There were some rumblings about the incredible performance of the new PHP system, but no mention of how the Rails version was performing by comparison (it sounds like it never went live).
The "integration" point seemed to be claiming that the only way for the transition to work was for Every Single Line of PHP to be removed from the system simultaneously, but it should be possible for different portions of the site to run in different languages.
The "don't want what I don't need" point sounds sensible, until you decide to go adding arbitrary features. Then it's kind of nice to have some well-tested shortcuts that someone has spent a lot of time testing.
I'm sure he could spend a lot of time and detail justifying the points he tried to make, but these brief descriptions seem nigh unto trollish, and are practically begging for pat answers like "What about connection.execute()?" which the author doubtless has already considered. I just want to know WHY connection.execute() wasn't working for him.
And after they place the condemnation notice on your front door, they'll kick your dog.
Seriously, what makes you think that the engineers building this thing are so incompetent that they haven't considered the possibility of hail falling on your roof? They actually do run tests like that. Second to last paragraph here.
I also find it very interesting that you didn't mention the dangers of actually living in a poison-dusted home, but only the danger that the EPA might deny you your God-given right to live in said death trap.
Tell you what, when serious people who actually know about the toxicity and regulatory requirements of cadmium telluride start telling me that this solar technology may present problems, then maybe I'll start worrying.
13% efficiency is great. I mean, it's about on par with photosynthesis, and well above the efficiency needed to make a south-facing rooftop installation provide as much energy as the household consumes. My place is about 900ft^2 (100m^2), which means that the sun pours about 500kWH/day on the roof (src). 11% of that is far more than I use.
Anyhow, efficiency becomes almost irrelevant when you're discussing big solar rigs way out in the desert. Land is cheap in surplus states like Nevada, Oklahoma, and Connecticut.
According to this article, they expect the things to last about twenty years, but they're still running stress tests. Same program, but a little over a year ago.
>> Since when does C02 drive weather anyway? they ignore basic high school science. I found it amusing to watch a show the other night harping on about increased C02 raising sea water acidity, when in fact a warming ocean results in c02 ESCAPING the water.
You've clearly forgotten high school chemistry. Yet you're arrogant enough to believe that climate scientists are the ones who have forgotten.
If you have a system with water and a CO2 atmosphere in equilibrium, some concentration of CO2 will be dissolved in the water. Now, what happens if you double the CO2 in the atmosphere? More of it gets dissolved in the water. That's where the increased acidity comes from.
It just goes to show that you anti-environmental types are happy to believe whatever absurd caricature allows you to feel justified in keeping your Hummers.
Show me one frakking environmental group that has come out in opposition to solar or wind energy. C'mon, just one.
Buying a second account isn't a viable solution for them. You'll probably still be using more than twenty normal customers, and the amount of bandwidth you use will still degrade service for every other customer on your loop.
To put it another way: the cable loop you're sharing with the rest of the neighborhood only has a finite amount of bandwidth, that has to be "equitably" split maybe thirty to a hundred ways. As one of the heaviest users, it's insanity to think that buying a second share would entitle you to twice as much bandwidth as you're using now.
But while I understand that they have a finite resource that has to be divided equitably, cable providers also enjoy something of a monopoly position, which makes it far easier for them to kick off high-usage customers rather than forking over the cash to upgrade their systems. So there are probably some perfectly good reasons for you to be offended.
I don't think it's incompatible the way you describe. On the GPL compatibility list, it says that the original BSD license is incompatible, but only because of the advertising clause.
Basically, it boils down to this: The BSD grants the recipient certain rights (such as the right to distribute binary-only products based on the licensed software) and certain responsibilities (give proper attribution). Recipients of BSD code are able to sublicense it to others, but while the sublicensees are required to live up to the same responsibilities, they receive only the rights granted by whoever licenses it to them.
You're right. Another good poll would be "How many people haven't bothered with Java because of the whole VM thing?" Or, "How many people haven't tried LISP because of the whole 'no side effects' thing?" Or "how many people refuse to use C because of the whole compiler thing?" Or "How many people reject Ruby because of the whole 'ability to pass blocks of code as arguments' thing?"
My point is, these things are kind of central to their respective languages. If you truly despise one of these central features, chances are good that there are a dozen other things about the language you won't like either. The Python people could jettison every feature you didn't like, until they finally wound up with a bastardized knockoff of Your Favorite Language. Then you'd end up ignoring Python in favor of Your Favorite Language anyways.
If the whitespace thing is a big deal to you, then either your editor of choice isn't doing anything to help you, or you're just whining that Python isn't exactly the same as YFL.
2) As has been thoroughly described elsewhere in this thread, the OLPC has all sorts of features that are intended specifically to promote education in the third world. The Classmate PC's only claim to fame is "being a cheap laptop".
3) The company that initially dismissed the OLPC as "a gadget" then turns around and starts marketing a similar device to the same populations? And without including many of the features that the OLPC project thinks are necessary to make such a product truly useful? I understand perfectly well why Negroponte would be pissed, and it has little to do with who gets credit.
>> In fact, what OLPC proved is, that commercial entities are already doing their best.
That's a load of crap. The Eeee!!!!!! didn't exist (hell, wasn't even on the drawing board) when the OLPC announced its intentions. Nor was Intel's Classmate PC. Commercial vendors have had the ability to make such ultracheap PCs for a long time now, but they didn't break down and do it until the OLPC made such machines inevitable. Before that, laptop manufacturers knew that each ultracheap machine they made would often end up substituting for the $800-$1200 laptop they would otherwise be selling to the customer.
But did anyone stop to ask themselves, "Why did we create those anti-sharing rules in the first place?" No. As far as the American public is concerned, those rules just magically wrote and adopted themselves.
Without those laws, it was easy for the FBI to get information on Americans living abroad (information that should have required a warrant). They'd just nudge the CIA and say, "Buddy, do me a solid." The CIA, for its part, could get information from the FBI that it wasn't allowed to collect. Such abuses were far from theoretical.
Certainly, there is information that the FBI and CIA were allowed to exchange, and I suspect that those sharing programs weren't run nearly as effectively as they could have been. They could have improved the flow of intel between the agencies without touching the wall.
I don't think 9/11 happened because the FBI wasn't able to trade certain kinds of data with the CIA. I think it happened because the Bush administration didn't take terrorism seriously. Bin Laden was Clinton's white whale, an obsession the new administration found silly, until it was too late.
Had Bush treated the "Bin Laden determined to attack inside the U.S." memo as vigorously as Clinton treated the reports surrounding the foiled Millennium Bombing, I don't think 9/11 would have happened.
So, you're of the John Bolton mindset? "The President represents the people who voted for him."
Feinstein does represent you, though in your case she may misrepresent you. You are, nonetheless, a part of the population that voted her into office.
But that's neither here nor there. The point I'm trying to make is that Senate Republicans wield power far out of proportion to the population they represent. I think it's a safe assumption to say that they wield disproportionate power when compared to the size of the population that shares their ideology. Unless you have evidence to indicate that Senate democrats are particularly prone to winning nailbiter races, I still think that's a safe assumption.
>> Most people here assume just accepting new ideas at face value (which is all the study suggested) is a good thing.
That's really not what the study is saying. I worry about extrapolating this very preliminary study too far, but insofar as it says anything, it's saying something very different.
It isn't saying that liberals (whether critically or uncritically) integrate new findings into their worldview faster or more completely than conservatives. Instead, it may be indicating that the "conservative mind" is less on the lookout for information that defies its expectations. Of course, the experiment only covers a situation where a snap judgment is required.
1) I don't see "PC" as a smear term. To me, being "politically correct" simply means speaking as though the feelings and opinions of people not like yourself are worth a damn.
2) Who in their right mind would recycle potato skins? They're the healthiest part of the potato. Loaded with nutrients. Mmmm, good.
3) Larry Craig isn't gay. He just likes having sex with men. See the difference?:)
I think that only libertarians and anarchists fail to see society as "one big family." Within the Democrat/Republican framework, maybe both sides see the government as sort of a parental figure, with Democrats wanting more nurturing parents and Republicans wanting more strict parents [src]. A lot also depends on whether you see luck or inherent worth as the primary determinant of an individual's fortunes.
The urban/rural divide is pretty easy to explain in my mind. In rural areas, it's less likely that any individual's behavior will have clear, harmful effects on the quality of life of their neighbors. You can play your stereo as loud as you want, there are fewer people to drop garbage in the streets, and anonymity is nigh unto impossible because everyone recognizes everyone. So the tribal notions of shame and ostracism serve to constrain antisocial behavior in ways that become ineffective as population density rises. In urban areas, the effects of collective antisocial behavior are more obvious, as is the beneficial role of government in regulating that behavior.
I can't for the life of me believe that you got a Troll rating.
The standard conservative line is that your reward should be proportionate to the value of your contributions to society. I believe this is about 41% true and 73% crock*. They also believe that capitalism is a fair judge of the value of contributions (which I think is 20% true and 92% crock).
I'm a pretty strong believer in genetic determinism, in that your genes strongly influence your physical, intellectual, and emotional capacities (and probably even your moral outlook). Luck plays a huge role in every person's life, especially if you see certain people as being very fortunate in having certain genes. Wealth-distributing policies (welfare, universal health care, public infrastructure, etc.) should be seen as a useful equalizing force. Some level of income inequality can be useful in directing people towards economically valuable behavior, so long as the inequality arises from a difference in value, rather than a mere difference in power.
>> Perhaps we could have a rule where Republican votes count for 3/5ths of Democrat votes...
For senate races, that would probably be about fair.
Consider that the 49 Democrats in the Senate represent about 165M people, while the 49 Republicans represent about 123M (165M vs 125M, if we spot them a Lieberman, but I won't). So the average Republican senator represents 2.5M people, while the average Democratic senator represents 3.3M. So if you nerfed the average Senator(R-XX)'s vote down to about.75 of a vote, they would have power proportionate to the population they represent.
I love Rails as much as (okay, more than) the next guy, but I don't think kongregate has a standard traffic profile. User shows up, navigates to favorite flash game, then plays it for a half hour or so (during which time the user isn't making much in the way of server requests). Most of the traffic would, I assume, come in the form of big Flash downloads, which would best be handled by Apache directly (if not put on another server altogether).
It's a nice site, with a lot of polish, and I would certainly use it to show off the niftiness of Rails. But it's not necessarily proof of scalability.
Well, it does help to be good buds with Richard Branson.
I assume that the authorities would spend some time looking for the crash site in any case. The only difference is, because Steve Fossett is Steve Fossett, some people outside the official investigation are pulling some strings to help make the search more efficient. If somebody came to a search and said, "We may have a faster way to search through your satellite data," it would be stupid to reject the help in the name of fairness.
Slashdot Mirror
I was disappointed too.
There were some rumblings about the incredible performance of the new PHP system, but no mention of how the Rails version was performing by comparison (it sounds like it never went live).
The "integration" point seemed to be claiming that the only way for the transition to work was for Every Single Line of PHP to be removed from the system simultaneously, but it should be possible for different portions of the site to run in different languages.
The "don't want what I don't need" point sounds sensible, until you decide to go adding arbitrary features. Then it's kind of nice to have some well-tested shortcuts that someone has spent a lot of time testing.
I'm sure he could spend a lot of time and detail justifying the points he tried to make, but these brief descriptions seem nigh unto trollish, and are practically begging for pat answers like "What about connection.execute()?" which the author doubtless has already considered. I just want to know WHY connection.execute() wasn't working for him.
Yes.
And after they place the condemnation notice on your front door, they'll kick your dog.
Seriously, what makes you think that the engineers building this thing are so incompetent that they haven't considered the possibility of hail falling on your roof? They actually do run tests like that. Second to last paragraph here.
I also find it very interesting that you didn't mention the dangers of actually living in a poison-dusted home, but only the danger that the EPA might deny you your God-given right to live in said death trap.
Tell you what, when serious people who actually know about the toxicity and regulatory requirements of cadmium telluride start telling me that this solar technology may present problems, then maybe I'll start worrying.
13% efficiency is great. I mean, it's about on par with photosynthesis, and well above the efficiency needed to make a south-facing rooftop installation provide as much energy as the household consumes. My place is about 900ft^2 (100m^2), which means that the sun pours about 500kWH/day on the roof (src). 11% of that is far more than I use.
Anyhow, efficiency becomes almost irrelevant when you're discussing big solar rigs way out in the desert. Land is cheap in surplus states like Nevada, Oklahoma, and Connecticut.
According to this article, they expect the things to last about twenty years, but they're still running stress tests. Same program, but a little over a year ago.
>> Since when does C02 drive weather anyway? they ignore basic high school science. I found it amusing to watch a show the other night harping on about increased C02 raising sea water acidity, when in fact a warming ocean results in c02 ESCAPING the water.
.1 lower than it was at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, even as the oceans have been warming. According to your vast geochemical knowledge, shouldn't the opposite be happening?
You've clearly forgotten high school chemistry. Yet you're arrogant enough to believe that climate scientists are the ones who have forgotten.
If you have a system with water and a CO2 atmosphere in equilibrium, some concentration of CO2 will be dissolved in the water. Now, what happens if you double the CO2 in the atmosphere? More of it gets dissolved in the water. That's where the increased acidity comes from.
And yes, it's coming. pH is
It just goes to show that you anti-environmental types are happy to believe whatever absurd caricature allows you to feel justified in keeping your Hummers.
Show me one frakking environmental group that has come out in opposition to solar or wind energy. C'mon, just one.
I'd just like to take a moment to point out that I have never once seen an Ubuntu story that didn't have this exact thread attached to it.
Everyone participating, listen very closely.
Go.
Outside.
And.
Play.
Buying a second account isn't a viable solution for them. You'll probably still be using more than twenty normal customers, and the amount of bandwidth you use will still degrade service for every other customer on your loop.
To put it another way: the cable loop you're sharing with the rest of the neighborhood only has a finite amount of bandwidth, that has to be "equitably" split maybe thirty to a hundred ways. As one of the heaviest users, it's insanity to think that buying a second share would entitle you to twice as much bandwidth as you're using now.
But while I understand that they have a finite resource that has to be divided equitably, cable providers also enjoy something of a monopoly position, which makes it far easier for them to kick off high-usage customers rather than forking over the cash to upgrade their systems. So there are probably some perfectly good reasons for you to be offended.
I don't think it's incompatible the way you describe. On the GPL compatibility list, it says that the original BSD license is incompatible, but only because of the advertising clause.
Basically, it boils down to this: The BSD grants the recipient certain rights (such as the right to distribute binary-only products based on the licensed software) and certain responsibilities (give proper attribution). Recipients of BSD code are able to sublicense it to others, but while the sublicensees are required to live up to the same responsibilities, they receive only the rights granted by whoever licenses it to them.
I don't see how all that "concern for the future" talk is going to help me afford mah Hummer.
You're right. Another good poll would be "How many people haven't bothered with Java because of the whole VM thing?" Or, "How many people haven't tried LISP because of the whole 'no side effects' thing?" Or "how many people refuse to use C because of the whole compiler thing?" Or "How many people reject Ruby because of the whole 'ability to pass blocks of code as arguments' thing?"
My point is, these things are kind of central to their respective languages. If you truly despise one of these central features, chances are good that there are a dozen other things about the language you won't like either. The Python people could jettison every feature you didn't like, until they finally wound up with a bastardized knockoff of Your Favorite Language. Then you'd end up ignoring Python in favor of Your Favorite Language anyways.
If the whitespace thing is a big deal to you, then either your editor of choice isn't doing anything to help you, or you're just whining that Python isn't exactly the same as YFL.
This has been a public service announcement from the Society for the Preservation of Curly Braces.
1) The Classmate PC is not cheaper than the OLPC.
2) As has been thoroughly described elsewhere in this thread, the OLPC has all sorts of features that are intended specifically to promote education in the third world. The Classmate PC's only claim to fame is "being a cheap laptop".
3) The company that initially dismissed the OLPC as "a gadget" then turns around and starts marketing a similar device to the same populations? And without including many of the features that the OLPC project thinks are necessary to make such a product truly useful? I understand perfectly well why Negroponte would be pissed, and it has little to do with who gets credit.
>> In fact, what OLPC proved is, that commercial entities are already doing their best.
That's a load of crap. The Eeee!!!!!! didn't exist (hell, wasn't even on the drawing board) when the OLPC announced its intentions. Nor was Intel's Classmate PC. Commercial vendors have had the ability to make such ultracheap PCs for a long time now, but they didn't break down and do it until the OLPC made such machines inevitable. Before that, laptop manufacturers knew that each ultracheap machine they made would often end up substituting for the $800-$1200 laptop they would otherwise be selling to the customer.
Negroponte's reading of the market was spot on.
But did anyone stop to ask themselves, "Why did we create those anti-sharing rules in the first place?" No. As far as the American public is concerned, those rules just magically wrote and adopted themselves.
Without those laws, it was easy for the FBI to get information on Americans living abroad (information that should have required a warrant). They'd just nudge the CIA and say, "Buddy, do me a solid." The CIA, for its part, could get information from the FBI that it wasn't allowed to collect. Such abuses were far from theoretical.
Certainly, there is information that the FBI and CIA were allowed to exchange, and I suspect that those sharing programs weren't run nearly as effectively as they could have been. They could have improved the flow of intel between the agencies without touching the wall.
I don't think 9/11 happened because the FBI wasn't able to trade certain kinds of data with the CIA. I think it happened because the Bush administration didn't take terrorism seriously. Bin Laden was Clinton's white whale, an obsession the new administration found silly, until it was too late.
Had Bush treated the "Bin Laden determined to attack inside the U.S." memo as vigorously as Clinton treated the reports surrounding the foiled Millennium Bombing, I don't think 9/11 would have happened.
So, you're of the John Bolton mindset? "The President represents the people who voted for him."
Feinstein does represent you, though in your case she may misrepresent you. You are, nonetheless, a part of the population that voted her into office.
But that's neither here nor there. The point I'm trying to make is that Senate Republicans wield power far out of proportion to the population they represent. I think it's a safe assumption to say that they wield disproportionate power when compared to the size of the population that shares their ideology. Unless you have evidence to indicate that Senate democrats are particularly prone to winning nailbiter races, I still think that's a safe assumption.
>> Most people here assume just accepting new ideas at face value (which is all the study suggested) is a good thing.
That's really not what the study is saying. I worry about extrapolating this very preliminary study too far, but insofar as it says anything, it's saying something very different.
It isn't saying that liberals (whether critically or uncritically) integrate new findings into their worldview faster or more completely than conservatives. Instead, it may be indicating that the "conservative mind" is less on the lookout for information that defies its expectations. Of course, the experiment only covers a situation where a snap judgment is required.
1) I don't see "PC" as a smear term. To me, being "politically correct" simply means speaking as though the feelings and opinions of people not like yourself are worth a damn.
:)
2) Who in their right mind would recycle potato skins? They're the healthiest part of the potato. Loaded with nutrients. Mmmm, good.
3) Larry Craig isn't gay. He just likes having sex with men. See the difference?
I think that only libertarians and anarchists fail to see society as "one big family." Within the Democrat/Republican framework, maybe both sides see the government as sort of a parental figure, with Democrats wanting more nurturing parents and Republicans wanting more strict parents [src]. A lot also depends on whether you see luck or inherent worth as the primary determinant of an individual's fortunes.
The urban/rural divide is pretty easy to explain in my mind. In rural areas, it's less likely that any individual's behavior will have clear, harmful effects on the quality of life of their neighbors. You can play your stereo as loud as you want, there are fewer people to drop garbage in the streets, and anonymity is nigh unto impossible because everyone recognizes everyone. So the tribal notions of shame and ostracism serve to constrain antisocial behavior in ways that become ineffective as population density rises. In urban areas, the effects of collective antisocial behavior are more obvious, as is the beneficial role of government in regulating that behavior.
I can't for the life of me believe that you got a Troll rating.
The standard conservative line is that your reward should be proportionate to the value of your contributions to society. I believe this is about 41% true and 73% crock*. They also believe that capitalism is a fair judge of the value of contributions (which I think is 20% true and 92% crock).
I'm a pretty strong believer in genetic determinism, in that your genes strongly influence your physical, intellectual, and emotional capacities (and probably even your moral outlook). Luck plays a huge role in every person's life, especially if you see certain people as being very fortunate in having certain genes. Wealth-distributing policies (welfare, universal health care, public infrastructure, etc.) should be seen as a useful equalizing force. Some level of income inequality can be useful in directing people towards economically valuable behavior, so long as the inequality arises from a difference in value, rather than a mere difference in power.
* I likes teh new maths.
>> Perhaps we could have a rule where Republican votes count for 3/5ths of Democrat votes...
.75 of a vote, they would have power proportionate to the population they represent.
For senate races, that would probably be about fair.
Consider that the 49 Democrats in the Senate represent about 165M people, while the 49 Republicans represent about 123M (165M vs 125M, if we spot them a Lieberman, but I won't). So the average Republican senator represents 2.5M people, while the average Democratic senator represents 3.3M. So if you nerfed the average Senator(R-XX)'s vote down to about
I love Rails as much as (okay, more than) the next guy, but I don't think kongregate has a standard traffic profile. User shows up, navigates to favorite flash game, then plays it for a half hour or so (during which time the user isn't making much in the way of server requests). Most of the traffic would, I assume, come in the form of big Flash downloads, which would best be handled by Apache directly (if not put on another server altogether).
It's a nice site, with a lot of polish, and I would certainly use it to show off the niftiness of Rails. But it's not necessarily proof of scalability.
Well, it does help to be good buds with Richard Branson.
I assume that the authorities would spend some time looking for the crash site in any case. The only difference is, because Steve Fossett is Steve Fossett, some people outside the official investigation are pulling some strings to help make the search more efficient. If somebody came to a search and said, "We may have a faster way to search through your satellite data," it would be stupid to reject the help in the name of fairness.
This set of images is up to date.
Hint: If you're using GEarth, and not seeing a black and white photo, you're doing something wrong.
That's what *she* said!
Had a chance to meet her ex, but never took her up on it.