Ditto. They also could have researched if submissions in a given (same) GCJ identity have been (or had a high probability of being...) written by two or more different coders...
The submissions' speed of top ranked coders seen in early stages of the GCJ contest always amazed me (compared, of course, with my turtle sluggishness...)
In a few time (a couple of years) I think Julia (http://julialang.org/) will be a contender. At present is not fully mature for industrial application IMHO (some evolution in syntax is expected, and debugging is ongoing).
Julia is a mix of Matlab, C and a typical scripting language (Perl, Python, Ruby....), wraps several numerical libraries (e.g. LAPACK for 'normal' matrices and SuiteSparse for sparse matrices, BLAS functions, PCRE for regular expressions...) and is prepared from its inception for painless running in parallel platforms. Its loaded with a ton of numerical functions (Bessels, Gammas, etc...) A good JIT compiler makes it run many numerical benchmarks almost as fast as compiled C or Fortran (see examples in the front page of http://julialang.org/), and also allows for many of the functions in Julia's standard library to be written in Julia instead of in C.
Julia is a Swiss knife for (numerical and scientific) programming in the making. It is open source and free and at present already runs in most platforms.
Alibaba has a front end to the final consumer called aliexpress, very similar to ebay. I've already used it 3 or 4 times, and everything went well (expected items and of good quality, good communication, etc...) I was buying sports stuff from Chinese brands, so the risk of getting fakes was low (although there are Chinese fakes of Chinese brands, such as Li Ning sport clothes). Aliexpress even has a scheme of client protection and refunding such as ebay's, which I've never used (I never used ebay's protection service either). And aliexpress is near 100% Chinese sellers and goods, so in the end it is a big Chinese shop.
Regarding prices, most sellers in aliexpress targeting western clients have their prices very similar to ebay, despite here and there you see some savings in the same item - but don't expect more than 20 or 30% except in very rare cases. Indeed I suspect that most ebay's Chinese sellers have also a shop in aliexpress where the goods have prices similar to ebay's.
Unless between us and the supernova is some "dark matter":-) (or something alike) that caused the photons to have the extra delay:-)
Indeed nobody has examined yet, IMHO, the path between us and the SN1987a supernova. Or even its "surroundings" when it was forming: did space time deformation or any other mysterious event occurred?
And if in general science often new knowledge erases old "facts", in Astronomy and Astrophysics that happens almost every day. So we have to take all this novelty with a grain of salt... (remember the recent flop of the particles travelling between CERN-Geneva and Grand Sasso...)
If it is this course http://training.linuxfoundatio... which is going to be released for free, IMO it doesn't target Einsteins, but it is not completely devoted to morons.
And $2400 is way too much for what it teaches.
Its the type of wood (or of several types of carbon, glass fiber, titanium, etc...) layers used in its assembly that dictate the offensiveness of the blade (in a defensive-offensive scale). The gluing, the thickness and the relative placement of the layers also are important in defining the type of the blade, and in conjunction with the type of the rubbers they set the type of the complete TT racket. There are several thousands of commercial blades and rubbers, so the choice is enormous;-)
Usually its the top layers in both sides that count more to the offensive-defensive grade. Blades are usually symmetrical (both sides are equal) but there are some models prepared for defense in one side and for attack in the other. The offensive blades have usually harder outer layers that cause a faster rebound of the ball when compared with defensive types.
"The Japanese name 'Hayabusa' means a peregrine falcon; a bird that often serves as a metaphor for speed due to its vertical hunting dive. The name was made popular by Japanese professional wrestler Hayabusa, also known as The Masked Falcon."
A bit off-topic, there's also a family of very good offensive table tennis blades from the Xiom brand (http://www.xiomtt.com/) with that name:-) I'm a player and aficionado of TT, so forgive me this hiatus.
You could initialize the hardware RNG and a software (open code, verified by whoever is interested) implementation of the same algorithm with the same seed and compare if the first millions or billions of generated numbers were the same. Reseed and redo this a certain number of times and you statistically can reduce the probability of evil-non-randomness to (near) zero.
Of course, the existence of a programmed or delayed-opening backdoor of any sort in the chip would break this procedure...
Just two more scenarios, such as deploying balloons to set up communication channels over Philippines' islands recently devastated by the Haiyan typhoon... Were these uses also patented, or are they still open to comm-balloon business?
Certainly these are not music festivals or sports events:-(
Is this comment related by any means with the post "Are SARS statistics really true?" Where the is the "anti-science"stuff? Are the reported facts lies? How do the stars and rooftops line fit the Plot? I'm really out of the game here...
By chance, a few weeks ago I saw a documentary about SARS in China.
Remember that the 2008 Olympics were to be in Beijing, and so Chinese authorities in 2002 tried everything to avoid inflicting any tiny bit of fear in the tourists coming to China. They tried at first to admit there was an epidemics, and along the way declared many SARS fatalities as due to other causes. The things become more transparent (i.e. the official numbers were more realistic) when the medical community all over the country began to put a strong pressure. Many doctors were victims because when SARS started the hospitals didn't have equipment to protect them conveniently. But today no one really can tell the "true" number of SARS victims (and also of infected people) in China, and that biases the global SARS statistics, of course.
But the documentary was not about the deaths: it was about the survivors that have been treated in hospitals. In fact, the standard treatment was to deploy huge amounts of cortisone in the infected and that, AFAIR, stops blood flow in bones (among other secondary effects) and so many bone parts died in the patients in the forthcoming months and years. Some people have already gone into surgery many times (up to a dozen or so, in some cases) to patch those dead bones and other injuries in joints, many are in wheelchairs and in some cases they are sorts of abandoned by family and authorities. Some have already died, or even committed suicide.
It was said that the "cortisone" treatment was in China only, other countries (such as Canada, which had a bunch of deaths) didn't follow those medical guidelines.
Final words: many survivors are still severely crippled from SARS. For them the SARS epidemics didn't end in a few months. And local medical practices still make a strong impact in the quality of life of the patients.
In fact this is clearly a positive feedback example: instead of trying to keep the chicken (Portugal) alive and delivering 1 egg each day for many years (reasonable interest rate), "good economy practices" instead dictate to get 7 eggs a day by using brute force for a couple of weeks, without worrying with chicken's ass destruction - followed by the wipe-out of the whole chicken.
It is like if a doctor who sees a patient suffering from cancer says: lets kill this guy right now because in this way he/she will not (eventually) die of cancer.
There's no mercy in this world for the weak (or those countries with stupid governance, which are most), at least under this nice "global economy"...
I'm a Portuguese, and we are paying here > 7% ïnterest on the money lent by Germans and others (USA banks surely) via IMF, BCE etc, while they are getting that money from BCE at 1% rate or so. So, strictly speaking perhaps they are saving us Portuguese suckers from ourselves (I don't speak in the name of Spanish and Greek people) but simultaneously they are leaches sucking our blood from us.
BTW I think Japan has one of the largest 'per capita' public debt in the world, but since it is mostly owned by national banks and citizens, "it stays at home" and there's not a strong international pressure on it (via USA rating agencies who performed miserably in the bank crisis 5 yrs ago).
Googling "Ice Ages coincide with the passage of the Solar System through the spiral arms of our galaxy" retrieves you a lot of links. See for instance the first lines of these two:
Didn't know this fact. But it seems that not many people stopped sending their money faithfully to Switzerland after this case.
In the end it all reduces to the present "image" each country displays regarding keeping data secret: AFAIK Swiss' weren't touched by Snowden's docs, but on the other hand it seems that US agencies have easy access to any data kept in US companies... And perception of "image" is everything and this perception changes with time and marketing:-)
I didn't say the Swiss system was nice. It isn't. See also what happened a few years ago with the pre-WWII Jew's accounts. However, if you leave an account holder untouched for >63 yrs it is arguable that the contents are archaeology... Perhaps today nobody knows that the holder exists anymore (original owners passed?).
Nevertheless, it is true that Switzerland is a stable country since many centuries, and also is the most prestigious "safe" of the world. A few years ago it was also the country which topped the "implicit spying" on citizens activity (huge number of cameras, dissemination of cards and automatic tolls, ATMs,... all this recorded) but given the recent info arising from the Snowden's docs, and the number of cameras in London, perhaps it is not anymore:-)
Despite (or because) all this, I think that Swiss could easy capitalize on this situation: just a few M&M (Money and Marketing) is needed...
If I were a Swiss, I would start a "safe databank service" company right now. The slogan would be:
"We kept your money safe (and secret) for hundreds of years; we invented the cuckoo clock; we'll keep your secret data safe for the next thousands of years!!!"
Big business here:-) Kickstart the thing!
To give a practical perspective on meteor sizes, recall that the Chelyabinsk meteor which arrived at Russia this same year had around 15-20 m of diameter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteor
So, a 60 meters meteor will probably create a big, big, hole (depending on the velocity at arrival and landing angle) if it falls to Earth. I also remember reading that the impact in Arizona caused much devastation in the surrounding areas, up to several tens of miles from the crater.
Finally, the meteor that "created" the gulf of Mexico and "killed" most of the dinosaurs, about 66 million years ago, had probably around 10 km of diameter. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater
Imagine when a "blackout" will be done to Japanese-style automatic toilets...
"...Malware.... Here goes a jet of boiling water right into your ba*ls!..."
So, 1024-bit encryption (at least) to the hot water valve key has to be enforced!:-)
I still run 3 desktops (2 of them very often, none of those 3 is a server) with Win 2K professional. Only recently I had some problems (recent USB 3.0 pen drives getting a few corrupted files). I've **never** had to reinstall Win2K in 10 yrs, and the only mark of a virus (I got infected only a couple of times) I've ever had was a crippled Excel binary due to "quarantining" in one of the PCs: precisely the one where I'm writing this text.
The only AV I use is some free tool named "Regrun Reanimator-Partizan" (google, perhaps most of you don't know about it - I run a simple scan with it a couple of times a month). The "normal" AVs (free or not) are heavy has hell in 1-core old HW and, besides that, ineffective to recently disclosed attacks.
Then, why switch the machines (or OS)? Well, my HW is 10-yrs old, and the hard disks one of these days will blow. Low memory is also a problem nowadays (the other day I tried to double from 1 GB to 2 GB in one of them and the moron PC stopped booting...), with the bloated memory-eating browsers (and web pages, with Java, Javascript, HTML5 and Flash, all running in parallel).
So I'll leave Win2K mostly because of HW issues, not SW issues.
One day we (the Humanity) will be laid back in a bed, tubes stuck deeply into ALL our external holes (the power), several open holes in the skull with HDMI, USB and 100 GB internet links (communication interfaces). Machines will know how to feed us, refill the food stocks, and suck our waste solids and liquids just in time. Then we will "have ALL the free time and brain power to spend on something else" (on interesting stuff, I suppose...).
Since then I had no more time to explore OpenCL and other alternatives (some are proprietary and I don't intend to buy...). Eventually I would agree with you and would choose OpenCL if I was doing professional work, but that hasn't happened yet...
Final word: CUDA is now in its 5.X incarnation, and AFAIK it kept improving its user-usability with the release of recent versions...
Slashdot Mirror
Ditto. They also could have researched if submissions in a given (same) GCJ identity have been (or had a high probability of being...) written by two or more different coders...
;-)
The submissions' speed of top ranked coders seen in early stages of the GCJ contest always amazed me (compared, of course, with my turtle sluggishness...)
In a few time (a couple of years) I think Julia (http://julialang.org/) will be a contender. At present is not fully mature for industrial application IMHO (some evolution in syntax is expected, and debugging is ongoing).
Julia is a mix of Matlab, C and a typical scripting language (Perl, Python, Ruby....), wraps several numerical libraries (e.g. LAPACK for 'normal' matrices and SuiteSparse for sparse matrices, BLAS functions, PCRE for regular expressions...) and is prepared from its inception for painless running in parallel platforms. Its loaded with a ton of numerical functions (Bessels, Gammas, etc...) A good JIT compiler makes it run many numerical benchmarks almost as fast as compiled C or Fortran (see examples in the front page of http://julialang.org/), and also allows for many of the functions in Julia's standard library to be written in Julia instead of in C.
Julia is a Swiss knife for (numerical and scientific) programming in the making. It is open source and free and at present already runs in most platforms.
Alibaba has a front end to the final consumer called aliexpress, very similar to ebay. I've already used it 3 or 4 times, and everything went well (expected items and of good quality, good communication, etc...) I was buying sports stuff from Chinese brands, so the risk of getting fakes was low (although there are Chinese fakes of Chinese brands, such as Li Ning sport clothes). Aliexpress even has a scheme of client protection and refunding such as ebay's, which I've never used (I never used ebay's protection service either). And aliexpress is near 100% Chinese sellers and goods, so in the end it is a big Chinese shop.
Regarding prices, most sellers in aliexpress targeting western clients have their prices very similar to ebay, despite here and there you see some savings in the same item - but don't expect more than 20 or 30% except in very rare cases. Indeed I suspect that most ebay's Chinese sellers have also a shop in aliexpress where the goods have prices similar to ebay's.
Unless between us and the supernova is some "dark matter" :-) (or something alike) that caused the photons to have the extra delay :-)
Indeed nobody has examined yet, IMHO, the path between us and the SN1987a supernova. Or even its "surroundings" when it was forming: did space time deformation or any other mysterious event occurred?
And if in general science often new knowledge erases old "facts", in Astronomy and Astrophysics that happens almost every day. So we have to take all this novelty with a grain of salt... (remember the recent flop of the particles travelling between CERN-Geneva and Grand Sasso...)
If it is this course
http://training.linuxfoundatio...
which is going to be released for free, IMO it doesn't target Einsteins, but it is not completely devoted to morons.
And $2400 is way too much for what it teaches.
Its the type of wood (or of several types of carbon, glass fiber, titanium, etc...) layers used in its assembly that dictate the offensiveness of the blade (in a defensive-offensive scale). The gluing, the thickness and the relative placement of the layers also are important in defining the type of the blade, and in conjunction with the type of the rubbers they set the type of the complete TT racket. There are several thousands of commercial blades and rubbers, so the choice is enormous ;-)
Usually its the top layers in both sides that count more to the offensive-defensive grade. Blades are usually symmetrical (both sides are equal) but there are some models prepared for defense in one side and for attack in the other. The offensive blades have usually harder outer layers that cause a faster rebound of the ball when compared with defensive types.
More details about common types of wood in TT blades are found, for example, in http://www.tabletennisdb.com/b...
From ask.com, a bit of culture...
:-) I'm a player and aficionado of TT, so forgive me this hiatus.
"The Japanese name 'Hayabusa' means a peregrine falcon; a bird that often serves as a metaphor for speed due to its vertical hunting dive. The name was made popular by Japanese professional wrestler Hayabusa, also known as The Masked Falcon."
A bit off-topic, there's also a family of very good offensive table tennis blades from the Xiom brand (http://www.xiomtt.com/) with that name
Let's also cover tables' legs with curtains, again, because they are utterly indecent... :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victorian_morality
With RNG I was using a short name for "Random Number Generator". I didn't meant a LFSR ;-)
You could initialize the hardware RNG and a software (open code, verified by whoever is interested) implementation of the same algorithm with the same seed and compare if the first millions or billions of generated numbers were the same. Reseed and redo this a certain number of times and you statistically can reduce the probability of evil-non-randomness to (near) zero.
Of course, the existence of a programmed or delayed-opening backdoor of any sort in the chip would break this procedure...
Just two more scenarios, such as deploying balloons to set up communication channels over Philippines' islands recently devastated by the Haiyan typhoon... Were these uses also patented, or are they still open to comm-balloon business?
:-(
Certainly these are not music festivals or sports events
Is this comment related by any means with the post "Are SARS statistics really true?" Where the is the "anti-science"stuff? Are the reported facts lies? How do the stars and rooftops line fit the Plot? I'm really out of the game here...
By chance, a few weeks ago I saw a documentary about SARS in China.
Remember that the 2008 Olympics were to be in Beijing, and so Chinese authorities in 2002 tried everything to avoid inflicting any tiny bit of fear in the tourists coming to China. They tried at first to admit there was an epidemics, and along the way declared many SARS fatalities as due to other causes. The things become more transparent (i.e. the official numbers were more realistic) when the medical community all over the country began to put a strong pressure. Many doctors were victims because when SARS started the hospitals didn't have equipment to protect them conveniently. But today no one really can tell the "true" number of SARS victims (and also of infected people) in China, and that biases the global SARS statistics, of course.
But the documentary was not about the deaths: it was about the survivors that have been treated in hospitals. In fact, the standard treatment was to deploy huge amounts of cortisone in the infected and that, AFAIR, stops blood flow in bones (among other secondary effects) and so many bone parts died in the patients in the forthcoming months and years. Some people have already gone into surgery many times (up to a dozen or so, in some cases) to patch those dead bones and other injuries in joints, many are in wheelchairs and in some cases they are sorts of abandoned by family and authorities. Some have already died, or even committed suicide.
It was said that the "cortisone" treatment was in China only, other countries (such as Canada, which had a bunch of deaths) didn't follow those medical guidelines.
Couldn't google the documentary name but just found an article about the issue: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2010-01/07/content_9276884.htm
Final words: many survivors are still severely crippled from SARS. For them the SARS epidemics didn't end in a few months. And local medical practices still make a strong impact in the quality of life of the patients.
I understand that risk vs. interest balancing.
In fact this is clearly a positive feedback example: instead of trying to keep the chicken (Portugal) alive and delivering 1 egg each day for many years (reasonable interest rate), "good economy practices" instead dictate to get 7 eggs a day by using brute force for a couple of weeks, without worrying with chicken's ass destruction - followed by the wipe-out of the whole chicken.
It is like if a doctor who sees a patient suffering from cancer says: lets kill this guy right now because in this way he/she will not (eventually) die of cancer.
There's no mercy in this world for the weak (or those countries with stupid governance, which are most), at least under this nice "global economy"...
I'm a Portuguese, and we are paying here > 7% ïnterest on the money lent by Germans and others (USA banks surely) via IMF, BCE etc, while they are getting that money from BCE at 1% rate or so. So, strictly speaking perhaps they are saving us Portuguese suckers from ourselves (I don't speak in the name of Spanish and Greek people) but simultaneously they are leaches sucking our blood from us.
BTW I think Japan has one of the largest 'per capita' public debt in the world, but since it is mostly owned by national banks and citizens, "it stays at home" and there's not a strong international pressure on it (via USA rating agencies who performed miserably in the bank crisis 5 yrs ago).
Do your beloved academic friend a prank: ask him/her to review the paper without a previous warning about the scam and see the outcome :-)
Googling "Ice Ages coincide with the passage of the Solar System through the spiral arms of our galaxy" retrieves you a lot of links. See for instance the first lines of these two:
http://www.phys.huji.ac.il/~shaviv/articles/ShavivChapter.pdf
http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0906/0906.2777.pdf (2009)
Many more there, such as this on dinosaur extinction:
http://www.dinosaurhome.com/root-causes-of-extinction-events-219.html
Didn't know this fact. But it seems that not many people stopped sending their money faithfully to Switzerland after this case. :-)
In the end it all reduces to the present "image" each country displays regarding keeping data secret: AFAIK Swiss' weren't touched by Snowden's docs, but on the other hand it seems that US agencies have easy access to any data kept in US companies... And perception of "image" is everything and this perception changes with time and marketing
I didn't say the Swiss system was nice. It isn't. See also what happened a few years ago with the pre-WWII Jew's accounts. However, if you leave an account holder untouched for >63 yrs it is arguable that the contents are archaeology... Perhaps today nobody knows that the holder exists anymore (original owners passed?). :-)
Nevertheless, it is true that Switzerland is a stable country since many centuries, and also is the most prestigious "safe" of the world. A few years ago it was also the country which topped the "implicit spying" on citizens activity (huge number of cameras, dissemination of cards and automatic tolls, ATMs,... all this recorded) but given the recent info arising from the Snowden's docs, and the number of cameras in London, perhaps it is not anymore
Despite (or because) all this, I think that Swiss could easy capitalize on this situation: just a few M&M (Money and Marketing) is needed...
If I were a Swiss, I would start a "safe databank service" company right now. The slogan would be: :-) Kickstart the thing!
"We kept your money safe (and secret) for hundreds of years; we invented the cuckoo clock; we'll keep your secret data safe for the next thousands of years!!!"
Big business here
To give a practical perspective on meteor sizes, recall that the Chelyabinsk meteor which arrived at Russia this same year had around 15-20 m of diameter
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteor
And the space rock that carved Meteor Crater (or Barringer crater) in Arizona, around 50 K years ago, had about 40 meters of diameter.
http://www.space.com/834-mystery-arizona-meteor-crater-solved.html
So, a 60 meters meteor will probably create a big, big, hole (depending on the velocity at arrival and landing angle) if it falls to Earth. I also remember reading that the impact in Arizona caused much devastation in the surrounding areas, up to several tens of miles from the crater.
Finally, the meteor that "created" the gulf of Mexico and "killed" most of the dinosaurs, about 66 million years ago, had probably around 10 km of diameter.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater
Imagine when a "blackout" will be done to Japanese-style automatic toilets... :-)
"...Malware.... Here goes a jet of boiling water right into your ba*ls!..."
So, 1024-bit encryption (at least) to the hot water valve key has to be enforced!
I still run 3 desktops (2 of them very often, none of those 3 is a server) with Win 2K professional. Only recently I had some problems (recent USB 3.0 pen drives getting a few corrupted files). I've **never** had to reinstall Win2K in 10 yrs, and the only mark of a virus (I got infected only a couple of times) I've ever had was a crippled Excel binary due to "quarantining" in one of the PCs: precisely the one where I'm writing this text.
The only AV I use is some free tool named "Regrun Reanimator-Partizan" (google, perhaps most of you don't know about it - I run a simple scan with it a couple of times a month). The "normal" AVs (free or not) are heavy has hell in 1-core old HW and, besides that, ineffective to recently disclosed attacks.
Then, why switch the machines (or OS)? Well, my HW is 10-yrs old, and the hard disks one of these days will blow. Low memory is also a problem nowadays (the other day I tried to double from 1 GB to 2 GB in one of them and the moron PC stopped booting...), with the bloated memory-eating browsers (and web pages, with Java, Javascript, HTML5 and Flash, all running in parallel). So I'll leave Win2K mostly because of HW issues, not SW issues.
One day we (the Humanity) will be laid back in a bed, tubes stuck deeply into ALL our external holes (the power), several open holes in the skull with HDMI, USB and 100 GB internet links (communication interfaces). Machines will know how to feed us, refill the food stocks, and suck our waste solids and liquids just in time. Then we will "have ALL the free time and brain power to spend on something else" (on interesting stuff, I suppose...).
I didn't use OpenCL (helas, both two courses are CUDA-directed), but compared some examples, written in CUDA and OpenCL, as given in http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Massively-Parallel-Processors-Hands/dp/0123814723/ref=pd_sim_b_3 (written by one of the instructors of Coursera HPP). My conclusion was that CUDA is more "friendly" - but indeed it is Nvidia's proprietary technology.
Since then I had no more time to explore OpenCL and other alternatives (some are proprietary and I don't intend to buy...). Eventually I would agree with you and would choose OpenCL if I was doing professional work, but that hasn't happened yet...
Final word: CUDA is now in its 5.X incarnation, and AFAIK it kept improving its user-usability with the release of recent versions...