1up has been one of the more reliable "slashdot-resistant" sites for me actually. Perhaps it is from where your connection in the world is from for that specific site.
Re:C++ is cross-platform, dont know what your smok
on
Write Portable Code
·
· Score: 1
The kind of things I drool over are the Turing-completness of the C++ template mechanism, but that just goes back to wanting to get the compiler to figure out as much as possible for me.
I dunno what you mean by "turing-compleness", but the Generics mechanism in 1.5 is probably what you're looking for: compile-time type-safety. Before when using collections you were always casting back-and-forth from collections, but now you can let the compiler ensure what you're doing.
Still not 100% efficient, as they made it a compiler-trick, and thus it's still doing type-checking at runtime (why they implemented it this way (even though it preserves backwards-compatability with existing bytecode, which isn't a good enough reason IMO) is beyond me, as the speed improvement would have been worth it).
Re:C++ is cross-platform, dont know what your smok
on
Write Portable Code
·
· Score: 1
While your solution works, I'll admit that the whole serialization thing is one of the nicer things about Java. Obviously there are other pitfalls with the language, but serialization is one of the things done "well" in most cases. I only wish there was something like that for C++, or the standard libraries at the least, with perhaps a class you could extend with your own class wherein you serialize your own primitives, or something.
I dunno, rambling. But Serialization is a real PITA sometimes.
Ya JMF seems like it has something: com.sun.media.codec.video.colorspace.YUVToRGB, along with other things in the package like javax.media.format.YUVFormat. Of course that means I'd need to LEARN JMF, which for what I'm doing might not be a bad thing, but still, it's another library that I don't know yet.
And as I put in my original reply above, the bitwise-AND is what I was already doing, as I couldn't see any other way. Was hoping for some type of builtin with native methods to do it faster.
What I'm actually doing is bringing in image data in a 4:2:0 format (you probably don't know what that is unless you're in an imaging/video field). Basically it's a large block of data for one color band (YCrCb in my case), then two smaller bands, which are then re-expanded back to full size (there's only 1/4 as much data for the two C-bands as for the Y-one). But of course each data value is an unsigned 8-bit value. After they're all in int arrays, then I process them in triplets (one from each color band) to convert to an RGB-format, which I then do other things to. I'm already using NIO to read them into correct-sized bytebuffers all-3 at once (the data's in the file that way), but it's after that we get "messy" putting them into a processable form, due to the unsigned issues, moving them around into the larger int-arrays, etc.
Your mention SIMD instructions intrigue me though. What can be done in Java on that front? Basically I AM doing exactly the same operation on these things, and so utilizing parallelism would be great if possible.
Just looked it up, and I can't believe I missed the readUnsignedByte() method of the DataInput interface, but I still have a question: any way to do this with large arrays that you know of? I can't think doing this in a loop, even if it IS from a buffered input stream would be efficient.
Are you responding to the wrong comment? Your #2 talks about chars, but I said nothing about using chars as a datatype for numbers. If I wanted 16-bit numbers, I'd be using a "short". And add to that the fact that actually all java primitives EXCEPT chars are SIGNED, that kind of throws point 1 out the window too.
But I will admit one point you have: reading in blocks of ints is another solution to my problem, as you could AND out each 8-bit component of what you want into another int (then shift obviously), and get the same result, though that's uselessly complex, as you usually do "block" reads anyways, in my case into a byte array.
The fact that you can't have an unsigned int in Java 1.5 is a huge pain
Or even worse, the lack of an unsigned byte when reading in binary data structures. I don't claim to be a Java expert by any stretch (so I may be missing an obvious way to do this), but do you know how unnecessarily complex it is to convert a read-in byte to it's CORRECT unsigned value? Why isn't there an automatic way to do this at all? You can't just assign the byte to an int, as it'll still be negative (if above 127). I think in the end I just asigned the byte to an int, then did a bitwise-AND to throw out the extra sign bits it tacked on in the widening conversion so that it was back to positive.
Still, something that would be easily alleviated by a simple unsigned type. Stupid that it's not there. I like Java, but an unsigned type would make these things so much easier, as it is in so common use in binary formats that it's an unnecessary impediment when it isn't easily read from/to in unsigned form.
I think you're right. If you use an unmodified GPL2 that includes the "upgrade" clause, then to fold the upgraded code back into YOUR project, it must all go to GPL3 as well.
Only if you had modified your original licence before any releases to not have the "upgrade" clause would they have violated moving to GPL3. But as of now, you can't fold their work back into yours without YOU changing your licence.
I went to a lecture that Stallman gave once. Your description is accurate. Though I would definitely add "zealot" to that as well. Not necessarily a bad thing (some zealots are always needed), but he does come on pretty strong.
I noticed that, but I hope they address that by the time they make this the "official" release, so that either we can ALL enjoy an increase in performance, or at the least they don't screw something up that's already working fine.
Ya, I'll be taking this with a grain of salt until there's a lot more independant confirmation. Everybody remember the quack vs quake debacle?
At various times BOTH manufacturers have been guilty of "internal tweaks" to degrade quality for a performance boost in a popular benchmark. I hope it's not happening again, and that the performance increase is genuine (I have a vested interest, as I have an X800), but it could be another fraud.
Actually, natural gas is already being used to fuel cars. Yes but these cars aren't RUNNING on natural gas. They are running on hydrogen which is extracted from natural gas (process is called "reforming" the gas). Hence there won't be many places around unless they already have their own reforming station.
Fleet vehicles are a good point though. This is another way of circumventing the chicken-n-egg problem, as those are another place where vehicles like this can start without the problem of no "commercial" fuel stations around.
This is probably the only way to solve the chicken-n-egg problem of hydrogen cars. Sure you won't be able to drive it cross-country for a while, but for burning around town, it should work, and then once enough of them are out there, THEN the commercial stations will follow.
Still, as others mentioned above, with high natural gas prices, I can't see this helping, though if it doubles as your home heating, hopefully the amount of natural gas per household increased useage isn't much.
I have no doubt your numbers are correct, but at the same time can the 2/3 vs 3/4 difference in urbanization really account for the difference in penetration and pricing? I would argue not. While there has been a focus on greater communications infrastructure by government (just look at Alberta Supernet for a dramatic example. Services every community in the province with high-speed internet that has any of a school, a library, or a medical centre), IMO it definitely was the co-location and promotion of competition that made the REAL difference. Telus (as well as the other big incumbents in Canada) fought tooth and nail against co-location, but it NEEDED to happen, and it has succeeded (somewhat).
But this gets into a bigger discussion about government involvment in industry. Personally I think government's main role in the market should be to encourage competition, and BREAK UP monopolies, not encourage them. With almost-no exceptions, there are always better results from MORE competition, and MORE players in the market, rather than fewer. And when the "natural" market starts creating dominant giants, either introduce factors to break their monopoly with new initiatives (mandating co-location would be one example of such), or break the companies up (more extreme, and necessary only when the previous option fails). But above all they should be ENSURING that meaningful competition always occurs.
Governments have an essential role in economies completely seperate from government spending and federally (or provincial/state) run companies. More competition is almost always good, and should be the government's PRIMARY responsability (aside from money flow), not encouraging monopolies.
How about you re-insert the section of the quote that you edited that talked about the heat islands of populated areas before posting misleading information.
Myth 1: Global temperatures are rising at a rapid, unprecedented rate. Fact: Accurate satellite, balloon and mountain top observations made over the last three decades have not shown any significant change in the long term rate of increase in global temperatures.
Average ground station readings do show a mild warming over the last 100 years, but well within the natural variations recorded in the last millenium. The ground station network suffers from an uneven distribution across the globe; the stations are preferentially located in growing urban and industrial areas ("heat islands") which show substantially higher readings than adjacent rural areas ("land use effects").
And this:
Myth 3: Human produced carbon dioxide has increased over the last 100 years, adding to the Greenhouse effect, thus warming the earth.
Fact: Carbon dioxide levels have indeed changed for various reasons, human and otherwise, just as they have throughout geologic time. The CO2 increase was only 0.4% over the last 50 years, rather than the 5% per 100 years quoted by Kyoto. However, as measured in ice cores dated over many thousands of years, CO2 levels move up and down AFTER the temperature has done so, and thus are the RESULT OF, NOT THE CAUSE of warming. Geological field work in recent sediments confirms this. There is solid evidence that as temperatures rise naturally and cyclically, the earth's oceans expel more CO2 as a result.
And don't forget the worst greenhouse gas of all: WATER VAPOUR!
Myth 4: CO2 is the most common greenhouse gas.
Fact: Water vapour or clouds, which makes up on average about 3 % of the atmosphere by volume, and - according to several researchers - about 60% by effect, is the major greenhouse gas. 97% of greenhouse gases are water vapour by volume. Moreover, because of its molecular weight and absorptive capacity, water vapour is 3000 times more effective than CO2 as a greenhouse gas. Those attributing climate change to CO2 rarely mention this important fact.
Better start campaigning to remove all the water vapour emissions. Oh wait, water covers 71% of the earth's surface. No dice there...
Yes there are advocates for global warming, and "evidence" therein, but there is much evidence against it, and ESPECIALLY against man-made warming. Today's Calgary Sun article by Licia Corbella also has some things to say on the topic.
Engineers without Borders (who provide solar-powered lights for kids in impovershed countries so they can read at night)
You're actually thinking about the Light up the World Foundation run by Dr. Dave Irvine-Halliday from the University of Calgary. I wouldn't be suprised if Engineers without Borders is involved, but the foundation you're thinking of is LutW.
And really, if development into micro-H-bombs is what it takes to get fusion research going, then I say "bring on the bombs." Often times military research is a BIG contributor to overall scientific knowledge just because of the AMOUNTS of money dumped into large research projects that could NEVER show ROI even in a university environment.
So destruction really can be the path to a better fusion future. Assuming we make it that far...
Or 3. Developer Celebrity. They had a number jump ship to NCSoft for Guild Wars. And they were people that some knew their names, and thus caused some waves about "true spirit of blizzard", etc. I don't know if it's true at all, but keeping them seperate completely takes this problem away.
Or 4. This keeps decisions from needing to be justified. With much questioning you can always say "the developers must have their reasons" rather than them being vetted by the community at large. It also helps them justify the snail's pace of fixing classes (1 talent revamp PER patch? wtf?).
Slashdot Mirror
1up has been one of the more reliable "slashdot-resistant" sites for me actually. Perhaps it is from where your connection in the world is from for that specific site.
/agree
I dunno what you mean by "turing-compleness", but the Generics mechanism in 1.5 is probably what you're looking for: compile-time type-safety. Before when using collections you were always casting back-and-forth from collections, but now you can let the compiler ensure what you're doing.
Still not 100% efficient, as they made it a compiler-trick, and thus it's still doing type-checking at runtime (why they implemented it this way (even though it preserves backwards-compatability with existing bytecode, which isn't a good enough reason IMO) is beyond me, as the speed improvement would have been worth it).
While your solution works, I'll admit that the whole serialization thing is one of the nicer things about Java. Obviously there are other pitfalls with the language, but serialization is one of the things done "well" in most cases. I only wish there was something like that for C++, or the standard libraries at the least, with perhaps a class you could extend with your own class wherein you serialize your own primitives, or something.
I dunno, rambling. But Serialization is a real PITA sometimes.
Ya JMF seems like it has something: com.sun.media.codec.video.colorspace.YUVToRGB, along with other things in the package like javax.media.format.YUVFormat. Of course that means I'd need to LEARN JMF, which for what I'm doing might not be a bad thing, but still, it's another library that I don't know yet.
And as I put in my original reply above, the bitwise-AND is what I was already doing, as I couldn't see any other way. Was hoping for some type of builtin with native methods to do it faster.
Thanks for your help man.
What I'm actually doing is bringing in image data in a 4:2:0 format (you probably don't know what that is unless you're in an imaging/video field). Basically it's a large block of data for one color band (YCrCb in my case), then two smaller bands, which are then re-expanded back to full size (there's only 1/4 as much data for the two C-bands as for the Y-one). But of course each data value is an unsigned 8-bit value. After they're all in int arrays, then I process them in triplets (one from each color band) to convert to an RGB-format, which I then do other things to. I'm already using NIO to read them into correct-sized bytebuffers all-3 at once (the data's in the file that way), but it's after that we get "messy" putting them into a processable form, due to the unsigned issues, moving them around into the larger int-arrays, etc.
Your mention SIMD instructions intrigue me though. What can be done in Java on that front? Basically I AM doing exactly the same operation on these things, and so utilizing parallelism would be great if possible.
Just looked it up, and I can't believe I missed the readUnsignedByte() method of the DataInput interface, but I still have a question: any way to do this with large arrays that you know of? I can't think doing this in a loop, even if it IS from a buffered input stream would be efficient.
Are you responding to the wrong comment? Your #2 talks about chars, but I said nothing about using chars as a datatype for numbers. If I wanted 16-bit numbers, I'd be using a "short". And add to that the fact that actually all java primitives EXCEPT chars are SIGNED, that kind of throws point 1 out the window too.
But I will admit one point you have: reading in blocks of ints is another solution to my problem, as you could AND out each 8-bit component of what you want into another int (then shift obviously), and get the same result, though that's uselessly complex, as you usually do "block" reads anyways, in my case into a byte array.
Or even worse, the lack of an unsigned byte when reading in binary data structures. I don't claim to be a Java expert by any stretch (so I may be missing an obvious way to do this), but do you know how unnecessarily complex it is to convert a read-in byte to it's CORRECT unsigned value? Why isn't there an automatic way to do this at all? You can't just assign the byte to an int, as it'll still be negative (if above 127). I think in the end I just asigned the byte to an int, then did a bitwise-AND to throw out the extra sign bits it tacked on in the widening conversion so that it was back to positive.
Still, something that would be easily alleviated by a simple unsigned type. Stupid that it's not there. I like Java, but an unsigned type would make these things so much easier, as it is in so common use in binary formats that it's an unnecessary impediment when it isn't easily read from/to in unsigned form.
I think you're right. If you use an unmodified GPL2 that includes the "upgrade" clause, then to fold the upgraded code back into YOUR project, it must all go to GPL3 as well.
Only if you had modified your original licence before any releases to not have the "upgrade" clause would they have violated moving to GPL3. But as of now, you can't fold their work back into yours without YOU changing your licence.
I went to a lecture that Stallman gave once. Your description is accurate. Though I would definitely add "zealot" to that as well. Not necessarily a bad thing (some zealots are always needed), but he does come on pretty strong.
I noticed that, but I hope they address that by the time they make this the "official" release, so that either we can ALL enjoy an increase in performance, or at the least they don't screw something up that's already working fine.
Ya, I'll be taking this with a grain of salt until there's a lot more independant confirmation. Everybody remember the quack vs quake debacle?
At various times BOTH manufacturers have been guilty of "internal tweaks" to degrade quality for a performance boost in a popular benchmark. I hope it's not happening again, and that the performance increase is genuine (I have a vested interest, as I have an X800), but it could be another fraud.
"Wait and see" is what I'll do.
Actually, natural gas is already being used to fuel cars.
Yes but these cars aren't RUNNING on natural gas. They are running on hydrogen which is extracted from natural gas (process is called "reforming" the gas). Hence there won't be many places around unless they already have their own reforming station.
Fleet vehicles are a good point though. This is another way of circumventing the chicken-n-egg problem, as those are another place where vehicles like this can start without the problem of no "commercial" fuel stations around.
This is probably the only way to solve the chicken-n-egg problem of hydrogen cars. Sure you won't be able to drive it cross-country for a while, but for burning around town, it should work, and then once enough of them are out there, THEN the commercial stations will follow.
Still, as others mentioned above, with high natural gas prices, I can't see this helping, though if it doubles as your home heating, hopefully the amount of natural gas per household increased useage isn't much.
I have no doubt your numbers are correct, but at the same time can the 2/3 vs 3/4 difference in urbanization really account for the difference in penetration and pricing? I would argue not. While there has been a focus on greater communications infrastructure by government (just look at Alberta Supernet for a dramatic example. Services every community in the province with high-speed internet that has any of a school, a library, or a medical centre), IMO it definitely was the co-location and promotion of competition that made the REAL difference. Telus (as well as the other big incumbents in Canada) fought tooth and nail against co-location, but it NEEDED to happen, and it has succeeded (somewhat).
But this gets into a bigger discussion about government involvment in industry. Personally I think government's main role in the market should be to encourage competition, and BREAK UP monopolies, not encourage them. With almost-no exceptions, there are always better results from MORE competition, and MORE players in the market, rather than fewer. And when the "natural" market starts creating dominant giants, either introduce factors to break their monopoly with new initiatives (mandating co-location would be one example of such), or break the companies up (more extreme, and necessary only when the previous option fails). But above all they should be ENSURING that meaningful competition always occurs.
Governments have an essential role in economies completely seperate from government spending and federally (or provincial/state) run companies. More competition is almost always good, and should be the government's PRIMARY responsability (aside from money flow), not encouraging monopolies.
How about because I didn't say any of the things you accuse me of? Stop making assumptions.
Not to mention turning your argument straight back at you. Equally applicable.
How about you re-insert the section of the quote that you edited that talked about the heat islands of populated areas before posting misleading information.
Some excerpts:
And this:
And don't forget the worst greenhouse gas of all: WATER VAPOUR!
Better start campaigning to remove all the water vapour emissions. Oh wait, water covers 71% of the earth's surface. No dice there...
Yes there are advocates for global warming, and "evidence" therein, but there is much evidence against it, and ESPECIALLY against man-made warming. Today's Calgary Sun article by Licia Corbella also has some things to say on the topic.
That last line DID seem to be tempting fate...
But can you PLAY Duke Nukem Forever on the Phantom Console? That'd be the ultimate irony...
Or perhaps it'll be an EXCLUSIVE for the Phantom.
Ya... that's it...
Happyness or Pleasure? Which is really being pursued by most? How many even know the difference?
You're actually thinking about the Light up the World Foundation run by Dr. Dave Irvine-Halliday from the University of Calgary. I wouldn't be suprised if Engineers without Borders is involved, but the foundation you're thinking of is LutW.
And really, if development into micro-H-bombs is what it takes to get fusion research going, then I say "bring on the bombs." Often times military research is a BIG contributor to overall scientific knowledge just because of the AMOUNTS of money dumped into large research projects that could NEVER show ROI even in a university environment.
So destruction really can be the path to a better fusion future. Assuming we make it that far...
Or 3. Developer Celebrity. They had a number jump ship to NCSoft for Guild Wars. And they were people that some knew their names, and thus caused some waves about "true spirit of blizzard", etc. I don't know if it's true at all, but keeping them seperate completely takes this problem away.
Or 4. This keeps decisions from needing to be justified. With much questioning you can always say "the developers must have their reasons" rather than them being vetted by the community at large. It also helps them justify the snail's pace of fixing classes (1 talent revamp PER patch? wtf?).