In your benchmarks, you list "1.26 hours" for Canny edge detection on a 4 Mpixel image in Matlab without GPU computing, and you miraculously speed that up to 8 seconds using your GPU tools:
On my three year old desktop, using just 1 CPU from a Core 2 Duo, I can do Canny edge detection on a 4 Mpixel PGM image in about 1.7 seconds with straightforward C code (no pointer tricks), including I/O, parsing the PGM, and god knows what else. It's about the same in Python.
So, my conclusions from this are that your company appears to have trouble writing efficient Matlab code (not a good sign for a company making a Matlab extension library), and that instead of spending a lot of time and money on Tesla boards and your GPU extensions to Matlab, people are better off writing their code in Python and use a little bit of C if they have to.
There is no "real need" for GPU computing yet because for most people, it's not cost effective: the speedups are modest at best, and you only get them if you know what you're doing (in which case you wouldn't be using these tools). Get yourself a multicore machine and use OMP and your code is likely going to run faster with less effort.
Open source developers will tackle GPU computing in scripting languages when it makes sense to do so. That's not because they need commercial leadership or leaks of "code snippets", it's because open source developers don't have a commercial ax to grind.
As for open source numerical solutions, I wasn't talking about Octave; Octave is as much of a joke as Matlab. There are tons of better tools, including R and Python.
That's just it. We've been in the world of parallelization for years now, but relatively few open source developers have innovated or even ported for performance.
A lot of parallel processing that's coming out today commercially was pioneered by open source projects years ago. OMP and distributed computing are widely used.
On GPU computing, the speedups are barely worth it today unless you really hand-optimize your application for parallelization; you're not going to get a lot of speedups with Jacket on real code. The reason there aren't more open source tools using GPU computing is because the effort still isn't worth it.
These kinds of technologies are being pushed by vendors with a commercial motive. They are selling snake oil. And if you want to see how snaky they are, take a look at their benchmarks:
I see. So a man who announces himself to be an unashamed homosexual, campaigns for an end to discrimination based on sexual orientation then receives the death penalty for having anal sex with his boyfriend is "not a political prisoner [but] an activist who committed a crime and accepted(!) the consequences".
He is certainly someone whose human rights are being violated and who deserves international support. He may also be a political prisoner, but that's really a separate question.
I mean, this may be hard for you to grasp, since you obviously don't give a shit about human rights, but there are people other than political prisoners who are in trouble and who need international support.
Now we have a vendor of an overpriced add-on battling it out with the vendor of the mother of all overpriced and badly designed pieces of scientific software. As someone who actually uses numerical scripting languages, let me tell you: I'm not impressed.
My guess is that within a year or two, there will be better open-source alternatives to Jacket, just like there are better open source alternatives to MATLAB alrady. I'll just wait, thank you very much.
Is it a US thing to teach "political crime" to mean the same thing as "crime of expressing an opinion"?
A political prisoner is someone who is in jail for opposing or criticizing the government.
I guess that's a way for the US to claim that there are no political prisoners in the US, since, hey, the US (sorta mostly) has freedom of speech.
The US probably has a few "political prisoners": people who rubbed some part of local or national government the wrong way and ended up in jail because of legal bias even though they are innocent; the same is going to be true for the UK, France, Germany, Iceland, you name it. That situation is totally different from North Korea or other totalitarian regimes.
Activism may begin with speech, but when you have been brought up to think that's where it ends, it's no surprise that nothing changes.
Depending on what you stand for, you may well argue that committing a crime as part of activism is morally justified. However, when you get thrown in jail for that, you still are not a political prisoner, you're an activist who committed a crime and accepted the consequences.
Many thieves and drug dealers are political prisoners.
No, they are not.
"Political prisoner" is just a euphemism for "does something which I think should be permissible but they don't".
A political prisoner is in prison because they criticized or opposed the government of their own country. People who oppose the government and happen to be in jail aren't political prisoners. People who actually commit drug or property crimes in connection with government opposition aren't political prisoners.
For all its fault, equating the US prison system with the system of political imprisonment in North Korea and other totalitarian regimes is extremely naive of you. And if you want to go off criticizing the judicial branches of democracies, there are plenty of things wrong with the European systems as well.
Ah, but as Christians and their churches will tell you: you do not grasp the subtlety and nuance of these phrases. You may think you know what they mean, but it takes an addled, brainwashed Christian to understand their true meaning! If you don't understand their meaning and think they contradict what actually happened you are an EVIL UNBELIEVER!
No, you did not "make a syntax error", and that is the problem: your code was wrong, but it was syntactically correct. You made a mistake that led to a variable having the wrong scope. Those can lead to extremely hard to find bugs.
JavaScript's choice that the default scope is global is bad language design. The two choices that actually work are: default local scope or requiring an explicit declaration for all variables.
JavaScript and Self are object oriented, but not class based.
They are "object oriented" only because they insisted on using that buzzword. It might be reasonable to call them something else.
But whatever you call it, it doesn't work well. Prototype-based "OOP" seems conceptually simpler, but it ends up being more complicated and harder to maintain in practice. It was a good thing to try, but it's an experiment that has failed.
Government and police can access anything in your cloud and on your machine if they want to: they can put trojans and keyloggers into your software updates and downloads, and they can fake SSL certificates and decrypt your encrypted traffic. And they don't just do that in the US, they do it in many countries. To protect against government intrusion into your data is very hard. A service like Hushmail is probably more secure than almost anything you can do yourself, even on your own harddisk.
Of course, the birther issue is idiotic; it makes no logical sense to presume the Obamas would forge records in 1961 in the hopes that their son would become president. More importantly, Obama's eligibility to serve as president doesn't depend on his birth certificate anymore, it depends on the election commission and the courts. They have looked at the evidence and said he can and that's the end of the story. The only option left to remove him would be impeachment.
But, apart from Obama, news organizations like the NY Times, the LA Times, FOX, and others are not independent, and they do have their own agendas and points of views. The question of how we can check that governments, news organizations, scientists, human rights organizations, etc. are telling us the truth is an important one, and it needs to get addressed better than by "trust the media". In fact, it is the media that are keeping this story alive. If the NYT, LAT, FOX, etc. stopped talking about this bullshit, the issue would go away.
Most Western nations allow their intelligence services to access online data and communications without a subpoena (some of them even allow other parts of the government and police to do this). Many of them also exchange the information with others. The only thing that's different about the US is that its businesses are actually particularly successful at delivering services people want.
Yes, there is a problem. But the problem won't get solved by anti-Americanism, because it's a global problem. You of all people should know that, given how Europe treated you. The problem won't get solved legislatively at all. If you want reasonably secure communications, you foremost need a technological solution that governments can't easily intercept or analyze. Those solutions exist, but people need to start using them. Can you contribute positively to that, Mr. Assange?
What's patented is the computer system that implements the formula, not the formula. As long as you just compute with the formula (numbers in, numbers out), you're fine and non-infringing.
Once you use the formula to achieve a physical effect in the machine, you have a physical mechanism, and that is patentable. In this case, the physical effect is how the blocks are arranged on disk.
So, formulas for engine design are not patentable; you can calculate with them by hand or machine, as long as all you ever get out is human-readable information. However, the engines designed using those formulas are (including specific dimensions of engines if novel and non-obvious). Furthermore, an engine controller that uses the formulas to control valves, timing, etc. may be patentable.
There are about a dozen video chat apps out for Android supporting lots of different standards, including the standards that supposedly make up Facetime. Yet, none of them support Apple Facetime. Chances are therefore that either Apple has not released the necessary information or nobody gives a damn about Facetime compatibility. I suspect it's the former. It wouldn't be the first time that Apple said one thing and did something different.
Yes, the mathematical formula is not patentable, and you can compute with it all you like. But when you actually apply it to perform information retrieval in a physical computer, then the patent applies.
I'm not saying that the patent is valid (there is tons of prior art), or that such a distinction ought to be made. But it is certainly a distinction one can make.
And if people keep insisting that such a distinction is meaningless, it is more likely that the patentability exclusion for mathematical formulas/facts will get dropped than a lot of patents will become invalidated.
Because I think most people in the US don't want to live in a former developed world country.
Well, if we follow your prescription ("reducing regulation, cutting Social Security, eliminating the mandates on employer health insurance"), that's exactly what will happen: the US will become just like a developing nation again.
Uh huh. Since we're talking about how much we "should" be paying for things, when are we going to pay less for health care? The very reason I mention cutting the mandates for employer health insurance is to start cutting the incentives to inflate health care costs.
Employer mandates likely have little impact on health care costs; you need some kind of mandate because otherwise people will simply not get insured.
The real driver behind health care costs is that people expect everything possible to be done to heal them and prolong their lives. But at some point, we can't afford that anymore.
If you look around the world, the way to keep health care costs in check is through more regulation, not less: in particular, you need to require everybody to receive basic health care, but at the same time you need to limit mandatory health care only to those interventions that make financial sense (if people want fancy features, they need to pay for that themselves).
Obama got it wrong by basically mandating gold-plated plans, while the Republicans got it wrong by trying to solve the problem through deregulation; neither works.
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In your benchmarks, you list "1.26 hours" for Canny edge detection on a 4 Mpixel image in Matlab without GPU computing, and you miraculously speed that up to 8 seconds using your GPU tools:
http://www.accelereyes.com/products/benchmarks
On my three year old desktop, using just 1 CPU from a Core 2 Duo, I can do Canny edge detection on a 4 Mpixel PGM image in about 1.7 seconds with straightforward C code (no pointer tricks), including I/O, parsing the PGM, and god knows what else. It's about the same in Python.
So, my conclusions from this are that your company appears to have trouble writing efficient Matlab code (not a good sign for a company making a Matlab extension library), and that instead of spending a lot of time and money on Tesla boards and your GPU extensions to Matlab, people are better off writing their code in Python and use a little bit of C if they have to.
Yes. The technical reason is called "Sony DRM".
There is no "real need" for GPU computing yet because for most people, it's not cost effective: the speedups are modest at best, and you only get them if you know what you're doing (in which case you wouldn't be using these tools). Get yourself a multicore machine and use OMP and your code is likely going to run faster with less effort.
Open source developers will tackle GPU computing in scripting languages when it makes sense to do so. That's not because they need commercial leadership or leaks of "code snippets", it's because open source developers don't have a commercial ax to grind.
As for open source numerical solutions, I wasn't talking about Octave; Octave is as much of a joke as Matlab. There are tons of better tools, including R and Python.
A lot of parallel processing that's coming out today commercially was pioneered by open source projects years ago. OMP and distributed computing are widely used.
On GPU computing, the speedups are barely worth it today unless you really hand-optimize your application for parallelization; you're not going to get a lot of speedups with Jacket on real code. The reason there aren't more open source tools using GPU computing is because the effort still isn't worth it.
These kinds of technologies are being pushed by vendors with a commercial motive. They are selling snake oil. And if you want to see how snaky they are, take a look at their benchmarks:
http://www.accelereyes.com/products/benchmarks
I mean, 8 hours for a Canny edge detection on an 8 Mpixel image? Are they doing pixel-by-pixel processing in Matlab?
I'm not sure in what way being shot at by the Chinese communist army makes one "the bad guys".
He is certainly someone whose human rights are being violated and who deserves international support. He may also be a political prisoner, but that's really a separate question.
I mean, this may be hard for you to grasp, since you obviously don't give a shit about human rights, but there are people other than political prisoners who are in trouble and who need international support.
And you're simply an evil demagogue.
Now we have a vendor of an overpriced add-on battling it out with the vendor of the mother of all overpriced and badly designed pieces of scientific software. As someone who actually uses numerical scripting languages, let me tell you: I'm not impressed.
My guess is that within a year or two, there will be better open-source alternatives to Jacket, just like there are better open source alternatives to MATLAB alrady. I'll just wait, thank you very much.
A political prisoner is someone who is in jail for opposing or criticizing the government.
The US probably has a few "political prisoners": people who rubbed some part of local or national government the wrong way and ended up in jail because of legal bias even though they are innocent; the same is going to be true for the UK, France, Germany, Iceland, you name it. That situation is totally different from North Korea or other totalitarian regimes.
Depending on what you stand for, you may well argue that committing a crime as part of activism is morally justified. However, when you get thrown in jail for that, you still are not a political prisoner, you're an activist who committed a crime and accepted the consequences.
No, they are not.
A political prisoner is in prison because they criticized or opposed the government of their own country. People who oppose the government and happen to be in jail aren't political prisoners. People who actually commit drug or property crimes in connection with government opposition aren't political prisoners.
For all its fault, equating the US prison system with the system of political imprisonment in North Korea and other totalitarian regimes is extremely naive of you. And if you want to go off criticizing the judicial branches of democracies, there are plenty of things wrong with the European systems as well.
Ah, but as Christians and their churches will tell you: you do not grasp the subtlety and nuance of these phrases. You may think you know what they mean, but it takes an addled, brainwashed Christian to understand their true meaning! If you don't understand their meaning and think they contradict what actually happened you are an EVIL UNBELIEVER!
If Apple haters are religious, they worship... what exactly?
Yes, and at this rate, JavaScript will be a decent programming language by the time this year's college graduates retire :-)
No, you did not "make a syntax error", and that is the problem: your code was wrong, but it was syntactically correct. You made a mistake that led to a variable having the wrong scope. Those can lead to extremely hard to find bugs.
JavaScript's choice that the default scope is global is bad language design. The two choices that actually work are: default local scope or requiring an explicit declaration for all variables.
JavaScript and Self are object oriented, but not class based.
They are "object oriented" only because they insisted on using that buzzword. It might be reasonable to call them something else.
But whatever you call it, it doesn't work well. Prototype-based "OOP" seems conceptually simpler, but it ends up being more complicated and harder to maintain in practice. It was a good thing to try, but it's an experiment that has failed.
That's the way it works in object oriented programming: objects have states and objects can have multiple names.
If you don't like that, program in a functional programming language, or just stop using "=".
While I generally don't like stuff coming out ouf technical committees, sometimes the alternative is worse... like in the case of JavaScript.
Government and police can access anything in your cloud and on your machine if they want to: they can put trojans and keyloggers into your software updates and downloads, and they can fake SSL certificates and decrypt your encrypted traffic. And they don't just do that in the US, they do it in many countries. To protect against government intrusion into your data is very hard. A service like Hushmail is probably more secure than almost anything you can do yourself, even on your own harddisk.
If you wanted to develop a small cheap computer, why would you make it look like a USB stick and give it a male USB connector?
This looks like some USB-to-HDMI stick that has been hacked to run Linux. That's nice, but it doesn't exactly make a supported product.
Of course, the birther issue is idiotic; it makes no logical sense to presume the Obamas would forge records in 1961 in the hopes that their son would become president. More importantly, Obama's eligibility to serve as president doesn't depend on his birth certificate anymore, it depends on the election commission and the courts. They have looked at the evidence and said he can and that's the end of the story. The only option left to remove him would be impeachment.
But, apart from Obama, news organizations like the NY Times, the LA Times, FOX, and others are not independent, and they do have their own agendas and points of views. The question of how we can check that governments, news organizations, scientists, human rights organizations, etc. are telling us the truth is an important one, and it needs to get addressed better than by "trust the media". In fact, it is the media that are keeping this story alive. If the NYT, LAT, FOX, etc. stopped talking about this bullshit, the issue would go away.
Most Western nations allow their intelligence services to access online data and communications without a subpoena (some of them even allow other parts of the government and police to do this). Many of them also exchange the information with others. The only thing that's different about the US is that its businesses are actually particularly successful at delivering services people want.
Yes, there is a problem. But the problem won't get solved by anti-Americanism, because it's a global problem. You of all people should know that, given how Europe treated you. The problem won't get solved legislatively at all. If you want reasonably secure communications, you foremost need a technological solution that governments can't easily intercept or analyze. Those solutions exist, but people need to start using them. Can you contribute positively to that, Mr. Assange?
What's patented is the computer system that implements the formula, not the formula. As long as you just compute with the formula (numbers in, numbers out), you're fine and non-infringing.
Once you use the formula to achieve a physical effect in the machine, you have a physical mechanism, and that is patentable. In this case, the physical effect is how the blocks are arranged on disk.
So, formulas for engine design are not patentable; you can calculate with them by hand or machine, as long as all you ever get out is human-readable information. However, the engines designed using those formulas are (including specific dimensions of engines if novel and non-obvious). Furthermore, an engine controller that uses the formulas to control valves, timing, etc. may be patentable.
There are about a dozen video chat apps out for Android supporting lots of different standards, including the standards that supposedly make up Facetime. Yet, none of them support Apple Facetime. Chances are therefore that either Apple has not released the necessary information or nobody gives a damn about Facetime compatibility. I suspect it's the former. It wouldn't be the first time that Apple said one thing and did something different.
Yes, the mathematical formula is not patentable, and you can compute with it all you like. But when you actually apply it to perform information retrieval in a physical computer, then the patent applies.
I'm not saying that the patent is valid (there is tons of prior art), or that such a distinction ought to be made. But it is certainly a distinction one can make.
And if people keep insisting that such a distinction is meaningless, it is more likely that the patentability exclusion for mathematical formulas/facts will get dropped than a lot of patents will become invalidated.
Well, if we follow your prescription ("reducing regulation, cutting Social Security, eliminating the mandates on employer health insurance"), that's exactly what will happen: the US will become just like a developing nation again.
Employer mandates likely have little impact on health care costs; you need some kind of mandate because otherwise people will simply not get insured.
The real driver behind health care costs is that people expect everything possible to be done to heal them and prolong their lives. But at some point, we can't afford that anymore.
If you look around the world, the way to keep health care costs in check is through more regulation, not less: in particular, you need to require everybody to receive basic health care, but at the same time you need to limit mandatory health care only to those interventions that make financial sense (if people want fancy features, they need to pay for that themselves).
Obama got it wrong by basically mandating gold-plated plans, while the Republicans got it wrong by trying to solve the problem through deregulation; neither works.
I'm sure someone can create a nice web-based, visual development tool for Android. AppInventor is not it; I found it to be cumbersome and useless.