and now Climate Skeptic are going to say: "Global warning is a lie from eco terrorists. And even if it might be possibly true, we can always inject sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere to cool it down. So, shut your mouth, communist!"
In France, we already have to pay a tax (The Tasca Tax) for each storage medium like CD-Rom, mp3 players. The money collected by that tax is supposed to be given to artists. You have to pay that tax even if you buy a CD-Rom to archive your personal data. At some point, it was even proposed that that tax should be paid for a hard drive in a PC. IIRC, this is currently not the case.
What will be the practice in France? Shall we pay twice?
Crichton is definitely a complete moron when he speaks about global warning (and probably on other subject too, but let's be conservative). That speech http://www.crichton-official.com/speeches/speeches _quote04.html, of which I discover the existence here on/., is a very good sample of that.
The most obvious proof of his blatant ignorance is that citation:
Nobody believes a weather prediction twelve hours ahead. Now we're asked to believe a prediction that goes out 100 years into the future? And make financial investments based on that prediction? Has everybody lost their minds?
Obviously, that guy does not know the difference between Meteorology and Climatology . What credit can he have after that?
But that speech is also full of many other memorable quotes. He believes in so naive epistemological theories. I can't resist to quote what he says about the scientific consensus:
I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.
All the validation of scientific results goes through a review by the community. This is how science is being practice for ages. Crichton probably does not realize how many crackpots there are. Without a living community that validates things, we would not have gone very far. That's too easy to criticize the scientific consensus using what the fact that too innovative ideas need some time to get into the consensus.
What he says about computer models is funny too. But I'm already completely off-topic and prefer to stop here.
That's easy to say now that C was badly designed almost 35 years ago. Given what we knew at this time about grammars, type systems, or language theory in general, I would say C was just a brilliant innovation. I'm not particularly shocked by the design choice about pointer and arrays. That looks vaguely reasonable if you are in a portable assembler. The only things I consider as a real mistake is automatic conversion. That is just not in the spirit of such low level language. The conversion from an "int" to a "double" is not trivial at the machine level. This should have been made explicit, IMHO. That's the major reason that makes coding numerical algorithm in C very dangerous.
What is absolutely non-sense, from a purely technical point of view, is to have extended that language during the 80's to reach the hideous C++. Unfortunately, things don't evolve based on technical reasons. And coders always prefer to learn a new feature of a plain old legacy stuff they know well, instead of learning a completely different language.
I fully agree with that. And I consider Carmak a little arrogant here when he says this research was a waste of time. 5 years ago, you should not expect to display a 32000 x 32000 terrain mesh in real time on a regular 3D board without some kind of level of details. This was a really needed technology.
Now, it might be faster to not be smart and instead cache all the mesh on the GPU. But there is still an upper bound on the mesh's size (a bound that you can easily cross when you work with plane simulators or google earth).
As a final remark, GPU could be even faster if those LOD algorithms coming from this wasted research were implemented directly on-board.
I can't stop laughing about that sentence. Like another comment said, have a look at ML to see what is a language with a safe type system.
You can't expect to have any reasonable type safety when keeping so much compatibility with C. The changes between C and
C++ about the typing rules for basic types was made with performance improvement in mind, not safety. They added a bool type to C++, which might be considered a step toward type safety. But they allow bool and int to be implicitely cast one into the other.
They did not want to break all the idiomatic constructions of C you usually find in clauses like:
int i; [...] if(i)...
So why did they introduce bool? The only reason I can imagine is that the generated code will be faster.
The best illustration of that is an example I found in the famous c++ pitfalls at http://www.horstmann.com/cpp/pitfalls.html. Look for the example that starts with "The stream classes support a type conversion basic_ios "
And I'm not talking about the other implicit conversions like the one from int to float (already made in other comments) with all the nifty interactions it has with overloading, inheritance, whatever...
We can forgive Kernighan and Richie for that design. 35 years ago, we did not have clear ideas about type systems. And C was a portable assembler to write OS. On a CPU, there is no differences between an integer and a boolean. Thus, no need to have a bool type in your language. But today , this is absolutely terrific that in the mainstream programming language, you can still write that program:
#include <iostream>
int main(int argc, char **argv) { int z = 5; if(1 <= z <= 3){ std::cout << "I love Stroustroup\n"; } else{ std::cout << "I hate Stroustroup\n"; } }
It will compile without a warning. When run, it produces aberrant results.
I basically agree with your point: X is not slow. But your argument is completely wrong in this case.
X is not concerned with 3D stuffs except for the initialisation of the GL context.
As soon as the app has its own GL context, it directly talks to the hardware. X has nothing to do with this business except in the forwarding of events (mouse, keyboard). Only the driver, the app and the 3D card play a role in this case.
What I'm saying is true even in the case where quake is run in a window (ie: not fullscreen)
Slashdot Mirror
and now Climate Skeptic are going to say:
"Global warning is a lie from eco terrorists. And even if it might be possibly true, we can always inject sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere to cool it down. So, shut your mouth, communist!"
In France, we already have to pay a tax (The Tasca Tax) for each storage medium like CD-Rom, mp3 players. The money collected by that tax is supposed to be given to artists.
You have to pay that tax even if you buy a CD-Rom to archive your personal data. At some point, it was even proposed that that tax should be paid for a hard drive in a PC. IIRC, this is currently not the case.
What will be the practice in France? Shall we pay twice?
Crichton is definitely a complete moron when he speaks about global warning (and probably on other subject too, but let's be conservative). That speech http://www.crichton-official.com/speeches/speeches _quote04.html, of which I discover the existence here on /., is a very good sample of that.
The most obvious proof of his blatant ignorance is that citation:
Obviously, that guy does not know the difference between Meteorology and Climatology . What credit can he have after that?
But that speech is also full of many other memorable quotes. He believes in so naive epistemological theories. I can't resist to quote what he says about the scientific consensus:
All the validation of scientific results goes through a review by the community. This is how science is being practice for ages. Crichton probably does not realize how many crackpots there are. Without a living community that validates things, we would not have gone very far. That's too easy to criticize the scientific consensus using what the fact that too innovative ideas need some time to get into the consensus.
What he says about computer models is funny too. But I'm already completely off-topic and prefer to stop here.
That's easy to say now that C was badly designed almost 35 years ago. Given what we knew at this time about grammars, type systems, or language theory in general, I would say C was just a brilliant innovation. I'm not particularly shocked by the design choice about pointer and arrays. That looks vaguely reasonable if you are in a portable assembler.
The only things I consider as a real mistake is automatic conversion. That is just not in the spirit of such low level language. The conversion from an "int" to a "double" is not trivial at the machine level. This should have been made explicit, IMHO. That's the major reason that makes coding numerical algorithm in C very dangerous.
What is absolutely non-sense, from a purely technical point of view, is to have extended that language during the 80's to reach the hideous
C++. Unfortunately, things don't evolve based on technical reasons. And coders always prefer to learn a new feature of a plain old legacy stuff they know well, instead of learning a completely different language.
I fully agree with that. And I consider Carmak a little arrogant here when he says this research was a waste of time. 5 years ago, you should not expect to display a 32000 x 32000 terrain mesh in real time on a regular 3D board without some kind of level of details. This was a really needed technology.
Now, it might be faster to not be smart and instead cache all the mesh on the GPU. But there is still an upper bound on the mesh's size (a bound that you can easily cross when you work with plane simulators or google earth).
As a final remark, GPU could be even faster if those LOD algorithms coming from this wasted research were implemented directly on-board.
I can't stop laughing about that sentence. Like another comment said, have a look at ML to see what is a language with a safe type system.
You can't expect to have any reasonable type safety when keeping so much compatibility with C. The changes between C and C++ about the typing rules for basic types was made with performance improvement in mind, not safety. They added a bool type to C++, which might be considered a step toward type safety. But they allow bool and int to be implicitely cast one into the other. They did not want to break all the idiomatic constructions of C you usually find in clauses like:
So why did they introduce bool? The only reason I can imagine is that the generated code will be faster.The best illustration of that is an example I found in the famous c++ pitfalls at http://www.horstmann.com/cpp/pitfalls.html. Look for the example that starts with "The stream classes support a type conversion basic_ios "
And I'm not talking about the other implicit conversions like the one from int to float (already made in other comments) with all the nifty interactions it has with overloading, inheritance, whatever...
We can forgive Kernighan and Richie for that design. 35 years ago, we did not have clear ideas about type systems. And C was a portable assembler to write OS. On a CPU, there is no differences between an integer and a boolean. Thus, no need to have a bool type in your language. But today , this is absolutely terrific that in the mainstream programming language, you can still write that program:It will compile without a warning. When run, it produces aberrant results.I basically agree with your point: X is not slow. But your argument is completely wrong in this case.
X is not concerned with 3D stuffs except for the initialisation of the GL context.
As soon as the app has its own GL context, it directly talks to the hardware. X has nothing to do with this business except in the forwarding of events (mouse, keyboard). Only the driver, the app and the 3D card play a role in this case.
What I'm saying is true even in the case where quake is run in a window (ie: not fullscreen)
I've read somewhere (the scientific american -- french edition) that the fact the gulf stream make the climate of europe warmer is an urban myth.
Recent models apparently proved that the inertia of the ocean is enough to explain the nice winters we have in Europe.
Does anyone has a reference on this ?
I googled a little bit but could not find any paper.
And there is another language that is, IMHO, far more interesting than xslt. It is called CDuce.
It is a strongly typed language (xslt is not). And this add a lot of robustness.
Moreover, it has a real syntax (close to ML's one)
It is still beta, though.