deeringc

I think you should run your QT app inside Electron!

The author was comparing REST to json-rpc. Nowhere in the article does he propose that people use SOA or CORBA.

Ireland is a net contributor to the EU budget.

What makes this really nice is that the variable is also still in scope in the corresponding else block.

Right, but 26 Billion! Something doesn't add up.

I also think that sites like reddit and hackernews have taken a part of the role that a portal once provided. Content that is crowd-sourced seems to be better received than what a single company can push in a curated list.

I don't see many valid reasons why you wouldn't want to use RAII patterns for any sort of resource management. I would go as far as saying that if you aren't doing so, you're probably doing it wrong. Having said that, I'd be genuinely interested to hear some resource managment sceanrios where you're better off not using RAII.

I also use it a lot and find it very useful. Most of the time it's spot on, however one time I was searching for a compiler error code at work and the next day Now had started tracking flight information for some flight that happened to have the same flight code as the compiler error. :)

I'm not sure a webkit monoculture is good for the web in the long run. Having multiple browser engines compete is a really positive thing, as long as they are all going for standards compliance. Thankfully, even Microsoft have made huge moves in the right direction on that front.

Last week I searched google for more information about a specific compiler error code. Later that day google now showed me flight info for some flight that happened to have the same code.

The flip side of this is that it becomes impossible for someone to prove that they haven't got an encrypted volume stored somewhere. It will be interesting to see in which way the courts go with this.

It seems to me that "one process per window" would make it very difficult to implement dragging tabs between windows, and out into their own window.

I guess maybe by mixing different medications that each individually contain high levels of paracetamol? A lot of different over-the-counter medications contain it and if you took 3 separate meds you could quickly end up in that situation.

What were the considerations which led to this design? Why not just stick with XML inside an XMPP extension directly?

> Again do we need all of those systems?

Yes. Like I've said above the explicit purpose of this mission is to gather advanced scientific data which requires comparatively bulky instruments and high power availability. Because it is so ridiculously expensive to get anything to Mars you want it to last as long as possible. "Disposable drones" make absolutely no sense when it costs so much to launch them into orbit, transport them 60 million km across the solar system, and then enter the Martian atmosphere and land in a coordinated place on the surface. Each gram you get to that point costs many thousand dollars. You don't just plan your strategy around losing a bunch of them - that would be many hundreds of millions of dollars down the drain.

Using a decaying nuclear isotope to power your probe you will get many multiples more bang for buck compared to solar powered probes which so far have maxed out at about 5 years. The solar concentration of a Martian winter is extremely low, and this problem is exasperated the smaller the probe and the resulting battery that it can carry.

Just like in computing and electronics, physical and mechanical distributed systems are inherently complex - more so than monolithic systems.

What you might "gain" in reduced complexity by getting rid of the arm you loose massively in being able to power the whole system efficiently in one go. If you split the 10.6 pounds of plutonium across N smaller drones you would need to duplicate N Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators (RTPs), power electronics, batteries, radios, cameras, computers and probably a half a dozen other things I haven't thought of yet. This probe is going to be going for at very least 10 years - probably quite a lot longer, all because of the design choices around how it's powered.

I agree, especially because many of the reasons for the older, less cutting edge technology used in space boil down to high levels of radiation. Building a small 2kg probe, launching via a weather balloon and then exploring a desert on earth would certainly be hugely educational (not to mention fun) but the constraints would be very different to those on a Mars mission and so the end result would look VERY different.

Well, surely for a certain type of scientific mission (e.g. something like spectral analysis via ChemCam) you cannot just shrink down the components and instruments indefinitely. The size of Curiosity is directly related to the fact that it is bristling with scientific instruments like no other probe before it. Sure you could make a swarm of toaster sized drones that just go off and cover ground, but the purpose of this mission is not just to take some pictures but to do some very detailed scientific analysis.

Yikes - sounds very similar to trying to deploy Java desktop apps. Not a pleasant experience. Why don't they just bake the AIR runtime into the original download? Sure it would be bigger and you'd end up with duplicate copies, but almost anything is better than trying to get end users to download runtimes.