I got my first programming job, after a couple of years of struggling to find one, in part because I remembered how to do long division (and some other pencil and paper math). No joke, it was my big break.
But it's been shown that memorizing multiplication tables (and using them in drill until you reach effortless competence with multiplication) directly improves your ability to learn more abstract math and related reasoning.
California has zero concern with cascading failures
"There's zero chance it can fail," said the young engineer.
Hydroelectric plants store so much potential energy that it has measurably changed the length of the day
Right, so it's just a matter of building a river, a dam, and a hydro plant next to my solar plant in the desert. That'll work. Some ideas have been tried like pumping water uphill, or molten salt for thermal storage, but are overly lossy. I'm a big fan of the idea of hydrogen-based energy storage (storing hydrogen as a palladium hydride is quite dense and safe), and that can work at small scale so individual home systems can use it, but again that's not yet practical, just another "looks great on paper" idea.
Also, the costs of solar are not particularly great... That means the entire cost per watt to the power grid to replace a coal plant with photovoltaics is less than 40 cents more for every dollar you spend.
An abrupt 40% increase in power cost (totally do-able with solar thermal) would destroy the economy. It's a non-starter. Over 20 years, though, maybe. Of course, that's plenty of time for better solar panels to happen (today the good ones simply can't be made in the needed quantity, but technology marches on).
Considering the hundreds of trillions of dollars in damage that is slated to be caused by the continued burning of carbon-based fuels over the next few centuries, I would say that it is time to start dictating to the power companies how we are going to move away from fossil fuel burning as soon as possible
I don't share your religious beliefs, and object to your suggestion that they be imposed by force. Maybe you can persuade one of the governments that will actually matter though - China and India. China might be an easy sell there since imposing crazy economic ideas by force is the norm. Pushing down coal use in the US, though, that seems to have some popular support. Natural gas is so cheap, and vastly better in terms of genuine pollution.
. Only those few who specialized in now ancient technologies will have any prospects beyond age 40.
Maybe it's you? I'm 45 and recruiters bother me more than ever. I keep my tech skills current, and carefully manage my career so as not to get stuck looking like an expert only on old things. Senior engineers are golden right now - I find it a great place to be. If what I do could be done by a kid anywhere, well, I'd be a terrible engineer after 20+ years.
The worst part is, there is no such thing as job security.
True enough, but it doesn't matter. Other than during the dot-bust, it's never taken me long to get a series of interviews whenever I wanted/needed a new job. This is not a career where staying for a long time at any company is usually rewarded, this is a job where technical success stories on your resume from many years of companies are rewarded.
If you want to join the Video Game Industry, all this same stuff applies, only cranked up to 11!
Any job that sounds fun like that will be exploitive and pay less. There's likely no worse corner of this industry than the large game companies. Find something to work on that puts your friends to sleep when you describe it, but people in the industry know is important.
Peak usage in the home is irrelevant, because homes (and their solar arrays) are generally connected to the power grid. It is only really an issue if you want to live off the grid.
In fact, California and most of the west has already spent a ton of money upgrading the power grid. It requires further upgrades, but it is time the rest of the country catches up. It just is not politically sexy to spend $100 billion dollars on needed upgrades
Even in the west, the grid is woefully behind (Texas is doing the best, but it's not great). Our 3 big power grids have been running on capacity that was originally intended as redundant for years now, and we've about exhausted that. It's a real and serious problem that no one is fixing. With most state governments going broke, it's not going to catch the interest of voters as a priority until the worst happens. And since that level of infrastructure buildout takes 20 years, it will be bad for some time once it goes bad.
Large scale blackouts due to cascading failures that take hours or days to recover from is the next step. "Off the grid" won't be optional, unless we change our ways and build infrastructure, or people can generate their own, thus taking load off the grid. "Off the grid" solutions are already somewhat popular in places where electrical power is unreliable - which increasingly will be "most places".
Also, "pure solar energy strategy" can "work today". There's no technological barrier that prevents us from adopting such a strategy like there is with electric cars or fusion power. It's simply a matter of political will.
I hope we never have to "political will" to impose some guy's idea of what's best on everyone else. It's too expensive and awkward to store power today. There's not really a good, cost-effective solution for using solar as base load generation. The panels that are cost-effective are too tied to rare materials to be more than a nice product. We could make solar thermal work if we had to, at industrial scale, but since we don't have to, we won't. However, with better energy storage and panel technology, it all becomes practical.
Solar power will happen on its own when it's cheap and practical, no dictatorial imposition required. And it seems like that's getting close, just a couple of breakthroughs away. But not today.
Peak energy usage in the home is highest when people are in the home. That's not contentious, right?
So rooftop solar panels on people's own roofs aren't going to generate power where and when it's needed. People buy them, however, because the directly see the savings as money in their pocket. Rooftop solar is growing in popularity. Building public infrastructure is falling in popularity, and as local governments go broke (especially in Cali) it just won't happen, except where cities see the same immediate money-in-pocket rewards. We're going to have an infrastructure crunch regardless of power generation method. And obviously, a pure solar generation strategy can't work today.
All of that gets vastly better with safe dense power storage. With that, home solar doesn't mean dumping power into the grid a 2, then pulling it back at 8- and people will buy it. With that, industrial solar power generation can become base load.
It that a more clear statement? Power storage (together with solar panels that are easier to make) will let mankind move to solar to meet our power needs for quite some time to come, perhaps long enough for fusion power to finally become real. But those are significant technical obstacles.
Hah, turns out feminists are saying this nail polish actually promotes rape culture. From ThinkProgress: "Now, remembering to put on anti-rape nail polish and discretely slip a finger into each drink might be added to that ever-growing checklist - something that actually reinforces a pervasive rape culture in our society."
Bet you didn't see that coming. It's not merely everything a man ever does that promotes rape culture in this new world, you see, it's also every step a woman might take to reduce the likelihood of rape.
Solar doesn't really "peak during peak energy usage" for homes. Most people aren't even home during early afternoon on most days. Peak home use is in the evening (later in places where heating is the dominant energy use, but they tend to suck for solar anyhow).
Americans won't vote to build infrastructure, but they will buy it themselves if it gives advantage. A magic battery that could (safely!) store a day's home power would is necessary for solar to be practical. Also necessary: solar panels that don't require rare materials to build.
Solar is the only thing that will scale to eventual human energy needs. To get 11 billion humans consuming at current US rates, only solar works (unless the fusion pipedream somehow happens). But significant technical obstacles remain, starting IMO with viable home power storage.
And I said according to whose figures? The official Chinese figures? Including the millions in work camps? Or do those die off fast enough to keep the count low.
What's needed is a layer of editorial fact checking. Today, the broadcast media instead checks for compatibility with their political party, instead. Many blogs many do the same, of course, but there are already a few that at least view favorable stories with suspicion, at least do a cursory google search first, ask around for technical experts on technical topics, and often update stories with retractions. None of which ever happens in the mainstream press.
But he wasn't. I know you Republicans always have trouble with the truth, but that's ridiculous. He did not pull the fire alarm. He did not pull the fire alarm. HE DID NOT PULL THE FIRE ALARM. If he had, that would be a crime. You might as well ask if he was caught anally raping the principal's seven cats while cutting the clitoris off of his teacher's vagina. That is what your nonsense is like. Please stop doing this typical Republican thing. It is disgusting.
If you're entirely oblivious to American politics (fair enough if you're not from here) then some facts: The Republicans are the pro-gun side. The Democrats are the anti-gun side. Public schools in the US are profoundly dominated by the Left (or was passes here for the Left).
Also, the left here is pro-"that religion that cuts girls clitorises off", the right is anti-that-religion. (But I thought that was true in most of Europe too?)
Please inform your future hate-filled rants with these simple facts.
Relatively recently there was video of two good old boys laughing it up whilst shooting news cameramen from an attach helicopter with a 50mm gun.
Just making shit up doesn't help your argument any. I can only guess you're talking about the incident where we heard the gunship crew radio that they saw a group of hostiles (true) and a guy with a tube-like device on his shoulder (true) and requested permission to engage. They were given permission to engage. There was no laughing. There was no evidence they knew there was a reporter embedded with the enemy troops. (There's also no such thing as a 50mm gun.)
"good old boys"? If you think that anyone with a southern accent is a bad person, you are simply a bigot.
Based on what? The official numbers published by China? China executes so many of it's people that they need custom-built execution vans for logistical convenience. America is a China-wannabe when it comes to human rights violations. We try (Delaware apparently bought 1 execution van in 1986), but we always fall short. Write a story about violence in Tiananmen Square and see what happens.
But that doesn't change the fact that the US has gone absolutely fucking insane about both guns and drugs in schools. When you punish a student for eating a Pop-Tart in such a way that it briefly looks like a gun, it's time to back slowly away from the levers of power and let someone sober, sane, and rational take over. And at least that incident has prompted a couple of state legislatures to take action in defense of sanity, but clearly not in South Carolina.
Through all of history, every place with a remotely hospitable climate was eventually governed by a nation with a strong military. If on government didn't have that, it would be conquered by one that did. There's no evidence that it's even possible to not have a strong central military for a long time (unless you live someplace where the environment is so hostile it's not worth anyone's effort to conquer, but sometimes even then).
There's no better decision you can make, IMO, than to walk away from broadcast media, and newspapers, and all those centrally-controlled outlets for news. If you have a deep distrust of blogs, that can work for you. Find a blog or two of interest; look for ones that routinely correct stories when commenters point out flaws, avoid those that instead ban the commenters. As long as you keep your distrust of blogs, that's a good way to keep your head out of the sand.
The only way to learn anything about current events is the combination of a hard-to-censor channel, a willingness to correct mistakes, and your own distrust of everything on that channel.
And how would subscriptions work? And why wouldn't everything be a subscription? A VAT can be made to work, but this is so game-able.
Plus, you're missing the key fact about government: they never give up a tax. Any tax you propose will be in addition to existing taxes, not in place of them.
Again with the "express". No, let's stay on the topic of "should a university provide students with the ability to read up on controversial political topics?" Of course they fucking should, or what's the point of a university? If a university doesn't exist for the very purpose of providing open access to all the information that there is without any for of censorship, what good is it? Such an institution should receive no accreditation, and no public funds.
right to free speech does not mean a university has to provide the publishing infrastructure to make that speech.
But this isn't about publishing. This is about web access. What was your point again?
Also Fred Phelps is not a defender of free speech , he's a serial pest who harrases people at family funerals
The man is a freaking icon of free speech. Only hateful, harmful, ugly, disagreeable speech needs any protection in the first place. I can't think of a living speaker who offends my more than that guy has. If you don't support his right to free speech, you're simply unclear on the concept.
It's like trainspotting, but for advertising memes.
Gartner is the king/pusher of course. But I think they were actually insightful about this 5 or so years ago. They predicted about 3 year of all hype, no product "cloud", another 3 years of practical, useful cloud infrastructure with nothing really taking advantage of it, and only after that would we see startups (and VC investment opportunities) making use of the cloud to make actual products. I think we're almost there.
Even for hobby programming, the cloud is becoming quite appealing. For example, take a look at this remarkable Mabdelbrot zoom to 10^275. This required 6 core-years to render (6 months wall clock). If you have the patience, the machines sitting idle (perhaps discarded bitcoin rigs) and no fear of power bills, then sure, turn on 3 old high-CPU towers for 6 months. But if you're good at massively parallel coding (and Mabdelbrot rendering is great to learn that!) you can usually get AWS Spot machines for under a penny per core-hour. That means you can get that 6 core-years of CPU for about the price of a midrange geek PC, and you can get thousands of cores in parallel, and be done rendering in a day.
For a hobby project it might be hard to justify spending $hundreds this way, but for a start-up it makes perfect sense. So there's something to the "cloud" IMO if you're trying to do supercomputer parallelism on a shoestring budget, something that's really only become possible in the past couple of years. I'm not sure how cheap 10000 core-hours for $100 is, really, but 10000 cores in parallel for an hour for $100 is something wonderful.
If we had a non-corrupt government at any level, we'd have "last mile" as a public utility and a free market for the long haul. If makes so much damn sense that it will never happen.
Oh, don't be naive about the local governemnts though. This is a federal politician owned by Comcast standing up against local politicians who would like to receive large donations from a new utility company (or who have a nephew they'd give the business to, or whatever), since they held out for too large a bribe from Comcast themselves and came up empty.
But it's getting pretty crazy that the "last mile" isn't a public utility.
This has nothing to do with "free marketism", unless you're in the market for strawmen. This is the opposite.
Do you think most towns can just stand up a muni broadband network on their own? No - they're going to hire some company to build and run their MAN, just the way that many utilities work.
This is existing corporate giants, which have government granted monopolies in many areas (the polar opposite of free marketism), using their political muscle to block competition from new "utility" companies who would be stealing their business.
Both parties have, as their first priority, protecting the financial interests of their largest (usually corporate) donors. Both parties lie about this to their voters, claiming to be the party of the common man. The only difference is that some donors don't give to both parties, and so different donors get favored depending on who's in power.
I cant speak for 45 years, but it's been this way for at least 25. Do you disagree?
Fahrenheit is the only temperature system anyone should use! It's the temperature component of the One True System of measure: the Fortnight-Firkin-Furlong system.
Nah, First learn assembly, so you know how a computer works Then learn Scheme and the lambda calculus, so you know what a computer does
Really, though, the most important thing to move past "coding for fun" is to completely grok the call stack, pointers, recursion, and lambda. You should have no fear, uncertainty, or doubt about these foundations, or you'll write ugly hacks where none are needed, or be unable to properly debug.
Even WotC has admitted that their skill initial 4E challenge system was a flop - but if they pushed out a revised version later I haven't seen it and maybe it's fine?
Convincing the goblin chief and his horde to go home carries the same XP as wiping them out, and can be done more quickly.
Heh, I haven't been in a game for 20 years now where you got XP for killing things, or for specific encounters. I forgot that people still play that way (I guess it's natural if you're used to MMOs), rather than XP based only on quest completion.
or poison a rampaging dinosaur
I ran a game once where the party poisoned a powerful enemy with a raging dinosaur (that wasn't a fly in his soup, and a subsequent dispel magic was quite colorful - ahh, early D&D).
hate that, and even though I like 4E I'm glad their move away from an open ecosystem bit them hard.
Do you think Hasbro learned anything? Or did they take the opposite lesson from Pathfinder? I guess we'll see where 5E goes. Open game management tools (character builders, encounter runners, etc) would make the game worth checking out, IMO.
Slashdot Mirror
I got my first programming job, after a couple of years of struggling to find one, in part because I remembered how to do long division (and some other pencil and paper math). No joke, it was my big break.
But it's been shown that memorizing multiplication tables (and using them in drill until you reach effortless competence with multiplication) directly improves your ability to learn more abstract math and related reasoning.
California has zero concern with cascading failures
"There's zero chance it can fail," said the young engineer.
Hydroelectric plants store so much potential energy that it has measurably changed the length of the day
Right, so it's just a matter of building a river, a dam, and a hydro plant next to my solar plant in the desert. That'll work. Some ideas have been tried like pumping water uphill, or molten salt for thermal storage, but are overly lossy. I'm a big fan of the idea of hydrogen-based energy storage (storing hydrogen as a palladium hydride is quite dense and safe), and that can work at small scale so individual home systems can use it, but again that's not yet practical, just another "looks great on paper" idea.
Also, the costs of solar are not particularly great ... That means the entire cost per watt to the power grid to replace a coal plant with photovoltaics is less than 40 cents more for every dollar you spend.
An abrupt 40% increase in power cost (totally do-able with solar thermal) would destroy the economy. It's a non-starter. Over 20 years, though, maybe. Of course, that's plenty of time for better solar panels to happen (today the good ones simply can't be made in the needed quantity, but technology marches on).
Considering the hundreds of trillions of dollars in damage that is slated to be caused by the continued burning of carbon-based fuels over the next few centuries, I would say that it is time to start dictating to the power companies how we are going to move away from fossil fuel burning as soon as possible
I don't share your religious beliefs, and object to your suggestion that they be imposed by force. Maybe you can persuade one of the governments that will actually matter though - China and India. China might be an easy sell there since imposing crazy economic ideas by force is the norm. Pushing down coal use in the US, though, that seems to have some popular support. Natural gas is so cheap, and vastly better in terms of genuine pollution.
. Only those few who specialized in now ancient technologies will have any prospects beyond age 40.
Maybe it's you? I'm 45 and recruiters bother me more than ever. I keep my tech skills current, and carefully manage my career so as not to get stuck looking like an expert only on old things. Senior engineers are golden right now - I find it a great place to be. If what I do could be done by a kid anywhere, well, I'd be a terrible engineer after 20+ years.
The worst part is, there is no such thing as job security.
True enough, but it doesn't matter. Other than during the dot-bust, it's never taken me long to get a series of interviews whenever I wanted/needed a new job. This is not a career where staying for a long time at any company is usually rewarded, this is a job where technical success stories on your resume from many years of companies are rewarded.
If you want to join the Video Game Industry, all this same stuff applies, only cranked up to 11!
Any job that sounds fun like that will be exploitive and pay less. There's likely no worse corner of this industry than the large game companies. Find something to work on that puts your friends to sleep when you describe it, but people in the industry know is important.
Peak usage in the home is irrelevant, because homes (and their solar arrays) are generally connected to the power grid. It is only really an issue if you want to live off the grid.
In fact, California and most of the west has already spent a ton of money upgrading the power grid. It requires further upgrades, but it is time the rest of the country catches up. It just is not politically sexy to spend $100 billion dollars on needed upgrades
Even in the west, the grid is woefully behind (Texas is doing the best, but it's not great). Our 3 big power grids have been running on capacity that was originally intended as redundant for years now, and we've about exhausted that. It's a real and serious problem that no one is fixing. With most state governments going broke, it's not going to catch the interest of voters as a priority until the worst happens. And since that level of infrastructure buildout takes 20 years, it will be bad for some time once it goes bad.
Large scale blackouts due to cascading failures that take hours or days to recover from is the next step. "Off the grid" won't be optional, unless we change our ways and build infrastructure, or people can generate their own, thus taking load off the grid. "Off the grid" solutions are already somewhat popular in places where electrical power is unreliable - which increasingly will be "most places".
Also, "pure solar energy strategy" can "work today". There's no technological barrier that prevents us from adopting such a strategy like there is with electric cars or fusion power. It's simply a matter of political will.
I hope we never have to "political will" to impose some guy's idea of what's best on everyone else. It's too expensive and awkward to store power today. There's not really a good, cost-effective solution for using solar as base load generation. The panels that are cost-effective are too tied to rare materials to be more than a nice product. We could make solar thermal work if we had to, at industrial scale, but since we don't have to, we won't. However, with better energy storage and panel technology, it all becomes practical.
Solar power will happen on its own when it's cheap and practical, no dictatorial imposition required. And it seems like that's getting close, just a couple of breakthroughs away. But not today.
Peak energy usage in the home is highest when people are in the home. That's not contentious, right?
So rooftop solar panels on people's own roofs aren't going to generate power where and when it's needed. People buy them, however, because the directly see the savings as money in their pocket. Rooftop solar is growing in popularity. Building public infrastructure is falling in popularity, and as local governments go broke (especially in Cali) it just won't happen, except where cities see the same immediate money-in-pocket rewards. We're going to have an infrastructure crunch regardless of power generation method. And obviously, a pure solar generation strategy can't work today.
All of that gets vastly better with safe dense power storage. With that, home solar doesn't mean dumping power into the grid a 2, then pulling it back at 8- and people will buy it. With that, industrial solar power generation can become base load.
It that a more clear statement? Power storage (together with solar panels that are easier to make) will let mankind move to solar to meet our power needs for quite some time to come, perhaps long enough for fusion power to finally become real. But those are significant technical obstacles.
Hah, turns out feminists are saying this nail polish actually promotes rape culture. From ThinkProgress: "Now, remembering to put on anti-rape nail polish and discretely slip a finger into each drink might be added to that ever-growing checklist - something that actually reinforces a pervasive rape culture in our society."
Bet you didn't see that coming. It's not merely everything a man ever does that promotes rape culture in this new world, you see, it's also every step a woman might take to reduce the likelihood of rape.
Solar doesn't really "peak during peak energy usage" for homes. Most people aren't even home during early afternoon on most days. Peak home use is in the evening (later in places where heating is the dominant energy use, but they tend to suck for solar anyhow).
Americans won't vote to build infrastructure, but they will buy it themselves if it gives advantage. A magic battery that could (safely!) store a day's home power would is necessary for solar to be practical. Also necessary: solar panels that don't require rare materials to build.
Solar is the only thing that will scale to eventual human energy needs. To get 11 billion humans consuming at current US rates, only solar works (unless the fusion pipedream somehow happens). But significant technical obstacles remain, starting IMO with viable home power storage.
And I said according to whose figures? The official Chinese figures? Including the millions in work camps? Or do those die off fast enough to keep the count low.
What's needed is a layer of editorial fact checking. Today, the broadcast media instead checks for compatibility with their political party, instead. Many blogs many do the same, of course, but there are already a few that at least view favorable stories with suspicion, at least do a cursory google search first, ask around for technical experts on technical topics, and often update stories with retractions. None of which ever happens in the mainstream press.
But he wasn't. I know you Republicans always have trouble with the truth, but that's ridiculous. He did not pull the fire alarm. He did not pull the fire alarm. HE DID NOT PULL THE FIRE ALARM. If he had, that would be a crime. You might as well ask if he was caught anally raping the principal's seven cats while cutting the clitoris off of his teacher's vagina. That is what your nonsense is like. Please stop doing this typical Republican thing. It is disgusting.
If you're entirely oblivious to American politics (fair enough if you're not from here) then some facts: The Republicans are the pro-gun side. The Democrats are the anti-gun side. Public schools in the US are profoundly dominated by the Left (or was passes here for the Left).
Also, the left here is pro-"that religion that cuts girls clitorises off", the right is anti-that-religion. (But I thought that was true in most of Europe too?)
Please inform your future hate-filled rants with these simple facts.
Relatively recently there was video of two good old boys laughing it up whilst shooting news cameramen from an attach helicopter with a 50mm gun.
Just making shit up doesn't help your argument any. I can only guess you're talking about the incident where we heard the gunship crew radio that they saw a group of hostiles (true) and a guy with a tube-like device on his shoulder (true) and requested permission to engage. They were given permission to engage. There was no laughing. There was no evidence they knew there was a reporter embedded with the enemy troops. (There's also no such thing as a 50mm gun.)
"good old boys"? If you think that anyone with a southern accent is a bad person, you are simply a bigot.
Based on what? The official numbers published by China? China executes so many of it's people that they need custom-built execution vans for logistical convenience. America is a China-wannabe when it comes to human rights violations. We try (Delaware apparently bought 1 execution van in 1986), but we always fall short. Write a story about violence in Tiananmen Square and see what happens.
But that doesn't change the fact that the US has gone absolutely fucking insane about both guns and drugs in schools. When you punish a student for eating a Pop-Tart in such a way that it briefly looks like a gun, it's time to back slowly away from the levers of power and let someone sober, sane, and rational take over. And at least that incident has prompted a couple of state legislatures to take action in defense of sanity, but clearly not in South Carolina.
Through all of history, every place with a remotely hospitable climate was eventually governed by a nation with a strong military. If on government didn't have that, it would be conquered by one that did. There's no evidence that it's even possible to not have a strong central military for a long time (unless you live someplace where the environment is so hostile it's not worth anyone's effort to conquer, but sometimes even then).
There's no better decision you can make, IMO, than to walk away from broadcast media, and newspapers, and all those centrally-controlled outlets for news. If you have a deep distrust of blogs, that can work for you. Find a blog or two of interest; look for ones that routinely correct stories when commenters point out flaws, avoid those that instead ban the commenters. As long as you keep your distrust of blogs, that's a good way to keep your head out of the sand.
The only way to learn anything about current events is the combination of a hard-to-censor channel, a willingness to correct mistakes, and your own distrust of everything on that channel.
And how would subscriptions work? And why wouldn't everything be a subscription? A VAT can be made to work, but this is so game-able.
Plus, you're missing the key fact about government: they never give up a tax. Any tax you propose will be in addition to existing taxes, not in place of them.
Again with the "express". No, let's stay on the topic of "should a university provide students with the ability to read up on controversial political topics?" Of course they fucking should, or what's the point of a university? If a university doesn't exist for the very purpose of providing open access to all the information that there is without any for of censorship, what good is it? Such an institution should receive no accreditation, and no public funds.
right to free speech does not mean a university has to provide the publishing infrastructure to make that speech.
But this isn't about publishing. This is about web access. What was your point again?
Also Fred Phelps is not a defender of free speech , he's a serial pest who harrases people at family funerals
The man is a freaking icon of free speech. Only hateful, harmful, ugly, disagreeable speech needs any protection in the first place. I can't think of a living speaker who offends my more than that guy has. If you don't support his right to free speech, you're simply unclear on the concept.
It's like trainspotting, but for advertising memes.
Gartner is the king/pusher of course. But I think they were actually insightful about this 5 or so years ago. They predicted about 3 year of all hype, no product "cloud", another 3 years of practical, useful cloud infrastructure with nothing really taking advantage of it, and only after that would we see startups (and VC investment opportunities) making use of the cloud to make actual products. I think we're almost there.
Even for hobby programming, the cloud is becoming quite appealing. For example, take a look at this remarkable Mabdelbrot zoom to 10^275. This required 6 core-years to render (6 months wall clock). If you have the patience, the machines sitting idle (perhaps discarded bitcoin rigs) and no fear of power bills, then sure, turn on 3 old high-CPU towers for 6 months. But if you're good at massively parallel coding (and Mabdelbrot rendering is great to learn that!) you can usually get AWS Spot machines for under a penny per core-hour. That means you can get that 6 core-years of CPU for about the price of a midrange geek PC, and you can get thousands of cores in parallel, and be done rendering in a day.
For a hobby project it might be hard to justify spending $hundreds this way, but for a start-up it makes perfect sense. So there's something to the "cloud" IMO if you're trying to do supercomputer parallelism on a shoestring budget, something that's really only become possible in the past couple of years. I'm not sure how cheap 10000 core-hours for $100 is, really, but 10000 cores in parallel for an hour for $100 is something wonderful.
If we had a non-corrupt government at any level, we'd have "last mile" as a public utility and a free market for the long haul. If makes so much damn sense that it will never happen.
Oh, don't be naive about the local governemnts though. This is a federal politician owned by Comcast standing up against local politicians who would like to receive large donations from a new utility company (or who have a nephew they'd give the business to, or whatever), since they held out for too large a bribe from Comcast themselves and came up empty.
But it's getting pretty crazy that the "last mile" isn't a public utility.
This has nothing to do with "free marketism", unless you're in the market for strawmen. This is the opposite.
Do you think most towns can just stand up a muni broadband network on their own? No - they're going to hire some company to build and run their MAN, just the way that many utilities work.
This is existing corporate giants, which have government granted monopolies in many areas (the polar opposite of free marketism), using their political muscle to block competition from new "utility" companies who would be stealing their business.
Both parties have, as their first priority, protecting the financial interests of their largest (usually corporate) donors. Both parties lie about this to their voters, claiming to be the party of the common man. The only difference is that some donors don't give to both parties, and so different donors get favored depending on who's in power.
I cant speak for 45 years, but it's been this way for at least 25. Do you disagree?
Fahrenheit is the only temperature system anyone should use! It's the temperature component of the One True System of measure: the Fortnight-Firkin-Furlong system.
Nah,
First learn assembly, so you know how a computer works
Then learn Scheme and the lambda calculus, so you know what a computer does
Really, though, the most important thing to move past "coding for fun" is to completely grok the call stack, pointers, recursion, and lambda. You should have no fear, uncertainty, or doubt about these foundations, or you'll write ugly hacks where none are needed, or be unable to properly debug.
Even WotC has admitted that their skill initial 4E challenge system was a flop - but if they pushed out a revised version later I haven't seen it and maybe it's fine?
Convincing the goblin chief and his horde to go home carries the same XP as wiping them out, and can be done more quickly.
Heh, I haven't been in a game for 20 years now where you got XP for killing things, or for specific encounters. I forgot that people still play that way (I guess it's natural if you're used to MMOs), rather than XP based only on quest completion.
or poison a rampaging dinosaur
I ran a game once where the party poisoned a powerful enemy with a raging dinosaur (that wasn't a fly in his soup, and a subsequent dispel magic was quite colorful - ahh, early D&D).
hate that, and even though I like 4E I'm glad their move away from an open ecosystem bit them hard.
Do you think Hasbro learned anything? Or did they take the opposite lesson from Pathfinder? I guess we'll see where 5E goes. Open game management tools (character builders, encounter runners, etc) would make the game worth checking out, IMO.