368 karma · joined October 10, 2012
But in many ways its better than a laptop, especially around note taking and reading.
My experience tells me that monoglots reach false maxima because there experience isn't broad enough to realize that there are other maxima to climb.
Java is still, probably, my strongest language, but I strongly believe my craft would have stagnated around Spring/Hibernate if I hadn't taken the time to figure out how problems like typing, dependency injection, persistence, IO etc all work in other ecosystems.
Pick a language that is good for the market place you care most about. Mobile go with C or Swift. Science probably python. JavaScript if you like the web and if you like the perks of working in an Enterprise Java won't hurt.
I agree the risk profile is wrong, so I offloaded the risk to SolarCity for this iteration (25 years), but if I'm still in the house when those panels expire I will almost certianly need to re-roof, and I'm hoping solar tiles are a no-brainer by that point.
22 years from now? I expect fossil fuels to be crazy expensive. I expect solar tech and home storage options to be commoditized, and I haven't seen anything to make me thing I'm wrong about any of that.
It makes citizens sound like property / cattle.
“I believe my cow pooped on your lawn. I demand the right to inspect your lawn for my cows poop to retrieve the poop. Expect further consultation if we decide you illegally benefited from that poop. I don’t care that you are ok with the poop or that the cow came to your lawn and pooped there of its own valition. In Cowville pooping outside of your allotted pen is illegal.”
Of course when you take that argument to its logical conclusion I may find that I’ve just argued for a firewall / vetting system that would prevent data leaving the national networks ‘illegally’. Maybe I am. Or maybe I’m arguing the other way, that national borders make less sense than ever and freedom of people, ideas and data requires a completely different take on national soverignty.
But the filament based plastics are usually fine. There is some questions around melting ABS in a home environment. The volume of gasses released are almost certainly below danger levels, but there are viable and ‘safer’ alternatives in PLA and PETG that are easier to print offering better resolution at the cost of high temperature resistant (PETG is similar to the plastic used in water bottles).
Unless you live in a dry, desert climate I’d advise against ABS anyway.
Most of the stuff I’ve printed or built has ended up being “ok”. A lot of that is that I’m not a meatspace engineer, or a pixie engineer, I’m a software engineer. So I’m very much on the learning curve of robotics... but there is a lot to learn. AvE talks a lot about industrial lego, and its true you can just bolt and solder stuff together and get a prototype, or a proof of concept, but getting that to a product is really hard.
So when we say that a kid has built an arm for his Dad, is that a cute story or a sign that the bar for this kind of technology has dropped to the point that a high school kid can build a useful product?
I suspect in this instance its a cute story. That or I really need to up my game.
The first week or so was really hard. Close to no carbohydrates and all I could think about was sweet things. Even after I reintroduced healthier sweet foods like fruit, it just didn't hit the same spots as a good sandwich or a bowl of pasta.
After I went back to regular food, I'd periodically do a month or so of paleo to try and the weight gain under control, but I got back up to 280. Currently I'm a couple of weeks into slimfast. I'm not hungry. I don't feel bad if grab a small piece of chocolate. Occasionally my evening meal is a small bowl of pasta, or a sandwich and I'm loosing a consistent amount of weight... for now.
Can AMD or Intel release another generation of chips with Spectre vulnerabilities?
Do we think they're going to have a solution to Spectre within a year?
Can x86 survive without out of order processing? Can any architectures perform at modern levels without it?
Is x86 relevant in the server if you use Linux/BSD and can recompile your deployables?
Without Spectre I'd be very bullish on AMD. With Spectre, I'm bearish for the entire sector.
It wasn't if the software functioned the way that we wanted (is the business logic correct), so much as did it have the effect on the business that we wanted.
The criteria would have been something a long the lines of:
"By adding this ad banner to this page template we will increase revenue by 5% per page view", or
"By adding this widget to the on boarding page we will reduce drop out by 50%".
If your feature didn't have the business impact it was supposed to, it was pulled. Maybe the widget actually increases drop out? Maybe increasing ads reduced page views?
But it prioritized being to answer those kinds of questions. Very neat.
In particular, he demanded that all features have measurable success criteria and if they didn't happen he pulled the feature from the code base.
Simple and elegant way of keeping your code base small and focused. The real miracle there was he got the customer to agree and held them to it. I still don't know how he did that.
1. Doctors 2. Foreign combatants 3. Police 4. Motorists 5. Other
I can see how all of those groups perform tasks that might result in the death of strangers unavoidably. Doctors are the only ones who I’d actually pay to wager with my life, so I’d them to win.
I’d like a world without wars, but I’m happy that we have a stading military.
I lived in the UK for 30 years. It’s national news when they kill someone and they stand up and appologise for not having a better solution. That feels about right. But their number isn’t zero.
And finally, cars. We’re already talking about the trolley problem wrt automated cars. It seems we accept that death from going 2-3 times our natural speed in vehicles 10x our weight is dangerous. But It would be nice if technology could get that death rate to lower than law enforcement.
i386 might not be as popular as it was on 'normal' OS, but I wouldn't be surprised if OpenBSD had a lot of people still using it.
CherryPy fits nicely into this window of opportunity, but as soon as you have to go back to your boss and say "I think we need a bigger boat" someone should be asking questions about library and language choices, at the very least there should be a conversation about prototypes vs production architectures.
Similarly, Python and the dynamic languages are 'fast enough' because in the 90s the bottleneck was IO, not CPU. That is still true, but is becoming less true. SSDs rapidly closed that gap, and it looks like memristor storage could mean that non-volatile RAM is as large as SSD and as fast as DRAM is today.
The dynamic language decision to focus on single threaded performance is also smart, but that will stop being true when CPU have hundreds of cores, instead of 10s. Synchronized access to cache is 100x slower than regular access. So to see benefit for work loads other than the "embarrassingly parallel" with multi-core you need around 100 threads. The new competition in the CPU market might see the first 100 core die on the market in 5 years.
The trend towards 'serverless' could be even worse for dynamic/interpreted languages. Smaller slices of billing will show that the same service written in Java vs Python cost 5-10x less. That was harder to show when you had to pay for at least two servers for every deployed service, now it will be very clear to CFOs how much language choice affects their bottom line.
What this means is that the perceived difference in performance between Java and Python can only grow over the next 5-10 years. If Java continues to gross you out, I'd be looking to pad your resume with something like Clojure / Go / Rust. High productivity, high performance languages are here and their relevance is growing.
It's the rise of these languages that confuses me.
They somehow got away with the 'fast enough' argument whilst Java is constantly being compared to languages that are designed for fine tuning for the target architecture.
In my mind it is Java that is 'fast enough' and,with Java 8, very expressive. The continued success of these incredibly slow interpreted languages in enterprises where you need to buy servers feels like an anti-pattern.
Despite being taught functional programming, I didn't get it until I learned Clojure.
If my first language had been a Scheme instead of Basic / Java I probably would have preferred functional languages.
Now functional languages are another tool in my belt, and I frequently apply their patterns when I'm in more imperative languages.
I'm Gen X (1979), grew up playing in dirt, house filled with dogs and cats. Ate a fair amount of things, apart from the things I was allergic too: apples mostly. Most of the food I ate was home cooked. My sisters do not have allergies.
It has since gone on to get much, much worse. I can no longer eat carrots or parsnips (which were my favourite). I'm now very allergic to dogs and cats and it wasn't because of a lack of exposure.
The days are long the years are short.
The electric cars problems are mostly magnified by American urbanites. Boston is no exception. It might help if zip cars were predominantly EV, although my urbite friends have mostly replaced Zip with Uber
It could be done, with right incentives.
It really doesn't take that long to charge the car after the commute. In winter, chances are that it's from municipal power, summer it's probably from my solar. Either way I'm offsetting my car use with clean, local power.
I live in sunny MA, where in the winter we average 15kWh generated to the summer we average 50kWh. My commute is 60 miles per day which is around 6-8kW depending in traffic and weather.
Also, my local power is a mixture of nuclear and wind.
So. Can we please stop rolling coal burning power plants into the electric car equation as if it is universally applicable.
The car was affordable: $12k second hand. The solar was $0 down and half the national grid per kW. My commute is at the edge of viable for a first gen electric car (really looking forward to the 200mile range of 2nd gen).
I do the vast majority of my charging is at home. My only issue is that the current system (sic) takes DC power converts to to AC only rectify it back to DC in the car. There is still a need for charging stations, but for rare 100 mile journeys. Drive 80 miles charge for 20 minutes, drive 80 miles. 2nd gen it's 160 miles, charge for 40 minutes. We have family in Western MA, which is 150 miles away. With a 200 mile range we'd do it in a single charge and recharge at their house. The use of a charging station is really rare, not part of the routine of ownership, like it is with ICE.
We don't have the infrastructure? We don't need the infrastructure. You can run an electric car almost entirely from energy reclaimed from the environment around your house. It will even store it for you in those handy, replaceable lion batteries it has, solving some of renewable energies gnarlier problems.
Whilst I understand that electric cars don't work well for people who travel more than 100 miles without a 20 minute break, that number is about to shift to 200miles... and that is virtually nobody. The infrastructure problems are solved by local generation (either municipal renewables or home solar). The recharging problem, even at 100mile range isn't a problem, you just charge it at the end of your journey.
If you buy Cisco and a Cisco specialist, you'll be buying Cisco for as long as the specialist is employed, regardless of any leaps or bounds Juniper et al. make.
Same deal with databases. Oracle is often a smart choice, but so is Postgres, SQL Server, Cassandra, Redis. If I've hired a DBA with 10 years of Oracle experience, the chances are that any move away from Oracle will rub against "Why hire an oracle specialist if you're not going to use them?".
My hope is always "Because they're smart, genuinely understand storage and retrieval and will learn the other systems faster than a smart generalist". But that isn't how it plays out.
I would hope that hiring a specialist means that, at some point, they come to you and say "So, I think I can save us money and increase uptime if we move to X". It happens in software all the time. Its hard to keep devs on any one particular platform before they get twitchy (also a problem).
In my mind buying Cisco is like using Heroku, Rails, Ember. All fine tools, that help you get a job done quickly whilst you figure out what your real problems are but shouldn't be seen as the final solution.