I don't get the sense that you've ever used a good digital camera.
I've blown 6MP images up to 20"x30". They look great. Good enough that people gush about how great they look when they buy them from us, at least. While I don't have access to an 11MP camera, I can't imagine that 30"x40" would be too much of a stretch.
Keep in mind that I'm talking about images from a $5000 camera, not a piece-o'-crap point-and-shoot.
Basically what this is saying is that if I go out and get a new whiz-bang camera with this funky new lens, I will be able to take a picture almost as good as the pictures I take with my 30 year old Cannon AE-1, and not have the leeway of doing photo processing tricks in the darkroom.
You stick to your film. I'll stack my Nikon D1X against your 30-year-old camera any day of the week, personally. And that's not even top of the line anymore -- Canon has a new 11MP camera that puts any 35mm camera to shame.
Just because $300 consumer digicams are crap doesn't mean that digital hasn't already surpassed film. It's just a matter of making it affordable now.
Agreed. All I'm saying is that the good old double-blind test is the only way to get to the bottom of it.
If we're not doing the experiments, we should be. If the people doing the experiments are crooked, we should be getting other people to double-check them. But I'll base my judgements upon such studies, which (potentially flawed though they may be) represent the best way we have of figuring out the truth behind a claim. If a claim (especially a human health claim!) isn't backed by double-blind trials, it isn't ready to be taken seriously.
Sure, but my point still stands. Aspartame is a source of phenylalanine & thus, the previous poster's assertion that "there is no link to aspartame and any problems" is not true.
Dear God, could we be a little bit less pedantic here?
Water can kill you. Air can kill you. Sugar can kill you. Heat can kill you. Cold can kill you. Phenylalanine can kill a very small percentage of people. Blaming that on aspartame is absolutely absurd.
In 1967 I was advised by an MD to start smoking because it would help my asthma. Studies since then have shown the hazards of smoke and secondhand smoke. I smoked for 17 years after that, have been quit for more than 20, but still have asthma.
Okay, so you have successfully proved that one doctor didn't know what he was talking about in one specific instance. What does that prove? I know lots of computer programmers that couldn't program a simple sort routine to save their lives, but that doesn't mean that everything that comes out of the field of computer science is inherently suspect.
I listed several peer-reviewed medical journals that dismiss this guy's claims. Maybe they're right, maybe not. Either way, I'll take the opinion of medical professionals doing peer-reviewed double-blind clinical studies over random anecdotes on the Web any day. Even if they ultimately turn out to be wrong, guess what -- they'll be proven wrong by other doctors doing other double-blind studies, not by random anecdotes on the Web.
I program computers; I don't study medicine. As such, my best bet is to trust the current prevailing wisdom among doctors. Sure, they may turn out to have been wrong about certain things, but I'll still take that chance over ignoring everything that the scientific method has taught us in the last few hundred years.
What would you say if his symptoms were caused by a firm, deep-seated belief that the CIA, in cooperation with aliens from the Andromeda galaxy, were shocking his testicles with cattle prods while he slept? His testicular pain would be, of course, absolutely real -- the presence of stress chemicals, FMRI scans, and whatever other tests you care to do all show that he's experiencing real testicular pain.
Does the fact that his pain is real make him any less of a crackpot?
I'm not dismissing this guy's suffering. He is experiencing a real problem, and needs competent psychiatric help to get through it. I truly hope that he seeks help and receives it. However, I honestly don't see a significant difference between him and the hypothetical cattle-prod-to-the-nuts guy, as their complaints are equally bizarre and imaginary. He needs help, I agree, but I stand firmly by the "crackpot" comment.
Studies of such "syndromes" as sensitivity to EMF have revealed that the people in question are utterly able to distinguish the presense of radio waves or whatnot. It's bogus -- they're scaring themselves to death.
"[MCS] has been rejected as an established organic disease by the American Academy of Allergy and Immunology, the American Medical Association, the California Medical Association, the American College of Physicians, and the International Society of Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology. It may be the only ailment in existence in which the patient defines both the cause and the manifestations of his own condition. Despite this, it has achieved credibility in workmen's [sic] compensation claims, tort liability, and regulatory actions."
"No evidence based on well-controlled clinical trials is available that supports a cause-and-effect relationship between exposure to very low levels of substances and the myriad symptoms reported by clinical ecologists to result from such exposure . . . . Until such accurate, reproducible, and well-controlled studies are available, the American Medical Association Council on Scientific Affairs believes that multiple chemical sensitivity should not be considered a recognized clinical syndrome."
"Review of the clinical ecology literature provides inadequate support for the beliefs and practices of clinical ecology. The existence of an environmental illness as presented in clinical ecology theory must be questioned because of the lack of a clinical definition. Diagnoses and treatments involve procedures of no proven efficacy."
Sorry to be insensitive, but until I see some better evidence for this being a real disorder, I'm going to assume that he's just another crackpot hypochondriac.
I'm just curious -- have you ever read a book? Watched TV?
HOW COULD YOU???
You're wasting your time, when you could be out searching for a cure for cancer! Helping the homeless! Unless you devote 100% of your waking time, every day, to helping those less fortunate than you, you are less than a human being. You are scum.
No books. No TV. No entertainment or leisure of any kind until cancer is cured!
Wait a sec... you say that you HAVE sat on your ass and watched TV for hours on end? You've wasted endless hours reading stupid books about fantasy worlds that don't exist? Then what the hell are you doing berating anybody else for how they choose to spend their time? What gives you the right?
Thank goodness I'm not the only one. I simply could not figure out what that site was supposed to be about. Isn't the point of a product site supposed to be, you know, the product?
After Googling for it and finding some actual information, I'm horrified that anyone would be stupid enough to pay an advertising agency to come up with that logo. Look, it's Mad Cow Disease (TM) in a bottle! Now available in "Berry Mixed Up" and "Chocolate Insanity"!
So, if a blue lazer allows 5x data storage on DVD's, why not incorporate this technology into CD's?
What on earth are you talking about? This is, effectively, the latest generation of writable CD. It's the same form factor and the same basic technology.
The funny thing is that I actually considered using a word other than "specious", because I didn't want to confuse the poor bastards that don't know how to use a dictionary.
I'm glad I went ahead and used it, though. Your response was priceless.
...over the next year or two it'll still be cheaper for most people just to buy another hard drive to store their backups. Unless you have a lot of data.
Those of us with 6MP digital cameras and MiniDV camcorders are already feeling the pain. While DVD-RW is good enough for now, I'm happy that an even bigger format is coming down the pipe.
What's at #1? Go on, take a look. I dare you. You will also note that Majora's Mask doesn't even show up on the list, so I don't think you can support your argument that "most people consider Majora's Mask superior to Ocarina". Both journalists and users ranked Ocarina higher.
I agree. I believe that the case against encryption is being overstated.
You could, for instance, adopt the following strategy: assume that the conjecture is true. Use it (however it supposedly makes encryption easier to crack) to crack encryption algorithms. If it works, great. If not, you can still crack it the old-fashioned way.
As I understand it, we're already pretty damned convinced that this conjecture is true, and we're just lacking a 100% rigorous proof of it. I don't see how the presence or absence of a 100% rigorous proof will have any effect on whether or not it's useful in cryptanalysis. Even if the conjecture turns out to be false in general, it is known to hold for an absolutely enormous set of numbers, right? Even if it only works on a small percentage of cases, that's still a small percentage of cases you don't have to solve via brute-force.
This fact tends to make me believe that the conjecture will not, in fact, help us crack encryption faster -- because we would already be using it if it helped. Could someone with a real mathematical background explain how a rigorous proof of the conjecture would make any difference whatsoever in cryptanalysis? How exactly does it apply, and how would a rigorous proof make it apply in ways that it doesn't today?
Not even Miyamoto is infallible - I couldn't be arsed to play through to the end of Ocarina Of Time, simply because I got caught in a die/retry loop and decided I couldn't face playing through the same section yet *again* just to reach the next checkpoint.
The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time is widely considered to be the best videogame ever made. It remains ranked at #1 among all videogames at Gamerankings to this day.
Fine, you didn't want to finish it. However, suggesting that somehow it's the game's fault seems a bit childish. It's impossible to please everybody, and I hardly think the fact that Miyamoto's masterpiece failed to please one random Slashdot poster should count as a failure on his part.
C can fit the number 50,000 into 2 bytes. Java can't.
Ummmm... okay. Wow, that's such a useful feature in the real world that it makes a huge difference in overall application performance.
I'm sure my 100,000 line Java app would run noticeably faster if only I could store the numbers from 32,768 to 65,535 in two bytes rather than four. Yep, that's the single biggest hurdle holding Java back.
Seriously, if you view that as anything but a non-issue your priorities are seriously screwed up. Show me a way to eliminate the potential of buffer overrun security exploits (such as the automatic array bounds checking in Java) and you have a useful real-world feature that needs to be talked about. Show me that you can store numbers from 32,768 to 65,535 in two bytes rather than four and I don't give a flying crap.
I'm not even saying that Java shouldn't have unsigned datatypes. I'm just saying that it doesn't matter. I've been writing Java code for six years, and I have never once had a desire for an unsigned datatype.
public class Test {
public static void main(String[] arg) {
long time = System.currentTimeMillis();
Random random = new Random();
int[] test = new int[100000];
for (int i = test.length - 1; i >= 0; i--)
test[i] = random.nextInt(Integer.MAX_VALUE);
Arrays.sort(test);
System.out.println("sort (including array generation) took " + (System.currentTimeMillis() - time) + "ms");
} }
It uses the built-in quicksort implementation in java.util.Arrays, but if you go check the source for that class you will note that it is 100% Java.
I happen to be using a 400MHz Pentium II with 256MB of RAM running Windows 98 right this second, so I'll use this machine. Here goes:
C:\temp>java -version java version "1.4.1_01" Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.4.1_01-b01) Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.4.1_01-b01, mixed mode)
C:\temp>javac Test.java
C:\temp>java -cp . Test sort (including array generation) took 220ms
220 milliseconds. Admittedly, the system timer isn't all that accurate under Windows 98, but I can certainly say that the wall-clock time is under two seconds (and that includes Java VM startup).
Now, I don't know what the hell kind of machine you're running on -- for all I know it's a programmable toaster -- but I cannot possibly see how a simple sort could take 15.32 seconds on ANY machine (which is your stated C time). Are you sorting legos using a robotic arm? Or did you just make these results up because you didn't feel like doing any real work?
Er, no. Java is compiled into an intermediate form, just like every other scripting language such as Perl, Python, etc. Calling that "machine code" shows an ignorance of programming in real assembly language. Java bytecodes are just a numeric version of the Java language.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
First, your precious native-code compilers compile into an intermediate language as well. No modern CPU runs a program as-is -- they all have tricks like microcode, out-of-order execution, register renaming, and other hand-waving that make the actual program run by the CPU quite different than the one sitting on your disk. I'm sure "that's different" for some reason, of course.
Second, Java bytecodes are a machine language. Admittedly, no 100% complete implementation of the machine in question exists, but I fail to see how that makes a difference. Are you saying that if I extended the picoJava CPU core to natively handle the last few instructions that are currently emulated, suddenly Java would switch from being a "scripting language" to a "real language"? That's asinine.
That's the primary reason that Java is so slow. The bytecodes cannot be efficiently interpreted.
The primary reason Java is "so slow" is that most of the people claiming that haven't used it in years. Java 1.4.1 is pretty damned fast as I see it. The other reason that Java is seen as slow is that its GUI libraries are not as fast as the native libraries. That doesn't have a thing to do with bytecodes, but rather with how they were designed.
There is nothing special about bytecodes that makes them any more difficult to run efficiently than any other programming language. In fact, they open the door to a lot of optimizations that are all-but-impossible with other languages.
There are things in Java that will NEVER allow Java to be useful as a general purpose language. The lack of an unsigned datatype is probably the most egregious flaw.
The only reason that unsigned datatypes matter one iota is in interfacing with someone else's code that does use an unsigned datatype, in which case nasty conversions must be done. If you don't need to interface with such code, you find that they are completely unnecessary. I fail to see how that is such a serious flaw.
I'm not saying "Java is the bestest language EVAR!!!", but please get your criticisms right.
If the rate of progress is really accelerating at an "exponential rate", why haven't people gone farther than the moon in the last thirty years or so?
We could, easily. If there were another moon, say, two or three times the distance away, we could easily reach it. Mars, though, isn't two or three times as far -- it's roughly 200 times the distance. Complaining that we haven't improved our spaceflight by a factor of 200 in only 30 years is absurd.
How do you explain the dark ages?
How Euro-centric. The Arabs and Chinese were making major strides during that period, despite what the Europeans had gotten themselves into. In any case, it wouldn't matter -- the fact that the real-life curve has a few bumps doesn't invalidate the idea.
There seems to be a lot of confusion about what the "singularity" is. Here's the deal.
Technological advancement has been occurring at an exponential rate. It took thousands of years to advance from "banging rocks together to start fires" to "simple agriculture", but a mere 66 years to go from the Wright Brother's first airplane to landing on the moon.
This rate of progress continues to accelerate. The time between significant human advancements has decreased from thousands of years, to hundreds, to tens, to the present where we expect major advancements every year or two. Eventually that time will be compressed to months, and then days.
If this continues, then ultimately our inventions will be occurring so quickly that the time between them is mere seconds, or even milliseconds or nanoseconds. This is the "singularity", the time when the progress of human advancement reaches "essentially infinite". Theoretically, we will uncover all the secrets of the universe -- all possible technology -- in seconds.
Sound ridiculous? Each of our inventions is a stepping-stone that makes future inventions easier. A super-intelligent AI will make future inventions pretty damned easy, because it will do all of the work for us. It will figure out how to make an even smarter AI, and it will do it in record time -- and ultimately we'll have something that can solve every problem in infinitesimal time. Thus, progress will become infinitely fast.
This has not been proven. Roger Penrose wrote a couple of interesting books about the subject.
I believe that Penrose is wildly off-base, personally. His application of Godel's incompleteness theorem is faulty, and that destroys the central tenet of many of his arguments.
I must stress that when I say "computer" I do not mean "Turing machine". I consider the brain a computer, although a fantastically complicated and delicate one which cannot be expressed as a Turing machine. To suggest that we cannot build a computer capable of thinking like a human is to suggest that we cannot possibly create an artificial duplicate of the human brain, which is patently absurd in my opinion. We make new brains all the time, just by having sex with one another. What physical law would permit us to create brains by having sex, but prevent us from manufacturing them artificially?
But your assumption that all mathematical proofs are merely algorithmic (= expressible through formal systems) is certainly debatable, at least.
My statement was that humans cannot (in general) solve problems that computers cannot solve, since we are computers. Again, "computer" does not necessarily mean "Turing machine", and most computability proofs apply specifically to Turing machines and are therefore not relevant.
But that doesn't take away from the fact that an intelligent human could look at a source printout and figure out if it halted or not, but no general algorithm can be deduced that would do so.
Complete, utter, and unmitigated bullshit.
If it can't be solved algorithmically, humans can't solve it either. Even if a human came up with the right solution, in the general case, you would never be able to prove it!
Simple example: I write a program which "solves" chess. In other words, it loops through every possible game configuration and determines whether, say, white can always force a win. If so, it halts. Otherwise, it just drops into an infinite loop. Now, naturally, this game would take longer than the universe's lifespan to run, but that's not the point. The point is that determining whether or not this program halts is equivalent to solving the problem in the first place! To know whether or not it halts, you have to know whether or not white can always force a win. The halting problem is equally unsolvable for both man and machine. We both use algorithms, even if we don't understand our own algorithms. The fact that we do use algorithms means that we're just as subject to the rules of what is and is not computable.
Put in other terms, a computer simulating a human brain would be able to solve the exact same problems as a human, and in the same ways. If a human can solve a problem (and prove it, not just make an intelligent guess), then it's by definition computable. The only counter to that is to assume that it is impossible to build a computer that simulates a human brain, but you're on shaky ground making such a claim.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't get the sense that you've ever used a good digital camera.
I've blown 6MP images up to 20"x30". They look great. Good enough that people gush about how great they look when they buy them from us, at least. While I don't have access to an 11MP camera, I can't imagine that 30"x40" would be too much of a stretch.
Keep in mind that I'm talking about images from a $5000 camera, not a piece-o'-crap point-and-shoot.
Basically what this is saying is that if I go out and get a new whiz-bang camera with this funky new lens, I will be able to take a picture almost as good as the pictures I take with my 30 year old Cannon AE-1, and not have the leeway of doing photo processing tricks in the darkroom.
You stick to your film. I'll stack my Nikon D1X against your 30-year-old camera any day of the week, personally. And that's not even top of the line anymore -- Canon has a new 11MP camera that puts any 35mm camera to shame.
Just because $300 consumer digicams are crap doesn't mean that digital hasn't already surpassed film. It's just a matter of making it affordable now.
Agreed. All I'm saying is that the good old double-blind test is the only way to get to the bottom of it.
If we're not doing the experiments, we should be. If the people doing the experiments are crooked, we should be getting other people to double-check them. But I'll base my judgements upon such studies, which (potentially flawed though they may be) represent the best way we have of figuring out the truth behind a claim. If a claim (especially a human health claim!) isn't backed by double-blind trials, it isn't ready to be taken seriously.
That would be "infrared" and "visible light", not "RF" or "radio waves". Ha ha, very funny.
Sure, but my point still stands. Aspartame is a source of phenylalanine & thus, the previous poster's assertion that "there is no link to aspartame and any problems" is not true.
Dear God, could we be a little bit less pedantic here?
Water can kill you. Air can kill you. Sugar can kill you. Heat can kill you. Cold can kill you. Phenylalanine can kill a very small percentage of people. Blaming that on aspartame is absolutely absurd.
And doctors know everything...
In 1967 I was advised by an MD to start smoking because it would help my asthma. Studies since then have shown the hazards of smoke and secondhand smoke. I smoked for 17 years after that, have been quit for more than 20, but still have asthma.
Okay, so you have successfully proved that one doctor didn't know what he was talking about in one specific instance. What does that prove? I know lots of computer programmers that couldn't program a simple sort routine to save their lives, but that doesn't mean that everything that comes out of the field of computer science is inherently suspect.
I listed several peer-reviewed medical journals that dismiss this guy's claims. Maybe they're right, maybe not. Either way, I'll take the opinion of medical professionals doing peer-reviewed double-blind clinical studies over random anecdotes on the Web any day. Even if they ultimately turn out to be wrong, guess what -- they'll be proven wrong by other doctors doing other double-blind studies, not by random anecdotes on the Web.
I program computers; I don't study medicine. As such, my best bet is to trust the current prevailing wisdom among doctors. Sure, they may turn out to have been wrong about certain things, but I'll still take that chance over ignoring everything that the scientific method has taught us in the last few hundred years.
What would you say if his symptoms were caused by a firm, deep-seated belief that the CIA, in cooperation with aliens from the Andromeda galaxy, were shocking his testicles with cattle prods while he slept? His testicular pain would be, of course, absolutely real -- the presence of stress chemicals, FMRI scans, and whatever other tests you care to do all show that he's experiencing real testicular pain.
Does the fact that his pain is real make him any less of a crackpot?
I'm not dismissing this guy's suffering. He is experiencing a real problem, and needs competent psychiatric help to get through it. I truly hope that he seeks help and receives it. However, I honestly don't see a significant difference between him and the hypothetical cattle-prod-to-the-nuts guy, as their complaints are equally bizarre and imaginary. He needs help, I agree, but I stand firmly by the "crackpot" comment.
Studies of such "syndromes" as sensitivity to EMF have revealed that the people in question are utterly able to distinguish the presense of radio waves or whatnot. It's bogus -- they're scaring themselves to death.
I quote from The American Academy of Family Physicians website:Sorry to be insensitive, but until I see some better evidence for this being a real disorder, I'm going to assume that he's just another crackpot hypochondriac.
I'm just curious -- have you ever read a book? Watched TV?
HOW COULD YOU???
You're wasting your time, when you could be out searching for a cure for cancer! Helping the homeless! Unless you devote 100% of your waking time, every day, to helping those less fortunate than you, you are less than a human being. You are scum.
No books. No TV. No entertainment or leisure of any kind until cancer is cured!
Wait a sec... you say that you HAVE sat on your ass and watched TV for hours on end? You've wasted endless hours reading stupid books about fantasy worlds that don't exist? Then what the hell are you doing berating anybody else for how they choose to spend their time? What gives you the right?
Thank goodness I'm not the only one. I simply could not figure out what that site was supposed to be about. Isn't the point of a product site supposed to be, you know, the product?
After Googling for it and finding some actual information, I'm horrified that anyone would be stupid enough to pay an advertising agency to come up with that logo. Look, it's Mad Cow Disease (TM) in a bottle! Now available in "Berry Mixed Up" and "Chocolate Insanity"!
So, if a blue lazer allows 5x data storage on DVD's, why not incorporate this technology into CD's?
What on earth are you talking about? This is, effectively, the latest generation of writable CD. It's the same form factor and the same basic technology.
The funny thing is that I actually considered using a word other than "specious", because I didn't want to confuse the poor bastards that don't know how to use a dictionary.
I'm glad I went ahead and used it, though. Your response was priceless.
Those of us with 6MP digital cameras and MiniDV camcorders are already feeling the pain. While DVD-RW is good enough for now, I'm happy that an even bigger format is coming down the pipe.
Care to provide a link for that assertion? Sounds specious to me.
That's why I cited an independent source for that pronouncement.
GameRanking's Top 10 Games
What's at #1? Go on, take a look. I dare you. You will also note that Majora's Mask doesn't even show up on the list, so I don't think you can support your argument that "most people consider Majora's Mask superior to Ocarina". Both journalists and users ranked Ocarina higher.
Dumbass.
I agree. I believe that the case against encryption is being overstated.
You could, for instance, adopt the following strategy: assume that the conjecture is true. Use it (however it supposedly makes encryption easier to crack) to crack encryption algorithms. If it works, great. If not, you can still crack it the old-fashioned way.
As I understand it, we're already pretty damned convinced that this conjecture is true, and we're just lacking a 100% rigorous proof of it. I don't see how the presence or absence of a 100% rigorous proof will have any effect on whether or not it's useful in cryptanalysis. Even if the conjecture turns out to be false in general, it is known to hold for an absolutely enormous set of numbers, right? Even if it only works on a small percentage of cases, that's still a small percentage of cases you don't have to solve via brute-force.
This fact tends to make me believe that the conjecture will not, in fact, help us crack encryption faster -- because we would already be using it if it helped. Could someone with a real mathematical background explain how a rigorous proof of the conjecture would make any difference whatsoever in cryptanalysis? How exactly does it apply, and how would a rigorous proof make it apply in ways that it doesn't today?
Not even Miyamoto is infallible - I couldn't be arsed to play through to the end of Ocarina Of Time, simply because I got caught in a die/retry loop and decided I couldn't face playing through the same section yet *again* just to reach the next checkpoint.
The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time is widely considered to be the best videogame ever made. It remains ranked at #1 among all videogames at Gamerankings to this day.
Fine, you didn't want to finish it. However, suggesting that somehow it's the game's fault seems a bit childish. It's impossible to please everybody, and I hardly think the fact that Miyamoto's masterpiece failed to please one random Slashdot poster should count as a failure on his part.
If you're using a 120 lumen LumiLeds LED, it's a 5W Luxeon Star. The 5W model actually has 4 emitters packaged into a single case.
C can fit the number 50,000 into 2 bytes. Java can't.
... okay. Wow, that's such a useful feature in the real world that it makes a huge difference in overall application performance.
Ummmm
I'm sure my 100,000 line Java app would run noticeably faster if only I could store the numbers from 32,768 to 65,535 in two bytes rather than four. Yep, that's the single biggest hurdle holding Java back.
Seriously, if you view that as anything but a non-issue your priorities are seriously screwed up. Show me a way to eliminate the potential of buffer overrun security exploits (such as the automatic array bounds checking in Java) and you have a useful real-world feature that needs to be talked about. Show me that you can store numbers from 32,768 to 65,535 in two bytes rather than four and I don't give a flying crap.
I'm not even saying that Java shouldn't have unsigned datatypes. I'm just saying that it doesn't matter. I've been writing Java code for six years, and I have never once had a desire for an unsigned datatype.
You, sir, are completely full of shit.
I compiled and ran the following test case:
import java.util.*;
public class Test {
public static void main(String[] arg) {
long time = System.currentTimeMillis();
Random random = new Random();
int[] test = new int[100000];
for (int i = test.length - 1; i >= 0; i--)
test[i] = random.nextInt(Integer.MAX_VALUE);
Arrays.sort(test);
System.out.println("sort (including array generation) took " + (System.currentTimeMillis() - time) + "ms");
}
}
It uses the built-in quicksort implementation in java.util.Arrays, but if you go check the source for that class you will note that it is 100% Java.
I happen to be using a 400MHz Pentium II with 256MB of RAM running Windows 98 right this second, so I'll use this machine. Here goes:
C:\temp>java -version
java version "1.4.1_01"
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.4.1_01-b01)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.4.1_01-b01, mixed mode)
C:\temp>javac Test.java
C:\temp>java -cp . Test
sort (including array generation) took 220ms
220 milliseconds. Admittedly, the system timer isn't all that accurate under Windows 98, but I can certainly say that the wall-clock time is under two seconds (and that includes Java VM startup).
Now, I don't know what the hell kind of machine you're running on -- for all I know it's a programmable toaster -- but I cannot possibly see how a simple sort could take 15.32 seconds on ANY machine (which is your stated C time). Are you sorting legos using a robotic arm? Or did you just make these results up because you didn't feel like doing any real work?
Er, no. Java is compiled into an intermediate form, just like every other scripting language such as Perl, Python, etc. Calling that "machine code" shows an ignorance of programming in real assembly language. Java bytecodes are just a numeric version of the Java language.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
First, your precious native-code compilers compile into an intermediate language as well. No modern CPU runs a program as-is -- they all have tricks like microcode, out-of-order execution, register renaming, and other hand-waving that make the actual program run by the CPU quite different than the one sitting on your disk. I'm sure "that's different" for some reason, of course.
Second, Java bytecodes are a machine language. Admittedly, no 100% complete implementation of the machine in question exists, but I fail to see how that makes a difference. Are you saying that if I extended the picoJava CPU core to natively handle the last few instructions that are currently emulated, suddenly Java would switch from being a "scripting language" to a "real language"? That's asinine.
That's the primary reason that Java is so slow. The bytecodes cannot be efficiently interpreted.
The primary reason Java is "so slow" is that most of the people claiming that haven't used it in years. Java 1.4.1 is pretty damned fast as I see it. The other reason that Java is seen as slow is that its GUI libraries are not as fast as the native libraries. That doesn't have a thing to do with bytecodes, but rather with how they were designed.
There is nothing special about bytecodes that makes them any more difficult to run efficiently than any other programming language. In fact, they open the door to a lot of optimizations that are all-but-impossible with other languages.
There are things in Java that will NEVER allow Java to be useful as a general purpose language. The lack of an unsigned datatype is probably the most egregious flaw.
The only reason that unsigned datatypes matter one iota is in interfacing with someone else's code that does use an unsigned datatype, in which case nasty conversions must be done. If you don't need to interface with such code, you find that they are completely unnecessary. I fail to see how that is such a serious flaw.
I'm not saying "Java is the bestest language EVAR!!!", but please get your criticisms right.
If the rate of progress is really accelerating at an "exponential rate", why haven't people gone farther than the moon in the last thirty years or so?
We could, easily. If there were another moon, say, two or three times the distance away, we could easily reach it. Mars, though, isn't two or three times as far -- it's roughly 200 times the distance. Complaining that we haven't improved our spaceflight by a factor of 200 in only 30 years is absurd.
How do you explain the dark ages?
How Euro-centric. The Arabs and Chinese were making major strides during that period, despite what the Europeans had gotten themselves into. In any case, it wouldn't matter -- the fact that the real-life curve has a few bumps doesn't invalidate the idea.
There seems to be a lot of confusion about what the "singularity" is. Here's the deal.
Technological advancement has been occurring at an exponential rate. It took thousands of years to advance from "banging rocks together to start fires" to "simple agriculture", but a mere 66 years to go from the Wright Brother's first airplane to landing on the moon.
This rate of progress continues to accelerate. The time between significant human advancements has decreased from thousands of years, to hundreds, to tens, to the present where we expect major advancements every year or two. Eventually that time will be compressed to months, and then days.
If this continues, then ultimately our inventions will be occurring so quickly that the time between them is mere seconds, or even milliseconds or nanoseconds. This is the "singularity", the time when the progress of human advancement reaches "essentially infinite". Theoretically, we will uncover all the secrets of the universe -- all possible technology -- in seconds.
Sound ridiculous? Each of our inventions is a stepping-stone that makes future inventions easier. A super-intelligent AI will make future inventions pretty damned easy, because it will do all of the work for us. It will figure out how to make an even smarter AI, and it will do it in record time -- and ultimately we'll have something that can solve every problem in infinitesimal time. Thus, progress will become infinitely fast.
This has not been proven. Roger Penrose wrote a couple of interesting books about the subject.
I believe that Penrose is wildly off-base, personally. His application of Godel's incompleteness theorem is faulty, and that destroys the central tenet of many of his arguments.
I must stress that when I say "computer" I do not mean "Turing machine". I consider the brain a computer, although a fantastically complicated and delicate one which cannot be expressed as a Turing machine. To suggest that we cannot build a computer capable of thinking like a human is to suggest that we cannot possibly create an artificial duplicate of the human brain, which is patently absurd in my opinion. We make new brains all the time, just by having sex with one another. What physical law would permit us to create brains by having sex, but prevent us from manufacturing them artificially?
But your assumption that all mathematical proofs are merely algorithmic (= expressible through formal systems) is certainly debatable, at least.
My statement was that humans cannot (in general) solve problems that computers cannot solve, since we are computers. Again, "computer" does not necessarily mean "Turing machine", and most computability proofs apply specifically to Turing machines and are therefore not relevant.
But that doesn't take away from the fact that an intelligent human could look at a source printout and figure out if it halted or not, but no general algorithm can be deduced that would do so.
Complete, utter, and unmitigated bullshit.
If it can't be solved algorithmically, humans can't solve it either. Even if a human came up with the right solution, in the general case, you would never be able to prove it!
Simple example: I write a program which "solves" chess. In other words, it loops through every possible game configuration and determines whether, say, white can always force a win. If so, it halts. Otherwise, it just drops into an infinite loop. Now, naturally, this game would take longer than the universe's lifespan to run, but that's not the point. The point is that determining whether or not this program halts is equivalent to solving the problem in the first place! To know whether or not it halts, you have to know whether or not white can always force a win. The halting problem is equally unsolvable for both man and machine. We both use algorithms, even if we don't understand our own algorithms. The fact that we do use algorithms means that we're just as subject to the rules of what is and is not computable.
Put in other terms, a computer simulating a human brain would be able to solve the exact same problems as a human, and in the same ways. If a human can solve a problem (and prove it, not just make an intelligent guess), then it's by definition computable. The only counter to that is to assume that it is impossible to build a computer that simulates a human brain, but you're on shaky ground making such a claim.