I think the "electrolysis" project for per-tab processes is such a feature to be excited about. Of course Chrome already has this, so maybe the excitement is not all that great. But I think that the unconditional Firefox bashing that is so cool these days is totally counter-productive. Just like me, most Firefox-bashers don't want a Chrome monoculture. Be careful, or you'll manage to kill it and then good night.
The center core of a falcon heavy (the triple-core version) stages too far away in order to return to the launch site. It will be landing on that barge.
The Americans like this narrative a lot, probably because it's a good excuse for preemptive interventions.
However, I don't think "appeasement" changed anything in the course of events except for holding up the outbreak of the war for one year. If the other European powers and the US had tried to isolate Hitler at the time, do you really think Hitler would have been cowed? On the contrary, it would just have been better for his propaganda machine and he wanted to start the war earlier anyway. And the idea of a massive military intervention to throw Germany out of Czechoslovakia is something that you may justify in retrospect, but at the time it would have been an absurd move, even it had had with popular support.
Icons for software development
on
A History of Icons
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· Score: 2, Informative
Until recently, I've found it quite difficult to find decent icons for software development. As a software developer I have a natural inability to draw anything that remotely resembles the intended object and the free icon collections on the internet made my applications look like frankenstein clones.
Fortunately, nowadays the situation has improved considerably. You can find a lot of useful BSD-licensed icons in the eclipse project, most of them are quite IDE-related, but with a little bit of imagination you can use them in lots of different situations.
If you have some money to spend, you can buy the icon collections from Incors. They're really great Windows XP-style icons for a very reasonable price.
In his book "Time", Stephen Baxter makes a similar argument, that humankind is close to destruction, because the probability to live now would be extremely small if humankind were to continue and expand for a long time. He calls it the "Carter catastrophe".
Of course this reasoning is complete bullshit and a massive abuse of probability theory. If you're a mathematician, you can probably feel the pain I feel at hearing this contrived I-wanna-make-headlines stuff.
I thinks his comments on dealing with performance problems are especially helpful, even for experienced programmers. Most decent programmers know how to debug, but few programmers excel in tackling performance problems. I've found that profiling is a very fruitful activity even if there are no obvious performance problems, because it provides tremendous insight into the runtime behavior of your applications. Things are often very different from what you would guess intuitively.
If you happen to work with Java, there are quite a few good commercial profilers around that are really easy to setup and use (such as JProfiler or Optimizeit). Try working with one of these for some time and observe how your way of programming changes for the better. Most importantly, you learn not to pre-emptively "improve" performance - one of the deadliest sins of programming which is responsible for a lot of bad and unreadable code.
The vast majority of ISPs offer PHP+MySQL as part of their low-cost solutions and not PHP+(any other RDBMS). That's why the vast majority of readers will be interested in excactly this combination.
In a small company, developers and support are often the same people. That's where you get really excellent support. Our provider domainfactory has the best support I have ever seen. They're a small bunch, but its customers routinely give raving reviews of their service. That's how we chose them and I hope they can keep up their support as they grow.
Along the same lines, my own company ej-technologies tries to provide an excellent service to its customers and evaluators. We sell a Java profiler which is a complex product and requires a lot of support. And guess what - it pays. People whose problems you solved come back to you and buy something. High quality support is a great confidence builder.
I'm shocked about how many people declare combining Access and Mysql to be a dumb idea. I've been doing this stuff for quite some time now and surprisingly I had far less problems than with Oracle and their own JDBC driver. After all, a CLI like ODBC allows for the separation of server and client implementation. Once you get your MyODBC driver going, the only caveat is that you should stick to pure SQL for SELECTs, INSERTs and UPDATEs. Don't use the DAOs themselves to do that, in this setting they're just good for navigation in result sets. Along these lines, Mysql does a terrific job as a speedy backend for your Access client.
I fail to see how anyone who thinks C++ is good might think that Java is painfully mediocre. The basic problem seems to be that human beings tend to reject what they don't know. Xenophobia.
Although you go on ranting about how the original poster is not knowledgeable, you on the other hand seem to have a barely superficial knowledge of Java as your unqualified comments on GC and threads clearly show. By the way, a decent GC requires a VM and threads are heavily platform dependent, which explains why Java has them and C++ doesn't. Not because they're hard to implement.
I believe the only reason you don't slam Java is that you like C++ and you'd have a hard time reconciling how C++ is great and Java sucks.
I've been working quite a lot on semiconductor quantum dots and let me tell you: Nobody's ever going to make a quantum computer from self-assembled quantum dots. There's a whole lot of reasons why this is highly likely but the primary problem is: you cannot easily address them. There is currently no other way to read and write a quantum dot but by placing a SNOM (scanning near field optical microscope) right above it. And SNOM tips are still far to large to really select a single quantum dot. And by the way, after a few milliseconds, the excited state usually recombines due to decoherence, so you would need to constantly refresh all quantum dots every few milliseconds by a very elaborate mechanical process. Finally, with so much decoherence, it's not really a quantum computer anymore, but just a very expensive memory chip.
There are promising designs of quantum computers, but they are not based on a semiconductor design. My personal opinion is that quantum computers will be first be realized in ultra-cold systems such as linear ion-chains. Any design that does not include the concept of a data bus is IMHO worthless.
To conclude, self-assembled quantum dots as described in the article do have their place: in optical devices such as semiconductor lasers, infrared sensors and highly specialized ultra-accurate gauge devices.
There are always several ways to do one thing. In MySQL you deal with kind of problem either through an application server or, if that's not possible, through MySQL application locks. Transactions are a feature which enhances security but the lack of which is by no means a serious degradation of functionality.
Says P.S. Goel, the centre's director who is likely to head the team: "There is nothing fundamental that we have not already done."
Mr Goel is certainly right. Sending a satellite in lunar orbit is not extremely different from placing it into geosynchroneous Earth orbit. In fact, a commercial comsat of Hughes (AsiaSat 3S), which was thought to be lost due to a 4th stage malfunction of a SL-12 Proton, was rescued to geosynchroneous orbit by performing a double lunar flyby using new resonant orbital hopping theory. Checkout this press release.
Do something different, please! There are so many good ideas which are untried and could give India international respect and real spin-offs.
Excellent, this is going to be one of my favourites!/. is becoming a place of mega-enterprise-I-have-all-the-experience-you-have -obviously-no-idea IT bosses. Arrogance par excellence. If you have a different opinion, say so (and I would definitely agree with you here). But please refrain from this kind of classy, elitist and sickening arrogance.
Why can't people just discuss a topic without taking everything personally?
Did you actually read any Einstein? The theory of uniformly moving reference systems is called the "theory of special relativity".
Travel times are relative. You can accelerate as long as you want, you get faster and faster and your total travel time goes down accordingly. It's just that the rest of the universe starts to behave "strangely" as you approach relative speeds close to c. But that does not affect the travellers ability to accelerate. At high relative velocities, you don't decrease your travel time by increasing the relative speed but by compressing space in the direction of your motion. There is just less distance to cover! If you could accelerate with one 1 g indefinitely, each year your subjective "speed" would increase by approximately the speed of light. After 10 years of acceleration you make 10 light years (from earth's point of view) in one year! (your idea of a year, that is)
If you intend to come back to earth, it's a different story, though. Here, people will think that you accelerated well up to a certain point when you started getting close to c. From then on your acceleration was decreasing asymptotically, so that you actually took an awful long time to complete the journey. It's all relative, isn't it?
There's been lots of talk how the internet will be the driving force for the obsolescence of geographical boundaries and a new kind of "network topology" would take its place.
Doesn't seem to be the case, does it?
Distributions: Most Americans seem to be running Red Hat or some derivate. Red Hat has a marginal market share in Europe, they don't even seem to sell it in my local computer stores.
Desktop Environments: I have seen uncountable installations of various window managers (mostly KDE) in Europe but I haven't ever seen a Gnome desktop. If it wasn't for screenshots, I wouldn't even know what it looks like. A great number of Americans seem to be using Gnome though.
What could be the reason for this geographical inequilibrium?
This is a classical example of a collision of two different worlds with two very different sets of interest: slashdot vs. science. Let me elaborate.
slashdot views nano-technology as a source of futuristic application systems, the science fiction realizable in our lifetimes. Terabyte molecular memory chips, terahertz optical computing, holographic computer screens etc. While this is a legitimate point of view, it differs radically from that of the
scientist who is in search of a model system which displays novel and unexpected features, thus making a good case for a publication in Science or Nature. The scientist's reputation and job hinge on those publications. Rarely these works are closely tied to an application. The physicist (less true for higher level disciplines) is not an engineer, but a searcher in the dark, looking for wonders that challenge his/her intellectuality. However, the money for projects mostly comes from much more wordly sources which want to see results. Thus, scientist have become exceedingly good at combining and compromising between their financers' requests and their own agenda.
One of the less original ideas, though, is the announcement of a new type of memory. Anything can be sold to the public as a new memory. I have seen so many proposals for new types of memories come and go that I'll believe them when I see them.
These new chiral molecules do have special applications, I cite their website:
To date, we have applied our chiral ligands to the solution of several problems, including the determination of the absolute configuration of -alkyl pyridinemethanamines, the development of chiral solvating agents for sulfoxides, and the design of a chiroptical sensor for certain metal ions.
That's all right, but is it really a story for slashdot?
Material research has a strong component of wishful thinking and future projections. So many things don't work out because of a few insurmountable details. You need strong sources of motivation to pursue the dire road to success.
In their reasoning and justification of their work, these guys live at least 10 years into the future all the time. The referenced article was probably written by someone who took all their statements at face value. It looks to me as if they still have a long way to go. That's not meant to diminish their merits - these scientist are certainly top notch researchers and their results are truly very impressive. I just don't think they have delivered an imminent disruptive technology.
It's commonly accepted that the existence of a laboratory setup does not guarantee the technological and economical viability of any particular solution in the real world. I would start preparing for an imminent disruptive technology if a successful prototype system did exist. Yet, I don't have the feeling that there are even useful laboratory setups of the presented kinds of photonic devices. It rather looks like promising basic research.
As for the all photonics claim, I think the notion should be scaled down a little to be less prone to misunderstanding. To many people, it sounds like all photons, no electrons. I don't believe there is such a thing within our technological reach. Photons are bosons and interact extremelyweakly. That's not a very good basis for a computing device. Fortunately, photons can be converted into excited states of electrons which are fermions, interact in many ways, and can be used to produce logic gates.
That leaves us with a possible extension of the present use of photonic devices from lines of communication between nodes on a network to nano-lines of communication between old-fashioned electronic gates. And that's certainly not going to happen very soon. So, sorry my friends, no reason to get all excited.
Re:Same old rant over and over again
on
Why Not MySQL?
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· Score: 1
I'll give you a trivial example: timestamping
This example is really a little bit too trivial too convince anybody.
...because Joe's Web Design And Auto Body doesn't need it.
I see you're a great hero doing the real heavy lifting on the internet. Hats off to this gentleman!
I'd use a damn tape-driven turing machine
Maybe you should do just that and declare yourself 313373
Re:Same old rant over and over again
on
Why Not MySQL?
·
· Score: 1
This is a joke, right? I've seen many RDBMS's come right back up, without data corruption, after power loss/UPS failure/hardware failure. Naturally, in a mission-critical environment, you need backup systems, but both mirroring and replication are also vulnerable in the absence of logged rollback functionality.
I've also seen RDBMS's screwing up entire systems without power loss/UPS failure/hardware failure because the application simply wasn't up to the task. Code integrity is orders of magnitude more critical than transactions and triggers. By the way, you must have been around for a 1000 years to see more than one combined power loss/UPS failure. What are you working with if I may ask? A generator and a car battery?
Oops... sorry. I had thought I was speaking to a professional
You should have rolled back your reply then, seriously.
What's the reason for the high suicide rate among RDBMS programmers? They keep jumping from skyscapers for fun, shouting "ROLLBACK" just befor they hit the ground.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the "electrolysis" project for per-tab processes is such a feature to be excited about. Of course Chrome already has this, so maybe the excitement is not all that great. But I think that the unconditional Firefox bashing that is so cool these days is totally counter-productive. Just like me, most Firefox-bashers don't want a Chrome monoculture. Be careful, or you'll manage to kill it and then good night.
The center core of a falcon heavy (the triple-core version) stages too far away in order to return to the launch site. It will be landing on that barge.
The Americans like this narrative a lot, probably because it's a good excuse for preemptive interventions.
However, I don't think "appeasement" changed anything in the course of events except for holding up the outbreak of the war for one year. If the other European powers and the US had tried to isolate Hitler at the time, do you really think Hitler would have been cowed? On the contrary, it would just have been better for his propaganda machine and he wanted to start the war earlier anyway. And the idea of a massive military intervention to throw Germany out of Czechoslovakia is something that you may justify in retrospect, but at the time it would have been an absurd move, even it had had with popular support.
Here it is:
http://code.google.com/p/wave-protocol/wiki/ConsoleClient
Her
Did Ron Paul drop out?
Fortunately, nowadays the situation has improved considerably. You can find a lot of useful BSD-licensed icons in the eclipse project, most of them are quite IDE-related, but with a little bit of imagination you can use them in lots of different situations.
If you have some money to spend, you can buy the icon collections from Incors. They're really great Windows XP-style icons for a very reasonable price.
In his book "Time", Stephen Baxter makes a similar argument, that humankind is close to destruction, because the probability to live now would be extremely small if humankind were to continue and expand for a long time. He calls it the "Carter catastrophe".
Of course this reasoning is complete bullshit and a massive abuse of probability theory. If you're a mathematician, you can probably feel the pain I feel at hearing this contrived I-wanna-make-headlines stuff.
If you happen to work with Java, there are quite a few good commercial profilers around that are really easy to setup and use (such as JProfiler or Optimizeit). Try working with one of these for some time and observe how your way of programming changes for the better. Most importantly, you learn not to pre-emptively "improve" performance - one of the deadliest sins of programming which is responsible for a lot of bad and unreadable code.
Well, if gcj's JVMPI becomes fully usable, maybe we could us a tool like JProfiler for natively compiled Java code. That would be great.
The vast majority of ISPs offer PHP+MySQL as part of their low-cost solutions and not PHP+(any other RDBMS). That's why the vast majority of readers will be interested in excactly this combination.
In a small company, developers and support are often the same people. That's where you get really excellent support. Our provider domainfactory has the best support I have ever seen. They're a small bunch, but its customers routinely give raving reviews of their service. That's how we chose them and I hope they can keep up their support as they grow.
Along the same lines, my own company ej-technologies tries to provide an excellent service to its customers and evaluators. We sell a Java profiler which is a complex product and requires a lot of support. And guess what - it pays. People whose problems you solved come back to you and buy something. High quality support is a great confidence builder.
I'm shocked about how many people declare combining Access and Mysql to be a dumb idea. I've been doing this stuff for quite some time now and surprisingly I had far less problems than with Oracle and their own JDBC driver. After all, a CLI like ODBC allows for the separation of server and client implementation. Once you get your MyODBC driver going, the only caveat is that you should stick to pure SQL for SELECTs, INSERTs and UPDATEs. Don't use the DAOs themselves to do that, in this setting they're just good for navigation in result sets. Along these lines, Mysql does a terrific job as a speedy backend for your Access client.
Although you go on ranting about how the original poster is not knowledgeable, you on the other hand seem to have a barely superficial knowledge of Java as your unqualified comments on GC and threads clearly show. By the way, a decent GC requires a VM and threads are heavily platform dependent, which explains why Java has them and C++ doesn't. Not because they're hard to implement.
I believe the only reason you don't slam Java is that you like C++ and you'd have a hard time reconciling how C++ is great and Java sucks.
There are promising designs of quantum computers, but they are not based on a semiconductor design. My personal opinion is that quantum computers will be first be realized in ultra-cold systems such as linear ion-chains. Any design that does not include the concept of a data bus is IMHO worthless.
To conclude, self-assembled quantum dots as described in the article do have their place: in optical devices such as semiconductor lasers, infrared sensors and highly specialized ultra-accurate gauge devices.
Just my 2 nm ...
There are always several ways to do one thing. In MySQL you deal with kind of problem either through an application server or, if that's not possible, through MySQL application locks. Transactions are a feature which enhances security but the lack of which is by no means a serious degradation of functionality.
Mr Goel is certainly right. Sending a satellite in lunar orbit is not extremely different from placing it into geosynchroneous Earth orbit. In fact, a commercial comsat of Hughes (AsiaSat 3S), which was thought to be lost due to a 4th stage malfunction of a SL-12 Proton, was rescued to geosynchroneous orbit by performing a double lunar flyby using new resonant orbital hopping theory. Checkout this press release.
Do something different, please! There are so many good ideas which are untried and could give India international respect and real spin-offs.
Ah, the naivete of youth ...
Excellent, this is going to be one of my favourites! /. is becoming a place of mega-enterprise-I-have-all-the-experience-you-have -obviously-no-idea IT bosses. Arrogance par excellence. If you have a different opinion, say so (and I would definitely agree with you here). But please refrain from this kind of classy, elitist and sickening arrogance.
Why can't people just discuss a topic without taking everything personally?
Did you actually read any Einstein? The theory of uniformly moving reference systems is called the "theory of special relativity".
Travel times are relative. You can accelerate as long as you want, you get faster and faster and your total travel time goes down accordingly. It's just that the rest of the universe starts to behave "strangely" as you approach relative speeds close to c. But that does not affect the travellers ability to accelerate. At high relative velocities, you don't decrease your travel time by increasing the relative speed but by compressing space in the direction of your motion. There is just less distance to cover! If you could accelerate with one 1 g indefinitely, each year your subjective "speed" would increase by approximately the speed of light. After 10 years of acceleration you make 10 light years (from earth's point of view) in one year! (your idea of a year, that is)
If you intend to come back to earth, it's a different story, though. Here, people will think that you accelerated well up to a certain point when you started getting close to c. From then on your acceleration was decreasing asymptotically, so that you actually took an awful long time to complete the journey. It's all relative, isn't it?
There's been lots of talk how the internet will be the driving force for the obsolescence of geographical boundaries and a new kind of "network topology" would take its place.
Doesn't seem to be the case, does it?
Distributions: Most Americans seem to be running Red Hat or some derivate. Red Hat has a marginal market share in Europe, they don't even seem to sell it in my local computer stores.
Desktop Environments: I have seen uncountable installations of various window managers (mostly KDE) in Europe but I haven't ever seen a Gnome desktop. If it wasn't for screenshots, I wouldn't even know what it looks like. A great number of Americans seem to be using Gnome though.
What could be the reason for this geographical inequilibrium?
This is a classical example of a collision of two different worlds with two very different sets of interest: slashdot vs. science. Let me elaborate.
One of the less original ideas, though, is the announcement of a new type of memory. Anything can be sold to the public as a new memory. I have seen so many proposals for new types of memories come and go that I'll believe them when I see them.
These new chiral molecules do have special applications, I cite their website:
That's all right, but is it really a story for slashdot?
Material research has a strong component of wishful thinking and future projections. So many things don't work out because of a few insurmountable details. You need strong sources of motivation to pursue the dire road to success.
In their reasoning and justification of their work, these guys live at least 10 years into the future all the time. The referenced article was probably written by someone who took all their statements at face value. It looks to me as if they still have a long way to go. That's not meant to diminish their merits - these scientist are certainly top notch researchers and their results are truly very impressive. I just don't think they have delivered an imminent disruptive technology.
It's commonly accepted that the existence of a laboratory setup does not guarantee the technological and economical viability of any particular solution in the real world. I would start preparing for an imminent disruptive technology if a successful prototype system did exist. Yet, I don't have the feeling that there are even useful laboratory setups of the presented kinds of photonic devices. It rather looks like promising basic research.
As for the all photonics claim, I think the notion should be scaled down a little to be less prone to misunderstanding. To many people, it sounds like all photons, no electrons. I don't believe there is such a thing within our technological reach. Photons are bosons and interact extremelyweakly. That's not a very good basis for a computing device. Fortunately, photons can be converted into excited states of electrons which are fermions, interact in many ways, and can be used to produce logic gates.
That leaves us with a possible extension of the present use of photonic devices from lines of communication between nodes on a network to nano-lines of communication between old-fashioned electronic gates. And that's certainly not going to happen very soon. So, sorry my friends, no reason to get all excited.
I'll give you a trivial example: timestamping
This example is really a little bit too trivial too convince anybody.
I see you're a great hero doing the real heavy lifting on the internet. Hats off to this gentleman!
I'd use a damn tape-driven turing machine
Maybe you should do just that and declare yourself 313373
This is a joke, right? I've seen many RDBMS's come right back up, without data corruption, after power loss/UPS failure/hardware failure. Naturally, in a mission-critical environment, you need backup systems, but both mirroring and replication are also vulnerable in the absence of logged rollback functionality.
I've also seen RDBMS's screwing up entire systems without power loss/UPS failure/hardware failure because the application simply wasn't up to the task. Code integrity is orders of magnitude more critical than transactions and triggers. By the way, you must have been around for a 1000 years to see more than one combined power loss/UPS failure. What are you working with if I may ask? A generator and a car battery?
Oops... sorry. I had thought I was speaking to a professional
You should have rolled back your reply then, seriously.
What's the reason for the high suicide rate among RDBMS programmers? They keep jumping from skyscapers for fun, shouting "ROLLBACK" just befor they hit the ground.