"Like the actual hardware doesn't have flaws as well.. Intel.."
Personally, I think the Intel x86 instruction set is all the evidence that anyone could need that being utterly and completely incompetent is not an imprediment to achieving overwhelming success. Even at the 8088 level it was a shambles compared to say the Motorola 6809. And it has only gotten worse over time.
I actually worked with those old 20000 line plus Fortran programs and they were surprisingly easy to work with. One quickly learned that in order to maintain some semblence of sanity, one had to block line numbers by function -- e.g. 0-1000 are global stuff, 1000-2000 are input... Sounds dumb, but it worked. In a few cases I saw both the 1960s monolithic Fortran code and the 1980s modern style code with roughly sixteen zillion tiny subroutines. Personally, I think the older style was often easier to work with.
I don't know much about Cobol, but the one time I had to debug an issue in a Cobol subsystem, I found it to be surprisingly readable. I don't think I have the patience to write Cobol code, but I think it probably deserves more respect than it gets.
Keep in mind that an awful lot of meaningful programming is done by folks who are capable, but are not "computer scientists" They tend to prefer "scripting languages" (Python, Perl, Javascript). to glorified assembly languages. But even though they don't and maybe can't write device drivers, their needs and preferences are important too.
If you're trying to make sense of 10 million data points, do you really want to write a C++ program to filter, manipulate, join sets, etc. Probably not. Even if you can do C or C++ or assembler, in practice, you'll probably use R or mathlab or Python.
Complaining about whitespace is a pretty certain sign that the poster doesn't know squat about Python. Python has plenty of issues. Here's one -- https://xkcd.com/1987/ In point of fact Python use of whitespace is (unlike say bash's) just a straightforward formalization of a pretty reasonable style rule for readable code in any language that allows some (by no means all) nested parentheses to be omitted.
The only genuine problem I'm aware of with Python indentation comes when trying to embed python in a shell script using python -c.... I'm not sure anything non-trivial can be done that way. I suspect that anyone wishing to embed Python code in a shell script will probably try -c, quickly become annoyed/frustrated/outraged and learn about heredoc.
I kind of wonder if a plastic gun isn't likely to be at least as dangerous to the user as to the target. I don't think a working zip is hard to cobble together from hardware store parts, but I think if I tried that I'd probably prefer metal parts to plastic in the areas in contact with hot, rapidly expanding, gases.
Watcha smokin there man? Of course Tesla's vehicles are overly expensive. The base price of the cheapest Toyota Camry -- which is what you look at if you have a wife, a couple of kids, a normal job, and need wheels is $23645. Prius (hybrid) is about the same. Likewise Honda Accord, Ford Fusion, and I assume whatever GM is selling to typical North Americans.
Autopilot is another $5K, right? I suppose you think you can run into a fire truck without it, but it will handle all the messy details for you. and it demonstrably works.
You're quite right, and it's not a problem just with Hoover Dam but with any large hydro dam in the Southwest -- including Shasta, Oroville, and dozens of smaller dams. One problem is that you have to move a LOT of water to store power. Roughly, one cubic meter (one metric tonne) needs to drop 100 meters (328 feet in American) to generate one kw/hr of electricity. Pumped storage using existing dams will mean moving a lot of water and one does need to balance water usage in the generally water short Southwest with energy storage.
Throw in the fact that rainfall in the region is quite seasonal with wet winters and drier summers. And pumped storage is not terribly efficient. You probably can't count on better than 70% efficiency.
On the bright side. pumped storage doesn't have to use somewhat precious fresh water. It'll work about as well with salt or alkaline water. It'd be a bit more expensive since dams would probably have to be built.
Nonetheless, it's not a stupid idea. Right now pumped storage is really the only option for adding really large amounts of intermittent power (wind and solar) to the western power grid. This is, of course, something that renewable advocates should of known up front.
"When Jesus comes back do we need to reset the year back to zero? "
I suspect that if/when Jesus comes back (Why would he/she/it come back to Earth? There HAVE to be more interesting places populated by less obtuse/obnoxious entities to spend time with), Calender reset (Why would we do that in any case?) will be somewhere around item 43612 on our list of problems.
"but this is just a nightmare for those of us who have to deal with low-bandwidth and/or high-latency links."
Quite clearly folks like you do not belong on the modern internet which is being designed by the greatest geniuses in human history to perfectly satisfy all legitimate needs.
You and your motley friends should pack up your kit and leave.
"Which is why the drive keeps moving it around in the course of wear leveling."
Exactly. The partition table (if there is one) is in the Master Boot Record which is the first record on the device. Address 0. Even though it's rarely written, it's a solid candidate to get overwritten/lost if anything goes wrong.
It wouldn't were it not that the USB device very likely has a mind of its own. Primitive, but a mind nontheless. Rumor has it that It moves stuff around and tinkers with its internal address tables constantly in order to improve your user experience. Your user experience is presumably very important to it.
I think one likely wants the stupid thing to finish what its up to before removing its power. Hopefully, typing umount or eject and waiting for the command to finish means that the drive has gone to sleep.
I think that "Python is the future of programming" if it's true at all, is sort of like a century from now, almost everyone on the planet will be able to carry on a rudimentary conversation in one or more of English/Chinese/Arabic and/or Spanish as well as whatever their native language might be. It's not that all, or even most, programming will be done in Python. It's that most everyone who programs at all will be comfortable using Python if they need to.
If you can't get Python indentations right, you may be in the wrong profession.
Python has its moments. Long scripts can be hard to navigate. The occasional need to understand the difference between deep and shallow copy can be unintuitive. Some of the library routines don't do what one might expect. For example a = sort(my_data) won't do what one probably expects. You probably want sorted, not sort Some of the error messages can be a bit obtuse. UnboundLocalError -- Whaaaa? Why me, God?
FWIW, The Register article on this https://www.theregister.co.uk/... contains some actual data including a chart that shows that levels of Cs137 in 2011 wines are several orders of magnitude BELOW those from the era of atmospheric nuclear tests (1950s/1960s) https://regmedia.co.uk/2018/07...
The comments on the Register article are interesting as well. I didn't know that mushrooms and cucumbers (the skins) seem to be effective collectors and concentrators of Cs137.
The best keyboard ever was quite likely the 1960 era IBM Selectric typewriter. The fact that Apple doesn't ship with an inexpensive, user replaceable, dirt and grit resistant, keyboard with similar touch and feel should tell us a lot about the skills and priorities of Apple designers.
"The only thing that really concerns me about all of this is the fact that it's still leaking into the ocean."
If I recall correctly, "They" built a barrier to keep water from seeping INTO the Fukushima site and thus increasing the amount of contaminated water they had to deal with. Presumably that also keeps most radioactive material -- predominantly Tritium which is a VERY weak beta emitter and pretty much harmless -- from seeping out.
Typical of most of the unending stream of enviro-crap posted by Slashdot editors the abstract an the link don't provide any usable quantification of the radioactive material in question. I'm guessing that it is MANY orders of magnitude below the natural sealevel background level of a bit more than 1 mSievert per year.
This is a truly stupid argument, but if we truly HAVE to pacify a bunch of sociopathic pedants, how about we define something called an NDMS (Non-Dairy Milk Substitute)? Will THAT make these flakes happy?
Would I put soy-NDMS or almond-NDMS in my coffee? Sure. Occasionally anyway.
If so, we can move on to what to do about Milk of Magnesia.
"Still trying to figure out what problem autonomous driving is trying to solve."
1. The problem of how to put bus drivers, taxi drivers, delivery drivers, etc out of work.
2. The problem of family members having to provide transportation for kids, the handicapped, the elderly.
3. The problem of kids getting exercise by walking or riding bicycles instead or riding in a powered vehicle like God intended.
And many other similar problems
Seriously -- once the bugs are worked out in a few decades, autonomous vehicles will hopefully provide cheaper delivery of goods, greater overall mobility, and a substantially reduced body count.
There's really no "autonomous driving" problem to solve. There are 5000 or maybe 50000 problems related to autonomous driving that need to be solved... one by tedious one. But you're right that an old Corolla or a 1935 Chevrolet or a Model T that can operate safely on public roads without a human in charge would have a market.
As far as this thing goes. What the hell? The founders get to live in luxury 'til the funding runs out. And they could conceivably end up with a small piece of some lucrative patents if they luck out with their R&D. It'll be small because the vulture capitalists aren't going to leave many crumbs. And probably when it all settles out, Warren Buffett and Goldman-Sachs will be richer and some pension funds, widows, and orphans will lose a bunch of money like always.
Slashdot Mirror
"Like the actual hardware doesn't have flaws as well.. Intel.."
Personally, I think the Intel x86 instruction set is all the evidence that anyone could need that being utterly and completely incompetent is not an imprediment to achieving overwhelming success. Even at the 8088 level it was a shambles compared to say the Motorola 6809. And it has only gotten worse over time.
I actually worked with those old 20000 line plus Fortran programs and they were surprisingly easy to work with. One quickly learned that in order to maintain some semblence of sanity, one had to block line numbers by function -- e.g. 0-1000 are global stuff, 1000-2000 are input ... Sounds dumb, but it worked. In a few cases I saw both the 1960s monolithic Fortran code and the 1980s modern style code with roughly sixteen zillion tiny subroutines. Personally, I think the older style was often easier to work with.
I don't know much about Cobol, but the one time I had to debug an issue in a Cobol subsystem, I found it to be surprisingly readable. I don't think I have the patience to write Cobol code, but I think it probably deserves more respect than it gets.
Keep in mind that an awful lot of meaningful programming is done by folks who are capable, but are not "computer scientists" They tend to prefer "scripting languages" (Python, Perl, Javascript). to glorified assembly languages. But even though they don't and maybe can't write device drivers, their needs and preferences are important too.
If you're trying to make sense of 10 million data points, do you really want to write a C++ program to filter, manipulate, join sets, etc. Probably not. Even if you can do C or C++ or assembler, in practice, you'll probably use R or mathlab or Python.
Complaining about whitespace is a pretty certain sign that the poster doesn't know squat about Python. Python has plenty of issues. Here's one -- https://xkcd.com/1987/ In point of fact Python use of whitespace is (unlike say bash's) just a straightforward formalization of a pretty reasonable style rule for readable code in any language that allows some (by no means all) nested parentheses to be omitted.
The only genuine problem I'm aware of with Python indentation comes when trying to embed python in a shell script using python -c .... I'm not sure anything non-trivial can be done that way. I suspect that anyone wishing to embed Python code in a shell script will probably try -c, quickly become annoyed/frustrated/outraged and learn about heredoc.
I kind of wonder if a plastic gun isn't likely to be at least as dangerous to the user as to the target. I don't think a working zip is hard to cobble together from hardware store parts, but I think if I tried that I'd probably prefer metal parts to plastic in the areas in contact with hot, rapidly expanding, gases.
"Tesla's vehicles are not overly expensive"
Watcha smokin there man? Of course Tesla's vehicles are overly expensive. The base price of the cheapest Toyota Camry -- which is what you look at if you have a wife, a couple of kids, a normal job, and need wheels is $23645. Prius (hybrid) is about the same. Likewise Honda Accord, Ford Fusion, and I assume whatever GM is selling to typical North Americans.
Autopilot is another $5K, right? I suppose you think you can run into a fire truck without it, but it will handle all the messy details for you. and it demonstrably works.
That gets you to $54K.
You're quite right, and it's not a problem just with Hoover Dam but with any large hydro dam in the Southwest -- including Shasta, Oroville, and dozens of smaller dams. One problem is that you have to move a LOT of water to store power. Roughly, one cubic meter (one metric tonne) needs to drop 100 meters (328 feet in American) to generate one kw/hr of electricity. Pumped storage using existing dams will mean moving a lot of water and one does need to balance water usage in the generally water short Southwest with energy storage.
Throw in the fact that rainfall in the region is quite seasonal with wet winters and drier summers. And pumped storage is not terribly efficient. You probably can't count on better than 70% efficiency.
On the bright side. pumped storage doesn't have to use somewhat precious fresh water. It'll work about as well with salt or alkaline water. It'd be a bit more expensive since dams would probably have to be built.
Nonetheless, it's not a stupid idea. Right now pumped storage is really the only option for adding really large amounts of intermittent power (wind and solar) to the western power grid. This is, of course, something that renewable advocates should of known up front.
"When Jesus comes back do we need to reset the year back to zero? "
I suspect that if/when Jesus comes back (Why would he/she/it come back to Earth? There HAVE to be more interesting places populated by less obtuse/obnoxious entities to spend time with), Calender reset (Why would we do that in any case?) will be somewhere around item 43612 on our list of problems.
"but this is just a nightmare for those of us who have to deal with low-bandwidth and/or high-latency links."
Quite clearly folks like you do not belong on the modern internet which is being designed by the greatest geniuses in human history to perfectly satisfy all legitimate needs.
You and your motley friends should pack up your kit and leave.
And yet people continue to buy these very expensive, unrepairable devices whose battery is not user replaceable.
So much for any economic theory involving rational markets.
"Which is why the drive keeps moving it around in the course of wear leveling."
Exactly. The partition table (if there is one) is in the Master Boot Record which is the first record on the device. Address 0. Even though it's rarely written, it's a solid candidate to get overwritten/lost if anything goes wrong.
" it doesn't matter."
It wouldn't were it not that the USB device very likely has a mind of its own. Primitive, but a mind nontheless. Rumor has it that It moves stuff around and tinkers with its internal address tables constantly in order to improve your user experience. Your user experience is presumably very important to it.
I think one likely wants the stupid thing to finish what its up to before removing its power. Hopefully, typing umount or eject and waiting for the command to finish means that the drive has gone to sleep.
I think that "Python is the future of programming" if it's true at all, is sort of like a century from now, almost everyone on the planet will be able to carry on a rudimentary conversation in one or more of English/Chinese/Arabic and/or Spanish as well as whatever their native language might be. It's not that all, or even most, programming will be done in Python. It's that most everyone who programs at all will be comfortable using Python if they need to.
If you can't get Python indentations right, you may be in the wrong profession.
Python has its moments. Long scripts can be hard to navigate. The occasional need to understand the difference between deep and shallow copy can be unintuitive. Some of the library routines don't do what one might expect. For example a = sort(my_data) won't do what one probably expects. You probably want sorted, not sort Some of the error messages can be a bit obtuse. UnboundLocalError -- Whaaaa? Why me, God?
But white space? Not a problem for most folks.
Right, Sell. .... ehrrrr ... To whom?
FWIW, The Register article on this https://www.theregister.co.uk/... contains some actual data including a chart that shows that levels of Cs137 in 2011 wines are several orders of magnitude BELOW those from the era of atmospheric nuclear tests (1950s/1960s) https://regmedia.co.uk/2018/07...
The comments on the Register article are interesting as well. I didn't know that mushrooms and cucumbers (the skins) seem to be effective collectors and concentrators of Cs137.
The best keyboard ever was quite likely the 1960 era IBM Selectric typewriter. The fact that Apple doesn't ship with an inexpensive, user replaceable, dirt and grit resistant, keyboard with similar touch and feel should tell us a lot about the skills and priorities of Apple designers.
"The only thing that really concerns me about all of this is the fact that it's still leaking into the ocean."
If I recall correctly, "They" built a barrier to keep water from seeping INTO the Fukushima site and thus increasing the amount of contaminated water they had to deal with. Presumably that also keeps most radioactive material -- predominantly Tritium which is a VERY weak beta emitter and pretty much harmless -- from seeping out.
Typical of most of the unending stream of enviro-crap posted by Slashdot editors the abstract an the link don't provide any usable quantification of the radioactive material in question. I'm guessing that it is MANY orders of magnitude below the natural sealevel background level of a bit more than 1 mSievert per year.
Certainly. As long as Surfactants isn't shortened to Surf. Might cause consumers to think the product is a suntan lotion.
This is a truly stupid argument, but if we truly HAVE to pacify a bunch of sociopathic pedants, how about we define something called an NDMS (Non-Dairy Milk Substitute)? Will THAT make these flakes happy?
Would I put soy-NDMS or almond-NDMS in my coffee? Sure. Occasionally anyway.
If so, we can move on to what to do about Milk of Magnesia.
"What the devil did they do with all that money?"
Hey, hookers and drugs aren't cheap. And neither is a penchant for trying to fill inside straights.
"yet they don't understand basics like suspension and alignment."
Probably won't go far or fast enough for its handling to be an issue.
"Still trying to figure out what problem autonomous driving is trying to solve."
1. The problem of how to put bus drivers, taxi drivers, delivery drivers, etc out of work.
2. The problem of family members having to provide transportation for kids, the handicapped, the elderly.
3. The problem of kids getting exercise by walking or riding bicycles instead or riding in a powered vehicle like God intended.
And many other similar problems
Seriously -- once the bugs are worked out in a few decades, autonomous vehicles will hopefully provide cheaper delivery of goods, greater overall mobility, and a substantially reduced body count.
There's really no "autonomous driving" problem to solve. There are 5000 or maybe 50000 problems related to autonomous driving that need to be solved ... one by tedious one. But you're right that an old Corolla or a 1935 Chevrolet or a Model T that can operate safely on public roads without a human in charge would have a market.
As far as this thing goes. What the hell? The founders get to live in luxury 'til the funding runs out. And they could conceivably end up with a small piece of some lucrative patents if they luck out with their R&D. It'll be small because the vulture capitalists aren't going to leave many crumbs. And probably when it all settles out, Warren Buffett and Goldman-Sachs will be richer and some pension funds, widows, and orphans will lose a bunch of money like always.
And so it goes ...