You're statement implies that there are 'on-planet aliens'.
1) "Your", not "you're"; 2) The phrase was used to reflect the post it was responding to; 3) "aliens" has several senses, "off-planet aliens" distinguishes the intended sense from the more general sense of a foreigner.
The thing is that the IDE has no idea what your intentions are. Take the JavaBean getter/setter idiom. Most of the time, you have a private member and a public getter and setter. Most of the time. But not all the time. Throwing out that aspect of the language because it fits with 75% (arbitrary number) of your usage means less flexibility and power for the other 25%.
Sure, but you don't have to throw out the flexibility to get much more concise expression, which is why its easy to tool it to be much quicker to enter than the verbose syntax to define the construct in Java. (And, for that matter, why there are languages that provide the same flexibility in this regard but offer more concise syntax than Java.)
There are certainly lots of uses for the ActiveRecord pattern (for example), but those tend to be fairly small databases or trivial schema.
Insofar as that's true of a direct implementation of the Active Record pattern doing a naive mapping between tables and classes, its not true of most real frameworks that implement the pattern as a starting point (even including the ActiveRecord framework that comes with Rails.) Now, ActiveRecord (the Ruby ORM framework) has all kinds of hassles when dealing with databases that don't fit its rather opinionated design, and some performance quirks that aren't limiting when its used with Rails (because Rails as a whole is stuck with some of the same quirks) but are limiting for more general use, but ActiveRecord isn't the only Ruby ORM, just the most commonly encountered because if its relationship with Rails. Sequel and DataMapper are each, arguably, better general ORMs than ActiveRecord.
That's not to say it won't get better over time, but right now for enterprise application development the offerings simply aren't there.
There may be problems with using Ruby or Python for enterprise development, but I don't see a lot of technical reasons that the quality of ORM available would be among them.
You can't conceive of "off-planet aliens" when you haven't yet conceived of *planets*.
The ancient Hebrews (and many other ancient people) had both a conception of the Earth as a distinct place within creation and a conception of beings which were not from that distinct place.
the Hebrews weren't talking about off-planet aliens when discussing the Nephilim, they're talking about children of fallen angels...
How, exactly, are angels, fallen or otherwise, not off planet aliens (aside from the belief that their off-planet origin is supernatural in nature rather than mundane, which, one would note, would apply equally to the ancient Hebrews conception of human origins.)
'The more that alien life is covered in films or television documentaries, the more people look up at the sky and don't look down at their feet,' said an expert on UFO sightings based at Sheffield Hallam University.
I'll start to believe this might be credible when there is a proven, positive correlation between the prominence of UFOs in film and on TV and the incidence of trip-and-fall accidents.
Three billion dollars? That would pay for some competent journalists at news bureaus around the world.
It would, but competent journalists don't bring in reliable viewers the way that college sports do. Commercial broadcasting businesses exists to sell ads, not to inform the public.
So what if they release a policy? It's not like they have any sort of legal standing to enforce it. What are they going to do, stop selling you tickets?
More likely, only offer to sell you tickets that incorporate the policy as part of the contract under which you are given admittance.
So... you mean anyone can come to my house, whether or not I approve?
Who said anything about homes? GP was asking about a exhibition venue.
Private property is still private property.
True, but discrimination on some of the bases (including race) suggested in GGP doesn't become legal in a public accommodation merely because that facility is "private property", see, e.g., 42 U.S.C. Sec. 2000a.
Huh? Nobody said automatic. That was you. I said code completion. As in, macros. Hotkeys.
Macros and hotkeys produce more code automatically from less input. Anything they could do that saves work could instead be done by having more concise language constructs.
but there are high-quality ORMs for Ruby and Python (and probably plenty of other languages)
OK, so you don't know what you're talking about.
Or you don't. Or quality is subjective, and we disagree about what is high quality. Tell me, what Python and Ruby ORMs have you evaluated to support your claim that none exist which are high quality, and under what standards do you dismiss them as not being high-quality?
But this news is not entirely awful. It just means that DNA is no longer quite so useful in proving that a person is guilty. It is still perfectly useful in the much more important task of proving not guilty.
Juries are generally more inclined to trust the government to start with, so, if DNA evidence could be fake, its not unreasonable to expect that juries will give weight to that fact more often when the evidence is exculpatory than when it is inculpatory, retaining (despite reliability concerns) its role in proving people guilty, while moderating its role in producing not guilty verdicts.
Sure, given the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard, that's not the way things should work, but many things in the real world don't work the way they should.
State level judges should not have this much power to effect global companies.
This isn't a "state-level" judge, its a federal judge.
Decisions like this should only be enforceable at a supreme court level.
The Constitution of the United States lays out the specific kinds of cases in which the Supreme Court has original jurisdiction, other than that, all federal judicial power rests initially in lower trial courts, with the Supreme Court only hearing appeals (and, for the most part, not even direct appeals.)
They did not question patent's validity in fear that it might undermine their portfolio.
They argued both that the patent was invalid and that they didn't infringe on it, in any case. They lost on both points, but they certainly made the argument.
why not just have the government hire, as regular employees, the technical staff to meet its ongoing technical needs so you also in-source the work itself rather than just the management of the work.
Because it's really hard to lay off government employees when they are no longer needed.
I think you missed the phrase "ongoing technical needs", and, additionally, have failed to consider that the overall technical staff needs of a very large organization (like the government) may be far less variable than the technical staffing needs of individual units of such an organization.
Also, as far as dealing with "surge" needs, its really not hard to shed government employees that are hired for limited-term positions -- which exist in most civil service systems, including, I believe, the federal system -- when the term of those positions expire.
I'm trying to figure out why the researchers are using DNA. Is it...
A - some unique and intrinsic property of DNA that makes it suited for the job. (If so, then is it just coincidence that our genetic information is stored in a molecule that has these unique properties?)
That's part of it; I wouldn't describe it as coincidence that a molecule that forms one of the basic information storage mechanisms which allows life to exist has properties that are useful in information technology, though.
B - just that DNA has been so well-studied in the last half century that we can manipulate it better (and cheaper) than most other complex micro-structures?
I blame Blair Witch Project for popularizing it, though even that didn't really start it.
even non sci-fi (syfy?) films do it now
What does the shaky faux-camcorder-documentary style have to do with sci-fi anyway? Sure, some sci-fi films and series have been done in the style, but its never been principally a sci-fi thing.
Well, it does tell us something about ourselves: how easily we resort to fascism in times of war, and how tempting it will seem to do so.
Except the movie doesn't show anything about that. Over-the-top, comic-book fascism is presented as a fait accompli in a rather heavy-handed way, but nothing in the film does anything to show "how easily we resort to fascism in a time of war" or "how tempting it will seem to do so".
Then later you see a commercial with "glick gluck mcglorlock" (translation: "We just want to go home.") and you kinda realize that there's going to be more depth to the story than Starship Troopers (the movie, not the book).
More depth to the story than Starship Troopers (the movie) is setting the bar pretty low. It's pretty hard to imagine a movie with less depth than that.
That will never happen. The public sector unions are huge supporters of the Democratic Party. Care to take a wild guess as to what they would think about a plan to increase the number of independent contractors working for government?
GP's plan was to reform government contracting so that individual technical contractors were directly supervised by civil service employees who would run the projects, rather than projects having the substantive work done by firms with technical contracts while the project oversight was done by integration contractors.
While that would probably increase the number of individual contractors, it would decrease the number of people working under the contracts, and shift work and influence to additional government employees, so the only reason public employees unions might complain is that it didn't go far enough.
I'm rediscovering the fun of Java with Grails and Groovy.
Grails and Groovy are not Java, so I don't really understand the point of this. Groovy is a non-Java language designed for the JVM. Grails is a framework for Groovy. Saying "I'm rediscovering the fun of Java with Grails and Groovy" makes about as much sense as, for instance, saying "I'm rediscovering the fun of Java with (J)Ruby and Rails", and for exactly the same reason.
I have felt for a long time that Wikipedia really needs to be split into two: one dealing with things that are at least nominally real, and one dealing with expressions of culture (which would include all articles that start with "this article is about a fictional...").
"Expressions of culture" are real (and not even merely "nominally" real.) To what extent they are "encyclopedic" is, of course, debatable, but much of the historical idea of what is "encyclopedic" (which would often include classical references, but not current ones, despite the fact that neither is more "real") is based on the fact that consuming space in a traditional encyclopedia is expensive (because both space and paid writing/editorial resources are at a premium.) Drawing the line for Wikipedia, where space is cheap and writing/editorial resources that aren't expended in editor's area of interest are lost rather than redistributable by management to some other place, is, well, something for which the standards are in constant flux, at least around the edges.
They should work with Obama to get executive orders and statutes written to position the federal government's management to not only hire 1099s like the private sector can, but to have that become the norm. One of the biggest reasons why federal IT is so expensive is because the federal government's management culture is still not conducive to having managers hire, direct and take responsibility for contract workers directly. If they could insource the project management en masse, that would shave an incredible amount of tax payer's money off of the cost of contracting as it would reduce the overhead that they pay to the big integrators to manage the projects (as well as pay HR, etc.)
Instead of making it easier for the government to hire individual contractors that are supervised by regular government employees to reduce the waste from the government hiring integration contractors to manage development contractors, why not just have the government hire, as regular employees, the technical staff to meet its ongoing technical needs so you also in-source the work itself rather than just the management of the work.
Is the Federal Government the Most Interesting Tech Startup For 2009?
No, its not. The US Federal Government has been in business continuously since the late 18th Century. Its not, by any sane standard, a startup.
It remains, as it has been for the whole time compting has existed, one of the biggest customers for (and funders of) new computing technology, and any major initiatives it has in that area will have potentially wide-ranging impact on the industry, but an established institution engaging in one or more new technology initiatives is a different beast than a tech startup.
Slashdot Mirror
1) "Your", not "you're";
2) The phrase was used to reflect the post it was responding to;
3) "aliens" has several senses, "off-planet aliens" distinguishes the intended sense from the more general sense of a foreigner.
Sure, but you don't have to throw out the flexibility to get much more concise expression, which is why its easy to tool it to be much quicker to enter than the verbose syntax to define the construct in Java. (And, for that matter, why there are languages that provide the same flexibility in this regard but offer more concise syntax than Java.)
Insofar as that's true of a direct implementation of the Active Record pattern doing a naive mapping between tables and classes, its not true of most real frameworks that implement the pattern as a starting point (even including the ActiveRecord framework that comes with Rails.) Now, ActiveRecord (the Ruby ORM framework) has all kinds of hassles when dealing with databases that don't fit its rather opinionated design, and some performance quirks that aren't limiting when its used with Rails (because Rails as a whole is stuck with some of the same quirks) but are limiting for more general use, but ActiveRecord isn't the only Ruby ORM, just the most commonly encountered because if its relationship with Rails. Sequel and DataMapper are each, arguably, better general ORMs than ActiveRecord.
There may be problems with using Ruby or Python for enterprise development, but I don't see a lot of technical reasons that the quality of ORM available would be among them.
The ancient Hebrews (and many other ancient people) had both a conception of the Earth as a distinct place within creation and a conception of beings which were not from that distinct place.
How, exactly, are angels, fallen or otherwise, not off planet aliens (aside from the belief that their off-planet origin is supernatural in nature rather than mundane, which, one would note, would apply equally to the ancient Hebrews conception of human origins.)
I'll start to believe this might be credible when there is a proven, positive correlation between the prominence of UFOs in film and on TV and the incidence of trip-and-fall accidents.
It would, but competent journalists don't bring in reliable viewers the way that college sports do. Commercial broadcasting businesses exists to sell ads, not to inform the public.
More likely, only offer to sell you tickets that incorporate the policy as part of the contract under which you are given admittance.
Who said anything about homes? GP was asking about a exhibition venue.
True, but discrimination on some of the bases (including race) suggested in GGP doesn't become legal in a public accommodation merely because that facility is "private property", see, e.g., 42 U.S.C. Sec. 2000a.
Macros and hotkeys produce more code automatically from less input. Anything they could do that saves work could instead be done by having more concise language constructs.
Or you don't. Or quality is subjective, and we disagree about what is high quality. Tell me, what Python and Ruby ORMs have you evaluated to support your claim that none exist which are high quality, and under what standards do you dismiss them as not being high-quality?
Juries are generally more inclined to trust the government to start with, so, if DNA evidence could be fake, its not unreasonable to expect that juries will give weight to that fact more often when the evidence is exculpatory than when it is inculpatory, retaining (despite reliability concerns) its role in proving people guilty, while moderating its role in producing not guilty verdicts.
Sure, given the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard, that's not the way things should work, but many things in the real world don't work the way they should.
This isn't a "state-level" judge, its a federal judge.
The Constitution of the United States lays out the specific kinds of cases in which the Supreme Court has original jurisdiction, other than that, all federal judicial power rests initially in lower trial courts, with the Supreme Court only hearing appeals (and, for the most part, not even direct appeals.)
They argued both that the patent was invalid and that they didn't infringe on it, in any case. They lost on both points, but they certainly made the argument.
The actual time invested in researching and writing the book has to count as "overhead". (And "overhead" and "risk" are pretty much the same thing.)
I think you missed the phrase "ongoing technical needs", and, additionally, have failed to consider that the overall technical staff needs of a very large organization (like the government) may be far less variable than the technical staffing needs of individual units of such an organization.
Also, as far as dealing with "surge" needs, its really not hard to shed government employees that are hired for limited-term positions -- which exist in most civil service systems, including, I believe, the federal system -- when the term of those positions expire.
That's part of it; I wouldn't describe it as coincidence that a molecule that forms one of the basic information storage mechanisms which allows life to exist has properties that are useful in information technology, though.
Well, yeah, there is some of that, too.
No, to be "life" it needs to do that (among other things.) To be DNA, all it has to do is, well, be DNA.
I blame Blair Witch Project for popularizing it, though even that didn't really start it.
What does the shaky faux-camcorder-documentary style have to do with sci-fi anyway? Sure, some sci-fi films and series have been done in the style, but its never been principally a sci-fi thing.
Except the movie doesn't show anything about that. Over-the-top, comic-book fascism is presented as a fait accompli in a rather heavy-handed way, but nothing in the film does anything to show "how easily we resort to fascism in a time of war" or "how tempting it will seem to do so".
More depth to the story than Starship Troopers (the movie) is setting the bar pretty low. It's pretty hard to imagine a movie with less depth than that.
GP's plan was to reform government contracting so that individual technical contractors were directly supervised by civil service employees who would run the projects, rather than projects having the substantive work done by firms with technical contracts while the project oversight was done by integration contractors.
While that would probably increase the number of individual contractors, it would decrease the number of people working under the contracts, and shift work and influence to additional government employees, so the only reason public employees unions might complain is that it didn't go far enough.
The compiler is free-as-in-beer, actually.
The non-stripped-down version of the IDE is not, however.
Grails and Groovy are not Java, so I don't really understand the point of this. Groovy is a non-Java language designed for the JVM. Grails is a framework for Groovy. Saying "I'm rediscovering the fun of Java with Grails and Groovy" makes about as much sense as, for instance, saying "I'm rediscovering the fun of Java with (J)Ruby and Rails", and for exactly the same reason.
"Expressions of culture" are real (and not even merely "nominally" real.) To what extent they are "encyclopedic" is, of course, debatable, but much of the historical idea of what is "encyclopedic" (which would often include classical references, but not current ones, despite the fact that neither is more "real") is based on the fact that consuming space in a traditional encyclopedia is expensive (because both space and paid writing/editorial resources are at a premium.) Drawing the line for Wikipedia, where space is cheap and writing/editorial resources that aren't expended in editor's area of interest are lost rather than redistributable by management to some other place, is, well, something for which the standards are in constant flux, at least around the edges.
Instead of making it easier for the government to hire individual contractors that are supervised by regular government employees to reduce the waste from the government hiring integration contractors to manage development contractors, why not just have the government hire, as regular employees, the technical staff to meet its ongoing technical needs so you also in-source the work itself rather than just the management of the work.
No, its not. The US Federal Government has been in business continuously since the late 18th Century. Its not, by any sane standard, a startup.
It remains, as it has been for the whole time compting has existed, one of the biggest customers for (and funders of) new computing technology, and any major initiatives it has in that area will have potentially wide-ranging impact on the industry, but an established institution engaging in one or more new technology initiatives is a different beast than a tech startup.