bwarp

Possibly, but isn't the entire carnival of Apple the same?

Tell me which bit of my post was not factual?

It'll be another ceremony. A parade of metal and glass. A celebration of our supposed progress. Another device for consumption. A window into a walled world. Another false need. Another life not really improved despite their insistence that it is

Please at least spare a thought for those around the world who are too busy trying to stay alive on this day to worry about a new monolith to worship.

I like technology, but I'm a human first.

Psychs (both types) who are funded by medical insurance are the issue. They're being effectively paid commission from the insurer to find anything that could be wrong with you so they can eat. The moment you get sick in the US, you are a landgrab for cash. It's just wrong.

Here in the UK, the free ones on the NHS are pretty good! If you don't want treatment, noone is going to lose any money (in fact they're saving cash) so you're fine.

This is where we are. We use Crucible/Fisheye as well which really just makes things painfully hard.

Brandy Basic is pretty much that: http://sourceforge.net/projects/brandy/

Rubbish! http://www.southgatearc.org/news/november2010/make_a_transis...

HTML5 is a piss poor evolutionary abstraction of what was effectively SGML and scripting carnage.

If you could start again, would you really end up with HTML5?

Well actually, I reckon yes. Much to my parents' latent terror (I didn't tell them until they came back from holiday), at the age of 15 a friend and myself built a small blast furnace using some ceramic pots, bits of stone lying around and a hoover. I managed to get 50g of what looked like pig iron out of that bugger before it basically fell to bits and set fire to the lawn. That was from about 2kg of ore I found at the bottom of a cliff face next to a beach at Skegness. Was great fun! (flux was limestone from the shed, coke was 3 large bags of barbeque charcoal)

I'm sure that and the rest of the process wasn't beyond people with a higher budget and requirements...

As for plants - it's all knowledge and experience. There is no abstraction. Eat this, don't eat that. I grow quite a few edible plants myself and there is little abstraction.

Cool - I bow before your Eliteness! (pun intended ;-)

Considering the web server takes less than 5% of the execution time in my stack, I'm not bothered and 99.99% of you probably shouldn't be either.

It'd be a better performance improvement to rewrite the stack entirely in C than change the web server and that's just illogical.

Get a Cub monitor though - it's not the same without one!

Semantically speaking, understanding is simply knowing enough to recreate something, preferably with your own aquired skills and knowledge. We're all just fancy parrots wrapped up in monkey bodies.

To be honest, the bedrock abstraction should stop at "what humans can realistically create with their own hands from nothing". You can make your own transistor quite easily and Ebers-Moll provides a nice set of rules to work with.

The quantum physicists and philosophers can remain arguing about technicalities then and let the rest of the world observe, understand and create.

It doesn't get us anything at all other than a fucking huge rabbit hole to stare down every time you do anything. Lets look at a pretty naff case for .Net CLR on x86 for windows workflow:

application -> xaml -> framework -> server -> container -> c# -> cil -> bytecode -> x86 instructions -> microcode.

Now forth on a 68000:

Forth screen -> 68k instructions

To be honest, for what I consider to be life and death stuff, a 10MHz 68000 is good enough (I have one in my TI92 calculator).

Not until the printers can make their own CPUs and complex parts such as threaded rods. That is a long time off.

3d printers are supposedly promoted as printing themselves i.e. as self-replicating. They are not. They print a small fraction of their own non-complex parts.

I was the proud owner of an ARM copro [1] many years ago (I still have the Master it was plugged into) and the first Acorn RISC machine (an A310 with 512k RAM if I remember correctly).

They were and still are extremely powerful and productive machines.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro_expansion_unit#ARM_Ev...

Good for you!

I (the parent of your post) actually have a BBC Master (and the advanced reference manuals) lying around still for precisely that reason. It's quite a handy and very powerful little machine to be honest.

It even runs LISP (AcornSoft LISP).

RAM, separate GPU+core and profit buy the looks.

A complete understanding if you ask me is one which requires no impenetrable "black-box abstractions" to be substituted in the abstraction hierarchy. In the case of a CPU, you would have to have a full gate level understanding of it and an understanding of how the gates operate.

To be honest, the "complete understanding" died way before the original post. It was the moment that they started building computers with integrated circuits inside them (before 1970) and complexity rocketed logarithmically. It died doubly so the moment that electrical engineering and the practical side of computer science diverged into "them" and "us".

If you want to use something which you understand, you will probably need to buy a crate of transistors, resistors and diodes and wirewrap yourself an entire computer from scratch PDP-7 style.

This fact is a warning: We really are building things with too deep abstraction hierarchies causing knowledge to be divided. One day we will never hope to comprehend anything in a lifetime.

It's an awful community (no pun intended). There are some of the worst people on the Internet hiding behind it.

My god I remember that guy from the late 90's. There was an Internet fad around then.

Now I feel old.

At the risk of sounding like a whinging old man, but do we really need 1Gbit to the home at the moment?

If you take the UK as an example, a lot of the country (outside major cities and metropolitan areas) is still stuck on 512kbit. The same is true worldwide with even parts of SA on dialup. Shouldn't we be concentrating on throwing more resources into getting these connections usable rather than feeding crazy large bandwidth to the rich?

As the broadband speeds are controlled pretty much by consumer demand, isn't it better to have more people than an elite few?

On the same subject, I'm sitting here on approximately 12Mbits and I genuinely have no problems with it streaming HD iPlayer and with three computers on it. I don't need any faster and it costs a whopping $20 a month equiv (unmetered consumption).

Also, if you consider the cost of bandwidth and caps thrown on people in Europe, a gig connection would suck up your entire allocation in about 48 seconds...

I didn't eat meat for about 5 years. One day I just bought a quarter pounder with cheese from McDonalds for no particular reason other than I felt crappy after being sick for two weeks.

That was the tastiest thing I'd ever eaten!

At the same time, I don't know why I do eat meat now but I seem to crave/need it and just can't shift that. I don't usually actually like it either ironically (apart from that one quarter pounder above).

Just as an anti-point to the above...

I'm doing some in depth analysis to see if it's a suitable replacement for C#/.Net framework in our current application stack (message oriented CQRS architecture, web front end). We're doing this by rewriting a chunk of the stack in it and seeing where we get to.

At the moment, it's a very good fit. The time to market is an order of magnitude less than .Net framework. The tooling and mindset is cheaper and easier to maintain and we're not having to invent many solutions to problems - they are already apparent (or just not required).

The only trouble so far has been availabiliy of quality persistence libraries for database engines.

I'm not going to write anything up though until v1 is out and I've ported everything to that and tidied it up.

I don't know if it scales up linearly as the codebase grows yet. This is my only real worry.

I've got one of these: http://www.avalontest.com/e-store/media/prod_full/hp_6236b.j...

It's terribly useful.

What you do is read the voltage you want from the device, turn the knob to the voltage you want and plug it in!

It was made in 1977. It works like the day it was bought i.e perfectly. I don't imagine a cheapy switch mode supply making it to 35 years old.

With regards to the "sweet DC juice" - it'll be full of noise if it's a switch mode supply. They're horrible devices that cause all sorts of local RF interference, noise and transients on the mains. Sometimes more than chucking an inductive load like a hoover on the line.

The only positive things is that they are small and cheap. They are definitely not good.

Also a switch mode supply does have a transformer! Just a small one.

Indeed - but that is the nature of the Internet. There should always be a counterpoint to a good view.

You've obviously know very little about the motivation of Go then...

And you are a sanctimonious twat.

These are pretty much the reason that Go exists.

My father tells me of such stories of the Autobahn. Usually terminated with much pant-shitting by three Trabants trying to overtake each other...

Upvoted. Spot on. It's nowhere near as dynamic as a basic dynamic language. So much so that I just don't bother with dynamic in C# (I also don't bother with nullable types and a load of other features as well but that's another story).

However, I don't find that a problem. I tend to prefer the correctness of statically typed languages these days.