Re:Boost epitomizes everything that is wrong with
on
Boost 1.36 Released
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Boost is not a "template metaprogramming" library, as you seem to be implying. It's just a good library that happens to use template techniques for some purposes for which it is very well suited, for example, the Spirit parser.
You don't need to know template metaprogramming at all to use Spirit. In fact, what Spirit does is make the specification of parsers look like BNF but in C++ syntax. Internally, yeah, the library is awfully complex. But that is the point of a library - it implements once and for all difficult things so that library user's lives are easier. And boost achieves that goal nicely.
Personal air transportation. Period. It's about 20 years overdue. It seems so obvious that this would have the single greatest impact on the way the majority of Americans live of any "device" that could possibly be invented.
Screw X-prize. We need cheap, reliable, safe personal helicopters (or jet-packs, or whatever).
It depends on what you're trying to do. An awful lot of supercomputer sites *are* solving, more or less, very large matrices. In that case it means everything.
Some applications scale on these kinds of clusters and some don't. But to say that "MFlops does not mean a lot" is just as silly a blanket statement as pretending that the Linpack benchmark is "the speed" of the computer.
I think it's only the "easy" mode he bothered creating. I'm pretty sure there are other mazes in the other difficulty setting. Remember the "catacombs"?
Was that it was fairly complex to solve it. Good times.
Well, I was just playing Baldur's Gate II earlier this evening, and to see how the level of complexity has risen in "adventure games" is just amazing. I solved Atari's adventure in about two minutes just a second ago. I have been playing Baldur's Gate for about 80 hours and I'm not done with it yet.
If you think autism is "an enhanced perception of life," you are terribly misinformed.
Please, go spend some time with autistic children. Between your comments, those about "California hypochondriacs", and about evolution(!?), I am surprised at the level of ignorance about this disease. It is a profound illness, not just lonely smart kids. Not even close.
If you think autism is anywhere in the ballpark of "hypochondriacs" you need to spend some time with an autistic child. That is like saying people with brain tumors are just hypochondriacs. It's really quite distasteful.
Sex is something that a lot of people think deserves a lot of respect. Why do they think that? One reason might be that sex leads to children, sometimes whether you like it or not, and bringing children into this world is about as serious as a life decision as there is. Life is hard enough; the conditions for kids ought to be as right as you know how to make it. That part is pretty reasonable, in my opinion.
So an attempt is made to bestow a great deal of respect and importance on sex. So it becomes sort of like money - it's gauche to talk about it. Part of making a big deal of it is not treating it as an everyday subject, because that cheapens it and deadens people to the respect it deserves.
The only problem with that is it doesn't seem to work very well. Mystifying it has the forbidden fruit effect, etc. You know the drill.
Anyway, I think that's in large part why sex tends to be hush-hush in our culture.
Until last year I had SGI and Sun workstations on my desktop, for the last 10 years. Now I have a dual 1.5 GHz "cheap PeeCee" and there is absolutely no comparison with respect to bang for the buck - and I do the most demanding develop/run cycle you will find *anywhere*.
The SGI boxes typically ran upwards of $50k, the Suns were upwards of $20k, and my "cheap PeeCee" that blows anything I've ever used out of the water was about $6k, packed to the gills.
On the desktop, you simply cannot get better bang for the buck than Linux on a top of the line x86.
I was asking a more general question than about the results of this particular paper.
I always have and still do reject this ridiculous notion that the exponent never matters because "for sufficiently large" n it's always a win.
We do not work with infinite n. We work with finite n of a quite limited range. The exponent matters, and to say anything to the contrary is a misleading oversimplification.
Sure. But n "large enough" may be completely - orders upon orders of magnitude - out of the range of applicability, in which case this usual professorial argument about "the exponent doesn't matter" is hogwash.
I don't see what calculus has to do with it, and your statement still doesn't convince me that it matters.
"After sufficient length." Sure. But there's *never* any discussion about what that length is. And if it's sufficiently large (as in, larger than you could ever use), it doesn't matter. The exponent *does* matter in that case.
There seems to be endless fascination with P vs NP problems, and I just can't understand how it could possibly matter. Aren't there infinitely many "polynomial times" that are complete disasters?
Oh, please. I've seen it written here a thousand times that if MacOS X ran on hardware comparable in cost to x86, we'd all be jumping on it. I know I would.
But it doesn't. It still runs on extremely expensive hardware, and that's the main reason Apple still lags and probably always will.
That's Apple's business problem.
Their respect problem is self inflicted. When you center entire ad campaigns around cute case colors, you deserve what you get.
When we talk about general relativity, we say "spacetime is curved." We don't say "spacetime has model that includes curvature which accurately predicts some experiments." Why? It's just tedious to always emphasize that the model is a model; it's easier to just say "is." It doesn't mean the distinction is lost on Wolfram that he doesn't emphasize it.
Another example: we say massive bodies have gravity. We don't say that the motion of masses in the presence of other masses can be modeled with gravity. There "is" gravity. The model nature of gravity is implied.
First of all, by your assessment cops using pepper spray are violating the chemical weapons convention. So what?
Second of all, the idea of weapons in general is to make combat as unfair as possible. You don't have to like it, but that is the idea behind war - it's not supposed to be "fair."
is how the backbone providers can charge the absolutely outrageous prices that they charge.
Correct my thinking here - once upfront costs for hardware and software are satisfied, aren't the costs of maintaining the network very small? Sure, maybe the routers are $100k each. But then you charge $35k a month for an OC3? At that point, after the network is built out, aren't the bits free forever (more or less)?
The upstream costs always blow me away, I'd like to know why they are so expensive, if there's anything more to it than the backbones are monopolized and they charge that because they can.
Umm, define "will of its own." This is no more hocus-pocus than trying to find a distinction between man and machine by saying people have a "soul." Try defining that one, too.
There are many who believe there is no fundamental distinction between man and machine. We believe that any apparent distinction is illusory, in that the functioning of the "human machine" is sufficiently complex that we haven't yet been able to decode the basic ruleset which governs our behavior, like we can the relatively simple current era digital computer.
That doesn't mean that such a ruleset doesn't exist. I think it does, and I think it is what is normally called "physics."
Laugh if you want. I find your notion of "will" to be funny myself.
Slashdot Mirror
Boost is not a "template metaprogramming" library, as you seem to be implying. It's just a good library that happens to use template techniques for some purposes for which it is very well suited, for example, the Spirit parser.
You don't need to know template metaprogramming at all to use Spirit. In fact, what Spirit does is make the specification of parsers look like BNF but in C++ syntax. Internally, yeah, the library is awfully complex. But that is the point of a library - it implements once and for all difficult things so that library user's lives are easier. And boost achieves that goal nicely.
Personal air transportation. Period. It's about 20 years overdue. It seems so obvious that this would have the single greatest impact on the way the majority of Americans live of any "device" that could possibly be invented.
Screw X-prize. We need cheap, reliable, safe personal helicopters (or jet-packs, or whatever).
I once complained to my father when I was young about not wanting to do my homework. He said something that has rung in my ears ever since:
"Bob... part of being a man means doing things even when you don't want to."
Those words have kept me going through "aw, crap, I really don't feel like doing this" moments throughout my entire life.
Flat5
Posing as ESR to try to get people to incriminate themselves is a pretty nice trick. But we're not falling for it!
Flat5
It depends on what you're trying to do. An awful lot of supercomputer sites *are* solving, more or less, very large matrices. In that case it means everything.
Some applications scale on these kinds of clusters and some don't. But to say that "MFlops does not mean a lot" is just as silly a blanket statement as pretending that the Linpack benchmark is "the speed" of the computer.
That Cray does look pretty awesome, btw.
Flat5
I think it's only the "easy" mode he bothered creating. I'm pretty sure there are other mazes in the other difficulty setting. Remember the "catacombs"?
Flat5
Was that it was fairly complex to solve it. Good times.
Well, I was just playing Baldur's Gate II earlier this evening, and to see how the level of complexity has risen in "adventure games" is just amazing. I solved Atari's adventure in about two minutes just a second ago. I have been playing Baldur's Gate for about 80 hours and I'm not done with it yet.
Flat5
If you think autism is "an enhanced perception of life," you are terribly misinformed.
Please, go spend some time with autistic children. Between your comments, those about "California hypochondriacs", and about evolution(!?), I am surprised at the level of ignorance about this disease. It is a profound illness, not just lonely smart kids. Not even close.
Flat5
If you think autism is anywhere in the ballpark of "hypochondriacs" you need to spend some time with an autistic child. That is like saying people with brain tumors are just hypochondriacs. It's really quite distasteful.
Flat5
Sex is something that a lot of people think deserves a lot of respect. Why do they think that? One reason might be that sex leads to children, sometimes whether you like it or not, and bringing children into this world is about as serious as a life decision as there is. Life is hard enough; the conditions for kids ought to be as right as you know how to make it. That part is pretty reasonable, in my opinion.
So an attempt is made to bestow a great deal of respect and importance on sex. So it becomes sort of like money - it's gauche to talk about it. Part of making a big deal of it is not treating it as an everyday subject, because that cheapens it and deadens people to the respect it deserves.
The only problem with that is it doesn't seem to work very well. Mystifying it has the forbidden fruit effect, etc. You know the drill.
Anyway, I think that's in large part why sex tends to be hush-hush in our culture.
Flat5
That opinion is, shall we say, not very informed.
You do realize that Los Alamos is the child of the Manhattan Project, don't you? The former home of Wen Ho Lee? Ringing any bells yet?
Flat5
Until last year I had SGI and Sun workstations on my desktop, for the last 10 years. Now I have a dual 1.5 GHz "cheap PeeCee" and there is absolutely no comparison with respect to bang for the buck - and I do the most demanding develop/run cycle you will find *anywhere*.
The SGI boxes typically ran upwards of $50k, the Suns were upwards of $20k, and my "cheap PeeCee" that blows anything I've ever used out of the water was about $6k, packed to the gills.
On the desktop, you simply cannot get better bang for the buck than Linux on a top of the line x86.
Flat5
I was asking a more general question than about the results of this particular paper.
I always have and still do reject this ridiculous notion that the exponent never matters because "for sufficiently large" n it's always a win.
We do not work with infinite n. We work with finite n of a quite limited range. The exponent matters, and to say anything to the contrary is a misleading oversimplification.
Flat5
Sure. But n "large enough" may be completely - orders upon orders of magnitude - out of the range of applicability, in which case this usual professorial argument about "the exponent doesn't matter" is hogwash.
Flat5
I don't see what calculus has to do with it, and your statement still doesn't convince me that it matters.
"After sufficient length." Sure. But there's *never* any discussion about what that length is. And if it's sufficiently large (as in, larger than you could ever use), it doesn't matter. The exponent *does* matter in that case.
Flat5
There seems to be endless fascination with P vs NP problems, and I just can't understand how it could possibly matter. Aren't there infinitely many "polynomial times" that are complete disasters?
Isn't n^1000000000000000000 polynomial time?
Flat5
Oh, please. I've seen it written here a thousand times that if MacOS X ran on hardware comparable in cost to x86, we'd all be jumping on it. I know I would.
But it doesn't. It still runs on extremely expensive hardware, and that's the main reason Apple still lags and probably always will.
That's Apple's business problem.
Their respect problem is self inflicted. When you center entire ad campaigns around cute case colors, you deserve what you get.
Flat5
When we talk about general relativity, we say "spacetime is curved." We don't say "spacetime has model that includes curvature which accurately predicts some experiments." Why? It's just tedious to always emphasize that the model is a model; it's easier to just say "is." It doesn't mean the distinction is lost on Wolfram that he doesn't emphasize it.
Another example: we say massive bodies have gravity. We don't say that the motion of masses in the presence of other masses can be modeled with gravity. There "is" gravity. The model nature of gravity is implied.
Flat5
Not Cellular Automation. You got this wrong not once, but every single time.
Flat5
Just felt it. Moderate shaking but seemed to last a long time and built up before subsiding.
Not looking forward to the big one!
Flat5
First of all, by your assessment cops using pepper spray are violating the chemical weapons convention.
So what?
Second of all, the idea of weapons in general is to make combat as unfair as possible. You don't have to like it, but that is the idea behind war - it's not supposed to be "fair."
Flat5
is how the backbone providers can charge the absolutely outrageous prices that they charge.
Correct my thinking here - once upfront costs for hardware and software are satisfied, aren't the costs of maintaining the network very small? Sure, maybe the routers are $100k each. But then you charge $35k a month for an OC3? At that point, after the network is built out, aren't the bits free forever (more or less)?
The upstream costs always blow me away, I'd like to know why they are so expensive, if there's anything more to it than the backbones are monopolized and they charge that because they can.
Flat5
Umm, define "will of its own." This is no more hocus-pocus than trying to find a distinction between man and machine by saying people have a "soul." Try defining that one, too.
There are many who believe there is no fundamental distinction between man and machine. We believe that any apparent distinction is illusory, in that the functioning of the "human machine" is sufficiently complex that we haven't yet been able to decode the basic ruleset which governs our behavior, like we can the relatively simple current era digital computer.
That doesn't mean that such a ruleset doesn't exist. I think it does, and I think it is what is normally called "physics."
Laugh if you want. I find your notion of "will" to be funny myself.
Flat5
A CFD Framework in C++
A Multiphysics Simulation Framework in C++
and many more. I have more to say but I must leave for work to get back to hacking my own OOP engineering code.
Flat5
You spoke my mind better than I did. Bravo.
Flat5