Slashdot Mirror
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..
--
"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.
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.
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