To give skeptics a harder time being skeptics about this? I am not one of the hoax believers, even though I am naturally skeptical to all things space and military we are told about, given the rich history of fuckups and coverups of these fuckups, but you have got to admit that in this age where its getting hard to tell in the movies what has been cg-enerated and what was in fact real, a bunch of pictures supposedly from the Moon will not proove ANYTHING to either hoax believers or those who believe we landed there. If anything, more scrutiny will be asked for with regard to photo material, to which bizarre rules will or will not apply ("no, you cannot have original data!" -NASA)
For this reason, I would say the only way the public would actually accept "public" photograph data as real deal, is if NASA "open-sourced" spacecraft broadcasting interface - frequencies, protocol, encoding, where to set up a dish, size of dish required - so that whoever actually doubts the authencity of such photos, may instead doubt whether NASA is faking a signal from the Moon that carries digital image data. After all, if the information is pubic, it is public. Nothing in the transmission is really secret or falls under NDA anyway? It involves radio waves, some archaic encoding scheme of some color channels and a wrapping protocol for transmission. The open-sourcing of the transmission would force the hoax game onto a whole new level of complexity, where it would not be so easy for the skeptics to cry fake.
From the movie "Contact":
KITZ Oh, I do think you may have suffered some kind of episode, yeah. I do. Doctor, I'd like to propose an alternate hypothesis, if I may, and I'd like you to bring your considerable scientific expertise to bear on it. To fake a signal from Vega, what would you need? ELLIE You would need a satellite to transmit the signal, but it would be impossible to simulate something... KITZ...you would need a satellite, and you would need launch capabilities to put the satellite into orbit. And of course the message itself. To put something like this together, so complex, drawing on so many different disciplines... ELLIE... would be impossible. KITZ Impossible? Impossible? Is there anyone who might have been up to the challenge? Someone with extraordinary technical expertise. Enormous financial resources. Someone perverse enough, eccentric enough to have come up with the idea in the first place? ELLIE Hadden? KITZ S. R. Hadden. ELLIE You're implying that this was all some kind of a hoax, that he engineered this...
The article subject line is misleading. One thing is certain, the commercial space business will not go back to where it came from, the blossoming has passed the point of no return. Given time, it will get off the ground. Given time, pigs will fly too, and birds will breathe nitrogen.
Not exactly a Cyberdyne Systems research object, but a good start:-) Give it a couple of hundred of revisions, and we have on our hands a human terminator with a neural net capable processor, hyperalloy endoskeleton that withstands molten steel exposure and can run at above 60mph for prolonged periods of time and lift objects five times its weight, a plasma fusion reactor for power source good for 200 years of continuous operation, and naturally a very perverse attitude towards all things human.
I took a break and went out to sit in a cafeteria just by where I live. It looks out to a street. So I was sitting there, sipping on green tea (hehe, no pun intended), smelling in the CO2 vapor, and observing all those cars and the drivers inside them. Endless line of those, each inside their metal coffin, inching along the freeways. Nothing spectacular about it. But those who forcefully perpetuate this culture, the wealthy who just want a little bit more of those profits that they know eventually will disappear, they will do their best that before these profits disappear, their pension is safe, the inheritance for their rich kids is safe, and all the property and wealth they have accumulated is under control. I guess this is basic human quality. Minimizing the risks from the environment. Nothing wrong about it, but there are other ways to do it, not at the expense of the whole goddamn planet.
I see that slashdot moderation is a joke. Sad, because after all this is peer reviewed. Seems like someone is just sore. So much for trying some democracy. Who knows, maybe it is one and the same asshole moderating out of his ass. Democracy has many flaws.
A big part of the problem as we have it already is rooted in the ways operate computers, ever since it was the only way to do so (slow, little memory, etc).
We tell our computers not only what to do but out of sheer paranoia HOW to do it. This is because we are not confident we have taught (programmed) the computer to make good decisions and map the road of solutions from the problem to that what we want computer to do, so we employ languages like C to map out every turn the program blindly has to take, no matter the road it is put on really. As most of the programming world, out of habit and what not, employs most slavish forms of imperative programming, what is the chances that a compiler-translator or an operating system (or the underlying hardware which IS INHERENTLY IMPERATIVE by nature) are able to override the decisions that the programmer itself has explicitly made on its behalf and thus ordered it to follow strictly? Granted, some compilers/translators do have freedom of interpretation, but is is also subject to language specification, I mean if you express A is implemented in a B way, then there is so much the compiler can do and no more.
To make an analogy, if your teenage son/daughter interns at your law firm as a your private secretary of sorts, when told "fetch me that contract from the finance dep. on second floor and bring me a good pencil from third for signing it" he/she might not catch and comment on the fact that you don't sign a contract with a pencil, and just follow through your order blindly. If you taught him/her the art of contracts though, he/she might become a much better secretary, might eventually replace you as well:-)
When the programmer assumes he knows most (of all parties involved) EXACTLY HOW the program should solve the problem across time/space, not only for their own testing hardware but for all the combinations of architectures and environments of his programs' users, then those chances are even slimmer. This is program optimization problem, which surfaces when we try to compile our serial source code to run on very parallel systems.
So here we are, discussing solving ways to parallelize our solutions to common problems, when we are like a one-eyed master who tells a slave not only what to do but also how to do it, instead of educating the slave so that he which has better depth-perception can better guide the master. And I am not talking about sloppy out-of-college programmers, this happens to the very best, because the habit was there for so long, I mean we had to tell the slave what to do because historically, that slave character was much more blind than the master and severely handicapped in many areas.
In essence, if we put parallel programming paradigms into an imperative language, how is this going to prevent even great programmers from assuming too much? We need to teach computers how to map the solution themselves, with us only specifying the constraints of such solution, or goals of the program. You might say that such assumptions on human part are always a necessity, because we are just not there yet to have sufficiently intelligent HCI translators, but we should try nevertheless, for the sake of solving several problems at once with one broad look at things. Like one guy here said, how sad is that opening a bunch of pages in Firefox that do absolutely nothing maxes out a modern multi-core, superscalar, out-of-order executing CPU. Is it the faul of a) Firefox slavishly told what to do by programmers that wrote its C code? b) Operating system slavishly doing what kernel calls coming from Firefox tell it do? or c) the underlying hardware slavishly doing what the CPU tells it to do? I'd guess all of the above are equally involved. But can you blame either? All three are, by design, doing their job as they are told.
Perhaps the technology to implement a Universal Turing machine (transistors today) will expire at one point (it is only logical to assume so), but other technologies that can start from there to continue implementing that same machine will emerge and put into use. What I am saying is that the method may change but the concept will live on. I. e. serial processing will continue to evolve, and who knows where the ultimate limit is? Transistors can only go so small yes, but how about made with quantum-mechanics or DNA-based computers or gods know what else? Even if at one point the Turing completeness will start being a bottleneck itself, another form of serial processing concept will take over and be implemented as hardware, who knows. I do believe serial processors can go a lot faster. There are millions of transistors per mm^2 on a modern CPU die, but there are trillions of atoms in that same area, and who knows what they can do in terms of supporting a serial machine of sorts.
Of course, the above can and perhaps should coexist with parallel processing concept, the two don't have to negate each other. A fast serial processor is good, but a lot of serial processors working together to solve a problem is even better.
Perhaps a good cue would be to observe mother Nature and how it gains efficiency by parallelizing anything it can, while still optimizing a multitude of heterogeneous serial processes one by one separately.
I am not sure I would call it an advancement. I ought to give it the deserved credit though - after all more products is always better. Thin film photovoltaic arrays however have been around for some time.
Also, Xunlights rolls have 8% efficiency, compared to around 15% for rigid (and heavy) panels you can already buy to install on the roof etc, or even 20% if you've really got the cash.
But for a laptop charger, you'd have to roll out 1 to 3 m of these, provided your laptop draws anything from 10 to 30 watts depending on load, plus the juice it would need to charge itself while it is being used simultaneously. The good part again is, you can make a nice roll of this and carry it around like a regular mat.
I may have gotten my math a bit wrong, but I was crazy about reading on photovoltaics a while ago and have soaked up a good deal of (what I think is) useful insight, do correct me if I am wrong though..
NoScript extension for Firefox may alleviate the symptoms:-) Does it fix the REAL problem? No. It is almost most annoying to use, when 75% of ALL websites I visit just fail to work without JavaScript, and I mean even navigation does not work, as sloppy Web-programmers use the horrid Microsoft-invented "postback" technique, which uses encoded navigation target as part of a JavaScript function call. Nothing insults WWW when the very method of navigating it - hyperlinks - is rejected in favour of some proprietary, user-unfriendly navigation URLs that need JavaScript to work. So with NoScript, it sort of defeats the purpose of using it, when you have to enable scripting anyway, which also brings all those non-filtered Flash Player applications to life.
No, i think, high cpu usage in pages that have flash is accurate description. The thing is, combination of sloppy Flash Player bytecode executing in a suboptimal version of Flash Player (i. e. for Linux to name one) really sucks the juice out of the CPU and laptop batteries. I am experiencing all those things. Laptop + Linux + Flash = slow, irresponsive experience.
Perhaps a good solution would be to implement some kind of careful sandbox in which all plugins would run, but not necessarily out of security concerns only, but also resource usage. Execute code in the plugin using at most 5% (or user defined) of the CPU, introduce rules and exceptions (when playing Flash games exclusively), etc. Use server-side meta-data (annotations) to tag what runs as fast, for example ads should use a "very low resource usage cap" constraint etc.
This is not only related to Web and Flash. We really lack such a facility on client side, where users have absolutely no control how much resources the applications they use consume. All you can do is restart or throttle down the CPU by force perhaps. Of course the problem is complicated one, but I think it can be done. Am I the one to do it? Maybe, but right now i have a headache:-)
A mature, reasonable person would understand that the world is not black and white. And I tried to settle with explaining you that. The problem with people like you is that there are too many of you, who believe in bruised egos and the world where they educate everyone who objects to their malfunctioning reason. Why should you educate me? Because you quote Wikipedia articles? Have you actually read any serious material on the subject? And if you did, how do you prove it? Student chooses the teacher, not the other way around. Time will come, perhaps I will beat you with a stick myself.
Being an anonymous coward, coming and frantically checking whether your little opinion has been disputed and retaliating beyond measure fits your profile perfectly though. Next time, get a user account, so you will not miss on useful education. Only ignorant fools quote wikipedia, while educated people write those articles instead.
Now you can finally shut up, I hope. But by all means, have the last word, where you try to explain me once again how I should heed to your wisdom. We have failed to convince each other, but I no longer try to convince you, so I said let us agree on disagreeing, which was a way of saying let us both shut up. But on Internet there is only one rule, it seems - the rule of the last word. Have it.
C'mon do you really expect me to bow down before your Wikipedia quoting skills? The good news is the article is in fact very good, it just seems to me you just read it right to left:-) There are so many ways you can interpret it, not in the least because of the very issue here - mangling terms. But I see there is no agreement here. That is fine, sometimes the point is to agree on disagreeing.
There's a reason developers divide systems programming from application programming - because if systems are considered applications, it's pointless even making a distinction. It would all be just "programming." Applications are programs that apply to specific problem domains. Systems support applications in a general-purpose way.
I can see what you are trying to stress here, but you are far too narrow-minded in your attempt at explaining the status-quo. Only a most generic system can be considered distinct from being an 'application'. Such system however is an abstract. Real systems, no matter how generic they are, are supported by a base. An operating system is supported by the hardware it is designed to operate, and is thus a 'hardware application' or simpler put a 'computer application'. That was my original message. I tend to loose temper and for that I must apologize. Let us now all chill. The ignorance must stop though, and I am confident this time around I explained VERY CLEARLY where is the difference and likeness between systems and applications. You tend to narrow the definition to a point where it serves purpose only as part of a very niche subdomain. I broaden it enough so that we all can be confident about talking about the same thing when we think we do. I think a broader view never hurt anyone, while the opposite case has been known to happen far too often.
Windows is an example of computer application, more precisely defined as an 'operating system', a system indeed. An operating system is hence an example of computer application. Pure logic, now what is the problem?
Wake up you crashtest dummy - an operating system is an application of your computer. It is a classic English word. It is in fact you and all the other nerds who very much want to redefine what 'application' refers to - in their case some sort of software running on top of an operating system and which is not a game. However it is accurate that both games and so called 'application software' are all applications of an operating system.
Ignorant illiterates, is it any wonder you fight about "which programming language is better" and "which one is the fastest", when they cannot be classified as either fast or 'good', because as most linguists learn, each language allows best expression of a particular domain, and neither can it be fast nor slow, it is whatever runtime parses such language expression that displays the quality of speed and effective parsing. And is it any wonder you can't write decent code, you are like children with lisp, mangling terms and "re-inventing" them. As far as I am concerned, just about the only body i would trust with writing source code is a space agency or some sort of overly cryptic and serious mission critical contract bearer. All the rest of us are just playing in the mud with our "object oriented programming" and our 'applications'.
And mods, thanks. I deserve the 'flamebait' label.
Oh, it is NOT because they TRY to mimic C, I assure you.
C is closest to the metal, after assembly language. General purpose computing on proprietary vector processors is something new. Naturally, just as with earliest computers, people are careful and the first compiler to pop up is the very straight-forward C-like, which is a natural first (and simplest) choice. C was designed to be close to metal, but this also made for a very simple compilers. C is very efficient in that sense - for RASP (Random Access Stored Program) Von Neumann architectures, which 99% of todays computers are - it is a real good compromise for a language that is quite readable and yet does not require state of art compiler to translate REALLY efficiently for the machine to understand. So, I think, they did not mimic C to run shaders for its beauty and programming potential, it is just that C is the next step of programming these shaders above bare assembly.
Just as with all software however, in my opinion, C becomes more difficult to maintain for very large programs, because the programmer tends to loose oversight of the problem among all those close-to-metal C primitives and/or misses on optimization, assuming stuff without profiling or inevitably negating optimization for one platform while trying to adapt for the other with his cross-platform C.
Anyways I may be wrong here, but from my experience I start to lean heavily towards starting to trust automated translators (compilers) more than I trust MYSELF when optimizing C code, and I know a lot about optimizing C code. Of course we are very far off from having compilers produce the kind of inverse square root functions John Carmack has written, but then again, an inverse square root function is a mathematical function, not something a compiler needs to write itself.
Slashdot Mirror
To give skeptics a harder time being skeptics about this? I am not one of the hoax believers, even though I am naturally skeptical to all things space and military we are told about, given the rich history of fuckups and coverups of these fuckups, but you have got to admit that in this age where its getting hard to tell in the movies what has been cg-enerated and what was in fact real, a bunch of pictures supposedly from the Moon will not proove ANYTHING to either hoax believers or those who believe we landed there. If anything, more scrutiny will be asked for with regard to photo material, to which bizarre rules will or will not apply ("no, you cannot have original data!" -NASA)
For this reason, I would say the only way the public would actually accept "public" photograph data as real deal, is if NASA "open-sourced" spacecraft broadcasting interface - frequencies, protocol, encoding, where to set up a dish, size of dish required - so that whoever actually doubts the authencity of such photos, may instead doubt whether NASA is faking a signal from the Moon that carries digital image data. After all, if the information is pubic, it is public. Nothing in the transmission is really secret or falls under NDA anyway? It involves radio waves, some archaic encoding scheme of some color channels and a wrapping protocol for transmission. The open-sourcing of the transmission would force the hoax game onto a whole new level of complexity, where it would not be so easy for the skeptics to cry fake.
From the movie "Contact":
KITZ ...you would need a satellite, and you would need launch capabilities to put the satellite into orbit. And of course the message itself. To put something like this together, so complex, drawing on so many different disciplines... ... would be impossible.
Oh, I do think you may have suffered some kind of episode, yeah. I do. Doctor, I'd like to propose an alternate hypothesis, if I may, and I'd like you to bring your considerable scientific expertise to bear on it. To fake a signal from Vega, what would you need?
ELLIE
You would need a satellite to transmit the signal, but it would be impossible to simulate something...
KITZ
ELLIE
KITZ
Impossible? Impossible? Is there anyone who might have been up to the challenge? Someone with extraordinary technical expertise. Enormous financial resources. Someone perverse enough, eccentric enough to have come up with the idea in the first place?
ELLIE
Hadden?
KITZ
S. R. Hadden.
ELLIE
You're implying that this was all some kind of a hoax, that he engineered this...
An atom packs an good deal of energy, yet I don't see them exploding around me all the time.
The article subject line is misleading. One thing is certain, the commercial space business will not go back to where it came from, the blossoming has passed the point of no return. Given time, it will get off the ground. Given time, pigs will fly too, and birds will breathe nitrogen.
Well, hopefully, as with many (not all though) other things that cost money, the process will perhaps get cheaper?
Send it off into space. Plenty of space in space.
Not exactly a Cyberdyne Systems research object, but a good start :-) Give it a couple of hundred of revisions, and we have on our hands a human terminator with a neural net capable processor, hyperalloy endoskeleton that withstands molten steel exposure and can run at above 60mph for prolonged periods of time and lift objects five times its weight, a plasma fusion reactor for power source good for 200 years of continuous operation, and naturally a very perverse attitude towards all things human.
I took a break and went out to sit in a cafeteria just by where I live. It looks out to a street. So I was sitting there, sipping on green tea (hehe, no pun intended), smelling in the CO2 vapor, and observing all those cars and the drivers inside them. Endless line of those, each inside their metal coffin, inching along the freeways. Nothing spectacular about it. But those who forcefully perpetuate this culture, the wealthy who just want a little bit more of those profits that they know eventually will disappear, they will do their best that before these profits disappear, their pension is safe, the inheritance for their rich kids is safe, and all the property and wealth they have accumulated is under control. I guess this is basic human quality. Minimizing the risks from the environment. Nothing wrong about it, but there are other ways to do it, not at the expense of the whole goddamn planet.
I see that slashdot moderation is a joke. Sad, because after all this is peer reviewed. Seems like someone is just sore. So much for trying some democracy. Who knows, maybe it is one and the same asshole moderating out of his ass. Democracy has many flaws.
A big part of the problem as we have it already is rooted in the ways operate computers, ever since it was the only way to do so (slow, little memory, etc).
We tell our computers not only what to do but out of sheer paranoia HOW to do it. This is because we are not confident we have taught (programmed) the computer to make good decisions and map the road of solutions from the problem to that what we want computer to do, so we employ languages like C to map out every turn the program blindly has to take, no matter the road it is put on really. As most of the programming world, out of habit and what not, employs most slavish forms of imperative programming, what is the chances that a compiler-translator or an operating system (or the underlying hardware which IS INHERENTLY IMPERATIVE by nature) are able to override the decisions that the programmer itself has explicitly made on its behalf and thus ordered it to follow strictly? Granted, some compilers/translators do have freedom of interpretation, but is is also subject to language specification, I mean if you express A is implemented in a B way, then there is so much the compiler can do and no more.
To make an analogy, if your teenage son/daughter interns at your law firm as a your private secretary of sorts, when told "fetch me that contract from the finance dep. on second floor and bring me a good pencil from third for signing it" he/she might not catch and comment on the fact that you don't sign a contract with a pencil, and just follow through your order blindly. If you taught him/her the art of contracts though, he/she might become a much better secretary, might eventually replace you as well :-)
When the programmer assumes he knows most (of all parties involved) EXACTLY HOW the program should solve the problem across time/space, not only for their own testing hardware but for all the combinations of architectures and environments of his programs' users, then those chances are even slimmer. This is program optimization problem, which surfaces when we try to compile our serial source code to run on very parallel systems.
So here we are, discussing solving ways to parallelize our solutions to common problems, when we are like a one-eyed master who tells a slave not only what to do but also how to do it, instead of educating the slave so that he which has better depth-perception can better guide the master. And I am not talking about sloppy out-of-college programmers, this happens to the very best, because the habit was there for so long, I mean we had to tell the slave what to do because historically, that slave character was much more blind than the master and severely handicapped in many areas.
In essence, if we put parallel programming paradigms into an imperative language, how is this going to prevent even great programmers from assuming too much? We need to teach computers how to map the solution themselves, with us only specifying the constraints of such solution, or goals of the program. You might say that such assumptions on human part are always a necessity, because we are just not there yet to have sufficiently intelligent HCI translators, but we should try nevertheless, for the sake of solving several problems at once with one broad look at things. Like one guy here said, how sad is that opening a bunch of pages in Firefox that do absolutely nothing maxes out a modern multi-core, superscalar, out-of-order executing CPU. Is it the faul of a) Firefox slavishly told what to do by programmers that wrote its C code? b) Operating system slavishly doing what kernel calls coming from Firefox tell it do? or c) the underlying hardware slavishly doing what the CPU tells it to do? I'd guess all of the above are equally involved. But can you blame either? All three are, by design, doing their job as they are told.
Perhaps the technology to implement a Universal Turing machine (transistors today) will expire at one point (it is only logical to assume so), but other technologies that can start from there to continue implementing that same machine will emerge and put into use. What I am saying is that the method may change but the concept will live on. I. e. serial processing will continue to evolve, and who knows where the ultimate limit is? Transistors can only go so small yes, but how about made with quantum-mechanics or DNA-based computers or gods know what else? Even if at one point the Turing completeness will start being a bottleneck itself, another form of serial processing concept will take over and be implemented as hardware, who knows. I do believe serial processors can go a lot faster. There are millions of transistors per mm^2 on a modern CPU die, but there are trillions of atoms in that same area, and who knows what they can do in terms of supporting a serial machine of sorts.
Of course, the above can and perhaps should coexist with parallel processing concept, the two don't have to negate each other. A fast serial processor is good, but a lot of serial processors working together to solve a problem is even better.
Perhaps a good cue would be to observe mother Nature and how it gains efficiency by parallelizing anything it can, while still optimizing a multitude of heterogeneous serial processes one by one separately.
This comment may be a lot of things, but it most certainly is not a Troll.
In the post above, it was supposed to read "1 to 3 m^2", but the submit script ate and swallowed my superscripted power value there.
I am not sure I would call it an advancement. I ought to give it the deserved credit though - after all more products is always better. Thin film photovoltaic arrays however have been around for some time.
Also, Xunlights rolls have 8% efficiency, compared to around 15% for rigid (and heavy) panels you can already buy to install on the roof etc, or even 20% if you've really got the cash.
The good part is, according to this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Solar_land_area.png, the black dots represent areas where installing 8% efficient modules would finely cover worlds energy consumption needs.
But for a laptop charger, you'd have to roll out 1 to 3 m of these, provided your laptop draws anything from 10 to 30 watts depending on load, plus the juice it would need to charge itself while it is being used simultaneously. The good part again is, you can make a nice roll of this and carry it around like a regular mat.
I may have gotten my math a bit wrong, but I was crazy about reading on photovoltaics a while ago and have soaked up a good deal of (what I think is) useful insight, do correct me if I am wrong though..
Umm, exactly why should I be looking for "word, excel and powerpoint" on that page?
NoScript extension for Firefox may alleviate the symptoms :-) Does it fix the REAL problem? No. It is almost most annoying to use, when 75% of ALL websites I visit just fail to work without JavaScript, and I mean even navigation does not work, as sloppy Web-programmers use the horrid Microsoft-invented "postback" technique, which uses encoded navigation target as part of a JavaScript function call. Nothing insults WWW when the very method of navigating it - hyperlinks - is rejected in favour of some proprietary, user-unfriendly navigation URLs that need JavaScript to work. So with NoScript, it sort of defeats the purpose of using it, when you have to enable scripting anyway, which also brings all those non-filtered Flash Player applications to life.
No, i think, high cpu usage in pages that have flash is accurate description. The thing is, combination of sloppy Flash Player bytecode executing in a suboptimal version of Flash Player (i. e. for Linux to name one) really sucks the juice out of the CPU and laptop batteries. I am experiencing all those things. Laptop + Linux + Flash = slow, irresponsive experience.
Perhaps a good solution would be to implement some kind of careful sandbox in which all plugins would run, but not necessarily out of security concerns only, but also resource usage. Execute code in the plugin using at most 5% (or user defined) of the CPU, introduce rules and exceptions (when playing Flash games exclusively), etc. Use server-side meta-data (annotations) to tag what runs as fast, for example ads should use a "very low resource usage cap" constraint etc.
This is not only related to Web and Flash. We really lack such a facility on client side, where users have absolutely no control how much resources the applications they use consume. All you can do is restart or throttle down the CPU by force perhaps. Of course the problem is complicated one, but I think it can be done. Am I the one to do it? Maybe, but right now i have a headache :-)
A mature, reasonable person would understand that the world is not black and white. And I tried to settle with explaining you that. The problem with people like you is that there are too many of you, who believe in bruised egos and the world where they educate everyone who objects to their malfunctioning reason. Why should you educate me? Because you quote Wikipedia articles? Have you actually read any serious material on the subject? And if you did, how do you prove it? Student chooses the teacher, not the other way around. Time will come, perhaps I will beat you with a stick myself.
Being an anonymous coward, coming and frantically checking whether your little opinion has been disputed and retaliating beyond measure fits your profile perfectly though. Next time, get a user account, so you will not miss on useful education. Only ignorant fools quote wikipedia, while educated people write those articles instead.
Now you can finally shut up, I hope. But by all means, have the last word, where you try to explain me once again how I should heed to your wisdom. We have failed to convince each other, but I no longer try to convince you, so I said let us agree on disagreeing, which was a way of saying let us both shut up. But on Internet there is only one rule, it seems - the rule of the last word. Have it.
C'mon do you really expect me to bow down before your Wikipedia quoting skills? The good news is the article is in fact very good, it just seems to me you just read it right to left :-) There are so many ways you can interpret it, not in the least because of the very issue here - mangling terms. But I see there is no agreement here. That is fine, sometimes the point is to agree on disagreeing.
Are you stupid? What word in the paragraph you did not understand? If you have no time to read, you should definitely not have time to reply.
There's a reason developers divide systems programming from application programming - because if systems are considered applications, it's pointless even making a distinction. It would all be just "programming." Applications are programs that apply to specific problem domains. Systems support applications in a general-purpose way.
I can see what you are trying to stress here, but you are far too narrow-minded in your attempt at explaining the status-quo. Only a most generic system can be considered distinct from being an 'application'. Such system however is an abstract. Real systems, no matter how generic they are, are supported by a base. An operating system is supported by the hardware it is designed to operate, and is thus a 'hardware application' or simpler put a 'computer application'. That was my original message. I tend to loose temper and for that I must apologize. Let us now all chill. The ignorance must stop though, and I am confident this time around I explained VERY CLEARLY where is the difference and likeness between systems and applications. You tend to narrow the definition to a point where it serves purpose only as part of a very niche subdomain. I broaden it enough so that we all can be confident about talking about the same thing when we think we do. I think a broader view never hurt anyone, while the opposite case has been known to happen far too often.
Windows is an example of computer application, more precisely defined as an 'operating system', a system indeed. An operating system is hence an example of computer application. Pure logic, now what is the problem?
What planet are you from? More importantly what is your spoken language, coz it aint English.
Everybody but you knows that an operating system is an application of computer hardware (to let a human operate it conveniently).
As for the rest of your acidic blabber, i will just leave it.
P.S. What does 'arse' has to do with ANYTHING I have said? It is just a place you are pulling your worthless remarks from.
Wake up you crashtest dummy - an operating system is an application of your computer. It is a classic English word. It is in fact you and all the other nerds who very much want to redefine what 'application' refers to - in their case some sort of software running on top of an operating system and which is not a game. However it is accurate that both games and so called 'application software' are all applications of an operating system.
Ignorant illiterates, is it any wonder you fight about "which programming language is better" and "which one is the fastest", when they cannot be classified as either fast or 'good', because as most linguists learn, each language allows best expression of a particular domain, and neither can it be fast nor slow, it is whatever runtime parses such language expression that displays the quality of speed and effective parsing. And is it any wonder you can't write decent code, you are like children with lisp, mangling terms and "re-inventing" them. As far as I am concerned, just about the only body i would trust with writing source code is a space agency or some sort of overly cryptic and serious mission critical contract bearer. All the rest of us are just playing in the mud with our "object oriented programming" and our 'applications'.
And mods, thanks. I deserve the 'flamebait' label.
Operating systems are applications of computers. Your ignorance is boring.
Umm yes, now how does it contradict anything I have said? I am not sure why you have asked me this. Perhaps just a question?
Oh, it is NOT because they TRY to mimic C, I assure you.
C is closest to the metal, after assembly language. General purpose computing on proprietary vector processors is something new. Naturally, just as with earliest computers, people are careful and the first compiler to pop up is the very straight-forward C-like, which is a natural first (and simplest) choice. C was designed to be close to metal, but this also made for a very simple compilers. C is very efficient in that sense - for RASP (Random Access Stored Program) Von Neumann architectures, which 99% of todays computers are - it is a real good compromise for a language that is quite readable and yet does not require state of art compiler to translate REALLY efficiently for the machine to understand. So, I think, they did not mimic C to run shaders for its beauty and programming potential, it is just that C is the next step of programming these shaders above bare assembly.
Just as with all software however, in my opinion, C becomes more difficult to maintain for very large programs, because the programmer tends to loose oversight of the problem among all those close-to-metal C primitives and/or misses on optimization, assuming stuff without profiling or inevitably negating optimization for one platform while trying to adapt for the other with his cross-platform C.
Anyways I may be wrong here, but from my experience I start to lean heavily towards starting to trust automated translators (compilers) more than I trust MYSELF when optimizing C code, and I know a lot about optimizing C code. Of course we are very far off from having compilers produce the kind of inverse square root functions John Carmack has written, but then again, an inverse square root function is a mathematical function, not something a compiler needs to write itself.