The technical reputation definitely comes from
Does Nintendo count for anything?
564 karma · joined November 8, 2011
Does Nintendo count for anything?
Don't patronize me. You wrote a screed justifying bombing the hell out of civilians because you didn't like their speech. Somewhere in your moral bankruptcy, you wrote
So, in an Islamic country, take away Islam, and there's no culture at all and, then, just chaos
This was your characterization of Iran and Iraq, which showed that you don't know jack. It also won't work for Turkey or Malaysia.
By the way, "nation building" failed in Germany as well, largely because Americans are hypocrites who SAY "nation building" and DO war profiteering, corruption and vindictiveness. The result was Adolf Hitler.
So the US had to fight another World War with Germany, and after getting their asses kicked so badly by the Axis, and coming close to losing in several ways, the US decided in 1945 to do actual nation building in half good faith, hence the Marshall Plan. This time round, it succeeded in Germany and Japan.
Unfortunately, the US forgot this lesson by 9/11, so when it came to Iraq and Afghanistan, they went back to "nation building" by Blackwater XE and Halliburton, with predictable results.
Apart from the fact that Madeleine Albright admitted it when she was Secretary of State. You are just being deliberately ignorant now. Oh, and a jackass.
That liquidation was not the doing of the US
There was interference by other powers as well such as the UK, and there is also a lot wrong with Iranian society, NONE of which removes at all the CIA's responsibility for the coup and the subsequent torture of Iranians by SAVAK under CIA direction during the decades you mention from 1953-1979. You think the story stopped in 53?
betrayed and liquidated by the subsequent leaders of the revolution
The people were mad at the two decades of torture and having Iranian oil stolen, and so they hated the pro-US Emperor and they hated the US. They acted on that hatred against the targets and got on the Khomeini bandwagon as a way of overthrowing the Emperor.
There wouldn't have been a revolution if there had been nothing to overthrow. Khomeini made his name opposing the Emperor. If the CIA hadn't launched the coup in 53 the democracy would still have existed instead. Mossadegh was everything. Khomeini was nothing. No one was going to follow Khomeini against the democracy.
Oh yeah, and Iranians would still love the US like they did in 1950.
If you think Salafist Afghanistan, Kohmeinist Iran and Baathist Iraq had anything in common then you know jack shit.
That's like comparing Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia and the US colonies in Cotton Mather's time, sticking them all into one big pot because they are all "Christian". Idiocy.
Why the US failed was because US troops were true believers in massacring innocent Afghan civilians. Their relatives sought revenge by joining the Afghan Army then turning their guns on their "team mates" - US troops - even if it meant their own deaths.
You will find that cynical Machiavellian policies of the sort you mentioned above depend to a great degree on deterrence, which doesn't work when your enemy no longer has anything to live for and decides to go kamikaze.
And nobody "took" territory, Whitey arranged a coup d'etat. Which destroyed the Iranian democratic institutions.Details here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...
If Whitey hadn't smashed them up, Iran's institutions might have been able to stand up to the religious loonies.
They talk about getting 10 million concurrent clients only; they don't talk about scaling in any other dimension. And you'll never have 10 million clients of one server in practice, because how much network bandwidth does your super server have? 10 gbps? So that means you'll be strangling each client down to only a few kbps - way to go for performance. The 1980s called, they want their network apps back.
In real life, you'd offload the task from the server onto middle-tier machines that talk to the clients. There'll be at most thousands of these, and each one would have at most thousands of clients. And this will let you provide several mbps to each client if you get the networking right.
In fact, it means that even highscalability.com's original mission statement of 10 thousand clients was moot in the first place.
Why would you make such an assumption?
You can't argue with math.
I can when you get the math so wrong, like above.
And when my data grows to multiple terabytes in size?
In the example you gave you shouldn't have problems if you put the right index on the table.
What really causes the opacity is either (a) the complexity of the query or (b) the guy writing the clearly doesn't know how to write declarative code, so he tries to write eg procedural code in SQL, with cursors and triggers and other horrors.
If you are in scenario (a) and you really do need to do something complex, I'd pick SQL over VB to do it in any day - the non-declarative style leads to huge code with side effects are more opportunities for bugs to creep in.
If you are in scenario (b), the guy writing the queries really needs to read this: http://www.amazon.com/Database-Management-Systems-Raghu-Rama...
Look at the different forms of relational calculus (SQL is intended to be basically syntactic sugar on top) or look at some research papers by Fariba Sadri - hell, look at the earliest papers on relational databases by EF Codd. RDBMSs were meant to be logic systems right from the start.
it's also easy to perform a join that is slow
Have you been using MySQL? Use a real database with a working query optimizer eg I know from experience that MS SQL will do its best even when you give it a dog of a query. For example it will re-arrange your "filter" and build a temporary index to make your join go at the fastest possible speed.
If you have a specific use case nailed down you can always make it go faster outside of an RDBMS much the same way that you can always make something go faster if you hand-code it in machine code instead of using a compiler.
But if you can't put that much effort into hand-optimizing things, say because your use case might change so you'd have to change the code, the query optimizer/compiler will do a better job.
Expressed in English, this says "YAGNI" of all the advanced RDBMS features.
Answer: Yes I freakin' AM gonna need it eventually
There is a lot of benefit to processing your data using a declarative language, which is what SQL is. It's basically prolog, with less recursion and more separation of code and data.
You get all of that power for all of the data manipulation code that you run inside the database. If you have the misfortune to be writing in VB or Java, that's a huge power-up that you gain by using an RDBMS.
But pg is already using a declarative language, because he programs in Lisp. So the advantages are fewer in his case.
So I doubt pg feels significantly empowered by an RDBMS.
Point 1: Fuck your "edification". Grandma doesn't want to be "edified". She wants to not starve. She isn't starving because of fertilized crops. We have fertilizer entirely because of the Haber Process. That's REAL science. Also known as "deployment", "engineering" and "application".
Point 2: The point of theory is to make application more efficient. IE Tesla's claim that knowing theory could have saved Edison 90% of his labour. That's the ONLY value it has, and the ONLY thing that makes it different to eg Lesbian Poetry as a discipline of study. But Lesbian Poetry sure does "edify" Grandma.
Point 3: Theory comes from application, not from the fever dreams of the publish-or-perish crowd. You get math from trying to deploy a seige engine, not the other way around. So real science is application, theory is just documentation.
Point 4: We don't force everybody in science to go straight for application, because some speculative theory may turn out to be useful later, the way finite field arithmetic turned out to be useful for RAID6 arrays. Most theory without application turns out to be junk but we could justify it having some salvage value as insurance.
Point 5: The publish-or-perish crowd have got Point 4 backwards. That's your crap ideology too. They treat theoretical junk as having the only value and they give you more credit if you write about something than if you build the fucking thing. You've heard about the "idea guy" who just wants a techie to build his "vision"? In academia, that cocksucker is the one who's valued.
No, but YOU are succeeding.
And he would be correct to do so
Bingo! There you go, sounding like an idiot and proving my point.
Getting something into the shop for people to buy is deployment. Deployment is how science started. Look up Archimedes, because he was the guy who started math and physics, building siege engines to defeat the Roman navy. Oh yeah, and medicine and biology started with Imhotep and also the Sassanid hospital system.
This crap ideology you are pushing only came about relatively recently, and I don't remember anyone asking the taxpayers about it.
Something that only exists on paper is no good to anyone, especially since it hasn't been tested so it is not known what it's true costs are and whether the assumptions behind it are even valid. The only reason for pure theory to even be allowed to exist is because it might lead to application in future, but science has become so corrupt that the dominating majority of the "scientific" output is stupid theory, and actual application gets no respect at all, or as you say "is not the job of academia".
The corruption has gone even further, because there used to be a division between scientific fields and engineering fields, where engineering specifically meant application. But now you can get the same "That's not SCIENCE" bullshit from Professors even if you're in the engineering department.
I'll give you one of many concrete examples. Design for manufacture for antennas could really help improve wireless internet, if you could get handset antennas to narrowcast data instead of broadcasting it, thereby avoiding interference. Try pitching that to a Professor and you'll get shot down.
Next, try AI-based packet scheduling and collision prediction for wireless handsets. The topic is a complete fraud, because you have no idea when the other handset is going to transmit without knowing the future. But you can get lots of Greek squiggles out of that topic, so you'll get greenlighted.
and often times the top level academics
So if there's a problem with academics it's because they're not top level academics, and somehow only the tiny percentage who are top level count... You love your No True Scotsman fallacies, don't you?
The reason I'm not dying from hunger is because of mostly Fritz Haber and partly Norman Borlaug. The work of everybody else is irrelevant. So, two geniuses. And Fritz Haber wasn't working in "theory", he was working in "application" for the Second Reich. Maybe you should stop using such terrible examples and maybe you should stop being so damn badly informed. There's a whole field called History of Science and Technology about how this stuff happens, as opposed to the self-serving narratives academics give you about how it happens. Try learning some of it.
So stop spreading disinformation
I'm not, the standard academic propaganda that you stated above is the disinformation. The truth is that academics often don't give a shit about applications. They care about getting publications and about getting tenure.
Try working on a project for an academic. If you give him a hypothesis to investigate that you can submit to a big journal, he'll give you the go ahead. If you instead suggest something which you can actually make, which will be helpful for Aunt Tillie, which she actually might be able to buy in her local shop, he'll say something like "That's not SCIENCE!" and veto you. Go on, try it. I dare you.
I don't know that Maxwell would have been anywhere near that discovery if it hadn't been for Faraday's work first.
Go take a look at first year engineering PhD students, and see how they flail around looking for a "hypothesis".
They have no idea what to look for because their work isn't grounded in anything.
In the end they often end up bodging together two or three previous research papers and going with that rather than solving a real problem. Because who cares about applications, right?
The PhD students' work usually ends up gathering dust on some shelf while the next breakthrough is usually made by three drop-outs with a year's supply of ramen in a trailer in Palo Alto.
About women being the "property" of their husbands, that's because the husband was liable for the wife's crimes, due to Coverture, which she covers here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=J...
About the vote: some men had it, men didn't have it, in Anglo countries. Then it was given to all men as a sop because men could be press-ganged. So going to war and dying in a filthy trench based on some politician's whim became the "price of citizenship".
But women got the vote without getting the draft that came with it. Yeah and she covers that here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHvcFzzUues
She's got logic and facts. You've got ... sarcasm and assertions. Good luck with that.
Now if you still think men have such a good deal, I suggest you try going through a nasty divorce and then get back to me.
If America were being ruled by some sort of King George and the Founding Fathers had their revolt today, the Founding Fathers would be called "terrorists", just like the Boston Bombers are.
Americans have had this stuff drummed into their heads as a result of nationalist propaganda for over 200 years, because history is written by the victors.
If history were different and King George had won, they'd instead have been hearing about how gun control was the foundation of their liberty and how it protected loyal subjects of the Crown from those nefarious pro-French traitors.
The same goes for Robin Hood: he isn't given a better presentation because we are reading fiction but because King John lost. And John was a tyrant, by the way, who was made to submit to Magna Carta by force.
According to media accounts of the Boston Bombers that I have seen, they claimed to be fighting America because of America's injustice to Islam.
Apart from its increased plausibility, how is this different from the claims of American gun-nut militias who are worried about being forced to give up their liberty and their Christianity because of plots by the United Nations, an organization led by the anti-Christ?
You don't go forward innovation
Innovation is irrelevant to p2p because p2p has already been invented. Nobody wants it, and nobody has wanted it for 20 years, that's its problem.
This is such an ugly topic, I don't even want to even try to talk about it. It's just not interesting.
That uninteresting ugliness decides which technologies go mainstream and which ones fail. If you want to stick your head in the sand, this conversation is over.
No you weren't! You were talking about the later stage: "going mainstream", which means efficiency, testing and deployment. But when I mentioned testing and deployment, you said Who cares about that?
that's the #1 reason I'm wrong
The reasons why you are wrong are contained in the damn links I went to the trouble of assembling for you. Why don't you go read them and learn something, instead of hitting me with a comeback? Sheesh.
Wrong. The point of the network is to transmit data.
Who cares about that ?
Who cares about most efficiently getting to systems that work? Grandma, Aunt Tillie, the engineer, his boss that pays his salary, his boss's boss, his boss's boss's investor, and everyone else who matters.
Who cares about p2p? You and a couple of other people who don't matter, don't pay anyone's salary and don't get to decide anything.
You sound like a teenager. Maybe you should try to learn how technology decisions are taken in real life. You could start by getting a job in a technology company, but first here is a reading list for you:
http://soloway.pbworks.com/w/file/fetch/46715502/Crossing-Th...
http://archive.org/details/TheInnovatorDilemma
http://it-ebooks.info/book/166/
Which is why rjempson shouldn't have started it. He was using "SAAS programmers are rubbish" as a way of dodging the crappy state of entreprise software.
if you look at enterprise, you'll find equal complexity just in different, non-sexy areas
Like the Wall Street system I heard about that ETLs its data continuously between three different databases because its developers had no idea what they were doing?
A lot of the stuff that happens under the label "entreprise" is just crap.