This is pretty damn cool technology that will probably be mainstream in 5 years or less. Leave it to slashdot commenters to completely miss the big picture and pick apart some stupid technical detail.
Myspace had around 80M users at peak. Even the almost forgotten orkut had 300M users at peak before FB came along and crushed it. Myspace was never contender for the throne.
> One of the the more likely scenarios for something else to beat out Facebook
How is that likely? Because you said so? Is there really any evidence that people have any reason to flock to niche-oriented social networks? I'm not saying FB can't be dethroned somehow. But the idea that nurses will flock to nursenet to talk nurse stuff with nurses *in lieu of* talking to their friends on Facebook... well, it's absurd.
After many years of reading and posting on this Slashdot, I'm out. The only people remaining here seem to be angry, old, self-centered Ayn-Rand-loving baby-men who begrudge everyone, whom they blame daily for their sad empty lives.
Back in the day, tech journalists were people who knew tech. Many were dabblers in coding. Even the worst of them usually knew enough to understand that a computer isn't a magic box.
Nowadays, tech journalists are usually just writers who like gadgets and who discovered that there's money to be made writing about tech. They have no background in computer science or information theory. They have virtually no understanding about what makes any of it tick, the problem space, or the solution space. So they write about how twitter should get the Nazis off their platform. And how Facebook needs to fix its fake news problem. And how google should filter results better to provide more truthful stories.
Because they don't understand technology, they write incensed articles complaining about these technology problems. The reality is that what we are seeing are social problems. And all of these problems existed before any of these companies existed. Sadly, I see some tech people starting to agree with these misguided assessments claiming technology failures. But I am heartened to see the slashdot community commentary here pretty firmly grounded in reality.
It's really starting to feel like the year 2000 again with the kind of hubris, absurd valuation claims, etc. coming from the tech world in general. One of my favorites: https://www.wired.com/1999/09/...
Based on recommendations that claimed.local can conflict with various UDP multicast LAN protocols, I recently changed my home DNS to be a subdomain of a domain I pay $10 a month for. I was skeptical doing this initially, but now that it's implemented, I like it better. With search domains set up, you don't even have to care that you now have a longish domain name for internal hosts.
Alternatively,.test is meant for local use even if it doesn't seem like the best name for the job.
FFS. Do you seriously deploy to the.prod TLD, which is also owned by google? You should write a book called "DNS Worst Practices". This stuff is spelled out quite clearly in RFCs.
Use dev.test, test.test, etc for your 2LDs. So myservice.dev.test, etc.
Better yet, just allocate domains for internal use on top of the one you certainly already own (e.g. dev.mydumbbusiness.com) so you can have myhost.dev.mydumbbusiness.com, etc. Or register a tld specifically for internal domains. In any case, you just manage the zone file in your internal DNS. You're already doing that if you're overriding the.dev and.prod TLDs internally.
> Completely impossible in C as C has nothing that resembles interfaces.
There are a couple reasons you are incorrect on this.
First, an "interface" has a few meanings in software development. It can simply mean the boundary between functions. A function declaration in a header file is an interface by this terminology.
Second, function pointers in C allow the type of interface definition I assume you are referring to (as in Go or Java for instance). The actual function called can be selected at runtime using this mechanism, and with a "self" struct pointer as a parameter, you can have all the functionality of an interface in other languages. Look at how COM objects can be called from and implemented in C for a good example of this (https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/13601/COM-in-plain-C). It's not quite as natural in C as in other languages, but it is certainly done.
Indeed. Many of the comments here seem to think the rest of the world is some sort of US colony.
US companies frequently have to censor things in various countries in order to adhere to local laws which are less liberal than those in the US. Facebook, Twitter, youtube, etc. all have special country-specific censorship in order to deal with government requests to block content. Germany particularly has stricter laws on threats and Nazi propaganda which end up being enforced by US companies on a regular basis.
You can't operate in China while breaking their laws. And despite China's crackdown on information, the net result of tech there is that the society and government are being forced to slowly liberalize their policies. Apple and other US companies' presence there is a net positive even when they are forced to abide by laws with which they'd rather not.
> the interpreter (or a large amount of the support libraries) are inevitably written in C or C++.
Whether a language bootstraps itself is super important when choosing a language for a project./s
"Well, gee boss. I realize you want us to build a web API for this internal data, and yeah we have this team of node developers, but JAVASCRIPT ISN'T SELF-BOOTSTRAPPING!!!! We must do it in C."
> essentially a giant abstraction layer for another language?
All computer languages are giant abstraction layers for machine language. Even your beloved C.
Without irony, you advocate for Credit Unions, which were established by federal regulations in the midst of the great depression to deal with the fact that lightly-regulated banking had destroyed the economy.
Contrary to the Ayn Rand libertarian fantasy ideals, regulation often creates stability, which is fundamental to economic growth. Chaos, which libertarians believe is a requirement for freedom and everything that is "good", is absolutely disastrous for real (not theoretical) markets.
You are correct of course that the article's mention of lending rates is absurd. Rates are at historical lows.
I'd disagree with your conclusion however, that "there has never been a better time to get a mortgage to buy a home". Interest rates in 2009-2012 were about the same as today, but housing prices had not re-inflated from the financial crash. I bought a house during that period which I sold 2.5 years later (due to a cross-country move) for nearly double what I paid. The same house is now "Zestimated" at another 20% above that price in about 2.5 years.
If incomes had grown at that rate, you wouldn't be wrong. But incomes have not grown at that rate.
> Just because you do not know them does not mean there are no differences...
The parent said nothing about whether s/he knows the differences.
> Lower power consumption > Better picture quality > Better durability and lighter weight
Virtually nobody cares about 1 and 3 - TVs are already cheap to operate, durable, and lightweight. And there's a very small market for the marginal improvement in picture quality. Today's cheap TVs already have amazingly good picture quality.
Slashdot Mirror
This is pretty damn cool technology that will probably be mainstream in 5 years or less. Leave it to slashdot commenters to completely miss the big picture and pick apart some stupid technical detail.
> Myspace was THE social networking site.
Myspace had around 80M users at peak. Even the almost forgotten orkut had 300M users at peak before FB came along and crushed it. Myspace was never contender for the throne.
> One of the the more likely scenarios for something else to beat out Facebook
How is that likely? Because you said so? Is there really any evidence that people have any reason to flock to niche-oriented social networks? I'm not saying FB can't be dethroned somehow. But the idea that nurses will flock to nursenet to talk nurse stuff with nurses *in lieu of* talking to their friends on Facebook... well, it's absurd.
After many years of reading and posting on this Slashdot, I'm out. The only people remaining here seem to be angry, old, self-centered Ayn-Rand-loving baby-men who begrudge everyone, whom they blame daily for their sad empty lives.
It's been fun but I won't miss it.
Uh, no. I've been coding for about 35 years. I'll take Python any day over the mess that is Perl. There's no comparison.
Back in the day, tech journalists were people who knew tech. Many were dabblers in coding. Even the worst of them usually knew enough to understand that a computer isn't a magic box.
Nowadays, tech journalists are usually just writers who like gadgets and who discovered that there's money to be made writing about tech. They have no background in computer science or information theory. They have virtually no understanding about what makes any of it tick, the problem space, or the solution space. So they write about how twitter should get the Nazis off their platform. And how Facebook needs to fix its fake news problem. And how google should filter results better to provide more truthful stories.
Because they don't understand technology, they write incensed articles complaining about these technology problems. The reality is that what we are seeing are social problems. And all of these problems existed before any of these companies existed. Sadly, I see some tech people starting to agree with these misguided assessments claiming technology failures. But I am heartened to see the slashdot community commentary here pretty firmly grounded in reality.
It's really starting to feel like the year 2000 again with the kind of hubris, absurd valuation claims, etc. coming from the tech world in general. One of my favorites: https://www.wired.com/1999/09/...
Based on recommendations that claimed .local can conflict with various UDP multicast LAN protocols, I recently changed my home DNS to be a subdomain of a domain I pay $10 a month for. I was skeptical doing this initially, but now that it's implemented, I like it better. With search domains set up, you don't even have to care that you now have a longish domain name for internal hosts.
Alternatively, .test is meant for local use even if it doesn't seem like the best name for the job.
No.
FFS. Do you seriously deploy to the .prod TLD, which is also owned by google? You should write a book called "DNS Worst Practices". This stuff is spelled out quite clearly in RFCs.
Use dev.test, test.test, etc for your 2LDs. So myservice.dev.test, etc.
Better yet, just allocate domains for internal use on top of the one you certainly already own (e.g. dev.mydumbbusiness.com) so you can have myhost.dev.mydumbbusiness.com, etc. Or register a tld specifically for internal domains. In any case, you just manage the zone file in your internal DNS. You're already doing that if you're overriding the .dev and .prod TLDs internally.
"Grandma, don't forget to set up a VPN before you use the WiFi at the coffee shop. Otherwise you deserve to get malware on your machine."
"What's WiFi?"
> Completely impossible in C as C has nothing that resembles interfaces.
There are a couple reasons you are incorrect on this.
First, an "interface" has a few meanings in software development. It can simply mean the boundary between functions. A function declaration in a header file is an interface by this terminology.
Second, function pointers in C allow the type of interface definition I assume you are referring to (as in Go or Java for instance). The actual function called can be selected at runtime using this mechanism, and with a "self" struct pointer as a parameter, you can have all the functionality of an interface in other languages. Look at how COM objects can be called from and implemented in C for a good example of this (https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/13601/COM-in-plain-C). It's not quite as natural in C as in other languages, but it is certainly done.
Indeed. Many of the comments here seem to think the rest of the world is some sort of US colony.
US companies frequently have to censor things in various countries in order to adhere to local laws which are less liberal than those in the US. Facebook, Twitter, youtube, etc. all have special country-specific censorship in order to deal with government requests to block content. Germany particularly has stricter laws on threats and Nazi propaganda which end up being enforced by US companies on a regular basis.
You can't operate in China while breaking their laws. And despite China's crackdown on information, the net result of tech there is that the society and government are being forced to slowly liberalize their policies. Apple and other US companies' presence there is a net positive even when they are forced to abide by laws with which they'd rather not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
> Rust? Which compiles to LLVM? Which is written in C++? Which uses the C runtime?
Your ignorance is truly on display now.
> only people who are hopelessly uncool and out of touch continue to use it
People have been saying this about slashdot for a decade.
> the interpreter (or a large amount of the support libraries) are inevitably written in C or C++.
Whether a language bootstraps itself is super important when choosing a language for a project. /s
"Well, gee boss. I realize you want us to build a web API for this internal data, and yeah we have this team of node developers, but JAVASCRIPT ISN'T SELF-BOOTSTRAPPING!!!! We must do it in C."
> essentially a giant abstraction layer for another language?
All computer languages are giant abstraction layers for machine language. Even your beloved C.
Without irony, you advocate for Credit Unions, which were established by federal regulations in the midst of the great depression to deal with the fact that lightly-regulated banking had destroyed the economy.
Contrary to the Ayn Rand libertarian fantasy ideals, regulation often creates stability, which is fundamental to economic growth. Chaos, which libertarians believe is a requirement for freedom and everything that is "good", is absolutely disastrous for real (not theoretical) markets.
Yeah, that's a cute story.
But banks are making all-time record profits.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/u...
Cast iron is as effective at the end of a spear and a bit cheaper. Heck, people will pay you to take away an old cast iron tub.
You are correct of course that the article's mention of lending rates is absurd. Rates are at historical lows.
I'd disagree with your conclusion however, that "there has never been a better time to get a mortgage to buy a home". Interest rates in 2009-2012 were about the same as today, but housing prices had not re-inflated from the financial crash. I bought a house during that period which I sold 2.5 years later (due to a cross-country move) for nearly double what I paid. The same house is now "Zestimated" at another 20% above that price in about 2.5 years.
If incomes had grown at that rate, you wouldn't be wrong. But incomes have not grown at that rate.
Umm, you're not even a casual gamer. This is how FPSes have been played for over 20 years:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
> Just because you do not know them does not mean there are no differences...
The parent said nothing about whether s/he knows the differences.
> Lower power consumption
> Better picture quality
> Better durability and lighter weight
Virtually nobody cares about 1 and 3 - TVs are already cheap to operate, durable, and lightweight. And there's a very small market for the marginal improvement in picture quality. Today's cheap TVs already have amazingly good picture quality.
Barnes & Noble is still trying to sell tablets.
There's the cloud and there's the cloud. There are billion-dollar companies whose businesses rely entirely on Amazon's cloud.
> perhaps this is a good time to buy low
It may be. But you could have said this for the last couple years with the declining prices of energy stocks, and you'd have been wrong.