10 years ago there were no Tesla on the road, now there are a few 1000. N*1000/0 = infinitely more Tesla
I'm amazed that nobody here has picked you up on this (indeterminately more Teslas, not infinite) - or maybe the Slashdot crowd are insensate to mathematical trolling.
Hehe.. Or even to be blatantly ignorant of what has actually occurred in the last 20 years. That's bliss.
It's curious that we forget that the last great act of systematic terrorism and genocide on European soil was by Christian Serbs against Bosnian Muslims. Arguably this was an ethnic dispute, not a religious one. But still, it would be easy to use this to paint Christians as blood thirsty murderers, if that was your particular beef.
Sometimes. The inclusion of the Old Testament in the Christian canon is curious, if it's true that the teachings of Jesus effectively say "You can forget all that old shit".
There is certainly hostility and violence brought down on gays and lesbians in Christian countries, with the Old Testament used as justification for these acts. See http://www.gaychristian101.com...
It's unfair to suggest that all Christians are like this, because it's patently not true. But similarly no Muslims I know are out there advocating violence on the basis of their religious texts (or arguing for slavery or any of the other "old school" tenets that are common to both the Biblical, Talmudic or Islamic texts). Most people of faith, in my experience, seem to be decent and caring folks. It's the dickheads with guns that give all religions a bad name.
Ninian Smart's book "The Religious Experience of Mankind" makes the case for Maxism to be considered a "religion". In his comparative study of the world's religions Smart applied a set of criteria against belief systems to in order to categorise them as the basis of religious experience, to wit Marxism - and the way it is commonly experience - falls generally into Smart's definition of religion.
Ritual: Forms and orders of ceremonies (private and/or public) (often regarded as revealed)
Narrative and Mythic: stories (often regarded as revealed) that work on several levels. Sometimes narratives fit together into a fairly complete and systematic interpretation of the universe and human's place in it.
Social and Institutional: belief system is shared and attitudes practiced by a group. Often rules for identifying community membership and participation (public)
Ethical and legal: Rules about human behavior (often regarded as revealed from supernatural realm)
Doctrinal and philosophical: systematic formulation of religious teachings in an intellectually coherent form
Material: ordinary objects or places that symbolize or manifest the sacred or supernatural
At the time of reading this (about 20 years ago) I was surprised to find Marxism included in a study that looked at Christianity, Hinduism, etc. But I remember it making sense at the time. Maybe if I went back and read the book I'd be less convinced.
Not always AC. Some people have actually read Dijkstra, consider him an extremely important contributor to computer science and yet have the capacity to not agree 100% with everything he said. Case in point, his comments about object oriented programming paint him as a man of his times:
"I don't think object-oriented programming is a structuring paradigm that meets my standards of elegance"
(http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD12xx/EWD1284.html)
Let's not forget that Dijkstra was primarily an academic. His search for purity is admirable, but if we all followed his criteria for elegant solutions we'd never get any work done.
Whatever the case, it's the 'X considered harmful' pattern that really diminishes his work. People thrash out blog posts along these lines - including the author of the original article - as if by association their work takes on more authority. The world doesn't need any more of these academic puff pieces.
I think we're in total agreement here. I did read the article - and others on the same site - and know only the quote was from Dijkstra. My beef is that adherents of Dijkstra's teachings tout this nonsense all the time, but I guess it's not surprising considering Dijkstra was primarily an academic (though a thoroughly brilliant one).
I was going to go off on a huge rant about this, but I think you've summed it up. Thanks.
You insensitive clod. I bought one of these recently, in an effort to reflow the solder on my failing Mac Book Pro. Now all I have is a dead laptop and a toaster that smells of Apple.
I think what this article highlights is that not everything Dijkstra said was gold. Nor does slavishly following his missives make you a better programmer.
Upvote. My kids (10 and 14) have managed to make amazing things in what to me looks like a complete toy. Plenty of books and articles, but best of all is the community around it - kids sharing and expanding each other ideas. Teaches the basics (variables, loops, etc) - but best of all lets them find success early.
I'd agree here. As someone who started his career in Smalltalk, and then had to give it up for the lack of programming jobs available (10 years of my life becoming an expert in Delphi I'll never get back) Ruby wasn't so much "cool" as "beautiful". It felt like a coming home - an expressive, easy to read language where the answer to "how do I do X?" is "What's the most obvious way." A language predicated on programmer joy is a pretty sweet thing.
I think the Ruby world can be divided into two camps. There's the "we are nice, because Matz is nice" crowd that were dominant in the early days. When I was a newb I found the community very helpful, very welcoming. Then we got the "DHH is a prick, so we are pricks" bunch. I don't think they were ever in the majority, but they were loud and obnoxious and fit the mould of "hipsters". I don't think this is particular to Ruby though. Every community has its wankers, every community has its good citizens.
I still love Ruby for what it is, and am thankful I've been able to carve out a reasonably well-paying career based on it.
Can we just for once stop using terms like "evolved" as if this thing has any kind of ability to mutate outside of the agency of people - intelligent designers if you will - actually making changes to the code.
Well our leader was up before the Judge twice, once for groping a girl from behind and once for theft of a traffic sign, so he resembles a criminal exported from the UK in some ways.
More to the point, he *is* from the UK. He was born there, studied there and - though it's been quietly forgotten about - may not be entitled to hold office unless he has given up his dual citizenship.
Ah yes, the AI will probably go through its Nietzsche phase, around the time it starts listening to The Doors and wearing black t-shirts. And like the artificial intelligence of teenagers it will probably sort itself out in the end, but we'll have a rocky few years until it works out that a priori is not Latin for "what I know".
No.. it's "Lego bricks". Lego is the company, Lego bricks are the product. Lego themselves tried to clarify the situation, with a notice on their website (since removed):
Please always refer to our products as “LEGO bricks or toys” and not “LEGOS.” By doing so, you will be helping to protect and preserve a brand of which we are very proud, and that stands for quality the world over”
It looks like Epic isn't based on Vista as I assumed - but still uses the same M(UMPS) based technology. A comparison of the two systems can be found in a Healthcare IT News blog article.
Vista has an interesting history. Because it was built using US Federal Government money, the "Hard Hats" who worked on it originally successfully argued for the release of its source code into the public domain. It's essentially open source, paid by the public purse and - despite the M language - a successful example of where interoperability between healthcare IT systems can really work.
We've had decades of development in open standards. HL7 for all its ugliness is a great system and has really driven interoperability. For Epic to "go it alone" seems a real shame. And patently stupid - but then we've had similar stupid in my country (Australia).
MUMPS is pretty special. You can write clean code in it, but the language and culture around don't exactly lend itself to it. That example at DailyWTF is pretty typical of what you see in OpenVista based systems (which I assume Epic uses).
Postgres-XL is currently compatible with Postgres 9.2. Postgres 9.3 introduces better support for JSON data that bring it closer to the functionality of a NoSQL DB. It looks like XL will be compatible with 9.3 in the near future.
Just in my experience, the introduction of HStore and JSON data types in Postgres has pretty much nullified the advantages I'd get from using a NoSQL DB. Sharding, high availability, etc are all there with a little work (and help from the many 3rd party projects in the Postgres "ecosystem"). Every now and then I find myself tempted to run a project using a NoSQL DB, but the trade offs (lots of memory, lack of ACID compliance, nascent querying languages, etc) bring me back to Postgres.
Of course there are situations where Mongo or other NoSQL DBs make sense. Using something like InfluxDB for time series data looks pretty neat, and having highly optimized lookup data in a NoSQL DB is great. In the end, you use the database system that makes sense in your work - and avoid the cargo-culting of any technology just because it's the new hotness.
I've been really happy with Postgtes's performance over the years. Raw speed is not an issue - you can always add more nodes using something like Postgres-XL if you have to. It's the gradual introduction of functionality that makes my life easier that I appreciate.
OP again. US$300 is a lot, but fairly typical here in SA. We regularly hear of families in our area paying AU$1500 per quarter (around US$1300) for electricity. But then we also see families with more TVs than actual family members, reverse-cycle airconditioners running all day and other sorts of outrageous waste.
Pricing has been seen as a means to reduce consumption in Australia. It's a valid approach, but it does hit people hard - particularly those who can't afford it - but by and large it has been effective. But it has also lead to an oversupply of electricity generation, so now the Carbon Tax has been removed it's possible we'll see a return to higher consumption. It's hard to tell if people's behaviour has changed during the period when the Carbon Tax was in force.
As a side note, as a point of comparison, we only pay around US$150 per month for a four-person household (inc. one teenager). We don't go without - everyone has their own computer, there are multiple tablets in the house. We're just careful about leaving things on that don't need to be on.
South Australia's climate also lends itself to better energy use. Winters are mild and because we have a very dry climate, evaporative air conditioning works really well here in Summer (and costs very little to run). We have the highest uptake of residential solar power in the country, thanks to a high number of days with sunshine. Solar panels are also mandatory on all State government buildings, including a large array on top of our Parliament House. I'm not actually from SA originally, but I'm quite proud of the place I call home. Far from being a "backwater", South Australia has been quietly leading the way for a long time.
OP here. Yes, the lack of political will is the main issue. We have a Federal Treasurer who openly declares wind farms an eye-sore (http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-05-02/joe-hockey-wind-turbines-utterly-offensive/5425804) - maybe because open-cut mines are so much more pleasing to look at - and many State and Federal bodies heavily engaged with the coal industry.
As a society we've kind of backed ourselves into a corner, with global coal prices slumping and China now pushing for high-quality and cleaner coal (e.g. less sulphur). As another poster mentioned, South Australia is often considered the butt of other States jokes and referred to as backward - when we actually have a long history of being progressive. It's a win for SA, but it sets the bar for other States and hopefully will help move us away from being dependent of just digging things out of the ground to get by.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm glad at least one person caught that. I don't write these things for my health, you know.
All good. Love your sig BTW. This might sound weird, but that's put me in a good mood - nice way to start the day.
10 years ago there were no Tesla on the road, now there are a few 1000. N*1000/0 = infinitely more Tesla
I'm amazed that nobody here has picked you up on this (indeterminately more Teslas, not infinite) - or maybe the Slashdot crowd are insensate to mathematical trolling.
Hehe.. Or even to be blatantly ignorant of what has actually occurred in the last 20 years. That's bliss.
It's curious that we forget that the last great act of systematic terrorism and genocide on European soil was by Christian Serbs against Bosnian Muslims. Arguably this was an ethnic dispute, not a religious one. But still, it would be easy to use this to paint Christians as blood thirsty murderers, if that was your particular beef.
History is what you make it, I guess.
Sometimes. The inclusion of the Old Testament in the Christian canon is curious, if it's true that the teachings of Jesus effectively say "You can forget all that old shit".
There is certainly hostility and violence brought down on gays and lesbians in Christian countries, with the Old Testament used as justification for these acts. See http://www.gaychristian101.com...
It's unfair to suggest that all Christians are like this, because it's patently not true. But similarly no Muslims I know are out there advocating violence on the basis of their religious texts (or arguing for slavery or any of the other "old school" tenets that are common to both the Biblical, Talmudic or Islamic texts). Most people of faith, in my experience, seem to be decent and caring folks. It's the dickheads with guns that give all religions a bad name.
Ninian Smart's book "The Religious Experience of Mankind" makes the case for Maxism to be considered a "religion". In his comparative study of the world's religions Smart applied a set of criteria against belief systems to in order to categorise them as the basis of religious experience, to wit Marxism - and the way it is commonly experience - falls generally into Smart's definition of religion.
Ritual: Forms and orders of ceremonies (private and/or public) (often regarded as revealed)
Narrative and Mythic: stories (often regarded as revealed) that work on several levels. Sometimes narratives fit together into a fairly complete and systematic interpretation of the universe and human's place in it.
Experiential and emotional: dread, guilt, awe, mystery, devotion, liberation, ecstasy, inner peace, bliss (private)
Social and Institutional: belief system is shared and attitudes practiced by a group. Often rules for identifying community membership and participation (public)
Ethical and legal: Rules about human behavior (often regarded as revealed from supernatural realm)
Doctrinal and philosophical: systematic formulation of religious teachings in an intellectually coherent form
Material: ordinary objects or places that symbolize or manifest the sacred or supernatural
At the time of reading this (about 20 years ago) I was surprised to find Marxism included in a study that looked at Christianity, Hinduism, etc. But I remember it making sense at the time. Maybe if I went back and read the book I'd be less convinced.
I like what you did there. Person made a error but you didn't make him / her look like a fool. Wish I had mod points I could spend here.
Not always AC. Some people have actually read Dijkstra, consider him an extremely important contributor to computer science and yet have the capacity to not agree 100% with everything he said. Case in point, his comments about object oriented programming paint him as a man of his times:
"I don't think object-oriented programming is a structuring paradigm that meets my standards of elegance" (http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD12xx/EWD1284.html)
Let's not forget that Dijkstra was primarily an academic. His search for purity is admirable, but if we all followed his criteria for elegant solutions we'd never get any work done.
Whatever the case, it's the 'X considered harmful' pattern that really diminishes his work. People thrash out blog posts along these lines - including the author of the original article - as if by association their work takes on more authority. The world doesn't need any more of these academic puff pieces.
I think we're in total agreement here. I did read the article - and others on the same site - and know only the quote was from Dijkstra. My beef is that adherents of Dijkstra's teachings tout this nonsense all the time, but I guess it's not surprising considering Dijkstra was primarily an academic (though a thoroughly brilliant one).
I was going to go off on a huge rant about this, but I think you've summed it up. Thanks.
You insensitive clod. I bought one of these recently, in an effort to reflow the solder on my failing Mac Book Pro. Now all I have is a dead laptop and a toaster that smells of Apple.
I think what this article highlights is that not everything Dijkstra said was gold. Nor does slavishly following his missives make you a better programmer.
http://scratch.mit.edu/
Upvote. My kids (10 and 14) have managed to make amazing things in what to me looks like a complete toy. Plenty of books and articles, but best of all is the community around it - kids sharing and expanding each other ideas. Teaches the basics (variables, loops, etc) - but best of all lets them find success early.
I'd agree here. As someone who started his career in Smalltalk, and then had to give it up for the lack of programming jobs available (10 years of my life becoming an expert in Delphi I'll never get back) Ruby wasn't so much "cool" as "beautiful". It felt like a coming home - an expressive, easy to read language where the answer to "how do I do X?" is "What's the most obvious way." A language predicated on programmer joy is a pretty sweet thing.
I think the Ruby world can be divided into two camps. There's the "we are nice, because Matz is nice" crowd that were dominant in the early days. When I was a newb I found the community very helpful, very welcoming. Then we got the "DHH is a prick, so we are pricks" bunch. I don't think they were ever in the majority, but they were loud and obnoxious and fit the mould of "hipsters". I don't think this is particular to Ruby though. Every community has its wankers, every community has its good citizens.
I still love Ruby for what it is, and am thankful I've been able to carve out a reasonably well-paying career based on it.
Can we just for once stop using terms like "evolved" as if this thing has any kind of ability to mutate outside of the agency of people - intelligent designers if you will - actually making changes to the code.
http://scratch.mit.edu/
Absolutely. And with the code sharing in Scratch 2.0 it also teaches concepts like community code, forking, etc.
Plus there are integrations with Arduino and the like for more comprehensive coding exercises.
Well our leader was up before the Judge twice, once for groping a girl from behind and once for theft of a traffic sign, so he resembles a criminal exported from the UK in some ways.
More to the point, he *is* from the UK. He was born there, studied there and - though it's been quietly forgotten about - may not be entitled to hold office unless he has given up his dual citizenship.
Ah yes, the AI will probably go through its Nietzsche phase, around the time it starts listening to The Doors and wearing black t-shirts. And like the artificial intelligence of teenagers it will probably sort itself out in the end, but we'll have a rocky few years until it works out that a priori is not Latin for "what I know".
Please always refer to our products as “LEGO bricks or toys” and not “LEGOS.” By doing so, you will be helping to protect and preserve a brand of which we are very proud, and that stands for quality the world over”
But no-one thinks of the innocent contractors, caught in the crossfire. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
It looks like Epic isn't based on Vista as I assumed - but still uses the same M(UMPS) based technology. A comparison of the two systems can be found in a Healthcare IT News blog article.
Vista has an interesting history. Because it was built using US Federal Government money, the "Hard Hats" who worked on it originally successfully argued for the release of its source code into the public domain. It's essentially open source, paid by the public purse and - despite the M language - a successful example of where interoperability between healthcare IT systems can really work.
We've had decades of development in open standards. HL7 for all its ugliness is a great system and has really driven interoperability. For Epic to "go it alone" seems a real shame. And patently stupid - but then we've had similar stupid in my country (Australia).
MUMPS is pretty special. You can write clean code in it, but the language and culture around don't exactly lend itself to it. That example at DailyWTF is pretty typical of what you see in OpenVista based systems (which I assume Epic uses).
Exactly. In much the same way that removing the brakes, airbags, firewall, etc will make your car travel faster downhill.
Postgres-XL is currently compatible with Postgres 9.2. Postgres 9.3 introduces better support for JSON data that bring it closer to the functionality of a NoSQL DB. It looks like XL will be compatible with 9.3 in the near future.
Just in my experience, the introduction of HStore and JSON data types in Postgres has pretty much nullified the advantages I'd get from using a NoSQL DB. Sharding, high availability, etc are all there with a little work (and help from the many 3rd party projects in the Postgres "ecosystem"). Every now and then I find myself tempted to run a project using a NoSQL DB, but the trade offs (lots of memory, lack of ACID compliance, nascent querying languages, etc) bring me back to Postgres.
Of course there are situations where Mongo or other NoSQL DBs make sense. Using something like InfluxDB for time series data looks pretty neat, and having highly optimized lookup data in a NoSQL DB is great. In the end, you use the database system that makes sense in your work - and avoid the cargo-culting of any technology just because it's the new hotness.
I've been really happy with Postgtes's performance over the years. Raw speed is not an issue - you can always add more nodes using something like Postgres-XL if you have to. It's the gradual introduction of functionality that makes my life easier that I appreciate.
OP again. US$300 is a lot, but fairly typical here in SA. We regularly hear of families in our area paying AU$1500 per quarter (around US$1300) for electricity. But then we also see families with more TVs than actual family members, reverse-cycle airconditioners running all day and other sorts of outrageous waste.
Pricing has been seen as a means to reduce consumption in Australia. It's a valid approach, but it does hit people hard - particularly those who can't afford it - but by and large it has been effective. But it has also lead to an oversupply of electricity generation, so now the Carbon Tax has been removed it's possible we'll see a return to higher consumption. It's hard to tell if people's behaviour has changed during the period when the Carbon Tax was in force.
As a side note, as a point of comparison, we only pay around US$150 per month for a four-person household (inc. one teenager). We don't go without - everyone has their own computer, there are multiple tablets in the house. We're just careful about leaving things on that don't need to be on.
South Australia's climate also lends itself to better energy use. Winters are mild and because we have a very dry climate, evaporative air conditioning works really well here in Summer (and costs very little to run). We have the highest uptake of residential solar power in the country, thanks to a high number of days with sunshine. Solar panels are also mandatory on all State government buildings, including a large array on top of our Parliament House. I'm not actually from SA originally, but I'm quite proud of the place I call home. Far from being a "backwater", South Australia has been quietly leading the way for a long time.
OP here. Yes, the lack of political will is the main issue. We have a Federal Treasurer who openly declares wind farms an eye-sore (http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-05-02/joe-hockey-wind-turbines-utterly-offensive/5425804) - maybe because open-cut mines are so much more pleasing to look at - and many State and Federal bodies heavily engaged with the coal industry.
As a society we've kind of backed ourselves into a corner, with global coal prices slumping and China now pushing for high-quality and cleaner coal (e.g. less sulphur). As another poster mentioned, South Australia is often considered the butt of other States jokes and referred to as backward - when we actually have a long history of being progressive. It's a win for SA, but it sets the bar for other States and hopefully will help move us away from being dependent of just digging things out of the ground to get by.