I think the real problem with the "Nuclear Drill" concept isn't that they make you do rather flimsy things that aren't liable to save your life -- even though it might. The problem was that a lot of people in society, in government and out, were content to live with the fact of a future nuclear war, believed in it as a necessary and practical means of offense against aggression, and used "drills" to try to normalize the expectation in young people and convince everyone that a thermonuclear war was just a really bad air raid and was a practical form of warfare, and not what it really was: mass genocide.
WTF, what is wrong with Slashdot!!!!! has it become so popular that we can't understand how searching in a map works vs a vtable indirection!!!!!!
All of the implementation addresses are cached when run for the first time, and it's usually inlined; after the first invocation a message usually is only a cycle or two slower than a vtable indirection, given the normal caveats. objc_msgSend is extremely optimized, it's the single most called function on the platform so it gets a lot of attention from optimizers.
And how do you propose to recover the history, as well as the listings of the the guy who retired or landed in jail? It's not what's for sale, but what's for sale and what does the market history deem a reasonable price.
These are just proxy records for the county recorder's originals-- the historical price argument is sort of bogus because the MLS is just a convenience so people don't have to go down to the recorder's office to research a comp. The MLS is not authoritative for any such data, and the MLS institutionally isn't authoritative for anything. It is the final repose of no actual information, it simply aggregates information from other sources. I concede your uptime argument, but I agree with the GP that realtors are a pretty casual lot and don't seem to be able to focus on things like backups and compliance, and if they lost the MLS for a few weeks I bet they'd probably find it a mixed blessing, since they wouldn't be able to do searches, but neither would their clients either, and suddenly they'd be getting a lot more attention for their insider knowledge. (I suspect realtors secretly hate that people can go up on Redfin and find their own homes and comps, since it commoditizes their services.)
Of course, the reason GP was probably cashiered was because his MLS admins didn't want an audit trail for their database in case anyone ever tried to subpoena it, and discovered all the comps that were getting goosed:)
MLSs only track currently offered properties, and the records themselves belong to the person making the listing (the agent doing the listing is responsible for making sure it's accurate, etc.) If an MLS died all of the sudden it would be a real inconvenience but the individual agents would just have to re-submit their listings, because it's their listings, not the MLSs. So the proprietary interest of the database is very different than in the case of a county recorder.
The Manning technical books always have someone in an elaborate local costume on the cover. Their Ruby on Rails book has a Turkish bey with an elaborate fan hat, for example.
When I see the phrase "The original real estate records HAVE NOT BEEN LOST," I interpret that to mean that they still have the deeds, surveys, sale contracts, liens, covenants and easements on file, on paper, in a cabinet.
Which is good. It just means they'll have about 30 years of data entry to do...
A somewhat correctable problem with debit cards is that there ARE some people who's credit is so terrible that they can't even get a checking account -- I'm not saying they don't deserve being frozen out of check writing, generally they do, but if you eliminate cash transactions the merely "unbanked" would become destitute.
A more pressing problem is that debit cards are offered by private companies to individuals on an at will basis -- a bank can cancel or decline your card, or forbid issuing you a card, according to whatever its policy is, and can charge you essentially whatever it damn well pleases for the "service" of giving you the card, let alone for penalties you may incur. It's dangerous when you let private banks become a gatekeeper to your monetary system, because, as I said before, there's a profound risk of them collecting rents instead of competing to deliver service.
As always, the most laissez-faire solution to any monetary problem is to get the government out of the banknote business entirely and only tolerate privately issued instruments, valued according to the worthiness of the issuer. (Of course this solution, like most of libertarian economics, is elegant but completely unworkable.)
Use virtual cash to buy ounce of silver, hand silver to friend. Another serous problem is that, if this were done in the US for example, you'd probably have people starving to death because they have bad credit, or at lest you'd be giving banks a huge potential to become rentiers. A solution would be to create a banker or last resort, like a postal banking/remittance system that will do business with anyone.
It's sortof a flip remark, since Tufte is pretty effusive with examples and citations. He rarely asserts a design principle a priori, he always goes and shows you how somebody historically did X and he's much more of a descriptive than prescriptive authority.
All C's are hard in latin; it was spelled the first way and pronounced the second way in Greek. I thought the story was that 616 in roman numerals, DCXVI, was an acrostic of an early Christian anti-Vespasian slogan.
You couldn't buy a PC when the Apple 1 came out, it was 1976(!). The Apple 1 was a competitor to the Altair and Imsai. The main competitive difference was that it could be bought fully assembled (but for a case) and would generate a composite video signal.
As wishful as we all may be, Google is a Python house, and the two are basically supplementary -- you rarely see anyone devote resources to both. It's more likely that if any major company loads in to Ruby, it's gonna be Apple.
I'm a big Objective-C fan, but running against you are the fact that most of the modern features that give it some parity with Java -- like the GC and the functional programming features -- are only supported by one extremely mercurial vendor that has a nasty tendency of making no 5-year roadmaps. Also the framework and libraries just don't offer the same coverage as Java. A lot of people at the turn of the century bet on WebObjects, which was a serious platform at that time, and now it's abandonware. Nobody wants to get burned like that again.
Everything I need to know about OSX Xgrid Cluster Computing
I suppose this means that my MIDI expression pedal is going to shoot up to $200 due to cross licensing. To say nothing of my PI Engineering foot controller that I use to switch editing controls in Pro Tools.
It seems like if they did this, Apple would be accused of furthering their third-party-app-as-second-class-citizen agenda... "Look! All of Apples first party iOS apps 'just work,' but third party apps make the user jump through hoops!" (they might be heard saying.)
If you require all URL schemes novel to the system to be validated by the user before they launch the other application, then you just end up with the "Are you sure you want to do that?" problem we all loved on Vista. Some application-defined URL schemes trigger Really Big Things (like Skype calls), and some just launch the app, it's up to the developer who decided to invented the scheme to actually describe what the scheme does. It's obviously impossible for the host OS to test an arbitrary URL to see if it "does something bad" or not, since that would require the OS solving the halting problem on the target app for the given input.
Of course you could point out that this is a side-effect of the fact that URLs are pretty much the ONLY way to do application-level IPC on iOS. Since URLs are highly containable, don't let apps share memory, are rigorously parseable, etc. they present a very thin vector for making Bad Things Happen, compared to anything else.
Of course, their people are mostly 40 - 50+ Americans, who are no doubt more expensive than 20-something Indians. But they also know what they're doing.
Knowing what you're doing is SO 20th century. Next you'll be telling us the 50-year-olds don't spend 70% of their day on AIM and Facebook...
Slashdot Mirror
I think the real problem with the "Nuclear Drill" concept isn't that they make you do rather flimsy things that aren't liable to save your life -- even though it might. The problem was that a lot of people in society, in government and out, were content to live with the fact of a future nuclear war, believed in it as a necessary and practical means of offense against aggression, and used "drills" to try to normalize the expectation in young people and convince everyone that a thermonuclear war was just a really bad air raid and was a practical form of warfare, and not what it really was: mass genocide.
Apple's implementation of Objective-C also offers vtable dispatching as an optimization since Mac OS X 10.6, and benchmarks indicate little chance that either approach gives you much improvement on modern hardware.
(Don't mean to keep posting but I did some more reading this morning and I found it interesting.)
All of the implementation addresses are cached when run for the first time, and it's usually inlined; after the first invocation a message usually is only a cycle or two slower than a vtable indirection, given the normal caveats. objc_msgSend is extremely optimized, it's the single most called function on the platform so it gets a lot of attention from optimizers.
Pointing out redundancy is not in itself redundant.
NSInputManagers, but all of that is behind us, or so we keep telling people. ;)
Well, Apple's customer service policies and support agreement would stop it, for any commercial development anyways, but nothing "technically."
These are just proxy records for the county recorder's originals-- the historical price argument is sort of bogus because the MLS is just a convenience so people don't have to go down to the recorder's office to research a comp. The MLS is not authoritative for any such data, and the MLS institutionally isn't authoritative for anything. It is the final repose of no actual information, it simply aggregates information from other sources. I concede your uptime argument, but I agree with the GP that realtors are a pretty casual lot and don't seem to be able to focus on things like backups and compliance, and if they lost the MLS for a few weeks I bet they'd probably find it a mixed blessing, since they wouldn't be able to do searches, but neither would their clients either, and suddenly they'd be getting a lot more attention for their insider knowledge. (I suspect realtors secretly hate that people can go up on Redfin and find their own homes and comps, since it commoditizes their services.)
Of course, the reason GP was probably cashiered was because his MLS admins didn't want an audit trail for their database in case anyone ever tried to subpoena it, and discovered all the comps that were getting goosed :)
MLSs only track currently offered properties, and the records themselves belong to the person making the listing (the agent doing the listing is responsible for making sure it's accurate, etc.) If an MLS died all of the sudden it would be a real inconvenience but the individual agents would just have to re-submit their listings, because it's their listings, not the MLSs. So the proprietary interest of the database is very different than in the case of a county recorder.
The Manning technical books always have someone in an elaborate local costume on the cover. Their Ruby on Rails book has a Turkish bey with an elaborate fan hat, for example.
When I see the phrase "The original real estate records HAVE NOT BEEN LOST," I interpret that to mean that they still have the deeds, surveys, sale contracts, liens, covenants and easements on file, on paper, in a cabinet.
Which is good. It just means they'll have about 30 years of data entry to do...
A somewhat correctable problem with debit cards is that there ARE some people who's credit is so terrible that they can't even get a checking account -- I'm not saying they don't deserve being frozen out of check writing, generally they do, but if you eliminate cash transactions the merely "unbanked" would become destitute.
A more pressing problem is that debit cards are offered by private companies to individuals on an at will basis -- a bank can cancel or decline your card, or forbid issuing you a card, according to whatever its policy is, and can charge you essentially whatever it damn well pleases for the "service" of giving you the card, let alone for penalties you may incur. It's dangerous when you let private banks become a gatekeeper to your monetary system, because, as I said before, there's a profound risk of them collecting rents instead of competing to deliver service.
As always, the most laissez-faire solution to any monetary problem is to get the government out of the banknote business entirely and only tolerate privately issued instruments, valued according to the worthiness of the issuer. (Of course this solution, like most of libertarian economics, is elegant but completely unworkable.)
Use virtual cash to buy ounce of silver, hand silver to friend. Another serous problem is that, if this were done in the US for example, you'd probably have people starving to death because they have bad credit, or at lest you'd be giving banks a huge potential to become rentiers. A solution would be to create a banker or last resort, like a postal banking/remittance system that will do business with anyone.
It's sortof a flip remark, since Tufte is pretty effusive with examples and citations. He rarely asserts a design principle a priori, he always goes and shows you how somebody historically did X and he's much more of a descriptive than prescriptive authority.
All C's are hard in latin; it was spelled the first way and pronounced the second way in Greek. I thought the story was that 616 in roman numerals, DCXVI, was an acrostic of an early Christian anti-Vespasian slogan.
Oops I totally misread your post. Apologize. I hope the trivial information was useful :(
You couldn't buy a PC when the Apple 1 came out, it was 1976(!). The Apple 1 was a competitor to the Altair and Imsai. The main competitive difference was that it could be bought fully assembled (but for a case) and would generate a composite video signal.
As wishful as we all may be, Google is a Python house, and the two are basically supplementary -- you rarely see anyone devote resources to both. It's more likely that if any major company loads in to Ruby, it's gonna be Apple.
How do you benchmark "tightness?" :/
I'm a big Objective-C fan, but running against you are the fact that most of the modern features that give it some parity with Java -- like the GC and the functional programming features -- are only supported by one extremely mercurial vendor that has a nasty tendency of making no 5-year roadmaps. Also the framework and libraries just don't offer the same coverage as Java. A lot of people at the turn of the century bet on WebObjects, which was a serious platform at that time, and now it's abandonware. Nobody wants to get burned like that again.
What was I saying about abandonware?
I suppose this means that my MIDI expression pedal is going to shoot up to $200 due to cross licensing. To say nothing of my PI Engineering foot controller that I use to switch editing controls in Pro Tools.
Can I just say that watching the founder of slashdot attempt to type a typo- and misspelling-free sentence is absolutely hysterical?
That's no moon...
It seems like if they did this, Apple would be accused of furthering their third-party-app-as-second-class-citizen agenda... "Look! All of Apples first party iOS apps 'just work,' but third party apps make the user jump through hoops!" (they might be heard saying.)
If you require all URL schemes novel to the system to be validated by the user before they launch the other application, then you just end up with the "Are you sure you want to do that?" problem we all loved on Vista. Some application-defined URL schemes trigger Really Big Things (like Skype calls), and some just launch the app, it's up to the developer who decided to invented the scheme to actually describe what the scheme does. It's obviously impossible for the host OS to test an arbitrary URL to see if it "does something bad" or not, since that would require the OS solving the halting problem on the target app for the given input.
Of course you could point out that this is a side-effect of the fact that URLs are pretty much the ONLY way to do application-level IPC on iOS. Since URLs are highly containable, don't let apps share memory, are rigorously parseable, etc. they present a very thin vector for making Bad Things Happen, compared to anything else.
Knowing what you're doing is SO 20th century. Next you'll be telling us the 50-year-olds don't spend 70% of their day on AIM and Facebook...