Au contraire! Have you ever considered the health benefits of an all-mushroom diet? Fungus varieties for every occasion: portabella, morels, white mushrooms, chanterelles, etc.
No it isn't. It's like no cheese I've ever tasted.
Re:Hooray fileinfo is standard!
on
PHP 5.3 Released
·
· Score: 1
Here's an example:
def foo(bar):
myVar = bar.baz()
Quick, what methods are available to be called on myVar? Answer: you have no idea, unless you know what bar is, and what bar.baz() returns.
Don't get me wrong, I like a lot about Python (and actually it's currently my primary language on the job), but it does have some downsides.
Re:[Sigh]... Still waiting for bulk loading...
on
PostgreSQL 8.4 Out
·
· Score: 1
My experience with dealing with large-ish data loads (max of about 500 million records) is that for anything that large you probably want to build a migration app of some kind anyways, in part because of point (d), and in part because you want a consistent state and recoverability in the event of trouble (e.g. server crash). At which point the application can and should be coded to handle the UCVs in some graceful way.
I also was basing my response a bit on the MySQL folks I've come in contact with, who often have a rather loose attitude towards database constraints (which can lead to some rather interesting bugs). Particularly those who come out of the web design end of the LAMP stack often aren't so concerned about details like foreign key constraints, and just want it to (appear to) work. That looseness is something these folks like, because it makes their job seem easier, and thus they tend to avoid DBs like PostGres and Oracle that really enforce the rules.
But then again, I know some DBAs who would fall into your camp on this. What can I say except that large data loads can really suck?
Re:[Sigh]... Still waiting for bulk loading...
on
PostgreSQL 8.4 Out
·
· Score: 1
The way I see your problem, you have either a very bad data set (millions of unique constraint violations) or a bad schema (a field that's marked as unique that shouldn't be). Yes, correcting this is a massive PITA, but PostGres is relatively intolerant of those sorts of faults for a reason. Both the INSERT IGNORE and INSERT REPLACE look to me (from the documentation, I'm not a DBA) like they'd be prone to losing some data in a way that you don't notice. Which for anything mission-critical is really really bad.
From your second chart, it looks to me like New York and Minnesota are net donors at roughly the same level, and the states that are the biggest spenders of federal cash are Mississippi, Arizona, Alaska, and Louisiana. (Mississippi and Louisiana make some sense due to Hurricane Katrina spending among other things.)
Look, it's not dead, it's resting. Wonderful OS the Windows XP, beautiful plumage.
Re:Hooray fileinfo is standard!
on
PHP 5.3 Released
·
· Score: 1
Having used PHP along with a whole slew of other languages, what I've generally found is that like most other languages PHP is a bit of a slave to its own history.
For PHP, its origins in dynamic web pages lead it towards results which are quick and often convenient for web designers who are great at making sites pretty, but lacking in design consistency and rigor. Some effects of this are APIs with inconsistent naming and structure compared to other languages, and the prevalence of bad code practices among PHP programmers.
For Java, the academic background surrounding OOP and design patterns means that it tends to over-engineer for things that are theoretically better but in practice are a big pain. Try juggling dates and you'll see immediately what I mean.
For Perl, its roots in sed and awk mean that some of the more incomprehensible syntax (designed to make programs fast to type on a PDP-11) is here to stay.
For Python, it's emphasis on simple syntax means that it's very hard to determine the capabilities of an object just by looking at the code that uses it. Choose bad variable names and you'll be in real trouble.
And so on. In short, all languages suck, but suck in different ways.
I'm well aware that Herbert Hoover intervened in the economy in 1929, reacting pretty close to immediately. The problem was that he had his priorities backwards: he was trying to raise taxes and cut spending (which in his defense was exactly what most of his economists were telling him to do), which turned out to be counterproductive. Tellingly, in 1938 when Roosevelt cut back some of his Keynesian public works projects in the name of balancing the budget and reducing the risk of inflation, unemployment went up and the GDP went down. In other words, the statement "stop spending" is exactly what you don't want the government to do according to the evidence.
You're right about the Fed having a lot to do with the current mess: Alan Greenspan admitted as much, basically saying that all of the theories he had used in deciding interest rates were completely wrong. There's a good reason to think that the Fed basically kept on cutting rates throughout the 2000's because doing so always gave them a cheer from the financial peanut gallery and made the Bush administration (which Greenspan supported) look good.
This obviously can only be settled via a Slashdot poll. My suggestions for options: - Dick Cheney's undisclosed location - The North Pole - Cobra base - R'lyeh - Google's secret undersea base - CowboyNeal's home
At the same time, "programming" in the US tends to attract very smart people, and very smart people often overestimate their capabilities (often by underestimating the significance of things that don't interest them).
Actually, virtually everybody overestimates their abilities. The classic example of this is around 70% of drivers thinking they are above average drivers (and yes, the skill of drivers roughly follows a bell curve with Dale Earnhardt at one end and a half-blind grandmother at the other). Plenty of stupid people don't think they're stupid, plenty of average-intelligence people think they're bright, and plenty of bright people think they are the next Einstein.
The Madoff lesson is that you don't just diversify your investments, you diversify your managers. In other words, one manager who says the portfolio is diversified is not enough. You should be employing more than one manager. One of them should be YOU. You may find out that they aren't any better than you.
Actually, that's a strong argument for trusting your money to nobody besides yourself and your family (assuming you trust them). If you do the extra homework to manage your money properly, you can have a far more profitable portfolio than a typical mutual fund. And as an added bonus, that gives you a lot of control over what sort of businesses you're invested in, so if you don't like cigarette companies you don't end up investing in them. You will make mistakes, but you will be able to learn from them and figure out ways of getting better.
In addition, don't trust Jim Cramer or any other particular money management celebrity when it comes to picking which securities to buy. Heck, even Jim Cramer says not to completely trust Jim Cramer.
The US is in economic meltdown and the only thing that it can do to save itself is to stop spending.
I'm glad to see the Herbert Hoover theory of handling a depression is alive and well.
Keynesianism was formulated in large part in direct response to the last time we have a stock market meltdown caused by lots of people borrowing lots of money with very little real value as collateral. The basic idea is that instead of supply-side economics, you use demand-side economics to stimulate consumer demand, which then stimulates the rest of the economy. That means that as a government you keep people employed at all costs, and if you do things right you employ them doing something useful (say, repairing highway bridges that badly need it, or upgrading or rebuilding the national rail network) which stimulates demand of inputs as well as labor.
Keynesianism was exactly how we went from the economy as it stood in 1929 and the economy as it stood in 1952. I'll take that result any day of the week. In fact, what's really bothering a lot of folks (most notably Paul Krugman, but Robert Reich is also going nuts over this) is that we have a known and proven way to handle economic crises that isn't getting used.
I have to admit I got a good chuckle about secularized mortgages, which thankfully can be defined.
secularized mortgage (n): A mortgage where the solvency and rating of said mortgage doesn't depend on pure faith that home prices will continue to rise.
You know, just because it's good for you right now doesn't mean the whole financial crisis doesn't suck for a lot of other folks, and won't suck for you in the near future (e.g. you get caught by a layoff, or your brother turns up broke on your doorstep).
In the interests of full disclosure, I'm in roughly the same position as you right now: good job, cash in the bank that will probably turn into a down payment eventually, and ridiculously low fixed expenses. But I also know that the situation can change on a dime.
Also, his credentials don't make him a scientific authority: a PhD in economics makes you an authority on economics, not climatology. A BS in physics give you a bit more authority than the average Joe on physics, not climatology.
In short, they were right to attack his credentials, because on this issue he doesn't have any.
voter fraud, and yes, even presidential eligibility
There have in fact been media reports laying both of those issues to rest, but since they come from the liberal Obama-loving media elite, they don't count in the minds of those who raised those issues in the first place.
Umm, you're exactly 100% backwards on this. Under cap & trade (which has been used for water pollutants with great success) there's a market for having extra pollution credits, which means that lowering pollution either lowers your cost or increases your profit by giving you credits to sell. The only big risk is if all polluters massively cut their pollution simultaneously and thus all have now-worthless credits for sale.
Slashdot Mirror
Au contraire! Have you ever considered the health benefits of an all-mushroom diet? Fungus varieties for every occasion: portabella, morels, white mushrooms, chanterelles, etc.
Here I was expecting the message to read
"We apologize for the inconvenience."
You meet a lot of crazy people in bars. One guy I saw in a bar said "I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy".
That line goes back a long way: It's attributed variously to Tom Waits (who definitely said it in the 70's), Dorothy Parker, and W.C. Fields.
Which is also completely different from "queen" when referring to either Freddie Mercury or RuPaul.
No it isn't. It's like no cheese I've ever tasted.
Here's an example:
def foo(bar):
myVar = bar.baz()
Quick, what methods are available to be called on myVar? Answer: you have no idea, unless you know what bar is, and what bar.baz() returns.
Don't get me wrong, I like a lot about Python (and actually it's currently my primary language on the job), but it does have some downsides.
My experience with dealing with large-ish data loads (max of about 500 million records) is that for anything that large you probably want to build a migration app of some kind anyways, in part because of point (d), and in part because you want a consistent state and recoverability in the event of trouble (e.g. server crash). At which point the application can and should be coded to handle the UCVs in some graceful way.
I also was basing my response a bit on the MySQL folks I've come in contact with, who often have a rather loose attitude towards database constraints (which can lead to some rather interesting bugs). Particularly those who come out of the web design end of the LAMP stack often aren't so concerned about details like foreign key constraints, and just want it to (appear to) work. That looseness is something these folks like, because it makes their job seem easier, and thus they tend to avoid DBs like PostGres and Oracle that really enforce the rules.
But then again, I know some DBAs who would fall into your camp on this. What can I say except that large data loads can really suck?
The way I see your problem, you have either a very bad data set (millions of unique constraint violations) or a bad schema (a field that's marked as unique that shouldn't be). Yes, correcting this is a massive PITA, but PostGres is relatively intolerant of those sorts of faults for a reason. Both the INSERT IGNORE and INSERT REPLACE look to me (from the documentation, I'm not a DBA) like they'd be prone to losing some data in a way that you don't notice. Which for anything mission-critical is really really bad.
Thanks for the links.
From your second chart, it looks to me like New York and Minnesota are net donors at roughly the same level, and the states that are the biggest spenders of federal cash are Mississippi, Arizona, Alaska, and Louisiana. (Mississippi and Louisiana make some sense due to Hurricane Katrina spending among other things.)
Look, it's not dead, it's resting. Wonderful OS the Windows XP, beautiful plumage.
Having used PHP along with a whole slew of other languages, what I've generally found is that like most other languages PHP is a bit of a slave to its own history.
For PHP, its origins in dynamic web pages lead it towards results which are quick and often convenient for web designers who are great at making sites pretty, but lacking in design consistency and rigor. Some effects of this are APIs with inconsistent naming and structure compared to other languages, and the prevalence of bad code practices among PHP programmers.
For Java, the academic background surrounding OOP and design patterns means that it tends to over-engineer for things that are theoretically better but in practice are a big pain. Try juggling dates and you'll see immediately what I mean.
For Perl, its roots in sed and awk mean that some of the more incomprehensible syntax (designed to make programs fast to type on a PDP-11) is here to stay.
For Python, it's emphasis on simple syntax means that it's very hard to determine the capabilities of an object just by looking at the code that uses it. Choose bad variable names and you'll be in real trouble.
And so on. In short, all languages suck, but suck in different ways.
I'm well aware that Herbert Hoover intervened in the economy in 1929, reacting pretty close to immediately. The problem was that he had his priorities backwards: he was trying to raise taxes and cut spending (which in his defense was exactly what most of his economists were telling him to do), which turned out to be counterproductive. Tellingly, in 1938 when Roosevelt cut back some of his Keynesian public works projects in the name of balancing the budget and reducing the risk of inflation, unemployment went up and the GDP went down. In other words, the statement "stop spending" is exactly what you don't want the government to do according to the evidence.
You're right about the Fed having a lot to do with the current mess: Alan Greenspan admitted as much, basically saying that all of the theories he had used in deciding interest rates were completely wrong. There's a good reason to think that the Fed basically kept on cutting rates throughout the 2000's because doing so always gave them a cheer from the financial peanut gallery and made the Bush administration (which Greenspan supported) look good.
This obviously can only be settled via a Slashdot poll. My suggestions for options:
- Dick Cheney's undisclosed location
- The North Pole
- Cobra base
- R'lyeh
- Google's secret undersea base
- CowboyNeal's home
At the same time, "programming" in the US tends to attract very smart people, and very smart people often overestimate their capabilities (often by underestimating the significance of things that don't interest them).
Actually, virtually everybody overestimates their abilities. The classic example of this is around 70% of drivers thinking they are above average drivers (and yes, the skill of drivers roughly follows a bell curve with Dale Earnhardt at one end and a half-blind grandmother at the other). Plenty of stupid people don't think they're stupid, plenty of average-intelligence people think they're bright, and plenty of bright people think they are the next Einstein.
The Madoff lesson is that you don't just diversify your investments, you diversify your managers. In other words, one manager who says the portfolio is diversified is not enough. You should be employing more than one manager. One of them should be YOU. You may find out that they aren't any better than you.
Actually, that's a strong argument for trusting your money to nobody besides yourself and your family (assuming you trust them). If you do the extra homework to manage your money properly, you can have a far more profitable portfolio than a typical mutual fund. And as an added bonus, that gives you a lot of control over what sort of businesses you're invested in, so if you don't like cigarette companies you don't end up investing in them. You will make mistakes, but you will be able to learn from them and figure out ways of getting better.
In addition, don't trust Jim Cramer or any other particular money management celebrity when it comes to picking which securities to buy. Heck, even Jim Cramer says not to completely trust Jim Cramer.
The US is in economic meltdown and the only thing that it can do to save itself is to stop spending.
I'm glad to see the Herbert Hoover theory of handling a depression is alive and well.
Keynesianism was formulated in large part in direct response to the last time we have a stock market meltdown caused by lots of people borrowing lots of money with very little real value as collateral. The basic idea is that instead of supply-side economics, you use demand-side economics to stimulate consumer demand, which then stimulates the rest of the economy. That means that as a government you keep people employed at all costs, and if you do things right you employ them doing something useful (say, repairing highway bridges that badly need it, or upgrading or rebuilding the national rail network) which stimulates demand of inputs as well as labor.
Keynesianism was exactly how we went from the economy as it stood in 1929 and the economy as it stood in 1952. I'll take that result any day of the week. In fact, what's really bothering a lot of folks (most notably Paul Krugman, but Robert Reich is also going nuts over this) is that we have a known and proven way to handle economic crises that isn't getting used.
I have to admit I got a good chuckle about secularized mortgages, which thankfully can be defined.
secularized mortgage (n): A mortgage where the solvency and rating of said mortgage doesn't depend on pure faith that home prices will continue to rise.
In other words, they'd be a great idea.
You know, just because it's good for you right now doesn't mean the whole financial crisis doesn't suck for a lot of other folks, and won't suck for you in the near future (e.g. you get caught by a layoff, or your brother turns up broke on your doorstep).
In the interests of full disclosure, I'm in roughly the same position as you right now: good job, cash in the bank that will probably turn into a down payment eventually, and ridiculously low fixed expenses. But I also know that the situation can change on a dime.
Besides, wouldn't losing lots of video be something more likely to happen to a Took than a Boffin?
Sure, but it does mean that the rest of us have no more reason to believe him than, say, timmarhy (659436).
Also, his credentials don't make him a scientific authority: a PhD in economics makes you an authority on economics, not climatology. A BS in physics give you a bit more authority than the average Joe on physics, not climatology.
In short, they were right to attack his credentials, because on this issue he doesn't have any.
What happens if we use an Ab Normal brain?
As someone who stood in line and watched well off folks who could fork up the cash
voter fraud, and yes, even presidential eligibility
There have in fact been media reports laying both of those issues to rest, but since they come from the liberal Obama-loving media elite, they don't count in the minds of those who raised those issues in the first place.
Umm, you're exactly 100% backwards on this. Under cap & trade (which has been used for water pollutants with great success) there's a market for having extra pollution credits, which means that lowering pollution either lowers your cost or increases your profit by giving you credits to sell. The only big risk is if all polluters massively cut their pollution simultaneously and thus all have now-worthless credits for sale.