There are bugs in the common libraries to be sure, but that can be said for common Linux libraries as well, can't it? Of course the massive advantage with most Linux libraries is that the source is available.
MS does include the source for the MFC libraries with VC++. I've seen it. I'm not saying it's pretty, but it's there.
The amount of info you can store in short term memory is 7 +/- 2 "chunks" (those are really the units the psychologists use), whree a "chunk" is (roughly speaking) an atomic unit of information. So, 42 stored as two digits ("four-two") is two chunks, but stored as a single quantity ("forty-two") is a single chunk.
Look, you're all missing the point here. What I was saying is that using the term DAG is an incredibly poor way of explaining the technology to a layperson.
Speculating on the basis of what I know of optimization in compiler theory, the data structures in question probably consist of a root node for the start of the program, with mutually independent paths of execution as branches on the graph. They join up eventually, but if you showed the general topology of the graph to a non-specialist, they'll go "Oh, that's a tree."
Now, at this point, you have two choices. You can say, "Well, actually, it's not a tree per se but a type of data structure known as a 'directed acyclic graph', or DAG for short, because...", with the result that you'll lose your audience completely, or you can say, "Yeah, it does, doesn't it", and get on with your explanation of code translation.
Unfortunately, when you're explaining a difficult concept to a non-specialist audience, you make a few sacrifices in accuracy in order to try and convey some sense of understanding. The trick is determining how much distortion of the truth through economy is acceptable. Science educators make this kind of compromise all the time, particularly in the physical sciences.
I think worrying about the subtle (to a layperson) differences between trees and DAGs is unnecessary and an impediment to explaining the concept (code translation) in question.
And in response to the AC who started this thread, I got a GPA of 6 in Data Structures.
No, the issue here is: why bother using all the syllables in 'directed acyclic graph' when just 'tree' (with maybe the qualifier 'dependency' in front) will do nicely, thank you. Nice, ordinary language that the common man has a slightly better chance of understanding, particularly when it comes with a quick explanation of the dependency issues involved (e.g. preventing pipeline stalls by putting an instruction that reads a register as far downstream from the last instruction that wrote the register as possible).
I fully support/. posters making fun of people mindlessly using jargon to impress clueless journalists. Death to jargon as a means of maintaining the technocratic order. Or something.
I'm sorry, but won't creating processors with such high clock frequencies just be negated by the inherent slowness of the bus? One of the things you have to remember when designing hardware with such short clock cycles are the inherent speed limits on signals propagating through it. Light can only travel 1.5 cm in the time afforded by a single cycle from a clock running at 20 GHz. Electrons are much slower. The implication of this are that, given current motherboards, the CPU will stall for a hell of a lot more cycles waiting for a memory read/write.
Caching can only go so far. It seems to me that increases in overall computing power (however you wish to measure it) will not come just through cranking up the clock speed, but will require fundamental architectural changes to the PC as we know it (main storage on the CPU, overall miniaturization, etc).
Why exactly would other companies (or government) donate hardware (or other capital) to your organization? Sure, they'll do it if it's good publicity for them (like donating to charity) or if the company performs some vital function they like. But Open Source doesn't exactly register on the public radar screen, and doesn't provide anything that's exclusive to Open Source.
Investors aren't going to pitch money in unless they see a return, which they aren't going to get. That leaves you drawing on your own revenue for expansion, which means that ultimately, after paying employees and directors, you need surplus funds for growth, in other words, a profit.
It's a nice idea (in a socialist collective kind of way) but I just don't see it getting off the ground. Unless your employees pitch in their own money and bring their own hardware to work.
I think you'll find that you are out by a factor of 1000.
Oops. My bad. Should be 10^-12.
The other point is that should it not be 2x E=mc^2 for AM conversion - as there is 10^-9 grammes of anti-matter and the equivalent matter converted to energy.
That shouldn't (generally speaking) affect the order of magnitude of the amount of energy produced. Depending on the exact numbers, you'll only get an increase of a factor of 10.
You don't want buggy software running an AM engine
on
Antimatter Propulsion
·
· Score: 1
Run the numbers. The amount of energy in any given amount of AM is given by:
E = m*c^2
You have on the order of 10^-9 kilos of antimatter, and c ~= 3*10^8, so c^2 ~= 9*10^16. Therefore, the amount of energy is on the order of 10^(16-9) = 10^7 joules.
So, if you have a spontaneous release of all the antimatter currently in existence, you're talking about the release of a few megajoules of gamma rays. Not too serious, unless you're standing right next to it or are in the immediate vicinity. Certainly not on the order of a tac nuke.
Now, I suppose, we *really* know why governments around the world want to eradicate music-swapping and "indecent" Internet imagery - they can't monitor what we're really up to through all the noise:)
I can see it now, yet another piece of propaganda in the moderator/troll war: "By sorting the insightful and interesting posts from the noise, moderators are helping the NSA to spy on innocent/.ers! Trolls are your only protection!"
Yeah, but the point is that hardware is a physical thing that suffers from the weaknesses of being a physical thing. It has certain tolerances you can't exceed, otherwise it'll break, and it's going to wear out eventually anyway.
Software, OTOH, is an idea, and doesn't suffer from any of the "weaknesses of the flesh"; you can't wear out a concept, can you? The old adage saying you can't build bug-free software isn't saying anything about the nature of software, it's a statement about the weaknesses of the humans who write software. Finding a way to write bug-free software is the Holy Grail of software verification research.
And who says you can't write bug-free software, anyway? I've done a few decent "Hello, World" implementations in my time...
At an altitude of about 30 miles, the fuel tank will detach and parachute back to Earth, hopefully to be used again.
Momentum will carry Walker and his capsule up to 32 miles, where he will experience several moments of weightlessness and then begin to fall back toward Earth.
I might be missing something here (my physics is total crap), but don't all objects accelerate downwards due to gravity at the same rate, regardless of mass? In which case, if this nutter does get up to 32 miles in his capsule, won't his fuel tank follow him (since both objects are moving at roughly the same velocity, ignoring the minor delta-v imparted during detachment)? Unless, of course, his capsule has boosters (or his tank has retros) we aren't being told about.
Needless to say, this may cause problems of the collision kind when both start falling to earth together...
Wouldn't surprise me if a missing plug was all you did need. I remember buying a PC with a half-gig HD; they must have been out of half-gig drives that day, so they just gave us a 1-gig drive partitioned down to half a gig.
One of the biggest ideals of free software is CHOICE...This certainly shouldn't be considered a win for free software because it doesn't respect the values thereof. All it is is force-feeding.
Troll, but I'll bite. If this law was about consumers, then you'd have a point. It isn't, it's about government institutions and public (state-owned or controlled) enterprises. So it's more about openness and accountability in government. I don't know about you, but I'd like to be able to fully audit the systems that calculate my taxes, store my records, etc.
Do you really want the situation where the make-up of a large proportion of the machinery of state is known only to the private parties that created them? Perhaps more importantly, do you want those systems to be under the control of restrictive license agreements that allow software companies to basically do what they please with the computers that run our public institutions?
I don't. I shudder to think of what the future will be like if that continues to be the case.
Of course, there's no *signature* on this agreement either, so I suppose that would be the first legal challenge, if there were one.
In general, the law of contract does not require a signature to create a legally binding agreement. You just need some communication between the parties, or even just actions, consistent with an intent to enter legal relations. A signature is useful purely for documentation (evidentiary) purposes.
There are exceptions to the rule, but they're generally for statutory classes of contract (e.g. contracts for the sale of land), and deeds (legally binding agreements where no consideration has been paid for a promise).
The fundamental truth is that the demand for more skilled programmers totally outstrips supply, as long as that is true companies will fight tooth and nail to attract them.
Of course! That's why there's such rampant age discrimination in IT! That's why companies are only looking for candidates with commercial experience, and why I (a CS grad of five or so months) still can't find a bloody JOB! I should have realized! That's why so many companies have been laying off staff! It's funny just how picky buyers can be in a "seller's" market. I don't know where you live, but things look a lot different from where I am.
This means that you CAN'T make programmers work 16 hours a day all the time and that you can't pay them 5 dollars a day.
It does provided all programmers refuse to accept lower conditions. If a substantial minority are prepared to accept lower conditions, then there's pressure on the rest to also accept the same conditions. That's the race to the bottom.
I have a fundamental problem with any labor system that encourages the mentality that ALL you have to do is A, B, C, and D to get salary X. It is the best way to kill professionalism, innovation, efficient allocation of resources, hard work, and all other things that make this country thrive.
Not if you set the standards high enough. Not if you provide an environment where people actually like what they're doing, instead of regarding it as pointless and a waste of time. Not if management acts in a way which actually engenders respect from the people under it. Impossible ideals? Well, maybe the last one is, but I'm not so sure about the first two.
If someone quitting has so little effect on the company, then what makes you think that the programmers are worth such special treatment? How are programmers too good to have to live with the realities of supply and demand?
Because, my son, the employer knows that without collective bargaining, it's very easy to replace that one worker. Say I don't like working sixteen-hour days. I ask my employer to only let me work eight, like a normal human being. But my employer knows there are plenty of obsessed geeks out there willing to put in the sixteen hours, so he can fire me with impunity and just replace me. The only protection I have is if I'm a one-in-a-million shit-hot ninja bastard piss-off-and-die code warrior, and I know I'm probably not, just like (by definition) 99% of my colleagues.
I have a fundamental problem with any labour system that punishes me for wanting to be treated as a normal human being.
I don't think the ability to skip ads is new tech. See, when I tape something on my VCR, and watch it later, and an ad break starts, I look to my horribly complex remote control and hit the ultra high-tech "fast-forward" button. The ads fly past in all of ten seconds, and I'm buggered if I know what they were for.
What we are dealing w/ is a finite set of possiblities here and true evolution is INFINITE!
I always thought the evolutionary possibilities for a particular organism were constrained by their environment. It's true that the environment is quite open and it's very hard to see what some of the possibilities might be, but some things can definitely be ruled out (no organism has photo-receptors tuned to pick up gamma rays, for example, because that wouldn't confer any advantage, and would be a waste of resources).
It's still natural selection, but in the case of these chips, we're controlling the criteria, and they're much narrower, that's all.
Just think of the ramifications of evolving computers...think, oh, I don't know, the Matrix or something...
If you select for Matrix-style AIs, then yes. If you base your selection of the best of each generation on their ability to multiply two numbers, then all you'll ever get is a multiplier. A very efficient multiplier, probably, but still just a multiplier.
Does anybody have any reliable info on where the majority of these cameras are put? I get the impression that the most popular places for them are crowded areas (malls, main streets, train stations, etc).
It's sad to think that a camera is considered greater protection against crime (particularly the violent crime these cameras are purported to prevent) than the great crush of your fellow citizens surrounding you.
There is a new technique, which relies on gravitational lensing, which should allow us to find smaller planets than we can using gravitationaly-induced wobbles in a star's motion.
It works like this: If you get a reasonably sized dark object (say a rogue planetoid or any object hypothesized by the MACHOS theory of dark matter) between the Earth and a star, then gravitational lensing will cause a larger proportion of the light's star to be sent in Earth's direction, causing an effective amplification in the brightness of the star. Plot this amplification over time, and you get a characteristic curve, known as a Paczynski curve (I think I splet that right), which is basically just a bell-curve.
If there are any planets in the system, chances are a similar lensing effect will occur as the focusing object passes them, creating another Paczynski curve. Superimpose that curve with the star's, and you get a curve with a spike to one side of the maximum or the other. Find this spike in your observation, and chances are you've got yourself a planet.
Of course, you have to get lucky and have a suitable object pass between you and the star, but if the MACHOS theory is correct, there's plenty of such objects out in deep space.
The Dark Ages were a factor in this. Had we not been held back by religious fundamentalism for several hundred years we might very well be well into the galactic empire stage by now.
The fact that they're part of a system within a system may also nullify this effect. When you're on a moon going around a gas giant with other moons, all going around a star, the observations you would get would make it much harder to convince yourself that you're the centre of the universe. Imagine how much faster our own cosmology might have progressed if Venus or Mars had easily detectable moons, giving mediaeval astronomers a much clearer demonstration of how the Solar System was really organized.
Of course, fundamentalists can come up with an explanation for everything, so who knows. It would be interesting to see what the native fundamentalists of this new system would come up with.:)
Slashdot Mirror
MS does include the source for the MFC libraries with VC++. I've seen it. I'm not saying it's pretty, but it's there.
It's not just money here, you actually have to have a company registered with that name.
What's the situation with respect to a registered small business?
The amount of info you can store in short term memory is 7 +/- 2 "chunks" (those are really the units the psychologists use), whree a "chunk" is (roughly speaking) an atomic unit of information. So, 42 stored as two digits ("four-two") is two chunks, but stored as a single quantity ("forty-two") is a single chunk.
In most Australian universities, 7 is the highest possible GPA.
Look, you're all missing the point here. What I was saying is that using the term DAG is an incredibly poor way of explaining the technology to a layperson.
Speculating on the basis of what I know of optimization in compiler theory, the data structures in question probably consist of a root node for the start of the program, with mutually independent paths of execution as branches on the graph. They join up eventually, but if you showed the general topology of the graph to a non-specialist, they'll go "Oh, that's a tree."
Now, at this point, you have two choices. You can say, "Well, actually, it's not a tree per se but a type of data structure known as a 'directed acyclic graph', or DAG for short, because...", with the result that you'll lose your audience completely, or you can say, "Yeah, it does, doesn't it", and get on with your explanation of code translation.
Unfortunately, when you're explaining a difficult concept to a non-specialist audience, you make a few sacrifices in accuracy in order to try and convey some sense of understanding. The trick is determining how much distortion of the truth through economy is acceptable. Science educators make this kind of compromise all the time, particularly in the physical sciences.
I think worrying about the subtle (to a layperson) differences between trees and DAGs is unnecessary and an impediment to explaining the concept (code translation) in question.
And in response to the AC who started this thread, I got a GPA of 6 in Data Structures.
No, the issue here is: why bother using all the syllables in 'directed acyclic graph' when just 'tree' (with maybe the qualifier 'dependency' in front) will do nicely, thank you. Nice, ordinary language that the common man has a slightly better chance of understanding, particularly when it comes with a quick explanation of the dependency issues involved (e.g. preventing pipeline stalls by putting an instruction that reads a register as far downstream from the last instruction that wrote the register as possible).
I fully support /. posters making fun of people mindlessly using jargon to impress clueless journalists. Death to jargon as a means of maintaining the technocratic order. Or something.
I'm sorry, but won't creating processors with such high clock frequencies just be negated by the inherent slowness of the bus? One of the things you have to remember when designing hardware with such short clock cycles are the inherent speed limits on signals propagating through it. Light can only travel 1.5 cm in the time afforded by a single cycle from a clock running at 20 GHz. Electrons are much slower. The implication of this are that, given current motherboards, the CPU will stall for a hell of a lot more cycles waiting for a memory read/write.
Caching can only go so far. It seems to me that increases in overall computing power (however you wish to measure it) will not come just through cranking up the clock speed, but will require fundamental architectural changes to the PC as we know it (main storage on the CPU, overall miniaturization, etc).
Why exactly would other companies (or government) donate hardware (or other capital) to your organization? Sure, they'll do it if it's good publicity for them (like donating to charity) or if the company performs some vital function they like. But Open Source doesn't exactly register on the public radar screen, and doesn't provide anything that's exclusive to Open Source.
Investors aren't going to pitch money in unless they see a return, which they aren't going to get. That leaves you drawing on your own revenue for expansion, which means that ultimately, after paying employees and directors, you need surplus funds for growth, in other words, a profit.
It's a nice idea (in a socialist collective kind of way) but I just don't see it getting off the ground. Unless your employees pitch in their own money and bring their own hardware to work.
I think you'll find that you are out by a factor of 1000.
Oops. My bad. Should be 10^-12.
The other point is that should it not be 2x E=mc^2 for AM conversion - as there is 10^-9 grammes of anti-matter and the equivalent matter converted to energy.
That shouldn't (generally speaking) affect the order of magnitude of the amount of energy produced. Depending on the exact numbers, you'll only get an increase of a factor of 10.
Segmentation fault: warp core dumped.
Run the numbers. The amount of energy in any given amount of AM is given by:
E = m*c^2
You have on the order of 10^-9 kilos of antimatter, and c ~= 3*10^8, so c^2 ~= 9*10^16. Therefore, the amount of energy is on the order of 10^(16-9) = 10^7 joules.
So, if you have a spontaneous release of all the antimatter currently in existence, you're talking about the release of a few megajoules of gamma rays. Not too serious, unless you're standing right next to it or are in the immediate vicinity. Certainly not on the order of a tac nuke.
I can see it now, yet another piece of propaganda in the moderator/troll war: "By sorting the insightful and interesting posts from the noise, moderators are helping the NSA to spy on innocent /.ers! Trolls are your only protection!"
software fails also... ever get a blue screen?
Yeah, but the point is that hardware is a physical thing that suffers from the weaknesses of being a physical thing. It has certain tolerances you can't exceed, otherwise it'll break, and it's going to wear out eventually anyway.
Software, OTOH, is an idea, and doesn't suffer from any of the "weaknesses of the flesh"; you can't wear out a concept, can you? The old adage saying you can't build bug-free software isn't saying anything about the nature of software, it's a statement about the weaknesses of the humans who write software. Finding a way to write bug-free software is the Holy Grail of software verification research.
And who says you can't write bug-free software, anyway? I've done a few decent "Hello, World" implementations in my time...
I might be missing something here (my physics is total crap), but don't all objects accelerate downwards due to gravity at the same rate, regardless of mass? In which case, if this nutter does get up to 32 miles in his capsule, won't his fuel tank follow him (since both objects are moving at roughly the same velocity, ignoring the minor delta-v imparted during detachment)? Unless, of course, his capsule has boosters (or his tank has retros) we aren't being told about.
Needless to say, this may cause problems of the collision kind when both start falling to earth together...
Wouldn't surprise me if a missing plug was all you did need. I remember buying a PC with a half-gig HD; they must have been out of half-gig drives that day, so they just gave us a 1-gig drive partitioned down to half a gig.
Troll, but I'll bite. If this law was about consumers, then you'd have a point. It isn't, it's about government institutions and public (state-owned or controlled) enterprises. So it's more about openness and accountability in government. I don't know about you, but I'd like to be able to fully audit the systems that calculate my taxes, store my records, etc.
Do you really want the situation where the make-up of a large proportion of the machinery of state is known only to the private parties that created them? Perhaps more importantly, do you want those systems to be under the control of restrictive license agreements that allow software companies to basically do what they please with the computers that run our public institutions?
I don't. I shudder to think of what the future will be like if that continues to be the case.
Of course, there's no *signature* on this agreement either, so I suppose that would be the first legal challenge, if there were one.
In general, the law of contract does not require a signature to create a legally binding agreement. You just need some communication between the parties, or even just actions, consistent with an intent to enter legal relations. A signature is useful purely for documentation (evidentiary) purposes.
There are exceptions to the rule, but they're generally for statutory classes of contract (e.g. contracts for the sale of land), and deeds (legally binding agreements where no consideration has been paid for a promise).
Isn't law fun?
IAALS: I Am A Law Student
The fundamental truth is that the demand for more skilled programmers totally outstrips supply, as long as that is true companies will fight tooth and nail to attract them.
Of course! That's why there's such rampant age discrimination in IT! That's why companies are only looking for candidates with commercial experience, and why I (a CS grad of five or so months) still can't find a bloody JOB! I should have realized! That's why so many companies have been laying off staff! It's funny just how picky buyers can be in a "seller's" market. I don't know where you live, but things look a lot different from where I am.
This means that you CAN'T make programmers work 16 hours a day all the time and that you can't pay them 5 dollars a day.
It does provided all programmers refuse to accept lower conditions. If a substantial minority are prepared to accept lower conditions, then there's pressure on the rest to also accept the same conditions. That's the race to the bottom.
Not if you set the standards high enough. Not if you provide an environment where people actually like what they're doing, instead of regarding it as pointless and a waste of time. Not if management acts in a way which actually engenders respect from the people under it. Impossible ideals? Well, maybe the last one is, but I'm not so sure about the first two.
Because, my son, the employer knows that without collective bargaining, it's very easy to replace that one worker. Say I don't like working sixteen-hour days. I ask my employer to only let me work eight, like a normal human being. But my employer knows there are plenty of obsessed geeks out there willing to put in the sixteen hours, so he can fire me with impunity and just replace me. The only protection I have is if I'm a one-in-a-million shit-hot ninja bastard piss-off-and-die code warrior, and I know I'm probably not, just like (by definition) 99% of my colleagues.
I have a fundamental problem with any labour system that punishes me for wanting to be treated as a normal human being.
I don't think the ability to skip ads is new tech. See, when I tape something on my VCR, and watch it later, and an ad break starts, I look to my horribly complex remote control and hit the ultra high-tech "fast-forward" button. The ads fly past in all of ten seconds, and I'm buggered if I know what they were for.
What we are dealing w/ is a finite set of possiblities here and true evolution is INFINITE!
I always thought the evolutionary possibilities for a particular organism were constrained by their environment. It's true that the environment is quite open and it's very hard to see what some of the possibilities might be, but some things can definitely be ruled out (no organism has photo-receptors tuned to pick up gamma rays, for example, because that wouldn't confer any advantage, and would be a waste of resources).
It's still natural selection, but in the case of these chips, we're controlling the criteria, and they're much narrower, that's all.
Just think of the ramifications of evolving computers...think, oh, I don't know, the Matrix or something...
If you select for Matrix-style AIs, then yes. If you base your selection of the best of each generation on their ability to multiply two numbers, then all you'll ever get is a multiplier. A very efficient multiplier, probably, but still just a multiplier.
Does anybody have any reliable info on where the majority of these cameras are put? I get the impression that the most popular places for them are crowded areas (malls, main streets, train stations, etc).
It's sad to think that a camera is considered greater protection against crime (particularly the violent crime these cameras are purported to prevent) than the great crush of your fellow citizens surrounding you.
There is a new technique, which relies on gravitational lensing, which should allow us to find smaller planets than we can using gravitationaly-induced wobbles in a star's motion.
It works like this: If you get a reasonably sized dark object (say a rogue planetoid or any object hypothesized by the MACHOS theory of dark matter) between the Earth and a star, then gravitational lensing will cause a larger proportion of the light's star to be sent in Earth's direction, causing an effective amplification in the brightness of the star. Plot this amplification over time, and you get a characteristic curve, known as a Paczynski curve (I think I splet that right), which is basically just a bell-curve.
If there are any planets in the system, chances are a similar lensing effect will occur as the focusing object passes them, creating another Paczynski curve. Superimpose that curve with the star's, and you get a curve with a spike to one side of the maximum or the other. Find this spike in your observation, and chances are you've got yourself a planet.
Of course, you have to get lucky and have a suitable object pass between you and the star, but if the MACHOS theory is correct, there's plenty of such objects out in deep space.
The Dark Ages were a factor in this. Had we not been held back by religious fundamentalism for several hundred years we might very well be well into the galactic empire stage by now.
The fact that they're part of a system within a system may also nullify this effect. When you're on a moon going around a gas giant with other moons, all going around a star, the observations you would get would make it much harder to convince yourself that you're the centre of the universe. Imagine how much faster our own cosmology might have progressed if Venus or Mars had easily detectable moons, giving mediaeval astronomers a much clearer demonstration of how the Solar System was really organized.
Of course, fundamentalists can come up with an explanation for everything, so who knows. It would be interesting to see what the native fundamentalists of this new system would come up with. :)