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Slashback: Lingualism, Cooperation, Re-entry
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.
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..
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"A mind is a horrible thing to waste. But a mime...
It feels wonderful wasting those fsckers."
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
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)
Bill - aka taniwha
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Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
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
addict (-dkt) v. tr. addicted, addicting, addicts. 1.To devote or give (oneself) habitually o
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!
everything leaks
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.
((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x))) http://www.endpointcomputing.com a scientific approach to custom computing.
How 'bout a Slashback update on the whole "using DCMA to censor Slashdot posts" issue?
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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
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-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
that the best programming language is Common Lisp.
Eat flaming death, Perl bigots!
Ahhh, Spaceballs. "No, no, no, go past this part. In fact, never play this again."
I use Macs for work, Linux for education, and Windows for cardplaying.
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!
Check out Magic Firesheep!
I think that Napster and Offspring should pick paylars.com to be the charity. That way Lars could make money from Napster....
Microsoft promising to fix a GPF violation!? ..Oh wait.. GPL.. I see. Nevermind.
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Starsucks
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.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
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Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org