Posts by Charlie Clark

Re: Pravada

Are you quite sure?

He probably is but he'd still be wrong: Pravda is the usual transliteration and was the name of the official newspaper of the Communist Party.

I think this might be the case in France where IT is centrally coordinated. But won't work in Germany where it's each council for itself.

There was work done back in 2003 to justify the initial switch and there was the hope that "if you install Linux the developers will come". Didn't happen so time to pull the plug. Now, if they'd started by simply moving to OpenOffice and sponsoring that and other projects things might have worked out differently. MS doesn't make a lot out of selling the OS, it's Office that makes the money.

Microsoft's Germany subsidiary happens to be registered in Munich.

Re: Database Normalisation Warning

So, no unfortunately loose and unshielded electrical cabling? Or unreliable light switches? Pzzzt!

Re: Are we surprised?

I'm not sure the UK has particularly more CCTV cameras than anywhere else.

Compared with other European countries it certainly does. CCTV schemes are always sold as crime prevention schemes because this is popular. They are at best aids to crime solving. But usually they serve as excuses for lower head counts in police forces and invasions of privacy.

I completely agree. I quite like Python, but don't understand why it doesn't insist that variables are explicitly declared.

Because it has strong and dynamic typing. This was a design decision related to Python's target audience of non-programmers. As a consequence there is a strong preference for descriptive variable names. Static typing is still considered relevant only for compiler optimisations.

Re: Edinburgh Uni and Standard ML

And I read "Markup Language" every time I see ML. It's usually best to avoid these abbreviations wherever there is a chance for ambiguity. But journalism 101 says in any case that you should define the abbreviation at the first use in a text. Sub-ed should have picked this up.

Automatically creating a local variable when I have forgotten to specify that as 'global' or have typed a variable name wrongly has driven me nuts using Python.

Sounds like your problems are more than with Python. global does exist but you will never need it. Like exec and eval it's there for a reason but the overwhelming majority of Python code will never need it.

Whitespace or braces is personal preference but in team work whitespace is much easier to enforce.

At a programming level Python can be criticised for dynamic typing, memory use, the global interpreter lock, speed but for any of the random inconsistencies that Javascript throws up.

Re: To be fair (?!) ...

So you're saying that unencrypted files of user data on corporate laptops is OK?

No, he didn't say that.

Re: Personalities

The OpenBSD community is an amazing clash of egos.

Possibly, but at least you don't have to worry about that when you read the licence.

Re: Impressive

The cost of fossil fuels will need to treble at least before that happens, or some process to be invented or discovered that makes the production much more efficient.

In some situations it's possible to imagine closed loop systems that produce CH4 from excess power and use it as storage instead of batteries. In this case it's competing with the inefficiency of the battery charge / discharge cycle. But it has to be closed loop to prevent arbitrage or downright illegal profiteering.

Re: Interesting

I dont know why they cant electrify the bigger roads - just put wires overhead , Tram Style , for cars and trucks to attach to.

Imagine the cost! And a maintenance nightmare. What is already being trialled is induction charging for buses and taxis.

Re: Impressive

Petrol or LPG are great ways of storing energy. If we ever get a way of making them from renewable power, water and air (CO2) that is cheaper than digging them out of the ground then we solve a lot of the problems associated with batteries.

Electric vehicles are currently popular because they are effectively subsidised by not having fuel duty.

Re: Interesting

The obvious solution is to make batteries easily swappable.

Not really. Electricity itself is far more fungible than battery packs. Not only do you have to devise simple, safe and quick ways of doing the swap, you're going to have non-trivial infrastructure for charging and storing them – protected from theft – and probably the need to ship them around. I think the company that wanted to do this for cars folded, but I could be mistaken. Much easier to build charging points even with dedicated MW lines.

@Voland don't forget the tyres.

Re: Interesting

Who needs drivers for these things? Sounds like they'll be limited to plugging and unplugging at charging stations.

What's the load of these standard units?

Re: re Charities

Most charities are, in effect, businesses. They employ professional fundraisers, own shops, etc. Altogether this already leads to a fairly hefty market distortions. The exemptions should either go or the definition should be tightened up and more effectively enforced.

Sounds like some kind of Nervana to me...

From Wikipedaia: the Sunway TaihuLight uses a total of 40,960 Chinese-designed SW26010 manycore 64-bit RISC processors based on the Sunway architecture. ARM and RISC give customers options they didn't have a few years ago. Even Intel has started making noises about custom silicon and FPGAs…

PS. I think you mean Nirvana…