It is almost funny to think that all if not initiatives to "do something about Internet" come from commercial players. Non-profit players have absolutely no issue with Internet as it is. Because nobody but the commercial players has anything to loose, in fact for most of us Internet functions just fine. In fact, it is the commercial lousy security that in the first place created the market for the botnets that move around gigabytes of SPAM every hour. It is the commercial lousy security that exposes those "without a driving license" to all seeming dangers of Internet. They have everything to gain from such "final" solution - indirect user identification usable for all sorts of power abuse, decreased attack on their servers by botnets and less money thus spent on maintaining firewalls, and finally since big commerce and government like to pat each other on the back, they will be favoured by that very government, the latter also gaining a lot from the internet driving license implementation. Like I said, funny how all these idiotic initiatives come from commercial actors.
I did not mean learning and teaching in themselves, I meant learning and teaching compassion (to others). But I guess you are right - those smart enough to survive understand that what goes around comes around. Do nice things, and nice things will be done to you. Nothing supernatural about that. In any case, I do not see how what many rich people do is considered compassion IN ANY WAY. There is NO CORRELATION. It is basic greed, based on fear, fear of one day not having money and/or thus not having any power. But that is another topic...
Bullshit. A required reading here would be "Heat: How to stop the planet burning" by George Monbiot. The important difference between that and the "Can we live on renewables" absolutely worthless piece of reading, is that it has been long established that green energy alone will not give us the terawatts we need to enjoy our relatively luxurious lifestyle. We need to go down on energy usage, and that is what Monbiot advocates for. Of course, he also mentions it will be a pain in the ass thing to do, people hate to say goodbye to their toys, but there is no other option. We are too many, and too many want to live how the fuck they see fit. The aquarium has become too crowded however, some fish will have to hold their breath or something. A solution is not to sustain current need for energy using alternative means, it is rather invest in more energy friendly solutions. Until it becomes viable to go back to the current energy usage levels.
But, for the record, it has already been estimated that f.e. (I do not consider it a practical solution) installing and using 12% efficient solar panels in the entire Sahara desert, will give us 10 times the energy we need today. Citation not needed, because the required parameters are scientific facts - solar irradiation output, solar panel efficiency, and installation square area. All it takes is a giant motivation. A person choking to death would do anything however, I believe. Before that, the options are wider and more comfortable.
The difference between a man and an ape that is driven by the survival instinct, is that men are much more able to learn, teach and execute compassion towards each other. Being so loaded with cash you have to spend 40 hours a week just to find out where to keep stuffing it, is NOT about survival, and even Darwin would agree with me here. Survival means acquiring necessary resources to actually well, survive. That's a bit different. Also, one of the richest people on this planet, Bill Gates, is pretty happy giving away millions to help the poor not be so poor. The skeptics might call it a publicity stunt and what not, but no matter how you look at it, you can hardly tell that Mr. Gates is "perfectly happy with the majority of other people suffering and being poor." Your wolf eat wolf manifesto needs some editing.
I did not bring Eclipse up because it is scripted. I brought it up because it has flaky UI. The parent poster needed citation. I believe the amount of abstraction layers involved in Eclipse code in combination with the cost of the Java primitives used by each of these layers, are what bring Eclipse to such crawl. This is a potential problem with any scripted language as well - if you interpret something, the cost of primitives is high, and stacking APIs on top of each other is going to cost you (and your users) plenty. C/C++ get away not because the software is written better, but because the primitives cost less. And here is where I get back at the Eclipse issue - if Java program has this kind of performance, and it is written by a good team, I believe scripted language software is to expect the same set of problems. You need to make sure that if you do abstract things in your project, you understand the cost involved with each additional such layer. Also, you should not pay for features you do not use (the zero overhead principle.) Native code is the true God. You can start with whatever script you desire, but make sure you can reduce it to something that can run fast. The problem is thus not necessarily in languages (most of them offer the same superset of needed features), but in implementations.
You are however, dead on on the loading application configuration (including libraries!) once as process local memory, the way "normal" client software functions.
PHP does not have to execute scripts from scratch on every request. APC cache API transparently caches JIT-compiled PHP script intepretations and these are run instead upon request.
Apache does not have to compile regular expression for mapping each URL request, when you specify RewriteRule directives in virtual server or server context it compiles them (or however else it wishes to cache these) on server startup and that is it. During the entire lifetime of the server, the specified rules are no longer interpreted.
Other than that I agree that the current style of server infrastructure we are "enjoying" can be improved at least 100-fold, database access including.
* Truly persistent (across HTTP requests) user memory is a good step in the right way - extend the lifetime of all scripted objects to persist across entire application lifetime (i.e. forever - servers are not supposed to die)
* Many database requests are so primitive that these could bypass TCP socket layer and benefit from extra speed at the cost of no longer being asynchronious. Most PHP developers use blocking database query APIs anyway, even though non-blocking calls are available.
* Compile scripts and run from compiled cache, preferrably as machine code. Think about environment - all those quad-core datacenters wasting cycles, because programmers are supposedly very expensive. Well, they are not that expensive that when a good team get together they cannot re-think this. They can. If nothing, they should worry about the environment too - it is not cheap.
* Offer asynchronious calls where these make sense (i.e. where they can benefit from hardware parallelization). Those devs who know how to make use of them will be happy to do speed up their applications.
In short, cache everything, whenever you can. Memory is cheap. Cache SQL query strings, cache script compilation output, cache, cache, cache.
Very good observation. As a person who has lived in Russia some 10 years in total, I can say that Russian government even though one of the people (for better or worse) has traditionally been one that will pursue bold objectives without taking notice of the more at-hand problems, such may be criminality, morale, education (well that one may be an exception now, and thank gods for that) etc. Too many older folks or their trusted descendants sit in the corridors of power in Kremlin that do not want to deviate from old style of doing things - still envisioning grand Mother Russia not only very potent but in fact aiding the rest of the world. Whether it does so at the cost of its own citizens, is of no concern to these few individuals in power - to them it is the image and glory that counts. Russia's ambitions cover as much ground as its whole land and more. In time, they will learn to see be realistic, only despotic communism could handle (and did so for limited time, as history shows) the kind of progress seen there until '89. New Russia must understand that it has to choose between happy people and happy but overambitious leaders. When the balance is restored, it perhaps can become productive without using its people. As someone who has seen a lot of misery there but also a lot of absolutely ingenious minds, I would say it has what it takes, but is still with one foot in the mess that was left after the last "party" collapsed. That's nothing new though...
Since you believe in fantasy anyway, why not wish for finding (and returning to owner - you) the Silk Spectre II. Without Dr. Manhattan - far too reliable.
You gotta love how companies have found exactly what to do with patent infringements - put them in a bag and keep them stored away well under room temperature until the right moment when these can be enjoyed - such as, at a time when they can be used to scare or threaten competitors or help achieve a goal. Patent infringement is not patent infringement until such time when it can be exploited to the limit.
I personally think Joel is one damn smart fellow. After reading his biography, I am also pretty sure he is a very dependable and likeable human being.
The original comment was indeed a joke. I do think duct tape programming has its uses, despite what I earlier argumented for (the topic was slashdotted some time ago), and I do think Jamie by now is probably earning his PhD. It is just that I do also think the type of error the 2016 bug is can indeed be attributed to the "duct tape programming" attitude. I've seen the effects myself.
That said, it does not have to be that either Joel or Jamie talk or do wrong. I am just acknowledging the dangers of using duct tape when not seeing how in the future things break and the "cost of ownership" rises. After all, this is a money industry too, right?
Jamie Zawinski is what I would call a duct-tape programmer. And I say that with a great deal of respect. He is the kind of programmer who is hard at work building the future, and making useful things so that people can do stuff. He is the guy you want on your team building go-carts, because he has two favorite tools: duct tape and WD-40. And he will wield them elegantly even as your go-cart is careening down the hill at a mile a minute. This will happen while other programmers are still at the starting line arguing over whether to use titanium or some kind of space-age composite material that Boeing is using in the 787 Dreamliner.
When you are done, you might have a messy go-cart, but it’ll sure as hell fly.
Hey, Jamie! Your proprietary date datatype didn't fly! Would you please turn around and fix it?
I knew that of all that I wrote in the post, most people will only pay attention to exactly that part of that sentence.
It is my belief that all creatures, especially mammals, being somewhat more complex, have, like humans, tendencies habits and if limited awareness of self. I believe they can change these tendencies, just like people stop eating at McDonalds (or start to). I.e. a wolf can indeed die as something else than wolf, in a sense. The body is probably the same, but there has been some transformation of self. This is as far as I will go explaining it, it is obviously not an easy thing to do.
What else do yo expect when you essentially give away source code to commercial players with traditional "intellectual property" morale?
It was bound to happen sooner or later. When you give food to wolves, don't expect them to return the favor. A wolf is a wolf, it is born a wolf, lives a wolf, and in most cases dies a wolf.
A smart idea would be to have a license that restricts not just mixing open source code with propritary (something GPL now handles well, restricting it, that is) but also bundling open source software with proprietary components. There should be minimal and weakest link between parts where some components are open-source and others are proprietary. That would teach those vultures a lesson. Because what they do now is that they eat from the table, but do not give anything back - they use the open source that thousands of people helped debug and release, and then think of it as something ready to be used and stack their own oldschool products on top of it, if slightly modified to both work on top of the underlying open source tech and give impression as if they are part of open-source ecosystem, when in reality their fingers are still twitching in fear someone else might steal their "proprietary" technology.
Well, since the current Copenhagen climate negotiations aren't progressing well for us all, we might as well part this rock. Of course, as they say, when you immigrate your problems immigrate with you..
In any case, it is perhaps thanks to people like you that the field has advanced to such a degree when we can enjoy such mindbogglingly marvelous photos of the Universe.
Clever solutions is a tool in the hands of a programmer who uses a compiler that cannot do the clever job itself. This is currently, most of all compilers/translators out there and more importantly, most of the "widely-used" (an oxymoron!) ones. In other words, if your compiler is stupid, it is your job to produce the optimization by altering readable code into code that performs efficiently but looks too funny. Maybe languages like Haskell or ML will liberate us from this. It is a culture, a culture that lacks education.
Always rely on the compiler. It is your translator, and as with any good translator, you can relax speaking your native language (i.e. human) and trust it to do more an adequate job.
Slashdot Mirror
It is almost funny to think that all if not initiatives to "do something about Internet" come from commercial players. Non-profit players have absolutely no issue with Internet as it is. Because nobody but the commercial players has anything to loose, in fact for most of us Internet functions just fine. In fact, it is the commercial lousy security that in the first place created the market for the botnets that move around gigabytes of SPAM every hour. It is the commercial lousy security that exposes those "without a driving license" to all seeming dangers of Internet. They have everything to gain from such "final" solution - indirect user identification usable for all sorts of power abuse, decreased attack on their servers by botnets and less money thus spent on maintaining firewalls, and finally since big commerce and government like to pat each other on the back, they will be favoured by that very government, the latter also gaining a lot from the internet driving license implementation. Like I said, funny how all these idiotic initiatives come from commercial actors.
I did not mean learning and teaching in themselves, I meant learning and teaching compassion (to others). But I guess you are right - those smart enough to survive understand that what goes around comes around. Do nice things, and nice things will be done to you. Nothing supernatural about that. In any case, I do not see how what many rich people do is considered compassion IN ANY WAY. There is NO CORRELATION. It is basic greed, based on fear, fear of one day not having money and/or thus not having any power. But that is another topic...
Ah, a bald skeptic. How depressing.
Bullshit. A required reading here would be "Heat: How to stop the planet burning" by George Monbiot. The important difference between that and the "Can we live on renewables" absolutely worthless piece of reading, is that it has been long established that green energy alone will not give us the terawatts we need to enjoy our relatively luxurious lifestyle. We need to go down on energy usage, and that is what Monbiot advocates for. Of course, he also mentions it will be a pain in the ass thing to do, people hate to say goodbye to their toys, but there is no other option. We are too many, and too many want to live how the fuck they see fit. The aquarium has become too crowded however, some fish will have to hold their breath or something. A solution is not to sustain current need for energy using alternative means, it is rather invest in more energy friendly solutions. Until it becomes viable to go back to the current energy usage levels.
But, for the record, it has already been estimated that f.e. (I do not consider it a practical solution) installing and using 12% efficient solar panels in the entire Sahara desert, will give us 10 times the energy we need today. Citation not needed, because the required parameters are scientific facts - solar irradiation output, solar panel efficiency, and installation square area. All it takes is a giant motivation. A person choking to death would do anything however, I believe. Before that, the options are wider and more comfortable.
The difference between a man and an ape that is driven by the survival instinct, is that men are much more able to learn, teach and execute compassion towards each other. Being so loaded with cash you have to spend 40 hours a week just to find out where to keep stuffing it, is NOT about survival, and even Darwin would agree with me here. Survival means acquiring necessary resources to actually well, survive. That's a bit different. Also, one of the richest people on this planet, Bill Gates, is pretty happy giving away millions to help the poor not be so poor. The skeptics might call it a publicity stunt and what not, but no matter how you look at it, you can hardly tell that Mr. Gates is "perfectly happy with the majority of other people suffering and being poor." Your wolf eat wolf manifesto needs some editing.
I did not bring Eclipse up because it is scripted. I brought it up because it has flaky UI. The parent poster needed citation. I believe the amount of abstraction layers involved in Eclipse code in combination with the cost of the Java primitives used by each of these layers, are what bring Eclipse to such crawl. This is a potential problem with any scripted language as well - if you interpret something, the cost of primitives is high, and stacking APIs on top of each other is going to cost you (and your users) plenty. C/C++ get away not because the software is written better, but because the primitives cost less. And here is where I get back at the Eclipse issue - if Java program has this kind of performance, and it is written by a good team, I believe scripted language software is to expect the same set of problems. You need to make sure that if you do abstract things in your project, you understand the cost involved with each additional such layer. Also, you should not pay for features you do not use (the zero overhead principle.) Native code is the true God. You can start with whatever script you desire, but make sure you can reduce it to something that can run fast. The problem is thus not necessarily in languages (most of them offer the same superset of needed features), but in implementations.
And why is that important exactly?
Its UI is sluggish, and the whole thing is a living example of leaking abstraction gone wrong.
Might as well be written in PHP.
:'-(
with flaky UIs.
Citation needed.
Run Eclipse.
You are however, dead on on the loading application configuration (including libraries!) once as process local memory, the way "normal" client software functions.
Check your facts better next time please.
PHP does not have to execute scripts from scratch on every request. APC cache API transparently caches JIT-compiled PHP script intepretations and these are run instead upon request.
Apache does not have to compile regular expression for mapping each URL request, when you specify RewriteRule directives in virtual server or server context it compiles them (or however else it wishes to cache these) on server startup and that is it. During the entire lifetime of the server, the specified rules are no longer interpreted.
Other than that I agree that the current style of server infrastructure we are "enjoying" can be improved at least 100-fold, database access including.
* Truly persistent (across HTTP requests) user memory is a good step in the right way - extend the lifetime of all scripted objects to persist across entire application lifetime (i.e. forever - servers are not supposed to die)
* Many database requests are so primitive that these could bypass TCP socket layer and benefit from extra speed at the cost of no longer being asynchronious. Most PHP developers use blocking database query APIs anyway, even though non-blocking calls are available.
* Compile scripts and run from compiled cache, preferrably as machine code. Think about environment - all those quad-core datacenters wasting cycles, because programmers are supposedly very expensive. Well, they are not that expensive that when a good team get together they cannot re-think this. They can. If nothing, they should worry about the environment too - it is not cheap.
* Offer asynchronious calls where these make sense (i.e. where they can benefit from hardware parallelization). Those devs who know how to make use of them will be happy to do speed up their applications.
In short, cache everything, whenever you can. Memory is cheap. Cache SQL query strings, cache script compilation output, cache, cache, cache.
Microsoft isn't exactly known for speed either.
Very good observation. As a person who has lived in Russia some 10 years in total, I can say that Russian government even though one of the people (for better or worse) has traditionally been one that will pursue bold objectives without taking notice of the more at-hand problems, such may be criminality, morale, education (well that one may be an exception now, and thank gods for that) etc. Too many older folks or their trusted descendants sit in the corridors of power in Kremlin that do not want to deviate from old style of doing things - still envisioning grand Mother Russia not only very potent but in fact aiding the rest of the world. Whether it does so at the cost of its own citizens, is of no concern to these few individuals in power - to them it is the image and glory that counts. Russia's ambitions cover as much ground as its whole land and more. In time, they will learn to see be realistic, only despotic communism could handle (and did so for limited time, as history shows) the kind of progress seen there until '89. New Russia must understand that it has to choose between happy people and happy but overambitious leaders. When the balance is restored, it perhaps can become productive without using its people. As someone who has seen a lot of misery there but also a lot of absolutely ingenious minds, I would say it has what it takes, but is still with one foot in the mess that was left after the last "party" collapsed. That's nothing new though...
Can't expect sentient extraterrestrials to help out every time, you know ;-)
Can't lay bricks made from shit, you know.
Unreliable, unreliable!
Since you believe in fantasy anyway, why not wish for finding (and returning to owner - you) the Silk Spectre II. Without Dr. Manhattan - far too reliable.
You gotta love how companies have found exactly what to do with patent infringements - put them in a bag and keep them stored away well under room temperature until the right moment when these can be enjoyed - such as, at a time when they can be used to scare or threaten competitors or help achieve a goal. Patent infringement is not patent infringement until such time when it can be exploited to the limit.
Humans are so damn smart it is scary.
I personally think Joel is one damn smart fellow. After reading his biography, I am also pretty sure he is a very dependable and likeable human being.
The original comment was indeed a joke. I do think duct tape programming has its uses, despite what I earlier argumented for (the topic was slashdotted some time ago), and I do think Jamie by now is probably earning his PhD. It is just that I do also think the type of error the 2016 bug is can indeed be attributed to the "duct tape programming" attitude. I've seen the effects myself.
That said, it does not have to be that either Joel or Jamie talk or do wrong. I am just acknowledging the dangers of using duct tape when not seeing how in the future things break and the "cost of ownership" rises. After all, this is a money industry too, right?
Time to quote Joel (from www.joelonsoftware.com):
Jamie Zawinski is what I would call a duct-tape programmer. And I say that with a great deal of respect. He is the kind of programmer who is hard at work building the future, and making useful things so that people can do stuff. He is the guy you want on your team building go-carts, because he has two favorite tools: duct tape and WD-40. And he will wield them elegantly even as your go-cart is careening down the hill at a mile a minute. This will happen while other programmers are still at the starting line arguing over whether to use titanium or some kind of space-age composite material that Boeing is using in the 787 Dreamliner.
When you are done, you might have a messy go-cart, but it’ll sure as hell fly.
Hey, Jamie! Your proprietary date datatype didn't fly! Would you please turn around and fix it?
I knew that of all that I wrote in the post, most people will only pay attention to exactly that part of that sentence.
It is my belief that all creatures, especially mammals, being somewhat more complex, have, like humans, tendencies habits and if limited awareness of self. I believe they can change these tendencies, just like people stop eating at McDonalds (or start to). I.e. a wolf can indeed die as something else than wolf, in a sense. The body is probably the same, but there has been some transformation of self. This is as far as I will go explaining it, it is obviously not an easy thing to do.
What else do yo expect when you essentially give away source code to commercial players with traditional "intellectual property" morale?
It was bound to happen sooner or later. When you give food to wolves, don't expect them to return the favor. A wolf is a wolf, it is born a wolf, lives a wolf, and in most cases dies a wolf.
A smart idea would be to have a license that restricts not just mixing open source code with propritary (something GPL now handles well, restricting it, that is) but also bundling open source software with proprietary components. There should be minimal and weakest link between parts where some components are open-source and others are proprietary. That would teach those vultures a lesson. Because what they do now is that they eat from the table, but do not give anything back - they use the open source that thousands of people helped debug and release, and then think of it as something ready to be used and stack their own oldschool products on top of it, if slightly modified to both work on top of the underlying open source tech and give impression as if they are part of open-source ecosystem, when in reality their fingers are still twitching in fear someone else might steal their "proprietary" technology.
Well, since the current Copenhagen climate negotiations aren't progressing well for us all, we might as well part this rock. Of course, as they say, when you immigrate your problems immigrate with you..
How old does that make you? :-)
In any case, it is perhaps thanks to people like you that the field has advanced to such a degree when we can enjoy such mindbogglingly marvelous photos of the Universe.
Clever solutions is a tool in the hands of a programmer who uses a compiler that cannot do the clever job itself. This is currently, most of all compilers/translators out there and more importantly, most of the "widely-used" (an oxymoron!) ones. In other words, if your compiler is stupid, it is your job to produce the optimization by altering readable code into code that performs efficiently but looks too funny. Maybe languages like Haskell or ML will liberate us from this. It is a culture, a culture that lacks education.
Always rely on the compiler. It is your translator, and as with any good translator, you can relax speaking your native language (i.e. human) and trust it to do more an adequate job.