venus

The Australian government is technologically illiterate and will do no such thing. If we're to have any real competition between countries to improve their governance, entrepreneurs have to vote with their feet and actually move to the countries with the best policies. Only then, when governments realise that they're missing out on tax revenue, will they be motivated to change for the better.

Point taken. However, like I said above, I know a few startups who use python, and the only Windows boxes there are for IE testing. Certainly no-one deploys on it. Academic computing seems to be a different world, though.

Yeah, they say that every couple of years (eg IronRuby) - it never seems to amount to anything. As with anything MS says, I'll believe it when I see it.

Well, fair enough then, I take that back. Nonetheless, I know a few python web programmers, and zero of them use windows. I imagine that libraries would be a big issue too, not to mention the native lack of simple things like a proper command line, ssh, all the normal tools. Sure, you might be able to make it all kind-of work, but it's harder than it should be and decidedly outside of the mainstream.

Couldn't really comment on academic computing. I suppose, though, they are not really relying on the larger ecosystem as much as (say) web applications, so would not be affected so badly by the libraries issue.

I'd say Windows has been a second class citizen for a long time for any of the unix-centric open source languages. Ruby, Python, even node - you're fighting an uphill battle trying to do anything on Windows.

I'm sort of amazed they've made it run at all, the systems are so different. I'd advise anyone trying to run any of these systems on Windows to use a linux VM.

You're thinking of the intel system:

http://iq.intel.com/future-headlight-technology-could-make-r...

BMW does have an interesting new headlight system available on the coming i8 which boosts the high beam range using lasers, which is still pretty cool but doesn't avoid rain.

It's not just high, it's ludicrously high. Over the easter weekend in my city, extensive random breath testing of almost 60,000 people caught 58 driving above 0.05 - still too high but orders of magnitude less than the GP's assertion.

One in 10^4 would be (much) more accurate.

Source: http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/breaking-news/nsw-poli...

This is an excessively cynical, misanthropic view of events. I know a lot of people who could be described as "long bitcoin" and while there's no doubt a few opportunistic types, most are genuinely excited and actively involved in something they truly believe in.

Your bitter prognostications about "young white libertarians" says more about you than anything else, IMO. And invoking the dot com bubble doesn't help your point - the internet was, indeed, the next big thing, but the bubble was misinformed and 10 years too early. Long term, though, "dot com" was and is real, and many are hoping and working towards cryptocurrencies travelling the same path.

The Malaysian transport minister has just denied this article's accuracy at a press conference in KL.

Which is interesting. The WSJ isn't just some random blog. I wonder where they got their information.

Didn't they lose about BTC700,000? Ie, about USD$400M? Which would suggest that neither of those numbers are anywhere near right.

Hey, what's a few orders of magnitude between friends?

Yep.

To me seeing "requires WebGL" indicates that some sort of check has been carried out and the current browser has failed. Not really good as a loading message, IMO...

Well what's stopping you? Stop regretting and pick up a book!

I don't have much love for C# but if your fundamentals are sound you won't have too much difficulty picking up a new language. 6 months ago I wouldn't have known an NSMutableArray from a bar of soap, a couple of books and some elbow grease later and I'm beta testing my first iOS app for the app store (with a ruby backend : D). And I am far from one of those "polyglot" hyper programming geniuses.

Stop regretting, start working, and keep going. This time next year you'll have another arrow for your bow. It's not rocket science, believe me.

Fantastic. This release has all the fixes I'd been waiting on before going to production; I'll be deploying this week. Great work ruby-core and thank you as always. Twenty-one years, wow, time flies!

Yeah, I realised after typing it that there's probably a huge amount of availability bias in my statement. It wouldn't surprise me if Wordpress MySQL deploys outnumber all rails/django postgres deploys combined. And the PHP mainstream isn't moving away anytime soon.

MongoDB, though - I do question that, however I have no figures and it again probably depends on the circles in which you move whether you see a lot of it or not. I don't move in node circles much, so I hardly see it at all.

Mea culpa. That said, in the startup-filled tech incubator in which I work, and in which rails is pretty dominant, postgres is king. Make of that what you will.

I am kind of amazed that that works. What's going on - does the baseband have its own IP stack, which it somehow shares to the computer, which then declares its own mini-lan and lets the iPhone on at a higher level such that iOS uses that preferentially?

That's bizarre; I'm tempted to try it out when I get back to a country in which I have mobile data.

"More happening in this iPhone, I feel, than has been revealed"

I suppose my main experience is with rails people, and as of rails 4 postgres is pretty clearly the "default" DB, emphatically displacing MySQL.

The author appears to come from much more of a node.js angle and so probably what he sees is different. I'm probably underestimating the number of node.js projects so the author likely has a good point. Still, I'd raise an eyebrow pretty highly at anyone who considered MongoDB a solid default choice for a general purpose application. Most companies I know who opted for MongoDB regret it, for reasons that have been rehashed here any number of times.

> Postgres has never been popular. [..] MongoDB is replacing MySQL not Postgres

I don't know what you are basing that on, but it's the complete opposite of what I am seeing. Postgres is now the default open source database as far as I can see, especially for Rails. MongoDB enjoyed a brief hype-fuelled day in the sun but is now viewed as a specialised tool whose choice over a more general RDBMS would require considerable justification.

I suspect the question of whether its popularity is "exploding" or not depends on your definition of the word. I have certainly noticed a very marked uptick in the last few years. Not exploding perhaps, but certainly ballooning.

That is really sad news.

Jim Weirich was a real gem. Friendly, approachable and chatty, he didn't have that aloofness so unfortunately common to some "personalities" in the ruby commmunity. In the last couple of years he had been interested in controlling drones with ruby, regularly posting articles on the Neo blog and speaking about it at conferences. It was my great pleasure to spend an hour or so with him in Singapore last year just chatting about drones, his argus control library, and applications present and future - he was a genuinely interested, interesting, friendly man with a fantastic, giving spirit.

He was one of the founding fathers of what I like to think of as the "real" ruby community and will be sorely missed.

Very telling that you felt the need to create a new account to make these idiotic comments - you're obviously unwilling to have your real account associated with them.

So even you know you're talking shit. Knock it off, why don't you?

If those projects have prospered enough that rewriting in a high-performance language has become a necessity, then I would say Rails fulfilled its function brilliantly.

Rails is a good, probably the best, general purpose web framework, and no-one claims otherwise.

I wonder what percentage of android users even uses SD cards?

My guess: pretty small.

Here is the study: http://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/early/2013/03/05/tobac...

Here is a (rather editorialised) summary: http://tobaccoanalysis.blogspot.com.au/2013/03/new-study-of-...

The study found variations up to 20x in levels of formaldehyde contained in the vapour produced by some top e-cigarette products. At the low range, the levels are of little concern and barely above background. At the high range, they are of some concern. Unfortunately brands, etc are not broken down.

I have a strong suspicion that formaldehyde levels correlate with country of origin and/or quality of the liquids involved. If you stick to using PG sourced from countries with reliable certification systems I think it is OK.

> the health effects of flavorings are still out there

This is very true. I have been very concerned with "vapers" I know buying cheap juices from China - to me this is rolling the dice, almost as bad as smoking!

You will find that reputable juice mixers will generally make statements about their ingredients. My usual favourite (indigo vapours - I have no commercial interest, just a customer) for example explicitly state that they do not use any flavour containing diacetyl, acetyl propionyl or acetoin.

Flavours which may contain aldehyde elements are a concern, but what is much more my concern with e-cigs is the long-term effect of propolene glycol inhalation, and potentially significant formaldehyde levels potentially produced by the heating and/or oxidation of the base liquids. There's a decent amount of research ongoing in these areas.

Despite these issues I am reasonably confident that e-cigarettes are within a safety range I am comfortable with if (and only if) used with high-quality liquids.

> the useless and stupid quest for "ease of use,"

> a very clearly function-follows-form company

Your opinions about Apple are, to put it mildly, non-mainstream. I am a frigging software engineer, perfectly able to handle complexity, and I prefer Apple products precisely due to that "useless, stupid" ease of use. I also question that "function follows form" is their design ethos, but even if it is, the result is still better than anyone else's.

And that's the stupidest "yo dawg" I've ever seen. If there's anything that's too easy to use, it's online meme generator tools.

I know what you're saying, and a lot of the time it's true, but it's not like all or even most people would put a monetary value on every single second of their time. Hell, a few weeks ago I started building a model plane - the time I've put into the project runs well into the thousands of dollars by now, but that wasn't the point of the project.

I remember a post here some time ago claiming that startup CEOs should value their time at $1000/hr, to force themselves to always make best use of their time. I can see how that works in context, but it doesn't mean said CEO shouldn't take a couple of hours off to watch a movie, thinking its true cost is $2000+. That way lies madness.

We can't all work all the time. It's fine to burn a few hours learning something new and just having fun, and it sounds like that's exactly what this woman did.

"Leverage is the only way a smart guy can go broke." - Warren Buffett

Hadn't thought of that. Even if so, I'd say they still failed - the car doesn't look like an old film, it looks like crappy CGI, with a lazy "blur shadow" underneath and wooden-doll driver.

> All the claims about Iceland doing things differently are useless

I don't understand your comment. What Iceland did - allow its banks to default on their debts - is completely different from what eg. Ireland did, ie. nationalise the debt.

That it then nationalised the bankrupt banks is a different matter. It nationalised them, sure, after they defaulted on the debt.

Geeze, that's some truly awful CGI in the first section of that video. You can tell the director is well aware, too, cutting away at every opportunity - quite a contrast to the loving treatment the camera later gives the 918.

You'd think Porsche, of all companies, would spend a little more and get something that looks the part.