That said, I will watch the progress of these languages designed specifically for the task, though I don't see them unseating C/C++/Java any time soon.
I think I prefer languages matched primarily to the problem the program is solving, rather than languages matched primarily to the hardware used to run the program (primarily; some degree of the latter is necessary, for example if your hardware is a GPU or an FPGA).;)
Oh, and I have to wonder a little: there's very little infrastructure terrorism, instead there's much more information terrorism at work. (i.e. the Pentagon hack that lost us the plans to the next air superiority fighter).
I think verbosity in moderation is necessary. I have read many an article with developers arguing that they don't need to document their code when their code is self-documenting. Do you make all of your variables and class/function/methods a single character for the sake of verbosity? I hope not. And I would think that reading and maintaining that code would be far less than a joy.
Long meaningful identifiers are useful. Needing 5 lines of setup for each API call is annoying, particularly if those 5 lines are usually the same. Requiring lots of redundant long keywords to "look more like English" is annoying. Large standard libraries that let you remove most of the tedious parts from your code are useful.
As enjoyable as it is to bash the newspapers for all of their real flaws, I don't understand how people have come to find paywalls outrageous. I really don't. The difference between newspapers and random hearsay is (in the best cases) a lot of effort in developing broad and balanced sources, fact checking, having an editorial process for some degree of fairness and accuracy (as much as that's suffered in the past decade) and generally putting out a "report" on a subject (that's why we call them reporters). That's a lot of hard, often tedious work that is not going to get done well unless someone is paid to do it.
Paywalls are evil because you can't link back to something, they break the web the same way that "check the referrer and redirect to the front page if they're from off-site" does. I'd say LWN has this exactly right, articles require a subscription (for the first week), but if a subscriber wants to cite or reference an article there's a link provided to them that lets non-subscribers see it.
For larger sites this would probably require a bit of extra work, maybe just have the link encode the ID of the subscriber who posted it so you can keep an eye on abuses.
The "power of working together" comes from shared individual resources and individual insights. There is no collective consciousness, no collective ideas.
That's actually debatable, given the degree to which there tend to be simultaneous inventions and how people's knowledge and ideas come in large part from collaboration, reading, and formal education.
Voluntary collaboration is capitalistic and leads to progress. Communism/socialism, on the other hand, demands forced collaboration.
Neither capitalism nor communism nor socialism has anything to do with collaboration. That's a third sphere, not economic (capitalism, socialism) or political (communism), but cultural, the positions being "fuck you" and "c'mon in".
"Most people in the West, including myself, were indoctrinated with the notion that extending the power of individuals necessarily diminishes the power of the state, and vice versa"
What? Western culture has been about empowering the individual, about heroes. Conversely, communist nations such as Russia and China are less about individuals, and more about "the good of many outweighs the good of the few".
The internet works because in many cases empowered individuals will choose the good of the many because it aligns so nicely with the good of the few/themselves. Some of these cases happen naturally, and some are the result of government setting a proper framework for interaction (so, extending the power of individuals by extending the power of government).
By your logic, if the goverment only had Ford motorcars then GM cars ain't an alternative since their operation is geared for Ford.
Doesn't fly my friend.
Well, that's because your analogy is crap.
A better might be if they only had diesel cars, and had their own filling stations that only had tanks/pumps for diesel, and someone wants to sell them gasoline or compressed natural gas cars. But that doesn't really work since in that case it's the cars (what's being replaced) that are the "important" part, whereas really it's probably what isn't being replaced (the applications) that's the important part.
Ah! The typical open source supporter: instead of just admitting we can't meet your need, we'll just pretend your need doesn't exist.
Um, no. It's not "oops, can't do that, pretend they don't exist", it's probably something closer to "I think you're silly, but here's the source if you want to do it yourself". A lack of interest rather than a lack of ability.
The fact is, asynchronous communications are just so much more useful... and if you're going for "enjoyable" instead of "useful", then voice+video is nowhere near as good as the real world.
The slashdot article writes: "What does this say for the wisdom of non-US citizens relying on US companies for their business or communication?"
It's not so much that it's a US company, but closed source product.
Um, WTF?
This is about using a service provided by a US-based company, and the idea that that company might suddenly stop providing that service to you because the government said something stupid.
If you care about your software infrastructure - make sure you have the ability to fix (or hire independent consultants to fix) your software no matter what your vendor does - whether it's something innocent like going bankrupt, or deliberately breaking your infrastructure.
No, you actually don't want to do that. You want to make sure you can always get at your data, so you can migrate it to whatever new system you like. The reason you don't want to fix it yourself (including hiring someone), is that this will almost certainly be far more expensive because you pay for everything yourself instead of only paying about 1/n of the cost (with n being the number of other customers your provider has).
I'm not sure if I'd call polarization a dimension because there are only two angles you can work with, the angle you start with and the angle perpendicular to it. If you try to use a third angle, data from other two will mix with what you're trying to read. So I would say polarization adds another bit (allowing you to store twice as much), but not another full dimension (potentially allowing you to store orders of magnitude more).
But it's completely independent of the other dimensions, so it probably counts. Maybe this is the same sort of thing as the string theory people mean when they talk about extra "rolled up" dimensions, or how the surface of a sheet of paper and the surface of a paper towel tube are both two dimensional even though there are a lot less discrete positions going around the circumference of the tube?
Just like how a tic-tac-toe board and a chess board are both two dimensional, despite one having a lot more locations than the other, the number of distinct polarizations or wavelengths this can detect doesn't matter. It's the number of different "things" it looks at.
Some at the Walgreens across the street, and I think some at Wal-Mart.
3) What does "pretty much" immediately mean
It means I was at work, where I didn't have one handy. Now that I'm home, I'd say it's less than a tenth of a second, barely long enough that I think I can see it brightening up. About the same as lower-wattage incandescent lights that also seem to be not-quite-instantaneous.
People always say 'oh my CFLs start instantly and were dirt cheap and lasted forever'. Then it turns out instantly is a minute, dirt cheap is $10 a bulb, and 'forever' is at 10 minutes a day.
Electricity costs about $1/watt-year. So for ~40 Watt savings (60 Watt incandescent vs 23 Watt "100 Watt replacement" CFL) and used maybe 6 hours/day (and more on weekends), they should pay for themselves in a year or so besides being brighter and a nicer color. And none of them have burned out yet, but we've only lived here two years and only bought the CFLs as space for them became available.
And I already replaced all my light bulbs with those dim, mercury-filled corkscrew kind!
Dim? The lower energy usage and heat output means I can put "100 Watt equivalent" bulbs in fixtures that are only supposed to have 60 Watt bulbs in them, that's quite a bit brighter. Plus they don't have that horrid long-wavelength tinge to them.
I can't be the only one that hates those damn things. They are useful in areas where the lights are left on for extended periods but I find them to be highly annoying in areas that I walk into and out of quickly. They don't even manage to reach full brightness before I've accomplished what I came into the room to do.
Most of he ones I have hit full brightness pretty much immediately. The ones that do take a while are "floodlight" shape and can go in enclosed spaces without getting fried, don't know whether they're just crappy or starting quickly isn't compatible with surviving that.
The amount of CO2 in the world is fixed. There is not more C02 in the world than there was several billion years ago.
No, the amount of carbon is fixed (ignoring unnoticeably small effects like gasses lost to space, and nuclear decay, and the like). If I burn a pencil, that carbon goes from graphite and organic material to CO2, and the amount of CO2 actually increases a tiny bit. Carbon can also be found in various kinds of rock, such as limestone... I think the carbon in limestone is actually carbon that used to be in CO2 in the atmosphere, since it's sedimentary rock.
As in, everything sold by intel in effect passes the cost of this judgment to the people buying the product. Since the dollar amount truly is not significant to alter intel's behavior this just becomes and embedded tax.
How so? It's not like Intel can just arbitrarily raise their prices to pay for this, if they could then they would have already raised them "just because".
I assume there's an equivalent of "contempt of court" over there, and probably that would let the firm on the receiving end sue for damages. Is this really the best time for them to be just digging themselves in deeper?
Are they working on the assumption that the Law and the Government are basically impotent?
If software controlling an aircraft crashes and causes the aircraft to crash too and that kills people, I'm pretty sure the software makers might end up liable too.
Actually it would probably be whoever decided that that software was OK to use in an aircraft. If I were to somehow get an aircraft and install Gentoo on some critical system, I'm pretty sure I'd be the one to get in trouble rather than the Gentoo or Linux (kernel) or Glibc people.
Probably the same place as always, ie, "you get what you pay for". If the users don't pay you, they can't reasonably expect anything from you. Well, maybe they could if you were to tell them that it would work (but who does that anyway), IIRC there tend to be rules about when people are harmed by relying on something you told them?
Moore's Law means that most functions that previously required arrays of expensive hardware can be done with a single server. If your needs are greater than that, surely it makes sense to buy capacity from a cloud computing vendor such as Amazon EC2.
This only makes sense if there are significant economies of scale in building larger data centers.
But although data centres are certainly needed now, do they really have a 'future'?
I work for an insurance TPA. We have multiple servers, for different security levels (production, FTP, dev, etc), different OSes (Windows, AIX, Linux), etc. We can't use a "cloud computing" provider because of the legal protection requirements for some of the data we handle, and if that wasn't the case we'd still not be able to because of paranoid clients (like the one that doesn't even like our primary production server, and pays extra for a special dedicated server with lots of extra security rules).
Slashdot Mirror
That said, I will watch the progress of these languages designed specifically for the task, though I don't see them unseating C/C++/Java any time soon.
I think I prefer languages matched primarily to the problem the program is solving, rather than languages matched primarily to the hardware used to run the program (primarily; some degree of the latter is necessary, for example if your hardware is a GPU or an FPGA). ;)
Harnessing muli-cpu machines with these installed is going to be.... Interesting.
No more interesting than existing many-core machines.
Seriously, having a couple dozen or more cores is nothing new.
Oh, and I have to wonder a little: there's very little infrastructure terrorism, instead there's much more information terrorism at work. (i.e. the Pentagon hack that lost us the plans to the next air superiority fighter).
WTF does stealing plans have to do with scaring people?
I think verbosity in moderation is necessary. I have read many an article with developers arguing that they don't need to document their code when their code is self-documenting. Do you make all of your variables and class/function/methods a single character for the sake of verbosity? I hope not. And I would think that reading and maintaining that code would be far less than a joy.
Long meaningful identifiers are useful. Needing 5 lines of setup for each API call is annoying, particularly if those 5 lines are usually the same. Requiring lots of redundant long keywords to "look more like English" is annoying. Large standard libraries that let you remove most of the tedious parts from your code are useful.
As enjoyable as it is to bash the newspapers for all of their real flaws, I don't understand how people have come to find paywalls outrageous. I really don't. The difference between newspapers and random hearsay is (in the best cases) a lot of effort in developing broad and balanced sources, fact checking, having an editorial process for some degree of fairness and accuracy (as much as that's suffered in the past decade) and generally putting out a "report" on a subject (that's why we call them reporters). That's a lot of hard, often tedious work that is not going to get done well unless someone is paid to do it.
Paywalls are evil because you can't link back to something, they break the web the same way that "check the referrer and redirect to the front page if they're from off-site" does. I'd say LWN has this exactly right, articles require a subscription (for the first week), but if a subscriber wants to cite or reference an article there's a link provided to them that lets non-subscribers see it.
For larger sites this would probably require a bit of extra work, maybe just have the link encode the ID of the subscriber who posted it so you can keep an eye on abuses.
The "power of working together" comes from shared individual resources and individual insights. There is no collective consciousness, no collective ideas.
That's actually debatable, given the degree to which there tend to be simultaneous inventions and how people's knowledge and ideas come in large part from collaboration, reading, and formal education.
Voluntary collaboration is capitalistic and leads to progress. Communism/socialism, on the other hand, demands forced collaboration.
Neither capitalism nor communism nor socialism has anything to do with collaboration. That's a third sphere, not economic (capitalism, socialism) or political (communism), but cultural, the positions being "fuck you" and "c'mon in".
"Most people in the West, including myself, were indoctrinated with the notion that extending the power of individuals necessarily diminishes the power of the state, and vice versa"
What? Western culture has been about empowering the individual, about heroes. Conversely, communist nations such as Russia and China are less about individuals, and more about "the good of many outweighs the good of the few".
The internet works because in many cases empowered individuals will choose the good of the many because it aligns so nicely with the good of the few/themselves. Some of these cases happen naturally, and some are the result of government setting a proper framework for interaction (so, extending the power of individuals by extending the power of government).
There is no "conversely" here.
By your logic, if the goverment only had Ford motorcars then GM cars ain't an alternative since their operation is geared for Ford.
Doesn't fly my friend.
Well, that's because your analogy is crap.
A better might be if they only had diesel cars, and had their own filling stations that only had tanks/pumps for diesel, and someone wants to sell them gasoline or compressed natural gas cars. But that doesn't really work since in that case it's the cars (what's being replaced) that are the "important" part, whereas really it's probably what isn't being replaced (the applications) that's the important part.
...everybody thinks they're average?
Ah! The typical open source supporter: instead of just admitting we can't meet your need, we'll just pretend your need doesn't exist.
Um, no. It's not "oops, can't do that, pretend they don't exist", it's probably something closer to "I think you're silly, but here's the source if you want to do it yourself". A lack of interest rather than a lack of ability.
The fact is, asynchronous communications are just so much more useful... and if you're going for "enjoyable" instead of "useful", then voice+video is nowhere near as good as the real world.
The slashdot article writes: "What does this say for the wisdom of non-US citizens relying on US companies for their business or communication?"
It's not so much that it's a US company, but closed source product.
Um, WTF?
This is about using a service provided by a US-based company, and the idea that that company might suddenly stop providing that service to you because the government said something stupid.
If you care about your software infrastructure - make sure you have the ability to fix (or hire independent consultants to fix) your software no matter what your vendor does - whether it's something innocent like going bankrupt, or deliberately breaking your infrastructure.
No, you actually don't want to do that. You want to make sure you can always get at your data, so you can migrate it to whatever new system you like. The reason you don't want to fix it yourself (including hiring someone), is that this will almost certainly be far more expensive because you pay for everything yourself instead of only paying about 1/n of the cost (with n being the number of other customers your provider has).
I'm not sure if I'd call polarization a dimension because there are only two angles you can work with, the angle you start with and the angle perpendicular to it. If you try to use a third angle, data from other two will mix with what you're trying to read. So I would say polarization adds another bit (allowing you to store twice as much), but not another full dimension (potentially allowing you to store orders of magnitude more).
But it's completely independent of the other dimensions, so it probably counts. Maybe this is the same sort of thing as the string theory people mean when they talk about extra "rolled up" dimensions, or how the surface of a sheet of paper and the surface of a paper towel tube are both two dimensional even though there are a lot less discrete positions going around the circumference of the tube?
X, Y, Z, wavelength, polarization
Just like how a tic-tac-toe board and a chess board are both two dimensional, despite one having a lot more locations than the other, the number of distinct polarizations or wavelengths this can detect doesn't matter. It's the number of different "things" it looks at.
So what happens when he vandalizes a car this way that happens to have a forward-facing camera mounted somewhere?
1) How much did you pay for them
I think about $10 or so. Maybe more like $7-$8.
2) Where did you buy them
Some at the Walgreens across the street, and I think some at Wal-Mart.
3) What does "pretty much" immediately mean
It means I was at work, where I didn't have one handy. Now that I'm home, I'd say it's less than a tenth of a second, barely long enough that I think I can see it brightening up. About the same as lower-wattage incandescent lights that also seem to be not-quite-instantaneous.
People always say 'oh my CFLs start instantly and were dirt cheap and lasted forever'. Then it turns out instantly is a minute, dirt cheap is $10 a bulb, and 'forever' is at 10 minutes a day.
Electricity costs about $1/watt-year. So for ~40 Watt savings (60 Watt incandescent vs 23 Watt "100 Watt replacement" CFL) and used maybe 6 hours/day (and more on weekends), they should pay for themselves in a year or so besides being brighter and a nicer color. And none of them have burned out yet, but we've only lived here two years and only bought the CFLs as space for them became available.
And I already replaced all my light bulbs with those dim, mercury-filled corkscrew kind!
Dim? The lower energy usage and heat output means I can put "100 Watt equivalent" bulbs in fixtures that are only supposed to have 60 Watt bulbs in them, that's quite a bit brighter. Plus they don't have that horrid long-wavelength tinge to them.
I can't be the only one that hates those damn things. They are useful in areas where the lights are left on for extended periods but I find them to be highly annoying in areas that I walk into and out of quickly. They don't even manage to reach full brightness before I've accomplished what I came into the room to do.
Most of he ones I have hit full brightness pretty much immediately. The ones that do take a while are "floodlight" shape and can go in enclosed spaces without getting fried, don't know whether they're just crappy or starting quickly isn't compatible with surviving that.
The amount of CO2 in the world is fixed. There is not more C02 in the world than there was several billion years ago.
No, the amount of carbon is fixed (ignoring unnoticeably small effects like gasses lost to space, and nuclear decay, and the like). If I burn a pencil, that carbon goes from graphite and organic material to CO2, and the amount of CO2 actually increases a tiny bit. Carbon can also be found in various kinds of rock, such as limestone... I think the carbon in limestone is actually carbon that used to be in CO2 in the atmosphere, since it's sedimentary rock.
As in, everything sold by intel in effect passes the cost of this judgment to the people buying the product. Since the dollar amount truly is not significant to alter intel's behavior this just becomes and embedded tax.
How so? It's not like Intel can just arbitrarily raise their prices to pay for this, if they could then they would have already raised them "just because".
and probably that would let the firm on the receiving end ...
Er, and probably something that would let the firm on the receiving end ....
I assume there's an equivalent of "contempt of court" over there, and probably that would let the firm on the receiving end sue for damages. Is this really the best time for them to be just digging themselves in deeper?
Are they working on the assumption that the Law and the Government are basically impotent?
(No, I did not RTFA. It's broken already.)
If software controlling an aircraft crashes and causes the aircraft to crash too and that kills people, I'm pretty sure the software makers might end up liable too.
Actually it would probably be whoever decided that that software was OK to use in an aircraft. If I were to somehow get an aircraft and install Gentoo on some critical system, I'm pretty sure I'd be the one to get in trouble rather than the Gentoo or Linux (kernel) or Glibc people.
The idea of making Microsoft pay for the billions of dollars of damage caused by flaws in its products is certainly attractive, but where would this idea leave free software coders?
Probably the same place as always, ie, "you get what you pay for". If the users don't pay you, they can't reasonably expect anything from you. Well, maybe they could if you were to tell them that it would work (but who does that anyway), IIRC there tend to be rules about when people are harmed by relying on something you told them?
Moore's Law means that most functions that previously required arrays of expensive hardware can be done with a single server. If your needs are greater than that, surely it makes sense to buy capacity from a cloud computing vendor such as Amazon EC2.
This only makes sense if there are significant economies of scale in building larger data centers.
But although data centres are certainly needed now, do they really have a 'future'?
I work for an insurance TPA. We have multiple servers, for different security levels (production, FTP, dev, etc), different OSes (Windows, AIX, Linux), etc. We can't use a "cloud computing" provider because of the legal protection requirements for some of the data we handle, and if that wasn't the case we'd still not be able to because of paranoid clients (like the one that doesn't even like our primary production server, and pays extra for a special dedicated server with lots of extra security rules).
Speaking as a Debian user who has had some major upgrade problems directly caused by glibc, anything that's "more upstream friendly" is okay by me.
I don't think this means "easy to upgrade", but rather "the maintainer isn't an asshole".
Industry standard is to report % /100 couples /1 year, so that should be what they are reporting.
Sure, but that's not what the article says. Could just be confused reporting, I suppose.