My problem is (and always has been) that Larry Has Opinions. And lots of those are expressed in such a heavy-handed manner: the language syntax, the intrusive keywords, the proudly gnomic and condescending tone that early on propagated down through Perl user groups, that they are off-putting...
You see, this don't sound like a technical dispute to me.
Spoken like someone who's never managed a software development project bigger than themselves.
Of course it's a technical problem. Why buy into a tool and ecosystem with warts that piss more people off than the next tool's?
Folks like me? No-one in the Perl community was ever mean to me. But I had half a dozen languages under the belt before I had the need for a quick-n-dirty scripting language in the mid 90's and fairly quickly made what I'm happy to this day to call an astute technical judgement that a language and community that was so ostentatiously opinionated would be a risky choice for team work; to say nothing of the languages's technical deficiencies at that time. It wasn't a hard decision. If you want to drive The Homer and gloat online about the fur-lined glove compartment that's fine by me. I'll take the fleet of Camrys and have fun going cool places with the team.
Respect where it's due for Perl's historical achievements - I've hacked enough HGP Perl scripts to know what's what - but they're not per se an argument in favour of using that tool now - any more than the existence of the pyramids are an argument for indentured labour. My problem is (and always has been) that Larry Has Opinions. And lots of those are expressed in such a heavy-handed manner: the language syntax, the intrusive keywords, the proudly gnomic and condescending tone that early on propagated down through Perl user groups, that they are off-putting for anyone that doesn't happen to want to join the club. Which would be a pity if there were no other good options out there, but... there are plenty! And they're not hanging shit on Perl because... why bother? So folks have voted with their feet. Frankly I read a lot of Wall's comments in that interview as the posturing of the second-smartest-kid-at-school. Smart, just not smart enough to shut up long enough for the other kids to get to like him.
I understand you're proud of Perl 6: that's great, but I'd be more convinced as a developer or manager of developers to take a deeper look if you could demonstrate with examples how teams of mixed experience and aptitude have built complex, performant, maintainable software with it, rather than throwing ill-judged stones at the competition (the Python and Java comments in particular). There are just so many panes of glass around... and I find myself strangely uncompelled by a cute factorial one-liner. And as roll-my-own guy, I'd be more convinced if you could demonstrate elegance surpassing Haskell or LISP.
"A last programming language" is a neat turn of phrase that a) is hard to reconcile with the claim that you're "thinking generationally" and b) much like the original TIMTOWTDI motto, though doubtless sprung from your own formidable brain, ironically reads to me like the exasperated marketing department's spin after realizing that "shit, Larry's written another language for Larry".
Clearly a lot of uniformed upvoters here if this gets a 5. The article says the test was done with an M2 AP (not ball) round and a half inch of even armour steel is not stopping one of those, let alone "thousands of shots with virtually no wear". See for yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Don't oversell what you're doing as "introductory software engineering". If your students are high school level and "new to logic and computer science" then what you should be doing is teaching them an introduction to programming. That is a fine and worthy goal right there. Software engineering is usually a college-level subject or even a degree in itself, teaching already-capable programmers how to design and build complex and robust real-world systems; much of the material revolves not around programming at all but SDLC process and other things that will be irrelevant (and boring) to computer-naive high schoolers. Not to be too precious about it, but the terminology matters; would you advertise an introductory high-school physics course on friction and statics as an "introductory civil engineering"?
Lots of comments here about the foolishness of paying off criminals. Indeed. But in fact I tip my hat to ProtonMail for their clever strategy for illuminating the likely identity of their attackers. The thing is, when you pay off blackmailers they typically don't then carry through with the initial threat because that's bad business. They may make further demands based on their new knowledge of you being an easy mark, but to carry out the initially threatened action after being paid simply sends the message to you and other potential targets that paying is a waste of money because the threat will be carried out anyway. The profile of the target (encrypted email service) alone combined with analysis of the second attack as having the hallmarks of a state actor would suggest a three-letter agency. The fact that they got hit after paying just clinches it.
Although the U.S. has more historically documented shark attacks in total, Australia is some way out in front when it comes to fatal shark attack:
http://www.sharkattackdata.com...
Over the last few years there have been around 3 fatal attacks per year in Australian coastal waters. Not a great many, but more than "every other year".
When it comes to numbers per head of population, it's not even close!
We like to swim and surf, and share our waters with relatively large numbers of potentially dangerous sharks (as well as box jellyfish, and crocodiles...)
This is claimed to be a Neolithic structure; the earliest evidence of horse domestication in Britain is from Bronze Age times, military use even later.
You have asked "What is the best car I could buy? Also, should I build it myself or get one from the showroom?"
As many other posts here suggest, the first question is kind of meaningless without knowing what you want to do with said car. Is it for trips around town? To carry 7 kids? A lean mean street-fightin' machine?
As for the second question, if your budget is $50k, then I suggest neither. You cannot (should not try to) build a general-purpose HPC solution and its infrastructure for that kind of money. If your use-case is not heavily dependent on high-bandwidth data transfer then definitely consider AWS/Google compute/Azure. If you have a very specialized use-case, perhaps a single compute job that was trivially parallelizable with little or no I/O, you could probably put something together for $50k and run it under a desk. But general-purpose HPC is not just a bunch of server units. A high-speed switch between your compute nodes alone could cost that much. A very basic chassis from Dell suitable as a compute node costs around $5k. Stuff it full of memory, 2 or 4 xeons, GPUs if you need them, fast local scratch disk, redundant 10GB network connects... again, you're looking well north of $25k per unit. Not to mention, as others have, you need a climate-controlled room with abundant, reliable and redundant power to put the thing in.
Lots of comments about Linux on XPS series; I've had up-and-down experiences with hardware build quality with those but what I can solidly recommend is the Dell Latitude series - currently E6540 or the 7000. They're a bit pricey but like the Thinkpad and HP ProBook these are business-oriented machines with great warranty support, and upgradeable parts. And Linux runs just great on them - I write this on a slightly older 6440 with Fedora 21 on it; never had any issues even though Fedora is a relatively "pure" distro that doesn't come with proprietary drivers. I would also recommend Fedora as good mainstream distro for work in the sciences - all the packages you would want to run on a laptop (R/scipy etc) are available as rpms: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/....
Java 7 introduced the Closeable interface and try-with-resources statement to give the programmer every incentive to Do The Right Thing in cases like these, and every good Java programmer I know uses them (see http://mina.apache.org/sshd-pr... for topical example of an SSH client implementing Closeable). True, anyone can code badly but that's not the language's fault and in this case I would hardly say that sloppy mentality is encouraged. A poster above noted that C++98 != C++14. By the same token, Java 1.8 != Java 1.2
That's not an article about the high tech warfare behind the Israel-Hamas conflict. It's an article about the alleged use of some pretty run-of-the-mill technology by one side (Hamas) with no reference to the actual sophisticated technology used by the other side (Israel). If the article in itself isn't necessarily so, the phrasing of the headline and the summary here is an attempt to portray this conflict as something other than the massively one-sided affair that it actually is. It's a whitewash pure and simple. I wish both sides would just stop killing each other but seriously, "cloud-based launching software"? So Hamas can launch unguided rockets without having to stand next to them. Sounds pretty nasty compared to sophisticated air defence, MBTs, total air superiority and massed artillery.
Did you actually what I wrote? Do you know what moral equivalence is? Hint: it's what you're peddling. At what point do I suggest there is any high ground to be had here, by anyone? The reason I can judge Russia's actions critically is the same reason I judged America's actions critically when they invaded Iraq in 2003. It's called intelligence, and partisanship doesn't play any part in it. I'm not even American.
The whole point is that you cannot speak of "the revolutionaries" en bloc - there were a bunch of people protesting Yanukovich's reject of the EU agreement in favour of closer ties with Russia, and their cause was jumped on by extreme Uke nationalists who were welcomed and in some cases invited to the party by the Russians - they aren't reflective of most Ukrainians' wishes but they do make the whole anti-Yanukovich crowd look extreme and can be used to justify an extreme response. This is classic false flag stuff that the Russians are so good at, much better than the West. Even if the nationalists were genuine home-grown idiots the level of their activity scarcely justifies an invasion by Russia, it's not like Russian nationals are being killed in the streets, or Russian assets being pillaged.
I'm sorry but that is just the weakest moral equivalence BS. The fact that both parties to a dispute have tarnished reputations has no bearing on the rightness or wrongness of their current cause. Some details for you to think about, if you care to come off the fence:
* Ukraine has been pretty badly run since independence but it's hardly a "failed state" - at 117 out of 178 countries it's not even in the bottom half of the index (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Failed_States_Index) - the US is 159 if you want to know.
* The overt and covert hands of Russia are MUCH more evident in Ukraine than the West's. US foreign policy been incredibly inward-looking of late and not much bothered with the complexities of post-Soviet states' politics (a mistake). EU is in play but mostly economically - this is the proximate cause of this whole recent mess.
* The 'Ukrainian people' means different things to different people - if you're an ethnic Russian in Crimea you live in Ukraine but probably have much more allegiance to mother Russia than the government in Kiev. If you're a kid in Kiev born post-Soviet era to ethnic Ukrainian parents, different deal. Ethnic Tatar, different again.
* People who live in Ukraine should decide how they are governed. If that means some regions split off and join Russia leaving a rump that is European-looking, fine.
* The one certainty once Russia gets involved militarily is that people will needlessly die, many Ukrainians will lose the right to choose their destiny, and the West will look foolish for having dealt with Putin's Russia as anything except an nuclear-armed oligarchic petrostate, i.e. a bad actor. How European countries let themselves become dependent on Russian oil and gas supplies with no thought for exactly this kind of contingency is beyond me. What are they going to do now, threaten economic sanctions that involve turning off their own heating?
So let's be careful before casting judgement but don't just throw the hands up and say "pot, kettle". I blame FOX (because I can) for having destroyed the critical thinking faculties of a generation of Americans with their discovery/invention of the "Fair and Balanced" trope, even amongst people that don't watch the damn channel.
Axiom I: Generalist IT skills (CS, systems analysis) do not evolve that quickly, but specific ones do
Lemma I: Most IT employers don't don't plan to be around in 10 years - I don't mean they actively plan to go out of business, they probably all dream of living forever or something, but they don't have - and probably can't have - a specific plan for how technology will be supporting their business model at that point.
Axiom II: Younger folks are less interested in the idea of a single-or-few employer career these days, and more willing to leave at short notice
Corollary: Most IT employers don't want to employ someone who has the potential to be a useful employee, but only after they have invested time training them in the requisite skills - they want someone who can start now, finish this 12-month project, and maybe hang on to them afterwards if the relationship pans out ok.
It's an arms race between employer and employee, with diminishing returns. If you are lucky, you will find people on both sides of this relationship who see this for the evil that it is, and move beyond it.
Guys, we've been down this road about a million times in physics.
presumptuous, much?
Stupid question I guess but did you even read TFA? There's no suggestion that this work is positing new physical dimensions. It's a calculational technique. In fact from TFA and the lead author
But the new amplituhedron research suggests space-time, and therefore dimensions, may be illusory anyway.
“We can’t rely on the usual familiar quantum mechanical space-time pictures of describing physics,”
I'm a particle physics PhD and although I'm not qualified to judge in detail (not my exact area) this has the smell of something new and exciting. These are very smart people in their field.
Obviously the Galactic Ghoul operating on an interstellar scale. I'd be taking a good hard look at the systems next up on Kepler's observing schedule...
Slashdot Mirror
You see, this don't sound like a technical dispute to me.
Spoken like someone who's never managed a software development project bigger than themselves.
Of course it's a technical problem. Why buy into a tool and ecosystem with warts that piss more people off than the next tool's?
Folks like me? No-one in the Perl community was ever mean to me. But I had half a dozen languages under the belt before I had the need for a quick-n-dirty scripting language in the mid 90's and fairly quickly made what I'm happy to this day to call an astute technical judgement that a language and community that was so ostentatiously opinionated would be a risky choice for team work; to say nothing of the languages's technical deficiencies at that time. It wasn't a hard decision. If you want to drive The Homer and gloat online about the fur-lined glove compartment that's fine by me. I'll take the fleet of Camrys and have fun going cool places with the team.
Respect where it's due for Perl's historical achievements - I've hacked enough HGP Perl scripts to know what's what - but they're not per se an argument in favour of using that tool now - any more than the existence of the pyramids are an argument for indentured labour. My problem is (and always has been) that Larry Has Opinions. And lots of those are expressed in such a heavy-handed manner: the language syntax, the intrusive keywords, the proudly gnomic and condescending tone that early on propagated down through Perl user groups, that they are off-putting for anyone that doesn't happen to want to join the club. Which would be a pity if there were no other good options out there, but... there are plenty! And they're not hanging shit on Perl because... why bother? So folks have voted with their feet. Frankly I read a lot of Wall's comments in that interview as the posturing of the second-smartest-kid-at-school. Smart, just not smart enough to shut up long enough for the other kids to get to like him.
I understand you're proud of Perl 6: that's great, but I'd be more convinced as a developer or manager of developers to take a deeper look if you could demonstrate with examples how teams of mixed experience and aptitude have built complex, performant, maintainable software with it, rather than throwing ill-judged stones at the competition (the Python and Java comments in particular). There are just so many panes of glass around... and I find myself strangely uncompelled by a cute factorial one-liner. And as roll-my-own guy, I'd be more convinced if you could demonstrate elegance surpassing Haskell or LISP.
"A last programming language" is a neat turn of phrase that a) is hard to reconcile with the claim that you're "thinking generationally" and b) much like the original TIMTOWTDI motto, though doubtless sprung from your own formidable brain, ironically reads to me like the exasperated marketing department's spin after realizing that "shit, Larry's written another language for Larry".
1. First they ignore you
2. Then they laugh at you
3. Then they fight you (make shit up) here we are hooray!
4. Then you win...
Clearly a lot of uniformed upvoters here if this gets a 5. The article says the test was done with an M2 AP (not ball) round and a half inch of even armour steel is not stopping one of those, let alone "thousands of shots with virtually no wear". See for yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
ooh, snap!
Don't oversell what you're doing as "introductory software engineering". If your students are high school level and "new to logic and computer science" then what you should be doing is teaching them an introduction to programming. That is a fine and worthy goal right there. Software engineering is usually a college-level subject or even a degree in itself, teaching already-capable programmers how to design and build complex and robust real-world systems; much of the material revolves not around programming at all but SDLC process and other things that will be irrelevant (and boring) to computer-naive high schoolers. Not to be too precious about it, but the terminology matters; would you advertise an introductory high-school physics course on friction and statics as an "introductory civil engineering"?
Lots of comments here about the foolishness of paying off criminals. Indeed. But in fact I tip my hat to ProtonMail for their clever strategy for illuminating the likely identity of their attackers. The thing is, when you pay off blackmailers they typically don't then carry through with the initial threat because that's bad business. They may make further demands based on their new knowledge of you being an easy mark, but to carry out the initially threatened action after being paid simply sends the message to you and other potential targets that paying is a waste of money because the threat will be carried out anyway. The profile of the target (encrypted email service) alone combined with analysis of the second attack as having the hallmarks of a state actor would suggest a three-letter agency. The fact that they got hit after paying just clinches it.
Although the U.S. has more historically documented shark attacks in total, Australia is some way out in front when it comes to fatal shark attack: http://www.sharkattackdata.com... Over the last few years there have been around 3 fatal attacks per year in Australian coastal waters. Not a great many, but more than "every other year". When it comes to numbers per head of population, it's not even close! We like to swim and surf, and share our waters with relatively large numbers of potentially dangerous sharks (as well as box jellyfish, and crocodiles...)
Where are my + mod points when I need them?
This is claimed to be a Neolithic structure; the earliest evidence of horse domestication in Britain is from Bronze Age times, military use even later.
I use base 6 for all my work.
You have asked "What is the best car I could buy? Also, should I build it myself or get one from the showroom?"
As many other posts here suggest, the first question is kind of meaningless without knowing what you want to do with said car. Is it for trips around town? To carry 7 kids? A lean mean street-fightin' machine?
As for the second question, if your budget is $50k, then I suggest neither. You cannot (should not try to) build a general-purpose HPC solution and its infrastructure for that kind of money. If your use-case is not heavily dependent on high-bandwidth data transfer then definitely consider AWS/Google compute/Azure. If you have a very specialized use-case, perhaps a single compute job that was trivially parallelizable with little or no I/O, you could probably put something together for $50k and run it under a desk. But general-purpose HPC is not just a bunch of server units. A high-speed switch between your compute nodes alone could cost that much. A very basic chassis from Dell suitable as a compute node costs around $5k. Stuff it full of memory, 2 or 4 xeons, GPUs if you need them, fast local scratch disk, redundant 10GB network connects... again, you're looking well north of $25k per unit. Not to mention, as others have, you need a climate-controlled room with abundant, reliable and redundant power to put the thing in.
Next up: sustained, controlled nuclear fusion around mid-2025.
Lots of comments about Linux on XPS series; I've had up-and-down experiences with hardware build quality with those but what I can solidly recommend is the Dell Latitude series - currently E6540 or the 7000. They're a bit pricey but like the Thinkpad and HP ProBook these are business-oriented machines with great warranty support, and upgradeable parts. And Linux runs just great on them - I write this on a slightly older 6440 with Fedora 21 on it; never had any issues even though Fedora is a relatively "pure" distro that doesn't come with proprietary drivers. I would also recommend Fedora as good mainstream distro for work in the sciences - all the packages you would want to run on a laptop (R/scipy etc) are available as rpms: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/....
Java 7 introduced the Closeable interface and try-with-resources statement to give the programmer every incentive to Do The Right Thing in cases like these, and every good Java programmer I know uses them (see http://mina.apache.org/sshd-pr... for topical example of an SSH client implementing Closeable). True, anyone can code badly but that's not the language's fault and in this case I would hardly say that sloppy mentality is encouraged. A poster above noted that C++98 != C++14. By the same token, Java 1.8 != Java 1.2
Or Enceladus perhaps?
That's not an article about the high tech warfare behind the Israel-Hamas conflict. It's an article about the alleged use of some pretty run-of-the-mill technology by one side (Hamas) with no reference to the actual sophisticated technology used by the other side (Israel). If the article in itself isn't necessarily so, the phrasing of the headline and the summary here is an attempt to portray this conflict as something other than the massively one-sided affair that it actually is. It's a whitewash pure and simple. I wish both sides would just stop killing each other but seriously, "cloud-based launching software"? So Hamas can launch unguided rockets without having to stand next to them. Sounds pretty nasty compared to sophisticated air defence, MBTs, total air superiority and massed artillery.
Did you actually what I wrote? Do you know what moral equivalence is? Hint: it's what you're peddling. At what point do I suggest there is any high ground to be had here, by anyone? The reason I can judge Russia's actions critically is the same reason I judged America's actions critically when they invaded Iraq in 2003. It's called intelligence, and partisanship doesn't play any part in it. I'm not even American.
The whole point is that you cannot speak of "the revolutionaries" en bloc - there were a bunch of people protesting Yanukovich's reject of the EU agreement in favour of closer ties with Russia, and their cause was jumped on by extreme Uke nationalists who were welcomed and in some cases invited to the party by the Russians - they aren't reflective of most Ukrainians' wishes but they do make the whole anti-Yanukovich crowd look extreme and can be used to justify an extreme response. This is classic false flag stuff that the Russians are so good at, much better than the West. Even if the nationalists were genuine home-grown idiots the level of their activity scarcely justifies an invasion by Russia, it's not like Russian nationals are being killed in the streets, or Russian assets being pillaged.
I'm sorry but that is just the weakest moral equivalence BS. The fact that both parties to a dispute have tarnished reputations has no bearing on the rightness or wrongness of their current cause. Some details for you to think about, if you care to come off the fence:
* Ukraine has been pretty badly run since independence but it's hardly a "failed state" - at 117 out of 178 countries it's not even in the bottom half of the index (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Failed_States_Index) - the US is 159 if you want to know.
* The overt and covert hands of Russia are MUCH more evident in Ukraine than the West's. US foreign policy been incredibly inward-looking of late and not much bothered with the complexities of post-Soviet states' politics (a mistake). EU is in play but mostly economically - this is the proximate cause of this whole recent mess.
* The 'Ukrainian people' means different things to different people - if you're an ethnic Russian in Crimea you live in Ukraine but probably have much more allegiance to mother Russia than the government in Kiev. If you're a kid in Kiev born post-Soviet era to ethnic Ukrainian parents, different deal. Ethnic Tatar, different again.
* People who live in Ukraine should decide how they are governed. If that means some regions split off and join Russia leaving a rump that is European-looking, fine.
* The one certainty once Russia gets involved militarily is that people will needlessly die, many Ukrainians will lose the right to choose their destiny, and the West will look foolish for having dealt with Putin's Russia as anything except an nuclear-armed oligarchic petrostate, i.e. a bad actor. How European countries let themselves become dependent on Russian oil and gas supplies with no thought for exactly this kind of contingency is beyond me. What are they going to do now, threaten economic sanctions that involve turning off their own heating?
So let's be careful before casting judgement but don't just throw the hands up and say "pot, kettle". I blame FOX (because I can) for having destroyed the critical thinking faculties of a generation of Americans with their discovery/invention of the "Fair and Balanced" trope, even amongst people that don't watch the damn channel.
Axiom I: Generalist IT skills (CS, systems analysis) do not evolve that quickly, but specific ones do
Lemma I: Most IT employers don't don't plan to be around in 10 years - I don't mean they actively plan to go out of business, they probably all dream of living forever or something, but they don't have - and probably can't have - a specific plan for how technology will be supporting their business model at that point.
Axiom II: Younger folks are less interested in the idea of a single-or-few employer career these days, and more willing to leave at short notice
Corollary: Most IT employers don't want to employ someone who has the potential to be a useful employee, but only after they have invested time training them in the requisite skills - they want someone who can start now, finish this 12-month project, and maybe hang on to them afterwards if the relationship pans out ok.
It's an arms race between employer and employee, with diminishing returns. If you are lucky, you will find people on both sides of this relationship who see this for the evil that it is, and move beyond it.
Guys, we've been down this road about a million times in physics.
presumptuous, much? Stupid question I guess but did you even read TFA? There's no suggestion that this work is positing new physical dimensions. It's a calculational technique. In fact from TFA and the lead author
But the new amplituhedron research suggests space-time, and therefore dimensions, may be illusory anyway. “We can’t rely on the usual familiar quantum mechanical space-time pictures of describing physics,”
I'm a particle physics PhD and although I'm not qualified to judge in detail (not my exact area) this has the smell of something new and exciting. These are very smart people in their field.
Obviously the Galactic Ghoul operating on an interstellar scale. I'd be taking a good hard look at the systems next up on Kepler's observing schedule...