Re:Breed Plutonium? Steam?
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Port-A-Nuke
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· Score: 1
If the reactor is long running, then it generates too much Pu-240, just like every other civilian reactor in the world. Plutonium containing lots of Pu-240 is know as "reactor grade" and nobody has ever managed to make a weapon out of it. If you think you're going to get into one of those reactors 10 years down the road and get anything other than a mess, you're dreaming.
It's ignorant fools like you who are responsible for our dependence on oil and (to a greater extent) coal. Thanks for black lung, learn something before bashing the scientists now.
Re:We've been seeing a lot of this "safe" nukes st
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Port-A-Nuke
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· Score: 1
This is, unfortunately, BS.
The disposal costs are factored in, nuke plants throughout the country pay a tax that was supposed to go towards building a repository. Instead, the feds decided to spend the money, not build a repository, and stiff the nuke utilities. The utilities have now had to pay TWICE for disposal of waste, and if the greens get their way they'll have to pay three or four times just for being on Nader's bad side.
The only fraud is coming from the environmentalists on this one.
By "prove" we mean to some disgusting (like 20) number of sigma. The odds of us all dying of a stroke on the same day is greater than the odds of us being wrong about that.
The odds aren't ever zero, but they're usually close enough.
In addition, beware of chaotic systems, for there quantum uncertainty truly can barge into the macroscopic world. For instance, the electricity and chemicals swirling around in your brain is probably a fairly chaotic system. This interaction magnifies the quantum effects, and your state of mind diverges (probably quite slowly) from the state that would be predicted given complete initial information.
As time goes on, one driver in a car slows down by 2 MPH for no discernable reason. You could not have predicted this if you were given just the state of his mind in the morning and all the inputs since then, because there are "random" inputs as well coming from the chaotic system that makes up the human brain. So, he slows down, then other drivers have to slow down, then the carrying capacity of the road decreases, eventually causing a traffic jam. Time goes on and the traffic jam vanishes just as mysteriously as it began. We've all seen it, and though it is heavily influenced by measurable phenomena (weather, etc...) there is a (probably) not insignificant random component caused by quantum uncertainty magnifying through two chaotic systems (a human brain, and a bunch of drivers interacting with each other on the road).
We know enough about quantum mechanics to know this. There is a great deal of science (from space craft to transistors and beyond) based on the fact that quantum uncertainty is truly random. This is (there is reason to believe) the actual source of randomness in the universe, and it is really random, it's not an illusion. This was shown by disproving the "hidden variable" conjecture, you can look it up easily on google, and it's been experimentally (and theoretically) tested.
Re:Nope, wrong, invalid.. nothing to see here.
on
The End of Encryption?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
This is why you use extremely long keys and strong algorithms. Use 4k RSA keys guys. It doesn't guarantee against attacks, but it does dramatically extend the time horizon. Even if there is a means of making factoring easier, it might not make it easy enough if the key is very big.
Make a key 10^10 as hard as the biggest one that can be broken (at least), and then only a very severe break will put you in danger.
You think so? A lawyer showing up one day and saying "We think you did something illegal, so give us 10,000 today or we'll take everything from you tomorrow." when you don't even own a computer and clearly didn't do it (as many of them didn't) doesn't qualify as tyrrany?
At the very least it's racketeering and extortion. Start just randomly demanding 1/2 a year's wage from random people many of whome never did anything like what you claim, and yet you can force them to pay it because they can't take 6 months off of work or pay 5 million dollars to mount a defense. I think that qualifies.
"Your instance, however, assumes that the reaction is self-sustaining."
It doesn't have to be self sustaining, it just has to be delayed from going out long enough to develop lots of energy, not hard when you consider the rate at which nuclear reactions can take place. The exact same thing is true of virtually any reaction, if dissipated it will be extinguished. Explosives do work however because they are able to liberate lots of energy before being dissipated.
Furthermore, magnetic fields and plasmas have lots of strange interplay that is not nearly as obvious as "make the reactor depend on water, then if the water boils the reaction stops" sort of calculations that go into fission reactors. Just look at a solar flare for instance. A magnetic field gets twisted, storing energy, then it can spontaniously "snap" and reconnect, releasing the energy in a small locallized spot. If that were to happen in a fusion reactor it's not hard to imagine it could cause a substantial explosion as it instantly fusions 2% of the reactor's fuel inventory. It's also a lot harder to convince yourself that things like this can't happen than in the fission case where it relies on the fundamental properties of mater, like specific heat and inertia. Magnetic fields have VERY little inertia, and they can catastrophically realign with very little warning. If you rely on something chaotic like that to run a 1 GW system, how can you really be sure it won't spike up to 50 TW for a split second as something jumps back into alignment.
First of all, a disruption of the DNC in the 70s kept them out of the white house. Disruptions of conventions, especially if lost of protestors get tear gassed are actually a fairly effective tactic.
However, that aside, I think taking an absolute stance on most things is foolish. The Bush administration has repeatedly used its powers to silence free speech, and his corporate cronies have stuffed all the airwaves with republican propaganda.
There's a reason there aren't many quakers around. Anyone group that categorically rejects violence (for any reason), will swiftly find themselves violated by people who aren't so particular. Evil men rule when good men do nothing, it's as true now as it always was.
I'm not saying this is right, but then again, giving a hypocrite a taste of his own medicine hardly qualifies as evil either.
Do you actually have any data to support this hypothesis? Fusion reactions have positive feedback (reaction goes faster -> more heat -> reaction speeds up), so why couldn't it lose control and go boom? I'm not talking megatons here, as that takes very careful planning and lots of high density fuel. However, I think it's foolish to dismiss offhand the risk of a significant explosion, a blast sufficient to destroy the reactor and scatter some material merits some thought.
Fission reactors can't really explode (like nuclear weapons) either, because they are never critical on prompt neutrons alone (look it up if you don't know what that means), but Cherenobyl did surge to 100x it rated power and let loose a substantial explosion. Western reactors are much safer than that design, and are designed to contain explosions of any plausible magnitude, but it's not wise to just say "that can't happen" beause that's what you read in the clueless newspapers.
A classical (fission based) nuclear explosion happens in microseconds (less than 10 if I remember correctly), are you certain that an overly dense area of plasma would dissipate faster than that? I'm not saying that fusion would be bad, but a substantial (say, 1 ton of TNT worth) explosion caused by some sort of magnetic field glitch supercompressing a sector of plasma could probably release essentially all of the reactor's radioactive inventory. Fusion reactors produce short lived isotopes, so they have less waste issues, but he inventory of a large GW sized reactor could be sufficient to cause serious problems for a few years (Half life of Tritium, probably most of the inventory is 12 years) until the radioactivity dies down.
Clearly this would be better than coal, but perhaps it wouldn't hurt to have some good containment vessels, and give some real thought to this issue.
I agree to a degree, but don't kid yourself into thinking that selling power back would get you much. If it's a sunny day then everyone will be trying to sell back their power, and quite simply the power company probably doesn't want to deal with the difficulty of collecting all this power from the countryside and funneling it somewhere it can be useful. Face it, you use energy at peak times, and you produce energy at off-peak times. In either case the power company has to transport it for you. You aren't going to get even 20% of what you pay for power back, even if you sell as much as you buy. Off peak distributed power just isn't worth much.
First of all, weather patterns are large. Clouds aren't independent random variables, it's not too difficult for the whole Eastern US to be socked in with clouds.
Secondly, I'll call BS because we have this thing called "nighttime" that covers the WHOLE COUNTRY AT ONCE!!!!!! What are the odds of that? Virtually garanteed every 24 hours or so.
Basically, the power grid is creaky as it is, and that's just with demand varying chaotically. If the supply did so as well, look out. Solar can probably provide 10% of our power before this becomes a problem. If you think it's going to provide 60%, you're living in a dream world. Strangely, Ralph Nader thinks this, but then again he's never met a scientist he didn't think was wrong about everything.
It sounds like the guys I once worked for who were convinced that software failures were independent random variables. They had a cluster of like 4 MS SQL servers, convinced that if each one was up only 90% of the time they'd have 4 nines of uptime. Of course if your failures are software in nature, then whatever bug crashed server N will crash server N+1 just as easily, and all four would go down in less than a second. A little understanding, please.
Standardize.
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XCode Roundup
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· Score: 2, Insightful
First, a disclaimer. I use OS X at home, Linux and Windows at work, and I write almost everything in Java.
Basically, I don't like using Visual Studio, because I can't use it at home. I don't like using X-Code because I can't use it at work. I write in Java because it will run at home, at work, and everywhere in between, and I write my Java with Netbeans. This prevents me from needing to do thing entirely differently in several places, and is really convenient. I also find Netbeans to be better than Eclipse (YMMV), but that's another story.
I wish Apple would just fold their work into Eclipse and Netbeans so we don't have n+1 coding tools each with its own quirks. Either contribute actual fixes to the programs, or just release a bunch of plugins that allow apple script development, etc....
That being said, I can't really complain too much. Free is free afterall, but I just wish they improved one of the other free (and cross platform) IDEs, rather than reinventing the wheel yet again.
Well, I'd certainly take it over MySQL, and I haven't used DB2 but it's optimizers look kindof sucky, so maybe DB2 as well.
However, I've seen Oracle perform miracles, and I've also seen the explain output from PSQL queries. The one thing PSQL needs in order to be a good OLAP (as opposed to OLTP) database is a really good query optimizer.
The primary problem I always ran into was that Postgres was always VERY optimistic when guessing row counts (if you actually perform the steps in the explain, you often get thousands of times more rows than PSQL says you'll get), and this is a problem. And yes, this is after vaccuming tables, etc...
This means that (in my experience) the thing actually runs about 10x faster when you turn off sequential scans and hash joins, as it always attempts to use those two on HUGE tables because it thinks they're small. If the optimizer could be improved a little bit, that would be wonderful.
However, if you don't plan to push it very hard, or give it any HUGE tables, then it does quite well. There's certainly no reason too pay actual money for a sucky database or use something like MySQL.
There are techniques to dramatically reduce memory use and garbage collection for VM based languages like Java.
One of them is escape analysis. Simply put, everything that can go on the stack is detected and placed there. You can then drop any synchronization as well. This is an excellent improvement essentially for free, once the compiler supports it.
A second technique is object inlining. Sometimes an object is always contained within another object, so you can just inline its data inside the bigger object, throw out anything you know you won't need, and have one less object floating around. You couldd even do this speculatively (and recover if an assumption proves bad) in a VM. These sorts of things are very hard to do in languages like C, and hard to do in statically compiled languages in general.
The advantage of going with a VM is linear in program difficulty (compiler optimizations tend to be in % terms), but the overhead is generally constant (10 MB for the VM, for instance), so at some point any program that could actually stress a computer will be far enough out that a VM will help rather than hurt it. That day has been approaching for awhile. Another half a dozen good optimizations (like the above two), combined with full VM sharing, and it might be here.
"You should compare a Java text editor to a native text editor"
Yes, go compare. JEdit is one of the better text editors around. They unfortunately try to sell themselves as an IDE (of which they are on of the worst), but they make a good programmer's text editor. You should try it out and then talk about native text editors always being better. JEdit is roughly equivalent to slick edit or ultra edit, and it's free. It also runs on any platform I've ever tried it on (Mac OS, Linux, Windows), which is more than I can say for the others.
In my case, I pretty much insist on java for most of my tools because I like to be able to use the same thing at home. I have a Mac at home, and very few programs that aren't in java have a Mac version (no visual studio, for instance) so that pretty well determines my choices. I also use Linux computers at work when that makes sense, and it's nice to use the same tools there as well. It makes life much easier, trust me.
Wow, this is pretty harsh. There's a few things you miss out on though. First of all, don't compare java apps to programs from Microsoft that are part of the OS. One of the primary reasons java is so heavy is that few things are written in it. If it was part of the OS, and more programs were written in it, then that 10 MB overhead for the VM just doesn't look so bad when spread over 20 processes. A lot of C programs are like this too. If you use the standard libraries (the ones everyone else uses), then you take a much smaller hit in memory size because most of your code is shared. If you use a non-standard library, then you get screwed. It's not very valid to compare two standard libraries against each other when one is spread over a dozen apps, and the other is spread over 1. It's like a chicken and the egg problem. If more stuff was written in java, then each program would take a smaller performance/memory hit. Unfortunately, not many desktop app developers want to be the first one.
Secondly, no java installation problems on OS X. I think you're referring to the foolish (or malevolent) choice made by your OS vendor to refuse to bundle any code that prevents platform lockin. That can hardly be blamed on Java, especially considering that Sun did all the work for them and then made it free, but said vendors refuse to bundle it because they want to have complete control over the "one true way." If your vendors made the same choices about standard libraries, you'd be in the same trouble. This isn't unique to java.
Keep in mind that pretty much all modern programs are absolute pigs. Mozilla is one of the worst ones ever seen, supposedly this is due to STL generating countless subtly different copies of the same code that then bloats up the memory use. Being a pig is not a monopoly held by java apps. Furthermore, how much control do you think the Mozilla developers really have? Didn't they write a front end that renders their own windows using some sort of markup language? Does that sound like an act undertaken by somebody who feels that fine grained control is very relevant?
The problem with properties (and granted, they do save you those two keystrokes for the parrentheses) is that you can't tell the difference between a member, and some arbitrarily complex block of code. Granted, if you made getters and setters for everything you'd have the same problem, but at least people would be reminded by the presence of the parentheses to maybe not call it over and over again in a tight loop if it can be helped.
1) Are you sure about that? If I remember correctly NYC has the lowest PCCR of any city with over a few hundred thousand people (forget the exact cutoff).
2) Most of NYC's crime is confined to a few sectors of the city. If you don't like crime then don't live there. Live prettymuch anywhere on Manhattan south of 110th street (and many places above) and you'll be fine.
The city isn't all bad. You get less space primarily if you want to live in the center of the city. If you live in one of the farther out reaches (I'm in NYC, so if you live in Inwood, the northern tip of Manhattan that counts as far reaches) you can get quite a lot of spce and lots of nice parks all around you. Furthermore, not needing a car more or less equalizes the price. Even better, if you are trying to save for retirement, jobs in the city pay about 50% more, so your retirement is worth about 50% more when you leave.:-) This also means that (almost) anywhere you go for vacation will be cheap by comparison, which is nice.
Give me my apartment a 15 minute walk from work, parks on all sides, a beautiful view of the skyline from work, and two week long vacations anywhere I want each year over the suburban dream, anyday. I'll also take the $15,000/year (20% of income) in retirement savings over the $10,000/year (also 20%) I'd have in suburbia as well. And of course, if I get bored I'll just get an apartment in a different part of town, a good change of scenery every 3 or 4 years.
This is almost entirely because the cities MASSIVELY subsidize the country and suburban areas of the US. For instance, NYC subsidizes upstate NY to the tune of around 9 billion dollars a year, and that's just direct state taxes vs. expenditures on residents in the metropolitan area. Add in the fact that our phone service (through the universal service fund, for instance) subsidizes suburban phone service, our electricity and water do likewise, and the list goes on. Then you can count federal taxes (people in cities make more money, but get less in pork compared to the rural states with big military bases and agriculture subsidies), and the list goes on. I would be surprised if NYC didn't subsidize your average suburban dream by about 20 billion a year, which is about $2,500 per new yorker. That's a lot of money.
Suburbia isn't cheaper, it just gets more handouts from the era when we crammed all the minorities in cities and then raped them with taxes to keep them poor.
Not that I'm against taxes, but my god, suburbia should have to pay its share, considering that it's also responsible for most of our environmental and strategic (oil anyone?) problems.
This is a weapons site, so they were going as quickly as possible to beat the soviets. There was no time (so it is said) to handle this properly, so they just extracted the plutonium and put the rest of the liquid waste in large tanks underground. This went on for decades. Surprise, surprise, several decades later it was found that some of the waste spilled here, a little leak there, etc....
It's not hard to properly handle if the site was setup to handle it properly in the beginning. Unfortunately, haste makes waste, and that's the problem with Hanford, it's a hold over from the cold war. In the future, it'll be vitrified (turned into glass), and then it's not going to leak or cause any problems.
Slashdot Mirror
If the reactor is long running, then it generates too much Pu-240, just like every other civilian reactor in the world. Plutonium containing lots of Pu-240 is know as "reactor grade" and nobody has ever managed to make a weapon out of it. If you think you're going to get into one of those reactors 10 years down the road and get anything other than a mess, you're dreaming.
It's ignorant fools like you who are responsible for our dependence on oil and (to a greater extent) coal. Thanks for black lung, learn something before bashing the scientists now.
This is, unfortunately, BS.
The disposal costs are factored in, nuke plants throughout the country pay a tax that was supposed to go towards building a repository. Instead, the feds decided to spend the money, not build a repository, and stiff the nuke utilities. The utilities have now had to pay TWICE for disposal of waste, and if the greens get their way they'll have to pay three or four times just for being on Nader's bad side.
The only fraud is coming from the environmentalists on this one.
-Tyler
By "prove" we mean to some disgusting (like 20) number of sigma. The odds of us all dying of a stroke on the same day is greater than the odds of us being wrong about that.
The odds aren't ever zero, but they're usually close enough.
In addition, beware of chaotic systems, for there quantum uncertainty truly can barge into the macroscopic world. For instance, the electricity and chemicals swirling around in your brain is probably a fairly chaotic system. This interaction magnifies the quantum effects, and your state of mind diverges (probably quite slowly) from the state that would be predicted given complete initial information.
As time goes on, one driver in a car slows down by 2 MPH for no discernable reason. You could not have predicted this if you were given just the state of his mind in the morning and all the inputs since then, because there are "random" inputs as well coming from the chaotic system that makes up the human brain. So, he slows down, then other drivers have to slow down, then the carrying capacity of the road decreases, eventually causing a traffic jam. Time goes on and the traffic jam vanishes just as mysteriously as it began. We've all seen it, and though it is heavily influenced by measurable phenomena (weather, etc...) there is a (probably) not insignificant random component caused by quantum uncertainty magnifying through two chaotic systems (a human brain, and a bunch of drivers interacting with each other on the road).
We know enough about quantum mechanics to know this. There is a great deal of science (from space craft to transistors and beyond) based on the fact that quantum uncertainty is truly random. This is (there is reason to believe) the actual source of randomness in the universe, and it is really random, it's not an illusion. This was shown by disproving the "hidden variable" conjecture, you can look it up easily on google, and it's been experimentally (and theoretically) tested.
This is why you use extremely long keys and strong algorithms. Use 4k RSA keys guys. It doesn't guarantee against attacks, but it does dramatically extend the time horizon. Even if there is a means of making factoring easier, it might not make it easy enough if the key is very big.
Make a key 10^10 as hard as the biggest one that can be broken (at least), and then only a very severe break will put you in danger.
You think so? A lawyer showing up one day and saying "We think you did something illegal, so give us 10,000 today or we'll take everything from you tomorrow." when you don't even own a computer and clearly didn't do it (as many of them didn't) doesn't qualify as tyrrany?
At the very least it's racketeering and extortion. Start just randomly demanding 1/2 a year's wage from random people many of whome never did anything like what you claim, and yet you can force them to pay it because they can't take 6 months off of work or pay 5 million dollars to mount a defense. I think that qualifies.
Well, I have a problem with this statement.....
"Your instance, however, assumes that the reaction is self-sustaining."
It doesn't have to be self sustaining, it just has to be delayed from going out long enough to develop lots of energy, not hard when you consider the rate at which nuclear reactions can take place. The exact same thing is true of virtually any reaction, if dissipated it will be extinguished. Explosives do work however because they are able to liberate lots of energy before being dissipated.
Furthermore, magnetic fields and plasmas have lots of strange interplay that is not nearly as obvious as "make the reactor depend on water, then if the water boils the reaction stops" sort of calculations that go into fission reactors. Just look at a solar flare for instance. A magnetic field gets twisted, storing energy, then it can spontaniously "snap" and reconnect, releasing the energy in a small locallized spot. If that were to happen in a fusion reactor it's not hard to imagine it could cause a substantial explosion as it instantly fusions 2% of the reactor's fuel inventory. It's also a lot harder to convince yourself that things like this can't happen than in the fission case where it relies on the fundamental properties of mater, like specific heat and inertia. Magnetic fields have VERY little inertia, and they can catastrophically realign with very little warning. If you rely on something chaotic like that to run a 1 GW system, how can you really be sure it won't spike up to 50 TW for a split second as something jumps back into alignment.
First of all, a disruption of the DNC in the 70s kept them out of the white house. Disruptions of conventions, especially if lost of protestors get tear gassed are actually a fairly effective tactic.
However, that aside, I think taking an absolute stance on most things is foolish. The Bush administration has repeatedly used its powers to silence free speech, and his corporate cronies have stuffed all the airwaves with republican propaganda.
There's a reason there aren't many quakers around. Anyone group that categorically rejects violence (for any reason), will swiftly find themselves violated by people who aren't so particular. Evil men rule when good men do nothing, it's as true now as it always was.
I'm not saying this is right, but then again, giving a hypocrite a taste of his own medicine hardly qualifies as evil either.
Do you actually have any data to support this hypothesis? Fusion reactions have positive feedback (reaction goes faster -> more heat -> reaction speeds up), so why couldn't it lose control and go boom? I'm not talking megatons here, as that takes very careful planning and lots of high density fuel. However, I think it's foolish to dismiss offhand the risk of a significant explosion, a blast sufficient to destroy the reactor and scatter some material merits some thought.
Fission reactors can't really explode (like nuclear weapons) either, because they are never critical on prompt neutrons alone (look it up if you don't know what that means), but Cherenobyl did surge to 100x it rated power and let loose a substantial explosion. Western reactors are much safer than that design, and are designed to contain explosions of any plausible magnitude, but it's not wise to just say "that can't happen" beause that's what you read in the clueless newspapers.
A classical (fission based) nuclear explosion happens in microseconds (less than 10 if I remember correctly), are you certain that an overly dense area of plasma would dissipate faster than that? I'm not saying that fusion would be bad, but a substantial (say, 1 ton of TNT worth) explosion caused by some sort of magnetic field glitch supercompressing a sector of plasma could probably release essentially all of the reactor's radioactive inventory. Fusion reactors produce short lived isotopes, so they have less waste issues, but he inventory of a large GW sized reactor could be sufficient to cause serious problems for a few years (Half life of Tritium, probably most of the inventory is 12 years) until the radioactivity dies down.
Clearly this would be better than coal, but perhaps it wouldn't hurt to have some good containment vessels, and give some real thought to this issue.
Spoken like a true anti-nuke. Go vote for Nader, he supports your "kill 99% of the world provided it's not me and lets live like cavemen" world view.
And of course your facts are entirely wrong as well, but that's pretty normal for an anti-nuke as well.
I agree to a degree, but don't kid yourself into thinking that selling power back would get you much. If it's a sunny day then everyone will be trying to sell back their power, and quite simply the power company probably doesn't want to deal with the difficulty of collecting all this power from the countryside and funneling it somewhere it can be useful. Face it, you use energy at peak times, and you produce energy at off-peak times. In either case the power company has to transport it for you. You aren't going to get even 20% of what you pay for power back, even if you sell as much as you buy. Off peak distributed power just isn't worth much.
OK, I'm calling BS on this as well.
First of all, weather patterns are large. Clouds aren't independent random variables, it's not too difficult for the whole Eastern US to be socked in with clouds.
Secondly, I'll call BS because we have this thing called "nighttime" that covers the WHOLE COUNTRY AT ONCE!!!!!! What are the odds of that? Virtually garanteed every 24 hours or so.
Basically, the power grid is creaky as it is, and that's just with demand varying chaotically. If the supply did so as well, look out. Solar can probably provide 10% of our power before this becomes a problem. If you think it's going to provide 60%, you're living in a dream world. Strangely, Ralph Nader thinks this, but then again he's never met a scientist he didn't think was wrong about everything.
It sounds like the guys I once worked for who were convinced that software failures were independent random variables. They had a cluster of like 4 MS SQL servers, convinced that if each one was up only 90% of the time they'd have 4 nines of uptime. Of course if your failures are software in nature, then whatever bug crashed server N will crash server N+1 just as easily, and all four would go down in less than a second. A little understanding, please.
First, a disclaimer. I use OS X at home, Linux and Windows at work, and I write almost everything in Java.
Basically, I don't like using Visual Studio, because I can't use it at home. I don't like using X-Code because I can't use it at work. I write in Java because it will run at home, at work, and everywhere in between, and I write my Java with Netbeans. This prevents me from needing to do thing entirely differently in several places, and is really convenient. I also find Netbeans to be better than Eclipse (YMMV), but that's another story.
I wish Apple would just fold their work into Eclipse and Netbeans so we don't have n+1 coding tools each with its own quirks. Either contribute actual fixes to the programs, or just release a bunch of plugins that allow apple script development, etc....
That being said, I can't really complain too much. Free is free afterall, but I just wish they improved one of the other free (and cross platform) IDEs, rather than reinventing the wheel yet again.
Well, I'd certainly take it over MySQL, and I haven't used DB2 but it's optimizers look kindof sucky, so maybe DB2 as well.
However, I've seen Oracle perform miracles, and I've also seen the explain output from PSQL queries. The one thing PSQL needs in order to be a good OLAP (as opposed to OLTP) database is a really good query optimizer.
The primary problem I always ran into was that Postgres was always VERY optimistic when guessing row counts (if you actually perform the steps in the explain, you often get thousands of times more rows than PSQL says you'll get), and this is a problem. And yes, this is after vaccuming tables, etc...
This means that (in my experience) the thing actually runs about 10x faster when you turn off sequential scans and hash joins, as it always attempts to use those two on HUGE tables because it thinks they're small. If the optimizer could be improved a little bit, that would be wonderful.
However, if you don't plan to push it very hard, or give it any HUGE tables, then it does quite well. There's certainly no reason too pay actual money for a sucky database or use something like MySQL.
Never say never.
There are techniques to dramatically reduce memory use and garbage collection for VM based languages like Java.
One of them is escape analysis. Simply put, everything that can go on the stack is detected and placed there. You can then drop any synchronization as well. This is an excellent improvement essentially for free, once the compiler supports it.
A second technique is object inlining. Sometimes an object is always contained within another object, so you can just inline its data inside the bigger object, throw out anything you know you won't need, and have one less object floating around. You couldd even do this speculatively (and recover if an assumption proves bad) in a VM. These sorts of things are very hard to do in languages like C, and hard to do in statically compiled languages in general.
The advantage of going with a VM is linear in program difficulty (compiler optimizations tend to be in % terms), but the overhead is generally constant (10 MB for the VM, for instance), so at some point any program that could actually stress a computer will be far enough out that a VM will help rather than hurt it. That day has been approaching for awhile. Another half a dozen good optimizations (like the above two), combined with full VM sharing, and it might be here.
"You should compare a Java text editor to a native text editor"
Yes, go compare. JEdit is one of the better text editors around. They unfortunately try to sell themselves as an IDE (of which they are on of the worst), but they make a good programmer's text editor. You should try it out and then talk about native text editors always being better. JEdit is roughly equivalent to slick edit or ultra edit, and it's free. It also runs on any platform I've ever tried it on (Mac OS, Linux, Windows), which is more than I can say for the others.
In my case, I pretty much insist on java for most of my tools because I like to be able to use the same thing at home. I have a Mac at home, and very few programs that aren't in java have a Mac version (no visual studio, for instance) so that pretty well determines my choices. I also use Linux computers at work when that makes sense, and it's nice to use the same tools there as well. It makes life much easier, trust me.
Wow, this is pretty harsh. There's a few things you miss out on though. First of all, don't compare java apps to programs from Microsoft that are part of the OS. One of the primary reasons java is so heavy is that few things are written in it. If it was part of the OS, and more programs were written in it, then that 10 MB overhead for the VM just doesn't look so bad when spread over 20 processes. A lot of C programs are like this too. If you use the standard libraries (the ones everyone else uses), then you take a much smaller hit in memory size because most of your code is shared. If you use a non-standard library, then you get screwed. It's not very valid to compare two standard libraries against each other when one is spread over a dozen apps, and the other is spread over 1. It's like a chicken and the egg problem. If more stuff was written in java, then each program would take a smaller performance/memory hit. Unfortunately, not many desktop app developers want to be the first one.
Secondly, no java installation problems on OS X. I think you're referring to the foolish (or malevolent) choice made by your OS vendor to refuse to bundle any code that prevents platform lockin. That can hardly be blamed on Java, especially considering that Sun did all the work for them and then made it free, but said vendors refuse to bundle it because they want to have complete control over the "one true way." If your vendors made the same choices about standard libraries, you'd be in the same trouble. This isn't unique to java.
Keep in mind that pretty much all modern programs are absolute pigs. Mozilla is one of the worst ones ever seen, supposedly this is due to STL generating countless subtly different copies of the same code that then bloats up the memory use. Being a pig is not a monopoly held by java apps. Furthermore, how much control do you think the Mozilla developers really have? Didn't they write a front end that renders their own windows using some sort of markup language? Does that sound like an act undertaken by somebody who feels that fine grained control is very relevant?
Is it really that hard to type the parrentheses?
The problem with properties (and granted, they do save you those two keystrokes for the parrentheses) is that you can't tell the difference between a member, and some arbitrarily complex block of code. Granted, if you made getters and setters for everything you'd have the same problem, but at least people would be reminded by the presence of the parentheses to maybe not call it over and over again in a tight loop if it can be helped.
Two points.
1) Are you sure about that? If I remember correctly NYC has the lowest PCCR of any city with over a few hundred thousand people (forget the exact cutoff).
2) Most of NYC's crime is confined to a few sectors of the city. If you don't like crime then don't live there. Live prettymuch anywhere on Manhattan south of 110th street (and many places above) and you'll be fine.
The city isn't all bad. You get less space primarily if you want to live in the center of the city. If you live in one of the farther out reaches (I'm in NYC, so if you live in Inwood, the northern tip of Manhattan that counts as far reaches) you can get quite a lot of spce and lots of nice parks all around you. Furthermore, not needing a car more or less equalizes the price. Even better, if you are trying to save for retirement, jobs in the city pay about 50% more, so your retirement is worth about 50% more when you leave.
Give me my apartment a 15 minute walk from work, parks on all sides, a beautiful view of the skyline from work, and two week long vacations anywhere I want each year over the suburban dream, anyday. I'll also take the $15,000/year (20% of income) in retirement savings over the $10,000/year (also 20%) I'd have in suburbia as well. And of course, if I get bored I'll just get an apartment in a different part of town, a good change of scenery every 3 or 4 years.
This is almost entirely because the cities MASSIVELY subsidize the country and suburban areas of the US. For instance, NYC subsidizes upstate NY to the tune of around 9 billion dollars a year, and that's just direct state taxes vs. expenditures on residents in the metropolitan area. Add in the fact that our phone service (through the universal service fund, for instance) subsidizes suburban phone service, our electricity and water do likewise, and the list goes on. Then you can count federal taxes (people in cities make more money, but get less in pork compared to the rural states with big military bases and agriculture subsidies), and the list goes on. I would be surprised if NYC didn't subsidize your average suburban dream by about 20 billion a year, which is about $2,500 per new yorker. That's a lot of money. Suburbia isn't cheaper, it just gets more handouts from the era when we crammed all the minorities in cities and then raped them with taxes to keep them poor. Not that I'm against taxes, but my god, suburbia should have to pay its share, considering that it's also responsible for most of our environmental and strategic (oil anyone?) problems.
nuclear was ready decades ago, we just weren't ready to accept it. Funny how irrationaly hysteria starts to diminish as cost becomes a factor, no?
if the waste is 50 years old than that helps immensly to reduce the danger.
This is a weapons site, so they were going as quickly as possible to beat the soviets. There was no time (so it is said) to handle this properly, so they just extracted the plutonium and put the rest of the liquid waste in large tanks underground. This went on for decades. Surprise, surprise, several decades later it was found that some of the waste spilled here, a little leak there, etc....
It's not hard to properly handle if the site was setup to handle it properly in the beginning. Unfortunately, haste makes waste, and that's the problem with Hanford, it's a hold over from the cold war. In the future, it'll be vitrified (turned into glass), and then it's not going to leak or cause any problems.