DeepDuh

I think you hit the spot. The reason why so many devs go for mac nowadays, is to have a good laptop that you don't have to babysit / configure much yourself and that's well integrated with a unix toolchain. On a desktop, many of these advantages go away when you compare to a linux workstation, therefore many go for that.

You certainly do have a point. I'm Swiss and our gun ownership clocks in somewhere after USA and Canada, yet violence levels are about the same as in the rest of Europe. It really seems to have much more to do with culture than with guns themselves. However, defending this position must be quite tough as an American. It means that there is something inherently violent in your culture.

Maybe there is a correlation with suburban car culture? First there is the significant correlation between environmental lead during childhood and violence, secondly I think that having a low population density might make people feel more on their own, the highest goal being to protect their family. I'm thinking that people that are used to a high population density, who are in contact with hundreds of other humans a day, get used to this and lower their defenses. Then again I've seen a study suggesting that the violence leves in cities and on the countryside is pretty much the same (at least after lead levels have evened out).

Maybe, hopefully, the decline in violence in the US will continue and it will level out at a similar point as Europe / Asia - then we'll probably know that you were just poisoning yourselves with lead. I hope that this will have some impact on limiting the power of lobbies. Think of how much lead gasoline, lobbied into the world by the oil and car industry, has cost society, if this really was the main cause of the 70ies / 80ies crime outbursts.

You raise a very good point here. IMO there should be a big push in the pedagogic branch of CS. It should be a requirement for math teachers to study, just like manual division algorithms. I was lucky to have a math teacher in high school who pushed this subject out of her own will. However in my home country (Switzerland), what we call high school is only visited by about the top 20% of pupils, the others go non academic routes.

Wait, so it isn't even worth prioritizing a field which heavily influences pretty much all of today's economy and the influence will only grow in the future. Your input about business proposals is certainly valid, but it dodges the issue at hand.

Would we require people to know the basics about car mechanics if 90% if out jobs were depending on driving a car and if people had about 50 of them on average? I think yes, Sir.

Well, if this is the case that would be a pretty deep architectural problem, I'd say, for a PaaS like Heroku.

I think it's pretty obvious that you need at least two layers of hierarchy for the routing here: One (or more) router forwarding requests to virtualized routers (per Heroku customer 'instance' or whatever that's called), which in turn provide the functionality I described in software. I'd probably use VMs running a specialized minimal linux distro for the per-instance-routers.

Yes, that's what I meant: I couldn't see a missile trail either, only airplane trails and the one from the meteorite itself.

Looking at these videos it doesn't look like there has been a defense missile: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wUqmS35REY. Such missiles would leave a visible trail in the atmosphere, wouldn't they?

This one is much better, it actually shows the incoming meteor:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wUqmS35REY

Really? Is that so hard? All you need is a table on the router that tells it the best information it can currently have about the number of requests processed on each dyno - without doing a roundtrip. This requires exactly one additional (one-way) package: A message from the dyno to the router, telling it that it has finished the current request.

Now, to avoid dead dynos (because the finished message might have been lost somewhere) the dyno can repeat the finished message ever 30 seconds or so (and the router ignores messages with counts <= 0).

> .., but since it's a Tesla owned review model, I'm sure they have legal rights to it.

I doubt that. Say, you lend a car to your friend and let the navigation system log his/her route. The route includes compromising information about work related issues. Even the logging itself is questionable, but then releasing that information to the public - boy, I'd sure check my lawyers first.

As I understand, the 'European sensor' for privacy tingles at quite different levels than the US American one.

While the whole discussion makes me skeptical of both Broder and Tesla's customer service, I'd like to add here that Tesla most probably would need permission to do that. Even releasing GPS data is already a questionable move - IANAL, but I believe in Europe this would be pretty much unthinkable, except if he gave explicit permission on paper first (general agreement terms probably wouldn't be enough, because of the surprising nature of such a term).

Regarding CUDA programming: If you want to do this seriously do yourself a favor and get a test machine with a Fermi and/or Kepler card running a CLI-only linux and ssh in for testing. CUDA drivers run just fine on linux, it's one of the most common environments for HPC programming right now.

What I mean is you usually don't want to do this on your laptop. First, a high end laptop like a macbook can hold up for 4 years while GPUs need to be replaced regularly in order to develop for the latest newest capabilities. At some point you will also want to try Intel MIC, AMD cards and so on. Secondly, it's just much nicer if the system you're working on doesn't get hot.

Note: If it's for graphical tools with user frontend I can understand if you don't want to do this. Even then it could be interesting to have offsite computing capabilities baked in however, since this is also preferred in many graphics/video designer houses.

I guess the problem I have is with the word 'love' itself. It's such a strong feeling for something that's just a tool that can in some situations make you turn around bits more efficiently. Can't we just look at that stuff rationally and reserve that kind of feelings for family and friends?

Sounds very similar to my experience with Japanese culture. We call their Shintoism a 'religion' but it doesn't fit either, it's much more like what you list.

As others here have pointed out in different discussions: Ideas aren't worth much by themselves. It's the subset that's implementable of which it's the subset that has gotten implemented that's worth anything. If we just love ideas we should better become philosophers.

Sorry to be a bit harsh, but I find it a bit shocking how even in this field where we can basically play god and do whatever we want and what we think is best on increasingly powerful bit-cruncher-and-storer-machines, so many here seem to behave like a herd of sheep and just do what 'everyone else' does. Just sit down for a moment and think! What are my requirements right now? What could be a requirement in the near future? What technologies are there which can help me? Am I sure about these feature? Better read up on it first! How difficult is it to get it to behave in ways that are or can be important for me?

Now list that stuff down. If it's puzzling sleep over it, forget it for a few days. Then suddenly, for example under a hot shower you get an idea - that requirement I had isn't really one, I can solve it differently! Come back, take the now fitting piece of the puzzle and do your job in 20% of the time that would have been needed if you would just have blindly followed some path. That's how it usually works for me. Be picky, be exact, but be lazy.

Now about that routing dispatcher problem: Couldn't we solve that in one to two weeks on a generic plattform, but specifically for a certain use case? Let's say you want to have a worker queue of rails request handlers that work in parallel. Just write that damn router! Maybe I'd be lazy, learn Erlang for a week and think about it afterwards.

Why do you 'want to love' Heroku? Because their marketing speak is so great?

Thanks for the link, it's indeed a good read.

I always liked them prioritizing to give you a complete out of the box features. Firefox's plugin hell made me crawl up the wall every time I saw the dreaded 'you must now restart Firefox' dialog. I assume it's better now but a few years ago Opera was so much ahead of FF in usability it wasn't even funny.

As someone who's been a longtime Opera user before switching to Chrome (buggy release around 10.x, weakening site compatibility) I'm so glad to read this. This decision shows the quality of engineers who work at Opera - not afraid to throw a huge chunk of code away if it doesn't serve the company anymore the way it was intended. Thinking about it I can't make up a single example of a large software house doing such a thing.

Looking forward to get my neat features again, such as fast forward, hotkey bindings, Opera turbo..

Ah thanks, there it is. Shame, I was hoping to get a node in Japan as well.

I was looking for a (publicly available) list of DigitalOcean's locations but couldn't find it. Would you happen to have a link?

As someone living in a land far beyond the mountains and the sea (aka Switzerland) I'm thinking this: 5$ for a nice Hulu / Netflix proxy? Sweet!

Your comment reads exactly like an xkcd comic. I wonder why this is..

Thanks for the input. I didn't have the exact timeframe in mind either, I just knew it was longer ago at a time when I wasn't yet interested in political events ;-). Also, I wasn't quite aware that this stuff isn't common knowledge outside of Europe, so thanks for the reminder.

Some note: When it comes to debugging I've rarely seen a better stacktrace output than the one Flask presents you in debug mode (provided by Werkzeug). It actually lets you open the damn sourcefile right there. Right now I'm (mis?)using Flask together with CouchDB to build a db application where you can dynamically define your entities, fields, code hooks and so on at runtime and using Flask for this has been great so far. Ronacher's attitude clearly shows through in how easy I could get Flask to behave in ways it was possibly never meant to (dynamically add view definitions, document mappings and so on).

So Armin, if you read this, thank you, it was a joy spending time with your framework (and source code) over the weekend ;)!

Is the collapse still influencing you in everyday life? I wasn't quite aware of that (sorry). For example in Sweden all signs of it seem to have long gone, then again it's been quite a bit longer in the past.

See, the root of the problem with the start screen behavior for me is that the desktop is treated like a metro app. It's true that you can get used to this, but I'm pretty sure it's one hell of a stretch for 'normal' users. It just looks and works too differently from metro apps and you don't get any kind of benefit, since for example the charms don't work and there is no additional touch integration.

sigh. Who came up with this brilliant gesture? Seriously..

I tried that on a laptop touch pad. Didn't work.