No, it is useless and actually degrading to people who do real things. Imagine neighbour getting ill and having to raise $100k for live saving treatment. They found $20k after going through all the family and friends and now only people living around are left. They come to you house (and let's assume your are filthy rich) and you give them one cent. After that, you go to other poor family who has not chipped in at all and gloat your moral superiority - "I do CARE, 1 cent might be just a drop in the ocean, but it is so much more than you have given!"
1 cent is not going to make any difference. It is actually more a slap in the face - both to ill guy and to all other people who donated these $20k.
It is a country doing something, not a private person. If every country in the world will consume 150 tons of meat less per year... it will reduce global meat requirements by 0.015%. Which in turn will reduce CO2 equivalent emission by even smaller fraction of percent. It will mean exactly nothing - because same countries will be increasing the emission due to other reasons by few percent.
Empty gestures are just empty gestures, not 'drop in the ocean'.
Based on data gathered from RFID tracing in our college, we will start coeducational toilets, because of high frequency of male-female pairs being close together in one of existing, gender-separate ones.
Thanks for clarification. But this only proves that whatever they are planning doesn't help with this - if they are already going to transfer something from the server, then they can transfer real stuff.
Are reallly contemporary FPS games calculating physics separately on each machine? Given that physic calcs tend to be non exact and a bit of chaos theory you could end up in really different worlds very soon. If we are just talking about moving 'server' from one of player consoles to the dedicated datacenter (like most 'normal' games do it), then it hardly looks to be exciting?
It's already been established that FTL does not exist in this universe. Inter-stellar operations are, effectively, suicide missions because by the time you return everyone you left behind will be dead.
FTL travel exists in the movie. When Ender is in orbital school, there are 28 days till invasion on Graff's screen. He managed to get some training, fly back to Earth, swim on lake a bit and FLY TO PLANET IN DIFFERENT SOLAR SYSTEM in these 28 days. In book, Formids base was on one of the asteroids and it still took months to get there. In the movie, they moved it to different planet in different system (merging it with the place where queen egg was found later) - but at the same time implied FTL travel (and reduced distance ansible works to have excuse to go there in first place).
This will make adapting later books considerably harder for them...
In other news, Skynet creator have been seen reasoning with T-800 platoon to put down their weapons and shut down the network. "We we have created autonomous, self-learning killing system, we haven't actually planned on it doing any learning, killing or being independent" were his last words to journalists before approaching the robots. Funeral rites will be held in Church of Naive Douchebags, Clueless Alley 42.
I have a feeling they would leave a 'afterimage' on retina if you look directly into accelerated beam.
And anyway, it is not about getting macroscopic mass out of black hole. All other exampled he gave mean that you can communicate out of the high gravity bodies using light. Black holes are 'evil', because you cannot get a word about the suffering and injustice to next StarTwitter gateway.
I'm really unimpressed with the demo so far. Don't see any real difference to Eve Online hangar rendering for example. Plus, rendering spaceships is probably easiest thing you can aim for - compared to trees/foliage, water, mossy rocks, realistic sky etc. If SC will require top-end hardware it will be only because they are lazy, not because there are so big requirements to render it nicely. High-poly models doesn't make sense when you end up having 6 polygons for each pixel... and when you can achieve 99% of same effect with some smart bump/displacement/whatever mappings.
I know that not all programmers have to worry about that - some stop at some test environment and it is later client's problem to do actual implementation in final environment. But some programmers are working in companies where stuff is created and delivered for in-house needs - and what I have found the hardest in entire equation is to actually deliver the final result. Sometimes, there are so many dependencies, rules, noise introduced by other systems etc that it is really really hard to do the last step and to deliver the actual, tested solution to destination. Preparing the deployment scripts, overviewing that all db dumps were done at correct time in case rollback is needed, guiding hand of some poor chap from offshore location who sees your application first time in his life but has to do installation because you are not allowed to touch production machines - these things often take more effort and sweat than the coding.
There was no Xenomorphic Climate Change on Mars. It is all natural process and if you observe last 15 years of data, you can see sharp increase in Mars average temperature, which clearly shows that previous billion years cool period is just cyclical and natural and very soon we will again have green Mars. Nobody has shown conclusive proof that PB and Llehs geometermal extractors have any influence on Martian atmosphere. Let's remember that climatology is not a strict science and you cannot generalize observations from periods as short as billion years. CO2 measurements from Martian rock layers clearly show that Mars was having climate issues 3 billion years ago and it turned out to be all good after all.
Does the same apply to people who were paid millions to play with CDO's, CDS's, and all those other wonderful financial instruments that were part of the housing bubble? Or do you not need math skills if you know that you're going to be bailed out no matter how badly you screwed up?
I don't understand the point here. If you play with your money and your life and you fail because of lack of basic math/reason - this might be fault of lack of education. If you play with others' people money without personal risk bigger than 1 or 2 months unemployment (which you have 100x financial buffer to survive), but possibility to gain millions of personal money - where is the problem?
I'll put it this way. You go to a lottery. Ticket costs $100k and you have 25% chances of winning $150kUSD. You are not smart if you take the chances. Now, imagine that ticket costs $1 of your money and $100k of random people money and you have 95% chances of winning $500k for yourself and $1000k for these people. If you are unlucky (5%), you lose $1 and they lose $100k. Do you think that taking the second option means somebody doesn't know math? You can discuss ethics, but certainly not math.
Regarding bailout - don't confuse bankers with banks. Bankers don't need the bailout - they just change the job. If they win the lottery, they become rich. If they lose - they can try again in different bank (unless they lose really, really badly and break law in the process - but these are just few people). Yes, if you lose 5 times in the row, you might start running out of the options - but crashing the bank is not considered as 'loss' in that game for anybody except the CEO. So, risky behaviour doesn't depend on idea "We will get bailed out" - nobody except CEO cares.
Kudos from me for writing "Write unit tests for your algorithms" instead of "Write unit tests for all your code". I'm so tired of people writing unit tests for most useless single-line methods, pretending it is helps with refactoring and documentation and showing their 95%+ test code coverage as a scout badge. Better to spend same effort doing _proper_ unit tests for the non-trivial parts of the code, covering real edge cases, not only all code paths.
News in 2015: Terminator Mark2 robots created to kill Terminator Jellyfish hunter robots clogging fishing nets....
This reminds me of SF short story, where people came up with idea of robotic doves (birds) acting as police and paralysing people who wanted to commit murder. But they had to adapt to do the job properly - to detect intent even in most ruthless killers. Soon they started to prevent people killing insects. After that, it was not possible to switch off TV set. And solution for that was to create self-evolving robotic killer hawks to catch the doves... anybody knows what was the name of the story, cannot find it now?
You can sell extra servers to next company preparing for big launch, few months down the road. Or rent them to Amazon/whoever to run their cloud on them, until you need them for a next event year or two later.
You won't recover all the money this way, but can probably cut the cost considerably.
I think that joy is quite close to chewy (through bubblegum and caramel for example). Of course, I believe some people may get more joy from playing with well oiled crankshaft, but that's a personal preference;)
I wonder how well it will fare against Zing (http://www.azulsystems.com/products/zing/faq) Azul decided to go with route of extending vanilla linux with some kernel modules to provide extensions for most critical things, rather then replacing entire system and making custom jvm to utilize these extensions. I have a feeling that it is a lot better approach than using custom OS with plain jvm which is not aware of extra capabilities (if there are any...).
Ok, fast forward 50 years. You are now at double population, living in current conditions with pollution/global warning in same situation as now. Will you then say 'Planet could support double the number of people we have now, if we constraint ourselves to Somalian levels of consumption'? And another 50 years in future we will say "We could have used resources for last 100 years to get away from being bound by Earth, but instead we put effort into quardupling the population and now we are with bigger problem and no solution, because all natural resources are gone"?
There are too many people. Having more people will not help us if giant asteroid comes our way or there is a global pandemic of super-bug. Better science/technology can. It is better to have 5 billion people spread across Solar System with high-tech, sending seed probes towards other star systems then 20 billion people on Earth, living 'naturally' on low level resource consumption in medieval-age tech.
At the moment we are overgrazing Earth (not just in food meaning, but also natural resources/pollution etc). We are 7 billion rabbits running unchecked on already semi-desert grass field, with no predators around. You are saying 'if we eat less, we can fit 14 billion rabbits on our island'. I'm saying that maybe goal of maximizing rabbit density is not what we should aim for. Maybe content, well fed rabbits can focus on other activities and evolve, go to other islands and look for meaning of life, rather than fight for last scraps of grass.
Unfortunately, this will not help against cancer, which is quite common cause of death these days. And I have a feeling that getting stem cells running crazy in your body is going to produce whole new set of cancer possibilities.
You need lambdas to do parallel transformations on collections in sane way. Java is claiming to be THE language for mainstream parallel programming (doesn't matter if it is actually valid, but Oracle sells it this way), so they need lambdas. You need operator overloading to do non-trivial math programming in sane way. Java was never sold as number-crunching platform, so there was no push from within Sun/Oracle for that.
OP asked why lambdas are better than anon classes. Example I gave is indeed simplistic and can be solved by snippet you gave - but as soon as you start adding some transformations, sorting, group by etc, plain java starts to be quite verbose. Still considerably better than 'functional' approach using anon classes of course.
So yes, lambdas are of smaller use to people who are not using anon classes in first place and don't want to switch to functional approach. In java 8, main rationale for adding them was for parallel collection processing, which is pretty tricky to express in plain java.
in readability and ease to write goes outside of what I normally call 'syntax sugar'. Going this way, most languages can be defined as syntax sugar over assembly...
'Usually' really depends on company. I had to fight very hard battle to use something newer than 1.4 in 2007/2008 and then witnessed slow upgrade of 1.5 to 1.6 in 2012 in different company. In both cases, these were big, serious companies, eventually running billion-dollar businesses on java apps in question. So reality for me is that I might see java 8 in production use somewhere in 2017 if I'm lucky. But given current tech direction of the company and fact that over last 1-2 years, thousands of people were moved from java to other platform of choice here, it might not happen at all.
Yes, java is a safe language - same was as COBOL was for a long time. We will have maintenance work to do 30 years in future for sure. But I really wish we get jvm+libraries+ecosystem and change the language...
Jvm/core libraries updates are very welcome - but the language level changes are just too late. If somebody can run cutting edge, (s)he probably long time ago switched to Groovy (http://groovy.codehaus.org/), Scala (http://www.scala-lang.org/) or Xtend (http://www.eclipse.org/xtend/). For slow corporate clients, java 8 will anyway not happen until 3-4 years after official release.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it is useless and actually degrading to people who do real things. Imagine neighbour getting ill and having to raise $100k for live saving treatment. They found $20k after going through all the family and friends and now only people living around are left. They come to you house (and let's assume your are filthy rich) and you give them one cent. After that, you go to other poor family who has not chipped in at all and gloat your moral superiority - "I do CARE, 1 cent might be just a drop in the ocean, but it is so much more than you have given!"
1 cent is not going to make any difference. It is actually more a slap in the face - both to ill guy and to all other people who donated these $20k.
It is a country doing something, not a private person. If every country in the world will consume 150 tons of meat less per year... it will reduce global meat requirements by 0.015%. Which in turn will reduce CO2 equivalent emission by even smaller fraction of percent. It will mean exactly nothing - because same countries will be increasing the emission due to other reasons by few percent.
Empty gestures are just empty gestures, not 'drop in the ocean'.
Based on data gathered from RFID tracing in our college, we will start coeducational toilets, because of high frequency of male-female pairs being close together in one of existing, gender-separate ones.
Thanks for clarification. But this only proves that whatever they are planning doesn't help with this - if they are already going to transfer something from the server, then they can transfer real stuff.
Are reallly contemporary FPS games calculating physics separately on each machine? Given that physic calcs tend to be non exact and a bit of chaos theory you could end up in really different worlds very soon.
If we are just talking about moving 'server' from one of player consoles to the dedicated datacenter (like most 'normal' games do it), then it hardly looks to be exciting?
It's already been established that FTL does not exist in this universe. Inter-stellar operations are, effectively, suicide missions because by the time you return everyone you left behind will be dead.
FTL travel exists in the movie. When Ender is in orbital school, there are 28 days till invasion on Graff's screen. He managed to get some training, fly back to Earth, swim on lake a bit and FLY TO PLANET IN DIFFERENT SOLAR SYSTEM in these 28 days. In book, Formids base was on one of the asteroids and it still took months to get there. In the movie, they moved it to different planet in different system (merging it with the place where queen egg was found later) - but at the same time implied FTL travel (and reduced distance ansible works to have excuse to go there in first place).
This will make adapting later books considerably harder for them...
In other news, Skynet creator have been seen reasoning with T-800 platoon to put down their weapons and shut down the network. "We we have created autonomous, self-learning killing system, we haven't actually planned on it doing any learning, killing or being independent" were his last words to journalists before approaching the robots.
Funeral rites will be held in Church of Naive Douchebags, Clueless Alley 42.
I have a feeling they would leave a 'afterimage' on retina if you look directly into accelerated beam.
And anyway, it is not about getting macroscopic mass out of black hole. All other exampled he gave mean that you can communicate out of the high gravity bodies using light. Black holes are 'evil', because you cannot get a word about the suffering and injustice to next StarTwitter gateway.
I'm really unimpressed with the demo so far. Don't see any real difference to Eve Online hangar rendering for example. Plus, rendering spaceships is probably easiest thing you can aim for - compared to trees/foliage, water, mossy rocks, realistic sky etc.
If SC will require top-end hardware it will be only because they are lazy, not because there are so big requirements to render it nicely. High-poly models doesn't make sense when you end up having 6 polygons for each pixel... and when you can achieve 99% of same effect with some smart bump/displacement/whatever mappings.
I know that not all programmers have to worry about that - some stop at some test environment and it is later client's problem to do actual implementation in final environment. But some programmers are working in companies where stuff is created and delivered for in-house needs - and what I have found the hardest in entire equation is to actually deliver the final result. Sometimes, there are so many dependencies, rules, noise introduced by other systems etc that it is really really hard to do the last step and to deliver the actual, tested solution to destination. Preparing the deployment scripts, overviewing that all db dumps were done at correct time in case rollback is needed, guiding hand of some poor chap from offshore location who sees your application first time in his life but has to do installation because you are not allowed to touch production machines - these things often take more effort and sweat than the coding.
There was no Xenomorphic Climate Change on Mars. It is all natural process and if you observe last 15 years of data, you can see sharp increase in Mars average temperature, which clearly shows that previous billion years cool period is just cyclical and natural and very soon we will again have green Mars. Nobody has shown conclusive proof that PB and Llehs geometermal extractors have any influence on Martian atmosphere. Let's remember that climatology is not a strict science and you cannot generalize observations from periods as short as billion years. CO2 measurements from Martian rock layers clearly show that Mars was having climate issues 3 billion years ago and it turned out to be all good after all.
Seems that competitors already developed similar technology, which can stop WW2 as an extra...
http://vimeo.com/72718945
Does the same apply to people who were paid millions to play with CDO's, CDS's, and all those other wonderful financial instruments that were part of the housing bubble? Or do you not need math skills if you know that you're going to be bailed out no matter how badly you screwed up?
I don't understand the point here. If you play with your money and your life and you fail because of lack of basic math/reason - this might be fault of lack of education. If you play with others' people money without personal risk bigger than 1 or 2 months unemployment (which you have 100x financial buffer to survive), but possibility to gain millions of personal money - where is the problem?
I'll put it this way. You go to a lottery. Ticket costs $100k and you have 25% chances of winning $150kUSD. You are not smart if you take the chances. Now, imagine that ticket costs $1 of your money and $100k of random people money and you have 95% chances of winning $500k for yourself and $1000k for these people. If you are unlucky (5%), you lose $1 and they lose $100k. Do you think that taking the second option means somebody doesn't know math? You can discuss ethics, but certainly not math.
Regarding bailout - don't confuse bankers with banks. Bankers don't need the bailout - they just change the job. If they win the lottery, they become rich. If they lose - they can try again in different bank (unless they lose really, really badly and break law in the process - but these are just few people). Yes, if you lose 5 times in the row, you might start running out of the options - but crashing the bank is not considered as 'loss' in that game for anybody except the CEO. So, risky behaviour doesn't depend on idea "We will get bailed out" - nobody except CEO cares.
Kudos from me for writing "Write unit tests for your algorithms" instead of "Write unit tests for all your code". I'm so tired of people writing unit tests for most useless single-line methods, pretending it is helps with refactoring and documentation and showing their 95%+ test code coverage as a scout badge. Better to spend same effort doing _proper_ unit tests for the non-trivial parts of the code, covering real edge cases, not only all code paths.
News in 2015: Terminator Mark2 robots created to kill Terminator Jellyfish hunter robots clogging fishing nets....
This reminds me of SF short story, where people came up with idea of robotic doves (birds) acting as police and paralysing people who wanted to commit murder. But they had to adapt to do the job properly - to detect intent even in most ruthless killers. Soon they started to prevent people killing insects. After that, it was not possible to switch off TV set. And solution for that was to create self-evolving robotic killer hawks to catch the doves... anybody knows what was the name of the story, cannot find it now?
You can sell extra servers to next company preparing for big launch, few months down the road. Or rent them to Amazon/whoever to run their cloud on them, until you need them for a next event year or two later.
You won't recover all the money this way, but can probably cut the cost considerably.
I think that joy is quite close to chewy (through bubblegum and caramel for example). Of course, I believe some people may get more joy from playing with well oiled crankshaft, but that's a personal preference ;)
I wonder how well it will fare against Zing (http://www.azulsystems.com/products/zing/faq)
Azul decided to go with route of extending vanilla linux with some kernel modules to provide extensions for most critical things, rather then replacing entire system and making custom jvm to utilize these extensions. I have a feeling that it is a lot better approach than using custom OS with plain jvm which is not aware of extra capabilities (if there are any...).
Ok, fast forward 50 years. You are now at double population, living in current conditions with pollution/global warning in same situation as now. Will you then say 'Planet could support double the number of people we have now, if we constraint ourselves to Somalian levels of consumption'? And another 50 years in future we will say "We could have used resources for last 100 years to get away from being bound by Earth, but instead we put effort into quardupling the population and now we are with bigger problem and no solution, because all natural resources are gone"?
There are too many people. Having more people will not help us if giant asteroid comes our way or there is a global pandemic of super-bug. Better science/technology can. It is better to have 5 billion people spread across Solar System with high-tech, sending seed probes towards other star systems then 20 billion people on Earth, living 'naturally' on low level resource consumption in medieval-age tech.
At the moment we are overgrazing Earth (not just in food meaning, but also natural resources/pollution etc). We are 7 billion rabbits running unchecked on already semi-desert grass field, with no predators around. You are saying 'if we eat less, we can fit 14 billion rabbits on our island'. I'm saying that maybe goal of maximizing rabbit density is not what we should aim for. Maybe content, well fed rabbits can focus on other activities and evolve, go to other islands and look for meaning of life, rather than fight for last scraps of grass.
Unfortunately, this will not help against cancer, which is quite common cause of death these days. And I have a feeling that getting stem cells running crazy in your body is going to produce whole new set of cancer possibilities.
Reminds me of radical regeneratives from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Planet_Called_Treason
You need lambdas to do parallel transformations on collections in sane way. Java is claiming to be THE language for mainstream parallel programming (doesn't matter if it is actually valid, but Oracle sells it this way), so they need lambdas.
You need operator overloading to do non-trivial math programming in sane way. Java was never sold as number-crunching platform, so there was no push from within Sun/Oracle for that.
OP asked why lambdas are better than anon classes. Example I gave is indeed simplistic and can be solved by snippet you gave - but as soon as you start adding some transformations, sorting, group by etc, plain java starts to be quite verbose. Still considerably better than 'functional' approach using anon classes of course.
So yes, lambdas are of smaller use to people who are not using anon classes in first place and don't want to switch to functional approach. In java 8, main rationale for adding them was for parallel collection processing, which is pretty tricky to express in plain java.
It makes a huge difference in readability when transforming collections. Difference between (Xtend example)
people.filter[age >30].forEach[println(it)]
and
people.filter(new Predicate1() {
public boolean match(Person p) {
return p.getAge()>30;
}
}).forEach(new Procedure1() {
public void run(Person p) {
System.out.println(p);
}
});
in readability and ease to write goes outside of what I normally call 'syntax sugar'. Going this way, most languages can be defined as syntax sugar over assembly...
'Usually' really depends on company. I had to fight very hard battle to use something newer than 1.4 in 2007/2008 and then witnessed slow upgrade of 1.5 to 1.6 in 2012 in different company. In both cases, these were big, serious companies, eventually running billion-dollar businesses on java apps in question. So reality for me is that I might see java 8 in production use somewhere in 2017 if I'm lucky. But given current tech direction of the company and fact that over last 1-2 years, thousands of people were moved from java to other platform of choice here, it might not happen at all.
Yes, java is a safe language - same was as COBOL was for a long time. We will have maintenance work to do 30 years in future for sure. But I really wish we get jvm+libraries+ecosystem and change the language...
My favorite one atm is Xtend. It has none of the disadvantages you mentioned above, but removed most annoying 'celebration' from java code.
Jvm/core libraries updates are very welcome - but the language level changes are just too late. If somebody can run cutting edge, (s)he probably long time ago switched to Groovy (http://groovy.codehaus.org/), Scala (http://www.scala-lang.org/) or Xtend (http://www.eclipse.org/xtend/). For slow corporate clients, java 8 will anyway not happen until 3-4 years after official release.