If we weren't already subsidizing interstates and cars to the exclusion of other forms of transportation, shallow and wrong-headed articles like this one wouldn't be pontificating about what we can't or won't do. Quoth the wiki:
"China aims to limit the cost of future construction extending the maglev line to approximately 200 million yuan (US$24.6 million) per kilometer.[3] These costs compare competitively with airport construction (e.g., Hong Kong Airport cost US$20 billion to build in 1998) and eight-lane Interstate highway systems that cost around US$50 million per mile (US$31 million per kilometer) in the US."
Translation: maglev can beat the costs of our fuel-guzzling, CO2-belching, traffic-jamming highways by a significant margin, but since GM and friends make so much money convincing Americans that cars and interstates are the way to go, whatever the hidden costs of roads and corporate welfare and military policing of oil-producing states, we won't consider shifting that investment into in anything else even though it's cheaper and better. We'll just keep paying in taxes and blood for the status quo. USA! USA! USA!
It's so tiresome seeing "whatcouldpossiblygowrong" attached to every science headline. It's an ignorant and cowardly attitude. What is this, a Fox TV show?
Incidentally, plants combine genetic material from more than two parents all the time, so doing this in an animal species is a very interesting thing. It's certainly possible and could have great advantages.
Whoa, doesn't everyone get it? Qt 4.x broke the barriers by becoming GPL and cross-platform on Windows, Mac, and Linux. This has paved the way for KDE. I use Linux, BSD, OSX, and if I really must play a game, Windows. I would *love* to have some quality apps across the board. For that matter, Qt's technologies like Qtopia offer a future in handheld devices that KDE applications could quite possibly make it to someday.
This is the game of getting architecture right, and then reaping the rewards. KDE may have seem cluttered before, but it's been powerful and able to be shaped to your comfort. Now it's getting a good cleanup and even better than design. Screw all that armchair bitching and "they shouldn't have released 4.0, I sez so on my interblog", I think this is a desktop hot on the pursuit of excellence.
And will having KDE applications on other platforms backfire? I don't think so. The KDE environment itself features a level of integration that is competitive with OSX. It's not just a cobbled-together pile of applications. Let the individual apps gain fans on Macs and Windows PCs, and then more people will be interested to try them where they all come together.
I think I see what people like A. Seigo really have in mind, and it gets me some architectural jollies. People who want eye-candy without the functional oomph can have whatever environment they want, but I would love to see a free desktop with good design inside and out, and KDE 4 is on track to be it.
There's a certain crowd that's criticizing the MacBook Air a lot for what it leaves off, and I don't think they get what you want with a subnotebook. I likewise wonder what they think of the EeePC.
There's a diversity of needs in personal computing, and at one end you have the gamers who want highly upgradable components and to cram everything they can into a 600-watt beast with fans whining. Fine, okay, but my own preference is that I'd rather not share my living space with that. The next is the quiet low-profile desktop, and Apple's doing that kind of thing very recognizably with the iMac and Mac Mini. There are PC systems like the shuttle. Then there are desktop-replacement laptops with enough GPU for gamers and CPU for number crunching. And now there are subnotebooks. Cite whatever midpoints or extremities you want, these are the relevant ones.
Most web/email/office use is simply best done on something like an iMac if you're stationary, or a laptop. Those of us who value quiet and energy efficiency will more and more choose this route. The real junkies among us have not one, but several machines. After a while, it gets annoying if they're all identical configurations. You don't want to pack a DVD and a monster peripheral set into your subnotebook - that's for basic needs on the go! Leave your movie collection at home, say, on a nice Kurobox or some other NAS. You don't need multiple DVD burners. You can get disk images off your NAS. Back it up with a Time Capsule or roll your own.
I like my network of specialized machines. It makes choosing an operating system and hardware configuration a matter of the right choice for the job. I think most of the criticism of the MacBook Air comes from the 600W desktop beast crowd that has everything in one or two boxes. Well... they'll come around.
I don't know what to call ethanol but a really inefficient, indirect way to run on solar power. The only good thing about it is that our automobiles could run on it until we fix our shit - green energy, cut down on sprawl, livable and affordable urban neighborhoods, good public transport. However, it sounds more like an excuse for not really solving those problems. What, you thought the world was going to be full of more and bigger cars indefinitely?
And of course the next guy after you looked at your directory of Python scripts, declared them hopeless, and rewrote them in something else, continuing the cycle.
That could happen, but it wouldn't happen for any lack of making my code clearly readable, maintainable, and extendable by others. It comes down to good practice, and some languages accommodate it better than others. You can do anything in Perl that you can in Python. However, your cost in time and tedium will definitely be higher in most cases beyond the quick 100-line regular expression script.
In which case, a well-design prototype in a high level language is just part of the process. The alternative is premature optimization, and you know what they say about that.
> For more conspiracy fodder, are the Clintons really stupid enough to have a hand in this?
Frankly, Yes.
I don't know if that can be called stupid anymore. If there's been any lesson for American politicians these past few years, it's that they can get away with anything as long as there's an scary external scapegoat. Mostly, the dissenters just vent on their intarblogs.
Not to argue that TIOBE's statistics aren't suspect, but the number of available jobs banging on Perl isn't meaningful to me. I've already had too many jobs where the first order of business is someone pointing me at a directory and saying, "These are your predecessor's Perl scripts. Please figure this out and make things work."
The last time I had free rein in something like that, I did just that, and made a clean rewrite to make a few cleanly commented, consistent Python modules that did the work of all the previous scripts, sans bugs. Just the fact that assignment by reference is the default, that building data structures deeply requires no line noise, makes the program design easy to get right the first time. No "oops, need another dollar sign there". No "how do I refer to a value in a hash of lists of hashes again?" You just do it.
Maybe it's that my sense of programming comes from years of looking at some of the cleaner C and C++ out there, and reading Design Patterns, makes me prefer a language that encourages design and clean coding practices by default. I don't want to deal with one more script from someone who munged strings of data with regular expressions where they should have used data structures or objects. Those of you who are about to clean up piles of Perl code with Perl Medic in hand, I salute you. You're braver than I care to be anymore.
I am a bit surprised that they didn't just rig some wipers up for the solar panels! They clearly overengineered the rovers for the initially expected mission duration - why didn't they add a small, simple way for themselves to dust themselves off and keep the power coming?
It's okay. It's absolutely fabulous having Spirit and Opportunity there, let alone still working at all.
I really don't see a need to expect OSX and Linux to kill each other off. I've been using Linux since the 0.9x kernels came with Slackware. The fact was that as much as any open source OS gained ground, you had the market open to whatever got the merit and mindshare for the job. This has happened to a great extent. OSX is seeing ports of games from EA using technology borrowed from WINE. At the same time, Apple has given things back that are benefiting open source OS's: WebKit (itself from KHTML), LLVM improvements, what have you. I am not 100% comfortable with how Apple behaves with the things it keeps closed, but in the meantime, I very happily use MacPorts and open source software whenever I can atop my MacBook Pro.
With Qt 4.x and KDE4 showing great promise for portability between Windows, Linux, and OSX, and not to mention the latent potential of GNUStep to make apps portable between OSX and other Unices, the opportunity for any platform is getting better. Unix and open source both offer Apple too much for it to ignore, and vice versa. If Apple wants to keep their slick Aqua interface closed, that's fine by me as long as I can migrate my data and key applications. And hey, there'll always be KDE4.
Windows is something I am now able to almost completely avoid.
There's a downside to a universal language when it pushes aside other languages, though. The cultural and intellectual diversity in language is a good thing; they ought to go on. Just as you don't want Lisp with its expressive macros or Perl with its regular expressions to just go away so everyone writes in C, you don't want a universal language to displace all others in the real world, nor do you want to halt evolution or innovation.
For example, written Korean beats any other language for writing distinct vowel sounds. This is because it was devised for the specific case of replacing borrowed Chinese characters that were awkward for Korean language with a cleanly organized system devised by royal scholars and actually put into wide use. For its purpose, you can't beat that. And yet, reading that link, you can see shortcomings that Korean has.
Similarly, if you want to talk about snow, you can't beat the Inuit language, and if you want to talk about time as relative rather than discrete units Hopi is a good choice, and if you want to talk about burning things, you can't beat Latin - damn those Roman pyromaniacs.
The universal language will surely happen to the degree that it is merited, but hopefully, no more.
Pypy is certainly interesting, but why would it move ahead of HLVM? Perhaps the language-specific needs make HLVM more difficult to realize in an efficient manner. Now, if we look at the.NET example, what's to be excited about? Me, I like the Command Language Runtime, but I'm not willing to drink Microsoft's kool-aid to get it.
LLVM is getting something about virtual machines right - the lighter and simpler, the better. Maybe HLVM can't do for Python what Pypy with LLVM can. If we can distill the really useful functionality into a simple solution the way LLVM is doing for its target, I think API exposure, threads, and semaphores are the basics that you want in common to make it come together. Let languages handle their memory management in specific ways. One size does not fit all; just make it work well together.
There are a number of forces conspiring to make something like LLVM happen. One is Apple with its need for a simple, portable OpenGL pipeline. In that regard, LLVM isn't an academic project, it's a shipped product.
Thanks for posting that. Small and simple virtual machines, I think, are the key to making the next generation of hardware really useful. The future is more and more multithreaded and parallel, no doubt of it, and a lightweight VM would go a long way towards making the next generation of hardware as useful as it should be.
I predict that LLVM and HLVM will gain steam. People are going to realize that this pair of abstractions is cleaner, leaner, and meaner than the current virtual machine + language + API way of doing things characterized by Java and.NET. The fact that a GPU can be used as a processor transparently where appropriate, just the way Apple already has with LLVM, is going to start the rethink that was cut short by Java and.NET's fiascoes of ownership or patents. They'll also start making development in compiled languages easier.
This will be the open source response to the blurring lines between CPU and GPU task-wise, as the vector computing tasks could be done much quicker on the GPU based on the advances of LLVM, and applications will benefit transparently. It will be very cool.
My subjective experience of Apple Stores and Fry's is completely different. I find Fry's a depressing, grueling place. You either come knowing exactly what you want, and are paying for the convenience, or you get swamped. Apple stores have a bright, fresh feeling. I haven't had a perfect experience there, but more often than not, the people are especially helpful. My MacBook Pro's power adapter cord, for example, began to fray recently near the Magsafe connector. I took it in, preparing to wave my warranty paperwork about for a while - they took one look at it and just gave me a new one. No fuss, no muss.
Apple's stroke of genius is that they convey, with a sense of minimalism and good energy, that the rest of your life matters, and that the computer is there to add to it rather than disrupt it. Fry's gives you a feeling that it's just taking over, swamping you with too many choices between too many gadgets with way too many buttons and lights leering back at you. It is for people who serve machines, almost like the usual sad lot of employees who never seem happy or helpful. They seem like modern plantation workers. Fry's makes you feel subservient to the merchandise.
At home, I run a Mac, a Windows PC, and a Linux server. I am not a devotee to Apple; I just rarely find that technology companies so consistently suit people like me who want to have a computer and then get along with their lives. I wish more technology carried that philosophy in its design.
I'm surprised that Slashdot doesn't discuss microgrids more often. Small energy sources near the consumer means that electricity is delivered more efficiently, rather than losing it a long distance of wires through resistance. I'd love to see neighborhoods with solar panels and windmills up, not to mention solar chimneys. But to guarantee a baseline of available power, this is the way.
One thing for sure, though, we simply have to trim our energy usage. I have had an interesting time putting effort into this: all my bulbs are CFL's or LED's. Everything that can possibly be guzzling electricity on "standby" is on a power strip which gets turned off. I have a desktop, but I use my laptop mostly. My extra drive space is coming from a KuroBox acting as a cheap NAS, which consumes only 17W when in use. During the summer, I only hit my air conditioning a few days when it was particularly hot or I had guests. Winter has proven a bit more trying as I am in an apartment which has poor insulation, as it turns out. Yet, my summer and fall electric bills from PG&E averaged about $15 a month, and in wintertime with me heating one or two rooms, I'm doing about $35.
Those are just examples. The means to have cleaner and more efficient power for our lifestyles is here. We could be making so much positive change if some greedy bastards would just get out of the way.
Slashdot Mirror
At least this way, all that plastic garbage we've churned out finally gets recycled.
If we weren't already subsidizing interstates and cars to the exclusion of other forms of transportation, shallow and wrong-headed articles like this one wouldn't be pontificating about what we can't or won't do. Quoth the wiki:
"China aims to limit the cost of future construction extending the maglev line to approximately 200 million yuan (US$24.6 million) per kilometer.[3] These costs compare competitively with airport construction (e.g., Hong Kong Airport cost US$20 billion to build in 1998) and eight-lane Interstate highway systems that cost around US$50 million per mile (US$31 million per kilometer) in the US."
Translation: maglev can beat the costs of our fuel-guzzling, CO2-belching, traffic-jamming highways by a significant margin, but since GM and friends make so much money convincing Americans that cars and interstates are the way to go, whatever the hidden costs of roads and corporate welfare and military policing of oil-producing states, we won't consider shifting that investment into in anything else even though it's cheaper and better. We'll just keep paying in taxes and blood for the status quo. USA! USA! USA!
It's so tiresome seeing "whatcouldpossiblygowrong" attached to every science headline. It's an ignorant and cowardly attitude. What is this, a Fox TV show?
Incidentally, plants combine genetic material from more than two parents all the time, so doing this in an animal species is a very interesting thing. It's certainly possible and could have great advantages.
...sending one of those rare extremes of dogma, the flat-earther, in one of these. I'd pay to see that reaction.
Next up, flyovers of the Apollo landing sites on the moon. Pack some cameras for those footprints. I just want to see those nuts crack.
Whoa, doesn't everyone get it? Qt 4.x broke the barriers by becoming GPL and cross-platform on Windows, Mac, and Linux. This has paved the way for KDE. I use Linux, BSD, OSX, and if I really must play a game, Windows. I would *love* to have some quality apps across the board. For that matter, Qt's technologies like Qtopia offer a future in handheld devices that KDE applications could quite possibly make it to someday.
This is the game of getting architecture right, and then reaping the rewards. KDE may have seem cluttered before, but it's been powerful and able to be shaped to your comfort. Now it's getting a good cleanup and even better than design. Screw all that armchair bitching and "they shouldn't have released 4.0, I sez so on my interblog", I think this is a desktop hot on the pursuit of excellence.
And will having KDE applications on other platforms backfire? I don't think so. The KDE environment itself features a level of integration that is competitive with OSX. It's not just a cobbled-together pile of applications. Let the individual apps gain fans on Macs and Windows PCs, and then more people will be interested to try them where they all come together.
I think I see what people like A. Seigo really have in mind, and it gets me some architectural jollies. People who want eye-candy without the functional oomph can have whatever environment they want, but I would love to see a free desktop with good design inside and out, and KDE 4 is on track to be it.
Pardon, Kurobox link fixed here.
There's a certain crowd that's criticizing the MacBook Air a lot for what it leaves off, and I don't think they get what you want with a subnotebook. I likewise wonder what they think of the EeePC.
There's a diversity of needs in personal computing, and at one end you have the gamers who want highly upgradable components and to cram everything they can into a 600-watt beast with fans whining. Fine, okay, but my own preference is that I'd rather not share my living space with that. The next is the quiet low-profile desktop, and Apple's doing that kind of thing very recognizably with the iMac and Mac Mini. There are PC systems like the shuttle. Then there are desktop-replacement laptops with enough GPU for gamers and CPU for number crunching. And now there are subnotebooks. Cite whatever midpoints or extremities you want, these are the relevant ones.
Most web/email/office use is simply best done on something like an iMac if you're stationary, or a laptop. Those of us who value quiet and energy efficiency will more and more choose this route. The real junkies among us have not one, but several machines. After a while, it gets annoying if they're all identical configurations. You don't want to pack a DVD and a monster peripheral set into your subnotebook - that's for basic needs on the go! Leave your movie collection at home, say, on a nice Kurobox or some other NAS. You don't need multiple DVD burners. You can get disk images off your NAS. Back it up with a Time Capsule or roll your own.
I like my network of specialized machines. It makes choosing an operating system and hardware configuration a matter of the right choice for the job. I think most of the criticism of the MacBook Air comes from the 600W desktop beast crowd that has everything in one or two boxes. Well... they'll come around.
I don't know what to call ethanol but a really inefficient, indirect way to run on solar power. The only good thing about it is that our automobiles could run on it until we fix our shit - green energy, cut down on sprawl, livable and affordable urban neighborhoods, good public transport. However, it sounds more like an excuse for not really solving those problems. What, you thought the world was going to be full of more and bigger cars indefinitely?
And of course the next guy after you looked at your directory of Python scripts, declared them hopeless, and rewrote them in something else, continuing the cycle.
That could happen, but it wouldn't happen for any lack of making my code clearly readable, maintainable, and extendable by others. It comes down to good practice, and some languages accommodate it better than others. You can do anything in Perl that you can in Python. However, your cost in time and tedium will definitely be higher in most cases beyond the quick 100-line regular expression script.
In which case, a well-design prototype in a high level language is just part of the process. The alternative is premature optimization, and you know what they say about that.
> For more conspiracy fodder, are the Clintons really stupid enough to have a hand in this?
Frankly, Yes.
I don't know if that can be called stupid anymore. If there's been any lesson for American politicians these past few years, it's that they can get away with anything as long as there's an scary external scapegoat. Mostly, the dissenters just vent on their intarblogs.
Not to argue that TIOBE's statistics aren't suspect, but the number of available jobs banging on Perl isn't meaningful to me. I've already had too many jobs where the first order of business is someone pointing me at a directory and saying, "These are your predecessor's Perl scripts. Please figure this out and make things work."
The last time I had free rein in something like that, I did just that, and made a clean rewrite to make a few cleanly commented, consistent Python modules that did the work of all the previous scripts, sans bugs. Just the fact that assignment by reference is the default, that building data structures deeply requires no line noise, makes the program design easy to get right the first time. No "oops, need another dollar sign there". No "how do I refer to a value in a hash of lists of hashes again?" You just do it.
Maybe it's that my sense of programming comes from years of looking at some of the cleaner C and C++ out there, and reading Design Patterns, makes me prefer a language that encourages design and clean coding practices by default. I don't want to deal with one more script from someone who munged strings of data with regular expressions where they should have used data structures or objects. Those of you who are about to clean up piles of Perl code with Perl Medic in hand, I salute you. You're braver than I care to be anymore.
I've been riding these already. They use a system called "trains".
Insert protest against how irresponsible towards the environment and energy resources it is to have a whole combustion engine per commuter here.
I am a bit surprised that they didn't just rig some wipers up for the solar panels! They clearly overengineered the rovers for the initially expected mission duration - why didn't they add a small, simple way for themselves to dust themselves off and keep the power coming?
It's okay. It's absolutely fabulous having Spirit and Opportunity there, let alone still working at all.
I really don't see a need to expect OSX and Linux to kill each other off. I've been using Linux since the 0.9x kernels came with Slackware. The fact was that as much as any open source OS gained ground, you had the market open to whatever got the merit and mindshare for the job. This has happened to a great extent. OSX is seeing ports of games from EA using technology borrowed from WINE. At the same time, Apple has given things back that are benefiting open source OS's: WebKit (itself from KHTML), LLVM improvements, what have you. I am not 100% comfortable with how Apple behaves with the things it keeps closed, but in the meantime, I very happily use MacPorts and open source software whenever I can atop my MacBook Pro.
With Qt 4.x and KDE4 showing great promise for portability between Windows, Linux, and OSX, and not to mention the latent potential of GNUStep to make apps portable between OSX and other Unices, the opportunity for any platform is getting better. Unix and open source both offer Apple too much for it to ignore, and vice versa. If Apple wants to keep their slick Aqua interface closed, that's fine by me as long as I can migrate my data and key applications. And hey, there'll always be KDE4.
Windows is something I am now able to almost completely avoid.
That's why I didn't incorrectly specify "50 words for snow" or try to say the Hopi had no words for specific units of time like Whorf did. :)
There's a downside to a universal language when it pushes aside other languages, though. The cultural and intellectual diversity in language is a good thing; they ought to go on. Just as you don't want Lisp with its expressive macros or Perl with its regular expressions to just go away so everyone writes in C, you don't want a universal language to displace all others in the real world, nor do you want to halt evolution or innovation.
For example, written Korean beats any other language for writing distinct vowel sounds. This is because it was devised for the specific case of replacing borrowed Chinese characters that were awkward for Korean language with a cleanly organized system devised by royal scholars and actually put into wide use. For its purpose, you can't beat that. And yet, reading that link, you can see shortcomings that Korean has.
Similarly, if you want to talk about snow, you can't beat the Inuit language, and if you want to talk about time as relative rather than discrete units Hopi is a good choice, and if you want to talk about burning things, you can't beat Latin - damn those Roman pyromaniacs.
The universal language will surely happen to the degree that it is merited, but hopefully, no more.
Pypy is certainly interesting, but why would it move ahead of HLVM? Perhaps the language-specific needs make HLVM more difficult to realize in an efficient manner. Now, if we look at the .NET example, what's to be excited about? Me, I like the Command Language Runtime, but I'm not willing to drink Microsoft's kool-aid to get it.
LLVM is getting something about virtual machines right - the lighter and simpler, the better. Maybe HLVM can't do for Python what Pypy with LLVM can. If we can distill the really useful functionality into a simple solution the way LLVM is doing for its target, I think API exposure, threads, and semaphores are the basics that you want in common to make it come together. Let languages handle their memory management in specific ways. One size does not fit all; just make it work well together.
Just speculating based on other responses.
There are a number of forces conspiring to make something like LLVM happen. One is Apple with its need for a simple, portable OpenGL pipeline. In that regard, LLVM isn't an academic project, it's a shipped product.
Thanks for posting that. Small and simple virtual machines, I think, are the key to making the next generation of hardware really useful. The future is more and more multithreaded and parallel, no doubt of it, and a lightweight VM would go a long way towards making the next generation of hardware as useful as it should be.
I predict that LLVM and HLVM will gain steam. People are going to realize that this pair of abstractions is cleaner, leaner, and meaner than the current virtual machine + language + API way of doing things characterized by Java and .NET. The fact that a GPU can be used as a processor transparently where appropriate, just the way Apple already has with LLVM, is going to start the rethink that was cut short by Java and .NET's fiascoes of ownership or patents. They'll also start making development in compiled languages easier.
This will be the open source response to the blurring lines between CPU and GPU task-wise, as the vector computing tasks could be done much quicker on the GPU based on the advances of LLVM, and applications will benefit transparently. It will be very cool.
My subjective experience of Apple Stores and Fry's is completely different. I find Fry's a depressing, grueling place. You either come knowing exactly what you want, and are paying for the convenience, or you get swamped. Apple stores have a bright, fresh feeling. I haven't had a perfect experience there, but more often than not, the people are especially helpful. My MacBook Pro's power adapter cord, for example, began to fray recently near the Magsafe connector. I took it in, preparing to wave my warranty paperwork about for a while - they took one look at it and just gave me a new one. No fuss, no muss.
Apple's stroke of genius is that they convey, with a sense of minimalism and good energy, that the rest of your life matters, and that the computer is there to add to it rather than disrupt it. Fry's gives you a feeling that it's just taking over, swamping you with too many choices between too many gadgets with way too many buttons and lights leering back at you. It is for people who serve machines, almost like the usual sad lot of employees who never seem happy or helpful. They seem like modern plantation workers. Fry's makes you feel subservient to the merchandise.
At home, I run a Mac, a Windows PC, and a Linux server. I am not a devotee to Apple; I just rarely find that technology companies so consistently suit people like me who want to have a computer and then get along with their lives. I wish more technology carried that philosophy in its design.
I'm surprised that Slashdot doesn't discuss microgrids more often. Small energy sources near the consumer means that electricity is delivered more efficiently, rather than losing it a long distance of wires through resistance. I'd love to see neighborhoods with solar panels and windmills up, not to mention solar chimneys. But to guarantee a baseline of available power, this is the way.
One thing for sure, though, we simply have to trim our energy usage. I have had an interesting time putting effort into this: all my bulbs are CFL's or LED's. Everything that can possibly be guzzling electricity on "standby" is on a power strip which gets turned off. I have a desktop, but I use my laptop mostly. My extra drive space is coming from a KuroBox acting as a cheap NAS, which consumes only 17W when in use. During the summer, I only hit my air conditioning a few days when it was particularly hot or I had guests. Winter has proven a bit more trying as I am in an apartment which has poor insulation, as it turns out. Yet, my summer and fall electric bills from PG&E averaged about $15 a month, and in wintertime with me heating one or two rooms, I'm doing about $35.
Those are just examples. The means to have cleaner and more efficient power for our lifestyles is here. We could be making so much positive change if some greedy bastards would just get out of the way.
I thought The Children of Húrin was a very interesting read. I hope that's the "sequel" they're thinking of.
Similar account, other interesting tidbits here