--- “Our results and those of everyone else show we are losing a huge amount of water into the oceans every year,” said Prof John Wahr of the University of Colorado. “People should be just as worried about the melting of the world’s ice as they were before.”
His team’s study, published in the journal Nature, concludes that between 443-629bn tonnes of meltwater overall are added to the world’s oceans each year. This is raising sea level by about 1.5mm a year, the team reports, in addition to the 2mm a year caused by expansion of the warming ocean. --
This same cherry-picked factoid has been doing the rounds of the "skeptic" blogs since the article's publication, and has made it's way here.
You're entitled to your own opinions on javascript -- I'm not a huge fan myself, although I see some of it's utility, especially the proper use of first-order functions a-la List or Scheme.
Your original post, however, and many since, have contained glaring factual inaccuracies. At least try to understand the language structure and design before making an argument to whether it's good or not. There are much better critiques if you're determined to hate it.
Having operator overloading and type inference does not mean "no types to speak of" or "+ doesn't work". It means that there's a design decision about the language -- you may not like it and plenty don't, but it's hardly uncommon either. I really don't think you have vars "containing numerical values, were assigned numerical values, are treated as strings". At some stage you put a string in the variable, 1 + 1 still equals 2 in javascript. "1" + 1 does not.
It's been explained about 20 times that having classes is not the same thing as being object oriented. Here's a better and more complete explanation from Douglas Crockford (one of the people who have contributed to this "one man hack" via ECMA).
The first couple of sentences are especially relevant:
"JavaScript is a class-free, object-oriented language, and as such, it uses prototypal inheritance instead of classical inheritance. This can be puzzling to programmers trained in conventional object-oriented languages like C++ and Java."
I really don't think you understand Javascript quite enough to be commenting this strongly on it.
It does have types, to speak of and to use. They are in the spec, they are in the language, they work. http://bclary.com/2004/11/07/#a- Since when has "+" appended 2 numbers? When they are strings I would imagine, which is exactly what most languages do. You might need to get your head around javascript types to stop this happening. Javascript has scope -- it's quite well defined. Object oriented does not mean classes, there are other ways of doing it. In particular, the prototype pattern which is followed by javascript. It can have inheritance because of this pattern also.
Javascript has been an ECMA standard for the last 15 years, and cannot be thought of as a one-person hack in any way.
Zones are the same concept, with the same benefit.
An added advantage Solaris zones have is flavoured zones: Make a Solaris 9 zone on a Solaris 10 host, a Linux zone on a Solaris 10 host and soon a Solaris 10 zone on an OpenSolaris host.
This has turned out much more stable, easy and simply effecient than our Vmware servers, which we now only have for Windows and other random OS's.
I think the "stable" moniker mainly comes from Solaris + Sun hardware, not Solaris as a standalone entity. Tight coupling to SPARC hardware (and Sun-made x86 to a lesser extent) means that Solaris has the ability to take portions of RAM offline if errors are detected, deactivate individual CPU cores or sockets if errors are detected and similar fault monitoring and recovery across the hardware. It's pretty cool stuff really, have a look at it if you get the chance.
Solaris SMF also kicks the ageing init.d method for 6 as far as software fault monitoring and recovery goes IMO.
Of course plenty of consultants have oversold this, deriding other good OSs at the same time, often without any knowledge to back it up.
Same reason they've started building it's own servers - they want to expand into new markets.
Sun would sure give them a leg-up, as the two product portfolios have very little crossover, but it remains to be seen if Cisco would be any better at selling Sun technology than Sun has been of late.
As a Sun partner/reseller I'd probably prefer Cisco however, because it's less likely that the cool stuff that Sun makes, which I know and sell, would be just be swallowed up never to be seen again as would likely happen in an IBM deal.
Poor urban planning and lack of forest management are definately contributing factors.
However: We've been in drought for 12 years, this has been the driest February on record, the hottest week on record was earlier this month and the hottest day on record was the day of the worst of these fires.
It's pretty easy to convince me of global warming after living through this.
The monstrosity of JavaScript/ECMAScript is more a function of the browser/DOM and not the language. If you get the chance to use some nice prototype-based OO Javascript away from the browser, you'll find that it's actually got a lot going for it.
It could sure do with a nice standard library though, there's a lot of roll-your-own low level functionality going on, which adds to it's reputation as a pig.
It's pretty much apples and oranges. Even with batteries (which I wouldn't trust) RAM has different characteristics in power consumption, heat output, storage density etc. By the time you address these challenges you'd have... an SSD.
Plus the SSDs get their long life from having more raw storage than advertised, and dynamically shutting down dead areas and bringing in reserve areas as it ages. Your sums would have to take into account the cost of this "hidden" storage.
As an aside the best use for these things is hands down as extended cache in a storage array. One or two SSD alongside a few terrabytes of "normal" disk managed an intelligent filesystem or storage firmware can speed the whole beast up by phenomenal amounts depending on the data usage patterns. Yet the total cost of the whole storage appliance is really not much changed in relative terms. Some of the new Sun boxes are designed to work with SSDs like this, and probably from other big storage vendors as well.
It's probably due to your video drivers that you see such poor performance.
With properly accelerated video playback you will have no problem. For example "Xv" playback on newer Ati cards uses hardware acceleration. Also, have a look at the XGL demonstration videos where they play videos overlapping, transparent, in the root window and deformed all at once.
Don't bother investing properly (i.e. shares, business, resources, property) unless you are prepared to do so actively (i.e. constant research and monitoring of the financial page) and be prepared for the long haul. Otherwise you are just likely to get burnt.
A term deposit on fixed interest or a high interest savings account is the best for the shorter term and lazy investor. Be sure to have a regular deposit plan (i.e. $X per month). The returns may seem modest (and they are), but the biggest advantage is that of having a savings plan you stick to.
Of course the best investment is almost always to pay off any loans you have IMHO, but I gather interest rates in the US aren't as high as over here in AU (~7% on a home loan):)
Actually with the Intel drivers there is barely a howto needed. It's one driver that just works fully accelerated out of the box because it's GPL and can be provided with any distribution.
Once drivers are working any howto on XGL will be all you need.
If you are buying a computer, particularly a laptop, and don't care about gaming then the Intel chips are the way to go with Linux in my experience.
I guess because Rails simply provides another option.
In this case one of the differentiating factors is mentioned in the parent post. The rails crowd are very anti-tools... anything that needs a big IDE and not just a text editor is too complex by half.
Both points of view are valid, but choice is good isn't it?
L.
Well, since this functionality was introduced double-clicking on the CD icon on your desktop brought up this view... not really that hard.
And since KDE 3.5 you will get a "You have just inserted a CD... what do you want to do?" dialog (unless you disable it).
L.
Nothing to see here...
on
KDE 4 Screenshots
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Well not if you're looking for actual screenshots.
These mock ups and their kind have been appearing on kde-artists.org for months now and are the work of artists trying to concenptualise ideas the devs could be working on.
AFAIK the developers haven't gotten up to doing anything remotely visual for KDE4 yet and are still working on the underpinning libraries.
$200k over how long a period? The article doesn't say that, but if he took more than 3 years to make this profit (depending on where he lives etc. etc.) he probably would have done much better in a boring-but-legal developer job.
I haven't yet worked out whether this is meant to be read in "Reverend Lovejoy" voice, "Crazy Televangelist" voice or "Samuel L. Jackson" voice. It's pretty funny in whichever you choose.
I never even heard the claim that NZ invented the pavlova until sometime last year. It's just so ingrained in Australian folklore that none of us can quite fathom the possibility that it isn't Australian.
Of course anything half worthwhile to come out of New Zealand is automatically the property of Australia...
Crowded House -> Australian
Geothermal Energy -> Australian
L.
(P.S. you can have Russell Crowe back, we don't want him anymore).
Oh, I thought the original issue was that asynch XMLHttpRequest was hard.
Yes the pull-only issue of http sucks for programming apps. But this kind of thing with timed javascript events can help alot until something better comes along.
> And, one of my pet peeves, communicating with the server after the page has been loaded is clumsy and inefficient at best.
I think this is what's being addressed. It really is pretty easy with Rails.
Slashdot Mirror
The Guardian article goes on to say:
---
“Our results and those of everyone else show we are losing a huge amount of water into the oceans every year,” said Prof John Wahr of the University of Colorado. “People should be just as worried about the melting of the world’s ice as they were before.”
His team’s study, published in the journal Nature, concludes that between 443-629bn tonnes of meltwater overall are added to the world’s oceans each year. This is raising sea level by about 1.5mm a year, the team reports, in addition to the 2mm a year caused by expansion of the warming ocean.
--
This same cherry-picked factoid has been doing the rounds of the "skeptic" blogs since the article's publication, and has made it's way here.
For reference, the paper this is all based on (subscription required): http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature10847.html
You're entitled to your own opinions on javascript -- I'm not a huge fan myself, although I see some of it's utility, especially the proper use of first-order functions a-la List or Scheme.
Your original post, however, and many since, have contained glaring factual inaccuracies. At least try to understand the language structure and design before making an argument to whether it's good or not. There are much better critiques if you're determined to hate it.
Having operator overloading and type inference does not mean "no types to speak of" or "+ doesn't work". It means that there's a design decision about the language -- you may not like it and plenty don't, but it's hardly uncommon either. I really don't think you have vars "containing numerical values, were assigned numerical values, are treated as strings". At some stage you put a string in the variable, 1 + 1 still equals 2 in javascript. "1" + 1 does not.
It's been explained about 20 times that having classes is not the same thing as being object oriented. Here's a better and more complete explanation from Douglas Crockford (one of the people who have contributed to this "one man hack" via ECMA).
http://www.crockford.com/javascript/inheritance.html
The first couple of sentences are especially relevant:
"JavaScript is a class-free, object-oriented language, and as such, it uses prototypal inheritance instead of classical inheritance. This can be puzzling to programmers trained in conventional object-oriented languages like C++ and Java."
Says it all.
I really don't think you understand Javascript quite enough to be commenting this strongly on it.
It does have types, to speak of and to use. They are in the spec, they are in the language, they work. http://bclary.com/2004/11/07/#a-
Since when has "+" appended 2 numbers? When they are strings I would imagine, which is exactly what most languages do. You might need to get your head around javascript types to stop this happening.
Javascript has scope -- it's quite well defined.
Object oriented does not mean classes, there are other ways of doing it. In particular, the prototype pattern which is followed by javascript. It can have inheritance because of this pattern also.
Javascript has been an ECMA standard for the last 15 years, and cannot be thought of as a one-person hack in any way.
I shake my head.
FYI, nightly builds for all platforms (Mac, Win, Linux, Linux x64) available here: http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/
Should get official versions soon, I guess, but I find any given nightly build (on Linux) fast and reliable.
Zones are the same concept, with the same benefit.
An added advantage Solaris zones have is flavoured zones: Make a Solaris 9 zone on a Solaris 10 host, a Linux zone on a Solaris 10 host and soon a Solaris 10 zone on an OpenSolaris host.
This has turned out much more stable, easy and simply effecient than our Vmware servers, which we now only have for Windows and other random OS's.
I use (and like) both Solaris and Linux.
I think the "stable" moniker mainly comes from Solaris + Sun hardware, not Solaris as a standalone entity. Tight coupling to SPARC hardware (and Sun-made x86 to a lesser extent) means that Solaris has the ability to take portions of RAM offline if errors are detected, deactivate individual CPU cores or sockets if errors are detected and similar fault monitoring and recovery across the hardware. It's pretty cool stuff really, have a look at it if you get the chance.
Solaris SMF also kicks the ageing init.d method for 6 as far as software fault monitoring and recovery goes IMO.
Of course plenty of consultants have oversold this, deriding other good OSs at the same time, often without any knowledge to back it up.
Same reason they've started building it's own servers - they want to expand into new markets.
Sun would sure give them a leg-up, as the two product portfolios have very little crossover, but it remains to be seen if Cisco would be any better at selling Sun technology than Sun has been of late.
As a Sun partner/reseller I'd probably prefer Cisco however, because it's less likely that the cool stuff that Sun makes, which I know and sell, would be just be swallowed up never to be seen again as would likely happen in an IBM deal.
Poor urban planning and lack of forest management are definately contributing factors.
However: We've been in drought for 12 years, this has been the driest February on record, the hottest week on record was earlier this month and the hottest day on record was the day of the worst of these fires.
It's pretty easy to convince me of global warming after living through this.
The monstrosity of JavaScript/ECMAScript is more a function of the browser/DOM and not the language. If you get the chance to use some nice prototype-based OO Javascript away from the browser, you'll find that it's actually got a lot going for it.
It could sure do with a nice standard library though, there's a lot of roll-your-own low level functionality going on, which adds to it's reputation as a pig.
It's pretty much apples and oranges. Even with batteries (which I wouldn't trust) RAM has different characteristics in power consumption, heat output, storage density etc. By the time you address these challenges you'd have... an SSD.
Plus the SSDs get their long life from having more raw storage than advertised, and dynamically shutting down dead areas and bringing in reserve areas as it ages. Your sums would have to take into account the cost of this "hidden" storage.
As an aside the best use for these things is hands down as extended cache in a storage array. One or two SSD alongside a few terrabytes of "normal" disk managed an intelligent filesystem or storage firmware can speed the whole beast up by phenomenal amounts depending on the data usage patterns. Yet the total cost of the whole storage appliance is really not much changed in relative terms. Some of the new Sun boxes are designed to work with SSDs like this, and probably from other big storage vendors as well.
The Avivo guys (open source r500 drivers) would appreciate it I would think:
- avivo.git;a=summarye r
http://gitweb.freedesktop.org/?p=avivo/xf86-video
http://www.phoronix.com/?page=project&q=AvivoDriv
It's probably due to your video drivers that you see such poor performance.
With properly accelerated video playback you will have no problem. For example "Xv" playback on newer Ati cards uses hardware acceleration. Also, have a look at the XGL demonstration videos where they play videos overlapping, transparent, in the root window and deformed all at once.
Don't bother investing properly (i.e. shares, business, resources, property) unless you are prepared to do so actively (i.e. constant research and monitoring of the financial page) and be prepared for the long haul. Otherwise you are just likely to get burnt.
:)
A term deposit on fixed interest or a high interest savings account is the best for the shorter term and lazy investor. Be sure to have a regular deposit plan (i.e. $X per month). The returns may seem modest (and they are), but the biggest advantage is that of having a savings plan you stick to.
Of course the best investment is almost always to pay off any loans you have IMHO, but I gather interest rates in the US aren't as high as over here in AU (~7% on a home loan)
L.
In fairness to the book and the reviewer the word "hobbyist" is mentioned several times.
It's not a book about how to make a commercially viable game, it's a book for the hobbyist programmer wishing to have some fun.
L.
Actually with the Intel drivers there is barely a howto needed. It's one driver that just works fully accelerated out of the box because it's GPL and can be provided with any distribution.
Once drivers are working any howto on XGL will be all you need.
If you are buying a computer, particularly a laptop, and don't care about gaming then the Intel chips are the way to go with Linux in my experience.
L.
I guess because Rails simply provides another option. In this case one of the differentiating factors is mentioned in the parent post. The rails crowd are very anti-tools... anything that needs a big IDE and not just a text editor is too complex by half. Both points of view are valid, but choice is good isn't it? L.
Well, since this functionality was introduced double-clicking on the CD icon on your desktop brought up this view... not really that hard.
And since KDE 3.5 you will get a "You have just inserted a CD... what do you want to do?" dialog (unless you disable it).
L.
Well not if you're looking for actual screenshots.
These mock ups and their kind have been appearing on kde-artists.org for months now and are the work of artists trying to concenptualise ideas the devs could be working on.
AFAIK the developers haven't gotten up to doing anything remotely visual for KDE4 yet and are still working on the underpinning libraries.
L.
$200k over how long a period? The article doesn't say that, but if he took more than 3 years to make this profit (depending on where he lives etc. etc.) he probably would have done much better in a boring-but-legal developer job.
L.
I haven't yet worked out whether this is meant to be read in "Reverend Lovejoy" voice, "Crazy Televangelist" voice or "Samuel L. Jackson" voice. It's pretty funny in whichever you choose.
I never even heard the claim that NZ invented the pavlova until sometime last year. It's just so ingrained in Australian folklore that none of us can quite fathom the possibility that it isn't Australian.
mmmm..... pavlova
Of course anything half worthwhile to come out of New Zealand is automatically the property of Australia... Crowded House -> Australian Geothermal Energy -> Australian L. (P.S. you can have Russell Crowe back, we don't want him anymore).
He should really try iPhoto.
I think it matches the description perfectly.
Oh, I thought the original issue was that asynch XMLHttpRequest was hard. Yes the pull-only issue of http sucks for programming apps. But this kind of thing with timed javascript events can help alot until something better comes along.
> And, one of my pet peeves, communicating with the server after the page has been loaded is clumsy and inefficient at best. I think this is what's being addressed. It really is pretty easy with Rails.