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Comment Quoth Neil Gaiman (Score 4, Insightful) 34

He's the finest living male American writer of SF and fantasy – possibly the finest living American writer. Most people haven't heard of him. And that doesn't bother Gene in the slightest. He just gets on with writing the next book.

If you have not read him, do it. The Book of the New Sun is a literary masterpiece independent of genre. But he wasn't a one hit wonder, Home Fires (his latest) is amazing. Gene Wolfe is the kind of author that puts most pieces of "literary" fiction to shame. He not only deserves this award, but a Pulitzer too. To bad literary community can not remove its collective head from its ass. Cheers to him and I can't wait for the next book.

Comment You are floating above the Earth like Helios (Score 1) 147

You are floating above the Earth like Helios riding a chariot of fire across the sky. The greeks would have believed you a god atop Olympus. The blue earth turns below you, so captivating in its beauty that generations have marveled at the blue marble. The night sky is so full of stars it is dizzying in its beauty. You are participating in mankind's first steps to becoming immortal among them.

But the coffee sucks.

Comment Re:Supply and demand. (Score 1) 625

Subsequently, a study by McPhedran and Baker compared the incidence of mass shootings in Australian and New Zealand. Data were standardised to a rate per 100,000 people, to control for differences in population size between the countries and mass shootings before and after 1996/1997 were compared between countries. That study found that in the period 1980–1996, both countries experienced mass shootings. The rate did not differ significantly between countries. However since 1996/1997, neither country has experienced a mass shooting event despite the continued availability of semi-automatic longarms in New Zealand. The authors conclude that “the hypothesis that Australia’s prohibition of certain types of firearms explains the absence of mass shootings in that country since 1996 does not appear to be supported if civilian access to certain types of firearms explained the occurrence of mass shootings in Australia (and conversely, if prohibiting such firearms explains the absence of mass shootings), then New Zealand (a country that still allows the ownership of such firearms) would have continued to experience mass shooting events.”

Comment Re:Supply and demand. (Score 4, Informative) 625

Except banning guns in two cultures very similar to ours has had no effect on either of those from an empirical perspective. You are basically plato reasoning about the five elements right now. No matter how well you construct your thought process the empirical, statistical evidence disagrees with your result. I have linked you to the associated articles on the effects of the gun ban in Australia, please take the time to read them.

Comment Re:Supply and demand. (Score 5, Interesting) 625

In crimes of passion almost any weapon will do. A gun being present generally only changes the cause of death. This is evidenced by the fact that in Britain and Australia gun bans have had no effect on either suicide or homicide rates when isolated against already prevailing national crime rates and trends. You are also incorrect about the nature of homicide in the US. 70-85% of those murdered the US every year have a criminal record. Most major cities track close to 80% of there homicides resulting from gang violence.
I should be clear, I am not a "gun rights" advocate, but from an economics perspective it is rather obvious that murder is price inelastic. The vast majority of murders are infact crime related. The remander are largely crimes of passion for which any serviceable weapon can and will do (suicide falls under this as well).

Comment Re:Did it really work? (Score 3, Insightful) 332

It sounds like you where just talking to a very bad functional programmer. You also have the order completely backwards. ANSI Common Lisp was the first standardized OO language. But more importantly most "OO" concepts come from functional languages to start with.

Design patterns for the most part are actually adaptations of pre-existing functional concepts. For example Chain of Responsibility is really just a slightly simplified monad (input must equal output). The first Iterator pattern was (map fn list). Flyweight is a simplified form of Memoization.

Packages and namespaces also first appeared in many functional languages first. Encapsulation vai lexical closures has been around since Scheme was invented in the 70's. Lambda functions? Those little gems, making there way into every OOP language where invented with lisp.

You have missed the entire point though if you think OOP is about organizing you programs or something. OOP is largely about encapsulating moving parts into logical pieces. Functional code is largely about minimizing or removing "state" (aka moving parts) from your code. E.g. an input to a function should always give the same output. These concepts are not incompatible at all.

Comment Large datasets are mostly IO limited (Score 5, Interesting) 135

While cool and all 125million tweets with geo tagging is at most: 1250000000*142bytes = 165 GB. That is not what "big data" considers a large data set. Indeed most "big data" queries are IO limited. For around 16k USD you can fit that entire working set in memory. You are not really in the "big data" realm into you have datasets in the 10's of TB's compressed (100's of TB's uncompressed).
For these kinds of datasets, and where more compute is necessary there is MARs.

Comment Specs for the interested (Score 5, Interesting) 168

From the HP Site: "The HP Moonshot 1500 Chassis has 45 hot-pluggable servers installed and fits into 4.3U. The density comes in part from the low-energy, efficient processors. The innovative chassis design supports 45 servers, 2 network switches, and supporting components."

Each pluggable unit support 1x 2GHZ intel atom S1200 series cpus (2x core, 4x thread), up to 1 dimm @ 8gb, and one SFF sata drive. That gives you 90 cores/180 threads, 360GB's in 4.3u.

For comparison a 6RU cisco UCS chasis can put down up to 160 Cores / 320 threads, 4TB of memory. Those are high performance Xeon cores. Not sure on the $$$ per compute/memory between the two.

The really big question is are there enough use cases for that many "thin" servers. At 2 cores and 8GB of ram you are very thing by modern standards and there is 0 opportunity for vertical growth.

Comment No (Score 1) 103

Gaming companies as whole have dated client side and server side architectures. The software they write is still stuck in the early 2000's for the most part. Things like distributed, highly available systems are still far beyond there grasp. They have a hatred towards modern languages (C++ EVERYWHERE YO) and tend to have a poor understanding of where, when, and what to optimize. I am sure there are some game companies out there that do push the edge and "get it", but for the most part game studio are some of the most bassackwards part of the industry.

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