In theory C++'s thread support may be better than Python's, but in practice writing working multithreaded programs is much, much easier in Python, particularly if you want to be crossplatform. (At this point you talk about the GIL, but again - it's a big problem in theory, but doesn't get in the way in practice).
As for speed, sure, C++ is faster in the same way that assembly is faster than C++, and where appropriate (i.e. you've profiled it and seen that function x is taking so much CPU time) by all means write particular functions in C++. But writing a whole program in it for "performance reasons" is the worst kind of premature optimization.
If they really cared about road damage they'd tax the trucks. The cost of maintenance due to private cars is trivial in comparison. But of course that would be "anti-business" so instead they'll go after the people in the street.
But, they shouldn't be. They should be tracking *upstream*, putting their effort into *upstream*, instead of following other forks of the kernel.
That'd be fine if upstream provided a reliable, stable kernel. But it doesn't, and hasn't for some time now; Linus has explicitly said if you want that you should go for one of the big distro's kernels. So I wouldn't blame e.g. slackware (a one-man distro) for following the red hat kernel rather than the kernel.org one - if you need a stable, tested kernel, the kernel.org one doesn't cut it, unless you have the resources to test it yourself.
It's only more dangerous if you think it isn't. Browsers could display self-signed sites as if they were unencrypted; that would be better than the current situation, and no more dangerous.
Their supplier is competing unfairly with US suppliers, though. I think we already have similar regulations for environmentally damaging suppliers? To my mind this is no different.
So what if you smell like beer. That's not illegal and it's not probable cause for a search.
I'd say that much should be probable cause. If you're not competent to drink without spilling it, you're probably not in a fit state to be driving. (Agreed with you in general, sure)
Looking around a local charity isn't really an "experiment"; there's no control, and it's not reflective of charities in general, at least in revenue terms (I'd guess most donations go through big multinational charities, not the local sort you'd look around). I suspect many charities do use the cheapest things available and pay as little as possible (which, while it may help them feel good, probably isn't the most efficient way to help people) - but I also know of people who are making a very comfortable living running charities.
For an actual experiment, the thing to do would be to compare lives saved - what's the difference in death toll between disasters where there was a big donation-to-charity response, and disasters of a comparable scale but which attracted far fewer donations for whatever reason (reduced media coverage? Happened during bad economic circumstances?). I'd be interested to see such a comparison, but from the fact that we don't see them made by the charities (where's the "your donations saved x000 lives in the tsunami" poster?), I have an inkling they're not that impressive.
As for a more efficient way of accomplishing the mission, that's what capitalism will find for you. I wouldn't be at all surprised if buying Japanese (from ordinary, profit-making Japanese companies) will help the country get back on its feet faster than charitable donations.
Mass, not gravity, so no good for tractor beams or gravity waves, and no better for storing power than any other particle. Creating matter with no mass (and using that for signalling, since it would travel at the speed of light) is... well, maybe. Probably only on quantum scales, but even that would be very useful for e.g. faster microchips.
There are multiple competing theories and, as others have said, many free parameters. What we call "supersymmetry" is not a single complete theory, we're nowhere near the stage where you could design your microchip using supersymmetric effects and calculate what the distances needed to be. In terms of making theoretical calculations assuming that supersymmetry is correct, physicists are doing that already, that's how they come up with these predictions. But even calculating what the outcomes of quite simple particle accelerator collisions would be at these kind of energies takes months of supercomputer time - to the extent that it may actually be easier to try it and see than do the calculation.
- A power-cycle would leave the machine exactly where it was. Well, that would be a problem with buggy software. But, for such cases we could have a hard-reset of some sort..
- Absolutely no waiting for shutdown/power-up/etc.
You can get that nowadays with ACPI S3 suspend if you leave your machine plugged in. It's awesome, and kinda freaky.
- Stuff like 'object serialization', 'state persistence', 'configuration persistence' etc.. would just be there. We wont have to deal with the whole lot of parsing, etc. nonsense.
Please, no. Haven't we learned enough from.doc about the stupidity of trying to store data by dumping memory out and reading it back in?
- Application startup would be blazingly fast.
What would battery-backed ram do to help that?
Side note: most modern systems can fit a complete OS into RAM. You can tweak a live-cd linux or similar to do it. It does run very fast, but you find yourself missing all that "bloat", or I do - most of the modern resource-consuming features are actually quite useful.
All the companies in the GP post are mature, mostly non-internet businesses. What're the P/Es of the companies in the summary - Zygna, Twitter, Facebook?
Which is useful but too limited for many nice GUIs. Using PyQt is hands down the best GUI writing experience I've ever had - it has all the power of the C++ version, but less of the faff.
yet even with the most clever swipey-typing system, it will still suck compared to a keyboard and full-sized monitor screen.
I've heard claims that dasher is faster than typing, and screen size is mostly a matter of how close you have it. I don't like it any more than you do, but I think this is the future.
Five years ago you could've made the same argument that people would always need the power of a desktop and laptops were never going to displace them. But it turns out they have.
"cached javascript"? What, just random javascript snippets from the cache? Most javascript delays occur either on page load, or after an ajax call; once your idle all the page load stuff has finished. Pre-emptively executing the onClick()s of all the links on the page and caching the result seems like a sensible optimization, until you realise it's going to play havoc with any ajax-based site. Prefetching linked-to pages in the background is a valid optimization and could include doing those page's onload javascript although, again, you have to worry about what that's going to do to more dynamic sites.
Darpa also has a reliable budget with which to sponsor annual contests. X-Prize relies on individual donations, and most donors would rather see something tangible now than set up a repeating but far smaller prize.
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As for speed, sure, C++ is faster in the same way that assembly is faster than C++, and where appropriate (i.e. you've profiled it and seen that function x is taking so much CPU time) by all means write particular functions in C++. But writing a whole program in it for "performance reasons" is the worst kind of premature optimization.
If they really cared about road damage they'd tax the trucks. The cost of maintenance due to private cars is trivial in comparison. But of course that would be "anti-business" so instead they'll go after the people in the street.
Vista worked and worked fine. I don't get all the hate.
But, they shouldn't be. They should be tracking *upstream*, putting their effort into *upstream*, instead of following other forks of the kernel.
That'd be fine if upstream provided a reliable, stable kernel. But it doesn't, and hasn't for some time now; Linus has explicitly said if you want that you should go for one of the big distro's kernels. So I wouldn't blame e.g. slackware (a one-man distro) for following the red hat kernel rather than the kernel.org one - if you need a stable, tested kernel, the kernel.org one doesn't cut it, unless you have the resources to test it yourself.
Except, how is a business supposed to know if its suppliers are running pirated software?
Get a contract that says the supplier is liable for these damages if they're found to be using pirated software. No?
It's only more dangerous if you think it isn't. Browsers could display self-signed sites as if they were unencrypted; that would be better than the current situation, and no more dangerous.
Their supplier is competing unfairly with US suppliers, though. I think we already have similar regulations for environmentally damaging suppliers? To my mind this is no different.
I'd say that much should be probable cause. If you're not competent to drink without spilling it, you're probably not in a fit state to be driving. (Agreed with you in general, sure)
For an actual experiment, the thing to do would be to compare lives saved - what's the difference in death toll between disasters where there was a big donation-to-charity response, and disasters of a comparable scale but which attracted far fewer donations for whatever reason (reduced media coverage? Happened during bad economic circumstances?). I'd be interested to see such a comparison, but from the fact that we don't see them made by the charities (where's the "your donations saved x000 lives in the tsunami" poster?), I have an inkling they're not that impressive.
As for a more efficient way of accomplishing the mission, that's what capitalism will find for you. I wouldn't be at all surprised if buying Japanese (from ordinary, profit-making Japanese companies) will help the country get back on its feet faster than charitable donations.
I thought if they could do anything right it would be html
Clearly you've never looked at the page source.
Or just use an alternative that doesn't have these notability standards, like tv tropes.
Which "same frame"? There are infinitely many possible frames with the same rotation but different translation.
Mass, not gravity, so no good for tractor beams or gravity waves, and no better for storing power than any other particle. Creating matter with no mass (and using that for signalling, since it would travel at the speed of light) is... well, maybe. Probably only on quantum scales, but even that would be very useful for e.g. faster microchips.
There are multiple competing theories and, as others have said, many free parameters. What we call "supersymmetry" is not a single complete theory, we're nowhere near the stage where you could design your microchip using supersymmetric effects and calculate what the distances needed to be. In terms of making theoretical calculations assuming that supersymmetry is correct, physicists are doing that already, that's how they come up with these predictions. But even calculating what the outcomes of quite simple particle accelerator collisions would be at these kind of energies takes months of supercomputer time - to the extent that it may actually be easier to try it and see than do the calculation.
Ten years ago I was saying the same thing about people who bought laptops.
- A power-cycle would leave the machine exactly where it was. Well, that would be a problem with buggy software. But, for such cases we could have a hard-reset of some sort..
- Absolutely no waiting for shutdown/power-up/etc.
You can get that nowadays with ACPI S3 suspend if you leave your machine plugged in. It's awesome, and kinda freaky.
- Stuff like 'object serialization', 'state persistence', 'configuration persistence' etc.. would just be there. We wont have to deal with the whole lot of parsing, etc. nonsense.
Please, no. Haven't we learned enough from .doc about the stupidity of trying to store data by dumping memory out and reading it back in?
- Application startup would be blazingly fast.
What would battery-backed ram do to help that?
Side note: most modern systems can fit a complete OS into RAM. You can tweak a live-cd linux or similar to do it. It does run very fast, but you find yourself missing all that "bloat", or I do - most of the modern resource-consuming features are actually quite useful.
Apologies if I'm being dumb here, but isn't a solar sail only really useful for moving away from the sun, not towards it?
Did you miss the "by their own admission there's no legal obligation for them to close down our account" right there in the summary?
All the companies in the GP post are mature, mostly non-internet businesses. What're the P/Es of the companies in the summary - Zygna, Twitter, Facebook?
Which is useful but too limited for many nice GUIs. Using PyQt is hands down the best GUI writing experience I've ever had - it has all the power of the C++ version, but less of the faff.
yet even with the most clever swipey-typing system, it will still suck compared to a keyboard and full-sized monitor screen.
I've heard claims that dasher is faster than typing, and screen size is mostly a matter of how close you have it. I don't like it any more than you do, but I think this is the future.
Five years ago you could've made the same argument that people would always need the power of a desktop and laptops were never going to displace them. But it turns out they have.
Gah. Once you're idle. Must be tired.
"cached javascript"? What, just random javascript snippets from the cache? Most javascript delays occur either on page load, or after an ajax call; once your idle all the page load stuff has finished. Pre-emptively executing the onClick()s of all the links on the page and caching the result seems like a sensible optimization, until you realise it's going to play havoc with any ajax-based site. Prefetching linked-to pages in the background is a valid optimization and could include doing those page's onload javascript although, again, you have to worry about what that's going to do to more dynamic sites.
Darpa also has a reliable budget with which to sponsor annual contests. X-Prize relies on individual donations, and most donors would rather see something tangible now than set up a repeating but far smaller prize.