25/5 or even 10/2 is good enough for most people - but right now, at least near me, it's $55 per month - so you're getting 1-3% of the Google Fiber bandwidth for 80% of the cost. I'd be totally satisfied if I could get 1-3% of the Google Fiber bandwidth for even 10-15% of the cost, but Comcast, Verizon, and Time Warner haven't moved substantially on cable internet pricing in ten years and clearly have no interest in moving much on it until competition appears.
For that reason alone, this is cause to celebrate - you can guarantee that every additional major city that gets Google Fiber will have a real price war on high speed internet access. Kansas City has no such price war, at least so far, because Time Warner has been caught with their pants down. But they won't fold without a fight - maybe the next city to be offered Google Fiber will have Time Warner offers of 10 down/1 up for $20 per month, or $15. That's something to celebrate. And of course many of these providers have monthly transfer caps, and Google Fiber does not.
But separately, the DVR service for Google Fiber television service ($120 per month instead of $70, but no $300 setup fee) carries a DVR that records 500 hours of HD video and can record 8 shows at once, and your television remove for it is a Google 7 inch tablet. I don't know of any other service that gives you both that much storage and also 8 show simultaneous recording and lets use use a tablet as your primary television remote. Here again, it's a shot across the bow aimed at the other television companies, showing consumers what we could be getting but are not because they other companies would rather have higher profits than focus on better features for their customers.
And maybe if you had 1Gbps home download and upload bandwidth, hosting your own website would be something 'normal' people do for fun. Few non-geeks do it today because of the cost and complexity. Free software for building your own website is getting better and easier to use every day, and if 1 Gbps upload speeds with zero bandwidth restrictions are part of your default home internet connection package, then the cost for hosting your own site drops dramatically.
I'm paying $140 per month for HD cable (no premium channels) and 25 down/4 up, a DVR that records 160GB of content and can only handle two shows at once, and a 300 GB usage cap with $10 per 50 GB over, so if my kids, my wife, and I want to use Netflix and Hulu Plus a lot, we have problems. If I use bittorrent - which I use for Linux distributions - I have to throttle the bandwidth heavily or the upload transfer prevents streaming video or anything else from working while I run bittorrent. (You can believe what you want, but I don't pirate anything.)
Now Google comes along with $120 for HD cable, 1Gbps down/1Gbps up, a DVR that records 2TB of content and 8 shows at once, with no usage caps. That's far more for less money, plus I can use bittorrent and streaming HD video in four rooms with no problems (we are a family of six), plus I could host my personal website right out of my house with no added cost except some dynamic DNS and no bandwidth throughput limits or total transfer caps.
In some cases logging is unnecessary or you have no useful place to put the log files, but in addition to comments and unit tests I have tons of log statements. e.g.:
log.debug("Entering function ___ which is supposed to sort the list of patients based on their most recent test results arrival.");
It won't show up in the log file when the code is run normally, but it's a form of comment all by itself, and it makes finding errors much easier - just turn your logging level up from warn to debug, and it will walk you through each step.
I think the reality is somewhere between your point and the writer's point. I think it's easy to convince Joe Sixpack that a decentralized social network is good:
1. No company can read or sell your personal information.
2. The government can't issue a subpoena to snoop your personal information. (They can issue a warrant to you, but you have some Fifth Amendment protections in the US and similar protections in some other countries, and you may be able to delete your data before they can get to it.)
3. They can't change the social network user interface or features without your consent.
4. No ads in the content.
5. You can share whatever you want, whether it's legal or not.
On the other hand, in order for it to get widespread non-geek adoption a distributed social network would need to be ridiculously easy to set up, run very well on low end hardware ( maybe even on tablets and smart phones ), and have some kind of distributed encrypted backup system similar to Wuala. The fact that Diaspora works at all is amazing, but this level of requirements takes things to a whole different level and I'll be pleasantly shocked if any free software community can make it work.
I am sure any stationary position gets bad after a time, so ideally we would have sort of routine position change during the day - stand for an hour, sit for ten minutes, stand for an hour, sit for ten minutes, etc... obviously that only works if you have an adjustable height desk or a tall chair. Some people also set up a treadmill at their workstation, although anecdotally moving much faster than 1.5 miles per hour makes it difficult to work at a normal pace with your keyboard and mouse.
Look at Wall Street. The people who fucked the economy are still employed. Some of them gave up a fourth yacht. Boo hoo.
I like the free market when it works. Toyota eating Ford's lunch ten years ago? Awesome. Google taking the lead in search? Awesome. iPhone destroying Blackberry and Palm? Awesome. But clearly that kind of free market competition has been prevented from working properly in the banking industry.
Fair enough. I know it's not a huge consolation to people disturbed by the idea of livestock, but I'm pretty sure McDonalds did pioneer relatively humane execution methods for cattle.
You are competent, willing to learn from your mistakes, and productive. That's all necessary for being a rock star developer, but it's not enough. I think when people use the phrase "rock star developer" they're specifically thinking of someone that's competent, willing to learn from their mistakes, and ridiculously productive.
I think Narcocide is correct, the article is a troll or at best misleading. If the person claiming to be a rock star developer can't code well, they are not one. If they don't use unit tests or write code that is hard to maintain, they are not one. If they charge off on needless tangents instead of tackling the task at hand, like the example in the article of writing a replacement for JSP, then they are not rock star developers. That said, JSP is horrendous and just about every other Java presentation layer system I have tried (like the ones in Tapestry, Wicket, GSP, Play Framework) is easier to read and write.
That's okay, the banking executives in the United States caused the biggest recession in 80 years without a single criminal prosecution or even getting fired. When the people on top of the economy get their house in order, I'll start listening to their advice for curbing the excess of the working class.
I probably overstated my case with respect to preservatives.
With respect to salt, I thought fast food restaurants use colossal amounts but now I'm not sure. A hamburger patty from a grocery store typically has less than 100 mg of salt, so when I read that a fast food burger usually has over 1000 mg of salt, I assumed they used tons of salt in the product. But I did some hunting around, and cheese can have 300 mg of salt per slice and hamburger buns can have 300 mg of salt. So maybe the fast food joints aren't that awful with salt either.
I may be a rarity in the modern age, but I won't lose sleep if my personal equivalent to a Facebook page is unavailable from time to time.
As it happens, I've had Comcast internet service for ten years without a single service interruption - but maybe I'm an exception to the norm for Comcast residential customers, a statistical sampling of one means very little.
I don't think anyone is defending the bun or the ketchup, which are loaded with sugar and lots of chemicals. The french fries have potatoes, which is good, and cooking oil and salt, which is not as good. The soda is awful. And as others mentioned, if the triple bacon burger is from most restaurants the cheese is probably more a product of a chemical factory than an animal and the meat is probably loaded with preservatives and salt.
But I'm not convinced the meat and cheese itself, especially if they're not from a fast food restaurant, are bad for you.
The SLA with Comcast, which is the only high speed internet provider I can get at my house other than satellite services, prevents me from running a commercial website with my residential connection. But it does not prevent me from hosting a non-commercial service. Since I don't have a fixed IP address, I would need to set up dynamic DNS for it to work properly.
My upload bandwidth is pretty consistently 3 Mbps - so if I wanted to share a video with friends, I would have to post it to Youtube or Vimeo and then share the link. But for anything else, a 3 Mbps uplink speed is adequate.
I knew that and I was not intentionally trying to mislead anyone. Sorry if I did.
But to be fair, from the same page the best desktop CPUs from AMD are on par with the first generation Core i5 and Core i7 chips, and that means it's still plenty for almost any conceivable consumer application. They lose to the current i3, but not the original i3. And again, value per dollar is impressive.
I think one of the many things that makes Jimmy appealing is that he clearly is grateful to his fans for the life they let him lead. The only thing I did not like is the lack of at least one request that nobody drive home drunk. I don't think he should be forced to do that, but I think it's a sensible thing to do. There were a lot of blitzed people at the concert.
I had to pay a babysitter to watch the kids for the 90 minutes it took to drive to the concert, the concert itself, and the 90 minutes to drive back. I don't live near a train station, so traveling that way was not an option. Total cost of the evening, tickets, drinks, parking, gas, and tolls was $450. I had a great time, but I don't think I'll ever do it again.
And yes, I think having a bank name associated with those prices was ludicrous. I was also miffed that they had dozens of staff members and lots of police directing traffic before the event, and almost none after. Clearly they were only trying to make life easier on the customers until they had our money - once they had our money, they had no interest in facilitating anything.
I hadn't realized the Mann center was so bad. Yikes.
There are a number of documented cases in the past few years when Intel paid major PC makers to only carry their own chips.
Regardless of the morality of that, the result was that it really hurt AMD sales, and in turn that prevented them from getting the investment capital they needed to keep improving their products.
Of course, the counter point is that AMD failed to make a compelling case to the major PC vendors that dropping AMD products was a serious mistake. That's competition at work. But I dislike the prospect of having only one major processor vendor in the market and I sincerely hope the world moves to ARM and other alternatives just so that there is more major players in the game.
Agreed. I think some of the things Intel (and AMD, and Qualcomm, and nVidia) put into their CPU instruction sets are 10% for real use and 90% so they can put an item on the bullet list for the marketing literature and get fanboys to buy something new when the thing they already had is just fine.
It was a great Buffett concert, wasn't it? But I'm getting too old for this, after two hours I couldn't hear much beyond the ringing in my ears. I still have a bit of it today. And also, I thought movie theaters with bars charged a lot for booze, but that was ridiculous.
That's why Tom's Hardware's latest "best gaming CPU for the money" article put the AMD FX-4170 at the top of the list on the AMD side - only four cores, but it runs at 4.2 GHz right out of the box. So in the rare event you're doing something massively parallel it will get creamed by one of the Bulldozer 6 or 8 core processors, but for games it's the best option AMD has. $120 at Newegg.
I'm building a new PC next year, if the Steamroller chips aren't really good both on performance and on price, I will probably just get the FX-4170.
Oh, I thought they were more or less equivalent but that was just a wild guess. I know well written Python and Ruby apps are blown away for performance by well written Java apps, which in turn is blown away by well written C++ (though on a tangent, a long running Java app will benefit from the internal optimizations that the Java Hotspot Virtual Machine does to enhance speed until it runs very nearly as quickly as C++... but the Java will still use a hell of a lot more memory in the process).
But I still think trying to build a pretty complex distributed web application in a year means that you have to target developer productivity above all else. Annoying slow but working Diaspora is better than vaporware.
a.) Running your own pod isn't too bad if you rent a cloud server - not dirt cheap, but for example a Rackspace.com cloud server starts at $17 per month. Then instead of having Facebook, or Google, or whoever access your personal data you only have to worry about your hosting provider caring enough about whatever it is that you do on your social network to trawl through your rented server instance and integrate the results with some other data set. That's a lot more work than having someone sitting at a superuser console at Facebook or Google getting complete access to your personal history from a few key strokes. And setting up your own server may not be too bad - you don't need a rack server and a T3, a dedicated small home server with a processor that uses a small amount of power (using an Intel Atom or some other low energy processor) might be less than $400. Or an old laptop would probably work too, and also draw relatively little power. Then you own the whole system front to back and the monthly cost is just electricity (since I presume you already have an internet connection).
b.) Even using someone else's pod isn't bad. I wouldn't put my credit cards into the account, but then I don't put my credit card information into Facebook or Google Plus either. You have to trust that the person hosting the pod has purer intentions and perhaps more importantly less to gain by raiding your personal information.
1. Language speed is not always the problem. Youtube's backend is written in Python, which is about as slow as Ruby, and it works fine. Most of Github is written in Ruby, and that works too.
2. The security problems were developer problems, not problems fundamental to Ruby. Early releases of Diaspora had SQL Injection vulnerabilities and Cross-Site-Scripting vulnerabilities, and a poor developer can create those in any language.
3. The reason they picked Ruby on Rails is that four kids were trying to create a distributed social network in less than a year. In order to have a prayer of pulling that off, you need a damn fast rate of development. If they had built the thing in Java using Spring and JSF, at this point they would be almost finished their "Hello World" implementation.
You were lucky to be born. You were lucky to be born not retarded, crippled, or blind, deaf, and dumb. You were lucky to survive to this point without dying of a freak accident, cancer, or some other illness. You almost certainly lucky enough to have at least one person in your life that taught you the value of hard work - maybe a parent, maybe an older sibling, maybe a teacher, maybe a coworker or manager. Now from that beginning you may have built your success through hard work and dedication, but you got nowhere without that lucky foundation.
But further, you travel on public roads. You conduct business using contracts enforced by public courts for both civil cases and criminal cases. You are protected from criminal attacks by a publicly funded police force. You are protected from fires and natural disasters by fire departments and in some cases the National Guard. Your entire country is protected by a publicly funded military. You do business with people educated in the public school, you were probably employed by people educated in public school, you might have employed other people who were educated in public school. You ship your products on a public infrastructure (for physical roads, trains, planes, etc..) or over the internet (created by publicly funded research).
Hard work and talent should always be rewarded. But don't pretend that every time society asks anyone to contribute time or money to society's continued existence that it's attack on the "winners and makers" by the "losers and takers". Society requires that kind of sacrifice from everyone to function. Not a total sacrifice, not a complete sacrifice, not "from each to his need from each according to his ability", but some percentage of everyone's wealth. Ayn Rand was an arrogant idiot, not a brilliant philosopher. When you show me the person who built an economic success without touching any aspect of publicly created, managed, and funded resources then I will admit that he or she can claim every cent of value he created - but no such person exists.
The attack on Lance Armstrong is just part of a larger problem - athletic competition in most sports at the top levels has a lot of money at stake, either directly from prizes or indirectly through product endorsements or consulting positions as trainers. It's likely that every winner in almost every major sport cheats some way or another.
I can't fault your math. But the bit about living with constant hunger? No thanks. I've tried it, and sooner or later I let my willpower lapse and ate poorly. 20 pounds into my last temporarily successful fat loss program, I was thinking about food more during the day as a 30 year old man than I had thought about sex during the day as a 17 year old boy.
I respect you for what you've accomplished, but frankly I am not willing to live like that again and even if I could live with it long enough to slim down I do not reasonably believe I could live that way, day in and day out, for the next forty years.
I drink one large iced coffee in the morning and then water for the rest of the day, I lift weights 2-3 days per week for half an hour, and I do a fifteen minute back and stomach exercise routine most mornings to stop some old back pains from returning. I just eat too much for the fat to come off.
Slashdot Mirror
25/5 or even 10/2 is good enough for most people - but right now, at least near me, it's $55 per month - so you're getting 1-3% of the Google Fiber bandwidth for 80% of the cost. I'd be totally satisfied if I could get 1-3% of the Google Fiber bandwidth for even 10-15% of the cost, but Comcast, Verizon, and Time Warner haven't moved substantially on cable internet pricing in ten years and clearly have no interest in moving much on it until competition appears.
For that reason alone, this is cause to celebrate - you can guarantee that every additional major city that gets Google Fiber will have a real price war on high speed internet access. Kansas City has no such price war, at least so far, because Time Warner has been caught with their pants down. But they won't fold without a fight - maybe the next city to be offered Google Fiber will have Time Warner offers of 10 down/1 up for $20 per month, or $15. That's something to celebrate. And of course many of these providers have monthly transfer caps, and Google Fiber does not.
But separately, the DVR service for Google Fiber television service ($120 per month instead of $70, but no $300 setup fee) carries a DVR that records 500 hours of HD video and can record 8 shows at once, and your television remove for it is a Google 7 inch tablet. I don't know of any other service that gives you both that much storage and also 8 show simultaneous recording and lets use use a tablet as your primary television remote. Here again, it's a shot across the bow aimed at the other television companies, showing consumers what we could be getting but are not because they other companies would rather have higher profits than focus on better features for their customers.
And maybe if you had 1Gbps home download and upload bandwidth, hosting your own website would be something 'normal' people do for fun. Few non-geeks do it today because of the cost and complexity. Free software for building your own website is getting better and easier to use every day, and if 1 Gbps upload speeds with zero bandwidth restrictions are part of your default home internet connection package, then the cost for hosting your own site drops dramatically.
I'm paying $140 per month for HD cable (no premium channels) and 25 down/4 up, a DVR that records 160GB of content and can only handle two shows at once, and a 300 GB usage cap with $10 per 50 GB over, so if my kids, my wife, and I want to use Netflix and Hulu Plus a lot, we have problems. If I use bittorrent - which I use for Linux distributions - I have to throttle the bandwidth heavily or the upload transfer prevents streaming video or anything else from working while I run bittorrent. (You can believe what you want, but I don't pirate anything.)
Now Google comes along with $120 for HD cable, 1Gbps down/1Gbps up, a DVR that records 2TB of content and 8 shows at once, with no usage caps. That's far more for less money, plus I can use bittorrent and streaming HD video in four rooms with no problems (we are a family of six), plus I could host my personal website right out of my house with no added cost except some dynamic DNS and no bandwidth throughput limits or total transfer caps.
In some cases logging is unnecessary or you have no useful place to put the log files, but in addition to comments and unit tests I have tons of log statements. e.g.:
log.debug("Entering function ___ which is supposed to sort the list of patients based on their most recent test results arrival.");
It won't show up in the log file when the code is run normally, but it's a form of comment all by itself, and it makes finding errors much easier - just turn your logging level up from warn to debug, and it will walk you through each step.
I think the reality is somewhere between your point and the writer's point. I think it's easy to convince Joe Sixpack that a decentralized social network is good:
1. No company can read or sell your personal information.
2. The government can't issue a subpoena to snoop your personal information. (They can issue a warrant to you, but you have some Fifth Amendment protections in the US and similar protections in some other countries, and you may be able to delete your data before they can get to it.)
3. They can't change the social network user interface or features without your consent.
4. No ads in the content.
5. You can share whatever you want, whether it's legal or not.
On the other hand, in order for it to get widespread non-geek adoption a distributed social network would need to be ridiculously easy to set up, run very well on low end hardware ( maybe even on tablets and smart phones ), and have some kind of distributed encrypted backup system similar to Wuala. The fact that Diaspora works at all is amazing, but this level of requirements takes things to a whole different level and I'll be pleasantly shocked if any free software community can make it work.
Hunt around the web, there are dozens of articles about research indicating that sitting for long periods increases your risk of death independent of other risk factors including age, body fat level, fitness, and diet. e.g. http://science.slashdot.org/story/10/01/20/011244/Sitting-Down-Too-Long-Is-Bad-Even-If-You-Exercise?from=rss
I am sure any stationary position gets bad after a time, so ideally we would have sort of routine position change during the day - stand for an hour, sit for ten minutes, stand for an hour, sit for ten minutes, etc... obviously that only works if you have an adjustable height desk or a tall chair. Some people also set up a treadmill at their workstation, although anecdotally moving much faster than 1.5 miles per hour makes it difficult to work at a normal pace with your keyboard and mouse.
Look at Wall Street. The people who fucked the economy are still employed. Some of them gave up a fourth yacht. Boo hoo.
I like the free market when it works. Toyota eating Ford's lunch ten years ago? Awesome. Google taking the lead in search? Awesome. iPhone destroying Blackberry and Palm? Awesome. But clearly that kind of free market competition has been prevented from working properly in the banking industry.
My second sentence was "That's all necessary for being a rock star developer, but it's not enough". Did you miss that sentence?
I agree that the term tends to denote someone who's more egomaniacal than focused on being polite and writing maintainable code.
Fair enough. I know it's not a huge consolation to people disturbed by the idea of livestock, but I'm pretty sure McDonalds did pioneer relatively humane execution methods for cattle.
You are competent, willing to learn from your mistakes, and productive. That's all necessary for being a rock star developer, but it's not enough. I think when people use the phrase "rock star developer" they're specifically thinking of someone that's competent, willing to learn from their mistakes, and ridiculously productive.
I think Narcocide is correct, the article is a troll or at best misleading. If the person claiming to be a rock star developer can't code well, they are not one. If they don't use unit tests or write code that is hard to maintain, they are not one. If they charge off on needless tangents instead of tackling the task at hand, like the example in the article of writing a replacement for JSP, then they are not rock star developers. That said, JSP is horrendous and just about every other Java presentation layer system I have tried (like the ones in Tapestry, Wicket, GSP, Play Framework) is easier to read and write.
That's okay, the banking executives in the United States caused the biggest recession in 80 years without a single criminal prosecution or even getting fired. When the people on top of the economy get their house in order, I'll start listening to their advice for curbing the excess of the working class.
I probably overstated my case with respect to preservatives.
With respect to salt, I thought fast food restaurants use colossal amounts but now I'm not sure. A hamburger patty from a grocery store typically has less than 100 mg of salt, so when I read that a fast food burger usually has over 1000 mg of salt, I assumed they used tons of salt in the product. But I did some hunting around, and cheese can have 300 mg of salt per slice and hamburger buns can have 300 mg of salt. So maybe the fast food joints aren't that awful with salt either.
I may be a rarity in the modern age, but I won't lose sleep if my personal equivalent to a Facebook page is unavailable from time to time.
As it happens, I've had Comcast internet service for ten years without a single service interruption - but maybe I'm an exception to the norm for Comcast residential customers, a statistical sampling of one means very little.
I don't think anyone is defending the bun or the ketchup, which are loaded with sugar and lots of chemicals. The french fries have potatoes, which is good, and cooking oil and salt, which is not as good. The soda is awful. And as others mentioned, if the triple bacon burger is from most restaurants the cheese is probably more a product of a chemical factory than an animal and the meat is probably loaded with preservatives and salt.
But I'm not convinced the meat and cheese itself, especially if they're not from a fast food restaurant, are bad for you.
The SLA with Comcast, which is the only high speed internet provider I can get at my house other than satellite services, prevents me from running a commercial website with my residential connection. But it does not prevent me from hosting a non-commercial service. Since I don't have a fixed IP address, I would need to set up dynamic DNS for it to work properly.
My upload bandwidth is pretty consistently 3 Mbps - so if I wanted to share a video with friends, I would have to post it to Youtube or Vimeo and then share the link. But for anything else, a 3 Mbps uplink speed is adequate.
I knew that and I was not intentionally trying to mislead anyone. Sorry if I did.
But to be fair, from the same page the best desktop CPUs from AMD are on par with the first generation Core i5 and Core i7 chips, and that means it's still plenty for almost any conceivable consumer application. They lose to the current i3, but not the original i3. And again, value per dollar is impressive.
I think one of the many things that makes Jimmy appealing is that he clearly is grateful to his fans for the life they let him lead. The only thing I did not like is the lack of at least one request that nobody drive home drunk. I don't think he should be forced to do that, but I think it's a sensible thing to do. There were a lot of blitzed people at the concert.
I had to pay a babysitter to watch the kids for the 90 minutes it took to drive to the concert, the concert itself, and the 90 minutes to drive back. I don't live near a train station, so traveling that way was not an option. Total cost of the evening, tickets, drinks, parking, gas, and tolls was $450. I had a great time, but I don't think I'll ever do it again.
And yes, I think having a bank name associated with those prices was ludicrous. I was also miffed that they had dozens of staff members and lots of police directing traffic before the event, and almost none after. Clearly they were only trying to make life easier on the customers until they had our money - once they had our money, they had no interest in facilitating anything.
I hadn't realized the Mann center was so bad. Yikes.
There are a number of documented cases in the past few years when Intel paid major PC makers to only carry their own chips.
Regardless of the morality of that, the result was that it really hurt AMD sales, and in turn that prevented them from getting the investment capital they needed to keep improving their products.
Of course, the counter point is that AMD failed to make a compelling case to the major PC vendors that dropping AMD products was a serious mistake. That's competition at work. But I dislike the prospect of having only one major processor vendor in the market and I sincerely hope the world moves to ARM and other alternatives just so that there is more major players in the game.
Agreed. I think some of the things Intel (and AMD, and Qualcomm, and nVidia) put into their CPU instruction sets are 10% for real use and 90% so they can put an item on the bullet list for the marketing literature and get fanboys to buy something new when the thing they already had is just fine.
It was a great Buffett concert, wasn't it? But I'm getting too old for this, after two hours I couldn't hear much beyond the ringing in my ears. I still have a bit of it today. And also, I thought movie theaters with bars charged a lot for booze, but that was ridiculous.
That's why Tom's Hardware's latest "best gaming CPU for the money" article put the AMD FX-4170 at the top of the list on the AMD side - only four cores, but it runs at 4.2 GHz right out of the box. So in the rare event you're doing something massively parallel it will get creamed by one of the Bulldozer 6 or 8 core processors, but for games it's the best option AMD has. $120 at Newegg.
I'm building a new PC next year, if the Steamroller chips aren't really good both on performance and on price, I will probably just get the FX-4170.
Oh, I thought they were more or less equivalent but that was just a wild guess. I know well written Python and Ruby apps are blown away for performance by well written Java apps, which in turn is blown away by well written C++ (though on a tangent, a long running Java app will benefit from the internal optimizations that the Java Hotspot Virtual Machine does to enhance speed until it runs very nearly as quickly as C++ ... but the Java will still use a hell of a lot more memory in the process).
But I still think trying to build a pretty complex distributed web application in a year means that you have to target developer productivity above all else. Annoying slow but working Diaspora is better than vaporware.
a.) Running your own pod isn't too bad if you rent a cloud server - not dirt cheap, but for example a Rackspace.com cloud server starts at $17 per month. Then instead of having Facebook, or Google, or whoever access your personal data you only have to worry about your hosting provider caring enough about whatever it is that you do on your social network to trawl through your rented server instance and integrate the results with some other data set. That's a lot more work than having someone sitting at a superuser console at Facebook or Google getting complete access to your personal history from a few key strokes. And setting up your own server may not be too bad - you don't need a rack server and a T3, a dedicated small home server with a processor that uses a small amount of power (using an Intel Atom or some other low energy processor) might be less than $400. Or an old laptop would probably work too, and also draw relatively little power. Then you own the whole system front to back and the monthly cost is just electricity (since I presume you already have an internet connection).
b.) Even using someone else's pod isn't bad. I wouldn't put my credit cards into the account, but then I don't put my credit card information into Facebook or Google Plus either. You have to trust that the person hosting the pod has purer intentions and perhaps more importantly less to gain by raiding your personal information.
1. Language speed is not always the problem. Youtube's backend is written in Python, which is about as slow as Ruby, and it works fine. Most of Github is written in Ruby, and that works too.
2. The security problems were developer problems, not problems fundamental to Ruby. Early releases of Diaspora had SQL Injection vulnerabilities and Cross-Site-Scripting vulnerabilities, and a poor developer can create those in any language.
3. The reason they picked Ruby on Rails is that four kids were trying to create a distributed social network in less than a year. In order to have a prayer of pulling that off, you need a damn fast rate of development. If they had built the thing in Java using Spring and JSF, at this point they would be almost finished their "Hello World" implementation.
You were lucky to be born. You were lucky to be born not retarded, crippled, or blind, deaf, and dumb. You were lucky to survive to this point without dying of a freak accident, cancer, or some other illness. You almost certainly lucky enough to have at least one person in your life that taught you the value of hard work - maybe a parent, maybe an older sibling, maybe a teacher, maybe a coworker or manager. Now from that beginning you may have built your success through hard work and dedication, but you got nowhere without that lucky foundation.
But further, you travel on public roads. You conduct business using contracts enforced by public courts for both civil cases and criminal cases. You are protected from criminal attacks by a publicly funded police force. You are protected from fires and natural disasters by fire departments and in some cases the National Guard. Your entire country is protected by a publicly funded military. You do business with people educated in the public school, you were probably employed by people educated in public school, you might have employed other people who were educated in public school. You ship your products on a public infrastructure (for physical roads, trains, planes, etc..) or over the internet (created by publicly funded research).
Hard work and talent should always be rewarded. But don't pretend that every time society asks anyone to contribute time or money to society's continued existence that it's attack on the "winners and makers" by the "losers and takers". Society requires that kind of sacrifice from everyone to function. Not a total sacrifice, not a complete sacrifice, not "from each to his need from each according to his ability", but some percentage of everyone's wealth. Ayn Rand was an arrogant idiot, not a brilliant philosopher. When you show me the person who built an economic success without touching any aspect of publicly created, managed, and funded resources then I will admit that he or she can claim every cent of value he created - but no such person exists.
The attack on Lance Armstrong is just part of a larger problem - athletic competition in most sports at the top levels has a lot of money at stake, either directly from prizes or indirectly through product endorsements or consulting positions as trainers. It's likely that every winner in almost every major sport cheats some way or another.
Oh, and I have no idea if I had the sleep apnea first as a teenager and then got fat, or if I got fat as a teenager and then developed sleep apnea.
I can't fault your math. But the bit about living with constant hunger? No thanks. I've tried it, and sooner or later I let my willpower lapse and ate poorly. 20 pounds into my last temporarily successful fat loss program, I was thinking about food more during the day as a 30 year old man than I had thought about sex during the day as a 17 year old boy.
I respect you for what you've accomplished, but frankly I am not willing to live like that again and even if I could live with it long enough to slim down I do not reasonably believe I could live that way, day in and day out, for the next forty years.
I drink one large iced coffee in the morning and then water for the rest of the day, I lift weights 2-3 days per week for half an hour, and I do a fifteen minute back and stomach exercise routine most mornings to stop some old back pains from returning. I just eat too much for the fat to come off.