Peter Sutton is an anthropologist and linguist (>50 years); Keryn Walshe is an archaeologist (>35 years). Peter Sutton in particular has spent large amounts of time living with indigenous people in the far north. Their book describes many deficiencies in Dark Emu, and also gives a huge amount of interesting information about how aboriginal people lived, and the way they curated the land and the food resources available to them.

https://www.amazon.com/Farmers-Hunter-gatherers-Dark-Emu-Deb...

But also: something changed in the 16th century: do you contend that the monarchs suddenly got uglier to the point that artists didn't want to paint them anymore?

Compare to Germany: weeks behind SK but already more than three times as many cases, new case rate in the last few days of 2500-4500 (SK's max: 851), daily deaths in the last few days 10-29 and heading north. Actually the death rate must reflect an amazing health care system given 30k cases, but it's early days for Germany. Their pipeline is very full, agreed I wouldn't want to make a prediction there.

EDIT: sensitivity.

The Nullarbor is a vast, arid, unpopulated plain over 1000km wide. I think the comment was meant to suggest that infrastructure projects like this are challenging in Australia, because the distances involved make them expensive, but the low population density makes them much less profitable than in places like the US and Europe with high population densities.

Many tourists from other parts of the world come to Australia thinking they can "just drive" from Melbourne to Cairns or Perth to Adelaide, not realizing how much of an undertaking that is because they don't have a good sense of the distances involved.

Wouldn't this also have been considered as part of the decision to ban Huawei? And yet the administration proceeded anyway.

Something that might be worth noting: two minutes of googling didn't turn up the author's age, but I recall seeing this photo on his website when I bought it some time after it was published in 2008: https://hcsw.org/contact.php

Here's a more up-to-date photo: https://hoytech.com/about

It's possible he was quite young when it was published. If that's the case, then I think the book is all the more a towering achievement. It's abrasive, and it smells a bit of 2000s forum fanboy discussions, but mature people should be able to read past the more opinionated parts and find the gems in the technical treatment.

The telecom bubble and crash was almost a side-effect. The telco executives saw the web taking off and used it to justify wildly over-inflated projections of traffic demand growth, and then began building out debt-financed networks to meet it. When the traffic didn't materialize (partly because the dotcom bubble burst), they had a bunch of overcapacity not generating revenue to service the debt that financed it, and that killed them.

Many embedded programmers come from a background that doesn't expose them to those sorts of ideas though.

I haven't had the time to learn it yet, though I would like to.

Contrast that to Haskell's ghci interpreter, which is slower (last time I checked) than the same code built on the command line with ghc, the compiler. But I would still consider Haskell a compiled language, not an interpreted one, since you never run code in production under ghci, you always ship your binaries.

I suppose it's about perception. To me "interpreter" refers to a language implementation strategy. It's fuzzy, I know, since there is some continuum between interpreting an AST directly, compiling the AST to bytecode and running the bytecode on a VM, JIT compiling the bytecode to machine code on the fly, and compiling offline direct to machine code (like C/Go/Rust). To some ears, "interpreted" can sound synonymous with "slow", which is I guess what prompted my comment.

Finally, to me the place where you can enter expressions to try out your program interactively is the REPL, not the interpreter.

Anyway, thanks for explaining your position to me. (Also, good to know Python dev environments have improved, but I guess it's to be expected, 10 years is a long time :-) .)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKbdE5LOGNQ

I've also noticed that reading in the office attracts strange looks sometimes. I don't know what to do about that. Reading research papers and text books related to what one is working on should be encouraged in a knowledge profession, yet I almost never see colleagues doing it. I guess if your hands aren't on the keyboard those JIRA tickets won't get closed.

I also got my start on pre-GUI computers (a VIC-20, specifically).