Nuclear has few operational issues, but significant failure issues.
Coal has significant operational issues, but few failure issues.
Oil has both, incidentally. Why do we use it so much?
I'm no fan of coal, but it will be around for decades. I just wish we would use this 'event' to see the true downside of nuclear and move our investment money towards sustainable power.
I'm with you there. I'm willing to accept nuclear for a short transitional period if it can really be made a lot safer than this, though with greed and corruption being what they are, I'm pretty sure that they'lll always be cutting corners on the safety measures. But most of all I want to reduce our reliance on coal and oil as fast as possible.
I had no problems with FF 3.6.13, but it keeps updating automatically to.14,.15 and.16, and those all freeze regularly. I thought Firefox left these kind of stability issues behind it years ago. What happened?
I think you are completely missing the point he's making. It's not about the exact amount of carbon on Earth (who cares about that?), it's about the total amount of carbon in the universe and where it comes from.
I don't think it's missing the point. If he said the Earth is mostly carbon, either he is misinformed or he didn't explain himself very well.
Or he's misquoted. Personally I consider it more likely that he expresses himself badly in an interview or that he's misquoted, than that he's wrong about such a simple fact that's easily checked and rather central to his theory. (Though it's obviously not merely about carbon on Earth; it's about carbon in the universe that's not locked in white dwarfs and other heavy stars.)
There's more stuff in the interview that's too clearly wrong, like small stars producing hydrogen and helium. They fuse it. These kind of basic mistakes seem rather unlikely when he's able to calculate how long it would take to produce carbon after the big bang. And considering how seriously professors take him, my guess he was either badly quoted in that article, or he just didn't express himself very well. Either seems much more likely than that he's completely wrong on something rather basic and central to what he's working on.
Of course the tsunami triggered the actual disaster, but the reason the plant wasn't designed to withstand such a disaster is surely a matter of money, politics, greed and corruption. The IAEA had warned Japan a couple of years ago that the safety of many of their nuclear plants was lacking. Japan didn't do anything with that warning.
The Fukushima incident has shown that even with multiple massive accidents, even old designs hold up pretty damn well.
Are you completely insane or what? Would you care to stay up to date which what is going on in Japan you would not write such bullshit.
I occasionally read The Register, so I've gotten used to that kind of bullshit. Their position is that Fukushima is a triumph for the nuclear safety record, because it was designed to withstand only much weaker earthquakes, and yet hasn't turned out to be worse than Chernobyl. I have no idea what straws they think they're grasping at, but they're not there.
Its true. Somewhere in the next 1000 years (could be tomorrow), the flank of La Palma is going to collapse and devastate the Atlantic coast. Comfortable idea, isn't it?
I think you are completely missing the point he's making. It's not about the exact amount of carbon on Earth (who cares about that?), it's about the total amount of carbon in the universe and where it comes from. He's claiming that according to the current theories on how it's created and released by stars don't predict enough carbon; the universe would have to be 21 million years old.
He might be wrong, but I'm pretty sure he already knows more about this particular subject than 99% of the people on Slashdot, and he's going to learn a lot of interesting things on his quest to figure this out. It might lead to a new Big Bang theory, or something else entirely, or maybe just an even better understanding of math and physics. In any case, something good is going to come out of this. A boy like that shouldn't aim too low.
Only faint glimpses of his theory show through the interview, but it does sound like an interesting point. I don't know enough about astrophysics to know how much carbon gets released in supernovae, but he apparently does. He might be onto something here. Or not, but at least it's going to be an interesting exercise.
He doesn't have to work on his earth-shattering theory right away. He just has to think and learn a lot. It's perfectly okay if his earth-shattering theory comes when he's 20.
Looking at the tone of the piece, I'm pretty sure it's not a troll and it's not a marketing hit piece, and in case you were too lazy to click the link above, he *is* a professional developer. I think it's straight from the heart, and it hit so many chords with me, I couldn't help but wipe a tear from my eye. And I don't even do web development.
I don't doubt it's straight from the heart. But most of the points he makes paint him as a very limited, inexperienced or just not terribly bright developer. Most of his points are just not reasonable.
Second, I love how everyone is ignoring the points he backed up well. Any takers for the packaging mess in OSX that resembles Windows more and more?
Sure, OS X package management is not like Linux package management. No non-linux OS has Linux-style package management. If that's what you wanted, then that's what you should have chosen. It doesn't mean Macs are useless for development, though. I'm using grails, and that works absolutely seamlessly in OS X. Package management s a non-issue for me.
Besides, he's a Linux sysadmin! Why the fuck does he even consider using something other than Linux? And when he does, why does he think that "it's not Linux" is a valid complaint? He should have known that from the start, and if he didn't, he's an idiot. His complaint is no different from that of a Windows user that can't get to grips with Linux or OS X.
How 'bout that price tag?
I don't skimp on professional tools. Especially not when my employer is paying.
Emacs: until you've written code with it - and I mean plenty of code - you just won't understand.
If that's what you want to use, then why don't you? OS X comes standard with Emacs, and if you don't like that version of emacs, there's a whole bunch of other emacsen you can choose to install. This is in no way a failing of OS X, it's the failing of a programmer who chooses not to use his favourite tool, and blames that decision on someone else.
Portability/platform issues: this really shouldn't be an issue, especially with something as high-level as web dev, but unfortunately, it sounds like an OSX problem.
It's not. The problem is his choice of platform without regard for his requirements. Would it be fair if I criticized Linux for not supporting Outlook which I'm required to use for work? Be aware of your requirements before you pick a platform. If Linux packages are an issue for you, then obviously Linux might be a better choice. That doesn't mean other platforms are bad, it just means they're less suitable for your needs. (Though plenty of people have managed to do Linux development on OS X just fine using Gentoo.)
Quite frankly, I'm glad to see this kind of article get posted. We have far too many Apple and MS fanboys here;
You don't like to be confronted with people with different opinions than your own? We don't exactly have many MS fanboys here, and Apple gets plenty of criticism here when it's justified. It's just not justified in this particular case. I'm no mac fan. I'm glad to be rid of my iPhone, and prefer Android. But I do like Macs exactly because they make such fine development platforms. But I don't develop specifically for the Linux kernel.
this kind of from the heart, in the trenches opinion piece is much more worthy than some marketing piece about the latest shiny piece of crap to come out of Steve Jobs' ass.
I don't know. You could argue that Steve's shiny crap at least counts as "news". And gadgets are popular with nerds. A reactionary "I don't like stuff I'm not used to" piece like this is neither news nor useful. "Successful startup founder turns out to be an idiot" might be, though.
Apparently that's not how you do things "when you are older".
Keep in mind that by "when you are older", he means older than a teenager. He wrote that Macworld letter in 1999 when he was 15, so he's 26 or 27 now. eBay is probably his second job, so he's not exactly the font of wisdom and experience that he'd like to be. He's just someone who just started on the road of gaining some experience. Not all of it good, apparently, but he'll eventually get older, and hopefully a bit wiser.
Windows is cheaper, but also much worse as development platform. It's not even a unix! Your command line is practically nonexistent (or should have been), and there's no possible way to even pretend to be somewhat like linux. Well, there's cygwin, but that's still quite a bit worse than OS X with macports or gentoo.
The choice here is really Linux or OS X, where Linux has the advantage of being more like your server, and OS X has the advantage of supporting crappy Microsoft stuff like Outlook and Office that for some reason everybody in the business worlds insists on using.
I'm guessing your leet Web skills brought in more than that last year, which is why you feel comfortable calling him an "amateur."
I may not be as rich as he is, but I do have more (and probably more diverse, development-wise) experience than he does. And I recognize an amateurish rant when I see one. There are certainly a few valid points hidden in there, but for the most part, he's not being terribly reasonable. He's blaming his own failure on others, despite the fact that it was his own choice. He's also assuming that what goes for him, goes for everybody. There are a lot of people out there for whom a Mac is a perfect development machine. There's only a problem when you want your dev machine to be identical to your production environment, but that's not necessarily a requirement when you've got a professionally maintained test, acceptance and production environment.
GP is not wrong, though. TFA sounds incredibly amateurish. Fresh out of college, probably, used to one particular environment, chooses a different one expecting it to be pretty much identical, not prepared to deal with the consequences of the mess he's making, and then blaming it on this stupid OS that he chose. And to make things worse, he likes to pretend that he's the older and wiser person, and gets rather childish about that.
If your application environment is highly OS dependent (note that it doesn't have to be), and you want your dev machine to be identical to your production environment (also not necessarily vital), then it's obvious that you need to run the same OS, and preferably the same distribution and version. Of course you can also do that in a VM if it's really that important to you. However, the professional thing to do is to make sure your production environment is well-maintained, and you don't add new dependencies willy-nilly without discussing that with the maintainer of the production environment.
I don't completely disagree with TFA, though. He's completely correct that macports is hell. (A Gentoo lib tree works very well, however.) And in amateurish webshops and startups, it's not unusual to make a big mess of environments and dependencies. If you don't want to deal with that, think about your choices and consider their consequences. You might be better off working on the JVM.
FPS bots have nothing to do with AI. When you've got access to exact coordinates, hitting is a matter of simple math. Making believable FPS bots it not a matter of making them intelligent, it's about disguising their superior data access. If you showed the bot the same rendered polygons that human players get to see, then it becomes a matter of intelligence.
AI is far more relevant in strategy games, and still practically unexplored in story driven CRPGs. And that last bit sounds a bit like what Improvisio might be about (but I haven't looked at it yet).
The differences in safety mechanisms are enormous, though. Chernobyl had very little in the way of backup safety, and even lacked proper containment if I understand correctly. Fukushima has several layers of containment.
Moore was better than Brosnan. Moore had style and irony. James Bond has to be a bit campy. It shouldn't be indistinguishable from other nameless spy thrillers.
That is not entirely true. Fukushima is close to very large population centers. Even with much less radioactive pollution, it could still cause more deaths, cancer and birth defects than Chernobyl. Of course in order for that to happen, absolutely everything that can possibly go wrong has to go spectacularly wrong, and the news of the past few days has to be way too optimistic, so it's extremely unlikely that it'll be worse than Chernobyl, but it's not completely impossible.
Could you describe the difference between evolution caused by increased radiation and evolution caused by what ever else? Evolution is just changes and nothing more. Stuff happens and sometimes it turns out to be something that changes things.
No, evolution is not just changes. Evolution is the effect of long term adaptation of a population to the environment through the combined effects of mutation, natural selection and reproduction. Mere mutation alone doesn't give you evolution.
The speed of evolution is not directly proportional to the mutation rate. If the mutation rate is too high, beneficial mutations are quickly swamped in harmful mutations, and unable to contribute to an increased chance of reproduction. What does speed up evolution is a change in environment. I bet Chernobyl will result in organisms in the area being more resistant to radiation and radioactive pollution.
Slashdot Mirror
Good thing there is still GPS, NTP, etc.
That's what I've been wondering. With constant GPS signal all over the place, what do we need land-based atomic clock synchronisation for?
Nuclear has few operational issues, but significant failure issues.
Coal has significant operational issues, but few failure issues.
Oil has both, incidentally. Why do we use it so much?
I'm no fan of coal, but it will be around for decades. I just wish we would use this 'event' to see the true downside of nuclear and move our investment money towards sustainable power.
I'm with you there. I'm willing to accept nuclear for a short transitional period if it can really be made a lot safer than this, though with greed and corruption being what they are, I'm pretty sure that they'lll always be cutting corners on the safety measures. But most of all I want to reduce our reliance on coal and oil as fast as possible.
I had no problems with FF 3.6.13, but it keeps updating automatically to .14, .15 and .16, and those all freeze regularly. I thought Firefox left these kind of stability issues behind it years ago. What happened?
I don't think it's missing the point. If he said the Earth is mostly carbon, either he is misinformed or he didn't explain himself very well.
Or he's misquoted. Personally I consider it more likely that he expresses himself badly in an interview or that he's misquoted, than that he's wrong about such a simple fact that's easily checked and rather central to his theory. (Though it's obviously not merely about carbon on Earth; it's about carbon in the universe that's not locked in white dwarfs and other heavy stars.)
You seem to be interpreting my agreement with you as some sort of disagreement. There's no need for that.
There's more stuff in the interview that's too clearly wrong, like small stars producing hydrogen and helium. They fuse it. These kind of basic mistakes seem rather unlikely when he's able to calculate how long it would take to produce carbon after the big bang. And considering how seriously professors take him, my guess he was either badly quoted in that article, or he just didn't express himself very well. Either seems much more likely than that he's completely wrong on something rather basic and central to what he's working on.
Of course the tsunami triggered the actual disaster, but the reason the plant wasn't designed to withstand such a disaster is surely a matter of money, politics, greed and corruption. The IAEA had warned Japan a couple of years ago that the safety of many of their nuclear plants was lacking. Japan didn't do anything with that warning.
Are you completely insane or what?
Would you care to stay up to date which what is going on in Japan you would not write such bullshit.
I occasionally read The Register, so I've gotten used to that kind of bullshit. Their position is that Fukushima is a triumph for the nuclear safety record, because it was designed to withstand only much weaker earthquakes, and yet hasn't turned out to be worse than Chernobyl. I have no idea what straws they think they're grasping at, but they're not there.
Its true. Somewhere in the next 1000 years (could be tomorrow), the flank of La Palma is going to collapse and devastate the Atlantic coast. Comfortable idea, isn't it?
All it takes is one accident, and you've got a disaster on your hands.
Eh? The reactors at the Fukushima no.1 complex were hit by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake, THEN a 12m high tsunami, and THEN several explosions.
You say that as if they're independent events. They're not.
I think you are completely missing the point he's making. It's not about the exact amount of carbon on Earth (who cares about that?), it's about the total amount of carbon in the universe and where it comes from. He's claiming that according to the current theories on how it's created and released by stars don't predict enough carbon; the universe would have to be 21 million years old.
He might be wrong, but I'm pretty sure he already knows more about this particular subject than 99% of the people on Slashdot, and he's going to learn a lot of interesting things on his quest to figure this out. It might lead to a new Big Bang theory, or something else entirely, or maybe just an even better understanding of math and physics. In any case, something good is going to come out of this. A boy like that shouldn't aim too low.
Only faint glimpses of his theory show through the interview, but it does sound like an interesting point. I don't know enough about astrophysics to know how much carbon gets released in supernovae, but he apparently does. He might be onto something here. Or not, but at least it's going to be an interesting exercise.
He doesn't have to work on his earth-shattering theory right away. He just has to think and learn a lot. It's perfectly okay if his earth-shattering theory comes when he's 20.
He went on a planned vacation to Brazil. Sony's lawyers tried to spin that as fleeing the country.
Looking at the tone of the piece, I'm pretty sure it's not a troll and it's not a marketing hit piece, and in case you were too lazy to click the link above, he *is* a professional developer. I think it's straight from the heart, and it hit so many chords with me, I couldn't help but wipe a tear from my eye. And I don't even do web development.
I don't doubt it's straight from the heart. But most of the points he makes paint him as a very limited, inexperienced or just not terribly bright developer. Most of his points are just not reasonable.
Second, I love how everyone is ignoring the points he backed up well. Any takers for the packaging mess in OSX that resembles Windows more and more?
Sure, OS X package management is not like Linux package management. No non-linux OS has Linux-style package management. If that's what you wanted, then that's what you should have chosen. It doesn't mean Macs are useless for development, though. I'm using grails, and that works absolutely seamlessly in OS X. Package management s a non-issue for me.
Besides, he's a Linux sysadmin! Why the fuck does he even consider using something other than Linux? And when he does, why does he think that "it's not Linux" is a valid complaint? He should have known that from the start, and if he didn't, he's an idiot. His complaint is no different from that of a Windows user that can't get to grips with Linux or OS X.
How 'bout that price tag?
I don't skimp on professional tools. Especially not when my employer is paying.
If that's what you want to use, then why don't you? OS X comes standard with Emacs, and if you don't like that version of emacs, there's a whole bunch of other emacsen you can choose to install. This is in no way a failing of OS X, it's the failing of a programmer who chooses not to use his favourite tool, and blames that decision on someone else.
It's not. The problem is his choice of platform without regard for his requirements. Would it be fair if I criticized Linux for not supporting Outlook which I'm required to use for work? Be aware of your requirements before you pick a platform. If Linux packages are an issue for you, then obviously Linux might be a better choice. That doesn't mean other platforms are bad, it just means they're less suitable for your needs. (Though plenty of people have managed to do Linux development on OS X just fine using Gentoo.)
Quite frankly, I'm glad to see this kind of article get posted. We have far too many Apple and MS fanboys here;
You don't like to be confronted with people with different opinions than your own? We don't exactly have many MS fanboys here, and Apple gets plenty of criticism here when it's justified. It's just not justified in this particular case. I'm no mac fan. I'm glad to be rid of my iPhone, and prefer Android. But I do like Macs exactly because they make such fine development platforms. But I don't develop specifically for the Linux kernel.
this kind of from the heart, in the trenches opinion piece is much more worthy than some marketing piece about the latest shiny piece of crap to come out of Steve Jobs' ass.
I don't know. You could argue that Steve's shiny crap at least counts as "news". And gadgets are popular with nerds. A reactionary "I don't like stuff I'm not used to" piece like this is neither news nor useful. "Successful startup founder turns out to be an idiot" might be, though.
Apparently that's not how you do things "when you are older".
Keep in mind that by "when you are older", he means older than a teenager. He wrote that Macworld letter in 1999 when he was 15, so he's 26 or 27 now. eBay is probably his second job, so he's not exactly the font of wisdom and experience that he'd like to be. He's just someone who just started on the road of gaining some experience. Not all of it good, apparently, but he'll eventually get older, and hopefully a bit wiser.
Windows is cheaper, but also much worse as development platform. It's not even a unix! Your command line is practically nonexistent (or should have been), and there's no possible way to even pretend to be somewhat like linux. Well, there's cygwin, but that's still quite a bit worse than OS X with macports or gentoo.
The choice here is really Linux or OS X, where Linux has the advantage of being more like your server, and OS X has the advantage of supporting crappy Microsoft stuff like Outlook and Office that for some reason everybody in the business worlds insists on using.
I'm guessing your leet Web skills brought in more than that last year, which is why you feel comfortable calling him an "amateur."
I may not be as rich as he is, but I do have more (and probably more diverse, development-wise) experience than he does. And I recognize an amateurish rant when I see one. There are certainly a few valid points hidden in there, but for the most part, he's not being terribly reasonable. He's blaming his own failure on others, despite the fact that it was his own choice. He's also assuming that what goes for him, goes for everybody. There are a lot of people out there for whom a Mac is a perfect development machine. There's only a problem when you want your dev machine to be identical to your production environment, but that's not necessarily a requirement when you've got a professionally maintained test, acceptance and production environment.
GP is not wrong, though. TFA sounds incredibly amateurish. Fresh out of college, probably, used to one particular environment, chooses a different one expecting it to be pretty much identical, not prepared to deal with the consequences of the mess he's making, and then blaming it on this stupid OS that he chose. And to make things worse, he likes to pretend that he's the older and wiser person, and gets rather childish about that.
If your application environment is highly OS dependent (note that it doesn't have to be), and you want your dev machine to be identical to your production environment (also not necessarily vital), then it's obvious that you need to run the same OS, and preferably the same distribution and version. Of course you can also do that in a VM if it's really that important to you. However, the professional thing to do is to make sure your production environment is well-maintained, and you don't add new dependencies willy-nilly without discussing that with the maintainer of the production environment.
I don't completely disagree with TFA, though. He's completely correct that macports is hell. (A Gentoo lib tree works very well, however.) And in amateurish webshops and startups, it's not unusual to make a big mess of environments and dependencies. If you don't want to deal with that, think about your choices and consider their consequences. You might be better off working on the JVM.
FPS bots have nothing to do with AI. When you've got access to exact coordinates, hitting is a matter of simple math. Making believable FPS bots it not a matter of making them intelligent, it's about disguising their superior data access. If you showed the bot the same rendered polygons that human players get to see, then it becomes a matter of intelligence.
AI is far more relevant in strategy games, and still practically unexplored in story driven CRPGs. And that last bit sounds a bit like what Improvisio might be about (but I haven't looked at it yet).
The differences in safety mechanisms are enormous, though. Chernobyl had very little in the way of backup safety, and even lacked proper containment if I understand correctly. Fukushima has several layers of containment.
Moore was better than Brosnan. Moore had style and irony. James Bond has to be a bit campy. It shouldn't be indistinguishable from other nameless spy thrillers.
You call the Starship Troopers movie "Saving Private Ryan in space"? Have you really missed all those heavy handed fascism themes?
That is not entirely true. Fukushima is close to very large population centers. Even with much less radioactive pollution, it could still cause more deaths, cancer and birth defects than Chernobyl. Of course in order for that to happen, absolutely everything that can possibly go wrong has to go spectacularly wrong, and the news of the past few days has to be way too optimistic, so it's extremely unlikely that it'll be worse than Chernobyl, but it's not completely impossible.
Could you describe the difference between evolution caused by increased radiation and evolution caused by what ever else? Evolution is just changes and nothing more. Stuff happens and sometimes it turns out to be something that changes things.
No, evolution is not just changes. Evolution is the effect of long term adaptation of a population to the environment through the combined effects of mutation, natural selection and reproduction. Mere mutation alone doesn't give you evolution.
The speed of evolution is not directly proportional to the mutation rate. If the mutation rate is too high, beneficial mutations are quickly swamped in harmful mutations, and unable to contribute to an increased chance of reproduction. What does speed up evolution is a change in environment. I bet Chernobyl will result in organisms in the area being more resistant to radiation and radioactive pollution.
Then again, since PS3's are sold at a loss, they really don't have much power to complain.
It's not the USAF's fault that Sony has a retarded business model.