The language seems to have reached the point that C++ gurus design it for other C++ gurus, and everyone else ignores it.
I think this is very close to true -- in particular, many new C++ features are there mainly so that the STL can 'magically' do the right thing in more cases. Mere mortals are not expected to make use of the new features directly; rather they are expected to use the improved STL and benefit from its smarter behavior.
In Digital, everything either is a "0" (zero) or a "1" (one), which means, everything is either true, or false
Take 32 of those bits and put them together, now you've got a floating point value that can represent "true" as 1.0, "false" as 0.0, and a few million shades of "maybe" in between those two extremes.
If that's not analog-y enough for you, make it 64 bits and now you can have trillions of shades. And if that's still not enough, add more bits until you've got the resolution you're looking for.
I don't see any significant distinction between analog and digital, since digital logic asymptotically approaches analog as you add bits, and with today's memory sizes there are plenty of bits to go around.
Our meatbrain can cope with a lot of stuffs that the digital computer can't precisely because our brain makes its decision based on imprecise feedback
Or perhaps because it's running a radically different kind of algorithm that no human has ever understood or implemented on a digital computer.
To someone who writes Javascript code every day, like myself, nothing at all is "broken" with the language (though obviously, like any language, it could use some improvements).
Ah, good old Stockholm Syndrome. Don't worry, I feel the same way about C++;^)
Somebody please stab and kill the HTML/DOM stack so we can move on to a better GUI fit.
Hmm, perhaps Qt running in a NaCL environment? The only fundamental limitation would be that it's Intel-only, but then again so are most desktops these days.
If you're looking for body count, take out a stadium during a finale game (of course that's no longer a viable option now that they're probably better protected than Penn Ave 1600 itself, but back then definitely easy).
I'm trying to imagine what sort of defense system a stadium could have that would prevent a rogue 747 from crashing in to it. There must be some pretty damn impressive anti-missile technologies hidden under the parking lots;^)
They also make it look like the systems last 80+ years when the reality is they at most last 25 (for solar) which at that point you are looking at full replacement.
Solar panels are typically warrantied for 20-25 years. The warranty specifies that they will still provide at least 80% of their rated power at the end of that period; and that is a conservative figure, so expect them to do better than that in practice. After the warranty period ends, there is no reason (that I'm aware of) that they should not continue to operate as before, albeit at a somewhat reduced capacity.
Whether or not it will be worthwhile to add additional panels, replace them all, or just keep using them as-is for longer will be a decision to make at some point, but AFAIK there is no reason why the system should suddenly stop working at the 20-25 year mark. (Your point about the inverters needing maintenance or replacement every 5-10 years is valid, though)
My roof is the floor of the people upstairs. I can't install solar!
True, but you could buy some shares in your community solar garden. It's not like the photons have to be gathered from your own roof; the solar panels only need to be sufficiently nearby that transporting the electrons to you is economical.
Oh well... maybe they can reuse the land for those totally environmentally friendly solar panels. Wait, what do we do with those when they reach end of life?
Well, the obvious thing to do would be to recycle them.
We aren't doing much of that yet, because there aren't enough worn-out solar panels yet to make it worthwhile. In 20-25 years, when large numbers of panels start reaching end-of-life, there will be.
The other thing to do, of course, is to start making solar panels using fewer toxic materials. Also a laudable and attainable goal, which will be reached in due course.
Carbon taxes do not pay the external costs of carbon emissions. Full stop.
But that was never the intent of a carbon tax, was it? It's not a reparations program.
The purpose of a carbon tax is to make carbon emitting-technologies more expensive, so that the market will be encouraged to find alternatives that emit less carbon.
Without that, it's difficult for alternative technologies to get a foothold in the market, as they are forced to compete with carbon-based technologies that are allowed to pollute "for free", thus neutralizing (from a monetary perspective) the advantage of the non-polluting technologies.
How many people does solyndra employ today? Where are the green jobs?
Here they are. The solar industry of the USA now employs more people than the coal industry of the USA.
Funny how you weren't aware of that fact, isn't it? It's almost as if your media sources chose not to mention it, because it doesn't fit their narrative.
This is the recurring problem with the left. They promise everyone a world of rainbows and unicorn cheeseburgers. But when push comes to shove... you fail. You don't deliver.
Or, they succeed, but the right-wing media bubble pretends not not notice. Cherry-picking reality might help them keep their market share in the short run, but as time goes on more and more people will realize they're full of shit.
You ask for the big picture, agile's answer is that there is none. The whole code base is alive and trying to keep on top of everything else that's happening is too much wasted time. You just keep the bits and pieces you work on working as you make changes.
My intuition tells me that this would cause the codebase to become an incomprehensible mess over time, as it would not have any consistent organizing principles to speak of. Is my intuition correct, or is that not generally a problem in practice?
ANYONE feels entitled to vent when you're on the Internet- you're relatively anonymous and there just aren't any real consequences for being a total douchebag.
Too true, and I'm not sure what the compensating benefit is. There are situations where anonymity can be beneficial, but a social/gaming arena is not one of them. Why allow anonymity if it only encourages people to act like irresponsible douchebags?
A half-serious solution for a gaming platform that wants to reduce the douchebag problem: make all gamers register under their real name, and record all of their in-game communications in a searchable database that the world (including present and future employers) can Google. That ought to clean at least some of them up.
Was the fact that they had all this equiptment hooked up to them a factor in their statistics?
Yes. When they compared their measurements against the measurements they gathered from the people they didn't measure, they took that bias into account.
Why would anybody want to wait for a day or two for a piece of plastic when they can access the data instantly online?
Nobody would, except perhaps for those with inadequate Internet bandwidth.
However, for a large number of movies you can't currently "access the data instantly online" (at least, not via Netflix). Netflix's primary focus should be on getting their streaming catalog to match their DVD catalog.
Finally, the American standard of social discourse, "I'm right because I'm yelling louder", can be brought to the homey confines of the minivan and ingrained on the little darlings early on.
Have you ever tried to reason with a 3-year old? There are times when the "Argument from Because I Said So" is literally the only option left. Finer points of logic are completely lost on a person with an undeveloped frontal lobe who is in the middle of a temper tantrum.
Hardware is cheap. It's not an elegant solution, but it's cheap. And getting cheaper.
Right, but if your company comes up with an elegant solution that gets 10x better performance out of a given piece of hardware, and your competitors cannot (or do not) do the same, then you've got a cost advantage over your competitors and can use that to get customers to choose to buy your product rather than theirs.
That will always be true, no matter how fast and cheap the hardware gets. Either your customers will be able to do 10 times more work with your product, or (if there isn't 10 times more work to actually do), they can get the job done with 10 times less hardware (and thus 10 times less expense).
Focus on the UX, because without that, who cares what your kernel can do?
There is a whole world of software out there that runs in the background and doesn't require much (if any) UX. Think of the software that generates your credit card statement every month.
Slashdot Mirror
The language seems to have reached the point that C++ gurus design it for other C++ gurus, and everyone else ignores it.
I think this is very close to true -- in particular, many new C++ features are there mainly so that the STL can 'magically' do the right thing in more cases. Mere mortals are not expected to make use of the new features directly; rather they are expected to use the improved STL and benefit from its smarter behavior.
Most people haven't written a symphony. Most people can't go beyond basic algebra. Most people cannot play chess.
Most people could learn to do those things (with greater or lesser degrees of skill) if they cared to devote the time to required do so.
In Digital, everything either is a "0" (zero) or a "1" (one), which means, everything is either true, or false
Take 32 of those bits and put them together, now you've got a floating point value that can represent "true" as 1.0, "false" as 0.0, and a few million shades of "maybe" in between those two extremes.
If that's not analog-y enough for you, make it 64 bits and now you can have trillions of shades. And if that's still not enough, add more bits until you've got the resolution you're looking for.
I don't see any significant distinction between analog and digital, since digital logic asymptotically approaches analog as you add bits, and with today's memory sizes there are plenty of bits to go around.
Our meatbrain can cope with a lot of stuffs that the digital computer can't precisely because our brain makes its decision based on imprecise feedback
Or perhaps because it's running a radically different kind of algorithm that no human has ever understood or implemented on a digital computer.
To someone who writes Javascript code every day, like myself, nothing at all is "broken" with the language (though obviously, like any language, it could use some improvements).
Ah, good old Stockholm Syndrome. Don't worry, I feel the same way about C++ ;^)
Somebody please stab and kill the HTML/DOM stack so we can move on to a better GUI fit.
Hmm, perhaps Qt running in a NaCL environment? The only fundamental limitation would be that it's Intel-only, but then again so are most desktops these days.
If you're looking for body count, take out a stadium during a finale game (of course that's no longer a viable option now that they're probably better protected than Penn Ave 1600 itself, but back then definitely easy).
I'm trying to imagine what sort of defense system a stadium could have that would prevent a rogue 747 from crashing in to it. There must be some pretty damn impressive anti-missile technologies hidden under the parking lots ;^)
They also make it look like the systems last 80+ years when the reality is they at most last 25 (for solar) which at that point you are looking at full replacement.
Solar panels are typically warrantied for 20-25 years. The warranty specifies that they will still provide at least 80% of their rated power at the end of that period; and that is a conservative figure, so expect them to do better than that in practice. After the warranty period ends, there is no reason (that I'm aware of) that they should not continue to operate as before, albeit at a somewhat reduced capacity.
Whether or not it will be worthwhile to add additional panels, replace them all, or just keep using them as-is for longer will be a decision to make at some point, but AFAIK there is no reason why the system should suddenly stop working at the 20-25 year mark. (Your point about the inverters needing maintenance or replacement every 5-10 years is valid, though)
Totally true -- but it's probably less than the price they'd pay for not co-operating.
If energy was cheap enough, maybe you would use your excess electricity to get free water instead
I prefer the opposite approach -- I've placed a paddle-wheel under my shower head, and I'm using the hydroelectricity it generates to power my house.
My roof is the floor of the people upstairs. I can't install solar!
True, but you could buy some shares in your community solar garden. It's not like the photons have to be gathered from your own roof; the solar panels only need to be sufficiently nearby that transporting the electrons to you is economical.
Ha ha, that is hilarious! Seriously, the reason they have massive profits is because they don't care about society as much as themselves.
Did you know that cynicism has been linked to dementia? You might want to get yourself examined by a doctor; your symptoms are rather severe.
Prototype, people, it's a prototype.
I'm all for alien-crushing super-robot strength too, just not while the software is still in beta :^)
Oh well... maybe they can reuse the land for those totally environmentally friendly solar panels. Wait, what do we do with those when they reach end of life?
Well, the obvious thing to do would be to recycle them.
We aren't doing much of that yet, because there aren't enough worn-out solar panels yet to make it worthwhile. In 20-25 years, when large numbers of panels start reaching end-of-life, there will be.
The other thing to do, of course, is to start making solar panels using fewer toxic materials. Also a laudable and attainable goal, which will be reached in due course.
hmm yeah but I'm thinking why would this be a device and not a piece of software?
Custom hardware gives it the ability to communicate using body language.
Whether that's worth the extra cost, I don't know; probably not. But it does make it more interesting than "just another app".
It looks like that HHGTG is also being treated as a manual rather than as a warning.
HHGTTG was a manual.
Carbon taxes do not pay the external costs of carbon emissions. Full stop.
But that was never the intent of a carbon tax, was it? It's not a reparations program.
The purpose of a carbon tax is to make carbon emitting-technologies more expensive, so that the market will be encouraged to find alternatives that emit less carbon.
Without that, it's difficult for alternative technologies to get a foothold in the market, as they are forced to compete with carbon-based technologies that are allowed to pollute "for free", thus neutralizing (from a monetary perspective) the advantage of the non-polluting technologies.
How many people does solyndra employ today? Where are the green jobs?
Here they are. The solar industry of the USA now employs more people than the coal industry of the USA.
Funny how you weren't aware of that fact, isn't it? It's almost as if your media sources chose not to mention it, because it doesn't fit their narrative.
This is the recurring problem with the left. They promise everyone a world of rainbows and unicorn cheeseburgers. But when push comes to shove... you fail. You don't deliver.
Or, they succeed, but the right-wing media bubble pretends not not notice. Cherry-picking reality might help them keep their market share in the short run, but as time goes on more and more people will realize they're full of shit.
Do you still drive a 70's car?
If the price of a new car was $180M, I would definitely stick with my trusty 70s car.
How did Southwest find out about this tweet?
Do they have a team of people sitting around watching a Twitter feed, so that if anyone mentions Southwest they can pounce?
If so, good job guys! You really saved the day here. SWA stock is going to go up tomorrow for sure! :^)
You ask for the big picture, agile's answer is that there is none. The whole code base is alive and trying to keep on top of everything else that's happening is too much wasted time. You just keep the bits and pieces you work on working as you make changes.
My intuition tells me that this would cause the codebase to become an incomprehensible mess over time, as it would not have any consistent organizing principles to speak of. Is my intuition correct, or is that not generally a problem in practice?
ANYONE feels entitled to vent when you're on the Internet- you're relatively anonymous and there just aren't any real consequences for being a total douchebag.
Too true, and I'm not sure what the compensating benefit is. There are situations where anonymity can be beneficial, but a social/gaming arena is not one of them. Why allow anonymity if it only encourages people to act like irresponsible douchebags?
A half-serious solution for a gaming platform that wants to reduce the douchebag problem: make all gamers register under their real name, and record all of their in-game communications in a searchable database that the world (including present and future employers) can Google. That ought to clean at least some of them up.
Was the fact that they had all this equiptment hooked up to them a factor in their statistics?
Yes. When they compared their measurements against the measurements they gathered from the people they didn't measure, they took that bias into account.
Why would anybody want to wait for a day or two for a piece of plastic when they can access the data instantly online?
Nobody would, except perhaps for those with inadequate Internet bandwidth.
However, for a large number of movies you can't currently "access the data instantly online" (at least, not via Netflix). Netflix's primary focus should be on getting their streaming catalog to match their DVD catalog.
Finally, the American standard of social discourse, "I'm right because I'm yelling louder", can be brought to the homey confines of the minivan and ingrained on the little darlings early on.
Have you ever tried to reason with a 3-year old? There are times when the "Argument from Because I Said So" is literally the only option left. Finer points of logic are completely lost on a person with an undeveloped frontal lobe who is in the middle of a temper tantrum.
Hardware is cheap. It's not an elegant solution, but it's cheap. And getting cheaper.
Right, but if your company comes up with an elegant solution that gets 10x better performance out of a given piece of hardware, and your competitors cannot (or do not) do the same, then you've got a cost advantage over your competitors and can use that to get customers to choose to buy your product rather than theirs.
That will always be true, no matter how fast and cheap the hardware gets. Either your customers will be able to do 10 times more work with your product, or (if there isn't 10 times more work to actually do), they can get the job done with 10 times less hardware (and thus 10 times less expense).
Focus on the UX, because without that, who cares what your kernel can do?
There is a whole world of software out there that runs in the background and doesn't require much (if any) UX. Think of the software that generates your credit card statement every month.