That's not true.. The poor get welfare and medicaide. The government and constitution makes no mention of the poor or health so technically you might be right, but these and similar laws were enacted as a matter of policy. Likewise, as a matter of policy, the middle class is purposefully left to fend for itself. With the generally accepted idea that a free market of employers and employees can produce the most efficient / desirable outcomes for both. Thus very few states have any laws mandating or prohibiting unions. The few exceptions are min wage, max work hours without overtime pay. But states tend to be more liberal than the federal government.
"Furthermore, since they bind to variables, changing the value of the variable outside the closure is reflected inside it:" True, but I've always considered this a negative.. The exact opposite of compartmentalization and data-hiding. Introducing bugs because it can cause unwanted surprise.
function foo(x) { var v = function() { return x + 9; }; for (; x > 0; x--) { } ; return v; }
Obviously contrived because I"m lazy, But in a sufficiently large function this type of bug is not uncommon. I more prefer the lisp and other immutable language style lambdas, or the Java style which requires declaring inputs final - makes it much more obvious the lack of side-effect programming.
You just repeated what I said. But the function that creates a function with closed context is the vast majority of jQuery code that I've seen. But every place I've seen closures used have been either to minimize the call parameter stack or to compartmentalize callback material. Yes, there are more clever things you can do, but really it's just syntactic sugar around object oriented data-hiding (at least in Java).
They launched space shuttles with assembly. This is more a testament to the coders given tight requirements that hardware just couldn't provide, and less to the language.
I've recently gone back to C++ programming after 12 years of perl/python/PHP/Java/bash/SQL. O.M.G. do I hate C++. All these other languages were created in response to C/C++'s common-coding pitfalls. String processing, memory management catch-22s, loose coding contracts, horrid cross-platform capability (Windows/Linux/Mac might as well have different source-code for all the damn ifdef's), insane compilation times (even on modern i7s). Since the core capabilities of C/C++ are so minimal, it's hard to link two 3rd party libraries together because they'll have incompatible base frameworks / assumptions. So every team re-invents anything the native OS/platform didn't provide.
That being said, I'd hate to see an OS written in anything other than C - but by definition, they enforce a common coding convention to all higher layers, and can't leverage 3rd party libraries, so they don't have many of these concerns.
"something as cool as jQuery wouldn't exist without closure support" jQuery is first-and-foremost a query language that merges 3 or 4 haphazard web namespaces into a single easy to use query-syntax. It's basically xpath on steroids. This plus a wealth of library operations that allow DOM / style manipulation in a more concise manner than straight-javascript and, of course, in a cross-browser manner..
THIS is what makes jQuery cool.
This drew the attention of developers which created a wealth of modules that's helped propel it well into the future.
I don't get the closure purism (perl, python, lisp, etc). It's nothing more than wrapping a pointer to heap allocated memory in a class. E.g. C++, Java classes. Or with function-pointers in C.
function op(d) { return function(e) { return d + e; } }
var f = op(9);
for (var x = 0; x < 10; x++) { sum += f(x); }
v.s.
typedef int (*op_t)(int); int myfunc(int x) { return 9 + x; } op_t op = myfunc; for (int x = 0; x < 10; x++) { sum += op(x); }
Not a whole lot of savings. I realize these arn't exactly the same, lamba builders allow slightly more abstraction, but from a practical matter - e.g. adaptive event handling / callbacks, it's the same deal.
Good lord, are you people still using PC-centric data models? Automatic Facial recognition and peer-scanning/meta-data-tagging is an awesome form of data-mining of thousands of pictures. I typically have 5 or 6 tags on any picture of interest from a collection and at least 2 tags on all the rest.
The Demi-God your particular sect of Catholicism chose to worship is circumstantial in my opinion (as a French Arcadian recovering catholic). I never gave a second's thought to the pre-occupation of Catholicism towards [the virgin] Mary until I heard an outsider say "But you Catholics over-emphasize Mary". Then I remembered that next to every picture of Jesus I ever saw in a Church, there was Mary, sitting at EQUAL elevation. To the left of the Alter was Jesus, to the right Mary, with equal sized statues. No Paul, No Peter (the basis of Catholic might-makes-right against other Christian sects), No Apostles in 'last supper' fashion.. Just Jesus and sexless super-nun-mom. My home (and that of most Catholics we'd visit) have pictures of whom? 3 guesses.. And there are LOTS of pictures/statues there-of. And even if you see a cross-most likely it's bare (with an occasional rosary with a figurine that causes consternation to eastern orthedoxers)
Consider that I spent more time praying to Mary than God - and almost no time to Jesus. I said hail-marry 25 times and our father only 5 times in a given Rosary. When I would hear a baptist or born again Christian use Jesus 10 times in a single paragraph, I'd whince thinking their culture was irreverant / dis-respectful, or just in bad taste. But why would evoking Mary over and over as someone to 'hear our prayers' be more humble? And for all this Jesus is king crap I went through, All the emotional attachment I achieved were for the abstract dis-combobulated Holy Ghost and God the Father.. Jesus was just the under-achieving son. And thus I was able to emotionally detach Jesus. He wasn't God to me.. After 20 years of Catholicism, he wasn't God.. He was part of God's family.. Just like Mary.
While my experiences are anecdotal, my point is that whatever the intent of the Trinity + Mary, it's effect was to dis-allusion me against Baptists and Born-againers who were singularly focused on Jesus. And then when I confronted Catholicism later on in life, I heard not difference, but subdued agreement with these sects - my sense of religious superior reverence was disillusioned. Thus invalidating the entire suite of absurd culture-fucking organizations. Catholicism, in short does indeed promote demi-Godary as is subtle yet evident in at least some youth.
The teachers I respected the most either had interesting course material (though they didn't matter at all), or were brutally honest about their disdain for our lack of quality / effort (though I didn't take it personally because I was the rare exception - so I guess it's not a good example in terms of effects on personal motivation). Jerimiad was once written on the class board after a mid-term with an average grade of 20%. The next two lectures were not fun. Some of my teachers referred to us as peons. And all I can say is that this is the result of successive grade-inflation. Beware the demise of American society. The two class system is upon us.
When did sports players worry about feelings when their coach told them they're the worst excuse for a foot-ball player they've ever seen in their lives? No, these players kick their testosterone into gear and try and earn the respect of their fallen coach (or they wash out - because they are already giving their all). Likewise, a person who knows they can do better take criticism as a challenge. This femaleification of our education system is destroying america. We need to challenge students, and stop worrying about their (or their parent's) feelings. Wash outs are SUPPOSED to happen. This is how you pick what you want to be when you grow up.. By washing out of stuff you have a delusion of adequacy about, and boning up and accepting that you need to be a mechanic or street-cleaner or starving-artist.
Now I'm going to have to look this up, but from memory, I'm pretty sure that 'printing' money has little to do with the devaluation of the Chinese Yuan to the US dollar. If they were printing, then yes, this would be the effect, but this ONLY affects past holdings. But the US isn't holding Chinese assets, it's the other way around. China holds trillions of dollars of US cash (in the form of government ($0.8T) and private bonds). These assets do not rise with inflation and thus are devalued by the printing of US money (but are actually aided by the printing of Chinese Yuan). Cross Currency valuation is purely a function of Trade balance, which is affected by relative changes in the money supply, relative changes in interest rates, relative changes in stock / asset values, and of course ultimately net export/import (of which the purchase of stocks/bonds/assets are included). In other words, the US buys lots of chinese products that require paying Chinese companies with Yuans, thus the US has to buy Yuans with USD. Since few people are ever buying USD's with Yuans, it SHOULD be the case that the price of Yuans rises. But the Chinese government monitors this and purchases corresponding amounts of USD's for the purpose of buying US bonds (private and public). Now they may or many not need to print money in order to make those purchases - being Communistic, I'm not exactly sure how their cash flow works.
China has signed to the WTO, and this practice is at least in part in violation of their rules, thus US is seeking punative damages - which is pretty much all that the US can do.. We're not crazy enough to have our government print $1T and try to buy Chinese assets to devalue our own currency. Especially since they'd just print $2T that year and counter-balance us. It's a lose lose situation.. We'd foster inflation (since most of our goods purchased from China would necessarily go up in price, and in the short term the purchase volumes won't decrease proportionately - there's simply no alternative providers), and more importantly China would block or nationalize any assets we purchased anyway. We COULD tax purchases from China - this is classic protectionism, but this has much greater consequences in the WTO than currency devaluation (since on it's face currency devaluation helps the US more than China, at least in the short term).
What does a 401k have to do with a social safety net? Do you realize what SS was designed for? The great depression left millions with nothing to eat. So are you suggesting that your F'D mis-managed 401k funds when they dry up at age 70 are all the society owes you? That and the freedom to feed off of trash cans? Oh, that's right.. That's what family and churches are for. Except. What if you're a widow with no children, and are estranged from other relatives. What if the entire town is a ghost town.
Sorry, should have invested in a 'better' portfolio. N.M.P. Don't let the class system hit you on the way down.
Now if you're fine with seeing old people on the street in your home town, then go ahead and advocate the demise of S.S. (e.g. privatization which will produce such a stock boom/bust period, due to a one shifting of massive funds, that you'll likely be crying in less than 10 years after it's activated). Still, It's a legitimate political course of action.
As to whether you think YOU will have anything in S.S. when you retire.. That's up to you and your generation isn't it? It's this generation that's going to decide the funding reserves for ourselves - through our election of public officers. The next generation will have the moral quandary of not immediately cutting off the preceding generation - few people are willing to cut people off cold - they much prefer to starve people in the distant future - with things like options to buy lottery tickets, etc. But keep in mind, the government prints money, so US treasury debt, and S.S. payments and military payments have zero fear of defaulting. It's the rest of society (namely renting working-class) that gets the shaft in the future.
In the end, what I'm saying is that S.S. is about a roof over your head and food to eat.. Medicare is about pumping you up with useless placebos to keep you going. If you want a car in your old age, that's up to your personal investments. Now is that too hard to advocate?
And for medicare and medicaide, I'd agree with you.. That's a per-transaction system. This is a once per head transaction. There is more special casing and oversight in stock trading - so sorry, I disagree - given the miniscule volume of data.
I wonder if it's possible to represent a non-cartesian basis vector-space with a DB. Maybe one of the columns is sinusoidally looped - haha,, every 32nd insert wraps around itself.. Oh this could be a cool MLK holiday project.
There are many problem-sets where you might like to perform associative mapping. If the keys and or values are large, you can easily hit the 2GB limit on a single primary key. Imagine if you felt that cassandra could help you in CPU node mappings.. Or weather patterns. The associations can be in the billions, and while you may or may not have a primary key for each main node, the association list may approach N. In traditional RDBMS, such large association mappings M:N tables, are impractical to traverse. An object oriented database might be a better fit, but the open-source ones I'm aware of aren't sufficient in horsepower. I'm not saying Cassandra fits the bill, but with TB sized total DBs this would be significantly faster than RDBMS with row-oriented storage (column store tables might do ok). And probably more to the point - the population of those large associations is what's going to kill traditional RDBMS M:N tables (or even proprietary blobs).
Have you reviewed the BigTable architecture? The central idea is to store what would normally be normalized joined data instead as in-line column-families. Within a column-family, you have related columns that are effectively your name-value pairs. Each name in the name-value pair is called a column (which in RDBMS it would more likely be a table with 3 columns, foreign-key, name, value - but with the tremendous innefficiency of having to do the join). All this effectively means is that prior to this version, Cassandra only supported a logical collection of name-value pairs that were less than 2Gig.. Now you're unlimited - or more correctly, I'm sure they're using a larger bit-value for some grouping thing.
Not that we're in any real disagreement here.. But for $5k, I can get you a geographically redundant system with 16 drives and 32Gig RAM that can handle 20M real-time multi-way indexed records a day without breaking a sweat - and be an OLTP system - something S.S. does not even require. Even with this crippled system, you can handle the entire year's worth of work-load in one month. Not that I've ever needed to run batch processing, but there's no reason the same system can't handle 1B records a day. And with a little clever system design, you can trivially perform off-line batch work that can get you to 1T records a day. And this is one machine (though the geographic redundancy might start to lag beyond 1G).
I'm sure the real latency is in the inter-bank operations. But again, even with credit card transactions, this is a no-brainer with high bandwidth potential. For $5k!!!! I don't care what security or COBOL scripting is involved. This does not require 100,000x as much money as this. As a public service, I'd offer this for free G*d damnit. This is government bloat plain and simple.
Because the difference in receiving $145 / year for life instead of $135 is so great a risk? The goal of S.S. was to make people 'feel' like it's something you have to work towards. (Maybe at the time the ponsi scheme looked like it might work indefinitely). But how would people survive up to age 65 if they didn't already work. So what's the charade all about then? Just give them a reasonable retirement amount from the general tax fund, and require a 10% min tax rate on every working citizen and you're done. Enough of this robbing peter to pay Paul crap.
"You are either aproved to dive into an experimental code path, in which case you can do it on a branch on a centralized SCM or you are not"
I'm not sure what world you live in. Yes, you technically can just make a branch to apply the experimental results. And the 'hiding' aspect may or may not be of value (not this is NO different than keeping your work in a view - except that you can't collaborate without patch/diff; svn switch + branch can work but by trigger the same buracracy). Companies that stifle innovation and ingenuity (read as nearly 100% of them - differing only in degree) will generally lose output. Tools the encourage ego-hiding innovation promote bottom-line productivity.
All else being equal, this is a good thing. Not sure you're hesitation.. Again it HAPPENs.. It's just a matter of being poorly supported by the tools.
But forget even that aspect. Try reproducing a bug. This often requires producing artificial code-conditions, and is sometimes best by putting '#if 1' or equilvant code.. This is meant as temporary stuff.. I'm never intending to check it in.. But now.. guess what.. I want to collaborate. Yes, I can svn switch + svn cp and collaborate, but it feels wrong.. So most people AREN'T going to do it. Plus it's extra work. But if we're in a DVCS, it's a no brainer. make some local branch, then someone else pulls locally from it.. we blow the branch away.. Yes, technically it's the same thing. But it feels more correct. and thus statistically it'll be more likely to happen and thus not hamper productivity. If for no other reason than a continuous integration solution isn't going to pick up the branch checkin, compile, detect errors and shame-email the whole group.
" If you have problems opening your internal SCM to a partner of you, you use the vendor branch approach (which conceptually, by the way, is exactly what you do when using a distributed SCM)."
Conceptually, perhaps, but not practically. I have suffered vendor integration with idiot management who request changes to the PHP code from the vendor, and idiot sys-admin applies the changes; since he doesn't know of any source-control locations, he doesn't back-port or back-communicate. Then the management verbally communicates to the vendor of the change, and now 4 out of 6 parties have no idea that something just happened. Unless the vendor can 'see' the VCS branch, then the low-level programmers on both sides can't trivially reconcile. But it is not good for their people to see any details of our larger product and visa versa. Likewise with not allowing them VPN'd access into a local source control machine.
The code 'drop' concept is exactly the problem I have dealt with unsuccessfully with svn. It only works when it's a black box, not a morphic piece of code of which there is shared ownership. It is precisely the pattern that DVCS excels at - so while you CAN shoe-horn it only other systems, you necessarily lose functionality / and code-defensiveness (e.g. it just works). So if you have the option (which you do), why wouldn't you leverage it. The vendor branch doesn't need to be the same solution as your central tool.. By throwing it in/vendor you've already admitted that. Thus it's going to require a special process thrown on top of it anyway. Why not use the right tool for the job.
"Not. It's just the first idea somebody comes with" [on project per VCS]
Empirically I'd dissagree. Most shops I've worked in use a monolithic svn. It's more work to export multiple svn repositories. Things like eclipse require setup per VCS. So I don't think people go out of their way to segment projects. The main reason I've encouraged it is that the 3rd party tools I've worked with that take advantage of checkin triggers don't work properly for multi project environments. Some tools that'll trigger on every checkin will go through a lot of work, just to find that nothing has changed. 'git-svn' for example takes about an hour to scour my sub-project, since it builds meta-data on every checkin, whether it's in the filtered path or not.
This is sick. The three physical costs of S.S. as I can see it: 1) Data acquisition (who has incrementally paid into the system) - this is B.S. accounting because it's all going to come from the general tax fund soon anyway, so why the charade? 2) Call centers - (this is for old people after all) 3) Printing checks
The rest can be handled by less than a million dollars in hardware / software. 3 can be outsourced (paychex doesn't overburdern my company with overhead as far as I know). 2 can be outsourced and them some 1 as I already alluded to is the fault of congress, and is largely unnecessary. You have to double the efforts of the IRS to make sure payments are correct. You have to audit, you have to make multiple transfers of small orders of money. You need financial advisors (who purchase US treasuriers with the surpluses), bla bla bla.. All simplified by simply being part of the general tax fund and withdrawing directly from US treasury.
A hadoop system can trivially destroy 300 million pieces of data in less than an hour - I don't care what language it's written in. This incremental B.S. thinking is pervasive in all forms of government and just needs to be viserally reacted to by the voting public. A company that's not in the black that needs a $500M investment to 'keep afloat' for crap like this would go out of business and be replaced from scratch. Dead is a powerful natural tool. It needs to be applied here.
A laptop costs between $500 and $2,000. You get one every 2 years or so.. A smartphone costs from $250 to $800. A tablet costs about $600 to $1,100. But if you get a smartphone or tablet via the $40/mo plans, then they subsidize $200 or more of it. So now your capital costs are like $300 every 2 years and your variable costs are $480/yr or $960 every 2 years.. Total of $1,260 every 2 years. Not completely out of the ball park for a laptop.. And the difference is a data-plan that allows you to transcend wi-fi spots (which are NOT ubiquitous from my experience.).
Now the $40 + data isn't the same for everybody. With a family plan, you can split say 3 ways for something like $25 per phone + the $20/mo for data-plan (use to be $15/mo on T-Mobile). So you CAN be at around the $40 mark.
Not a no-brainer, for sure. But not as horrid as everybody seems to make it.
I haven't said that free markets are bad - you're only glossing over the conversation. I've said free markets have no business dealing with life and death decisions - that there is little evidence to suggest they make 'moral' or desirable outcomes (with respect to human life), while simultaneously having much supporting evidence to the contrary (pollution, safety standards, food-health-hazards, etc). You countered with stating that Governments kill more people, to which I replied: some do, yes. But in general they do so out of desperation / defense.
Is this socialism? No it's freaking learning my history of both the governmental world and the corporate world.
"There is a huge difference between government control of business and courts upholding contract laws"
And when it involves life and death decisions, businesses have no leg to stand on - when their natural aspirations will involve mass death if left to their own [oligopoly] vises. Not sure what the conflict here is. The constitution is absent on the topic of corporations - somehow republicans have granted them greater-than-citizen-status over the years and wish to embue super-human status to them going forward. I'm personally not jazzed about that, all else being equal.. But the states at least are constitutionally allowed to deny corporations from public harm as they see fit.. I guess unless you're Texas and reality is optional, but God talks to wealthy, under-achieving frat-boys.
How exactly does this relate in any way to free markets? Are you suggesting that anarchy is the logical extension of a free market? The lack of a central representative government is called the dark ages - where you have local mafia style rules by local thugs. Well, Afghanistan if you must. Free market in the sense of a barter based society, I'll give you. Is this the direction you were trying to take the conversation?
Next, the target of military endeavors is hardly different than tribal disputes (with no central government) - organized defense against foreign aggressors is hardly morally abject. The occasional desperate local citizenry deciding that it's in their best interest to agress their neighbors. I'm not personally convinced that this is a failure of government. Though I would count when the majority condones/supports a racist government slaughtering segments of it's citizens:
Hitler, Stalin, Sadam, Khmer Rouge, etc.
"You'll have to manage it at the "ego" level, not the tool." You're only addressing a justification for the actual problem which is experimental code paths.
"You give them access to a ACLed branch or you give then a different repo and you use the "vendor branch" pattern to merge it back to your trunk." Are you serious? You want to grant firewall, VPN, internal login-names to an outside firm? You want to maintain customer support of their development environment?
In this case, the point is that they go and do their own thing - you require that they use SOME DVCS. Then they zip up a snapshot and send it to you. Deviations from the shipped product can then be co-maintained if need-be. This isn't possible with a CVCS, since you'd have irreconcileable forks.
"Read the user manual for, say, Subversion. You probably will be surprised." Almost the entire DVCS world is a reaction to subversion/CVS deficiencies.
svn branch merging can be made to work, but leaves a tremendous ammount of meta-data (every branch range-delta). It can be a nightmare to keep track of if you do any degree of branching beyond feature-branches. Then your branch tree gets enormous over time, so you'd like to blow away the namespaces. But then you have this bolted-on feel to the history of the now phantom branches. And it doesn't take much to bork your data (and not notice it for several versions). Add in a handful of code-reformatting and it's a nearly impossible mess to recover from.
Note this isn't a CVCS v.s. DVCS issue, it's a subversion issue. But that was the line-item at hand.
"And you do it just the same with a central than with a distributed source code management system."
Well, not really. The use case of linux is that there are several co-maintained forks. Is this just an open-source problem? Hardly. Try forking your own company's product. Why would you do such a horrible thing, you might ask? Well, if your 'core' is leveraged in say a custom cookie-cutter shop, then the core can get overly bloated and require slimming or specialization. Or maybe you just want to start from scratch, but fully intend to maintain the original code base for years to come (possibly with new major features that you'd like to share between the old and new fork). At a minimum, to maintain reconciliation, the CVCS server needs to be common between the two forks - not plausible in open-source forks. Many VCS plugins do support the subversion sub-path concept. Some, by default do not (trac commit plugins, etc). And just in general, it's nice to have a dedicated VCS per project - thus forking a project gives it an unfortunate status. And once you decide the fork gets it's own CVCS, you're stuck with diff -C5 / patch. Welcome back to RCS.
If the point is to outsource a subsection of the code, then the implication is that they 'own' a sub-tree of your code. The point is merging separately mirrored CVCS's is hard, merging decoupled VCS's is possible, and DVCS's make the latter trivial.
But that even remotely owned code-sections can be tweaked and via email/phone collaboration, merged on an ongoing basis.
And no, giving them restricted access is not always an option - VPN, firewall rules, login polluting namespaces, central LDAP/kerberos or what-have-you security risks, etc.
Nice echo chamber commentary; but do you have any evidence of free markets 'saving' or 'naturally-selecting' lives? My intuition, which I think might be easier to support argumentatively, is that life/death is not allowed to be at the whims of the market - that government and thereby social aggregate decision making has produced almost all of the worlds life/death decisions and will continue to do so well into the future as 'greed-based' (aka self-interest-promoting) invisible-hand nonsense continues to demonstrate itself as anything but life-saving.
Free markets didn't decide to clean local drinking waters of factory toxins. Free markets didn't decide that California air (and now Hong Kong air) was toxic and thus needed production-killing regulation. Free markets didn't decide that copper-smelter and sulfer-emitting smoke-stacks shouldn't be up wind of any living thing. Free markets didn't decide that seat belts, working car-lights, air-bags, and rigid-frames should be installed - yes some people desire them, but the market clearly pointed in the opposite direction (people argued for years against air-bags, or that they'd prefer to be thrown from a car-wreck - at 80mph even).
There's nothing wrong with the Adam Smith theory of free markets.. But that theory is so far divorced from reality as to be counter-productive to society. Especially that little tid-bit about all participants being well informed and having equal access to the information which provides them the ability to make efficient decisions. Even in the absence of a complete lazy-assed-couch-potato middle-class. Even in the absence of mis-information corporate machinery. You still have a number of human psychological phenomina which prevents a man from choosing his best outcome. And this extends to the corporate world (where presumably financial incentive would supersede all else).
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That's not true.. The poor get welfare and medicaide. The government and constitution makes no mention of the poor or health so technically you might be right, but these and similar laws were enacted as a matter of policy. Likewise, as a matter of policy, the middle class is purposefully left to fend for itself. With the generally accepted idea that a free market of employers and employees can produce the most efficient / desirable outcomes for both. Thus very few states have any laws mandating or prohibiting unions. The few exceptions are min wage, max work hours without overtime pay. But states tend to be more liberal than the federal government.
"Furthermore, since they bind to variables, changing the value of the variable outside the closure is reflected inside it:"
True, but I've always considered this a negative.. The exact opposite of compartmentalization and data-hiding. Introducing bugs because it can cause unwanted surprise.
function foo(x) { var v = function() { return x + 9; }; for (; x > 0; x--) { } ; return v; }
Obviously contrived because I"m lazy, But in a sufficiently large function this type of bug is not uncommon. I more prefer the lisp and other immutable language style lambdas, or the Java style which requires declaring inputs final - makes it much more obvious the lack of side-effect programming.
You just repeated what I said. But the function that creates a function with closed context is the vast majority of jQuery code that I've seen. But every place I've seen closures used have been either to minimize the call parameter stack or to compartmentalize callback material. Yes, there are more clever things you can do, but really it's just syntactic sugar around object oriented data-hiding (at least in Java).
They launched space shuttles with assembly. This is more a testament to the coders given tight requirements that hardware just couldn't provide, and less to the language.
I've recently gone back to C++ programming after 12 years of perl/python/PHP/Java/bash/SQL. O.M.G. do I hate C++. All these other languages were created in response to C/C++'s common-coding pitfalls. String processing, memory management catch-22s, loose coding contracts, horrid cross-platform capability (Windows/Linux/Mac might as well have different source-code for all the damn ifdef's), insane compilation times (even on modern i7s). Since the core capabilities of C/C++ are so minimal, it's hard to link two 3rd party libraries together because they'll have incompatible base frameworks / assumptions. So every team re-invents anything the native OS/platform didn't provide.
That being said, I'd hate to see an OS written in anything other than C - but by definition, they enforce a common coding convention to all higher layers, and can't leverage 3rd party libraries, so they don't have many of these concerns.
"something as cool as jQuery wouldn't exist without closure support"
jQuery is first-and-foremost a query language that merges 3 or 4 haphazard web namespaces into a single easy to use query-syntax. It's basically xpath on steroids. This plus a wealth of library operations that allow DOM / style manipulation in a more concise manner than straight-javascript and, of course, in a cross-browser manner..
THIS is what makes jQuery cool.
This drew the attention of developers which created a wealth of modules that's helped propel it well into the future.
I don't get the closure purism (perl, python, lisp, etc). It's nothing more than wrapping a pointer to heap allocated memory in a class. E.g. C++, Java classes. Or with function-pointers in C.
function op(d) { return function(e) { return d + e; } }
var f = op(9);
for (var x = 0; x < 10; x++) { sum += f(x); }
v.s.
typedef int (*op_t)(int);
int myfunc(int x) { return 9 + x; }
op_t op = myfunc;
for (int x = 0; x < 10; x++) { sum += op(x); }
Not a whole lot of savings. I realize these arn't exactly the same, lamba builders allow slightly more abstraction, but from a practical matter - e.g. adaptive event handling / callbacks, it's the same deal.
Good lord, are you people still using PC-centric data models? Automatic Facial recognition and peer-scanning/meta-data-tagging is an awesome form of data-mining of thousands of pictures. I typically have 5 or 6 tags on any picture of interest from a collection and at least 2 tags on all the rest.
The Demi-God your particular sect of Catholicism chose to worship is circumstantial in my opinion (as a French Arcadian recovering catholic). I never gave a second's thought to the pre-occupation of Catholicism towards [the virgin] Mary until I heard an outsider say "But you Catholics over-emphasize Mary". Then I remembered that next to every picture of Jesus I ever saw in a Church, there was Mary, sitting at EQUAL elevation. To the left of the Alter was Jesus, to the right Mary, with equal sized statues. No Paul, No Peter (the basis of Catholic might-makes-right against other Christian sects), No Apostles in 'last supper' fashion.. Just Jesus and sexless super-nun-mom. My home (and that of most Catholics we'd visit) have pictures of whom? 3 guesses.. And there are LOTS of pictures/statues there-of. And even if you see a cross-most likely it's bare (with an occasional rosary with a figurine that causes consternation to eastern orthedoxers)
Consider that I spent more time praying to Mary than God - and almost no time to Jesus. I said hail-marry 25 times and our father only 5 times in a given Rosary. When I would hear a baptist or born again Christian use Jesus 10 times in a single paragraph, I'd whince thinking their culture was irreverant / dis-respectful, or just in bad taste. But why would evoking Mary over and over as someone to 'hear our prayers' be more humble? And for all this Jesus is king crap I went through, All the emotional attachment I achieved were for the abstract dis-combobulated Holy Ghost and God the Father.. Jesus was just the under-achieving son. And thus I was able to emotionally detach Jesus. He wasn't God to me.. After 20 years of Catholicism, he wasn't God.. He was part of God's family.. Just like Mary.
While my experiences are anecdotal, my point is that whatever the intent of the Trinity + Mary, it's effect was to dis-allusion me against Baptists and Born-againers who were singularly focused on Jesus. And then when I confronted Catholicism later on in life, I heard not difference, but subdued agreement with these sects - my sense of religious superior reverence was disillusioned. Thus invalidating the entire suite of absurd culture-fucking organizations. Catholicism, in short does indeed promote demi-Godary as is subtle yet evident in at least some youth.
The teachers I respected the most either had interesting course material (though they didn't matter at all), or were brutally honest about their disdain for our lack of quality / effort (though I didn't take it personally because I was the rare exception - so I guess it's not a good example in terms of effects on personal motivation). Jerimiad was once written on the class board after a mid-term with an average grade of 20%. The next two lectures were not fun. Some of my teachers referred to us as peons. And all I can say is that this is the result of successive grade-inflation. Beware the demise of American society. The two class system is upon us.
When did sports players worry about feelings when their coach told them they're the worst excuse for a foot-ball player they've ever seen in their lives? No, these players kick their testosterone into gear and try and earn the respect of their fallen coach (or they wash out - because they are already giving their all). Likewise, a person who knows they can do better take criticism as a challenge. This femaleification of our education system is destroying america. We need to challenge students, and stop worrying about their (or their parent's) feelings. Wash outs are SUPPOSED to happen. This is how you pick what you want to be when you grow up.. By washing out of stuff you have a delusion of adequacy about, and boning up and accepting that you need to be a mechanic or street-cleaner or starving-artist.
Now I'm going to have to look this up, but from memory, I'm pretty sure that 'printing' money has little to do with the devaluation of the Chinese Yuan to the US dollar. If they were printing, then yes, this would be the effect, but this ONLY affects past holdings. But the US isn't holding Chinese assets, it's the other way around. China holds trillions of dollars of US cash (in the form of government ($0.8T) and private bonds). These assets do not rise with inflation and thus are devalued by the printing of US money (but are actually aided by the printing of Chinese Yuan). Cross Currency valuation is purely a function of Trade balance, which is affected by relative changes in the money supply, relative changes in interest rates, relative changes in stock / asset values, and of course ultimately net export/import (of which the purchase of stocks/bonds/assets are included). In other words, the US buys lots of chinese products that require paying Chinese companies with Yuans, thus the US has to buy Yuans with USD. Since few people are ever buying USD's with Yuans, it SHOULD be the case that the price of Yuans rises. But the Chinese government monitors this and purchases corresponding amounts of USD's for the purpose of buying US bonds (private and public). Now they may or many not need to print money in order to make those purchases - being Communistic, I'm not exactly sure how their cash flow works.
China has signed to the WTO, and this practice is at least in part in violation of their rules, thus US is seeking punative damages - which is pretty much all that the US can do.. We're not crazy enough to have our government print $1T and try to buy Chinese assets to devalue our own currency. Especially since they'd just print $2T that year and counter-balance us. It's a lose lose situation.. We'd foster inflation (since most of our goods purchased from China would necessarily go up in price, and in the short term the purchase volumes won't decrease proportionately - there's simply no alternative providers), and more importantly China would block or nationalize any assets we purchased anyway. We COULD tax purchases from China - this is classic protectionism, but this has much greater consequences in the WTO than currency devaluation (since on it's face currency devaluation helps the US more than China, at least in the short term).
What does a 401k have to do with a social safety net? Do you realize what SS was designed for? The great depression left millions with nothing to eat. So are you suggesting that your F'D mis-managed 401k funds when they dry up at age 70 are all the society owes you? That and the freedom to feed off of trash cans? Oh, that's right.. That's what family and churches are for. Except. What if you're a widow with no children, and are estranged from other relatives. What if the entire town is a ghost town.
Sorry, should have invested in a 'better' portfolio. N.M.P. Don't let the class system hit you on the way down.
Now if you're fine with seeing old people on the street in your home town, then go ahead and advocate the demise of S.S. (e.g. privatization which will produce such a stock boom/bust period, due to a one shifting of massive funds, that you'll likely be crying in less than 10 years after it's activated). Still, It's a legitimate political course of action.
As to whether you think YOU will have anything in S.S. when you retire.. That's up to you and your generation isn't it? It's this generation that's going to decide the funding reserves for ourselves - through our election of public officers. The next generation will have the moral quandary of not immediately cutting off the preceding generation - few people are willing to cut people off cold - they much prefer to starve people in the distant future - with things like options to buy lottery tickets, etc. But keep in mind, the government prints money, so US treasury debt, and S.S. payments and military payments have zero fear of defaulting. It's the rest of society (namely renting working-class) that gets the shaft in the future.
In the end, what I'm saying is that S.S. is about a roof over your head and food to eat.. Medicare is about pumping you up with useless placebos to keep you going. If you want a car in your old age, that's up to your personal investments. Now is that too hard to advocate?
And for medicare and medicaide, I'd agree with you.. That's a per-transaction system. This is a once per head transaction. There is more special casing and oversight in stock trading - so sorry, I disagree - given the miniscule volume of data.
I wonder if it's possible to represent a non-cartesian basis vector-space with a DB. Maybe one of the columns is sinusoidally looped - haha,, every 32nd insert wraps around itself.. Oh this could be a cool MLK holiday project.
There are many problem-sets where you might like to perform associative mapping. If the keys and or values are large, you can easily hit the 2GB limit on a single primary key. Imagine if you felt that cassandra could help you in CPU node mappings.. Or weather patterns. The associations can be in the billions, and while you may or may not have a primary key for each main node, the association list may approach N. In traditional RDBMS, such large association mappings M:N tables, are impractical to traverse. An object oriented database might be a better fit, but the open-source ones I'm aware of aren't sufficient in horsepower. I'm not saying Cassandra fits the bill, but with TB sized total DBs this would be significantly faster than RDBMS with row-oriented storage (column store tables might do ok). And probably more to the point - the population of those large associations is what's going to kill traditional RDBMS M:N tables (or even proprietary blobs).
Have you reviewed the BigTable architecture? The central idea is to store what would normally be normalized joined data instead as in-line column-families. Within a column-family, you have related columns that are effectively your name-value pairs. Each name in the name-value pair is called a column (which in RDBMS it would more likely be a table with 3 columns, foreign-key, name, value - but with the tremendous innefficiency of having to do the join). All this effectively means is that prior to this version, Cassandra only supported a logical collection of name-value pairs that were less than 2Gig.. Now you're unlimited - or more correctly, I'm sure they're using a larger bit-value for some grouping thing.
"The data thing is the hard part."
Not that we're in any real disagreement here.. But for $5k, I can get you a geographically redundant system with 16 drives and 32Gig RAM that can handle 20M real-time multi-way indexed records a day without breaking a sweat - and be an OLTP system - something S.S. does not even require. Even with this crippled system, you can handle the entire year's worth of work-load in one month. Not that I've ever needed to run batch processing, but there's no reason the same system can't handle 1B records a day. And with a little clever system design, you can trivially perform off-line batch work that can get you to 1T records a day. And this is one machine (though the geographic redundancy might start to lag beyond 1G).
I'm sure the real latency is in the inter-bank operations. But again, even with credit card transactions, this is a no-brainer with high bandwidth potential. For $5k!!!! I don't care what security or COBOL scripting is involved. This does not require 100,000x as much money as this. As a public service, I'd offer this for free G*d damnit. This is government bloat plain and simple.
Because the difference in receiving $145 / year for life instead of $135 is so great a risk? The goal of S.S. was to make people 'feel' like it's something you have to work towards. (Maybe at the time the ponsi scheme looked like it might work indefinitely). But how would people survive up to age 65 if they didn't already work. So what's the charade all about then? Just give them a reasonable retirement amount from the general tax fund, and require a 10% min tax rate on every working citizen and you're done. Enough of this robbing peter to pay Paul crap.
"You are either aproved to dive into an experimental code path, in which case you can do it on a branch on a centralized SCM or you are not"
/vendor you've already admitted that. Thus it's going to require a special process thrown on top of it anyway. Why not use the right tool for the job.
I'm not sure what world you live in. Yes, you technically can just make a branch to apply the experimental results. And the 'hiding' aspect may or may not be of value (not this is NO different than keeping your work in a view - except that you can't collaborate without patch/diff; svn switch + branch can work but by trigger the same buracracy). Companies that stifle innovation and ingenuity (read as nearly 100% of them - differing only in degree) will generally lose output. Tools the encourage ego-hiding innovation promote bottom-line productivity.
All else being equal, this is a good thing. Not sure you're hesitation.. Again it HAPPENs.. It's just a matter of being poorly supported by the tools.
But forget even that aspect. Try reproducing a bug. This often requires producing artificial code-conditions, and is sometimes best by putting '#if 1' or equilvant code.. This is meant as temporary stuff.. I'm never intending to check it in.. But now.. guess what.. I want to collaborate. Yes, I can svn switch + svn cp and collaborate, but it feels wrong.. So most people AREN'T going to do it. Plus it's extra work. But if we're in a DVCS, it's a no brainer. make some local branch, then someone else pulls locally from it.. we blow the branch away.. Yes, technically it's the same thing. But it feels more correct. and thus statistically it'll be more likely to happen and thus not hamper productivity. If for no other reason than a continuous integration solution isn't going to pick up the branch checkin, compile, detect errors and shame-email the whole group.
" If you have problems opening your internal SCM to a partner of you, you use the vendor branch approach (which conceptually, by the way, is exactly what you do when using a distributed SCM)."
Conceptually, perhaps, but not practically. I have suffered vendor integration with idiot management who request changes to the PHP code from the vendor, and idiot sys-admin applies the changes; since he doesn't know of any source-control locations, he doesn't back-port or back-communicate. Then the management verbally communicates to the vendor of the change, and now 4 out of 6 parties have no idea that something just happened. Unless the vendor can 'see' the VCS branch, then the low-level programmers on both sides can't trivially reconcile. But it is not good for their people to see any details of our larger product and visa versa. Likewise with not allowing them VPN'd access into a local source control machine.
The code 'drop' concept is exactly the problem I have dealt with unsuccessfully with svn. It only works when it's a black box, not a morphic piece of code of which there is shared ownership. It is precisely the pattern that DVCS excels at - so while you CAN shoe-horn it only other systems, you necessarily lose functionality / and code-defensiveness (e.g. it just works). So if you have the option (which you do), why wouldn't you leverage it. The vendor branch doesn't need to be the same solution as your central tool.. By throwing it in
"Not. It's just the first idea somebody comes with" [on project per VCS]
Empirically I'd dissagree. Most shops I've worked in use a monolithic svn. It's more work to export multiple svn repositories. Things like eclipse require setup per VCS. So I don't think people go out of their way to segment projects. The main reason I've encouraged it is that the 3rd party tools I've worked with that take advantage of checkin triggers don't work properly for multi project environments. Some tools that'll trigger on every checkin will go through a lot of work, just to find that nothing has changed. 'git-svn' for example takes about an hour to scour my sub-project, since it builds meta-data on every checkin, whether it's in the filtered path or not.
This is sick. The three physical costs of S.S. as I can see it:
1) Data acquisition (who has incrementally paid into the system) - this is B.S. accounting because it's all going to come from the general tax fund soon anyway, so why the charade?
2) Call centers - (this is for old people after all)
3) Printing checks
The rest can be handled by less than a million dollars in hardware / software.
3 can be outsourced (paychex doesn't overburdern my company with overhead as far as I know).
2 can be outsourced and them some
1 as I already alluded to is the fault of congress, and is largely unnecessary. You have to double the efforts of the IRS to make sure payments are correct. You have to audit, you have to make multiple transfers of small orders of money. You need financial advisors (who purchase US treasuriers with the surpluses), bla bla bla.. All simplified by simply being part of the general tax fund and withdrawing directly from US treasury.
A hadoop system can trivially destroy 300 million pieces of data in less than an hour - I don't care what language it's written in. This incremental B.S. thinking is pervasive in all forms of government and just needs to be viserally reacted to by the voting public. A company that's not in the black that needs a $500M investment to 'keep afloat' for crap like this would go out of business and be replaced from scratch. Dead is a powerful natural tool. It needs to be applied here.
You can't offline google searches. Which is 90% of what I use it for. Ready access to information.
A laptop costs between $500 and $2,000. You get one every 2 years or so.. A smartphone costs from $250 to $800. A tablet costs about $600 to $1,100. But if you get a smartphone or tablet via the $40/mo plans, then they subsidize $200 or more of it. So now your capital costs are like $300 every 2 years and your variable costs are $480/yr or $960 every 2 years.. Total of $1,260 every 2 years. Not completely out of the ball park for a laptop.. And the difference is a data-plan that allows you to transcend wi-fi spots (which are NOT ubiquitous from my experience.).
Now the $40 + data isn't the same for everybody. With a family plan, you can split say 3 ways for something like $25 per phone + the $20/mo for data-plan (use to be $15/mo on T-Mobile). So you CAN be at around the $40 mark.
Not a no-brainer, for sure. But not as horrid as everybody seems to make it.
Personal jibes aside,
I haven't said that free markets are bad - you're only glossing over the conversation. I've said free markets have no business dealing with life and death decisions - that there is little evidence to suggest they make 'moral' or desirable outcomes (with respect to human life), while simultaneously having much supporting evidence to the contrary (pollution, safety standards, food-health-hazards, etc). You countered with stating that Governments kill more people, to which I replied: some do, yes. But in general they do so out of desperation / defense.
Is this socialism? No it's freaking learning my history of both the governmental world and the corporate world.
"There is a huge difference between government control of business and courts upholding contract laws"
And when it involves life and death decisions, businesses have no leg to stand on - when their natural aspirations will involve mass death if left to their own [oligopoly] vises. Not sure what the conflict here is. The constitution is absent on the topic of corporations - somehow republicans have granted them greater-than-citizen-status over the years and wish to embue super-human status to them going forward. I'm personally not jazzed about that, all else being equal.. But the states at least are constitutionally allowed to deny corporations from public harm as they see fit.. I guess unless you're Texas and reality is optional, but God talks to wealthy, under-achieving frat-boys.
How exactly does this relate in any way to free markets? Are you suggesting that anarchy is the logical extension of a free market? The lack of a central representative government is called the dark ages - where you have local mafia style rules by local thugs. Well, Afghanistan if you must. Free market in the sense of a barter based society, I'll give you. Is this the direction you were trying to take the conversation?
Next, the target of military endeavors is hardly different than tribal disputes (with no central government) - organized defense against foreign aggressors is hardly morally abject. The occasional desperate local citizenry deciding that it's in their best interest to agress their neighbors. I'm not personally convinced that this is a failure of government. Though I would count when the majority condones/supports a racist government slaughtering segments of it's citizens:
Hitler, Stalin, Sadam, Khmer Rouge, etc.
"You'll have to manage it at the "ego" level, not the tool."
You're only addressing a justification for the actual problem which is experimental code paths.
"You give them access to a ACLed branch or you give then a different repo and you use the "vendor branch" pattern to merge it back to your trunk."
Are you serious? You want to grant firewall, VPN, internal login-names to an outside firm? You want to maintain customer support of their development environment?
In this case, the point is that they go and do their own thing - you require that they use SOME DVCS. Then they zip up a snapshot and send it to you. Deviations from the shipped product can then be co-maintained if need-be. This isn't possible with a CVCS, since you'd have irreconcileable forks.
"Read the user manual for, say, Subversion. You probably will be surprised."
Almost the entire DVCS world is a reaction to subversion/CVS deficiencies.
svn branch merging can be made to work, but leaves a tremendous ammount of meta-data (every branch range-delta). It can be a nightmare to keep track of if you do any degree of branching beyond feature-branches. Then your branch tree gets enormous over time, so you'd like to blow away the namespaces. But then you have this bolted-on feel to the history of the now phantom branches. And it doesn't take much to bork your data (and not notice it for several versions). Add in a handful of code-reformatting and it's a nearly impossible mess to recover from.
Note this isn't a CVCS v.s. DVCS issue, it's a subversion issue. But that was the line-item at hand.
"And you do it just the same with a central than with a distributed source code management system."
Well, not really. The use case of linux is that there are several co-maintained forks. Is this just an open-source problem? Hardly. Try forking your own company's product. Why would you do such a horrible thing, you might ask? Well, if your 'core' is leveraged in say a custom cookie-cutter shop, then the core can get overly bloated and require slimming or specialization. Or maybe you just want to start from scratch, but fully intend to maintain the original code base for years to come (possibly with new major features that you'd like to share between the old and new fork). At a minimum, to maintain reconciliation, the CVCS server needs to be common between the two forks - not plausible in open-source forks. Many VCS plugins do support the subversion sub-path concept. Some, by default do not (trac commit plugins, etc). And just in general, it's nice to have a dedicated VCS per project - thus forking a project gives it an unfortunate status. And once you decide the fork gets it's own CVCS, you're stuck with diff -C5 / patch. Welcome back to RCS.
If the point is to outsource a subsection of the code, then the implication is that they 'own' a sub-tree of your code. The point is merging separately mirrored CVCS's is hard, merging decoupled VCS's is possible, and DVCS's make the latter trivial.
But that even remotely owned code-sections can be tweaked and via email/phone collaboration, merged on an ongoing basis.
And no, giving them restricted access is not always an option - VPN, firewall rules, login polluting namespaces, central LDAP/kerberos or what-have-you security risks, etc.
Nice echo chamber commentary; but do you have any evidence of free markets 'saving' or 'naturally-selecting' lives? My intuition, which I think might be easier to support argumentatively, is that life/death is not allowed to be at the whims of the market - that government and thereby social aggregate decision making has produced almost all of the worlds life/death decisions and will continue to do so well into the future as 'greed-based' (aka self-interest-promoting) invisible-hand nonsense continues to demonstrate itself as anything but life-saving.
Free markets didn't decide to clean local drinking waters of factory toxins. Free markets didn't decide that California air (and now Hong Kong air) was toxic and thus needed production-killing regulation. Free markets didn't decide that copper-smelter and sulfer-emitting smoke-stacks shouldn't be up wind of any living thing. Free markets didn't decide that seat belts, working car-lights, air-bags, and rigid-frames should be installed - yes some people desire them, but the market clearly pointed in the opposite direction (people argued for years against air-bags, or that they'd prefer to be thrown from a car-wreck - at 80mph even).
There's nothing wrong with the Adam Smith theory of free markets.. But that theory is so far divorced from reality as to be counter-productive to society. Especially that little tid-bit about all participants being well informed and having equal access to the information which provides them the ability to make efficient decisions. Even in the absence of a complete lazy-assed-couch-potato middle-class. Even in the absence of mis-information corporate machinery. You still have a number of human psychological phenomina which prevents a man from choosing his best outcome. And this extends to the corporate world (where presumably financial incentive would supersede all else).