Posts by jzl

Re: Wait. what?

I'm 46, so hardly young, and Java was invented while I was still at university.

Re: "In IT" != software development

I started off on £18k in London back in the day myself. My comment was about starting salaries now.

Re: Can confirm

Why "Oh poor me"?

Did you think I was *complaining*?

I'm not complaining. I'm extremely happy about my personal situation. I'm just pointing out that if you want to hire decent senior developers, you have to pony up. You may like it, you may not like it, but the market decides.

"In IT" != software development

This is the point the writer was making. There are a wide range of careers in IT, as there are in many other fields.

A software engineer would expect to *start* their career on at least £40k these days and ramp up quickly from there.

Re: There's no such thing as a workstation

There is still a continuous spectrum, even for these criteria. There is no magical spec which suddenly makes a computer a workstation.

"Workstation" is defined by context, so a computer can be a workstation in one context, but not if transplanted to another.

Which is what I was pointing out. The idea that a company can say "this is the smallest / biggest / cheapest / quietest / whatever workstation" is meaningless. The word is defined by the context that the machine is being used in, rather than being an intrinsic property of the machine itself.

As to your comment about certifications, well it's certainly *possible* to get a computer certified to various standards, but there's no indication that the machine in this article has any of those certifications and I've never seen anyone say that certification is a requirement to call a computer a workstation on a sales website.

The term "workstation" is so broad and so ill-defined as to be meaningless.

The various qualifications that you're talking about, well they're not meaningless, but they're not the word "workstation" are they?

Re: There's no such thing as a workstation

Indeed. Not to mention that people almost always emphasise the wrong parts when specifying computers in the first place.

The number of times I've seen someone worrying about whether their machine has an "i5" or "i7" processor, without even thinking about how much RAM it has....

Re: There's no such thing as a workstation

And powerful as it was for a mid-80's machine, it is still comfortably outclassed in every performance metric by a 2021 smartwatch. This is kind of my point really. That Sun 3/60 isn't a workstation now - it's just an old, slow vintage computer with some collector value.

If "workstation" was a meaningful label, it would be intrinsic to the hardware. A workstation would be as much a workstation twenty years after being made as it was when it was new.

Yes, and Teslas have that tech. A Tesla will complain if someone is sat in a seat without a seatbelt, same as most other cars.

Misunderstanding

Autopilot doesn't require white lines to operate. If they disappear while it's engaged, it works perfectly well.

It just requires white lines to be present in order for the driver to be allowed by the car to engage it.

Source: me. I own a Tesla.

Yes, fossil fuel is indeed consumed. But less.

The perfect is the enemy of the good.

Re: Diesel

Emissions aren't a single thing. Diesel produces less carbon dioxide - the main climate change gas - but more pollution nasties.

Diesel exhaust is nasty stuff in the short term, particularly if you're breathing it. Carbon dioxide is nasty stuff in the long term.

Basically, burning oil products is a bad idea full stop.

Except that volcanoes don't actually produce as much carbon as mankind. Not even close.

We burn relatively little fossil fuel in the UK for the grid. About 50% generally - most of it natural gas, almost no coal.

Re: Whisper it…

My wife and I actually own a Tesla Model S in real life. It's been our only car for two years now. That makes me relatively well qualified to comment on it.

Much of what you say is true, but I dispute - deeply - the assertion that it's not a very good car.

Have you actually driven one? For more than just a spin round the block? They are incredibly satisfying to drive in a quite difficult to define, but utterly real way. There's something about the immediacy of the power - the total and utter lack of any sort of lag - that makes every other vehicle feel a bit wrong. It's not the steering - a Model S has steering which is firmly in the middle of the pack in terms of feel and weighting. It's the powertrain. It really is qualitatively different and in a very pervasive way.

Powerful electric cars are like that, it seems. The Jaguar I-Pace (I've driven one) is similarly satisfying. But there really isn't much competition - it's basically the I-Pace or bust at the moment if you want to actually buy something.

They don't have the best quality interior for the price, but they're improving significantly. The Model S in particular has improved substantially in the last two months or so since they did a mild interior refresh and replaced all the cheap looking chrome and plastic with graphite and much higher quality materials. A late 2018 Model S is rather different beast to even a late 2017 Model S, or heaven forbid one of the early cars.

My Tesla is - by far - the best car I have ever owned. Not just because it's a gadget, but because it's such an impressively rewarding vehicle to drive. It's comfortable, spacious, fast as hell and almost telepathic at the throttle.

Re: Eight times brighter than the Moon?

Not that I disagree with you in principle about the scale of this thing, it's worth pointing out that the moon is not very reflective. It has an albedo of around 10-15%. A mirror would be closer to 100%.

Re: Can someone explain

Graph means a set of items of data (nodes) connected by pointers (edges). In this case, the nodes are probably functions which transform tensors (multi-dimensional arrays of numbers).

Graph (abstract data type)