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my current major language (Igor pro) will use all the cores automatically, and how many languages do multithread this way? Matlab(?), Octave(?)

LabVIEW, by its very nature [which is graphical - based on "G" - the "Graphical" programming language] is kinda/sorta topologically self-threading: If a piece of LabVIEW code sits off in its own connected component, then [more or less] it gets its own thread.

Of course, all your ".h" & ".c" [or ".cc"] files [& their innards] might very well break down into little distinct connected components which are ripe for running their own threads, it's just that you can't - unless you're some sort of a super genius - you can't readily visualize all those connected components as they exist in your code.

Now you and your colleagues could try to anticipate the connected components a priori, during the "planning" phase: You could draw huge pictures on the dry-erase board, and everyone could yell and scream at each other about the topological structure which the code should ultimately embody, and then everyone would have to promise - Scout's Honor! - that they would stick to the blueprint [which they might very well resent as having been shoved down their throats by some pointed-headed suit who didn't have any clue what he was talking about] - but the beauty of LabVIEW is that THE CODE IS THE BLUEPRINT [which I think is a point that Jack Reeves used to make].

There's actually a Slashdotter, MOBE2001, who maintains a blog called Rebel Science News, who's got some pretty interesting ideas here - he seems to be leaning towards a graphical approach to this [realizing that the fundamental nature of the problem tends to be topological, rather than anything which we (YET!) would recognize as semantic], but his program is very, very ambitious [if I had a couple of spare lifetimes, I must just throw one in that general direction].

Another line of thought which everyone should keep an eye on is the discipline of Petri nets - it's kinduva big graphical/topological approach to state machines, which [if someone were to put the necessary elbow grease into it] might prove to be very useful in squeezing the most bang for the buck out of these massively-multicore CPU's.

Threads are the second worse thing to have happened to computing, in my opinion. They make the problem worse. Ask Intel and Microsoft. They've been trying to make threads works for years and they've spent a lot of money on it. They have nothing interesting to show for their effort. What's amazing to me is that we've had the answer to parallel programming with us all along. We are just blind to it, for whatever psycho-social reason. We've been using it to parallelize processes in such applications as cellular automata, simulations, neural networks for decades. And without using threads, mind you. We just need to apply the same principle at the instruction level and design development tools and special multicore CPUs to support the model. Read Half a Century of Crappy Computing to find out more.

The reason that parallel programming is so hard is that we're still using the same computing model that English mathematician Charles Babbage pioneered 150 years ago. It's time to change. To understand the problem, read, Parallel Programming, Math, and the Curse of the Algorithm.

E.g. here's one flash-v-h264 cpu-usage comparison which contradicts the claim that H.264 uses more CPU - not exactly lab conditions though, so pinches of salt are still needed.

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Unfortunately it gets taken advantage of every once in awhile by scum who are trying to profit from the work of others. I like to call this backspaceware.

I'd say, follow their story and see what they do... http://4chanstatus.blogspot.com/

This post is both in the state of being the first and not the first post until I hit the submit button and decide the outcome by refreshing the page. That's quantum computing.

Yeah. That's quantum computing alright, 100% bullshit. Now you idiots can mod me down as a troll but it's still bullshit. ahahaha...

why is it so very gorrammed hard to follow the method used in india (http://techaos.blogspot.com/2004/05/indian-evm-compared-with-diebold.html)? is that so very difficult?

i think it's pretty clear that american manufacturers of e-voting devices are either unforgiveably incompetent or deliberately introducing devices with obvious non-security. i'm not sure which prospect i find more troubling, but to be honest, what i find even more troubling is the fact that the media largely appears to be ignoring the matter.

ed

The chart in this blog is brilliant: http://i-r-squared.blogspot.com/2006/04/fuel-efficiency-and-lessons-from.html

It is possible - and I think Walt Brown may have it right on this one - that Saturn's rings are from the Earth - believe it or not, I know it sounds crazy - let me explain. He says when the fountains of the deep broke open - Genesis Chapter 7 - the pressure of 10 or 15 miles of rock [...] the pressure 10 or 15 miles down is phenomenal [...] So if there was water in the crust of the Earth like the Bible says there was [...] then this water would come shooting up to the surface when the "fountains of the deep" broke open and the Earth busted up like an eggshell. That water shooting up would have enough pressure - according to Walt Brown - to eject things into space. They would drift around for awhile - who knows for a couple of hundred years - and run into something like Saturn and make the rings.
Truth Radio 6 June 2006 @ 26:30 (Tape 2)

Check out Tom Smith's wonderful song "Pygmalion 2.0" for a humorous and insightful look at humans, droids, sex and love. http://filkertom-itom.blogspot.com/2007/03/033-pygmalion-20.html People fall in love with their cars, boats, and computers all the time. Why would you expect them not to fall in love with a human-looking device which makes them feel fantastic?

Best of all about this is that it demonstrates once again that UNmanned spaceflight has just as many technology spin-offs as the manned variety... and if you get 5$% of the results for 1% of the outlay and almost infinitely less risk to human life, there's just no point sending humans.

Yeah. Quantum computing is both crackpottery and a fraud. Any technology that is based on the idea that a cat can be both alive and dead simultaneously is obviously voodoo science. Those QC fraudsters, especially that Oxford crackpot, David Deutsch (of zillions of parallel universes fame), don't even know why nature is probabilistic and yet they feel free to postulate all sorts of voodoo crap. As Feyrabend once said, "The most stupid procedures and the most laughable results in their domain are surrounded with an aura of excellence". Laughable indeed. ahahaha...

I never heard of this L.O.S.T. thing so I looked it up. Only article I really found was this: http://itssd.blogspot.com/2007/12/lost-at-sea.html

He seems mad for other reasons. Please elaborate?

Some of the issues raised in this are things I have blogged about, here and more recently here.

Modern television is by many to be considered solely a form of entertainment -- a mechanism for television channels to deliver their true product to customers, i.e., consumer attention for advertisers. I feel however that it has a different meaning, where we can use the TV shows that someone professes to enjoy as a kind of Socratic mirror, in which is reflected the true intentions, ideals, likes and fears of the viewer.

So, what are we to make of the current plethora of television shows which grace our TV screens (or Bit Torrent trackers?) Can we learn something about our Western culture (I am confining myself to the current "Rex Artis" or cultural hegemony of the USA and its satellites in Australia, UK, New Zealand and even Canada) by identifying the themes which rise to the surface?

Some of the issues raised in this are things I have blogged about, here and more recently here.

Modern television is by many to be considered solely a form of entertainment -- a mechanism for television channels to deliver their true product to customers, i.e., consumer attention for advertisers. I feel however that it has a different meaning, where we can use the TV shows that someone professes to enjoy as a kind of Socratic mirror, in which is reflected the true intentions, ideals, likes and fears of the viewer.

So, what are we to make of the current plethora of television shows which grace our TV screens (or Bit Torrent trackers?) Can we learn something about our Western culture (I am confining myself to the current "Rex Artis" or cultural hegemony of the USA and its satellites in Australia, UK, New Zealand and even Canada) by identifying the themes which rise to the surface?

I'm sorry, but just adding up the memory usage columns from something like 'top' is a horrible way to measure actual memory usage. Why? Well, shared libraries is one big reason. Most of those applications are likely to use a similar set of shared libraries, which the operating system only loads once in memory and then uses for all of the applications. However, things like 'top' include the memory usage of those libraries in every application that uses them. Thus, if 'libkdeprint' is 1 MB and is used by 10 KDE programs, the ACTUAL memory usage of that library would be 1 MB, but top would report 10 MB of memory used (1 MB for each app).

This effect is very noticeable with desktop environments like KDE and GNOME, where there are a ton of programs that all use the same set of shared libraries. If you reduced the size of a few very basic libraries (e.g. 'libkdecore') by a sizable amount, then you could show a fake "huge savings" across the ~30 KDE/GNOME apps that were running.

It isn't that I doubt that KDE 4 uses less memory -- it undoubtedly does -- it's just that using overly simplistic methods to measure the difference in usage is misleading and somewhat pointless.

See a longer discussion of the issue at: http://virtualthreads.blogspot.com/2006/02/understanding-memory-usage-on-linux.html

Shutting down is extremely difficult. As you can see at this link the new shutdown process was quite...lengthy. Meetings, redesigns, oy.

Chris Isaak has the answer. (I have no idea whose blog this is, just showed up in GIS and I didn't want to hotlink her image)

On Wednesday 12 December 2007, QuantumG wrote:
> Maybe one day it won't be silly :)

Absolutely. I'm doing some research in the background. Try this:

Litho-history [PDF]
Simple Lithography [blog]
News story, semirelevant

query: lenses circuits wax Intel
result: MY OWN PAGE *argh* (re: analytical instrumentation)
I also get: "Bryan's page on semiconductor manufacturing" which is also,
alas, me. But the page contains just as far as I've been able to get so
far: how to take sand and extract silicon from it, into giant crystals
that you can pull. The next step is to use diamond saws or diamond wire
to cut the silicon crystals into the wafers that you start with. The
diamond wire is very costly: it apparently degrades after a few uses.
So I haven't been able to figure out how to make my own diamond wire
yet. Another option might be to use high-powered lasers to cut the
silicon. Not sure about that one. Then, the next step is to go back
over Wikibooks book re: photolithography and the chemical etching
process, which I also have on my /notes.html file on my website. I need
to flow chart the whole operation soon.

How can we achieve fabbing@home?
- distribute the components across a city, absorb cost
- ship each incremental stage to different members
-- costly packaging, but pricing absorbed by people able to afford each individual component of the stage.

- Bryan

Check out this chic, she gets so much press too for just being in the software industry.

There are other solutions - including ones that keep the current twin-stick controller setup.

I've written a fairly extensive article on this at my blog: http://hansonvideogaming.blogspot.com/2006/10/levelling-playing-field-mice-and.html

In short, if the graph of rotational speed vs stick deflection looked like a U instead of the more common V, twin-stick players could get both the precision and speed that a mouse provides.

Anyone who's played a shooter on a laptop using the "eraser" pointer stick and with mouse acceleration on will have an idea what I'm referring to. I played through Half-Life that way and preferred it to a regular mouse.

Hans

Bush/Cheney did claim that there was an Al Qaeda / Iraq connection and that Iraq had WMD, and that this posed a clear an present danger to the security of the United States. But then when faced with contrary information, e.g., from Joseph Wilson that Iraq was not in fact trying to obtain Uranium from Niger, Bush/Cheney attacked Wilson (by revealing his wife Valerie Plame was a CIA operative), instead of revising their public story.

Al Qaeda did have connections to Iraq, though not strong. The invasion of Iraq was never sold as being because Iraq and Al Qaeda had strong connections, despite what the history revisionists say. At the time of the invasion, Most Dems, Reps, and governments of the world believed Iraq had WMDs. Even Iraqi leadership believed it. Saddam Hussein was perpetrating a fraud on everyone because the belief of him having WMD was almost as good as actually having them. It should also be noted that a grand jury bent on charging the administration concerning the Valerie Plame "revelation" wasn't able to come up with any charges whatsoever except for a single perjury.

Later Bush/Cheney nefariously blamed "intelligence failures" when in fact they knew better than anyone else that there was no credible threat from Iraq. Cheney was encumbered by a conflict of interest because, in classic Washington revolving-door style, he was re-entering politics having just served as CEO of Halliburton who ended up profiting heavily from the Iraq war. This is absolutely relevant!

The CIA itself admitted the intelligence failures. You can't say that they were just covering because they've also been critical of the administration. The intelligence agencies of a lot of other countries also failed as they believed the same thing. As for Cheney's Halliburton connection, It's been shown that Cheney doesn't gain anything from Halliburton and hasn't since he left the company.

Bush, as commander-in-chief, is guilty of Dereliction of Duty by both starting an unnecessary war based on lies, and then grossly incompetently managing that war. The deaths of American service men and women were absolutely avoidable because they war was unnecessary and avoidable. Abusing power, and abusing the trust and dedication of military personnel by getting them killed unnecessarily is absolutely criminal and cannot go unpunished.

There were some obvious mistakes made during the invasion and occupation. Most of those have been corrected. The fact remains that no war of this caliber has had as few American casualties as this one. No war plan is perfect but this one is far from a grossly incompetent mismanagement.

The death of every American serviceperson and Iraqi civilian due to the war in Iraq is an individual charge of manslaughter against Bush.

Uh, yeah. Right.

There should also be criminal repercussions for the lesser, but still significant crimes, of distracting the US military away from the war against terrorism (in Afghanistan) to a distraction in Iraq, right when the US was most vulnerable to terrorism (after 9/11). The enormous waste of money is also criminal mismanagement.

I hate to break it to you, but the War on Terror is in more places than Afghanistan. I have 2 cousins that just got back from the African "front" in the War on Terror. If you want to read about successes in the War on Terror, check out what we're doing in Africa.

Don't be dissuaded or intimidated by misinformation on Wikipedia, the rabid invective of idiots on FOX News, or snide comments

A high school buddy of mine went to the south pole a couple of years ago. Here's his blog.

The closest thing to a universal frame of reference is the cosmic microwave background. The Solar System is moving, with respect to that, at about 370 km/s (1,332,000 kmh) in the direction of Leo.

http://mrsquid.blogspot.com/

I can't decide whether I'm more comfortable with them pulling information OUT of my emails, or inserting information INTO my web page? I guess I'd probably stick with the latter. Check this out: http://fakerush.blogspot.com/2007/10/us-domestic-surveillance.html

Look at these benchmarks:

http://zrusin.blogspot.com/2006/10/benchmarks.html

Compared to Qt, the GTK+ 2 rendering engine is sorely lacking.

...and as a user am repelled by apps which break my back button, don't let me save state, and basically break the web. This really annoys me about gmail - though I understand there that they're dealing with info you're not generally going to make public, so the lack of bookmarking ability doesn't matter so much...

Google is aware of these issues, and has actually fixed them in the Gmail interface a month or so ago. You can bookmark emails and searches as well as actually using the browser's back and forward buttons. Check it out.

You might want to read the site:

http://yahooanswerssucks.blogspot.com/

It's one person's attempt to explore the stupidity that is Yahoo Answers. The truth is intelligent, well researched answers get you banned, while mindless drivel gets you a "Best Answer" rating real quick.

The supernova was quite significant to astrophysics. SN2006gy appears to be a new class of supernova, and thus has changed the way we think of the late evolution of massive starts. I would argue that this was one of the few discoveries that actually deserved to be on the list.

http://mrsquid.blogspot.com/

One of the biggest benefits of Slashdot's firehose is that you can always go and take a look at the original story and the original headline as it was submitted to slashdot.

The originals are always at the top of the page under "Related Stories."

The editors do make changes to the stories and to the headline, but as someone who has had many stories published on slashdot, I have found that most of the time the changes are an improvement over the original.

In this specific case, NewYorkCountryLawyer's original headline was RIAA ups ante, argues MP3's from CD's unauthorized.

I would say that KDawson 's new headlines RIAA Argues That MP3s From CDs Are Unauthorized is substantially the same as the submitted headline.

I think NewYorkCountryLawyer got carried away this time and committed the cardinal sin of journalism, he was wrong about a fact.

I'm sure he will be more careful next time.

It was decided against Howell initially. Then Mr. Howell submitted a motion for "reconsideration", in which he submitted some of the briefs from other cases. The Court granted the reconsideration motion and vacated its prior order.

. . . a responsible party, like someone working for the Cato Institute, or Exxon-Mobile, or George Deutsch?

  http://morningcuppa.blogspot.com/2006/11/answer-me.html

but can't quite get used to using a gamepad for shooters.

Did it take you long to switch over (assuming you even play FPSes)?

I'm collecting links to the actual bill.

See: http://fakesteve.blogspot.com/2007/12/borg-is-getting-desperate-on-vista.html. Made me laugh, at least....

Slashdot readers might also find an insider's perspective on nuclear interesting, since the real world of atomic power (good and bad) is far different than what is commonly portrayed. You get to hear outsiders and spokespeople and executives talk about it. How about listening to a nuclear worker bee for a change?

See http://raddecision.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com] for the novel "Rad Decision", which is available at no cost to readers. The author has been an engineer in the US nuclear industry over twenty years. The book covers the people, politics and technology of this controversial energy source within an exciting story. The book is also in paperback at online retailers. (I get no royalities).

Stewart Brand, noted environmentalist and founder of "The Whole Earth Catalog" has said "I'd like to see Rad Decision widely read."

jimaach@comcast.net

Here is the cached image.

This is absurd. There's no point in even debating that.

I think it's the (RI|MP)AA asking for the moon - that way, when they tone down their demands they won't sound as absurd.