The fact that we are here, and are not part of a race that have conquered the galaxy (let alone all galaxies) is evidence to the theory that faster than time travel is inherently impossible.
Note that there's a distinct difference between stuff deemed practically impossible (faster than the speed of sound? Your machine will collapse), and stuff that is deemed theoretically impossible (temperature lower than 0 Kelvin? Information travelling faster than the speed of light?). Flight was always theoretically possible, as was flight at whatever speed. We didn't know if people could cope with it, but nothing theoretical was in the way. But with the speed of light there is a theoretical problem, as the very notion of time hinges on the fact that the speed of light is constant. Compare this with 0 Kelvin temperature, another of these limits. It is hard to comprehend if something can be colder than 0 Kelvin, as it would mean that we surpass the point where all motion stops. What can be beyond? Same with the speed of light. Faster than light travel means that you can make a trip from earth and arrive earlier than you started. Instant time travel. The fact that the future has not been come knocking on our doors explaining how to travel faster than the speed of light makes the theory that faster than light travel is impossible more likely.
The fact that faster than light travel is necessary for galactic scale civilizations does not mean that there must be a way around it. For all we know, we are stuck here and everyone we will send out will never be heard from again... simply because communications take too long.
No, I don't think anybody said something like that about Glenn Beck. I'm not surprised that you think someone said something like this because Glenn Beck never denied that he raped and murdered a young girl in 1990.
Yes, I'm pretty sure that when you have an application server talking to a database on a single key-lookup with index (log(N)), and you can only serve 100 concurrent users, that complexity theory will spit out the answer (you need to replace the lan+firewall between the DB and the server).
Yes, I agree. However, I usually find that the comments are the unreadable part, while the code can be followed through mostly without problems. If the code is too hard to read, I might try to decompile the comments.
I'm sorry, but without Google, somebody else would likely be the front-end, or there might still be a bit of competition. Competition is a good thing. I used altavista before Google, exactly as I use Google now. Google's search was simply better, nothing dramatic. The only thing Google changed on the internet
has been making advertisements less annoying and making advertising on the internet available for everyone. They changed advertising, not the internet at all. So, Apple changed the music industry, Google changed the advertising industry. My vote goes to Apple.
Aw come off it! We are both geeks and humans, we live to complain! I'm a Linux fan, so I hate Apple and Microsoft. Yes, Apple can make great products, but I can't love them, not my style. Microsoft can make great products (in theory they should be capable of that, they've been on the market for a while and they seem to hire bright people,) yet I hate to be forced to use them. There are Apple fans, that cannot fathom that anyone would want this do-it-yourself atmosphere surrounding Linux, rather than going for the road of design and things-work-as-long-as-you-do-it-the-approved-way. And there must be Microsoft fans -- obviously by lack of experience with anything better, like OpenBSD.
My guess is that all of these people have great curiosity in how things function. We all like technology for technology's sake, but Linux/OpenBSD/Apple/Microsoft are just not our style.
Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. The 10x more productive number (and I've seen it quoted as 100x more productive) comes from the observation that a good coder will do the task, produce working software and move on. The mediocre coder will do the task, produce working software (slightly less quickly than the good coder), and spends the rest of his career hunting down bugs and otherwise keeping the p.o.s. running. Maintenance, that's where the large factors comes into play.
*I don't actually think this, obviously. I disagree with the man's policies, but that's a long way from hating him so much as to justify calling him that.
Be careful here dear corbettw, and ask yourself: how much would you need to hate a man to be justified in calling him a nigger? In other words: what does a single man need to do in order for an other to be justified in insulting his group?
I did watch the video review (all 70 minutes of it), thought it was funny as hell, and still agree with the grandparent complaining about it. A video is a very poor way of transmitting information. I need to remember from rote all that this guy said in the video, as there is no way in hell that I would ever revisit this video to find some choice words. Were it written down, I might do that. As it is know, it's a nice consumable, but hasn't been archived. The information content is most likely lost.
In math, do you use multi-character symbols? And what is that '.' operator doing there?
In true OO-programming, performing an action that doesn't change state should be done by a library function (a static function). Changing state is done through a method. A class is an abstraction over a set of data with only one purpose: to maintain some invariant on the data members. Holding a couple of values together that can be independently changed is called a struct. Plain setters are generally bad, as it points to an abstraction problem: you are not working with a class, but with a struct. Setters are bad, m'kay? Properties are interesting, they make what appears to be a struct (public members) behave like a class (has invariant guarded by methods). This looks cool but is very devious as now syntax is ambiguous (Is this a plain assignment on some struct-like collection of values, or am I calling a (possibly expensive) method here?) You can only tell by opening the definition file of the thing you are inspecting.
I think properties have exactly the same problem as operator overloading in general. They are great if you know what you are doing, for instance if you create a commercial library for vector math or something, yet they are terrible in the hands of the clueless. It is really a pain to have code where everything can mean something unusual depending on what some file you are currently not looking at says.
Read any 'Design patterns' book for Java. A 'Design pattern' is usually a shortcoming of the language that needs to be solved so often that its worthwhile to write a book about the boilerplate code that needs to be written to accomplish it. Boiler plate is bad, Java's got lots and lots of boilerplate.
Aside from patterns, my personal pet peeve about Java is the memory footprint/absence of value classes. Every class is derived from Object, costing 8 bytes. Make the class Serializable and you have another 8 bytes per instance. So, the class Integer, containing a full 4 bytes of content, takes 20 bytes to represent in Java. An array of Integer is thus 4/5-ths overhead. There's no way around the 8 byte Object overhead in Java, so I've been forced at times to break perfectly nice code that works with large arrays of structures to an awful mess that works with structures of arrays, simply because I could triple the sizes of the arrays that way.
Well, the question then becomes, how is the Japanese smartphone market developing? I wouldn't be too surprised that it is growing in double digits, poised to take over both the cellphone and PDA market in about 5 years. Having 46% of that potential now is staggering, but given their track record, apple is not likely to hold on to it.
Unless some radical breakthrough in compiler technology happened overnight that could suddenly make dynamically typed, dictionary based dispatch languages
run as quick as statically typed, virtual table based dispatch languages,
speed gains in javascript will not make apps written in it come significantly closer to the speed of compile-time type-checked languages such as java, objective-c, c++, or for that matter, Flash Actionscript.
Theoretically there is no reason that a JIT compiler for achieving this cannot be build, but despite years of very serious effort to achieve this, it just isn't there, not even close.
Javascript is neat and versatile, and also very, very slow. Once Javascript can compete with, say, Flash for rendering video in the browser, it might be possible to take this whole web application business seriously. Until that time development in Javascript is going to live in the twilight zone between serving up static pages and creating applications.
I think your argument is missing something, something about what heppened to your dev. Say, if you would be able to write...
But you don't have to look very far to find an example of a developer who, disgruntled with the iPhone app store review process, has chosen instead to release it as a web app, was wildely successful doing this, people recommended this application to all their friends, making the developer a shitload of money. All because he didn't target the app store.
... then I would say you would be onto something. As it stands, the above would be untrue, and nobody cares that some dev somewhere decides to kill his business in order to stick it to the man.
If that's the case, the solution is rather simple. The moment your co-workers talk amongst themselves, pick up the telephone or do anything else that creates even the tiniest amount of noise, jump as a team on the person and say 'sssst' very loud in their face. Demand that everybody that needs to communicate with anyone else needs to find a sound-proof room, and soon this manager will be floating in requests to please let the developers wear headphones again to reduce distractions.
The subpoena was illegal. Their lawyers undoubtedly knew that it was so. The companies decided that complying with an illegal act by the US government was preferable to standing up for their customers. Volunteering might be too strong a word, brown-nosing isn't. It's up to their customers to show that this choice was wrong, business-wise, by condemning their actions whenever it comes up. Microsoft and Yahoo have never cared about the privacy of their customers as their actions show. Google has.
There is a problem with people who have chronic, recurring problems. The thing is, at that point that person is essentially a charity case - whether it's charity through higher premiums everyone else pays or through a government mandate, they are someone who costs more to keep alive than they will produce with their life. The insurance model breaks down.
Are you actually arguing that the insurance model breaks down when it tries to do its job: insure something?? That's odd. If it is not possible that a person will take much more than he puts into the fund, we are not talking about insurance, but about investment, a pension fund, or something else. Compare what you just said with liability insurance. For a few dollars per year, one is insured for liabilities that would normally bankrupt an individual. Some people actually will incur this cost, but instead of being bankrupted, they can continue. Everybody else foots the bill. These people take more out of the pot than they will ever put back. Does the insurance model break down here as well?
If people didn't eat meat, so much more land would be available, that we could feed everyone and have room to spare. We might be able to sustain maybe 40 billion people on this earth before running out of land. Imagine that, more and more people, paradise!
I don't agree. The people getting killed are most likely the crewmembers on the ships. Remember, these ships are very understaffed as people cost money. So you have, for a big boat, maybe 10 sailors on board. The pirates are from a country where there is no law. If 10 people aren't enough to take over the ship, the ransom for a tanker of 2 million barrel of crude oil is high enough to try with 20, 30, even 100 people. Unless it's a marine ship, they will get on board.
It seems that the general population here at slashdot are assuming that these oil-tankers are full of trained marines that are not allowed to carry guns. It's really not that way. These sailors are just trained seaman that know how to operate a modern ship. They might not even be trained in the use of guns. Pitting them against people with AK-47s is really asking for them to die.
Slashdot Mirror
Note that there's a distinct difference between stuff deemed practically impossible (faster than the speed of sound? Your machine will collapse), and stuff that is deemed theoretically impossible (temperature lower than 0 Kelvin? Information travelling faster than the speed of light?). Flight was always theoretically possible, as was flight at whatever speed. We didn't know if people could cope with it, but nothing theoretical was in the way. But with the speed of light there is a theoretical problem, as the very notion of time hinges on the fact that the speed of light is constant. Compare this with 0 Kelvin temperature, another of these limits. It is hard to comprehend if something can be colder than 0 Kelvin, as it would mean that we surpass the point where all motion stops. What can be beyond? Same with the speed of light. Faster than light travel means that you can make a trip from earth and arrive earlier than you started. Instant time travel. The fact that the future has not been come knocking on our doors explaining how to travel faster than the speed of light makes the theory that faster than light travel is impossible more likely.
The fact that faster than light travel is necessary for galactic scale civilizations does not mean that there must be a way around it. For all we know, we are stuck here and everyone we will send out will never be heard from again... simply because communications take too long.
No, I don't think anybody said something like that about Glenn Beck. I'm not surprised that you think someone said something like this because Glenn Beck never denied that he raped and murdered a young girl in 1990.
Yes, I'm pretty sure that when you have an application server talking to a database on a single key-lookup with index (log(N)), and you can only serve 100 concurrent users, that complexity theory will spit out the answer (you need to replace the lan+firewall between the DB and the server).
Yes, I agree. However, I usually find that the comments are the unreadable part, while the code can be followed through mostly without problems. If the code is too hard to read, I might try to decompile the comments.
I'm sorry, but without Google, somebody else would likely be the front-end, or there might still be a bit of competition. Competition is a good thing. I used altavista before Google, exactly as I use Google now. Google's search was simply better, nothing dramatic. The only thing Google changed on the internet has been making advertisements less annoying and making advertising on the internet available for everyone. They changed advertising, not the internet at all. So, Apple changed the music industry, Google changed the advertising industry. My vote goes to Apple.
My guess is that all of these people have great curiosity in how things function. We all like technology for technology's sake, but Linux/OpenBSD/Apple/Microsoft are just not our style.
If a train with stops can get you to atlanta in less time than with a plane, the train is faster. Non-stop.
Given the quality of the staff of most ISP's, yes, I think lag injection sounds very far-fetched.
The question is not how many ads they put there, it's how many the populace can stomach before going to the next best (free) thing.
Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. The 10x more productive number (and I've seen it quoted as 100x more productive) comes from the observation that a good coder will do the task, produce working software and move on. The mediocre coder will do the task, produce working software (slightly less quickly than the good coder), and spends the rest of his career hunting down bugs and otherwise keeping the p.o.s. running. Maintenance, that's where the large factors comes into play.
Be careful here dear corbettw, and ask yourself: how much would you need to hate a man to be justified in calling him a nigger? In other words: what does a single man need to do in order for an other to be justified in insulting his group?
Brin and Page own 51% of the voting stock, so what they decide is best for the company, goes.
I did watch the video review (all 70 minutes of it), thought it was funny as hell, and still agree with the grandparent complaining about it. A video is a very poor way of transmitting information. I need to remember from rote all that this guy said in the video, as there is no way in hell that I would ever revisit this video to find some choice words. Were it written down, I might do that. As it is know, it's a nice consumable, but hasn't been archived. The information content is most likely lost.
In math, do you use multi-character symbols? And what is that '.' operator doing there?
In true OO-programming, performing an action that doesn't change state should be done by a library function (a static function). Changing state is done through a method. A class is an abstraction over a set of data with only one purpose: to maintain some invariant on the data members. Holding a couple of values together that can be independently changed is called a struct. Plain setters are generally bad, as it points to an abstraction problem: you are not working with a class, but with a struct. Setters are bad, m'kay? Properties are interesting, they make what appears to be a struct (public members) behave like a class (has invariant guarded by methods). This looks cool but is very devious as now syntax is ambiguous (Is this a plain assignment on some struct-like collection of values, or am I calling a (possibly expensive) method here?) You can only tell by opening the definition file of the thing you are inspecting.
I think properties have exactly the same problem as operator overloading in general. They are great if you know what you are doing, for instance if you create a commercial library for vector math or something, yet they are terrible in the hands of the clueless. It is really a pain to have code where everything can mean something unusual depending on what some file you are currently not looking at says.
Aside from patterns, my personal pet peeve about Java is the memory footprint/absence of value classes. Every class is derived from Object, costing 8 bytes. Make the class Serializable and you have another 8 bytes per instance. So, the class Integer, containing a full 4 bytes of content, takes 20 bytes to represent in Java. An array of Integer is thus 4/5-ths overhead. There's no way around the 8 byte Object overhead in Java, so I've been forced at times to break perfectly nice code that works with large arrays of structures to an awful mess that works with structures of arrays, simply because I could triple the sizes of the arrays that way.
Well, the question then becomes, how is the Japanese smartphone market developing? I wouldn't be too surprised that it is growing in double digits, poised to take over both the cellphone and PDA market in about 5 years. Having 46% of that potential now is staggering, but given their track record, apple is not likely to hold on to it.
Unless some radical breakthrough in compiler technology happened overnight that could suddenly make dynamically typed, dictionary based dispatch languages run as quick as statically typed, virtual table based dispatch languages, speed gains in javascript will not make apps written in it come significantly closer to the speed of compile-time type-checked languages such as java, objective-c, c++, or for that matter, Flash Actionscript.
Theoretically there is no reason that a JIT compiler for achieving this cannot be build, but despite years of very serious effort to achieve this, it just isn't there, not even close.
Javascript is neat and versatile, and also very, very slow. Once Javascript can compete with, say, Flash for rendering video in the browser, it might be possible to take this whole web application business seriously. Until that time development in Javascript is going to live in the twilight zone between serving up static pages and creating applications.
If that's the case, the solution is rather simple. The moment your co-workers talk amongst themselves, pick up the telephone or do anything else that creates even the tiniest amount of noise, jump as a team on the person and say 'sssst' very loud in their face. Demand that everybody that needs to communicate with anyone else needs to find a sound-proof room, and soon this manager will be floating in requests to please let the developers wear headphones again to reduce distractions.
The subpoena was illegal. Their lawyers undoubtedly knew that it was so. The companies decided that complying with an illegal act by the US government was preferable to standing up for their customers. Volunteering might be too strong a word, brown-nosing isn't. It's up to their customers to show that this choice was wrong, business-wise, by condemning their actions whenever it comes up. Microsoft and Yahoo have never cared about the privacy of their customers as their actions show. Google has.
Are you actually arguing that the insurance model breaks down when it tries to do its job: insure something?? That's odd. If it is not possible that a person will take much more than he puts into the fund, we are not talking about insurance, but about investment, a pension fund, or something else. Compare what you just said with liability insurance. For a few dollars per year, one is insured for liabilities that would normally bankrupt an individual. Some people actually will incur this cost, but instead of being bankrupted, they can continue. Everybody else foots the bill. These people take more out of the pot than they will ever put back. Does the insurance model break down here as well?
If people didn't eat meat, so much more land would be available, that we could feed everyone and have room to spare. We might be able to sustain maybe 40 billion people on this earth before running out of land. Imagine that, more and more people, paradise!
It seems that the general population here at slashdot are assuming that these oil-tankers are full of trained marines that are not allowed to carry guns. It's really not that way. These sailors are just trained seaman that know how to operate a modern ship. They might not even be trained in the use of guns. Pitting them against people with AK-47s is really asking for them to die.