I'm sorry, I should've made my post more clear. I'm well aware that modern-day JVMs do just-in-time compilation. The comparison I meant to imply with my sentence didn't have anything to do with performance, it was that Java is a write-once run-anywhere language suited for applications, whereas Go needs a compiler for every target system, and for that reason isn't quite suited to the kinds of things Java programmers are writing.
I understand the need to drive page hits by claiming, "In this bad situation $LANGUAGE could step in and fill the void", but Go seems like an odd choice. It's not that I don't like it: I've written some pet projects with it and it's a fascinating language that I doubt I'd mind having to code in as a full-time job, but they're not similar languages at all, it's an apples-and-oranges comparison
Java is interpreted, Go is compiled. Go lacks inheritance, generics, huge backing libraries, and a bunch of other things that Java programmers rely on. Basically, Go is not an application language, it's a systems programming language that happens to have garbage collection; it's closer to a replacement for C++ than one for Java.
In any event, I just don't see people abandoning Java en masse because of this Oracle spat. There's just too much legacy code out there, and too many programmers fluent in Java and nothing else.
I think the objection is this: let's say you're an inventor, and you've invented this incredible spoon. For whatever reason, the shape and ergonomic design of this spoon revolutionize the eating process, making it orders of magnitude faster, safer, and more efficient. (I have no idea how a spoon would accomplish this, but then, I'm not an inventive genius).
By taking out a patent on your new spoon design you've ensured that unscrupulous manufacturers can't just make a mold of it and start stamping out their own Mega-Spoons without fairly compensating you. That's how patent law is supposed to work.
But what about a world where everyone has 3D printers? If someone uploads the schematics for your spoon to The Pirate Bay and lets anyone print one out, instead of buying it from you, are they breaking patent law? Is it still a breach of the law if you're only doing it for your own use instead of selling it? Is it theft? (you're being deprived of revenue, after all)
I'm not asking rhetorically: I honestly don't know, and I bet a lot of other people don't know either. It'd be cool if all of this could be straightened out before these printers become household technology, but that's probably wishful thinking and we'll see the same reactive nonsense that we see for movies/music now.
"Nowadays"? Penny Arcade was mocking this back in 1998. Hell, anyone remember Pac-Man for the Atari 2600? Game developers have been putting out buggy releases since time immaterial, I'm a little surprised that everyone angry at Bethesda thinks this is some emergent phenomenon.
The real reason behind Google pulling their advertising is pressure from governments and schools to increase worker/student productivity, and if you think I'm kidding, you've never been to TvTropes. As far as a free-time black hole, it's orders of magnitude worse than Facebook.
I realize Slashdot has a certain "information should be free" ethos...
Not really. "Information wants to be free" is used more when talking about the free/open-source software movement, or against locking down data in inaccessible proprietary formats. It's generally only used as justification for piracy in one of two contexts:
1. As a straw man attacking people with a rightful opposition to invasive DRM schemes.
2. By idiots who pirate things because they don't want to pay for them, and then flail around trying to find some kind of philosophical justification for their actions. Of course, that's nobody on Slashdot... riiiiiiiiight?
The reality is, there are always going to be fucktards who will look to the Internet to avoid having to pay for something. What we're saying is we don't see why the existence of these people- who will always exist and will always find a way to crack DRM, guaranteed- should mean that we have to have a crippled product that we legitimately paid for, and legally own.
I don't recommend it yet. Tried to go to Slashdot right after installation: it loaded about halfway, hung for 30 seconds (not even the buttons below the screen responded), then crashed back to the homescreen. A few issues to work out, methinks.
It's because the book-scanning process is completely automated. I can't find a look to it, but a remember a Slashdot or Wired article about Google's automatic book-scanning machine. Basically it's too difficult to adjust for perfect focus for every book.
I wouldn't worry about it though: Google is doing OCR on all these books, and they'll presumably replace the images with plain-text equivalents at some point (more searchable, portable, etc.) That's my hope, anyway.
Can we please talk about the "the networks cancel the good stuff and keep the crap" spiel that I see every single time Slashdot or Reddit or whatever starts talking about television?
Networks are businesses: they exist to make money. Network executives are not evil men who... well, OK, they are evil, but not in the way you think: they don't say to themselves, "This show is much too intelligent, it might awaken our viewers out of their drunken stupor, cause them to realize that corporations like us are the reason for their miserable lives, and spark a revolution! Away with it!". No, what they do is say, "This show is losing money, not enough people are watching it. Away with it." That's their job.
And don't talk to me about how the Nielsen ratings don't accurately reflect viewership, and how Firefly was actually this smash hit being watched by gobs of people around the country that Fox somehow overlooked. You know how Serenity did at the box office, the movie that all the fans were supposed to go see multiple times to convince Fox to bring the show back? It didn't break even, even when you factor in DVD sales. You're not as numerous as you think.
If you want to complain about bad television being the norm, you need to go find people and convince them to watch your favorite show instead of { watching crap like American Idol, pirating the show off the Internet, doing intellectually-stimulating or otherwise rewarding activities besides TV }. Lousy television is their fault, not the networks', the latter is just giving people what they want.
Lord knows I don't want to sound like I'm sticking up for TV executives, but it pains me to see this same crap appear in the comments every single time, when people could actually fix the problem if they were willing to make the effort.
Actually I think it's doing exactly the right thing. I think the problem with your expectations is that "climate change" is such a huge topic. When looking for things like scholarly papers, actual academics would never use a term like "climate change" in a search engine, it's way too broad. Do you want air temperatures or ocean temperatures, effects on biospheres, which time periods are you looking at, how is the data normalized... I could go on like this for a while. Hell, at a typical big research university there are probably a dozen different departments whose work could be said to be connected to "climate change".
Given this, I think what Blekko is doing is assuming that if you type in "climate change/science", you're looking for general news articles on climate change, from scientific sources who know what they're talking about (as opposed to, say, "climate change/fox"), because if you were looking for something more specific, that's what you would've typed.
I'm not saying this website is a great idea- I'll still be using Google for the foreseeable future, both for general news and scholarly search, and the idea that people can now have search engines catered to their confirmation bias disturbs me- but in this case I think their choices make sense.
Have to agree with the comments above, that article is pretty useless.
Coincidentally, though, at a university book sale a few weeks ago, I picked up a copy of N. David Mermin's Quantum Computer Science: An Introduction, for just $5 (seems to be about $30 on Amazon) and I can't recommend it highly enough. It's an intro to quantum computing textbook, about 200 pages, written specifically for people who have CS or math (as opposed to physics) backgrounds, and while it's almost impossible to get into the nitty-gritty of why quantum computing works without a lot of quantum mechanics esoterica, this book does a great job of explaining how it works (which is plenty complicated on it's own).
It's not a light read (it's a textbook, after all), and contains some serious math, but it's nothing someone with a college education can't handle and it really helped me understand this whole mess better than any popular news article.
The news also prompted developer Anil Dash to call for an open alternative to the Mac App Store.
Wow, what an incredible idea. You mean, like, promoting your app and selling it on your own so that anyone can download it? Like we've been doing for years?
That philosophy is fine for tax loopholes that were created by popular vote with broad support from the general public. I have a harder time accepting it when these loopholes- which are designed specifically to exempt only corporations, you and I can go pound sand- were drafted and created by expensive corporate lobbyists. You're essentially saying that we should allow Google to bribe our politicians into giving them huge tax breaks, and then gag us with Hand's quote to keep us from complaining about it. To be blunt, fuck that.
In case you're interested, Ars has a good piece on why Apple chose the Core 2 instead of an i-series chip. Basically it boils down to
a) Graphics performance. The integrated graphics on the i-series can't touch Nvidia's 320M, and Nvidia hasn't come out an equivalent for Arrandale yet.
b) Arrandale needs a separate memory controller, and there's no room for it on the MBA's tiny motherboard.
Good points, though I still want to see head-to-head performance numbers to see if the choice was a good one.
Please try to avoid posting two articles in a row with words like "hologram" in the title. My brain is now full of confusing images about the universe actually being a virtual Japanese pop star.
At 100% O2, the partial pressure of oxygen at 5 psi is actually higher than it is on Earth, so it's quite easy.
Of course, there are other issues with an all-oxygen atmosphere, but breathing isn't one of them. The idea was to reduce the amount of pressure the cabins had to be designed to withstand.
If you haven't opted out of Domain Helper ("helpfully" redirecting your 404's to advertising), it doesn't mean anything yet. If you are, it means your DNS lookups are going to be done over a secure channel, which in theory makes it much more difficult to perform DNS redirection attacks (where you look up www.google.com but a hiacking means that you get back the IP address for http://ebay.spamwarezdeath.ru./ In short, it's a Good Thing;)
I was going to suggest just the opposite. Medical studies aren't like doing physics experiments in the lab: you can't control the minutae of the experiment to anywhere near an ideal degree. You need to have control groups, you need to factor out all possible other causes (and even then, you can be sure you won't catch them all), you need to have long-term observations and follow-up studies. Sometimes you'll see a trend and it turns out it was pure chance. Everyone is different, both in terms of genetic makeup and environment, and that's going to mean that everyone has different reactions to just about anything.
There's clearly room for a great deal of improvement here, but people might need to accept that results of medical studies are never going to be as clear-cut as math papers. I think, and now I'm moving into personal opinion, the most important step-- and this applies to both the media and to scientists who might want to cite or cross-reference something-- is that nothing is ever, ever proved after the first paper. Ever. The first paper on some hypothetical connection really should just be ignored, except for prompting further investigation Like I said above, it needs follow-ups, and experiments with different variables controlled for.
Blame New Scientist, the typo is there and was just quoted verbatim. Although there really should have been some basic sanity checking before it hit the front page (perhaps as a snarky "30,000 RPM? Really" footnote), I've long since learned not to expect such feats from the editors.
There's not going to be a leak this time. It's a stationary "midway-house delivery" platform, not a drilling platform.
Not downplaying the significance of this (what was it the energy industry said about the BP explosion being a "once-in-a-lifetime" event and so Obama's drilling ban was unwarranted?), but we don't need to worry about another spill.
their patent rights expired as they should, and is still using old packaging/molds/etc. that display the patent number and are now falsely claiming protection they don't have...
Most of these companies are undoubtedly committing these violations unknowingly, but GP does have a point that the law exists for a reason: otherwise people could go on falsely claiming patent protection indefinitely. Don't why the gov't has to split the money with random third parties, though, that's just asking for abuse.
a) Big-name publications. As you say, they're pretty much factories which output wonderful reviews for the sake of early-access and other perks.
b) Individual commenters and nobodies with blogs. They're either paid shills or, more commonly, frothing fanboys who don't meet any standards of objectivity.
There are reliable sources, though, when you look outside of these categories. Sites like Ars Technica are pretty good, although since gaming is just one of several things they do, there's never any guarantee that they'll review the game you're interested in. Penny Arcade is of course the gold standard: Tycho (or Jerry, or whatever) is a great writer, and you can be damn sure that if he gives a game a thumbs-up, he's not doing it as a favor to some PR man. As long as you stick to established good sources you don't have to worry about scams like this.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry, I should've made my post more clear. I'm well aware that modern-day JVMs do just-in-time compilation. The comparison I meant to imply with my sentence didn't have anything to do with performance, it was that Java is a write-once run-anywhere language suited for applications, whereas Go needs a compiler for every target system, and for that reason isn't quite suited to the kinds of things Java programmers are writing.
I understand the need to drive page hits by claiming, "In this bad situation $LANGUAGE could step in and fill the void", but Go seems like an odd choice. It's not that I don't like it: I've written some pet projects with it and it's a fascinating language that I doubt I'd mind having to code in as a full-time job, but they're not similar languages at all, it's an apples-and-oranges comparison
Java is interpreted, Go is compiled. Go lacks inheritance, generics, huge backing libraries, and a bunch of other things that Java programmers rely on. Basically, Go is not an application language, it's a systems programming language that happens to have garbage collection; it's closer to a replacement for C++ than one for Java.
In any event, I just don't see people abandoning Java en masse because of this Oracle spat. There's just too much legacy code out there, and too many programmers fluent in Java and nothing else.
I think the objection is this: let's say you're an inventor, and you've invented this incredible spoon. For whatever reason, the shape and ergonomic design of this spoon revolutionize the eating process, making it orders of magnitude faster, safer, and more efficient. (I have no idea how a spoon would accomplish this, but then, I'm not an inventive genius).
By taking out a patent on your new spoon design you've ensured that unscrupulous manufacturers can't just make a mold of it and start stamping out their own Mega-Spoons without fairly compensating you. That's how patent law is supposed to work.
But what about a world where everyone has 3D printers? If someone uploads the schematics for your spoon to The Pirate Bay and lets anyone print one out, instead of buying it from you, are they breaking patent law? Is it still a breach of the law if you're only doing it for your own use instead of selling it? Is it theft? (you're being deprived of revenue, after all)
I'm not asking rhetorically: I honestly don't know, and I bet a lot of other people don't know either. It'd be cool if all of this could be straightened out before these printers become household technology, but that's probably wishful thinking and we'll see the same reactive nonsense that we see for movies/music now.
"Nowadays"? Penny Arcade was mocking this back in 1998. Hell, anyone remember Pac-Man for the Atari 2600? Game developers have been putting out buggy releases since time immaterial, I'm a little surprised that everyone angry at Bethesda thinks this is some emergent phenomenon.
The real reason behind Google pulling their advertising is pressure from governments and schools to increase worker/student productivity, and if you think I'm kidding, you've never been to TvTropes. As far as a free-time black hole, it's orders of magnitude worse than Facebook.
I realize Slashdot has a certain "information should be free" ethos...
Not really. "Information wants to be free" is used more when talking about the free/open-source software movement, or against locking down data in inaccessible proprietary formats. It's generally only used as justification for piracy in one of two contexts:
1. As a straw man attacking people with a rightful opposition to invasive DRM schemes.
2. By idiots who pirate things because they don't want to pay for them, and then flail around trying to find some kind of philosophical justification for their actions. Of course, that's nobody on Slashdot... riiiiiiiiight?
The reality is, there are always going to be fucktards who will look to the Internet to avoid having to pay for something. What we're saying is we don't see why the existence of these people- who will always exist and will always find a way to crack DRM, guaranteed- should mean that we have to have a crippled product that we legitimately paid for, and legally own.
I don't recommend it yet. Tried to go to Slashdot right after installation: it loaded about halfway, hung for 30 seconds (not even the buttons below the screen responded), then crashed back to the homescreen. A few issues to work out, methinks.
It's because the book-scanning process is completely automated. I can't find a look to it, but a remember a Slashdot or Wired article about Google's automatic book-scanning machine. Basically it's too difficult to adjust for perfect focus for every book.
I wouldn't worry about it though: Google is doing OCR on all these books, and they'll presumably replace the images with plain-text equivalents at some point (more searchable, portable, etc.) That's my hope, anyway.
Can we please talk about the "the networks cancel the good stuff and keep the crap" spiel that I see every single time Slashdot or Reddit or whatever starts talking about television?
Networks are businesses: they exist to make money. Network executives are not evil men who... well, OK, they are evil, but not in the way you think: they don't say to themselves, "This show is much too intelligent, it might awaken our viewers out of their drunken stupor, cause them to realize that corporations like us are the reason for their miserable lives, and spark a revolution! Away with it!". No, what they do is say, "This show is losing money, not enough people are watching it. Away with it." That's their job.
And don't talk to me about how the Nielsen ratings don't accurately reflect viewership, and how Firefly was actually this smash hit being watched by gobs of people around the country that Fox somehow overlooked. You know how Serenity did at the box office, the movie that all the fans were supposed to go see multiple times to convince Fox to bring the show back? It didn't break even, even when you factor in DVD sales. You're not as numerous as you think.
If you want to complain about bad television being the norm, you need to go find people and convince them to watch your favorite show instead of { watching crap like American Idol, pirating the show off the Internet, doing intellectually-stimulating or otherwise rewarding activities besides TV }. Lousy television is their fault, not the networks', the latter is just giving people what they want.
Lord knows I don't want to sound like I'm sticking up for TV executives, but it pains me to see this same crap appear in the comments every single time, when people could actually fix the problem if they were willing to make the effort.
Frothing rant over now.
Actually I think it's doing exactly the right thing. I think the problem with your expectations is that "climate change" is such a huge topic. When looking for things like scholarly papers, actual academics would never use a term like "climate change" in a search engine, it's way too broad. Do you want air temperatures or ocean temperatures, effects on biospheres, which time periods are you looking at, how is the data normalized... I could go on like this for a while. Hell, at a typical big research university there are probably a dozen different departments whose work could be said to be connected to "climate change".
/science", you're looking for general news articles on climate change, from scientific sources who know what they're talking about (as opposed to, say, "climate change /fox"), because if you were looking for something more specific, that's what you would've typed.
Given this, I think what Blekko is doing is assuming that if you type in "climate change
I'm not saying this website is a great idea- I'll still be using Google for the foreseeable future, both for general news and scholarly search, and the idea that people can now have search engines catered to their confirmation bias disturbs me- but in this case I think their choices make sense.
What a bunch of whiners. Apple tries to do something nice for you, give you a little more time in the morning, and this is how you thank them?
Have to agree with the comments above, that article is pretty useless.
Coincidentally, though, at a university book sale a few weeks ago, I picked up a copy of N. David Mermin's Quantum Computer Science: An Introduction, for just $5 (seems to be about $30 on Amazon) and I can't recommend it highly enough. It's an intro to quantum computing textbook, about 200 pages, written specifically for people who have CS or math (as opposed to physics) backgrounds, and while it's almost impossible to get into the nitty-gritty of why quantum computing works without a lot of quantum mechanics esoterica, this book does a great job of explaining how it works (which is plenty complicated on it's own).
It's not a light read (it's a textbook, after all), and contains some serious math, but it's nothing someone with a college education can't handle and it really helped me understand this whole mess better than any popular news article.
The news also prompted developer Anil Dash to call for an open alternative to the Mac App Store.
Wow, what an incredible idea. You mean, like, promoting your app and selling it on your own so that anyone can download it? Like we've been doing for years?
That philosophy is fine for tax loopholes that were created by popular vote with broad support from the general public. I have a harder time accepting it when these loopholes- which are designed specifically to exempt only corporations, you and I can go pound sand- were drafted and created by expensive corporate lobbyists. You're essentially saying that we should allow Google to bribe our politicians into giving them huge tax breaks, and then gag us with Hand's quote to keep us from complaining about it. To be blunt, fuck that.
In case you're interested, Ars has a good piece on why Apple chose the Core 2 instead of an i-series chip. Basically it boils down to
a) Graphics performance. The integrated graphics on the i-series can't touch Nvidia's 320M, and Nvidia hasn't come out an equivalent for Arrandale yet.
b) Arrandale needs a separate memory controller, and there's no room for it on the MBA's tiny motherboard.
Good points, though I still want to see head-to-head performance numbers to see if the choice was a good one.
Please try to avoid posting two articles in a row with words like "hologram" in the title. My brain is now full of confusing images about the universe actually being a virtual Japanese pop star.
Much appreciated.
At 100% O2, the partial pressure of oxygen at 5 psi is actually higher than it is on Earth, so it's quite easy.
Of course, there are other issues with an all-oxygen atmosphere, but breathing isn't one of them. The idea was to reduce the amount of pressure the cabins had to be designed to withstand.
If you haven't opted out of Domain Helper ("helpfully" redirecting your 404's to advertising), it doesn't mean anything yet. If you are, it means your DNS lookups are going to be done over a secure channel, which in theory makes it much more difficult to perform DNS redirection attacks (where you look up www.google.com but a hiacking means that you get back the IP address for http://ebay.spamwarezdeath.ru./ In short, it's a Good Thing ;)
I was going to suggest just the opposite. Medical studies aren't like doing physics experiments in the lab: you can't control the minutae of the experiment to anywhere near an ideal degree. You need to have control groups, you need to factor out all possible other causes (and even then, you can be sure you won't catch them all), you need to have long-term observations and follow-up studies. Sometimes you'll see a trend and it turns out it was pure chance. Everyone is different, both in terms of genetic makeup and environment, and that's going to mean that everyone has different reactions to just about anything.
There's clearly room for a great deal of improvement here, but people might need to accept that results of medical studies are never going to be as clear-cut as math papers. I think, and now I'm moving into personal opinion, the most important step-- and this applies to both the media and to scientists who might want to cite or cross-reference something-- is that nothing is ever, ever proved after the first paper. Ever. The first paper on some hypothetical connection really should just be ignored, except for prompting further investigation Like I said above, it needs follow-ups, and experiments with different variables controlled for.
Blame New Scientist, the typo is there and was just quoted verbatim. Although there really should have been some basic sanity checking before it hit the front page (perhaps as a snarky "30,000 RPM? Really" footnote), I've long since learned not to expect such feats from the editors.
Oh you poor, stupid bastard Linus.
The Slashdot server has decided it is not in the best interest of the Computers to let you post anonymously. Nice try, human.
There's not going to be a leak this time. It's a stationary "midway-house delivery" platform, not a drilling platform.
Not downplaying the significance of this (what was it the energy industry said about the BP explosion being a "once-in-a-lifetime" event and so Obama's drilling ban was unwarranted?), but we don't need to worry about another spill.
their patent rights expired as they should, and is still using old packaging/molds/etc. that display the patent number and are now falsely claiming protection they don't have...
Most of these companies are undoubtedly committing these violations unknowingly, but GP does have a point that the law exists for a reason: otherwise people could go on falsely claiming patent protection indefinitely. Don't why the gov't has to split the money with random third parties, though, that's just asking for abuse.
It's not all bad, you just need to ignore both
a) Big-name publications. As you say, they're pretty much factories which output wonderful reviews for the sake of early-access and other perks.
b) Individual commenters and nobodies with blogs. They're either paid shills or, more commonly, frothing fanboys who don't meet any standards of objectivity.
There are reliable sources, though, when you look outside of these categories. Sites like Ars Technica are pretty good, although since gaming is just one of several things they do, there's never any guarantee that they'll review the game you're interested in. Penny Arcade is of course the gold standard: Tycho (or Jerry, or whatever) is a great writer, and you can be damn sure that if he gives a game a thumbs-up, he's not doing it as a favor to some PR man. As long as you stick to established good sources you don't have to worry about scams like this.