Posts by BlueGreen 1205 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Jul 2008
'Jupiter Collaboration System' link goes to ACM which requires an account. Free version of paper is here (needs postscript, ghostscript reports an error but it seems harmless):
<ftp://ftp.lambda.moo.mud.org/pub/MOO/papers/JupiterWin.ps>
google textified version can be found easily enough but it lacks diagrams.
So - MS is the biggest software co in the world, and xerox commercial software production is nowhere despite their incredible legacy. There must be a moral.
Don't necessarily render content until the user switches to the tab. Discard the rendered content after a user-specifiable time (typically a few hours), keeping the raw markup/css to re-render if needed. Or keep an LRU/MRU list, just render the top few entries.
I'd make this suggestions on the Moz page but I can't see how.
@ Gary F: Fix the darn memory leaks! --- I don't see a problem, but I disable flash + scripting. If I close tabs, mem use shrinks. I'm sure it ain't FF's fault (it certainly was in FF 2.x, it was terrible. No longer IME)
If you run a decently loaded db server (fer example) you'll typically want it on a real machine of its own. Putting it into a virtual machine isn't going to reduce the load so sharing it as a vm with other vms on a real machine isn't going to help [*].
Ditto Exchange which I understand is a pig (never used it). etc.
If you do though run lightly loaded apps then you don't need a VM to run several of them on the same physical server; you just install them directly.
For managing resources, then, VMs seem to gain you nothing.
So what's the win? Do departments just get sloppy with resource management or what?
I know there's other stuff like running legacy apps (gray_ said useful stuff, thanks), but still. I can't understand how e.g. Dez_Borders could possibly get 25:1 without the original setup being a total wasting mess from the start. Even 3:1 per Ian Ferguson can't have been a good setup.
Perhaps you're virtualising desktops but MS terminal services (AKA screenscraping with licenses, it is MS we're talking about...) worked fine for us for some testing.
[*] More than likely it'll make it worse as the app/OS suddenly can't monitor real performance so starts fighting with other apps, in fact.
EMP produced by a decent blast 100 miles up would be devastating (can't find booklet, I believe it's Nuclear Electromagnetic Pulse by Tim Williams) to a large part of britain. Perhaps much more than a low/ground blast. According to it, the emp gets everywhere and is very damaging.
That said I agree it's scaremongering and if we had one go off then we'd likely be in a significantly worse situation than suggested here ie. looming national nuclear conflict which might well dwarf a single nuke's use.
@Lionel Baden: go down yer local supermarket and ask how much food they keep. It's a JIT-ish pipeline with quite a bit less slack in it than you'd expect.
if you don't *want* to update then *don't*. Being told there are new versions available is informational - the puppy won't get shot if you ignore them.
Wait for the new version to settle down before upgrading (I still use 3.0.11). Don't upgrade your addons unless you have to. If you NoScript your JScript and don't browse a wide range of sites, you've mitigated your risk hugely. If an addon just provides functionality you don't need rather than being a security risk, or you just don't use that addon any more, consider not updating.
Blech, I think moz ought to add a little "..but you don't have to" on their update popups. I could perhaps write an addon to do it...
@Crazy Operations Guy + AC 09:19 + Defiant + others: I'm with you on the childishness of bringing MS into it. All shall have bugs: a serious one was a failure to honour FILE_FLAG_WRITE_THROUGH correctly in some circumstances for Win2k, this being fixed in SP3 (ie. it took far too bloody long). This was potentially very serious if you are, as I was, managing large DBs for clients, but did anyone hear about it? Nope. I only found out by accident. MS don't advertise their failures.
@Sean Timarco Baggaley: You were making sense up until the point you started talking about linear text. Do some research on these (eg. Visual Programming Environments, paradigms & systems, Ephraim P. Glinert), actually design a language & learn the lessons (which are: dataflow driven execution behaviour becomes totally obvious and... that's it on the good side) and use a visual language. I & a colleague used several. They were all horrid; unwieldy, slow to program with, had to rely on text to do anything significant etc.
Also don't confuse the linear representation of text with the concepts the text impart.
Certain stuff is a very good fit for graphical expression, such as smallish automata, which are much more comprehensible, and probably high-level UIs (perhaps inc. stuff like Mathematica). Much else isn't IME because the necessary abstractions can't be expressed graphically (how do you represent addition but with a + sign? or looping n times without numbers? Or a 'max' function without using the word? or 'pick the nth item from this array'? How do you identify subroutines if you can't use text to name them? etc. forever.)
@Francis Vaughan: Your comments on null make a kind of sense but tagged architectures simply offload complexity from the software to the hardware. Which I think is a fail. Keep hardware simple (& consequently correct) & fast, let the compilers do the work.
@Tzvetan Mikov - thanks.
I'm about to demonstrate that I'm not an expert, but why don't non-kernel processes have their (virtual) first page/segment, into which any null (as zero[*]) would point, by default removed from the process' address space? The hardware would then catch it and hand it to the kernel on a plate.
And perhaps get GCC to report check-after-use constructs like this which are clearly wrong.
[*] null != zero in the C spec but in any current machine I'd expect it to be.
Thought the same, went to the site which suggested I download silverlight (hah!) so I clicked on the plain HTML alternative but can't do anything because you need scripting enabled, and that was that.
Anyway, this at the bottom of the page:
"Only complete downloads of Windows® Internet Explorer® 8 through browserforthebetter.com from June 8, 2009 through August 8, 2009 qualify for the charitable donation to Feeding America®. Microsoft® is donating $1.15 per download to Feeding America® up to a maximum of $1,000,000. Meals are used for illustrative purposes only. Meal conversion is effective until June 30th, 2010."
I guess they'll hit 869,565 downloads in the first day or two to make the $1M and the rest is just cheap advertising.
...while everyone else loses. Classic case of giving what they want to give rather than what's needed.
1. No RIA crud. Plain simple w3c stuff and nowt else
2. bombproof security (touched on here but not enough)
3. No vendor proprietary tie-in. Which is exactly what this is about.
Still reckon it's going to fail. Not sure I believe riastats.com but then I can't check anything cos its one vast page of flash. Which I block. And while blocked it still eats up 4 secs of cpu time when I switch to that tab. Which is why I don't want RIA crud on my pooter or browser.
BOHICA - and again.
Aside from the possibility of it being extended for government use, which I'll ignore.
ReputationShare is about making money. That in itself makes me uneasy.
Reputation is much wider than 'cyberbullying' and lack of 'courteous behaviour' on a site like this where technical content and insightful comments matter. There are some witless posts without profanity, but sans useful content too. How does this fit in with their concept of reputation?
Pretty language is intrinsically unlinked to useful content (although I note that those who post best also tend to be least offensive so there is actually a strong correlation, which is helpful).
I don't think that anyone's mentioned the implication - a reputation could be valuable for improving job prospects so a market is likely to develop for, shall we say, carefully cultivated pret-a-porter reps. This is likely to happen at the high-end if I guess right cos these would take time + money to develop (except if partly automated which effectively means spamming forums with gloopy niceness. I'm not sure they've thought this through).
Also valuable -> disputes -> courts -> money. They'd better have lawyers, which means their fees may soon have to cover much more than technical costs.
I appreciate it's a bloody drag for our mod to do what she does but I like this system, and she's blocked a couple of unwisely worded posts of mine. Much rather that than have them out in the wild (so, thanks Ms. Bee).
AFAIK SO2 is considered a GHG (the fact that it does so by becoming sulphuric acid I didn't know) and it certainly does have an effect in cooling as you described. Mayhem never said it caused warming; he said "influence the climate".
Edward Teller suggested injecting it into the atmosphere to cause cooling, as if he hadn't had enough good ideas already. Shipping injects so much into the atmosphere (cos ships can legally burn undesulphured fuel because they're not near land??? dunno) that it was/is thought to have significantly affected temperatures over the ocean (from memory).
It certainly does have an effect and AFAIK it therefore seems reasonable to call it a GHG even if only in layman's terms. Be fair.
As for regional heat trapping events, didn't know that, ta.
It's hard to see how they could have got so many monitoring stations so consistently badly sited and a quick look at the site (FAQs + user data collection guidelines + whatever) doesn't show how their bias was estimated - but it looks valuable nonetheless and I'm not arguing with it. At the very least it should cause the monitoring agencies to tighten up. Again, thanks.
(after a bit more scanning) - bias is per NOAA's own standards (link under main pic). Interesting indeed... and actually <written in bitter tones> valuable climate-change-skeptic info, unlike pretty well all the crud posted before.
Dammit, my first smiley is warranted. I'm chuffed.
>Since you appear to want references for everything
I do, I call them facts. Otherwise it's bluster and bull which gets nowhere. And I really do appreciate what you've provided, I'll read them this eve.
[assorted Mayhem facts on GHGs, clouds, whatnot] - thanks, someone at last who knows what he's talking about.
> @AC @19:43 brought up the issue of how sensitive the current ...
actually that was my post. In any event, useful comments.
> Realistically none of the models talk of such drastic temperature changes over the short term, everyone reporting on their results suggest timeframes of centuries
IIRC the IPCC predicted up to 6.4C temp increase by 2100, albeit at the outer edge of their probabilities.
> With regards to the concept of geologic time, this is *exactly* the timeframe we need to look at to get our models right ...
Mkay, I didn't know that but discounted the idea because the detail is lost. We don't even agree in our own time that CO2 causes warming, nor that CO2 is anthropogenic - just see some of the posts above. If we can't do that right now, I can't see how it'll work looking back over millions of years. Depends what geological time is, though, as suggested by your following para.
> Currently there are no models that can replicate the past without extensive tweaking of the results...
Interesting. I thought we'd got past that stage. Bummer.
Quality post. Thanks again.
without any backup too. And possibly worse.
@AC 00:14 :
> Allowing us "deniers" to tell you what you believe has no basis in science, which is based on testing.
err, any evidence you'd care to offer to justify the "has no basis in science" bit?
@elderlybloke:
> You will call be a denier , but I am really a Skeptic.
Skeptic sounds more dignified, I agree. It rather implies you have a sound rational basis for your position, I'd love to hear it.
> I have not believed anything the screaming greenies have said for over 35 years , as I found them to be a pack of lying , twisting lot
oh, there it is. I'm convinced.
> Even James Lovelock of Gia fame , now believes that the warming idea is wrong
Massive FUD! Outright lie! From an interview with him (<http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2008/mar/01/scienceofclimatechange.climatechange>)
<< Lovelock believes global warming is now irreversible, and that nothing can prevent large parts of the planet becoming too hot to inhabit, or sinking underwater, resulting in mass migration, famine and epidemics. >>
Also, this bit may seem very faintly familiar...
<< This is all delivered with an air of benign wonder at the intractable stupidity of people. "I see it with everybody. People just want to go on doing what they're doing. They want business as usual. They say, 'Oh yes, there's going to be a problem up ahead,' but they don't want to change anything." >>
... but I'm guessing not.
> ... Augie Auer ... who strongly opposed the CO2 argument
Indeed, here's a link (<http://www.nzherald.co.nz/climate-change/news/article.cfm?c_id=26&objectid=10416137>) where it says the same. In the same link it says
<< MetService has distanced itself from former chief meteorologist Augie Auer over his stance on global warming.
Dr Auer is one of several high-profile figures involved in the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition - a group that challenges what it maintains are unfounded claims about global warming.
MetService chief executive John Lumsden said the latest World Meteorological Organisation report confirmed the global warming trend.
"We are certain of this observation and would like to point out that the views recently made public by Augie Auer in relation to climate change are his own, and in no way do they reflect those of MetService." >>
I also wonder if the misinformation provided here is being presented in rather too consistent & coherent a manner.
Another curious post ignoring relevant questions. Still,
> Regarding water vapour (which is a major estimated parameter), all the climate models we are currently using are highly sensitive.
Regarding h20 + a million other variables, they all contribute to an intrinsically incomplete, fundamentally chaotic model. Intrinsically incomplete because we can never gather enough input to feed them, and fundamentally chaotic because that's the nature of climate, and hence of climate models. Even if we could gather every variable, the chaos in the models would render them still imprecise.
But that doesn't mean they're useless. They indicate possible outcomes. it's just that many of these outcomes are not nice. If temp in the UK rises 4 degress, or 5, or 6, or more - it's all unknown but the consequences of each of these are not great here and for the rest of the world. Or sea level. Bad in varying degress but probably still bad.
>In reality, cloud formation causes negative feedback
Ref? because I've already asked for it. Standard trick, repeat X until it becomes accepted.
>Over geological time we have seen gradual changes in the climate, as such it tends to strongly suggest we need models with negative feedback
We're not talking geological time, merely the past 200 or so years. If you want to go back far into the mists of time then any signals of sudden temp/co2/whatever changes would tend, I suspect, to be diluted over time and difficult to extract from them reliably what happened. Let's suppose a sudden increase of co2 might e.g. acidify the ocean for a millenium causing a die-off, but that leaves a thin fossil layer of very uncertain cause if we're looking back over it from 50 million years later (this is my *supposition* - I'm making this point because it seems a reasonable example. This is way outside my area of expertise). Not enough data to know for absolute sure, but I think enough to be very concerned; enough that it's past time to act.
Computer models are not omniscient, hence the handy loophole for deniers.
I await another mysterious post that re-asserts assorted stuff without references.
Hmm. Okay, some interesting claims here. Clarification requested as there's clearly stuff I need to know more about, so
> Fundamental physics indicates that CO2 does 'trap' (Ok - inaccurate, I know) heat, but to quite a small degree,
Really? ref please
> and by a diminishing amount as the concentrations increase.
'diminishing' is a rather relative term, but anyway ref please?
> All parties agree that increasing CO2 - from, say 300ppm to 400ppm - will change the world temperature by a minimal unimportant amount.if just the CO2 is considered.
Eh? Ref please. Also as we're nearly at 400ppm anyway it's red-herring moot anyway. It's perhaps the 400->500 range that's now important.
> The AGW claim is that a miniscule change of CO2 concentration will result in increased H2O evaporation,
Why? because it's warmer hence more evaporation, or some other mechanism? ref please
> and it's this water vapour which will create a runaway climate disaster.
Didn't know this. Thanks.
> - CO2 levels have varied and been much higher in the past - up to 1500 ppm, and no runaway has resulted
'in the past' is a bit loose. From wiki: "While these measurements give much less precise estimates of carbon dioxide concentration than ice cores, there is evidence for very high CO2 volume concentrations between 200 and 150 Ma of over 3,000 ppm and between 600 and 400 Ma of over 6,000 ppm.", so much higher than your suggestion. So, please, when are you talking about?
> - More water vapour results in more clouds, which reflect and convect (again simplistic) large amounts of energy back into space.
From wiki on water vapour: "However, it is less clear how cloudiness would respond to a warming climate; depending on the nature of the response, clouds could either further amplify or partly mitigate the water vapor feedback" which tallies with my (non-professional) understanding. I thought clouds were water particle suspensions, which if temperatures were higher might not condense out at all, hence possible higher h20 vapour levels with no clouds.
> - The net result is a stable, insensitive climate with strong NEGATIVE feedbacks from H2O
Mmm. Strong claim. Incredibly strong claim. Kind of a linchpin assertion. Back it up?
> - although temperatures were rising in the 1990s, they have now leveled out and started to fall.
Ref please because I didn't know this (and fall over what period anyway)
> - CO2 levels are still rising though temperatures are falling, which indicates that CO2 levels do not cause unequivocal warming.
Global temps falling? Over a what period is this? ref please?
> - the predicted signs for CO2-driven global warming, such as a hot spot in the Troposphere, have been found not to exist
Yeah. Earlier you say "All the theoretical predictions were, and still are, developed by feeding calculations which comply with this theory into computer models, [...]" so you're apparently criticising computer models, now you put forward the above climate prediction failure which I presume was predicted by the selfsame flawed computer models, and then claim it supports your argument. One or the other please.
Also you say in full
"All the theoretical predictions were, and still are, developed by feeding calculations which comply with this theory into computer models, ***and not by any practical measurement***"
What kind of practical measurement is to be made of a state of the atmosphere which exists *in the future* ferpetesake? You have some four-dimensional thermometer?
Q1: Dunno. I suspect a slump in economic terms is a few % reduction in goods production overall over a couple of years. If so, it wouldn't really show up. I'm not sure there have been really big slumps since the '60s (a la 1929-sized). Good question, perhaps someone who knows economics can chip in.
Q2: A very deep recession in terms of our current view of life-as-consumerism. Leaving out the great implications of this, we'll get the huge reduction one way or another - either we do it ourselves or very likely it happens to us catastrophically.
Put another way, if you overspend on a personal level you either choose to reign in further spending until you've repaid it all, or the bailiffs come. Similar I believe with climate change. That behaviour has consequences can be a bit uncomfortable, and it's easier to ignore than face it.
@John Angelico: At 20 million barrels of oil/day for the USA (wiki), that's an annual consumption of 7.3 billion barrels of oil/year and I don't believe that amount of carbon would be released from forest fires, especially a few just in february. Refs please. And BTW I don't think massive bushfires occur all that often.
@Aron: pre-industrial CO2 levels were 280PPM, not 180PPM. They rose that much in the industrial revolution, over about ~200 years, not 22,000. Nice fuddery. Britain was largely forested before outside the ice ages IIRC. May be "Not one tree existed here 20,000 years ago" - if it was the ice age, but I still don't believe that. You've got a fair bit of info wrong there - I call it not an accident.
"Oil and gas is not bottoming out anytime soon" - hmm, the oil industry would agree with you because it pays not to alarm people. Some say otherwise: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantarell_Field#Production_decline> <http://www.oilmarketer.co.uk/2007/02/13/north-sea-oil-gas-production-projected-to-decline/> plenty of other interesting figures for other oil fields, can't be bothered to find them right now. And ghawar, well, the saudis are a bit secretive over the size of their golden egg, but here's a view <http://www.econbrowser.com/archives/2007/05/northern_ghawar.html>
"As for CO2, technologically speaking we have been decarbonising for many centuries" - so we went from wood burning to coal/oil/gas burning in huge amounts? You're talking rubbish.
"You have information at the touch of the button so why allow yourself to be fed information as if you're a farm animal?" - err, you can talk. Get your facts right first, it only takes a little searching as you say. Do you work for anyone in the energy business?
I'm not going to read any more witless comments, some of which I rather suspect may be astroturfing.
If only you had your very own world to destroy that would be good. Sadly we have to share it.
Rational beings - meh.
not possible. Can't have.
Most especially not if you don't need a deep knowledge of the architecture.
Must try harder.
Fer pete's sake do the sums, 1 petaflop = 10^15 flop.
1 nanosecond = 10^-9 seconds. About the time taken for a photon in vacuum to travel 1 foot.
So, about 10^6 calculations per nanosecond, meaning about the time it takes for a ray of light to cross your box (being very generous, cos it's going to be bigger than a foot cube). Comms alone is going to be a problem, innit.
Either some William Gibsonesque quantum crap (right now I've no good reason to believe quantum stuff will ever work in a big way), or a shift to something else (analogue computing anyone? entailing a severe 'paradigm' shift, and with results not measurable in flops anyway), or something I haven't thought of.
Grow out of it, darpa. The real world awaits.
> It gives them the entry level and lower end of the DB market, meaning they end up covering the entire range of database customers: entry level up to enterprise.
Granted, but that's not quite what I was getting at. Oracle can take their high-end source and rip out enough to make it low end, at the MySQL & postgres level, and release it free. Technically costs them little - much less surely than the billion (?) that sun paid for MySQL - is technically easier to maintain 2 very similar sources rather than 2 very different sources, takes on postgres *as well*, and is branded oracle which both gives users of this 'oracle lite' an easy upgrade path from low end to high, and a single vendor all the way (see AC 11:43: "To some customers it will be really attractive that they will only have to deal with one vendor").
MS did similarly with sql server for presumably exactly these reasons - and for that matter, if oracle did the same it would take on MS's desktop offerings too. Many birds, one very cheap stone.
It makes sense, it's a coherent strategy that costs sweet FA compared to what they're doing... I dunno.
Re: OpenSolaris and Solaris, thanks, I didn't know this.
@WinHatter: I assumed the mention of java in the article meant the language not the heavyweight middleware, so I take your point, I think, but not sure if charging a big certification fee is going to work in the present and coming economy. Cheers anyhow.
MySQL has a poor reputation from what I've read and is not going to complement Oracle's business as DBs are a main line of it anyway, Solaris is now substantially open (AFAICS), and java is pretty well open-ish and what remains would be easily cloned quite cheaply.
So I'm missing something rather large; can anyone fill in the picture for me.
and it was good, insightful, honest, deserving of its prize and now it's gone.
Bravo, tossers. You will reduce the world to blankness in your efforts to scrape up a bit more profit.
I hope all responsible get a eaten from the inside by giant worms worthy of a Lewis Page story.
"Don't look here, look at them!"
The yellow dot stuff hasn't been mentioned for a while
<http://w2.eff.org/Privacy/printers/docucolor/>
<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/15/secret_printer_tracking_dots/>
Pushed in by the US.
All said and done though I'd infinitely prefer the US as the superpower over China any day. Except they've totally boiled their economy dry and are effectively bankrupt, so that's soon to be that.
bloody hell, she never got mentioned. This is the first I heard of her and I went to a 2-day talk held by Steve Furber and Ivan Sutherland (that Ivan Sutherland) on the attempt to make a clockless ARM [*] and I'm sure her name never came up.
And even did the beeb basic <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Wilson>. Give it a while loop and it would have been about perfect.
(a bit later) Ah. Mystery solved. Clue's in the wiki page near the end. Hmm. Well, best of luck to her.
PCW - well, I read you for a long while but it became obsessed with flashy new computers on the front cover so I dropped you decades ago. Needed a bit more meat on the bone. Not your target demographic, I guess.
[*] Does anyone know why this failed?
A great example is comp.compilers, moderated by John Levine, and apparently (IIRC) the longest moderated NG in existence. A lot of real experts post there (and a couple of mine I hope to forget). Very, very good - if you have the time, of course.
Having a committed mod is key but that means either an employed, salaried position or an unusually public-minded person; a rare bird.
@AC 20:22 re. alt.2eggs... Unlucky. I only lurked for a while and saw nothing of that.
... there were some real treasures like comp.arch (wish I had time to read it, if it's not dissolved into viaqqra ads) and many more, some quite specialised.
Also one charming and very english NG locked in a kind of Douglas Adams-esque eternal breakfast time, impeccably mannered and welcoming to all; alt.2eggs.sausage.beans.tomatoes.2toast.largetea.cheerslove.
NGs - magic stuffed screwed over by flamethrowing idiots and spammers.
1. @Peyton: don't ditch AC. I don't like the silly posts but there are plenty that are AC+actually good, and plenty that are signed+nobbish. I (like to think I) post relevant stuff under AC because it's sensitive and because my handle will inevitably be linked back to my real name (just the way that it is).
2. If you're soliciting for other suggestions, howsabout unfixing the sodding width. Then I can dump greasemonkey.
3. Some kind of rating system a la slashdot would be useful so silly posts get hidden, either globally or per reader (for instance if Flocke Kroes or jake or a few others post then I want it up in lights. If Mr. digraph-with-probabilities AMFM posts I'd rather not see it). Globally would be infinitely easier in any event, but it's a big ask.
Louis Savain 'business model' comprises the demand that someone (intel is oft mentioned) give him some millions of dollars and a couple of years and he'll deliver something amazing.
Shame he can't even get anything working until then, innit.
Louis, you're not "some maverick" but a monkey. Some of them can even make their own tools (<http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227104.300-sweet-tooth-drives-tool-use-in-chimpanzees.html>). Apparently you can't.
If he's said anything of value, it's entirely drowned in party political playground politicking.
Just shut up.
And incidentally stop telling us 'what the electorate really want is X', because you don't ask and you don't care anyway. It's just entertainment for you.
Shut up, grow up, act like it's a job where your decisions matter to us plebs.
And stop the party $%^&* politics! All of you! ALL OF YOU! NOT JUST CAMERON, ALL OF YOU!
I'd agree with you except I'm paranoid to the extent of considering deleting them.
It's about trust. I don't trust them. I don't trust them not to have accidents with them, I don't trust them not to deliberately spread my info around without my consent.
I *don't* trust anymore. That's a bad sign for a society.
It's a magnificent resource, it's genuinely of great potential use, if I trusted our 'lords and masters' (heh) then I'd be entirely happy. I don't so I'm not, not at all. So deletion is in the balance right now.
which they won't (tar sands oil take a lot of energy to extract & clean up), that there really are 173 billion barrels (hmm, right), that would represent about 5.5 years of world consumption at 85 million barrels a day, current consumption.
IIRC current increase of CO2 is about 2.5 parts per million per year due to current fossil fuel consumption. So that would represent about 13.75 ppm additional CO2. Taking us from about 380ppm of CO2 currently to about 394ppm CO2 (perhaps less as not all fossil use is oil)
Assuming we haven't got a runaway breakdown of natural CO2 deposits going by then, taking us much higher.
I remember seeing photos on the news of the tsunami a few years ago. I seem to remember in the pictures people standing on the beach apparently discussing the strange wall of water in the distance.
Cheeky buggers, but I doubt it's the first time the reg has been Belkin'd. And the home page looks nicely minimal with NoScript at work (what *is* it with jscript that it just has to be used on every site? You'd think it was magic pixie dust that made everything it touched better).
I'm with you. A few months and it'll be likely dead anyway.
A couple of examples of java syntactic crapness from a public tutorial:
CleanUp<IllegalAccessException,DisconnectTask> cleaner = new CleanUp<IllegalAccessException,DisconnectTask>();
-and-
Triple<? extends Collection<?>> q = new Triple<List<? extends Number>>();
The second is a bit contrived but not much. The first is quite viable. If they can't even get that right... FFS someone in the generics development team must have said *something* at the time...
I wonder, does anyone read my posts before replying? AC said this: "In my many years of programming I haven't come across a single new language that can do something that C can't do or be made, quite trivially, to do." And hence my challenge -- in C. I'll repeat that, in C.
Now it may be that AC had written a working Java compiler/interpreter in C and was prepared to put that forward as a kind of DSL for my challenge, and I would have admitted he had won (overlooking that Java doesn't do multimethods), but otherwise I can't see how his answer fits anything I said and my challenge still stands.
As for your comments on Dylan, it was described by an expert as being a dialect of scheme. If you don't like it, do it in lisp (you have experience in lisp IIRC). I didn't mention this because I have no experience with lisp, whereas I do with Dylan.
I don't much like Dylan syntax, but Java is just terrible -- what kind of language requires you to write out the type of everything *in full*, without being able to denote a full type with a straightforward name -- it gets bloody awful with templates. In C++ at least you can typedef, in Java you can't and you can't even clean it up with a preprocessor because they removed it as cpp was 'abused' (translation: 10,000,000 numpty programmers didn't have a clue so they took it out).
When Java has closures (not the hack using anonymous classes), proper support for functional programming and a decent syntax (preferably extensible like Dylan with hygienic macros) then maybe you'll have a point.
I partly agree that the strength is in the programmer not the language but claiming it can all be done in C, trivially, is nutz.
So, a challenge!
Ignoring one vital aspect of readability (cos that's incompatible with what follows), write something small for me that exhibits use of
* OO, in the form of inheritance, virtual funcs etc. (the usual)
* multiple dispatch
* multithreading (that's easy, but...) *with* thread safety by use of totally immutable functions, and, because purely functional style programming generates garbage in immense quantities:
* garbage collection to pick up the dead pieces and recycle them.
All by hand. Preprocessor us is fine. Using a conservative GC like great circle etc. isn't allowed as 1) you didn't write it and 2) it won't work.
Whatever you do I can do it faster, better, more readably, more efficiently and just plain nicer in dylan (which I haven't touched for years, but anyway).
2nd thoughts: I don't know if OO as I'm familiar with it works with pure functional stuff (probably does but I've no experience with it), so let's split it into 2 and you can choose either: OO+MD or MT with immutability+GC. Makes it easier, surely.
Kettle's on, mate...
... is what I've been rattling on about. If the user (@Gareth e.g.) has to find $5 then it's not micro.
And if you have to dig out a credit card then it's definitely not going to work. You need a reserve which a website can, with your very explicit permission, dip into.
I know, security implications all round, but that's life on the web and ads can be gamed with false clickthroughs.
I find the people with the loudest voices and strongest opinions generally have least knowledge. Learn how to use sql properly, in anger, with a grownup db, understand what goes on under the hood and on your next project involving storage you might save a lot of time and bugs.
@Ian Michael Gumby: "query optimization developers isn't a commodity skill". Well said.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
