Upvote. My kids (10 and 14) have managed to make amazing things in what to me looks like a complete toy. Plenty of books and articles, but best of all is the community around it - kids sharing and expanding each other ideas. Teaches the basics (variables, loops, etc) - but best of all lets them find success early.

I'd agree here. As someone who started his career in Smalltalk, and then had to give it up for the lack of programming jobs available (10 years of my life becoming an expert in Delphi I'll never get back) Ruby wasn't so much "cool" as "beautiful". It felt like a coming home - an expressive, easy to read language where the answer to "how do I do X?" is "What's the most obvious way." A language predicated on programmer joy is a pretty sweet thing.

I think the Ruby world can be divided into two camps. There's the "we are nice, because Matz is nice" crowd that were dominant in the early days. When I was a newb I found the community very helpful, very welcoming. Then we got the "DHH is a prick, so we are pricks" bunch. I don't think they were ever in the majority, but they were loud and obnoxious and fit the mould of "hipsters". I don't think this is particular to Ruby though. Every community has its wankers, every community has its good citizens.

I still love Ruby for what it is, and am thankful I've been able to carve out a reasonably well-paying career based on it.

Can we just for once stop using terms like "evolved" as if this thing has any kind of ability to mutate outside of the agency of people - intelligent designers if you will - actually making changes to the code.

Absolutely. And with the code sharing in Scratch 2.0 it also teaches concepts like community code, forking, etc.

Plus there are integrations with Arduino and the like for more comprehensive coding exercises.

More to the point, he *is* from the UK. He was born there, studied there and - though it's been quietly forgotten about - may not be entitled to hold office unless he has given up his dual citizenship.

Ah yes, the AI will probably go through its Nietzsche phase, around the time it starts listening to The Doors and wearing black t-shirts. And like the artificial intelligence of teenagers it will probably sort itself out in the end, but we'll have a rocky few years until it works out that a priori is not Latin for "what I know".

No.. it's "Lego bricks". Lego is the company, Lego bricks are the product. Lego themselves tried to clarify the situation, with a notice on their website (since removed):

But no-one thinks of the innocent contractors, caught in the crossfire. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

It looks like Epic isn't based on Vista as I assumed - but still uses the same M(UMPS) based technology. A comparison of the two systems can be found in a Healthcare IT News blog article.

Vista has an interesting history. Because it was built using US Federal Government money, the "Hard Hats" who worked on it originally successfully argued for the release of its source code into the public domain. It's essentially open source, paid by the public purse and - despite the M language - a successful example of where interoperability between healthcare IT systems can really work.

We've had decades of development in open standards. HL7 for all its ugliness is a great system and has really driven interoperability. For Epic to "go it alone" seems a real shame. And patently stupid - but then we've had similar stupid in my country (Australia).

MUMPS is pretty special. You can write clean code in it, but the language and culture around don't exactly lend itself to it. That example at DailyWTF is pretty typical of what you see in OpenVista based systems (which I assume Epic uses).

Exactly. In much the same way that removing the brakes, airbags, firewall, etc will make your car travel faster downhill.

Postgres-XL is currently compatible with Postgres 9.2. Postgres 9.3 introduces better support for JSON data that bring it closer to the functionality of a NoSQL DB. It looks like XL will be compatible with 9.3 in the near future.

Just in my experience, the introduction of HStore and JSON data types in Postgres has pretty much nullified the advantages I'd get from using a NoSQL DB. Sharding, high availability, etc are all there with a little work (and help from the many 3rd party projects in the Postgres "ecosystem"). Every now and then I find myself tempted to run a project using a NoSQL DB, but the trade offs (lots of memory, lack of ACID compliance, nascent querying languages, etc) bring me back to Postgres.

Of course there are situations where Mongo or other NoSQL DBs make sense. Using something like InfluxDB for time series data looks pretty neat, and having highly optimized lookup data in a NoSQL DB is great. In the end, you use the database system that makes sense in your work - and avoid the cargo-culting of any technology just because it's the new hotness.

I've been really happy with Postgtes's performance over the years. Raw speed is not an issue - you can always add more nodes using something like Postgres-XL if you have to. It's the gradual introduction of functionality that makes my life easier that I appreciate.

OP again. US$300 is a lot, but fairly typical here in SA. We regularly hear of families in our area paying AU$1500 per quarter (around US$1300) for electricity. But then we also see families with more TVs than actual family members, reverse-cycle airconditioners running all day and other sorts of outrageous waste.

Pricing has been seen as a means to reduce consumption in Australia. It's a valid approach, but it does hit people hard - particularly those who can't afford it - but by and large it has been effective. But it has also lead to an oversupply of electricity generation, so now the Carbon Tax has been removed it's possible we'll see a return to higher consumption. It's hard to tell if people's behaviour has changed during the period when the Carbon Tax was in force.

As a side note, as a point of comparison, we only pay around US$150 per month for a four-person household (inc. one teenager). We don't go without - everyone has their own computer, there are multiple tablets in the house. We're just careful about leaving things on that don't need to be on.

South Australia's climate also lends itself to better energy use. Winters are mild and because we have a very dry climate, evaporative air conditioning works really well here in Summer (and costs very little to run). We have the highest uptake of residential solar power in the country, thanks to a high number of days with sunshine. Solar panels are also mandatory on all State government buildings, including a large array on top of our Parliament House. I'm not actually from SA originally, but I'm quite proud of the place I call home. Far from being a "backwater", South Australia has been quietly leading the way for a long time.

OP here. Yes, the lack of political will is the main issue. We have a Federal Treasurer who openly declares wind farms an eye-sore (http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-05-02/joe-hockey-wind-turbines-utterly-offensive/5425804) - maybe because open-cut mines are so much more pleasing to look at - and many State and Federal bodies heavily engaged with the coal industry.

As a society we've kind of backed ourselves into a corner, with global coal prices slumping and China now pushing for high-quality and cleaner coal (e.g. less sulphur). As another poster mentioned, South Australia is often considered the butt of other States jokes and referred to as backward - when we actually have a long history of being progressive. It's a win for SA, but it sets the bar for other States and hopefully will help move us away from being dependent of just digging things out of the ground to get by.