A colleague and I were joking around one day, when a hardcore-dev (with a lot less humour, and chronic flatulence, as I remember) overheard us. He maintained that super-terse code is easier to read than the alternative. Since we were just messing about, we both just let him say his peace and then stated that the One True Language was of course Turbo Pascal 6 (which sort of ended the conversation).
My take on it is that the terse syntax does make sense (more quickly) to someone who knows the syntax really well. If you don't know it quite as well, then the long-form is better because as OP says "the sentence would look wrong". Also, actual words are 'googleable' where as it's hard to lookup the meaning of "~->" or whatever. Thus, the long-form plays to more average programmers.
The question then becomes... who should a language be for? For the super-expert, or for the midrange programmer, or possibly even the junior? IMHO, midrange is a good place to aim at because that's where the majority are, and if they're using your language then you'd want them to be able to do so reasonably easily and safely. That way, of all the billions of opcodes executed around the world as a result of your language, the majority of them will be reasonably safe and sensible.
It's not just about copyright infringement - it's also because BitTorrent makes the flow of data stop being "big (american) corp -> you" and makes it into "just about anyone -> you". From your ISPs point of view, that makes upgrading their crappy network harder because they can't just ask BigCorp for some money.
Mods should be ashamed of up-voting such an incredibly lazy comment. It's a 'trendy' meme here on/., but anyone can say those words, but how about demanding that they also throw in some opposing facts.
Most street lights are essentially ancient - there are still plenty of sodium and other lights around. These were the best we could do about 50 years ago, but nowadays we could do so much better.
I'll side-step what we need to do on motorways and big road junctions - flood lighting may well be the best thing to do there, although I'm sure we can do that without sending so much of it upwards.
Town and city streets need to be lit for pedestrians. Cars have their own lights, and apart from a bit of extra here and there, can manage just fine without too much more light. With LED technology, we must surely be able to make smaller lights that only really illuminate the pavement and not the houses, the road and the sky above. I will concede that the cost of converting to such a scheme is pretty high, and if you get it wrong then you look like a money-wasting idiot, so the uptake is likely to be slow.
I'm sure there must be lighting experts and architects that have 'reimagined' how you'd build a street now, using all the latest knowledge and technology. Sadly, here in the UK at least, we're still seeing councils approving the same old shit housing and just 'turning the handle' to pop out estates with their slightly windy streets, and super-compact houses just like they have been for decades. Innovation will be slow.
In my experience, GDPR and other legislation with less memorable names here in the EU has pretty much got tech companies shitting themselves. The penalties are so huge it could mean the end of your company if you royally fsck up, and even if you're sort of playing along with the rules, the audits and other 'hazards' to you are still pretty scary.
Take Equifax or Uber - if those hacks take place after May next year, then those companies are in a world of pain. Equifax lost some EU people's data, Uber probably did, but that's not been confirmed yet. Both companies tried not to disclose the hack and/or cover it up. Do that after May, and it's a short ride to the courts to put and end to you and your company.
Roll on May... I'm looking to see who falls first.
Use any language you like, just build the software according to TEFLON standards. Gartner reports that companies that work to TEFLON standards have 40% higher revenues per capita fortnight than those that don't.
...and they knew it well enough to stop the system using too much battery unless you made a specific act to let it do so.
There's so much wrong here - first that the charger can't be powerful enough to do the job. Second that you have to 'enable' performance - why can't it just turn itself on and off when appropriate? As a baseline it could turn on high performance when charging and demand was high enough. But no, they knew the battery was shit, the charger was shit and so made the software shit to match.
In my experience, Google makes the pricing more opaque than it needs to. I have experience of a couple of other providers, who charge for the resource you've been allocated, regardless of how you use it (we just use VMs, no fancy-schmancy stuff). They may have some sort of fair-use clauses that mean they'll throttle your VM if you burn too much CPU for too long - I'm not sure. Google charge for idle, and then for how much you use it, and then give you a committed use discount. It's really hard to know anything with that much complexity.
Also, Google do a really bad job of reporting what you're costing. It's hard to see what any given VM adds to the total, and hard to predict what a change will do the end-of-month bill. Their reporting can't show you "last 30 days", it only shows you "since last billing date", so you can't even get a rough idea of trends in your usage/price. I asked them about this and they said I should dump all the billing data into one of their database/big data tools and then slice it and dice it as I want. Seems a bit much to ask me to pay for more services to find out how much the existing ones are costing me.
There are also a load of weird restrictions on things you wouldn't really expect. For example, if you want network packet forwarding in your VM, you have to create your VM from scratch to do it - you can't enable it retrospectively. Another one is if you put a local SSD on your VM, you can't reboot your VM. Yep, once you connect one of those, if you type 'reboot', your VM will go down, but not come back up (with no option for backup/recovery). You have to destroy it and start again. I'm not quite sure what the intended use-case is there. Oh, and changing the number of CPUs, or amount of RAM, or pretty much anything about the system requires a reboot - almost nothing happens dynamically. Better detatch that SSD before you reboot!
Then, Google insist on messing with/etc/hosts, the system hostname,/etc/resolv.conf, and a bunch of other config files on your system. If you set them the way you want them, Google will put them back at some future time of their choosing, so you're not so much renting a VM as you're running your apps in someone else's computer.
One thing Google has going for it is that it's cheap. The SSDs are cheaper than other people's standard disks (for example), and putting a couple of extra CPUs into a VM is pretty affordable. They also gave us something like $350 signing credit, which means we didn't have to pay two providers while we migrated from our old provider to them. The other thing they have is their name - you tell anyone "oh yeah, we're hosted at Google", then they immediately feel a bit safer than if you say "yeah, we're at rockbottompricehosting.com" - just as well, because they'd probably fail to evaluate as well as rockbottomhosting.com for a lot of their technical stuff. I also like their firewalling options, although have found sharing networks between two firewall zones a painful experience.
So yeah, it's more complex than it needs to be. It gets even more complex when you have more complex requirements than "just give me some VMs".
It's pretty easy to say "We've fixed the problem, it'll only take you $20 billion to get the benefit of it though".
Someone above mentioned aeroplanes - when they have any sort of problem, the solution is found and retro-fitted to all planes of the same model. Thus we have lots of progress in that area. In nucular, we don't because almost nothing gets done to bajillion different ancient designs already running around the world. That, plus the need to squeeze another few years of use out of an existing reactor, or to squeeze a bit more capacity out of one, and you've got a pretty sorry looking future ahead.
...and whatever "problems" you think your country has due to immigrants... well, it's going to get a lot worse. Given the political difficulties various countries are having right now with that particular subject, it's not looking too bright for us in the future - not necessarily any 'real' problems, but imagined and perceived ones turned into political problems. Yep, plenty of upheaval coming up.
...not so cool when you've used the browser to authenticate with Google, and you've logged in the facebook app, and you've connected up your email to the email app.
If you're never going to do those things, then yeah, don't bother with the lock. In fact, sell your phone and buy one of those cheap Nokias, as it'll do 90% of what you use your smart phone for, but at a fraction of the cost.
The point is, for calls and texts, yes, your provider can stop that service. For anything else, they can't do that for you, and so those services continue to work with the phone in someone else's hands. Even changing the password on a lot of Internet services won't actually log any existing users out, so until they hit the 2 week re-authentication timeout, they're doing what the hell they like with your accounts.
So it's broken, but they've explained so it's okay?
If I enter my pin code, it's just what it is. It doesn't magically transmogrify into allowing a different pin code. No explanation needed by vendor - it's pretty much 'a given'.
Pff! When our train workers go on strike, the government bails out the train companies so they can afford to make the strikes go on a bit longer. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...
most of their sources of news can now be owned by the right people, so they can reassure us that it is for the best.
Hmm... Trump-o-vision? TrumpTV, TrumpNews, World of Trump, TrumpFilms, TrumpFlix?
As fun as it is to come up with Trump-esque crass names for things, it seems unlikely Trump would control any amount of the mega-corp that'll soon be running all of your media. But that's not to say your next president won't. By then, the rest of us will just call it your 'state broadcaster'.
I've got to agree. "AMP - load complete and utter shit faster than you can with HTML!"
I'd love to just turn off AMP altogether, or at least have a "view normal mobile version" always available. I'm not sure there's ever been a time I've clicked on an AMP link and not wished I could just use the normal site. For that matter, I wonder why some news outlets are using AMP - if you go to an actual website, there's at least a small chance you might stay there. AMP doesn't really 'take' you anywhere, so there's nowhere to stay either. In other words, it means you're back to Google search results quicker than you're onto more content on the site (and then there's the adverts that sites love to plaster their sites with that don't make it onto AMP).
If you're making a point, and one that moderators turn out to think is "Score 5; insightful", there's no need for the 'casual' racism. Actually, there's no need for racism if you're not making a point either.
Is it not possible to choose another candidate because "they do way more for me that Bernie Sanders, except they don't want to stop corporate political donations" without being a hypocrite? Is it not possible to have some sort of 'grey area'? Maybe some 'degrees of support'?
In American politics, there is an enduring culture of "you're with us, or against us" - where it's not possible to support a candidate "a bit more" than another. Nope, you've got to love and cherish your chosen candidate 100%, forsaking all others (and worse - you're expected to pour as much vitriol and scorn onto all other candidates). I'm not sure that's healthy for your democracy, but it's yours to f'up if you wish.
No monopoly in search? Really? Google has something like 80% market share globally - that looks like a monopoly to me [source: https://www.netmarketshare.com...
there is almost no barrier to creating a new search engine
Yep, no barrier, except maybe millions of dollars and years of development work, oh and millions more in servers to actually crawl the Internet. Oh, and then somehow you've got to prize people away from their default browsers, 'mind share', phones and whatever else. Seems like small-potatoes to me too.
Google is completely up front about what they do with the data people freely give them.
Well, I'd disagree because people aren't aware of what they're giving google, and aren't aware of the ways it gets used either. "We use it to target ads at you" really doesn't do justice to the amount of data they scoop up and how much 'mining' they do on your data and how they use that data to influence you in various ways.
Google is how ever a monopolist in advertising
There we agree, although until recently Yahoo actually had a larger advertising network than Google. The critical difference is of course that Yahoo's network didn't extend to the search results page on Google search. Once you needed to use Google to put ads on that one page, it was easy to put them elsewhere too. One could argue that Google used their search dominance to gain advertising market share, which is really what happened but would be hard to prove sufficiently clearly in any legal proceedings unless you happen to get a dump of Google's internal email over the last 10 years or something.
...or use your Pi to be the server, and use the ipod as external storage with your MP3s on it. Use whatever you like as the client side.
I've got an ipod shuffle (old style, the one with the 'stand' for charging it) - the battery's shot, so I don't suppose it'll do much useful any more, but I did wonder if I could use the clicky buttons for something. I'm not even sure how to open the case though...
Slashdot Mirror
A colleague and I were joking around one day, when a hardcore-dev (with a lot less humour, and chronic flatulence, as I remember) overheard us. He maintained that super-terse code is easier to read than the alternative. Since we were just messing about, we both just let him say his peace and then stated that the One True Language was of course Turbo Pascal 6 (which sort of ended the conversation).
My take on it is that the terse syntax does make sense (more quickly) to someone who knows the syntax really well. If you don't know it quite as well, then the long-form is better because as OP says "the sentence would look wrong". Also, actual words are 'googleable' where as it's hard to lookup the meaning of "~->" or whatever. Thus, the long-form plays to more average programmers.
The question then becomes... who should a language be for? For the super-expert, or for the midrange programmer, or possibly even the junior? IMHO, midrange is a good place to aim at because that's where the majority are, and if they're using your language then you'd want them to be able to do so reasonably easily and safely. That way, of all the billions of opcodes executed around the world as a result of your language, the majority of them will be reasonably safe and sensible.
It's not just about copyright infringement - it's also because BitTorrent makes the flow of data stop being "big (american) corp -> you" and makes it into "just about anyone -> you". From your ISPs point of view, that makes upgrading their crappy network harder because they can't just ask BigCorp for some money.
I'm doing my bit to keep the stats up though, There are no 'duplicates' of any of my code ;-)
Mods should be ashamed of up-voting such an incredibly lazy comment. It's a 'trendy' meme here on /., but anyone can say those words, but how about demanding that they also throw in some opposing facts.
Most street lights are essentially ancient - there are still plenty of sodium and other lights around. These were the best we could do about 50 years ago, but nowadays we could do so much better.
I'll side-step what we need to do on motorways and big road junctions - flood lighting may well be the best thing to do there, although I'm sure we can do that without sending so much of it upwards.
Town and city streets need to be lit for pedestrians. Cars have their own lights, and apart from a bit of extra here and there, can manage just fine without too much more light. With LED technology, we must surely be able to make smaller lights that only really illuminate the pavement and not the houses, the road and the sky above. I will concede that the cost of converting to such a scheme is pretty high, and if you get it wrong then you look like a money-wasting idiot, so the uptake is likely to be slow.
I'm sure there must be lighting experts and architects that have 'reimagined' how you'd build a street now, using all the latest knowledge and technology. Sadly, here in the UK at least, we're still seeing councils approving the same old shit housing and just 'turning the handle' to pop out estates with their slightly windy streets, and super-compact houses just like they have been for decades. Innovation will be slow.
The BBC reported it as 'corporate whack-a-mole' in Uber - just as soon as one crisis is dealt with, another one pops up ;-)
In my experience, GDPR and other legislation with less memorable names here in the EU has pretty much got tech companies shitting themselves. The penalties are so huge it could mean the end of your company if you royally fsck up, and even if you're sort of playing along with the rules, the audits and other 'hazards' to you are still pretty scary.
Take Equifax or Uber - if those hacks take place after May next year, then those companies are in a world of pain. Equifax lost some EU people's data, Uber probably did, but that's not been confirmed yet. Both companies tried not to disclose the hack and/or cover it up. Do that after May, and it's a short ride to the courts to put and end to you and your company.
Roll on May... I'm looking to see who falls first.
Use any language you like, just build the software according to TEFLON standards. Gartner reports that companies that work to TEFLON standards have 40% higher revenues per capita fortnight than those that don't.
...and they knew it well enough to stop the system using too much battery unless you made a specific act to let it do so.
There's so much wrong here - first that the charger can't be powerful enough to do the job. Second that you have to 'enable' performance - why can't it just turn itself on and off when appropriate? As a baseline it could turn on high performance when charging and demand was high enough. But no, they knew the battery was shit, the charger was shit and so made the software shit to match.
In my experience, Google makes the pricing more opaque than it needs to. I have experience of a couple of other providers, who charge for the resource you've been allocated, regardless of how you use it (we just use VMs, no fancy-schmancy stuff). They may have some sort of fair-use clauses that mean they'll throttle your VM if you burn too much CPU for too long - I'm not sure. Google charge for idle, and then for how much you use it, and then give you a committed use discount. It's really hard to know anything with that much complexity.
Also, Google do a really bad job of reporting what you're costing. It's hard to see what any given VM adds to the total, and hard to predict what a change will do the end-of-month bill. Their reporting can't show you "last 30 days", it only shows you "since last billing date", so you can't even get a rough idea of trends in your usage/price. I asked them about this and they said I should dump all the billing data into one of their database/big data tools and then slice it and dice it as I want. Seems a bit much to ask me to pay for more services to find out how much the existing ones are costing me.
There are also a load of weird restrictions on things you wouldn't really expect. For example, if you want network packet forwarding in your VM, you have to create your VM from scratch to do it - you can't enable it retrospectively. Another one is if you put a local SSD on your VM, you can't reboot your VM. Yep, once you connect one of those, if you type 'reboot', your VM will go down, but not come back up (with no option for backup/recovery). You have to destroy it and start again. I'm not quite sure what the intended use-case is there. Oh, and changing the number of CPUs, or amount of RAM, or pretty much anything about the system requires a reboot - almost nothing happens dynamically. Better detatch that SSD before you reboot!
Then, Google insist on messing with /etc/hosts, the system hostname, /etc/resolv.conf, and a bunch of other config files on your system. If you set them the way you want them, Google will put them back at some future time of their choosing, so you're not so much renting a VM as you're running your apps in someone else's computer.
One thing Google has going for it is that it's cheap. The SSDs are cheaper than other people's standard disks (for example), and putting a couple of extra CPUs into a VM is pretty affordable. They also gave us something like $350 signing credit, which means we didn't have to pay two providers while we migrated from our old provider to them. The other thing they have is their name - you tell anyone "oh yeah, we're hosted at Google", then they immediately feel a bit safer than if you say "yeah, we're at rockbottompricehosting.com" - just as well, because they'd probably fail to evaluate as well as rockbottomhosting.com for a lot of their technical stuff. I also like their firewalling options, although have found sharing networks between two firewall zones a painful experience.
So yeah, it's more complex than it needs to be. It gets even more complex when you have more complex requirements than "just give me some VMs".
the only issues driverless cars will have will be trust
I agree - and an Uber self-driving car is probably the one I'd trust the least of the handful of household names currently working on them.
It's pretty easy to say "We've fixed the problem, it'll only take you $20 billion to get the benefit of it though".
Someone above mentioned aeroplanes - when they have any sort of problem, the solution is found and retro-fitted to all planes of the same model. Thus we have lots of progress in that area. In nucular, we don't because almost nothing gets done to bajillion different ancient designs already running around the world. That, plus the need to squeeze another few years of use out of an existing reactor, or to squeeze a bit more capacity out of one, and you've got a pretty sorry looking future ahead.
...and whatever "problems" you think your country has due to immigrants... well, it's going to get a lot worse. Given the political difficulties various countries are having right now with that particular subject, it's not looking too bright for us in the future - not necessarily any 'real' problems, but imagined and perceived ones turned into political problems. Yep, plenty of upheaval coming up.
slowing in the earth's rotatio
Rotation ratio?
Rotation potato?
Rotisserie potato?
A simple typo, and a good 5 minutes of day lost ;-)
...not so cool when you've used the browser to authenticate with Google, and you've logged in the facebook app, and you've connected up your email to the email app.
If you're never going to do those things, then yeah, don't bother with the lock. In fact, sell your phone and buy one of those cheap Nokias, as it'll do 90% of what you use your smart phone for, but at a fraction of the cost.
The point is, for calls and texts, yes, your provider can stop that service. For anything else, they can't do that for you, and so those services continue to work with the phone in someone else's hands. Even changing the password on a lot of Internet services won't actually log any existing users out, so until they hit the 2 week re-authentication timeout, they're doing what the hell they like with your accounts.
So it's broken, but they've explained so it's okay?
If I enter my pin code, it's just what it is. It doesn't magically transmogrify into allowing a different pin code. No explanation needed by vendor - it's pretty much 'a given'.
Pff! When our train workers go on strike, the government bails out the train companies so they can afford to make the strikes go on a bit longer.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...
most of their sources of news can now be owned by the right people, so they can reassure us that it is for the best.
Hmm... Trump-o-vision? TrumpTV, TrumpNews, World of Trump, TrumpFilms, TrumpFlix?
As fun as it is to come up with Trump-esque crass names for things, it seems unlikely Trump would control any amount of the mega-corp that'll soon be running all of your media. But that's not to say your next president won't. By then, the rest of us will just call it your 'state broadcaster'.
I've got to agree. "AMP - load complete and utter shit faster than you can with HTML!"
I'd love to just turn off AMP altogether, or at least have a "view normal mobile version" always available. I'm not sure there's ever been a time I've clicked on an AMP link and not wished I could just use the normal site. For that matter, I wonder why some news outlets are using AMP - if you go to an actual website, there's at least a small chance you might stay there. AMP doesn't really 'take' you anywhere, so there's nowhere to stay either. In other words, it means you're back to Google search results quicker than you're onto more content on the site (and then there's the adverts that sites love to plaster their sites with that don't make it onto AMP).
If you're making a point, and one that moderators turn out to think is "Score 5; insightful", there's no need for the 'casual' racism. Actually, there's no need for racism if you're not making a point either.
So you're saying people are using Linux as a 'framework' upon which they build their own (custom) supercomputer OS? Nice! :-)
Is it not possible to choose another candidate because "they do way more for me that Bernie Sanders, except they don't want to stop corporate political donations" without being a hypocrite? Is it not possible to have some sort of 'grey area'? Maybe some 'degrees of support'?
In American politics, there is an enduring culture of "you're with us, or against us" - where it's not possible to support a candidate "a bit more" than another. Nope, you've got to love and cherish your chosen candidate 100%, forsaking all others (and worse - you're expected to pour as much vitriol and scorn onto all other candidates). I'm not sure that's healthy for your democracy, but it's yours to f'up if you wish.
No monopoly in search? Really? Google has something like 80% market share globally - that looks like a monopoly to me [source: https://www.netmarketshare.com...
there is almost no barrier to creating a new search engine
Yep, no barrier, except maybe millions of dollars and years of development work, oh and millions more in servers to actually crawl the Internet. Oh, and then somehow you've got to prize people away from their default browsers, 'mind share', phones and whatever else. Seems like small-potatoes to me too.
Google is completely up front about what they do with the data people freely give them.
Well, I'd disagree because people aren't aware of what they're giving google, and aren't aware of the ways it gets used either. "We use it to target ads at you" really doesn't do justice to the amount of data they scoop up and how much 'mining' they do on your data and how they use that data to influence you in various ways.
Google is how ever a monopolist in advertising
There we agree, although until recently Yahoo actually had a larger advertising network than Google. The critical difference is of course that Yahoo's network didn't extend to the search results page on Google search. Once you needed to use Google to put ads on that one page, it was easy to put them elsewhere too. One could argue that Google used their search dominance to gain advertising market share, which is really what happened but would be hard to prove sufficiently clearly in any legal proceedings unless you happen to get a dump of Google's internal email over the last 10 years or something.
...or use your Pi to be the server, and use the ipod as external storage with your MP3s on it. Use whatever you like as the client side.
I've got an ipod shuffle (old style, the one with the 'stand' for charging it) - the battery's shot, so I don't suppose it'll do much useful any more, but I did wonder if I could use the clicky buttons for something. I'm not even sure how to open the case though...
Bhuddism?