I find it immensely helpful to work on the assumption that I am too stupid to get things right. This leads me to conservatively use what has already been shown to work, to cautiously test out new ideas before committing to them, and above all to prize simplicity.
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I wrote an article for New Geography related to the second point last spring. The role played by housing regulations in the housing bubble is one of the most under-reported and under-analyzed factors contributing to the 2008 financial crisis, and nowhere was its destructive force more evident than in California. Regulators lathered on rule after rule to construction requirements, escalating costs so dramatically that lenders had to design “exotic” mortgages so even relatively affluent people could afford homes. One of Texas’s attractions, meanwhile, was the opportunity of much more affordable homeownership.
This is actually the first of a series of posts on the theme of contrasts between Texas and California.
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The world has found me out. It has discovered my burrow beneath the tool shed, the half-finished lifeboat cannibalized from the viscera of dead helicopters. The world is busy destroying my means of escape. Then it will come back for me.
An awesome story, by way of a link from John Scalzi’s blog.
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The future of computing is its own past, mashed-up and remixed by young’uns who have yet to fear the dark corners, the places where us old farts went in with similar bushy-tailed attitudes and came out with ashen-faced, eyes barn-door wide and with fifty new words for “pucker.” Heed us.
Why was I not informed about this blog?
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Our custom TruePower power outlet solution includes two Universal Serial Bus (USB) charge ports in addition to the two standard three prong power outlet ports.
From the “Why didn’t I think of that” file…
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For this reason, anycast is generally used as a way to provide high availability and load balancing for stateless services such as access to replicated data; for example, DNS service is a distributed service over multiple geographically dispersed servers.
One of many things I need to learn more about one of these days is Internet infrastructure. For some reason, I’d never heard of ‘Anycast’ until today, as I was reading up on how Google’s new DNS service would work. Interesting stuff in there too about using Anycast as part of the transititon to IPv6.
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Whether you’re a student, teacher, or parent, I think you’ll
appreciate this story of how one teacher can completely and
permanently change someone’s life in only a few lessons.
At last, here’s the droid we were all looking for. In this frame you can clearly see R2-D2’s cameo in JJ Abrams’ Star Trek. This time there’s absolutely no doubt about it: It’s been confirmed by ILM.
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I’m glad to see this; there has been too little innovation on the system programming language front. I do like C, though I’ve become more conscious of its faults since I learned it (*mumble*) years ago.
I’m a little disappointed that Google didn’t throw its weight behind the other major contender in this category, The D Programming Language. They have to have considered it; I wonder if their decision not to use it involved technical considerations, licensing considerations, or a little of both.
The write-up on TechCrunch is light on technical details, and the comments are hilariously clueless: paranoiacs spluttering that Google is taking over the world, people who’ve never written a line of code in their lives declaring it an instant failure, and Johnny One-Note programmers insisting that this will never take the place of PHP, or C#, or JavaScript, or whatever their One True Language is, shrieking with terror at the thought of learning something new.
For myself, I like what I’ve read so far about Go. It looks not much more complex than C (and waaaay less complex than C++), with a more modern, more streamlined feel. I like the idea of trying to head off the formatting wars by including a canonical pretty-printer in the core tool set (though I wish they had standardized on spaces instead of tabs for indentation). Requiring braces around blocks is good: it heads off a common error in C/C++ coding, and there shouldn’t be any ‘friction’ in changing a one-line block into a multi-line block. I liked structural equivalence of types when I first encountered it in Modula-3, and the Go concept of interfaces is nicely reminiscent of that. I don’t miss the whole object oriented feature list (encapsulation, polymorphism, inheritance, and dynamic binding), so long as modularity and information hiding are supported. And garbage collection is a huge win, so long as it can be done efficiently and without causing the program to stutter.
All in all, very interesting, and a worthy challenger to D as a 21st-century systems programming language.
