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Thu, 22 Sep 2005
Non-MSIE platform users not need apply for hurricane relief
The Inquirer reports that FEMA is only allowing users of the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser to apply for hurricane relief funds. "The now very much criticised US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has stopped Mac and Linux victims of hurricane Katrina from applying for relief. The agency, which is already in hot water for its lack-lustre rescue efforts in New Orleans, has created a web-based service that only works for users of Windows and IE6."
File this under the WTF Were They Thinking Dept.
If you've not heard of Arc from Paul Graham you probably don't follow programming language wanking that much. Philip Greenspun decided to offer his thoughts on Arc:
No hopes for Arc, though Paul is a nice guy, unless someone writes a ground-breaking must-have open-source application in Arc that others want to modify. Lisp is more tasteful than C or Java but not that dramatic a help unless the programmer is very smart and tasteful him or herself. The average programmer seems to be getting progressively less devoted to taste and quality and therefore I would think that Lisp will continue to dwell in obscurity as things like PHP ascend to popularity.
To me Arc sounds like an interesting idea but if you take 100 years to design the 100-year language you'll have to re-advertise again since all the people who first heard of such a great idea will probably be in their graves. But if you have it made financially what's the rush? Unless you're trying to become ultra-famous...
Link to Phil Greenspun's comments on Arc
Boston is the nation's most expensive city
According to an article on Boston.com Boston has now become the most expensive city to live in. Here's a choice quote:
The report found that last year, a family of four living in the Boston area needed $64,656 to cover its basic needs. This was $6,000 more than in New York City, and about $7,000 more than in San Francisco. Living expenses, which include healthcare, child care, and other basic needs, were $44,000 or less in Austin, Texas; Chicago; Miami; and Raleigh, N.C.
My thoughts? Boston was pretty expensive to live in but I did enjoy the environment. Although there is a lot to enjoy there, if the prices continue to rise for living expenses I'm afraid it makes it hard to really want to resettle back in that enchanting city. But like everything else in life you just need to balance the good sides and the bad sides and decide if it looks good or bad for you.
Read the Boston.com article
Kudos to Philip Greenspun for the link
Whatever happened with Expert Systems?
Paolo Amoroso posed an interesting question on the comp.ai newsgroup (yes newsgroups still exist!) regarding what has happened to Expert Systems since the AI Winter. He got some very enlightening responses on what has happened with these systems since their introduction a couple of decades ago. Here is a choice quote from one of the replies:
In financial fraud detection, particularly the problem of finding credit card transaction fraud, expert systems were an early candidate. Based on experts' experience, rules were posed which characterized known fraud and the output on unseen data was used to figure out how the rules would go wrong. These systems did as well as the state of the art at the time which was considerably worse than the state of the art now.
Go right to the discussion
Paolo's blog post on Expert Systems
Paolo's blog post on LISA and rule-based Programming
OpenCroquet downloads are back up
After my previous whining about the Croquet download site being down for repairs. A recent email on the Croquet Mailing Lists led me to believe they had fixed the download service.
I double check it to find it's back up. Awesome. Kudos to a quick recovery. And non-kudos to my crappy timing on checking the Croquet site when they were caught under repair.