Eh, as a homebrewer, I can't say I agree. I will concede that, in high school, I started drinking beer to "get high". And the stuff I drank-- Bud, Coors, "the beast"-- well, that's all it's good for. I "officially" didn't like beer.
Then I went to Germany.
After a long bike ride with a friend, she convinced me to spend the rest of the afternoon at a biergarten. "At least you can enjoy the flowers!" she said. She ordered for me, and what she got me was a hefeweizen, with a slice of orange.
Wow! It was cool and refreshing, with a wheat-y, citrus-y, yeasty flavor. I tried some others. Some I didn't like, some I did.
When I came back to the U.S., I tried making some myself. I found it to be remarkably fun and easy to make your standard American IPA-- another refreshing, but floral and bitter beer. Others were more challenging. But universally, I like the taste. In my opinion, there's nothing better than a pizza and an IPA.
So, you can either continue to live in your little cave where the only opinion that matters is yours, or you can come visit the rest of us out here in the real world. It's fun, we're all friends, and I promise, the beer tastes good.
Hey, sometimes the "terrible things people have been whining about for the last 12-13 years" didn't happen because people whined about them. Let's take, oh, car safety. The whining about it and subsequent uproar is largely responsible for why we have safer cars now.
No one is saying that argibusiness will be in ruins. What they're saying is that, given tendency of corporations to act badly in the public interest, why should we take their word now? Who would it hurt to validate their claims?
If you're so concerned about the book link I sent being a page where you can buy the book, send me a mailing address and I'll buy a copy for you.
I'm not so sure that's true. Vaccines are subject to extensive scrutiny, because the risks of something going wrong are high. The CDC protocols ensure that there is a process to eliminate problems, and to identify them early if things start to go wrong. With vaccines, the benefit far outweighs the cost.
There is nothing of the kind in place for food, probably because historically, the public health problems resulting from new food production have been virtually nonexistent. You can hardly compare the two. But we don't really know what the problems will be for transgenic/nano foods. They're too new. It's a small consolation to someone who develops cancer years down the road to say "I guess we should stop making it now." To be honest, I don't know the right answer-- the kind of testing that new drugs get would be prohibitively expensive in the food industry. But it's disingenuous to say that the risk is modest. The risk is unknown.
The question of using new technology to develop food is hardly a political one. Sure, the discussion has become politicized, with all manner of uninformed people weighing in, but that doesn't mean the discussion is unimportant.
There have been problems with new foods, like transgenic crops. Trust Us, We're Experts details a case where potato crops utilizing a moth gene caused anaphylaxis (resulting in death) in a not-insignificant number of people who ate them. The scientist at Monsanto who was responsible for the problem attempted to raise awareness of the issue and had his career promptly squashed by his employer. Nanotech foods are similarly new.
That's not to say that new food technologies aren't important. They absolutely are. But the issue not as black-and-white as you make it out to be. Healthy skepticism is not the same thing as a knee-jerk backlash.
True. AFAICT the LaserJet 4M Plus is indestructible, as long as you can suppress the urge to hit it with a baseball bat when it says "PC LOAD LETTER". Oh, and it's slow, but when you're printing at home, big deal.
If you want to encrypt data in your own database, I'm pretty sure you don't need the NASA gear.
I don't buy the ITAR argument, either. Any competent programmer would make the encryption routines modular. It's not hard to swap something good out for something bad for export purposes. I think Microsoft just "forgot". Too many people, and too much undocumented code.
Aside from fixing broken government practices when they're discovered, what else could a president do? Despite the fact that I was very much a critic of the Bush administration, I don't see what the difference would have been had this happened to them instead. The U.S. is a big country, with lots of people doing risky things in it all the time. It's not like the President can use his laser eyes to cauterize the well.
What this spill does do is lend a lot of legitimacy to telling the "Drill, Baby, Drill" douchebags to STFU already. If Obama fails to do that, then I will loudly criticize him.
Sadly, spilled oil is such a hazard that burning it has been standard practice for awhile. There was a fuel-oil spill on a highway in southern Massachusetts a couple years ago where they employed this technique-- it was the first I had heard of it. Will post link if I find it...
But I agree with you. Horrible waste. Oil spills are disasters from many perspectives. Hopefully, this will give even critics some pause to think about energy alternatives.
And, interestingly enough, the idea of separate Church and State long predates the Founders. The Founder of Rhode Island, Roger Williams, was banished from Massachusetts by the then-Governor, John Winthrop, who, strangely enough, was secretly also helping Williams to establish Rhode Island. It's quite an interesting story, and it predates the Founders by more than a century. I think a lot of people forget that the Founders were taking ideas that had evolved over a not-insignificant amount of time in the new colony. In many cases, these ideas were already well-established here.
Difficulty does not mean that there is a problem, but it does indicate that there is one. What does indicate a problem is when doing event-driven GUI programming (you know, the style of programming that was invented, oh, 30 years ago) requires hacks (i.e., AJAX) to function. Did I mention that web programming is singly-threaded? Ah, I forgot, if cooperative multitasking was good enough for Windows 95 and System 7, it sure is good enough for the web! No worries, though, we'll have awesome 1980's features like generics in Javascript Real Soon Now.
The web as a platform sucks. I've done web programming for more than a decade. Our current mess is a perfect example of design-by-committee. Most Internet technologies succeed because the barriers to using them are low, NOT because they are technically superior.
I'm not saying that it's impossible. It's just really hard. Google has the money and people to make that stuff happen. You can use Google's toolkits, and that makes development easier in some places, but it still does not address the fact that things are done wrongly in the first place.
I grew up in Massachusetts, and I've lived in Boston for the latter half of my life, so I've grown accustomed to our bizarre system of roads. I always thought that they had a certain charming quaintness to them. But then I travelled to new cities, like Miami, where they've had the opportunity to actually plan a city, or Manhattan, where they have enough money to level things and start over again. The difference is night and day. Modern cities have this property where you can go where you need to without needing to plan a route. Just go. Everything's on a coordinate system. In Boston, you are forced to ask some irritable local, who barely knows anything outside his neighborhood anyway. That's the difference that proper architecture makes. The web platform is like Boston, which makes sense given that the W3C is headquartered here.
The real problem is that HTML is not a platform; it's a document format. Javascript is essentially a macro language, but it's been asked to do a heck of a lot more. As a result, W3C bent over backward to make the DOM (ok, so we have structure now, good), but the DOM is not a platform either. Really, you need an architecture that supports the kind of semantics that we want from the start. [server-side-language-of-the-moment]+HTML+Javascript does not a good platform make.
The things you mention aren't so much hacks (HTTP and MySQL are hadly hacks... PHP, well OK) as technologies that aren't a part of a coherent design philosophy. Web development barely has a design philosophy (REST is an interesting idea, but it's hardly an architecture). Compare this with other complex software ecosystems, UNIX in particular, and you can see that it's the philosophy that makes many of the warts go away. In UNIX, your whole toolchain just hangs together naturally, and using it is a pleasure.
It's absurd that to write a web application, you need to minimally know some kind of database query language, many forms of markup, at least one server-side language, and Javascript (the most horrid language of all time). And due to Javascript's horribleness and lack of platform-consistency, people use Javascript frameworks, which, surprise surprise, themselves have issues which must be tracked. Kinda makes you wish you just had a C compiler again.
We're at the point now where cross-platform rapid application development for Desktops (e.g., GTK#) is vastly easier than writing the equivalent web app. I love the idea of universal access, but trying to use Javascript to cram data through HTTP just ain't cutting it. I've come to the conclusion that if you want a 'rich' application, don't target the web as your platform.
I know you're being funny, but actually, that's true. A Turing machine with a tape alphabet consisting of two symbols is equivalent to a Turing machine that has four. As OP noted, the only thing you're getting is higher density, not more computational power. The beauty of binary computer is that they can do a lot with very little: two states. This makes building them MUCH easier.
Why is Apple's inability to get their shit in order our problem? If I make an honest effort to return someone's property, and that honest effort results in me being raided by the police, I am minimally owed an apology.
I've been a ThinkPad user for over 10 years (I tried a Sony and a Panasonic-- both were lousy machines), and the best feature in my mind is the pointing stick. Touchpads give me terrible wrist/forearm pain, especially when I'm on an airplane or train, because the seating tends to force me into an uncomfortable position. But in these spaces, I can use the pointing stick without a problem.
Sadly, over time, my pointers start to drift to one side. At first, if I take my finger off of it, it will recenter itself. Over time, though, it eventually loses this ability. Is there some kind of calibration tool I need to run, or is this usual wear and tear? It's happened on every ThinkPad I've ever owned, including my first 365CD and my current X61.
The physicist would respond, however, "Necks are not my field." A chiropractor, however, claims be able to cure any ailment using spinal adjustments, which is patently absurd.
Kind of a lame argument. You don't have to be Google to require scalability. All you need is a workload that may grow or diminish faster than you can throw a fast computer at it. Don't know if you've ever heard of a website... turns out these things often run on load-balanced clusters nowadays...
The point is not how many (and the answer to your question is actually "thousands"), but that there is a legitimate need for scalable computer architectures. Scientists need them, design firms need them, video production houses need them, high-density data centers need them, web hosts need them, and so on. Low-cost, commodity hardware makes sense in a lot of places, but when performance and high availability are really important, you need architectures to support it. There is indeed a point at which the benefits of unusual configurations outweigh the cost.
Slashdot Mirror
Eh, as a homebrewer, I can't say I agree. I will concede that, in high school, I started drinking beer to "get high". And the stuff I drank-- Bud, Coors, "the beast"-- well, that's all it's good for. I "officially" didn't like beer.
Then I went to Germany.
After a long bike ride with a friend, she convinced me to spend the rest of the afternoon at a biergarten. "At least you can enjoy the flowers!" she said. She ordered for me, and what she got me was a hefeweizen, with a slice of orange.
Wow! It was cool and refreshing, with a wheat-y, citrus-y, yeasty flavor. I tried some others. Some I didn't like, some I did.
When I came back to the U.S., I tried making some myself. I found it to be remarkably fun and easy to make your standard American IPA-- another refreshing, but floral and bitter beer. Others were more challenging. But universally, I like the taste. In my opinion, there's nothing better than a pizza and an IPA.
So, you can either continue to live in your little cave where the only opinion that matters is yours, or you can come visit the rest of us out here in the real world. It's fun, we're all friends, and I promise, the beer tastes good.
Hey, sometimes the "terrible things people have been whining about for the last 12-13 years" didn't happen because people whined about them. Let's take, oh, car safety. The whining about it and subsequent uproar is largely responsible for why we have safer cars now.
No one is saying that argibusiness will be in ruins. What they're saying is that, given tendency of corporations to act badly in the public interest, why should we take their word now? Who would it hurt to validate their claims?
If you're so concerned about the book link I sent being a page where you can buy the book, send me a mailing address and I'll buy a copy for you.
I'm not so sure that's true. Vaccines are subject to extensive scrutiny, because the risks of something going wrong are high. The CDC protocols ensure that there is a process to eliminate problems, and to identify them early if things start to go wrong. With vaccines, the benefit far outweighs the cost.
There is nothing of the kind in place for food, probably because historically, the public health problems resulting from new food production have been virtually nonexistent. You can hardly compare the two. But we don't really know what the problems will be for transgenic/nano foods. They're too new. It's a small consolation to someone who develops cancer years down the road to say "I guess we should stop making it now." To be honest, I don't know the right answer-- the kind of testing that new drugs get would be prohibitively expensive in the food industry. But it's disingenuous to say that the risk is modest. The risk is unknown.
The question of using new technology to develop food is hardly a political one. Sure, the discussion has become politicized, with all manner of uninformed people weighing in, but that doesn't mean the discussion is unimportant.
There have been problems with new foods, like transgenic crops. Trust Us, We're Experts details a case where potato crops utilizing a moth gene caused anaphylaxis (resulting in death) in a not-insignificant number of people who ate them. The scientist at Monsanto who was responsible for the problem attempted to raise awareness of the issue and had his career promptly squashed by his employer. Nanotech foods are similarly new.
That's not to say that new food technologies aren't important. They absolutely are. But the issue not as black-and-white as you make it out to be. Healthy skepticism is not the same thing as a knee-jerk backlash.
Which is ironic given that something like 30% of all sugar consumed globally is from beets. Doesn't taste like poo.
True. AFAICT the LaserJet 4M Plus is indestructible, as long as you can suppress the urge to hit it with a baseball bat when it says "PC LOAD LETTER". Oh, and it's slow, but when you're printing at home, big deal.
If you want to encrypt data in your own database, I'm pretty sure you don't need the NASA gear.
I don't buy the ITAR argument, either. Any competent programmer would make the encryption routines modular. It's not hard to swap something good out for something bad for export purposes. I think Microsoft just "forgot". Too many people, and too much undocumented code.
Aside from fixing broken government practices when they're discovered, what else could a president do? Despite the fact that I was very much a critic of the Bush administration, I don't see what the difference would have been had this happened to them instead. The U.S. is a big country, with lots of people doing risky things in it all the time. It's not like the President can use his laser eyes to cauterize the well.
What this spill does do is lend a lot of legitimacy to telling the "Drill, Baby, Drill" douchebags to STFU already. If Obama fails to do that, then I will loudly criticize him.
Sadly, spilled oil is such a hazard that burning it has been standard practice for awhile. There was a fuel-oil spill on a highway in southern Massachusetts a couple years ago where they employed this technique-- it was the first I had heard of it. Will post link if I find it...
But I agree with you. Horrible waste. Oil spills are disasters from many perspectives. Hopefully, this will give even critics some pause to think about energy alternatives.
Beowulf is not going to help here. Beowulf is for clustering computational resources. You want to cluster storage resources, something like RAID-Z.
You can have nigh-unbreakable ciphers that are just as fast as ROT13. XOR is a single operation on most processors.
The slowness comes in when you want features like asymmetric cryptography. Features that are not required here.
Good point. Maybe theodp would be satisfied if we reduced Google's new API to a series of yes/no questions. I assure you that it can be done.
I'll betcha most Slashdotters would be into anything female. Maybe /. should pick up where where Google left off. Guaranteed revenue stream.
And, interestingly enough, the idea of separate Church and State long predates the Founders. The Founder of Rhode Island, Roger Williams, was banished from Massachusetts by the then-Governor, John Winthrop, who, strangely enough, was secretly also helping Williams to establish Rhode Island. It's quite an interesting story, and it predates the Founders by more than a century. I think a lot of people forget that the Founders were taking ideas that had evolved over a not-insignificant amount of time in the new colony. In many cases, these ideas were already well-established here.
Difficulty does not mean that there is a problem, but it does indicate that there is one. What does indicate a problem is when doing event-driven GUI programming (you know, the style of programming that was invented, oh, 30 years ago) requires hacks (i.e., AJAX) to function. Did I mention that web programming is singly-threaded? Ah, I forgot, if cooperative multitasking was good enough for Windows 95 and System 7, it sure is good enough for the web! No worries, though, we'll have awesome 1980's features like generics in Javascript Real Soon Now.
The web as a platform sucks. I've done web programming for more than a decade. Our current mess is a perfect example of design-by-committee. Most Internet technologies succeed because the barriers to using them are low, NOT because they are technically superior.
I'm not saying that it's impossible. It's just really hard. Google has the money and people to make that stuff happen. You can use Google's toolkits, and that makes development easier in some places, but it still does not address the fact that things are done wrongly in the first place.
I grew up in Massachusetts, and I've lived in Boston for the latter half of my life, so I've grown accustomed to our bizarre system of roads. I always thought that they had a certain charming quaintness to them. But then I travelled to new cities, like Miami, where they've had the opportunity to actually plan a city, or Manhattan, where they have enough money to level things and start over again. The difference is night and day. Modern cities have this property where you can go where you need to without needing to plan a route. Just go. Everything's on a coordinate system. In Boston, you are forced to ask some irritable local, who barely knows anything outside his neighborhood anyway. That's the difference that proper architecture makes. The web platform is like Boston, which makes sense given that the W3C is headquartered here.
The real problem is that HTML is not a platform; it's a document format. Javascript is essentially a macro language, but it's been asked to do a heck of a lot more. As a result, W3C bent over backward to make the DOM (ok, so we have structure now, good), but the DOM is not a platform either. Really, you need an architecture that supports the kind of semantics that we want from the start. [server-side-language-of-the-moment]+HTML+Javascript does not a good platform make.
The things you mention aren't so much hacks (HTTP and MySQL are hadly hacks... PHP, well OK) as technologies that aren't a part of a coherent design philosophy. Web development barely has a design philosophy (REST is an interesting idea, but it's hardly an architecture). Compare this with other complex software ecosystems, UNIX in particular, and you can see that it's the philosophy that makes many of the warts go away. In UNIX, your whole toolchain just hangs together naturally, and using it is a pleasure.
It's absurd that to write a web application, you need to minimally know some kind of database query language, many forms of markup, at least one server-side language, and Javascript (the most horrid language of all time). And due to Javascript's horribleness and lack of platform-consistency, people use Javascript frameworks, which, surprise surprise, themselves have issues which must be tracked. Kinda makes you wish you just had a C compiler again.
We're at the point now where cross-platform rapid application development for Desktops (e.g., GTK#) is vastly easier than writing the equivalent web app. I love the idea of universal access, but trying to use Javascript to cram data through HTTP just ain't cutting it. I've come to the conclusion that if you want a 'rich' application, don't target the web as your platform.
Strangely, people like to see results during their lifetimes. The nerve.
I know you're being funny, but actually, that's true. A Turing machine with a tape alphabet consisting of two symbols is equivalent to a Turing machine that has four. As OP noted, the only thing you're getting is higher density, not more computational power. The beauty of binary computer is that they can do a lot with very little: two states. This makes building them MUCH easier.
Why is Apple's inability to get their shit in order our problem? If I make an honest effort to return someone's property, and that honest effort results in me being raided by the police, I am minimally owed an apology.
I've been a ThinkPad user for over 10 years (I tried a Sony and a Panasonic-- both were lousy machines), and the best feature in my mind is the pointing stick. Touchpads give me terrible wrist/forearm pain, especially when I'm on an airplane or train, because the seating tends to force me into an uncomfortable position. But in these spaces, I can use the pointing stick without a problem.
Sadly, over time, my pointers start to drift to one side. At first, if I take my finger off of it, it will recenter itself. Over time, though, it eventually loses this ability. Is there some kind of calibration tool I need to run, or is this usual wear and tear? It's happened on every ThinkPad I've ever owned, including my first 365CD and my current X61.
The physicist would respond, however, "Necks are not my field." A chiropractor, however, claims be able to cure any ailment using spinal adjustments, which is patently absurd.
it's
if(you're like me && you love it) {
blah
}
not
if(you're like me) {
you love it
}
Parent is insightful, people? Come on.
Kind of a lame argument. You don't have to be Google to require scalability. All you need is a workload that may grow or diminish faster than you can throw a fast computer at it. Don't know if you've ever heard of a website... turns out these things often run on load-balanced clusters nowadays...
The point is not how many (and the answer to your question is actually "thousands"), but that there is a legitimate need for scalable computer architectures. Scientists need them, design firms need them, video production houses need them, high-density data centers need them, web hosts need them, and so on. Low-cost, commodity hardware makes sense in a lot of places, but when performance and high availability are really important, you need architectures to support it. There is indeed a point at which the benefits of unusual configurations outweigh the cost.