I more suspect the article might be a troll by someone who just wanted to create fireworks in the comments. But taken at face value, if my employer starts making a series of technical decisions I disagree with I would certainly start looking for new work. I would not quit my current job if I could not find a replacement, but I would start looking. Staying at an unpleasant work environment is a poor option and this guy has ever right to complain. Your statement is equivalent to, "There are other people starving, so stop complaining about your diet of rice!"
And there are plenty of valid reasons to want to avoid Microsoft products, especially in small companies. A Fortune 500 firm isn't going to blink at the costs in terms of license costs and also of employee time managing their licensing infrastructure. But for a small firm, moving to Windows Server from Debian, moving to SQL Server from (for example) PostgreSQL, moving to Visual Studio and C# from (for example) Java or Python or C++, moving to Microsoft Office instead of Open Office, moving to Exchange from Postfix, and hiring someone to manage all the licenses, and time lost by the transition period, you're looking at tens of thousands of dollars in additional expenses that could instead have been put into additional hardware, or education courses, or training seminars, etc...
Not to mention that rewriting a flagship application from scratch in a new language is never a sure thing, and a lot of clean rewrites never become production ready. Ugly codebases are often not like dilapidated houses, where past a certain point it makes sense to tear it down and start over. Instead with the codebase you add unit tests and formal testing to make sure your changes don't break things in unexpected ways, and then start incrementally rewriting aspects of the application.
I prefer Perl to Python, but I would not group Python with Visual Basic or Java.
I think the main reason Perl has a bad reputation has nothing to do with the language syntax and everything to do with the dot com boom. All these companies were hiring people who knew nothing about web computing and who made things up as they went along. Perl was a hot language at the time, so the hordes of newbies ran with it. The end result is hundreds of millions of klugey, poorly organized, poorly documented, poorly written code that would have had all the same problems no matter what language was used. Then as the newbies became more experienced, new developers entered the field, and other veteran developers switched to Perl from other languages, their first encounter with Perl is a nightmare app they have to maintain. That's a condemnation of bad coding practice and assuming you can hire anybody with the slightest interest in software development to build your hot new web company. It's not a condemnation of Perl.
For a new project these days, in many fields Perl is as good a choice as anything. CPAN, the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network, has tons of junk but for almost any conceivable project there's a good chance that out of the one or two dozen CPAN modules written to handle it, at least a few are rock solid and get you more than 80% of the way towards your goal.
If you're a happy Python programmer there really isn't a strong case for you to switch to Perl. But if you're neither a Perl or Python programmer and looking to learn one or the other, don't let the flame wars over Perl syntax and Python whitespace distract you. Perl is an awesome choice.
There was a recent Slashdot article about Firefox memory leaks: http://developers.slashdot.org/story/12/01/17/1338225/notes-on-reducing-firefoxs-memory-consumption in more recent versions of Firefox, the leaks are all or almost all related to add-ons. Add-ons are a big reason to use Firefox, so it's still a problem, but it's not as bad as it was. And they're working on ways to help developers who create add-ons prevent memory leaks too.
Hear hear. If you don't like Rust, don't use it. The free software developers who don't feel like learning Rust don't have to contribute to Firefox. Big deal - it looks like it's close enough to C++ that the learning curve will be a matter of days for any good C++ developer. Someone unwilling to do that isn't worth having on your team anyway.
We can beat this to death. There are arguments on both sides. I get paid to use Java (yuck) and frankly the compiler does catch a whole class of potential problems before I have to worry about catching them with unit testing or QA testing. But just as often our problem comes from mis-configuring our data layer, or a typo in a configuration file, or forgetting to put an HTML form variable that's required into a page, or missing some required information in the database. All of that blows up in your face at run time, and the compiler can't help at all. You have to catch that with unit tests and QA testing, and that would be true no matter how type-safe your programming language is.
But there is value in reducing the possible universe of run time errors by having the compiler check your code for correctness before it gets run. Even if it does not protect you from all possible errors or even most possible errors, it protects from some and that's nice. You just have to weigh the added work of static typing versus the added work of unit testing to cover dynamic typing. My personal opinion is that some languages - including Java - have an overly verbose and complex type system that makes the static typing generally not worth the effort. But I've tinkered with, for example, Scala and D and their type systems are much more flexible and less verbose. There are also languages like Perl6 (if any of the implementations ever hit 1.0) which has default dynamic typing but optional static typing, for a best-of-both worlds.
I know that's the most common objection to 4th edition, but World of Warcraft (wow) is absurdly popular for a reason. There are exceptions, but older versions of Dungeons and Dragons generally had combat like this: Figher - "I rule!" Thief - "If I'm able to sneak around I rule harder. If not I suck." Cleric - "I'm bored to tears playing a healbot, which is what the other players want. I have fun playing a combatant, which the other players hate." Mage - "I am god until I run out of spells. Then I suck really bad."
The massive multiplayer online roleplaying game standard conventions keep combat in Dungeons and Dragons 4 interesting for everyone. The Fighter types are as much fun as they ever were. The Thief types are more fun, because even when sneaking fails they have more options for hamstringing enemies. The Cleric has an array of abilities that make him both a combatant and a healbot with the same move, keeping everyone happy. And the Mage no longer dominates combat at the beginning but neither does he run out of spells and become totally useless after the first few rounds.
If you don't like the change, that's fine. You have a huge number of other previous editions to use, including the Dungeons and Dragons offshoots Pathfinder, Tunnels and Trolls, and my personal favorites FantasyCraft and Hackmaster (Hackmaster 4, which is actually the first edition as some kind of odd joke, is decent. Hackmaster Basic, the first book in the Hackmaster 5 series, is awesome). But the changes in Dungeons and Dragons 4 to borrow elements from other games is not automatically bad.
I consider ripping fair use for DVDs I've purchased (and these days if you're not desperate to buy a movie the first two years after it came out, you can probably find the DVD for $5 or less). It may not stand up in court, but I figure it has a better chance than torrenting. It's also harder for the MPAA to track.
I know logistics is hard, and it's not something any idiot or even some damn good businessmen and strategists could get right. But Haliburton is not the only military logistics company in the world or the United States with a good record. It is, however, the only military logistics company that had been run by the Vice President when the US government needed logistics support in Iraq. And there was plenty of corruption and screwups by Haliburton - fewer people would complain if their handling of Iraq had been squeaky clean.
Republicans aren't trying to erect a national church, but they are trying to post the Ten Commandments in courthouses, keep "Under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance and on currency (when it wasn't there for the first 150 years our country existed), block gay marriage and abortion rights because some Christians dislike them, and teach Christian abstinence-based sex education to teens when study after study demonstrates that it doesn't work. That's degrading the separation between Church and State. And of course Republicans all over are trying to get Intelligent Design taught in science class, when it's not a scientific theory at all. (How do you conduct an experiment to prove or disprove Intelligent Design? )
You are correct that many or maybe most Democrats are idiots with respect to Nuclear Power. The objection to genetically modified food is often not that it's modified per se, but the fact that it's not reproductive. If you grow natural corn, or beans, you just need to save some seeds from each crop to plant the next one. With GMO corn and beans, you grow tons of great food but none of the seeds will germinate - you have to buy GMO seeds from the vendor again every season. That's a big objection to genetically modified foods, and it's legitimate.
Our public schools are awful because funding is uneven. A nice suburban school district have highly educated children and pay each teacher $60,000 or more, with $11,000 in annual funding per student. An urban school district might receive less than half as much funding and a big piece of the funding they do receive needs to be diverted to security concerns. A rural school district might receive even less money and struggle to find good teachers because pay is too low. The real solution is to fix the funding allocations - but to oversimplify the problems, I would rather take the Democrat solution (through more money at the problem) than the Republican one (it's broke, so instead of trying to fix it just dismantle it and become a nation of morons).
Air and water are not the cleanest they've been since the dawn of civilization. They're cleaner in the US than they were part way through the industrial age precisely because of the environmental regulations the Republicans love to hate. If you want to see a country without hindrances like the EPA, go to China - where the air in most areas is two steps removed from mustard gas. And fracking definitely has been criticized and there is evidence it causes problems, no matter what the natural gas industry wants you to think.
As the grandparent post indicated, the Obama Administration is guilty of the same cronyism that the Bush Administration did. So they don't hold the high moral ground there. As you said, they've been every bit as bad as the Bush Administration on civil liberties. I am upset by that, and so are plenty of other Democrats, independents, and of course Republicans. They don't hold the moral high ground there either. High CAFE standards are an inherently flawed method for encouraging reduced fossil use, and the Democrats have run with it. Democrats are also every bit in the pockets of the RIAA and MPAA and their attempted violations of civil liberties. (I don't believe in software or music piracy... but neither to I support an erosion of my rights just so that corporations can prevent them. That's as absurd as outlawing individual ownership of screwdrivers and crowbars because they can be used to steal cars.) There is plenty to criticize.
But the Republicans are still fundamentally opposed to anything moving us closer to universal health care. They are still attempting to dismantle public education, dismantle separation of Church and State, dismantle environmental protections to clean air and water (e.g. "damn the water quality, start fracking now!"), de-fund and dismantle social services programs, and push forward with Trickle Down Economics, which has been proven over and over to do nothing for the economy as a whole and everything to widen the gap between the haves and the have-nots. Fuck science, fuck the poor, fuck the sick, fuck the abused, and fuck air quality.
This isn't a pick between two different forms of rape and murder, this is a choice between a flawed and corrupt party which nevertheless has a lot of valuable goals and one that is bent on turning the country into a wealthy minority and a massive under-class of illiterate slaves. I realize that we would be better off if some third parties could break the deadlock on power that the Democrats and Republicans possess, but I would rather shoot for a weak goal we have a good chance of reaching than an awesome one that is effectively impossible.
You can't, of course. But what it he had lent out the $30,000 to someone for 25 years at a 5% interest rate? Then he gets back $175.38 per month for 25 years. After that time he gets no more money from the loan (but has at least $52,614 from 300 payments of $175.38 to invest) but after 25 years the solar system might be running strong or possibly in need of replacement.
You can't weigh $30,000 in a solar system versus $30,000 in a box in your attic. If you already have $30,000 in the bank you have to weigh the investment on a solar system against other financial investments. If you have to borrow $30,000 you have to weigh the investment on a solar system against the $30,000 plus the repayment interest on the loan.
On the other hand, like you said the prices of electricity could go up. It's very likely they will go up. So you have to weigh that into your consideration.
The wind doesn't blow at any one place all day long, which means if you want 100 MW of reliable wind energy all day you need to install 300 or more MW in wind turbines all over the country so that at any given time at least some of them are receiving wind. That need for redundancy makes wind energy very expensive relative to natural gas and coal power.
The plain fact is that wind and solar both could get us off fossil fuels, but they would require even more government subsidies than they already receive to do it. Convincing voters to support more government spending when the US government already spent most of 2011 deadlocked over spending is effectively impossible. I would love to see it happen, but it won't.
Nixon was impeached for trying to illegally interfere with an election. As bad as political nepotism is, it's not as serious as fucking with the election process. If Nixon hadn't been pardoned, you could argue that he should have been prosecuted for treason.
Haliburton, which Cheney used to run, got 7 billion dollars in a no-bids contract for part of the Iraq reconstruction. When people complained, the government put the same contract up for bid and then manipulated the process so that only Haliburton could win. That's every bit as bad as the Solyndra scandal - and bank bailout bullshit at the end of Bush's term in office was every bit as ludicrous as bank bailout bullshit after Obama took over. They're all bad.
I take it as a given that anyone with enough resources to play in US politics at the national level is corrupt, in both major US political parties. I still vote according to the lesser of two evils philosophy - I view Obama as the pickpocket that still gets things right occasionally and his Republican opponents as a gang of devil worshipers conspiring to eviscerate any American who isn't hideously wealthy and sell his organs for a few pennies. Given that kind of choice, I'm going to go with the pickpocket every time.
Expecting most of an international community composed mostly of hobbyist volunteers to unite under one end-to-end free software solution is crazy. The freedom of choice we have is good, and the splintering of resources is one of the prices we pay for it.
That's why I included "(although it's starting to carry a lot of patent licensing fees from other companies)" in my post. I'm hopeful, but not optimistic, that Google is going to use the patents it bought with Motorola Mobility (assuming that purchase is approved by the appropriate regulators) and others to fight back against Microsoft's Android license tax.
I also hope the Mozilla Boot 2 Gecko project to make smart phone and tablet operating systems that use only HTML5 and Javascript for everything takes off. First, competition is good. Second, because (hopefully) by basing the platform as much as possible on open web standards they should be vulnerable to fewer patent lawsuits from Oracle, Microsoft, and Apple.
I realize Android has a native development kit, but outside the really high performance games I suspect most Android apps don't use it. It also makes the whole platform less enticing to developers, because you're encouraged to learn one development environment and API when you first use Android and then have to move to a totally different NDK environment and API once you hit a performance wall with the default SDK. So while in theory Android and iOS apps can always have equivalent speed on equivalent hardware, in practice most iOS apps are going to be faster.
I expect Android to start eating away at iOS sales in a big way anyway, because sooner or later the price competition between Android vendors is going to mean that you can get an octa-core Android tablet with 24GB of RAM and 256GB of storage for less cost than a quad core iPad 5 with 6GB of RAM and 64GB of storage. At that point the Android advantage in hardware will negate any efficiency advantges that iOS has.
But you have to keep the comparison with iOS in mind. For any given piece of hardware, most iOS apps will run faster and more smoothly than equivalent Android apps (except for the Android apps that use C and C++ instead of Java). So that Tegra 3 device that is pretty good with Android will positively scream with iOS.
I understand why Google chose Java as the primary language for Android - using a language that runs on a virtual machine makes it easy to set up their developer tools on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X, you don't have to recompile old apps for new processor architectures (like the x86 smartphone chips that Intel has announced for mid 2012 or if people want to run Android on desktops someday), and it's easier to enforce application security constraints. And of course Java is easier to learn and write than Objective-C. But by using native code Apple has an efficiency advantage, and that has big performance benefits.
?? You misunderstood what I wrote. I wrote that Java is not as efficient in processing or memory as Objective-C. In other words, Objective-C is more efficient... which is exactly what you said!
I hadn't tried GNOME 3 yet. Thanks for the information. I may give it a go. But again, I'm fine with Unity. I don't expect everyone to like it, but I think it deserves a bit more credit than the nearly universal hatred it receives on Slashdot.
Slashdot Mirror
I more suspect the article might be a troll by someone who just wanted to create fireworks in the comments. But taken at face value, if my employer starts making a series of technical decisions I disagree with I would certainly start looking for new work. I would not quit my current job if I could not find a replacement, but I would start looking. Staying at an unpleasant work environment is a poor option and this guy has ever right to complain. Your statement is equivalent to, "There are other people starving, so stop complaining about your diet of rice!"
And there are plenty of valid reasons to want to avoid Microsoft products, especially in small companies. A Fortune 500 firm isn't going to blink at the costs in terms of license costs and also of employee time managing their licensing infrastructure. But for a small firm, moving to Windows Server from Debian, moving to SQL Server from (for example) PostgreSQL, moving to Visual Studio and C# from (for example) Java or Python or C++, moving to Microsoft Office instead of Open Office, moving to Exchange from Postfix, and hiring someone to manage all the licenses, and time lost by the transition period, you're looking at tens of thousands of dollars in additional expenses that could instead have been put into additional hardware, or education courses, or training seminars, etc...
Not to mention that rewriting a flagship application from scratch in a new language is never a sure thing, and a lot of clean rewrites never become production ready. Ugly codebases are often not like dilapidated houses, where past a certain point it makes sense to tear it down and start over. Instead with the codebase you add unit tests and formal testing to make sure your changes don't break things in unexpected ways, and then start incrementally rewriting aspects of the application.
I prefer Perl to Python, but I would not group Python with Visual Basic or Java.
I think the main reason Perl has a bad reputation has nothing to do with the language syntax and everything to do with the dot com boom. All these companies were hiring people who knew nothing about web computing and who made things up as they went along. Perl was a hot language at the time, so the hordes of newbies ran with it. The end result is hundreds of millions of klugey, poorly organized, poorly documented, poorly written code that would have had all the same problems no matter what language was used. Then as the newbies became more experienced, new developers entered the field, and other veteran developers switched to Perl from other languages, their first encounter with Perl is a nightmare app they have to maintain. That's a condemnation of bad coding practice and assuming you can hire anybody with the slightest interest in software development to build your hot new web company. It's not a condemnation of Perl.
For a new project these days, in many fields Perl is as good a choice as anything. CPAN, the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network, has tons of junk but for almost any conceivable project there's a good chance that out of the one or two dozen CPAN modules written to handle it, at least a few are rock solid and get you more than 80% of the way towards your goal.
If you're a happy Python programmer there really isn't a strong case for you to switch to Perl. But if you're neither a Perl or Python programmer and looking to learn one or the other, don't let the flame wars over Perl syntax and Python whitespace distract you. Perl is an awesome choice.
There was a recent Slashdot article about Firefox memory leaks: http://developers.slashdot.org/story/12/01/17/1338225/notes-on-reducing-firefoxs-memory-consumption in more recent versions of Firefox, the leaks are all or almost all related to add-ons. Add-ons are a big reason to use Firefox, so it's still a problem, but it's not as bad as it was. And they're working on ways to help developers who create add-ons prevent memory leaks too.
In terms of overall speed and memory usage, Tom's Hardware Guide does a very thorough browser comparison shootout a few times a year. For a long stretch Firefox was awful. But Firefox won the last two comparisons: September 30, 2011 http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/firefox-7-web-browser,3037.html and January 6 http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/macbook-air-chrome-16-firefox-9-benchmark,3108.html
Hear hear. If you don't like Rust, don't use it. The free software developers who don't feel like learning Rust don't have to contribute to Firefox. Big deal - it looks like it's close enough to C++ that the learning curve will be a matter of days for any good C++ developer. Someone unwilling to do that isn't worth having on your team anyway.
Really? Tom's Hardware Guide does comprehensive browser comparisons every few months, and Firefox won the last two of them after years of being outdone by most of the competition. Have a look: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/macbook-air-chrome-16-firefox-9-benchmark,3108.html and http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/firefox-7-web-browser,3037.html Firefox still has more extensions than any other browser and in April they're planning to switch to the Chrome deployment model of auto-updating in the background without prompting the user to apply updates and bug fixes every few days.
I'd say their usability, performance, security, and innovation are top notch.
We can beat this to death. There are arguments on both sides. I get paid to use Java (yuck) and frankly the compiler does catch a whole class of potential problems before I have to worry about catching them with unit testing or QA testing. But just as often our problem comes from mis-configuring our data layer, or a typo in a configuration file, or forgetting to put an HTML form variable that's required into a page, or missing some required information in the database. All of that blows up in your face at run time, and the compiler can't help at all. You have to catch that with unit tests and QA testing, and that would be true no matter how type-safe your programming language is.
But there is value in reducing the possible universe of run time errors by having the compiler check your code for correctness before it gets run. Even if it does not protect you from all possible errors or even most possible errors, it protects from some and that's nice. You just have to weigh the added work of static typing versus the added work of unit testing to cover dynamic typing. My personal opinion is that some languages - including Java - have an overly verbose and complex type system that makes the static typing generally not worth the effort. But I've tinkered with, for example, Scala and D and their type systems are much more flexible and less verbose. There are also languages like Perl6 (if any of the implementations ever hit 1.0) which has default dynamic typing but optional static typing, for a best-of-both worlds.
Yeah, 3.5 really knocked the Wizard and Cleric down to "still by far among the most powerful classes in the game."
Quoted for truth since I'm out of mod points.
I know that's the most common objection to 4th edition, but World of Warcraft (wow) is absurdly popular for a reason. There are exceptions, but older versions of Dungeons and Dragons generally had combat like this: Figher - "I rule!" Thief - "If I'm able to sneak around I rule harder. If not I suck." Cleric - "I'm bored to tears playing a healbot, which is what the other players want. I have fun playing a combatant, which the other players hate." Mage - "I am god until I run out of spells. Then I suck really bad."
The massive multiplayer online roleplaying game standard conventions keep combat in Dungeons and Dragons 4 interesting for everyone. The Fighter types are as much fun as they ever were. The Thief types are more fun, because even when sneaking fails they have more options for hamstringing enemies. The Cleric has an array of abilities that make him both a combatant and a healbot with the same move, keeping everyone happy. And the Mage no longer dominates combat at the beginning but neither does he run out of spells and become totally useless after the first few rounds.
If you don't like the change, that's fine. You have a huge number of other previous editions to use, including the Dungeons and Dragons offshoots Pathfinder, Tunnels and Trolls, and my personal favorites FantasyCraft and Hackmaster (Hackmaster 4, which is actually the first edition as some kind of odd joke, is decent. Hackmaster Basic, the first book in the Hackmaster 5 series, is awesome). But the changes in Dungeons and Dragons 4 to borrow elements from other games is not automatically bad.
I consider ripping fair use for DVDs I've purchased (and these days if you're not desperate to buy a movie the first two years after it came out, you can probably find the DVD for $5 or less). It may not stand up in court, but I figure it has a better chance than torrenting. It's also harder for the MPAA to track.
I know logistics is hard, and it's not something any idiot or even some damn good businessmen and strategists could get right. But Haliburton is not the only military logistics company in the world or the United States with a good record. It is, however, the only military logistics company that had been run by the Vice President when the US government needed logistics support in Iraq. And there was plenty of corruption and screwups by Haliburton - fewer people would complain if their handling of Iraq had been squeaky clean.
Republicans aren't trying to erect a national church, but they are trying to post the Ten Commandments in courthouses, keep "Under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance and on currency (when it wasn't there for the first 150 years our country existed), block gay marriage and abortion rights because some Christians dislike them, and teach Christian abstinence-based sex education to teens when study after study demonstrates that it doesn't work. That's degrading the separation between Church and State. And of course Republicans all over are trying to get Intelligent Design taught in science class, when it's not a scientific theory at all. (How do you conduct an experiment to prove or disprove Intelligent Design? )
You are correct that many or maybe most Democrats are idiots with respect to Nuclear Power. The objection to genetically modified food is often not that it's modified per se, but the fact that it's not reproductive. If you grow natural corn, or beans, you just need to save some seeds from each crop to plant the next one. With GMO corn and beans, you grow tons of great food but none of the seeds will germinate - you have to buy GMO seeds from the vendor again every season. That's a big objection to genetically modified foods, and it's legitimate.
Our public schools are awful because funding is uneven. A nice suburban school district have highly educated children and pay each teacher $60,000 or more, with $11,000 in annual funding per student. An urban school district might receive less than half as much funding and a big piece of the funding they do receive needs to be diverted to security concerns. A rural school district might receive even less money and struggle to find good teachers because pay is too low. The real solution is to fix the funding allocations - but to oversimplify the problems, I would rather take the Democrat solution (through more money at the problem) than the Republican one (it's broke, so instead of trying to fix it just dismantle it and become a nation of morons).
Air and water are not the cleanest they've been since the dawn of civilization. They're cleaner in the US than they were part way through the industrial age precisely because of the environmental regulations the Republicans love to hate. If you want to see a country without hindrances like the EPA, go to China - where the air in most areas is two steps removed from mustard gas. And fracking definitely has been criticized and there is evidence it causes problems, no matter what the natural gas industry wants you to think.
I started reading the blog. Very nice. Thanks.
Ouch. I believe your numbers. I really want renewable energy to take the world by storm, but with current technology it's just not feasible.
Good points, but I still disagree.
As the grandparent post indicated, the Obama Administration is guilty of the same cronyism that the Bush Administration did. So they don't hold the high moral ground there. As you said, they've been every bit as bad as the Bush Administration on civil liberties. I am upset by that, and so are plenty of other Democrats, independents, and of course Republicans. They don't hold the moral high ground there either. High CAFE standards are an inherently flawed method for encouraging reduced fossil use, and the Democrats have run with it. Democrats are also every bit in the pockets of the RIAA and MPAA and their attempted violations of civil liberties. (I don't believe in software or music piracy... but neither to I support an erosion of my rights just so that corporations can prevent them. That's as absurd as outlawing individual ownership of screwdrivers and crowbars because they can be used to steal cars.) There is plenty to criticize.
But the Republicans are still fundamentally opposed to anything moving us closer to universal health care. They are still attempting to dismantle public education, dismantle separation of Church and State, dismantle environmental protections to clean air and water (e.g. "damn the water quality, start fracking now!"), de-fund and dismantle social services programs, and push forward with Trickle Down Economics, which has been proven over and over to do nothing for the economy as a whole and everything to widen the gap between the haves and the have-nots. Fuck science, fuck the poor, fuck the sick, fuck the abused, and fuck air quality.
This isn't a pick between two different forms of rape and murder, this is a choice between a flawed and corrupt party which nevertheless has a lot of valuable goals and one that is bent on turning the country into a wealthy minority and a massive under-class of illiterate slaves. I realize that we would be better off if some third parties could break the deadlock on power that the Democrats and Republicans possess, but I would rather shoot for a weak goal we have a good chance of reaching than an awesome one that is effectively impossible.
Thank you for the correction.
You can't, of course. But what it he had lent out the $30,000 to someone for 25 years at a 5% interest rate? Then he gets back $175.38 per month for 25 years. After that time he gets no more money from the loan (but has at least $52,614 from 300 payments of $175.38 to invest) but after 25 years the solar system might be running strong or possibly in need of replacement.
You can't weigh $30,000 in a solar system versus $30,000 in a box in your attic. If you already have $30,000 in the bank you have to weigh the investment on a solar system against other financial investments. If you have to borrow $30,000 you have to weigh the investment on a solar system against the $30,000 plus the repayment interest on the loan.
On the other hand, like you said the prices of electricity could go up. It's very likely they will go up. So you have to weigh that into your consideration.
The wind doesn't blow at any one place all day long, which means if you want 100 MW of reliable wind energy all day you need to install 300 or more MW in wind turbines all over the country so that at any given time at least some of them are receiving wind. That need for redundancy makes wind energy very expensive relative to natural gas and coal power.
The plain fact is that wind and solar both could get us off fossil fuels, but they would require even more government subsidies than they already receive to do it. Convincing voters to support more government spending when the US government already spent most of 2011 deadlocked over spending is effectively impossible. I would love to see it happen, but it won't.
Nixon was impeached for trying to illegally interfere with an election. As bad as political nepotism is, it's not as serious as fucking with the election process. If Nixon hadn't been pardoned, you could argue that he should have been prosecuted for treason.
Haliburton, which Cheney used to run, got 7 billion dollars in a no-bids contract for part of the Iraq reconstruction. When people complained, the government put the same contract up for bid and then manipulated the process so that only Haliburton could win. That's every bit as bad as the Solyndra scandal - and bank bailout bullshit at the end of Bush's term in office was every bit as ludicrous as bank bailout bullshit after Obama took over. They're all bad.
I take it as a given that anyone with enough resources to play in US politics at the national level is corrupt, in both major US political parties. I still vote according to the lesser of two evils philosophy - I view Obama as the pickpocket that still gets things right occasionally and his Republican opponents as a gang of devil worshipers conspiring to eviscerate any American who isn't hideously wealthy and sell his organs for a few pennies. Given that kind of choice, I'm going to go with the pickpocket every time.
Expecting most of an international community composed mostly of hobbyist volunteers to unite under one end-to-end free software solution is crazy. The freedom of choice we have is good, and the splintering of resources is one of the prices we pay for it.
That's why I included "(although it's starting to carry a lot of patent licensing fees from other companies)" in my post. I'm hopeful, but not optimistic, that Google is going to use the patents it bought with Motorola Mobility (assuming that purchase is approved by the appropriate regulators) and others to fight back against Microsoft's Android license tax.
I also hope the Mozilla Boot 2 Gecko project to make smart phone and tablet operating systems that use only HTML5 and Javascript for everything takes off. First, competition is good. Second, because (hopefully) by basing the platform as much as possible on open web standards they should be vulnerable to fewer patent lawsuits from Oracle, Microsoft, and Apple.
I realize Android has a native development kit, but outside the really high performance games I suspect most Android apps don't use it. It also makes the whole platform less enticing to developers, because you're encouraged to learn one development environment and API when you first use Android and then have to move to a totally different NDK environment and API once you hit a performance wall with the default SDK. So while in theory Android and iOS apps can always have equivalent speed on equivalent hardware, in practice most iOS apps are going to be faster.
I expect Android to start eating away at iOS sales in a big way anyway, because sooner or later the price competition between Android vendors is going to mean that you can get an octa-core Android tablet with 24GB of RAM and 256GB of storage for less cost than a quad core iPad 5 with 6GB of RAM and 64GB of storage. At that point the Android advantage in hardware will negate any efficiency advantges that iOS has.
But you have to keep the comparison with iOS in mind. For any given piece of hardware, most iOS apps will run faster and more smoothly than equivalent Android apps (except for the Android apps that use C and C++ instead of Java). So that Tegra 3 device that is pretty good with Android will positively scream with iOS.
I understand why Google chose Java as the primary language for Android - using a language that runs on a virtual machine makes it easy to set up their developer tools on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X, you don't have to recompile old apps for new processor architectures (like the x86 smartphone chips that Intel has announced for mid 2012 or if people want to run Android on desktops someday), and it's easier to enforce application security constraints. And of course Java is easier to learn and write than Objective-C. But by using native code Apple has an efficiency advantage, and that has big performance benefits.
?? You misunderstood what I wrote. I wrote that Java is not as efficient in processing or memory as Objective-C. In other words, Objective-C is more efficient... which is exactly what you said!
I hadn't tried GNOME 3 yet. Thanks for the information. I may give it a go. But again, I'm fine with Unity. I don't expect everyone to like it, but I think it deserves a bit more credit than the nearly universal hatred it receives on Slashdot.