True enough, but the class of applications for which parallel processing is useful is growing rapidly as programmers learn to think in those terms. Any program with a "for" or "while" loop in which the results of one iteration do not depend on the results of the previous iteration, as well as a fair number of such loops in which the results do have such a dependency, is a candidate for parallelization -- and that means most of the programs which most programmers will ever write. We just need the languages not to make coding this way too painful.
There are some packages on CRAN that claim to implement parallel processing for R -- go to http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/ and search for the text "parallel" to find several examples. I haven't tried any of them out yet, but sooner or later I'm going to have to.
And actually, I think that "scripting" languages in general will have a very bright future in the parallel processing world. If memory management and garbage collection are implemented invisibly (and well!) in the core language, then the programmer can concentrate on the application logic and not have to worry about the kind of allocation headaches discussed in TFA. Python and R, where I spend most of my coding time these days, both offer very nicely implemented versions of function mapping, which I see as the key to making multiple processors useful for a wide variety of tasks. And no, the memory management and GC aren't quite there yet in either language, but they will be.
I doubt you're anywhere near as cute as my fiancee. Sorry, you're going to have to work out your repressed impulses somewhere else. May I suggest airport restrooms?
Well, yeah, that was what I meant when I said "deathly afraid of the Think Of The Chiiildren wackos." I still think the "fundie on a crusade" possibility is a little more likely, though, because anyone who is capable of using a web browser knows how much potentially offensive material is easily available; someone who's that afraid of getting sued would be well advised not to work for a company that distributes any internet-enabled applications of any kind, which of course Apple does.
This is happening often enough, and in a similar enough way each time, that it seems likely to me that someone's doing it as a matter of policy. If it's just individual actions on the part of low-level employees, I'd expect those people to be discovered and fired fairly quickly.
1. Someone high up in the App Store hierarchy is completely batshit insane. They're a fundie wacko, or they're deathly afraid of the Think Of The Chiiildren wackos, or something like that. I really just can't believe that the orders to ban anything that can get dirty words from anywhere on the internet came down from upper management; they can't be that ignorant. So it's someone on a personal crusade who has just enough pull to make it work.
2. Apple basically wants to own every internet-enabled app on the iPhone, and they're using these dumb excuses to get rid of any competition. Sooner or later, they think, everything you do on the iPhone that isn't strictly local will go through an app bearing the Apple logo.
Either way, it's a dumb move. I'm one of those irritating smug Mac users everyone loves to whine about. The last five computers I've bought have been Macs, and the next five probably will be as well. Whenever anyone asks me about what to do with their malware-ridden PCs, I say, "get a Mac." And I was seriously considering getting an iPhone to go with my iPod and iEverythingElse... but I'm not going to even think about it until Apple fixes whatever the hell is going on with the App Store. I really doubt I'm the only one.
Try reading TFA instead of just TFS. It goes into a reasonable amount of detail, and should help dispel some of your doubts. (Unless, of course, you're already determined to reach the opposite conclusion, in which case there's no reason you should confuse your pretty little head with facts.) Girls perform at least as well mathematically as boys in a number of countries, including those where there's a lot less worry about "traditionally disadvantaged" groups than there is here in the US. You'll have a hell of a time pinning this on political correctness in Korea...
Thank you for showing the reality of the attitudes held by bigots on this subject. Most of them try to disguise their sexism, racism, etc. You come right out with yours, and reveal the thinking which underlies all such claims.
In every field which was once exclusively male, but is now no longer, it's been claimed first, that no woman can perform alongside men; second, when the first claim is disproven, that hardly any woman can; and third, when the second claim is disproven, that maybe a few women can, but a majority lack the ability or the inclination. And every single time, as the residual sexism fades, the third claim is shown to be false as well. Business, politics, medicine: it's a familiar pattern. Now math is next on the list.
In short, if there's a difference, it's not the sex, it's the sexism. Anyone who can't acknowledge this is a bigot and a twit.
Men and women are different, yadda yadda. Yes, they are, and they may be even be different in ways that affect performance at certain jobs. But every time the issue is put to the test, we see that those differences are not nearly as signficant as the bigots desperately believe. The difference in means between the sexes, or any other groups into which people can conveniently be divided, is far smaller than the variances between individuals.
Your black neighbors, who have the rights of citizenship thanks to the damned Yankees very much not staying the hell of your lawns, probably won't share your feelings of Dixie solidarity.
Look, I know y'all love your Stars and Bars, but the war is over. You lost. Deal with it.
I semi-agree -- procedural languages are much closer to the way most people think, and that's why pure functional languages have remained a niche. OTOH, the power and expressiveness of functional programming is really amazing. It seems to me that this is a major reason for Python's success: it's basically a procedural language (of which OO is a subset) that makes a functional style easily available.
Except the Chinese government is trying to control the market and shut down competition, and the Japanese government is... doing something, presumably, but what isn't exactly clear from TFA. They could try to promote competition, but unsurprisingly, it doesn't sound like they're doing it.
Windows and Mac OS provide a devoloper with a guaranteed stable platform development-wise, and as such are much safer bets.
Pretty much every major release of Windows or of OS X is guaranteed to break someone's application. More stable than Linux? Maybe so. Really, truly stable? Not so much.
And drop some legacy systems (X comes to mind) along the way.
X is the only GUI* which is pretty much guaranteed to be installed on every Unix and Unix-type system in the modern world. It is to GUIs what ASCII is to text encoding schemes, or what HTML is to markup languages. We're never going to completely get rid of it, and any widely used standard that replaces it is going to have to include it as a subset. You may not like it, but it's relatively simple, its quirks are well understood, and dismissing it as "legacy" isn't going to make it go away.
*Please let's not get into the argument over whether or not X is a "real" GUI because it doesn't include this or that feature of your favorite window manager. It's as silly over the argument over whether MySQL is a "real" DBMS, or Perl / Python / Ruby / scripting language of your choice is a "real" programming language. The answer to all of these is "yes." Now let's move on.
Ever heard the phrase "publish or perish?" Trust me, there's just as much pressure in academia to produce results within a specified time frame as there is in industry. The organization's measurement is different -- publications vs. ROI -- but the situation of the individual researcher is much the same.
Some systems are inherently less insecure than others. I don't know why this is so hard to understand. Everyone gets that some chips are faster than others, some hard drives have more capacity than others, etc. But when it comes to operating systems and security, a lot of people continue to insist on an equality that clearly doesn't exist.
The difference this time is that Obama is a Democrat, so the media will ignore the czar's complete ineffectiveness and never criticize anything he or she does.
You're not just trolling, are you? You actually believe that. Dear God.
Have you actually read a newspaper, or watched a TV news program, or listened to a radio news show, at any point during Obama's administration? Or during the Clinton administration? Or during the Carter administration, assuming you're old enough to remember that? Ever?
Scientology is currently everyone's favorite whipping boy. Followers of larger and more powerful religions don't want to get into a debate about whose beliefs are nuttier, because they're all about equally nutty when you get right down to it. So instead they label it a "cult" and try to make it go away. Sometimes that doesn't work out so well, but it's never stopped the powers-that-be from trying.
There's a limit. I.e., if you're the sort of person best described as a "drug-using hooker-banging ex-con" and that's it, you're not getting in. But if you're basically an upstanding citizen who in your younger days smoked a joint or two, visited a prostitute once or twice, or got caught shoplifting some low-value item, it would be stupid for the service to reject you on that basis alone. (Actually, as far as the prostitution bit goes, fighter jocks and hookers go together like ducks and water.)
On a serious note, you stated that you were applying for a software patent. That information, in and of itself, is enough to tell me that what you are doing is wrong. My "torturing puppies" example may have been melodramatic, but there's a reason I chose it: certain things are always wrong, and there is no benefit which can possibly be gained from them sufficient to make them right. Torturing puppies is one of those things, and patenting software is another. Your flippant comment about the "chorus of boos" indicates that not only don't you understand this, you don't even understand that there are other people who do understand it. Maybe you should try.
I'm in the process of applying for a software patent myself (I know, summon the chorus of boos; but having it could be the difference between being able to raise VC and not being able to raise VC for my starting business; loans, too, are often secured against your IP).
So if your VCs wanted you to torture puppies to death before they'd give you money, would the "chorus of boos" have any effect on your actions?
There are many ways to get money. Some of them are right, and some of them are wrong. People with consciences know there's a difference.
A wide variety of mining and manufacturing operations which have already been proposed for the Moon, by people who have studied the idea in great detail. This information is widely available, and it's not my job to educate you on the subject. If you were interested in having an a rational debate, I might be willing to give you a few pointers, but you've pretty much declared that you're already at the "my mind is made up, don't confuse me with facts" stage. Enjoy your ignorance.
This may come as a shock to you, but there are a number of environmentalists, myself among them, who agree completely that using off-world resources and finding (or creating) places other than Earth where large numbers of people can live is a Really Good Idea. The problem is time. Even if every industrialized nation in the world committed themselves right now to a serious, well-funded program of space resource utilization and colonization, it would be a generation before the materiel started coming back to Earth in significant amounts, and another generation or two after that before emigration to off-world colonies would have a prayer of reducing population pressure in any meaningful way. In the meantime, we have to find a way to work toward sustainability, even if we don't actually get to that point... or else find ourselves in the nightmare scenario you describe, which would pretty much guarantee that we'd all be stuck on this planet for a very long time to come.
Right now, at this moment in history, we can do both: work toward colonizing the Solar System, and also work toward keeping Earth a good place to live. We may not have that option much longer. Extremists who dismiss those who concentrate on one or the other goal as "idiots" really aren't helping.
Slashdot Mirror
True enough, but the class of applications for which parallel processing is useful is growing rapidly as programmers learn to think in those terms. Any program with a "for" or "while" loop in which the results of one iteration do not depend on the results of the previous iteration, as well as a fair number of such loops in which the results do have such a dependency, is a candidate for parallelization -- and that means most of the programs which most programmers will ever write. We just need the languages not to make coding this way too painful.
There are some packages on CRAN that claim to implement parallel processing for R -- go to http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/ and search for the text "parallel" to find several examples. I haven't tried any of them out yet, but sooner or later I'm going to have to.
And actually, I think that "scripting" languages in general will have a very bright future in the parallel processing world. If memory management and garbage collection are implemented invisibly (and well!) in the core language, then the programmer can concentrate on the application logic and not have to worry about the kind of allocation headaches discussed in TFA. Python and R, where I spend most of my coding time these days, both offer very nicely implemented versions of function mapping, which I see as the key to making multiple processors useful for a wide variety of tasks. And no, the memory management and GC aren't quite there yet in either language, but they will be.
I doubt you're anywhere near as cute as my fiancee. Sorry, you're going to have to work out your repressed impulses somewhere else. May I suggest airport restrooms?
Well, yeah, that was what I meant when I said "deathly afraid of the Think Of The Chiiildren wackos." I still think the "fundie on a crusade" possibility is a little more likely, though, because anyone who is capable of using a web browser knows how much potentially offensive material is easily available; someone who's that afraid of getting sued would be well advised not to work for a company that distributes any internet-enabled applications of any kind, which of course Apple does.
This is happening often enough, and in a similar enough way each time, that it seems likely to me that someone's doing it as a matter of policy. If it's just individual actions on the part of low-level employees, I'd expect those people to be discovered and fired fairly quickly.
... I can think of two possibilities here.
1. Someone high up in the App Store hierarchy is completely batshit insane. They're a fundie wacko, or they're deathly afraid of the Think Of The Chiiildren wackos, or something like that. I really just can't believe that the orders to ban anything that can get dirty words from anywhere on the internet came down from upper management; they can't be that ignorant. So it's someone on a personal crusade who has just enough pull to make it work.
2. Apple basically wants to own every internet-enabled app on the iPhone, and they're using these dumb excuses to get rid of any competition. Sooner or later, they think, everything you do on the iPhone that isn't strictly local will go through an app bearing the Apple logo.
Either way, it's a dumb move. I'm one of those irritating smug Mac users everyone loves to whine about. The last five computers I've bought have been Macs, and the next five probably will be as well. Whenever anyone asks me about what to do with their malware-ridden PCs, I say, "get a Mac." And I was seriously considering getting an iPhone to go with my iPod and iEverythingElse ... but I'm not going to even think about it until Apple fixes whatever the hell is going on with the App Store. I really doubt I'm the only one.
Try reading TFA instead of just TFS. It goes into a reasonable amount of detail, and should help dispel some of your doubts. (Unless, of course, you're already determined to reach the opposite conclusion, in which case there's no reason you should confuse your pretty little head with facts.) Girls perform at least as well mathematically as boys in a number of countries, including those where there's a lot less worry about "traditionally disadvantaged" groups than there is here in the US. You'll have a hell of a time pinning this on political correctness in Korea ...
Thank you for showing the reality of the attitudes held by bigots on this subject. Most of them try to disguise their sexism, racism, etc. You come right out with yours, and reveal the thinking which underlies all such claims.
In every field which was once exclusively male, but is now no longer, it's been claimed first, that no woman can perform alongside men; second, when the first claim is disproven, that hardly any woman can; and third, when the second claim is disproven, that maybe a few women can, but a majority lack the ability or the inclination. And every single time, as the residual sexism fades, the third claim is shown to be false as well. Business, politics, medicine: it's a familiar pattern. Now math is next on the list.
In short, if there's a difference, it's not the sex, it's the sexism. Anyone who can't acknowledge this is a bigot and a twit.
Men and women are different, yadda yadda. Yes, they are, and they may be even be different in ways that affect performance at certain jobs. But every time the issue is put to the test, we see that those differences are not nearly as signficant as the bigots desperately believe. The difference in means between the sexes, or any other groups into which people can conveniently be divided, is far smaller than the variances between individuals.
It was only 6000 years ago -- didn't anyone get any pictures?
Your black neighbors, who have the rights of citizenship thanks to the damned Yankees very much not staying the hell of your lawns, probably won't share your feelings of Dixie solidarity.
Look, I know y'all love your Stars and Bars, but the war is over. You lost. Deal with it.
I semi-agree -- procedural languages are much closer to the way most people think, and that's why pure functional languages have remained a niche. OTOH, the power and expressiveness of functional programming is really amazing. It seems to me that this is a major reason for Python's success: it's basically a procedural language (of which OO is a subset) that makes a functional style easily available.
Except the Chinese government is trying to control the market and shut down competition, and the Japanese government is ... doing something, presumably, but what isn't exactly clear from TFA. They could try to promote competition, but unsurprisingly, it doesn't sound like they're doing it.
Windows and Mac OS provide a devoloper with a guaranteed stable platform development-wise, and as such are much safer bets.
Pretty much every major release of Windows or of OS X is guaranteed to break someone's application. More stable than Linux? Maybe so. Really, truly stable? Not so much.
And drop some legacy systems (X comes to mind) along the way.
X is the only GUI* which is pretty much guaranteed to be installed on every Unix and Unix-type system in the modern world. It is to GUIs what ASCII is to text encoding schemes, or what HTML is to markup languages. We're never going to completely get rid of it, and any widely used standard that replaces it is going to have to include it as a subset. You may not like it, but it's relatively simple, its quirks are well understood, and dismissing it as "legacy" isn't going to make it go away.
*Please let's not get into the argument over whether or not X is a "real" GUI because it doesn't include this or that feature of your favorite window manager. It's as silly over the argument over whether MySQL is a "real" DBMS, or Perl / Python / Ruby / scripting language of your choice is a "real" programming language. The answer to all of these is "yes." Now let's move on.
Ever heard the phrase "publish or perish?" Trust me, there's just as much pressure in academia to produce results within a specified time frame as there is in industry. The organization's measurement is different -- publications vs. ROI -- but the situation of the individual researcher is much the same.
Some systems are inherently less insecure than others. I don't know why this is so hard to understand. Everyone gets that some chips are faster than others, some hard drives have more capacity than others, etc. But when it comes to operating systems and security, a lot of people continue to insist on an equality that clearly doesn't exist.
The difference this time is that Obama is a Democrat, so the media will ignore the czar's complete ineffectiveness and never criticize anything he or she does.
You're not just trolling, are you? You actually believe that. Dear God.
Have you actually read a newspaper, or watched a TV news program, or listened to a radio news show, at any point during Obama's administration? Or during the Clinton administration? Or during the Carter administration, assuming you're old enough to remember that? Ever?
Scientology is currently everyone's favorite whipping boy. Followers of larger and more powerful religions don't want to get into a debate about whose beliefs are nuttier, because they're all about equally nutty when you get right down to it. So instead they label it a "cult" and try to make it go away. Sometimes that doesn't work out so well, but it's never stopped the powers-that-be from trying.
There's a limit. I.e., if you're the sort of person best described as a "drug-using hooker-banging ex-con" and that's it, you're not getting in. But if you're basically an upstanding citizen who in your younger days smoked a joint or two, visited a prostitute once or twice, or got caught shoplifting some low-value item, it would be stupid for the service to reject you on that basis alone. (Actually, as far as the prostitution bit goes, fighter jocks and hookers go together like ducks and water.)
How many things in nature have been IMPROVED through human involvement?
Go on, count them...I'll wait.
Ever heard of polio?
Know why we don't worry about it much any more?
On a serious note, you stated that you were applying for a software patent. That information, in and of itself, is enough to tell me that what you are doing is wrong. My "torturing puppies" example may have been melodramatic, but there's a reason I chose it: certain things are always wrong, and there is no benefit which can possibly be gained from them sufficient to make them right. Torturing puppies is one of those things, and patenting software is another. Your flippant comment about the "chorus of boos" indicates that not only don't you understand this, you don't even understand that there are other people who do understand it. Maybe you should try.
I'm in the process of applying for a software patent myself (I know, summon the chorus of boos; but having it could be the difference between being able to raise VC and not being able to raise VC for my starting business; loans, too, are often secured against your IP).
So if your VCs wanted you to torture puppies to death before they'd give you money, would the "chorus of boos" have any effect on your actions?
There are many ways to get money. Some of them are right, and some of them are wrong. People with consciences know there's a difference.
A wide variety of mining and manufacturing operations which have already been proposed for the Moon, by people who have studied the idea in great detail. This information is widely available, and it's not my job to educate you on the subject. If you were interested in having an a rational debate, I might be willing to give you a few pointers, but you've pretty much declared that you're already at the "my mind is made up, don't confuse me with facts" stage. Enjoy your ignorance.
This may come as a shock to you, but there are a number of environmentalists, myself among them, who agree completely that using off-world resources and finding (or creating) places other than Earth where large numbers of people can live is a Really Good Idea. The problem is time. Even if every industrialized nation in the world committed themselves right now to a serious, well-funded program of space resource utilization and colonization, it would be a generation before the materiel started coming back to Earth in significant amounts, and another generation or two after that before emigration to off-world colonies would have a prayer of reducing population pressure in any meaningful way. In the meantime, we have to find a way to work toward sustainability, even if we don't actually get to that point ... or else find ourselves in the nightmare scenario you describe, which would pretty much guarantee that we'd all be stuck on this planet for a very long time to come.
Right now, at this moment in history, we can do both: work toward colonizing the Solar System, and also work toward keeping Earth a good place to live. We may not have that option much longer. Extremists who dismiss those who concentrate on one or the other goal as "idiots" really aren't helping.