Forgive my ignorance ... What are the advantages of using icon systems such as Iconic & Fontawesome as opposed to using Unicode character codes. Maybe not all various icons are available in Unicode? And Unicode is geared towards language? thoughts?
Per the NYT:
"But the government was so slow in issuing specifications that the firm did not start writing software code until this spring, according to people familiar with the process."
In a previous life I worked on similar software development projects at the US State level. This project was several orders of magnitude larger in scope and in complexity than what I worked on. Assuming a generous start date for Spring - say March 1 - this boils down to ~7 months to design and develop to the Oct 1 hard deadline. Nearly impossible in my opinion.
I'm not discounting that there couldn't be issues else where in whole process. These would include: communication overhead between all the various agencies and contractors, integration nightmares, and not enough skilled folks at Medicare to manage all of this. But having the requirements delivered several months before roll-out seems to me a recipe for disaster.
You don't need 100% final requirements to start building the system. If nothing else start working though the interfaces with other systems, and try and get as close as possible to a working prototype. Granted funding is often an issue, but even a tiny team given a few months head start can get a lot done.
On government contracts that's actually a problem. You can't bill for any work you did without 'authorization'. Which means you can't do anything until a finalized spec, signed in triplicate, is physically delivered to you.
I have wondered for some time now if it is legal to develop tools and libraries that are relevant to an upcoming contract, but which are also general purpose and could be used elsewhere.
Probably not your core market, but I love the platform aspect of this. The notion of a stim pack for the lawyer-client relationship can work in a lot of other areas.
Thanks! We're super excited about that aspect too - it's amazing how many different types of lawyers have said they need a Clerky in their practice area. Unfortunately there's quite a few more features we need before we can really serve that market well. We'll get there though! Feel free to shoot us an email and we'll put you on our list of lawyers to reach out to when we're ready!
They have a fair amount of pretty good TV programming (subjective I admit). They also have a significant amount of kids TV programming which is not to be underestimated.
I use a password manager, and I have a unique password per site. I generally try to use an MD5 hash resulting from a "ps waux | md5" at the time of registration. I've encountered sites that rejected this due to lack of upper characters (oracle.com, which then allowed me to use "Abc123"), having no special characters, being too long (often forcing me to down-size to 16 or 8 chars). The worst are sites that silently truncate long passwords (I'm guessing due to code errors), so your password is invalid the second you register and must immediately proceed with a password reset.
Big sites are generally good about allowing long/strong passwords. Many mom-n-pop sites are often hit-or-miss.
It seems it was only a matter of time until Ive took over as true heir apparent to SJ in this respect. Will be interesting to see how the relationship with Cook works and if it pans out in a similar fashion as it did with SJ+Cook.
Ahhh that keyboard! by far the best I've ever used on a laptop. I think I started with a 770 going back almost 15 years ago to a t61 and the keyboard was rock solid. Switched to a MBP and still long for that keyboard.
FB, Twitter, and YT were incredibly small teams of less than a handful who knew exactly what they wanted to build. Expectations were minimal or non-existent when they launched. They didn't have a corporate board, a CEO, or Wall Street looking over their shoulders for monetization.
Looking from the outside, they seem to have a dysfunctional culture around shipping software with all the additional layers of management. Hopefully this changes and they have a chance producing meaningful products but I'm not hopeful.
0.1 What You Should Know
To study calculus it is essential that you are able to breathe. Without that ability you will soon die, and be unable to continue.
Beyond that, you will need some familiarity with two notions: the notion of a number, and that of a function.