Comment Re:Why bother? (Score 2, Interesting) 421
Uhh...
As far as I can see the premise of the original question is that 'my employees like
Uhh...
As far as I can see the premise of the original question is that 'my employees like
Which is probably more important than anything else. The benefit of open sourcing
From (mostly indirect) experience, maybe it does for CRUD apps. For complicated applications though you might get ~30% code sharing and a lot of pain.
I've never found the antipodal argument convincing. Seismic waves converge at the antipode of an impact only if the target is spherically symmetric and isotropic. In the actual Earth, you have reflections off all kinds of laterally varying boundaries. Also, the sound speed differs substantially between continental and oceanic crust, so the path matters quite a bit. The Chixulub impact is also not that big (as planetary-scale impacts go). The projectile was what, 10 km? Shock heating is only significant within a few times the projectile diameter.
I'm not a geophysicist but I do write software for the field so so I do have some limited knowledge of it. With the disclaimer out of the way, forgive me if I am wrong but:
1. Would anistropy mater much in this situation? I know it matters a lot in seismic tomography but the magnitude of the waves here is, well, of a completly different order of magnitude (excuse the pun). Would the physics creating angle dependent and/or horizontal velocity variations in the crust still hold up? Would they mater much on this scale? Presumably the waves are spending most of the time traveling through the mantle.
2. Similarly is being exactly spherically symmetric that important? Are the other stellar bodies were the antipodal phenomenon has been observed exactly spherically symmetric?
http://www.newgeology.us/presentation35.html provides a reasonably good summary of the pro-antipodal argument. Even if the waves are not focusing on an exact point with equally timed first-arrivals you could still reasonably expect see something resembling antipodal effects.
Only if you think that being off by about 10,000 km is "reasonably good". What kills the "killer" asteroid hypothesis is that the bulk of the biogeostratigraphic and high-resolution geochronological evidence now both suggest that the bolide impact predates the mass-extinction by about 100-150 kyrs.
The circumfrence of the earth is ~40,000km, being 10,000km off implies being a quater of the world away. I can't see that looking at the map provided by mbone. The map divides the earth into 12 longitude sections with the rough location of the impact crater and the Indian land mass being seperated by 6 longitude sections. Similarly the impact site and the location of the Indian land mass are roughly symmetric about the equator.
From the link:
The crater is about 300 miles wide. It was found by looking at differences in density that show up in gravity measurements taken with NASA's GRACE satellites. Researchers spotted a mass concentration, which they call a mascon-dense stuff that welled up from the mantle, likely in an impact.
So Frese and colleagues overlaid data from airborne radar images that showed a 300-mile wide sub-surface, circular ridge. The mascon fit neatly inside the circle.
Far from definite but the evidence is far stronger than you are making out.
Hush! Most christians don't know the winter solstice was expropriated by the early christian church! The early christian church was having difficulty converting people because the "pagan" faiths have better hollidays, so they just borrowed them with a bit of "Christian" window dressing thrown on top. What? You thought christmas trees are christian?
I went to a Christian school and this was hardly a secret. We had to take Christian Studies classes, where we learnt the history of Christianity including things like this.
Organized relegion is not just composed of faith but also of tradition and social order. In Christianity faith is belief in Jesus and hence God. Chrismas on the other hand is a mater of tradition, and to some degree social order. The fact that it was originally a pagan festival does not lessen its importants as a mater of Christian tradition.
Similar distinctions can be seen in religions around the world. In Islam (in my limited understanding), faith is the belief in Muhammed as the final prophet of God, while tradition and social order are primarily determined by Sharia Law. Sharia Law in itself is only in part derived from the Quran. As many Islamic communities have faced what they feel are existential crisis, they have turned to tradition and hence stricter observation of Sharia law.
In Japan, Shinto could be seen to exist as a 'relegion' but it is in reality devoid of all aspects of faith. It continues to exist as a mater of tradition with the observance of thousands (probably tens of thousands) of festivals/observances at shrines around the country. On the face of it, these festivals exist to (mostly) placate look Shinto 'Gods'. However, nobody seriously believes in these local 'Gods'. Even with Budhism the faith aspect is generaly very weak. Probably the biggest aspect of 'Budhist' faith in Japan is the visting of ancestral graves, which is closer to ancestor whorship than Budhism.
I'm sure there are similar examples from plenty of other countries as well but these sprang to mind.
If your only experience with C / C++ is MS VSxxxx, its no wonder you hate the thing so much. The MS tool chains have never been standards compliant, and they have absolutely zero qualms about breaking their customers legacy code just for random changes. When are developers going to learn their lesson and stop relying on MS for anything they don't have to. You end up locked to MS and they can do whatever they want to you (including large scale cash withdrawal).
To be clear I don't hate C++ at all. I find it a very powerful and expressive language but if the project requirements allow for it I'd rather use Java/C#. They're much more productive language to program in imo. No waiting for compiles, better tooling (e.g. refactoring), nice runtime errors, and the relative ease of integrating third party libraries being the main factors.
Couldn't agree more with you about Microsoft VC++. Clang is sooo much nicer.
So basically you're complaining because you wrote bad code that only worked due to Visual Studio not following standards and that on top of that you don't know how to read template error messages?
No smartarse. The VC++2012 Chrono did have bugs and fail to conform to the standard but afik my code was compliant. VC++2013 fixed the VC++2012 bugs and introduced a new set of its own (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/24586804/c11-chrono-in-visual-studio-2013)
Compiles in GCC/Clang/VC++2012 but not VC++2013**:
std::chrono::seconds a(10), b(20);
auto test = a / b;
** Disclaimer: I'm on Linux at home and so can't test that particular block. uint64_t test = a
Unlike our previous poster, though My opinion is that Java, is actually one of the least useful languages out there. It doesn't provide a higher level syntax than objC or C++, like the "better languages" Ruby, Python, etc.
Java doesn't provide a higher level syntax than C++/Obj-C but it does provide a much more easily parsed syntax. The result is lightning fast compilation, sane compilation errors and excellent tooling support. Auto-completion, powerfull refactoring, background compilation and powerful lint tools make for a very productive programming environment. Even C# doesn't have full proper background compilation yet. Intellisense is close but there are whole classes of compile time errors that it doesn't pick up.
Similarly stability has done a lot for the language. Java is one of the few languages were I'm confident that I could build a project I wrote ten years ago with no issues. C++ on the other hand... ugh! Just last week I shifted a project from VS2012 to VS2013 and had spend an afternoon fixing random code breakage because MS broke their Chrono libraries and their retarded compiler gave errors in the template definition in their header file rather than the actual lines breaking compilation. Not to mention the ball of fun that was trying to get the latest versions of our dependencies to compile... Fun stuff like the 64bit build for some reason produced 32bit obj files... In Java land I add a line to Maven or for Android drop a library in the libs file and add it to the dependencies... Presto, nothing more to think about.
It's also a very readable proramming language imo. Packages=directories and one public class per file make navigating Java code very easy. Types are obvious and code is simple to follow. I've worked in C++,Java,C#,Javascript,Python and also on my own time in C and Haskell. Out of those I'd say Java and C# easily have the best readability. (For the record Haskell has the worst by far imo.)
It is bound by a runtime, that is meant to make it run-anywhere. Yet ironically the universal crown is going to javascript+HTML5, not java.
I'm not sure if that is ironic. The Java runtime brings other benefits than cross platform compatibility. If I dereference a null pointer or use an index outside of array bounds, the Java runtime will give me a nice error telling me exactly what the error was, which line of code in which class caused it and what the sequence of calls that lead to the error was. Try doing the same thing in C++/Obj-C. If you're lucky the code will be running on a developer machine and you can hook in the debugger and if the code isn't too heavily optimized maybe even get the line of code it occured on. If you're unlucky the code is on a production server/client system somewhere and your stuck trawling through a log to find the error. (For the record record Haskell easily takes the title of hardest to debug language thanks to lazy evaluation.)
Plus it's not like C++/ObjC have no runtime. For example, if you don't have the right VC++ redistributable installed, you'll get nowhere trying to run C++ application compiled in VC++. Their runtime just doesn't include a JIT compilation stage (for better or worse)
Anyway here's the tl;dr: Java doesn't have exciting language features but it does have excellent tooling, excellent readability and is one of the easiest languages out their to debug. That too me is way more valuable than exciting language features. I prefer C# but I'm happy to work in Java instead.
I was very tempted by Xamarin but put off by the $$$. Is it as good as claimed?
My company got a few licenses for a project recently since our client wanted it done in C#.
From version 3 it has the ability to write cross-platform GUI code. The other option being to write Android/iOS GUI code seperately through C# mappings of their native apis. I wasn't responsible for trying the x-plat GUI part out but I do know that ultimately we were unimpressed and elected not to use it, instead developing for Android and later porting the GUI code to iOS. From memory it was just too limited.
It may be acceptable for routine business apps but then why not just develop them as a web-service and avoid the Apple-tax and pain of dealing with Apple's provisioning cluster fuck. (Seriously why do so many company's want to use iPads for internal apps? Distributing apps on them is a major pita)
The other pain point for us was third party libraries. In theory you can import jars and it will automatically map them to C#. In practice that doesn't work. We had to support mobile scanners with a laughably bad and somewhat broken API and broken default apps. I ended up writing an Android service to deal with all that crap. When it is time to add iOS support we'll have to write an iOS specific layer.. (iOS bluetooth access is too limited to directly access the scannner so that will probably involve treating it as a keyboard and capturing keystrokes...)
IMO. the real value is for Windows shops that want to utilize their existing investment in tooling/developer training, reuse existing core-logic code and/or write their core logic once in C#. For places like that it could be worth the several thousand dollars per developer.
We used to run linux in the server room because it was lean and easy to admin. Windows was slow, mousy, and dependencies were hellish. Now we run Windows Server 2012 with no GUI, virtualized, and admin with powershell. We've ripped out tens of thousands of dollars of Red Hat; windows is cheaper.
If you don't mind me asking, what were you running on the servers which allowed an easy switch over? How did you go retraining a group of Linux admins to run Windows? Why not move off Redhat to another Linux platform?
$1.3 trillion (US) federal tax cost / 12 million people = $11.3 million per person covered. Does that look right so far, or did I fat-finger the calculation? That's US trillion, which is different from UK trillion, I believe.
As has already been pointed out you were off by a factor of 100 and that's assuming the basis of your calculation is correct. It isn't.
Here is the actually CBO report: https://cbo.gov/publication/45...
They estimate 1.4 trillion over the next __10 years__ with a net cost of $36 billion in 2014. 36 billion for 11 million people is approximately $3300 per person per year. Without considering inflation that is about $33,000 per person over 10 years.
For comparison the US goverment in 2012 spent $4075 per person on healthcare (http://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?DataSetCode=HEALTH_STAT#).
On a side note, European nations providing free healthcare to their entire population spent about $3500 (Purchasing Parity USD) per person in 2012. Adding in private expenditures and the US spent about 2~2.5x the amount per person on healthcare as comparible nations in Western Europe / Australia / Japan and generally achieved worse out comes in pretty much all categories.
It is not only the Obamacare - everything else, from Syria to ISIL to Afghanistan to Europe to Islamization of America to you name it - everything that Obama has touched on it turned into a mess
I'm sure there are lots of valid criticisms of the Obama presidency but I'm not sure his foreign policy is so easy to fault. I mean, what exactly would he have been better of doing in any of those places?
What exactly was he meant to do in Iraq/Syria? Undo the decision to invade Iraq? Fix hundreds of years of tribal and religious divisions, which had already torn appart other neighbouring countires? Pump weapons and cash to some different assuredly better rebel group in Syria?
Building a coalition of local forces and providing aerial support / special forces support seems to be about the only sane path that doesn't get America (and its partners) even deeper into a massive mess.
Ditto for Ukraine. What should he have done? Or to put it differently what actions should he have taken to better suit the national interest of the United States - a very powerful but still very limited player? The reality is the problems have existed since long before Obama became president and he is ultimately as powerless to influence events as his predecessor was to influence events in Georgia. He has actually come out far more forcefully than Bush did in 2008. Current American sanctions are actually damaging to Russia and America has managed to lead an unwilling Europe into sanctioning Russia as well.
Then there is Afghanistan. What would you consider the right path there? The original objectives of the war - kill Osama and neuter Al Qaida had been achieved and he chose to withdraw. Was this the wrong decision? If now was the wrong time then when would have been the right time?
To program is to be.
