brevitic

“If we want to write parallel programs that work reliably, we must pay particular attention to beauty. Sadly, parallel program are often less beautiful than their sequential cousins; in particular they are, as we shall see, less modular.”

“

I found it interesting that someone at Microsoft thought that it was important to control how guests use the Wi-Fi network and created a whole complicated system of registration and a nice four-color brochure, while the person with the same job at Google just decided to make the Wi-Fi free and open.

Presumably that person at Microsoft was very convinced that all kinds of chaos would ensue if guests just willy-nilly connected their laptop computers to the Internet. And yet Google proves that no such mayhem actually occurs.

”

“Two economists working at Dartmouth, Katherine Baicker and Amitabh Chandra, found that the more money Medicare spent per person in a given state the lower that state’s quality ranking tended to be. In fact, the four states with the highest levels of spending—Louisiana, Texas, California, and Florida—were near the bottom of the national rankings on the quality of patient care.”

“It is still too early to argue whether Wave can or will every replace email (it’s only a developer preview at this point after all), but after using it for a while, we really hoped that we could add more of our contacts to our list so that it could become our default messaging system - until then, though, we are back to Gmail and IM.”

Google Wave: Our First Hands-On Impressions

“Healthcare needs to be Amazoned, Zipcarred, Facebooked, Etsyed, Tumblred, Appled, and Zapposed. But our government is imprisoned by the grey-headed leaders of those institutions that control the $2.5 trillion health care market (insurance companies, the American Hospital Association, the American Medical Association representing the specialists, and many others who benefit from quantity medicine). And therefore, those “leaders” of healthcare will do everything they can to prevent change and doing what’s right for our country.”

“The Blimpduino kit is a very low cost, open source, autonomous blimp kit. It consists of an Arduino-based blimp controller board with on-board infrared and ultrasonic sensors and an interface for an optional RC mode, a simple gondola with two vectoring (tilting) differential thrusters, and ground-based infrared beacon.”