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Comment I was introduced to Python first (Score 4, Interesting) 415

Back in 2001 I was attending Minnesota State University Mankato. The CS program there did all of the introductory programming courses in Python. A year or two prior to my enrollment all the intro classes were taught in Java. The profs found that students would get hung up on java syntax when their goal was to teach them basic programming concepts so they switched to Python. Courses in Python only lasted for a couple semesters. After that the rest of the curriculum was primarily taught in Java. I think that Python accomplished the CS department's goal quite well.

Comment Re:Amusing (Score 1) 355

Oil tankers tend to go forward a long while even after the engine is off.

MS has been going forward quite a while now without any engine running. And restarting it means that you have to invest a LOT of fuel just to get it going again, unless you strip that tanker down to a speedboat and leave the rusted hulk behind.

Can you rephrase this as a car analogy. I'm not familiar with nautical terminology.

Comment Re:More to the point... (Score 2) 437

Think in 3D, not 2D. This article appears to reference a decent study http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21692423 According to it, the average depth of ice in the Antarctic is around 2126m, (~6975ft, or ~1.3 miles!) At that depth, it would take the ice contained under a 1 square yard area to cover a football field with over a foot of ice. (6875*3*3 = 62275 cubic ft, 360*160*1=57600 cubic feet)

Oh yeah: that 2.1km average: it's apparently over a 12.295 million square kilometer area. 26.54 million cubic _kilometers_ of ice. while we're at it: surface area of the planet: 510,072,000 sq km (wikipedia).

So. simple math from there: 26,540,000/510,072,000 = 0.052km... or about 52m (170ft) for the planet if all ice in Antarctica melts. The article actually says potential equivalent of 58m, so an exercise to the reader to determine where the extra 6m comes from.. and how many cities that would affect.

BTW: Highly recommend seeing the movie Chasing Ice http://www.chasingice.com/ for a view of how fast the glaciers are changing. Netflix carries it.

Your not thinking fourth dimensionally!

Databases

Horizontal Scaling of SQL Databases? 222

still_sick writes "I'm currently responsible for operations at a software-as-a-service startup, and we're increasingly hitting limitations in what we can do with relational databases. We've been looking at various NoSQL stores and I've been following Adrian Cockcroft's blog at Netflix which compares the various options. I was intrigued by the most recent entry, about Translattice, which purports to provide many of the same scaling advantages for SQL databases. Is this even possible given the CAP theorem? Is anyone using a system like this in production?"

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