Slashback: Lingualism, Cooperation, Re-entry

More information below -- for your edification and amusement -- on black holes (if they exist), Napster (a happy outcome for once), comparitive computer languages (after Chris Rijk's Java / C comparison) and more. Even a (gasp) positive statement about Microsoft. Hope you enjoy it.

What goes up must go SPLOOSH. Detritus writes: "The BBC is reporting that GRO has reentered the atmosphere and splashed down in the Pacific ocean, as predicted." So just what is the space equivalent of Davy Jones' Locker?

Serbo-Croatian, Swahili, Esperanto. After many spirited comments regarding Chris Rijk's Java / C shootout, Nilsson writes: "John Pierce has done some interesting language performance tests. Instead of benchmarking how a problem can be solved in the fastest possible way he tries to benchmark how an average programmer would have solved the problem in various languages. C, Awk, Java, Perl, Pike and Tcl are tested. You can probably start religious wars with this document." Tools for the job, tools for the job ...

Just like an after-school special. Landaras writes "NYC pointed out in a thread that The Offspring and Napster have reached a very amicable settlement over the whole t-shirt issue link Since you clarified that Napster wasn't suing (it was a cease and decist) you might want to again clarify that the cease and decist has been dropped. In fact, Napster is now helping The Offspring create new products." Writing in with more detail, mishaco pointed out this link to an NME story noting that " Napster have now backed down, allowing the band to sell the material, but only if the proceeds are donated to charity."

If it exists, it blows. Which doesn't suck, necessarily. dthor writes: "The Hubble Space Telescope finds more freaks of space: a black hole that's been switched from suck to blow. Apparently, a black hole in the Virgo cluster has begun to emit largish bubbles of colourful nebula gas (or rather...began to emit hundreds of years ago, but CNN is just now catching up). Read the article, complete with an "interactive" Anatomy of a Black Hole (the regular sucking kind). Neato." [Updated 8 June 12:05GMT by timothy] Note that, as readers like daVinci1980 point out below, this is entirely consistent with current black hole theory and observations. There's not really a "suck / blow" switch on black holes' control panels. That we know of.

How the suits saw it. Duncan Lawie penned -- err, "tapped" -- his account of the UK Linux Expo 2000 in London, and it was at least partly about code, distributions and drinking beer. On the other side of the aisle, meanwhile ... Xolution writes "There's a small article on CNN.com about Linux starting to come into the mainstream."

Out of the goodness of their 8-chambered hearts? Kaufmann writes: "Bruce reports: they've received email from a MS product manager, promising to fix the Interix GPL violation (recently reported on Slashdot as well). That's a relief." Nice to hear; thanks for Bruce and company for the sharp eye and persistence.

Comments

Davy Jones' Locker

[CaptainCarrot]

So just what is the space equivalent of Davy Jones' Locker?

Major Tom's Capsule?

Quantum Equivalent

[Yarn]

Schrödinger's Cat box

An important one they missed

[Richy_T]

Security

Your slashdot password is stored unencrypted in your cookie file

I didn't believe it myself until I looked. It's URL encoded but it aint encrypted

Rich

The Black Hole DOES NOT BLOW (IMPORTANT)

[daVinci1980]

This Black hole is NOT blowing, as the headline suggests. The behavior of this black hole is exactly as expected, and is totally inline with other Black holes found to date.

There is an important distinction to be made here. The Black hole itself is still happily gravitating objects in towards its center, at incredible rates of speed. As these objects are brought in closer to the event horizon, they are both stretched and squeezed.

To visualize what is happening to the matter and energy a black hole feeds on, remember all the cartoons you've seen as a child (or last night) where a cartoon character is sucked into a bottle. As they enter into the bottle, their body is stretched ever so slightly. And because their hands are not being pulled directly downward, but to a point mass directly below their feet, they are squeezed towards their center of mass.

The squeezing causes light to be emitted in the form of X-Rays at increasing intensity the closer to the Event horizon the trapped particles are. Of course once the particles cross the event horizon, all light they emit in the form of X-rays are trapped within the black hole, never to be seen from again. (Except possibly from a white hole...)

Because of a unique property of Black Holes, the larger the black hole, the shorter the distance of space around the black hole is affected. This is a natural result of Universal Gravitation (Gmm/R^2), which again applies once outside the event horizon. This means that Gas and dust that are a significant distance away from the Black hole will not be drawn in towards the sucker as much as they are pushed away by the force of the collisions from the X-Rays. Kinda neat, huh?

Apologies to physicists if I oversimplified anything..
--
"A mind is a horrible thing to waste. But a mime...
It feels wonderful wasting those fsckers."

Re:The Black Hole DOES NOT BLOW (IMPORTANT)

[rsw]

Exactly right.

The matter swirling towards the black hole forms a disc which is in the plane of the spinning of the black hole (most black holes are thought to spin on an axis much in the way that the earth does). This disc, the accretion disc, is the way in which most suspected black holes are spotted--we can't see the black hole itself, but as the matter around the hole is heated up it releases energy in the form of EM radiation (it "fluoresces").

Sometimes, as in the case of quasars (quasi-stellar objects), the radiation is at the wavelength of visible light, making an object that looks like a star, but is not. In some cases, there are very nifty effects such as jets shooting off of the black hole at the poles. (This particular effect is currently not well-understood, but there are several theories as to the mechanism behind this.)

In addition to the jets shooting off the poles, quasars (and in general very large black holes with large accretion discs) can have enough matter in the accretion disc that the energy that builds up is enough to blow off some of the outer matter. It is thought that small black holes do not exhibit this effect as much because they do not tend to build up large accretion discs, and the matter that does accrete is too close to the hole--that is, under too much gravitational force--to be blown off).

In all of these cases, the black hole still sucks :-); the matter blowing off has not crossed the event horizon (that is, it has not "entered" the black hole yet), so it can still escape the gravitational forces of the black hole given enough energy.

Re:Java Compiler counter productive.

[angst_ridden_hipster]

Yes, and no.

The virtual machine / bytecode concept has existed for quite a while. Java's promise to write once run anywhere is not unique, just the most publicized. And if you look around in Sun's archives, you'll probably find info on the Java Processor, which was to have been a CPU that ran Java bytecodes in a truly native environment. As far as I know, that's been abandoned.

But a native compiler will beat a VM written in native code, if both are written by people who know what they are doing. A JIT will help some, but still will lose out to a native compiler.

Java's portability is great. The ease of use is great. But it will never perform as well in a VM as a native compile. That's why some people (e.g., TowerJ) write native compilers. It's not counterproductive. It's just solving a different problem.

The primary resistance to native compilers for Java is over portability and the fear of non-standard extensions or implementations. Java programmers don't want to worry about (or even know) how many bytes are in an int; it's specified in the standard, after all. A bad native compiler may end up introducing the need to worry about that kind of thing...
-
bukra fil mish mish
-
Monitor the Web, or Track your site!

UAL816

[Bill Currie]

from LA to Sydney (4/6/00) had to shift it's flight path a little because of GRO. I know because I was on that flight :O

IIRC, the plane flew a little to the west of it's usual flight path. Appearently there was no danger due to the timing of the events (ie plane and satelite not in the same area at the same time) but they weren't taking any risks (though it would be an interesting way to go: "err, his plane was hit by a satellite", though I don't think my wife would see it that way)

Theory vs practice :-(

[tilly]

I just timed and got a better improvement on the string test:

$s = "abcdefghij";

$n = shift || 50000;
foreach (1..$n) {
push @X, $s ;
}

foreach my $str (@X) {
push @Y, $str . " ";
}

Damn, that's 815, not 816

[Bill Currie]

sorry, typo :/

Re:Gosh.

[anatoli]

FYI: ackermann 6 6 is equal to
....
2
2
2
2
2
where exponentiation is made m times, where m is equal to
....
2
2
2
2
2
where exponentiation is made 65536 times.
--

Re:What about the MS Kerberos problem

[Black Parrot]

> How 'bout a Slashback update on the whole "using DCMA to censor Slashdot posts" issue?

I think the fact that their latest attempt in this vein uses patents rather than clickwraps is a tipoff that they realize their case was a wash.

--

Re:Java Compiler counter productive.

[Hard_Code]

But you cannot deny that dynamic optimization, like that done in the Crusoe chip has a significant advantage over static compilation in some areas. I mean, it's obvious: at compile-time you CANNOT know how the program will run and what you can optimize. But you CAN at run time! The important thing is not just the VM, which the original poster is correct in enumerating the benefits of hardware and system abstraction, but also the very fact of dynamic optimization, which I believe, as systems increase in complexity, will be the only way to go. We have always made a trade-off between overhead/performance expense and complexity. High level and fourth generation languages are plain evidence of this. As we move to MUCH more complex, distributed applications, in a heterogenous, pervasively networked world, I believe dynamic optimization and system independence will pay off big time. I mean, what's better: a fast C program 2 years late, or a *well-designed*, clean, OO, distributed cross-platform program now? Premature optimization and all...why not push it back to the runtime and not have to munge up our code trying to second guess the machine?

The Offspring blew it

[Reality Master 101]

Ah man, The Offspring backed off. They should have told Napster to shove it and kept the profits.

On the other hand, perhaps this is the solution to Napster. Perhaps Napster, Inc. could go to the record companies and say they will donate all of their proceeds to charity. :)

--

blow holes

[ryanr]

Ehh... it's been done. Red Dwarf's "White Hole" episode.

Go shove a planet down it's throat.

Java Compiler counter productive.

[etwilegar]

When the java versus c article first appeared on slashdot there was a comment about java needing to be compiled. I think that people do not quite understand the importance of vm's in the future of computer science and of the pc ( or whatever it becomes) in the future.

Most problems arise in software is caused by lack of abstraction. Look at all the problems that games had early on. Remember trying to get quake to run in 800x600. You had to install the vesa bios extension. Which really wasn't all that hard, but it did stick the game to a very basic set of drivers. Now that gaming has moved over to the open/gl or direct x games can run on all kinds of different systems, and have made a lot of progress in a short amount of time. Mainly because it allows games to be hardware accelerated.

Today software is ran the same way it was ran 20 years ago. When it comes down to it, we still interact with our hardware using add, mov, lea, and a whole slew of other very simple instructions. In the case of RISC chips there is even less. Functions are totaly basic, but no chips out there allow you to define one on the chip, allowing it to be optimized. The time has come for us to move more of our common software structure into hardware.

Imagine if all your objects were not only stored in hardware, but managed by a hardware memory controller, and garbage collector. If threading was unified so that hardware could really do the switching, and the os would be left to kick things off and make sure things got scheduled correctly. Sun is already working on this and the next line of sparc hardware will have java acceleration built-in to the hardware. Servlets on sparc will take over as the leader in web based application performance.

Pick up the java vm specs from Sun and you'll find that the real magic is the java byte code. Java uses an single byte code. There are 202 op codes that can do almost everything that a non-gui program would ever have to do. From simple addition and all the object/function handling routines. When you start to look under the hood of a java vm you find that a large majority of it is acutally native code. java.system java.io, the major packages of classes, are all written natively. Bascially it creates a standard interface to hardware that can then be ported to each operating system. Now image that your video card, network card, sound card, and harddrive controller all have java acceleration or a part of a java vm running on them. Then a the core java vm, or java kernel would then coordinate all the transactions. Threading and IO performance would increase dramactically, and be much faster and robust then any simple intel like arch. running simple c code. The age of accelerated software is upon us, wake up. my $0.02

Re:Java Compiler counter productive.

[etwilegar]

i agree that it will be faster, but I don't care. well I do, but only if it were enough to make me angry at my own program. I like the fact that I can distribute one jar, around 200k that has all my source and compiled classes, and I know that it will run for everyone without having to recompile. Once someone writes a good jar app manager it will be easiest way to install and update code. No linking or recompiling to worry about. IBM has VM's that will run at 90%+ performance times of c++, and the 1.3 with hotspot is really quite fast. I wrote a ftp client, not quite done, but I was able to write a nice swing app that is multithreaded and runs good on linux and win32. And the network performance, especially with the blackdown port, beats all the commercial clients I've tested it with. I think its the same argument with assembly. When processors hit 10 gigahertz, will performance be that big of a deal, when we get quantum computer :). I agree that some things should always be written natively, especially database, drivers. And I would like nothing more than to have a compiler so that I could write the oop stuff. But that is the real reason why there is not a good compiler, most things are dynamically allocated, so you would still have to have a good library running to help clean things up in the background. I'm sure someone will write a good one eventually, but if you want native performance, then you should probably be using c++ and not java. Everything exists for a reason, even visual basic, but I can't remember what it is, or even remember if I ever knew :)

Re:Java Compiler counter productive.

[Animats]

Imagine if all your objects were not only stored in hardware, but managed by a hardware memory controller, and garbage collector. If threading was unified so that hardware could really do the switching, and the os would be left to kick things off and make sure things got scheduled correctly.

You'd think so, but it's been tried a few times, and the vanilla hardware always won in the end. The Intel iAPX 432 and the Symbolics 3600 had hardware support for garbage collection. Both were much slower than comparable vanilla machines of the same period. Sun tried a direct-execution Java chip, but it was slower than other CPUs of comparable cost and complexity.

A little support for garbage collection in the MMU, though, is a big win.

Re:Language Comparisons

[wrygrin]

I would be interested in knowing the relative effort of creation for each of the languages.

Of course, this is a much more difficult question - but i, for one, think it is a much *much* more interesting one. For a rare and satisfyingly substantial example of a study concerned with just this question, see (postscript) "An Empirical Comparison of C, C++, Java, Perl, Python, Rexx, and Tcl for a Search/String-Processing Program". It involves much more than lines-of-code and wild-assed guessing - it's an extensive and rational empirical study that examines programming practice and productivity, and the way that different languages facilititate it. Cool!

Re:We ALL Know

[dlakelan]

I'm writing the equivalent routines in Common Lisp as we speak...

So far CMUCL has been quite impressive on our sparc here at work, but I have to get home and check out my linux box which is quite similar to the one used in the tests.

I'd like to point out that the only usefulness of this test is to show what speed one-off programs will run at in various languages.

This really totally ignores the features of each language, (for example they couldn't do a C based hash-table test even... DUH), and it is heavily biased toward a c/perl/awk style of programming.... pre-allocating arrays and filling them, multiple hash tables... The descriptions even give you an algorithm, rather than a problem to solve... so they pre-suppose a way to solve a given problem.

For example, most common lisp compilers, and all scheme compilers will optimize away the function calls in the ackermann example. Furthermore, it is much more natural in lisp to compute some of these results by the use of concatenate and map(-into)... Some compilers (esp functional languages) will prove you could never use the results of your little loop that has no side effects and returns no value, and simply optimize it away entirely !!! :-)

I'll give some results here tomorrow for a few of the tests... the easy ones that don't require me to download large datasets over a slow link... in CMUCL on a dual pII 233 w/ 128 MB of ram running linux.

What about the MS Kerberos problem

[JoeShmoe]

How 'bout a Slashback update on the whole "using DCMA to censor Slashdot posts" issue?

I just checked and the posts are still up (very good Slashdot) but I for one am curious on whether the lawyers are still mulling over this or if Microsoft has just decided to ignore it?

Is there any kind of upcoming date like "must be removed by _____ that we can watch for?

- JoeShmoe

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= -=-=-=-=-=-=-

Re:Pick One and Only One

[cpt kangarooski]

Sure it does. Arguing that it's semantics is like claiming that you own someone else's property. Or that you own something that's common, like the atmosphere or the EM spectrum.

Ownership has a very specific meaning. Pretending otherwise doesn't change things. Information can't be owned because it's impossible to satisfy the qualifications for ownership. (Being able to use it in any way, being able to control it's use by others, being able to dispose of it)

And legally, ownership doesn't extend to information.

Please feel free to disregard language, law and the nature of reality. But don't expect the universe to comply with your misconceptions.

We ALL Know

[Anonymous Coward]

that the best programming language is Common Lisp.

Eat flaming death, Perl bigots!

gone from suck to blow?

[imac.usr]

Why, the gas bubbles from that black hole must be moving at ludicrous speed...

Ahhh, Spaceballs. "No, no, no, go past this part. In fact, never play this again."

Black Holes and the Virgo Cluster

[Anonymous Coward]

There is widely reputed to be a black hole at the center of M87 (also known as Virgo A), which is an enormous spiral galaxy in the region of space known as the Virgo Cluster. A decent-sized amateur telescope will reveal many galaxies if you star-hop through this part of the sky. M87 is among the brightest (usually considered the brightest.)

This black hole is widely reported to be the final resting place of Pioneer 10, OS/2, 8-track tapes, the two-hit-wonder Australian band "Men At Work", and the Chevy Chase Show. Recently the Hubble Space Telescope spotted a slew of Amigas being drawn towards the center of M87 as well. NASA predicts that future victims will include BeOS and Britney Spears.

HUH???

[um... Lucas]

So... Napster one way or the other inadvertently allows users to share/distribute their IP and copyrighted material (songs) without said artists permission and attempts to make it more and more difficult for the artists involved to stop the spread of it... BUT:

Napster gets angry when a band (who actually supports them) lifts their logo (IP and trademark) and distributes T shirts with the sites logo on it?

Will anyone here please realize that if you want to share music with your friends, that's fine... but Napster is trully evil... They stand for nothing that the whole open source movement stands for except the "free as in beer" concept... And even that looks shady if they move forward on charging subscription access.

Yeah... Napster backed down quickly, but even the idea that they acted up about the whole thing in the first place should go to show you that they're just another corporation like any other...

Re:HUH???

[mikpos]

Agreed. The only positive aspect of Napster is that it's popular, and that isn't that great. At first it seems great, because we get something like 10TB of music to choose from. Then it slowly dawns on you, oh shit, 9TB of that is Britney Spears.

Seriously, though, Napster has no technical advantage over any of the other distributed filesystems. I don't see any reason for it to exist (and if CNN would shut up about it, maybe it actually *would* die). Mind you I guess Gnutella is already kind of taking over, so maybe it'll die anyway.

Yay for death.

Side note: anyone else here that someone offered Britney Spears 10M US$ or something for sex? Funny stuff.

YAY!!!

[wrenling]

Napster and the Offspring are proof that intelligent people can reach amicable solutions if they just talk to one another.

Now THERE'S a business model for the new millenium!

Charity

[Savafan1]

I think that Napster and Offspring should pick paylars.com to be the charity. That way Lars could make money from Napster....

Pick One and Only One

[brank]

Which band do you think is acting more responsibly? The "Let's sell t-shirts" Offspring or the "We Hate Fans" Metallica? Which one do you think will be getting more of my hard earned cash?

GPF Violation?

[ShaniaTwain]

Microsoft promising to fix a GPF violation!? ..Oh wait.. GPL.. I see. Nevermind.

-

NEWS: Articles About Linux Going Mainstream

[cje]

ARTICLES ABOUT LINUX GOING MAINSTREAM BEGINNING TO GO MAINSTREAM
News Organizations Feel More Comfortable About Reporting On Open-Source OS

ATLANTA, GA (AP) - News organizations such as CNN and ABC News are beginning to warm up to the Linux operating system. Linux, which is an "open source" operating system that provides an alternative to Microsoft Windows, has been seeing gradually more media coverage over the course of the past year or so. Although the popular operating system has been in use in the industry's mainstream for quite some time now, news stories about the OS's mainstream status were considered "fringe" by major media outlets, and were generally avoided.

"A year or so ago, you would never have seen an article about how Linux has entered the mainstream," explained Steve Kinsworth, a senior editor at Brill's Content. "Articles like that were considered 'niche articles' that had a very limited readership. The majority of people would have no use for such articles, and would be better served by articles about systems such as Microsoft Windows. These days, though, everybody is jumping on the Linux mainstream reporting bandwagon. Reporting about Linux's mainstream status has jumped from fringe to mainstream. We are very excited by all this."

Leonard Shaffer, Vice-President of Corporate Egotism at Wired, echoed Kinsworth's sentiments. "The media is in love with Linux and stories about how it has gone mainstream. Just a few months ago, if you had gone into your editor's office and suggested doing an article about Linux, the response would have been 'Huh?' or 'You wanna write about what?' These days, editors and managers all over are chomping at the bit to get more coverage of mainstream Linux onto the pages of their magazine."

Not everybody shares the enthusiasm, however. Rupert Murdoch, chairman of News Corp. and owner of the Fox News Channel, has publicly decried the coverage of the operating system. "I am deeply disturbed by the mainstreaming of coverage of Linux as mainstream," Murdoch said. "We at the Fox News Channel cater to the Christian Right and to ultra-paranoid conservatives," Murdoch explained. "We have absolutely no interest in blubbering all over some sort of leftist free-love collectivist liberal mishmash of computer code." Fox News contributor Bob Dornan agreed, calling Linux author Linus Torvalds "the anti-Christ."

Ted Turner contributed to this story.

Re:NEWS: Articles About Linux Going Mainstream

[Joe Groff]

I'm still not sure if I can risk writing an article about Linux going mainstream. After all, no one has ever gotten fired for writing an article about Microsoft.

Space equivalent

[Syberghost]

The space equivalent of Davy Jones' Locker is:

Klono's gadolinium guts.

Trust me on this.
--

How Black Holes Blow Better than Monica...

[Sir_Winston]

Catchy title for a research paper, eh? ;-) But seriously, in Hawking's *Brief History of Time* he tells us exactly how a black hole could do like this one is apparently doing. The radio emissions aren't the most important part; the really interesting thing is that black holes can actually potentially "create matter" accounting for the "from suck to blow" effect mentioned here.

See, space isn't really a vacuum, as Hawking points out in his book. In actuality, in the vacuum of space particles and their associated anti-particles blink in and out of existence constantly--they appear, move apart from one another an imperceptible distance, and then are immediately drawn back together and "cancel out" and disappear with no remnants. So, although we on the macroscopic level perceive space to be empty, on a sub-atomic scale it is quite full and active.

But that's where black holes come in. The only force strong enough to prevent those sub-atomic particles from re-colliding and blinking out of existence is, you guessed it, the event horizon of a black hole. If the particles pop into existence right at the event horizon, and one crosses the event horizon and the other doesn't, then both particles will be forced into continued existence instead of cancelling out--the anti-particle can get sucked into the black hole and actually cause the black hole's mass to decrease by one particle when it cancels out part of the black hole's central point, while the particle which escapes becomes part of the rest of the universe just like any other particle. Hawking mentioned this as a possible way that black holes could decrease in mass/size of event horizon over time, and this process could account for the "blow" effect of the black hole mentioned in the article if, for whatever physical reasons, the black hole's situation is conducive to the condition of capturing these anti-particles at its event horizon and thus "emitting" particles. It's complicated, but I've tried to explain it as simplistically as possible, so forgive me if the explanation is slightly inaccurate. But, that's how this could happen.

Har, Me Hearties!

[Mike Buddha]

"The BBC is reporting that GRO has reentered the atmosphere and splashed down in the Pacific ocean, as predicted." So just what is the space equivalent of Davy Jones' Locker?

Major Tom's Locker?

Re:Language Comparisons

[ahem]

I'm willing to bet that the elapsed time varies wildly for novices and not very much at all for gurus

I guess that's what I was trying to solicit. For those that have worked in two or more of these languages, give me an estimate of how long you thought it would take you to have coded up each of these examples for each of your langagues when you were at the novice, average and guru stages in your development.

Then, I could aggregate the responses and perhaps plot out some consensus of what the learning curve looks like for each language.

From there, we could interpret the relative performance versus the 'degree of difficulty' and come up with a very precise estimate of the bang per buck ratio of each language

Of course, that very precise estimate will be almost, but not quite, perfectly irrelevant to anything in the real world. (spot the reference)

Cheers.

Re:Language Comparisons

[kaphka]

I would be interested in knowing the relative effort of creation for each of the languages.

Interesting question, but complicated. Not every language has the same learning curve. For example, VB is pretty effortless for beginners, but gradually gets more tedious as you get more experienced. C++, on the other hand, starts out pretty smoothly, then rapidly sinks into complete incomprehensibility... until you achieve C++ nirvana, and everything makes perfect sense. (And all your friends think you're insane.)

Language Comparisons

[ahem]

I would be interested in knowing the relative effort of creation for each of the languages. I know that the universal answer of 'it depends' is the One True Answer, but at the very least, a lines-of-code metric would be good (which I guess I can go and count myself!).

A scientific wild ass guess of elapsed time for a novice, average and guru programmer of each language would also be good.

If people want to look at the sources and email me with their estimates, I'll compile the stats in about a week and post them. Cheers!

Re:Language Comparisons

[ucblockhead]

I'm willing to bet that the elapsed time varies wildly for novices and not very much at all for gurus.

Part of being a guru is being adept enough at the language that your design flows almost immediately into code, and your design is invariably one that is easy to adapt to the language.

Thus, all the time is spent understanding the problem.

Many Black Holes Blow!

[ClubStew]

It is important to note that world-reknown physicist Stephen Hawkings has hypothesized that radio waves are actually spewed from black holes, perhaps remnants of what has gone in and that could even tell us information about what actually has entered the black hole. He has a lot of interesting stuff he's written about, such as using black holes for space-time travel (not explicitely stated, but many ideas to build your own) and I encourage anyone interested in black holes to pick up one of many copies of his work and read it! Enjoy!

Re:language tests

[ucblockhead]

Redundant? Jesus Christ, it's so bad these days that plain old common sense deserves insightful, not redundant.

Hell hasn't actually frozen over

[Zaffle]

The blackhole itself is not actually emmitting the "bubbles". The "bubbles" occur as a result of gas being sucked into the singularity. Some of the gas, rather than spiraling into the singularity shoots off in another direction, and, well, read the article to get a basic understanding of it.

Yes Stephen Hawking has predicted black holes could emmit radiation (Hawking radiation), however it wouldn't be of such a large and sizable ammount.

---

Re:Haiku

[jellicle]

Readers Demand It
Lack Of Follow-Through, They Cry
We Serve Most Humbly.

--
Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org

The Perl examples have very poor style

[tilly]

I went through and methodically used my instead of local, foreach loops instead of for, stopped changing the array base, stopped worrying about whether you had numbers or strings, used the list oriented nature of the language a little, and got decent speed increases across the board.

The biggest benefit being the incr_loop test:

$n = shift || 50000;

foreach (1..$n) {
++$sum;
}
print "$sum\n";

I sent my modified version to the author along with pointers to what and why the style changes were made. (Every last one has maintainability as its primary goal. The speed increase comes because more maintainable code pushes more work checking boundary conditions etc down to Perl, which is both less likely to mess up and is faster than your code written in Perl.)

I hope he redoes the Perl tests...

Cheers,
Ben