Bill Gates has been around for a while too, but that doesn't make his "nobody will ever need more than 640k memory" statement come true.
Of course, but I feel the need to point out that Gates never said that.
I would take Paul Graham as a solid reference for eg. LISP. But his argumentation for why Python developers are smarter than developers for language X is subjective and unfounded at very best.
Subjective, yes, but not in any way unfounded. Graham has a long history of working with very, very smart programmers (and is one himself), so it behooves people who care about what smart programmers think to listen to his opinions. Which is not to say that he's going to be right about anything you quote him on -- although I happen to agree with him vis a vis Java -- but that his opinion is, by virtue of his experience, weightier than, say yours (or mine.)
It would be hard to mischaracterize Fabian Pascal more thoroughly than to call him an "Oo fanboy". He's a screaming kook, no dispute, but I would wager that he hates the OODB crowd as much, if not more, than he hates SQL.
Right. Five 200gb spindles == five times the likelihood of a catastrophic failure. No, thanks.
'jfb
Re:Using the right tool for the job
on
OpenGL in PHP
·
· Score: 1
No offense, but you don't know shit from fat meat. Lisp has no OO support? Lisp is slow? Lisp requires recursion? Recursion is slow? Lisp is a purely functional language? All wrong: completely, unequivocally, nine-seconds-of-googling-would-show-different wrong.
And that's not even to get into the PHP discussion. Suffice to say that your opinions in that area are likely informed by a level of technical merit equal to that displayed above, and thus of no consequence whatsoever.
(A friend of mine proposes some kind of on-the-fly transcoding to Apple's Lossless format, but I doubt seriously that that's how Apple has implemented it.)
In fact, that's exactly how it works. It transcodes to Apple Lossless, which is compressed, and streams that. So in theory, anything you can play in iTunes, you can stream to the Airport eXXXpress.
If wind and solar were really reliable and less expensive, what in God's name makes you think we'd be relying on fossil fuels?
A good point, but equally as important to consider is that coal, oil and gas producers pay nothing for their obvious externalities. In fact, unproductive fossil fuel plants are kept running through massive government subsidy. The best solution -- and as a certified ranting leftist loon I find some amusement in my belief of a pure market based system -- is a carbon tax. Carbon output is a reasonable proxy for environmental damage, and taxing carbon is therefore a reasonable method of assessing the true costs of each megawatt produced.
Nuclear STILL wouldn't be cost effective, but it'd certainly look a lot better than coal, for instance.
What riles those up (so to speak) is when governments relax protections and don't watch themselves or the corporations they higher to ensure it is disposed of properly.
To say nothing of the outrageously distorting government subsidies. Nuclear power is just not cost-effective in its current state.
You're just wrong here - SuperSPARC never delivered as promised, but UltraSPARC was a whole new level of proce/performance that Intel couldn't even touch.
Sure, Sun was faster than Intel in 1995. But how about, say, the R4400 or R10000? PA8000? Faster than Alpha 21164? Hardly. UltraSparc was never the performance leader, but the situation has gotten laughable. Sun could never compete in SMP or NUMA when that was the state-of-the-art, and can't compete with the swarm of faster, smaller machines now.
My opinion of Sun service was never good, and when I had a Sun engineer destroy a UE10000 through abject incompetence, I swore off recommending their hardware. Never had a problem with IBM or DEC (SGI was worse than Sun.)
No cowering here: UltraSparc is a dog. It was a dog when it was new, and there's no reason to think that the performance delta between Sun's SPARC and the rest of the general purpose CPU market is going to improve. It's a dead ISA walking.
I don't understand why anybody, anywhere, buys Sun. Their service has been terrible for several years, hardware quality at least as bad for at least as long, and performance has ALWAYS been dismal.
Because a) there are enough people using Windows to make the port possible, and b) Quicktime was already ported to Windows. Neither of these facts are REMOTELY true about Linux.
Because at 100gb per $60, the cost is such that even redudant backups would be cheap. Made sense to me. What makes even more sense to me is the well-founded skepticism with which people now view Iomega.
This is very true: I use one of the Apple "soapbar" mice, and a Kensington Expert Mouse Pro trackball, and I switch mice and handedness every couple of weeks. It's helped a great deal. I found that it's not that hard to develop the ability to use your mouse with either hand.
I'm not sure that prototyping -- creating objects from other existing objects by copying, essentially making inheritance a "first class" consideration -- is an analogy that's going to truly redefine the way I look at programming.
Perhaps not, but there already is a very widely used prototype-based language -- sure it's got some crappy implementations, but lots of people all over the world use it every day. It's as "ready for primetime" as most anything else we're stuck with.
It can't be a coincidence that Microsoft is planning on inflicting this device upon Europe, what with the breakdown in their settlement talks with the EU, can it?
Why is Christ portrayed with sheep? Psalm 23? The references to Christ as a lamb and shepherd thick throughout the Gospels? I'm no Christian, but this stuff is basic Western Civ, man.
C is the BEST? By what twisted calculus could any rational person say that? There is NO problem domain in which C is ever the best choice for doing ANYTHING -- unless said problem domain is, of course, writing C programs. Name me ONE thing that C is better at, and I can provide you with a technology demonstrably superior, without even breaking a sweat.
Anybody in this day and age who chooses to write any program in C anywhere is misguided at best, more likely a dismal backwards-looking sadistic fuckwit who thinks that their own suffering at the hands of '70s technology is somehow the norm. To these sad sacks, I say, welcome to 1980!.
GodDAMNit! When will you APES learn that "unique" refers to one thing? ONE THING. A magnetic field is either "UNIQUE" or "NOT UNIQUE". "So unique" is a solecism on par with "irregardless"or "begs the question". Just STOP it!
Slashdot Mirror
Derek Jeter is an asshole on and off the field; he beat the shit out of a Special Ed teacher moonlighting as a Fenway groundskeeper ...
Well, I don't know if he's an asshole, but I do know that Jeter wasn't anywhere near the brawl in the bullpen.
'jfb
Bill Gates has been around for a while too, but that doesn't make his "nobody will ever need more than 640k memory" statement come true.
Of course, but I feel the need to point out that Gates never said that.
I would take Paul Graham as a solid reference for eg. LISP. But his argumentation for why Python developers are smarter than developers for language X is subjective and unfounded at very best.
Subjective, yes, but not in any way unfounded. Graham has a long history of working with very, very smart programmers (and is one himself), so it behooves people who care about what smart programmers think to listen to his opinions. Which is not to say that he's going to be right about anything you quote him on -- although I happen to agree with him vis a vis Java -- but that his opinion is, by virtue of his experience, weightier than, say yours (or mine.)
'jfb
It would be hard to mischaracterize Fabian Pascal more thoroughly than to call him an "Oo fanboy". He's a screaming kook, no dispute, but I would wager that he hates the OODB crowd as much, if not more, than he hates SQL.
'jfb
I saw this: it was the crappiest movie I think I may ever have seen. The graphics were N64 level. But it was still a giant killer shark picture, so ...
'jfb
Wrong. The plural of "virus" is "viruses". English word: English plural.
'jfb
Right. Five 200gb spindles == five times the likelihood of a catastrophic failure. No, thanks.
'jfb
No offense, but you don't know shit from fat meat. Lisp has no OO support? Lisp is slow? Lisp requires recursion? Recursion is slow? Lisp is a purely functional language? All wrong: completely, unequivocally, nine-seconds-of-googling-would-show-different wrong.
And that's not even to get into the PHP discussion. Suffice to say that your opinions in that area are likely informed by a level of technical merit equal to that displayed above, and thus of no consequence whatsoever.
'jfb
(A friend of mine proposes some kind of on-the-fly transcoding to Apple's Lossless format, but I doubt seriously that that's how Apple has implemented it.)
In fact, that's exactly how it works. It transcodes to Apple Lossless, which is compressed, and streams that. So in theory, anything you can play in iTunes, you can stream to the Airport eXXXpress.
And yes, I want one.
'jfb
If wind and solar were really reliable and less expensive, what in God's name makes you think we'd be relying on fossil fuels?
A good point, but equally as important to consider is that coal, oil and gas producers pay nothing for their obvious externalities. In fact, unproductive fossil fuel plants are kept running through massive government subsidy. The best solution -- and as a certified ranting leftist loon I find some amusement in my belief of a pure market based system -- is a carbon tax. Carbon output is a reasonable proxy for environmental damage, and taxing carbon is therefore a reasonable method of assessing the true costs of each megawatt produced.
Nuclear STILL wouldn't be cost effective, but it'd certainly look a lot better than coal, for instance.
'jfb
Nicely done, sir!
'jfb
What riles those up (so to speak) is when governments relax protections and don't watch themselves or the corporations they higher to ensure it is disposed of properly.
To say nothing of the outrageously distorting government subsidies. Nuclear power is just not cost-effective in its current state.
'jfb
You're just wrong here - SuperSPARC never delivered as promised, but UltraSPARC was a whole new level of proce/performance that Intel couldn't even touch.
Sure, Sun was faster than Intel in 1995. But how about, say, the R4400 or R10000? PA8000? Faster than Alpha 21164? Hardly. UltraSparc was never the performance leader, but the situation has gotten laughable. Sun could never compete in SMP or NUMA when that was the state-of-the-art, and can't compete with the swarm of faster, smaller machines now.
My opinion of Sun service was never good, and when I had a Sun engineer destroy a UE10000 through abject incompetence, I swore off recommending their hardware. Never had a problem with IBM or DEC (SGI was worse than Sun.)
'jfb
No cowering here: UltraSparc is a dog. It was a dog when it was new, and there's no reason to think that the performance delta between Sun's SPARC and the rest of the general purpose CPU market is going to improve. It's a dead ISA walking.
I don't understand why anybody, anywhere, buys Sun. Their service has been terrible for several years, hardware quality at least as bad for at least as long, and performance has ALWAYS been dismal.
'jfb
Because a) there are enough people using Windows to make the port possible, and b) Quicktime was already ported to Windows. Neither of these facts are REMOTELY true about Linux.
'jfb
Because at 100gb per $60, the cost is such that even redudant backups would be cheap. Made sense to me. What makes even more sense to me is the well-founded skepticism with which people now view Iomega.
... click ... click ...
click
'jfb
No, no, no: you feed the cats to RATS, and get the cat skins for nothing.
'jfb
This is very true: I use one of the Apple "soapbar" mice, and a Kensington Expert Mouse Pro trackball, and I switch mice and handedness every couple of weeks. It's helped a great deal. I found that it's not that hard to develop the ability to use your mouse with either hand.
'jfb
Ok, I just cut and pasted some Haskell. No problems. How about Python? No problems. Funny, that.
But then, I use Emacs on a Macintosh, not vi on X11, so what do I know.
'jfb
I'm not sure that prototyping -- creating objects from other existing objects by copying, essentially making inheritance a "first class" consideration -- is an analogy that's going to truly redefine the way I look at programming.
Perhaps not, but there already is a very widely used prototype-based language -- sure it's got some crappy implementations, but lots of people all over the world use it every day. It's as "ready for primetime" as most anything else we're stuck with.
'jfb
Is that like a bandersnitch?
'jfb
It can't be a coincidence that Microsoft is planning on inflicting this device upon Europe, what with the breakdown in their settlement talks with the EU, can it?
'jfb
Why is Christ portrayed with sheep? Psalm 23? The references to Christ as a lamb and shepherd thick throughout the Gospels? I'm no Christian, but this stuff is basic Western Civ, man.
'jfb
C is the BEST? By what twisted calculus could any rational person say that? There is NO problem domain in which C is ever the best choice for doing ANYTHING -- unless said problem domain is, of course, writing C programs. Name me ONE thing that C is better at, and I can provide you with a technology demonstrably superior, without even breaking a sweat.
Anybody in this day and age who chooses to write any program in C anywhere is misguided at best, more likely a dismal backwards-looking sadistic fuckwit who thinks that their own suffering at the hands of '70s technology is somehow the norm. To these sad sacks, I say, welcome to 1980!.
'jfb
Jeez. One is infuriated far past the point of being able to proof one's own writing.
Shamefacedly,
'jfb
GodDAMNit! When will you APES learn that "unique" refers to one thing? ONE THING. A magnetic field is either "UNIQUE" or "NOT UNIQUE". "So unique" is a solecism on par with "irregardless"or "begs the question". Just STOP it!
'jfb