I was trying to install Mandrake 7.1 on a dual-partition machine but the installer kept crashing reliably at the same point halfway through. (Corrupted graphics, then freezeup.) Afterwards the computer only booted up to a GRUB prompt. I was able to get into Windows by typing
root (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1
into GRUB. So I figured I'd fix it later.
But the 4th or 5th time I restarted it, the chainload command just stopped working. There was no error message- the prompt just wouldn't go away. WTF? I tried to troubleshoot it but after a day or two of dry Google searches I got sick of it and did an fdisk/mbr from a floppy. Problem solved. I mean, I probably could have figured it out, but if I followed through on every problem I've ever had with Linux all the way to a resolution, I wouldn't have any time for other things. Life is just too short.
Afterwards I installed Red Hat 7.1 (with LILO) on all my computers, with no installer complications, even on my laptop. It works like a charm. But I guess my own experience with LILO and GRUB isn't necessarily representative of the real strengths and drawbacks of each. And there are real benefits to GRUB. Still, I have to laugh when RH points to a higher screen resolution as being one of them. Who the hell cares if the screen resolution is only 320x200? It's a fscking bootloader!
Sorry that the script kiddies have been giving you trouble and moderating you as flamebait. After all, you were reporting a real experience with GRUB. (Although I wouldn't have titled my post "GRUB sucks".) But there seems to be this attitude that if you're unable to resolve a problem, it's because you're not trying hard enough. In fact the attitude is more like "Well I didn't have that problem so you must be stupid." Linux and other open source projects are supposedly based on a model of people helping each other out. It pisses me off when I see people new to Linux being hazed as if they're fraternity pledges.
The point is moot. The chip is only being shrunk in one dimension. Any "quantum effects" are going to be confined to that dimension. The other two are independent.
The real problems are mesoscopic effects, because atoms are "sticky" and objects made of 10-1000 of them do weird things. They aren't as easy to manipulate as the macroscopic objects that we have real-world experience with.
Sounds good, but doesn't the native layer still have to support garbage collection, threads, and all that automated stuff that comes down from the IL layer? Real native code isn't hampered by this kind of overhead.
There are a bunch of compilers out there already that compile Java to native executables. They never took off because the performance increase wasn't as impressive as you would think.
Do you really have to post this on every thread?
on
Five Years of KDE
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· Score: 1
It's getting old, really. Can't you think of a better troll?
Yeah, INTERCAL. Do you have to resort to such hyperbole?
Actually it's probably worth pointing out that you can compile INTERCAL to Java bytecode already. See the J-INTERCAL page. Looks like.NET already has some catching up to do.
I, for one, am hoping that I can move my Malbolge code to.NET where it belongs!
Re:It's about debugging.
on
J#
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
The main advantage is here: development is faster in a team where every programmer can use the language he/she likes the most.
.NET people love to say this and it makes me laugh. It's so naive. It's like saying that development is going to be faster once you let all the programmers use the bracing and indent styles that they personally prefer.
"Welcome to the team. I wrote the C# parts of the application. John writes in Eiffel, Paul here likes C++ and uses that, and George over there prefers to use VB because he really likes its type system. You'll be sitting at this desk here, and you'll be in charge of the code that Ringo was working on before he left. None of us really knows how it works because we don't know INTERCAL."
I submit that development is faster in a team where all the developers are using the same language and can at least read each other's code. I work with a bunch of guys on a successful Java-based scientific application. We have to go into each other's code and change things all the time. They're all smart guys- and I have real respect for them, because 1.they're very productive and 2.might be reading this. But they're physics PhDs with no formal CS training, and they write fiendishly clever code that is really hard to read. The best of them writes huge amounts of complex-flow infrastructure that is riddled with "historical" stuff that gets coded around everywhere. Another one writes impenetrable clockwork mechanisms. A third delights in purposeful obfuscation (so he handles the licensing validation code). If any of them were on a plane that got hijacked, the company would be in serious trouble! Their code is pretty hard to read, but I can usually figure it out because I'm used to deciphering uncommented Java. The mere idea of these guys running around writing different parts of the code in their favorite languages makes me shudder. (The clockwork mechanism guy likes OCaml, for example, and naturally the obfuscator would prefer C.)
The idea of everyone coding in their favorite language only works well if each developer is going to be entirely responsible for his/her own domains of the code, and nobody will need to cross boundaries too often into other domains. If there is more coupling than that, then soon everyone has to learn everyone else's favorite language. This sets up a language holy war. It also makes it difficult to reassign responsibility for parts of the code because now you have to worry about who knows what language.
This might be useful for more loosely coupled development teams. As in, your project in language X could really use this nice new library that someone wrote in language Y. But you can already use language bindings that are already available for that purpose. If you encounter a bug in a library do you normally debug it yourself? If you're like most people, you either send a nasty email to the guy who sold you a buggy library, or you dig through a mailing list archive to find out what the problem is. If you use a debugger at all, it's to get a general idea of what's going on so that you might get an idea for a workaround to put in your client X code. But you can usually just pull that off if you just have the source! It is kind of neat that you can step into a different language, but it's unlikely to be of much critical importance for reasons that have more to do with humans than computers.
So the Sun JVM would run on top of.NET? The JVM itself would be running under a CLR VM. Native code is now TWO levels below you.
This is actually an interesting idea. Maybe you could use Java to write an interpreter for your own custom bytecode. Then you would run it using the Sun JVM running on top of the CLR VM and get THREE levels away from the native code. The ultimate would be a VM written in the same bytecode that it interprets. Then you could just stack those VM layers up like Legos to the sky! There are probably some good IOCCC entries in here somewhere.
The real question is: if.NET is only going to run on Windows then why does Microsoft need to set up a VM for it at all?
warning: goatse.cx link
on
J#
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· Score: 1, Offtopic
Maybe slashcode can look for a redirect URL in the query string of each URL. It would be useful to see something like
[lindqvist.com ?-> GOATSE.CX]
or even
[lindqvist.com/externsajt.php?externalSite= http://GOATSE.CX]
instead of
[lindqvist.com]
Although it's still a good pictoral overview of Microsoft's Java offerings.
public class SlashdotBitchfest {
public static void main(String[] args) {
String s = "Code monkeys are what make Java performance suck. ";
s += "You can spot a code monkey because they write stuff like this. ";
s += "Java handles String concatenation really badly ";
s += "and each += involves an array copy ";
s += "and the creation of a new immutable String object ";
s += "because a+=b is really syntactic sugar for ";
s += "\nStringBuffer temp = new StringBuffer(a);";
s += "\ntemp.append(b);";
s += "\na = temp.toString();";
s += "\nso you waste resources quadratically ";
s += "and kick the garbage collector into overdrive. ";
s += "You're supposed to allocate memory for a single StringBuffer instead ";
s += "and append() stuff to it in succession. ";
s += "But this isn't obvious. ";
s += "And the fact that += works at all means that ";
s += "the code monkeys will always use it. ";
s += "\"It saves me typing!\" they whine. \"And it WORKS, doesn't it?\" ";
s += "Stopping them is hopeless. ";
s += "\nJava's automatic Unicode support is a bitch too. ";
s += "Half the time you don't need it but you get it anyway \"for free\", ";
s += "but all those Unicode conversions take time! ";
s += "\nEven something like String.toUpperCase() is expensive. ";
s += "(You would think that Sun would be doing this in a loop: ";
s += "\nif (\'a\'=myChar&&myChar=\'z\') myChar-=(\'a\'-\'A\'); ";
s += "\nbut they don't do that. It's more complicated! ";
s += "String.toUpperCase() is actually testing for the German \"ß\" ";
s += "so it can convert it to a pair of letters \"SS\"! ";
s += "It also worries about Chinese characters, Arabic, all that stuff. ";
s += "For Strings that only need to be machine-readable, ";
s += "this is an unnecessary performance hit ";
s += "because you aren't going to have Kanji and Swedish characters ";
s += "in things like database identifiers. ";
s += "\nBut Sun has deprecated all non-Unicode stuff from its API. ";
s += "So often you have to use byte[] arrays ";
s += "or write your own non-politically correct ";
s += "ASCII-only String conversion routines. ";
s += "\nIt IS possible to write very efficient Java code ";
s += "but to do so requires some expertise ";
s += "and you have to pay very close attention to the code you're writing. ";
s += "Code monkeys don't do this. ";
s += "They have no idea what they're doing. ";
s += "Inefficient Java programs are really easy to write ";
s += "because the API hides many details from you ";
s += "and so you often don't realize the performance impact of your decisions. ";
s += "In fact the JVM gets blamed a lot for the lousy performance of ";
s += "many Java programs, but the real culprit is the API which in many ";
s += "places makes too many decisions on its own. It caters to ";
s += "lazy people who don't like to learn how to do things the right way.";
s += "\nWe found a long String concatenation series like this ";
s += "in one of our most frequently called routines, in its innermost loop. ";
s += "Thousands and thousands of += appends were being used to build up a ";
s += "huge String that kept getting copied, replaced, and garbage collected ";
s += "with each +=. Once we fixed it, we got something like a 5000% ";
s += "performance increase. \nGo figure!";
System.out.println(s);
}
}
To anyone taking this guy seriously: don't waste your time responding. Instead, grab a brewsky, kick back, turn on the tube, and watch the unfolding progression of America's shiny brand new war!
There was a really clever idea (~10-15 years ago?) for using muons to catalyze cold fusion that never panned out (or at least, it lost all its funding). Except that the method DOES generate helium at room temperature, unlike all the palladium-electrode methods. And it was a really cool idea.
In muon-catalyzed cold fusion, you inject a muon into a cold mixture of hydrogen molecules (D-T or D-D) to create a singly-ionized muonic hydrogen molecule that consists of deuterium and tritium. They share the muon just as if it were a bound electron. But muons are 200 times heavier than electrons, so their orbitals are much, much tighter and so the nuclei are brought much closer together than in ordinary singly-ionized hydrogen. Since the charges are brought so much closer, enough energy is released to disperse the D-T molecule's electrons (which would only get in the way). And the muon screens the repulsive charges of the nuclei so well that they are brought close enough to each other to tunnel through the remaining potential barrier and fuse via strong interactions, forming helium. The muon generally survives this process and is free to catalyze it again with another D-T or D-D molecule.
The problem with muon-catalyzed fusion is that muons are expensive to make (they're about ~100 MeV) and the fusion reaction generates only a few MeV. So you have to recycle your muons over and over again just to get your initial investment back. The muon is actually quite recyclable, but you have to use it fast because it decays to an electron + neutrino + antineutrino in something on the order of a microsecond. (Which is a pretty long time actually.) Muons are also lost when they stick to the helium instead of going off to catalyze the next reaction. This is the bigger problem. In fact, muon-alpha sticking is how you eventually lose most of your muons. They did manage to recycle muons to catalyze about 150 fusions, but that's not enough to make break-even.
Still, people have made helium with this method! That's a hell of a lot more than you can say for the palladium electrode voodoo that completely ruined the reputation of "cold fusion".
Haha, yeah. I had that thought too when I saw it. Skyscrapers are a terrible image to use right now. They symbolize vulnerability.
But think of what you could do with the metaphor. You could represent Code Red and Nimda as passenger jets!
They're dead.
Not a single one of them gives a sh1t if we eventually decide to get on with our lives. There is an understandable impulse to not forget those who died. But get some perspective: these will be the least forgettable 6000 deaths we've ever seen. Everyone's been crying for almost three weeks now. We can get on with our lives without "dishonoring the memories" of anyone. The events of this past month have made a lot of people like you come out of the woodwork and it's amazing and disturbing to see how many idiots like you there are.
You should really be ashamed of yourself. You're trying to enforce this mourning period to last as long as it possibly can as though you're really enjoying it, and you loudly disapprove of every ounce of joy and normalcy you find left in the world. Stop tsk-tsking people who aren't constantly talking about terrorism, and go do something that will really help. Spend some money on consumer goods. Buy some stocks. Hell, go take unnecessary flights. And please stop throwing a fit every time you see things getting back to normal.
I'm just amazed that political correctness has now been taken over by conservatives! Damn!
BTW- support Bill Maher and sign the petition to keep Politically Incorrect on the air!
When did this happen? I actually like the new icon. The old one was a little disparaging to Hormel.
I could never stand SPAM anyway. I guess I'd eat it if I were trapped in a fallout shelter. Maybe.
In related news, the inventor of the boxcutter committed suicide today, after renouncing his invention and blaming himself for the terrorist attacks which it made possible. "It was all my fault," he said. "If I hadn't invented that stupid boxcutter then none of this would have happened."
Attorney General John Ashcroft agreed, as he proposed a new set of restrictions on boxcutters, including a provision that no boxcutter blade should be sharp enough to cut more than 2 mm through a stick of butter at 120 degrees F. The restrictions also include new penalties for those who commit crimes with boxcutters. "We need to cut down on boxcutter-crime," said Ashcroft. "This is a different world now, calling for a lower level of tolerance, like zero. This extra security may inconvenience us when we have to open a box, but that's the price of getting serious in this new war of fighting terrorism."
Meanwhile, critics decried the move, claiming that with the new restrictions, only federal law enforcement agencies will be able to open boxes. Meanwhile, according to a new Fox News poll, 80% of Americans support restrictions on boxcutters that would make them as blunt as plastic knives. 59% approve of restrictions on sales of boxcutters to people who look Arabic or who wear turbans. And 70% said that anyone who buys a boxcutter should have a hair and semen sample stored in a federal DNA database.
"How often do I ever have to open a box?" said Virginia Redneck, mother of two. "Only terrorists need to do that. This is one piece of my freedom that I am willing to give up for an extra meaningless measure of pretend safety."
Shares of companies which manufacture letter-openers lost 15-25% this afternoon after heavy trading.
Tim O'Reilly wrote a Salon article back in November 1999 about the obstacles M$ places in the path of people who want to run alternative web servers on NT:
In fact, the rise of Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS) as the dominant Web server on NT shows much the same pattern as the rise of IE as the dominant browser: Microsoft got pole position by exercising its unique leverage as an operating system vendor.
Originally IIS, Web server software that runs only on the NT operating system, was bundled "free" with a version of NT called NT Server. Web server vendors such as Netscape and O'Reilly responded by pointing out in our advertising and PR that if customers ran our third-party Web server software on NT Workstation (a less expensive version of NT, which came without the IIS Web server software), they would end up with a more powerful server than Microsoft's IIS running on NT Server -- and it would cost less too.
Much as it had done by bundling the browser with Windows 98, Microsoft was bundling an application -- the IIS Web server -- as part of an operating system, (NT Server). But in this case, the company offered another version of the same operating system without the bundle, (NT Workstation). It seemed natural to competitors to offer our products on top of the version of the operating system that came without IIS.
It did not, however, please Microsoft that we did so. In June 1996 Microsoft responded by changing the license to NT Workstation to prohibit its use as a server platform. (At first, the company went further, and actually crippled the version of TCP/IP provided in NT Workstation, but the outcry from users forced it to backtrack.)
Microsoft argued, quite rightly, that it had the right to create two different versions of NT, with different price points, and different functionality. But the company went a step further, and used its operating system license (and more specifically the license to the parts of the operating system that implemented TCP/IP, an industry standard protocol) to prohibit the use of third-party applications that duplicated the functionality of Microsoft's more expensive platform.
Microsoft's public rationale for the policy -- that it was protecting its customers because NT Workstation was not suitable for use as a server operating system -- was proven false by my colleague, former O'Reilly editor Andrew Schulman (working with Mark Russinovich). Shulman and Russinovich demonstrated that it was possible to convert NT Workstation to NT Server by changing only a few registry entries. NT Workstation contained all of the same program code as NT Server; the code was simply disabled, and some additional applications bundled.
This is admittedly an old story; I don't know if M$ is still legally implementing this particular "innovative" license restriction nowadays. Does anybody know?
It takes an incredible amount of conceit to imagine that the U.S.A. is the only possible source of encryption software in the world. What makes these idiots think that Bin Laden is going to continue to upgrade his software (and therefore subject himself to potential back doors which his current software lacks)? And back doors are useless against stenography anyway.
It would make more sense to put "backdoors" in airplanes to prevent crazy pilots from getting control of them in the first place! I can't think of any non-stupid way to implement this. (Do we really want airplanes to be remotely pilotable? But it can't be a worse idea than restrictions on cryptography.
Maybe they should pass a law that from now on, terrorists must encrypt their communications with CSS.
The density can be calculated two ways. The real density is infinite (all the mass is at a point in the center)
Apparent density (which is the only density you can really calculate) varies proportionally to M/R^3 where M is mass and R is the radius from the center to event horizon. But with black holes, R is directly proportional to M (R=2GM/c^2). So this "density" falls off as 1/R^2 or 1/M^2 (take your pick). But this is not real density. Remember the "volume" is proportional to M^3. But this isn't the hole's own volume. It's the volume contained within its event horizon, which is much different.
The surface gravity at the event horizon can be arbitrarily low, because it varies INVERSELY with the mass of the hole: g=(c^4)/(4*G*M). A 2-million-sun black hole has a mass of 5.2x10^36 kg. I get a "surface gravity" (at the event horizon) of about 6000 g when I plug that in. (This is about 7.7 million km from the hole.) Which is pretty sad, actually. Surface gravity at the surface of a mere sun-sized black hole would be 2.6 million times greater than this. But you would have to get much closer to the smaller hole to reach its own event horizon. A small black hole's field falls off very quickly because the mass is comparatively small. A supermassive black hole, OTOH, has a relatively weak field that persists in strength for many light years outward.
For a black hole to have a surface gravity of about 1g, it would need to weigh as much as 16 billion stars (only a few percent of the mass of a typical galaxy). Such a hole would have a radius of 50 billion km (about 1/3 of the distance from the Sun to the Earth). The hole in M87 is only about half this size. Meaning that you would experience a surface gravity of 2g at the event horizon, and you would probably not even realize you fell in for several hours after wandering inside- unless you could look through your spaceship's window and see the weird optical effects on stars. By the time you would experience the "spaghettification" effect from tidal forces, you would almost be at the singularity anyway. A smaller hole can spaghettify you before you even cross the event horizon.
No, they are not. If they were, then your silly position might have some logical consistency. Sorry.
I haven't seen any evidence that the only way (or even the fastest way) to find these treatments is through federal funding of emroyinc stem cell research.
But even if it were eventually found to be the fastest and only way (which is probably the case) I have a feeling it wouldn't matter. I doubt that any evidence presented to you would affect your established opinion one bit.
Crazy to you because you accept that it's OK to kill a `less' valuable life in order to save another more `valuable' life. It seems you're forcing YOUR views on how valuable a life is on ME too.
Although the fact that your "less valuable life" will be killed anyway, whether research proceeds or not, doesn't seem to matter to you.
I'm saying find other roads to these cures; it's not moral.
And you sneer at me about wishful thinking! Has it occurred to you that there might be no other roads to those cures, as you cheer the blocking of this one?
The FDA stands in the way of lots of promosing research that could be speed along if loosing a certin number of test subjects was acceptable.
Aah, here we see the true nature of your strange morality.
All your illogical fuming aside, you still have not offered any convincing anti-ESR arguments that aren't empty rehashes of the right-to-life argument. And the fact remains that by blocking federal funding of any effective embryological research, Bush will not save the life of a single embryo.
I've seeen this stupid argument 500 times already in this thread.
Private investment -> companies file patents on each and every biological cell or structure their researchers are the first to encounter -> the field locks up as one avenue of research after another is patented. This does not happen with public funding.
If only we had _unlimited federal_ funding in the _US_ we might not have disease. People might not have to die. We'd live forever.
Well, if we had limited but unconditional funding, we might have new skin for burn victims, or new kidney cells for diabetes patients, or real treatment for spinal cord injuries so that patients could walk again. While a cure for Alzheimer's might not help us "live forever", everyone agrees that it would be a nice thing to have during the last 10-15 years of life. You are disingenuously reducing the issue at stake to simply making people live longer, which is not the promise of stem cell research at all and would be a dubious benifit at most.
It's wrong to take another human life to save another. I know many Slashdot readers don't consider embryos to be alive (and their all going to be destroyed anyways), but a lot of people do. A lot of people aren't willing to overlook the means because of the ends.
Then where is your outrage against the fertility clinics themselves, who are the source of all these embryos? There isn't a peep from you morons on this subject. Because if the purpose is to make a baby, you are willing to overlook the means because of the ends. You concentrate all your energies on who gets them after they're not needed anymore- stem cell researchers, or the garbage can? Now they'll all be thrown out, thanks to you. Meanwhile fertility clinics continue their operations without any interference or harassment, since you take it for granted that abortion clinics are the source of all these embryos anyway- which they are not.
What if someone decided that it was OK to harvest organs from orphans less then a year old?
We'd say they were nuts. (What are you singling out orphans for, anyway?) But if it was a kidney, and if it were, say, to save a twin's life, then maybe some of us would agree that the transplantation made sense. We'd have to weigh the situation and make a reasonable decision based on it, something which you seem to assume is impossible.
I mean, is a three month old baby alive? It can't talk, it can't sue anyone, it can't even feed it self. If no one put food in front of it, it would die.
This is a really strange definition of being "alive". I think we can all agree that if a live 3 year old baby fails your criteria for being alive, the baby is still alive- your definition is just stupid and needs more work.
So why can't we SAVE the lives of `wanted' children with `unwanted' children? Because it's wrong, it's murder. Some may accuse me of forcing my right-wing extremist conservative religious views on other people, but you have to draw the line somewhere.
So you have drawn your line in the craziest place imaginable, because of your hocus pocus religious beliefs, and now you demand that the world conform to your wishes and adopt your line as its own. Who gave you the impression that the line was yours and yours alone to draw anyway? The truth is that no line you draw will ever be in the correct place in all cases. You leave yourself no room to account for exceptions, special cases, and emergencies. Quit drawing silly lines for us.
I guess well all just have to spend our tax money on boring things like cancer research. Ugh. How many lives will THAT save?
Don't be so smug. Cancer and embryology are closely related fields. Bush has stuck a knife into the heart of U.S. cancer research with this ignorant and superstitious decision.
People always make fun of Stalin for declaring computer science to be a "false science" and squashing all research in it in his own country. Bush apparently thinks this is a mistake worth repeating.
You guys have the typical American attitude that the world stops at our borders. You probably think that Dubya's stupid, incoherent, and superstitious decision is going to kill stem cell research worldwide the way it's been killed here, don't you? As if no scientific research takes place anywhere else in the world except here in America, because we're so wonderful and advanced. Just look at our high school students' test scores in math and science. Look at all our native-born scientists (all ten of them). And just look at our president. We're very scientifically literate.
By not giving his $60 million to Stanford, Clarke can instead give it to a research facility that can do useful research with the money- without being hampered by illogical directives from a president who is openly hostile to scientific research. Bush has prohibited all potentially meaningful stem cell research in this country. But stem cell research (or cryptography research, or any scientific research for that matter) is not going to stop just because it's been prohibited in the U.S. by American zealotry and corruption.
Stanford is still getting money from Clarke- just $60 million less of it. They're still getting much more than that from him for other research (that the American government has not yet forbidden). Anybody who chooses to waste $60 million, by donating it to researchers who have been forbidden by the American government from making effective use of it, is a fool.
In related news, Russia is warning its programmers to avoid traveling to the U.S.A. I feel so proud to be an American.
Slashdot Mirror
I was trying to install Mandrake 7.1 on a dual-partition machine but the installer kept crashing reliably at the same point halfway through. (Corrupted graphics, then freezeup.) Afterwards the computer only booted up to a GRUB prompt. I was able to get into Windows by typing
/mbr from a floppy. Problem solved. I mean, I probably could have figured it out, but if I followed through on every problem I've ever had with Linux all the way to a resolution, I wouldn't have any time for other things. Life is just too short.
root (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1
into GRUB. So I figured I'd fix it later.
But the 4th or 5th time I restarted it, the chainload command just stopped working. There was no error message- the prompt just wouldn't go away. WTF? I tried to troubleshoot it but after a day or two of dry Google searches I got sick of it and did an fdisk
Afterwards I installed Red Hat 7.1 (with LILO) on all my computers, with no installer complications, even on my laptop. It works like a charm. But I guess my own experience with LILO and GRUB isn't necessarily representative of the real strengths and drawbacks of each. And there are real benefits to GRUB. Still, I have to laugh when RH points to a higher screen resolution as being one of them. Who the hell cares if the screen resolution is only 320x200? It's a fscking bootloader!
Sorry that the script kiddies have been giving you trouble and moderating you as flamebait. After all, you were reporting a real experience with GRUB. (Although I wouldn't have titled my post "GRUB sucks".) But there seems to be this attitude that if you're unable to resolve a problem, it's because you're not trying hard enough. In fact the attitude is more like "Well I didn't have that problem so you must be stupid." Linux and other open source projects are supposedly based on a model of people helping each other out. It pisses me off when I see people new to Linux being hazed as if they're fraternity pledges.
The point is moot. The chip is only being shrunk in one dimension. Any "quantum effects" are going to be confined to that dimension. The other two are independent.
The real problems are mesoscopic effects, because atoms are "sticky" and objects made of 10-1000 of them do weird things. They aren't as easy to manipulate as the macroscopic objects that we have real-world experience with.
Are these going to be smart cards with chips in them? If they are then I'm gonna hack mine and run Linux on it.
Sounds good, but doesn't the native layer still have to support garbage collection, threads, and all that automated stuff that comes down from the IL layer? Real native code isn't hampered by this kind of overhead.
There are a bunch of compilers out there already that compile Java to native executables. They never took off because the performance increase wasn't as impressive as you would think.
It's getting old, really. Can't you think of a better troll?
Yeah, INTERCAL. Do you have to resort to such hyperbole?
.NET already has some catching up to do.
.NET where it belongs!
Actually it's probably worth pointing out that you can compile INTERCAL to Java bytecode already. See the J-INTERCAL page. Looks like
I, for one, am hoping that I can move my Malbolge code to
I'm not clicking on that.
The main advantage is here: development is faster in a team where every programmer can use the language he/she likes the most.
.NET people love to say this and it makes me laugh. It's so naive. It's like saying that development is going to be faster once you let all the programmers use the bracing and indent styles that they personally prefer.
"Welcome to the team. I wrote the C# parts of the application. John writes in Eiffel, Paul here likes C++ and uses that, and George over there prefers to use VB because he really likes its type system. You'll be sitting at this desk here, and you'll be in charge of the code that Ringo was working on before he left. None of us really knows how it works because we don't know INTERCAL."
I submit that development is faster in a team where all the developers are using the same language and can at least read each other's code. I work with a bunch of guys on a successful Java-based scientific application. We have to go into each other's code and change things all the time. They're all smart guys- and I have real respect for them, because 1.they're very productive and 2.might be reading this. But they're physics PhDs with no formal CS training, and they write fiendishly clever code that is really hard to read. The best of them writes huge amounts of complex-flow infrastructure that is riddled with "historical" stuff that gets coded around everywhere. Another one writes impenetrable clockwork mechanisms. A third delights in purposeful obfuscation (so he handles the licensing validation code). If any of them were on a plane that got hijacked, the company would be in serious trouble! Their code is pretty hard to read, but I can usually figure it out because I'm used to deciphering uncommented Java. The mere idea of these guys running around writing different parts of the code in their favorite languages makes me shudder. (The clockwork mechanism guy likes OCaml, for example, and naturally the obfuscator would prefer C.)
The idea of everyone coding in their favorite language only works well if each developer is going to be entirely responsible for his/her own domains of the code, and nobody will need to cross boundaries too often into other domains. If there is more coupling than that, then soon everyone has to learn everyone else's favorite language. This sets up a language holy war. It also makes it difficult to reassign responsibility for parts of the code because now you have to worry about who knows what language.
This might be useful for more loosely coupled development teams. As in, your project in language X could really use this nice new library that someone wrote in language Y. But you can already use language bindings that are already available for that purpose. If you encounter a bug in a library do you normally debug it yourself? If you're like most people, you either send a nasty email to the guy who sold you a buggy library, or you dig through a mailing list archive to find out what the problem is. If you use a debugger at all, it's to get a general idea of what's going on so that you might get an idea for a workaround to put in your client X code. But you can usually just pull that off if you just have the source! It is kind of neat that you can step into a different language, but it's unlikely to be of much critical importance for reasons that have more to do with humans than computers.
So the Sun JVM would run on top of .NET? The JVM itself would be running under a CLR VM. Native code is now TWO levels below you.
.NET is only going to run on Windows then why does Microsoft need to set up a VM for it at all?
This is actually an interesting idea. Maybe you could use Java to write an interpreter for your own custom bytecode. Then you would run it using the Sun JVM running on top of the CLR VM and get THREE levels away from the native code. The ultimate would be a VM written in the same bytecode that it interprets. Then you could just stack those VM layers up like Legos to the sky! There are probably some good IOCCC entries in here somewhere.
The real question is: if
Maybe slashcode can look for a redirect URL in the query string of each URL. It would be useful to see something like .php?externalSite= http://GOATSE .CX]
[lindqvist.com ?-> GOATSE.CX]
or even
[lindqvist.com/externsajt
instead of
[lindqvist.com]
Although it's still a good pictoral overview of Microsoft's Java offerings.
public class SlashdotBitchfest {
public static void main(String[] args) {
String s = "Code monkeys are what make Java performance suck. ";
s += "You can spot a code monkey because they write stuff like this. ";
s += "Java handles String concatenation really badly ";
s += "and each += involves an array copy ";
s += "and the creation of a new immutable String object ";
s += "because a+=b is really syntactic sugar for ";
s += "\nStringBuffer temp = new StringBuffer(a);";
s += "\ntemp.append(b);";
s += "\na = temp.toString();";
s += "\nso you waste resources quadratically ";
s += "and kick the garbage collector into overdrive. ";
s += "You're supposed to allocate memory for a single StringBuffer instead ";
s += "and append() stuff to it in succession. ";
s += "But this isn't obvious. ";
s += "And the fact that += works at all means that ";
s += "the code monkeys will always use it. ";
s += "\"It saves me typing!\" they whine. \"And it WORKS, doesn't it?\" ";
s += "Stopping them is hopeless. ";
s += "\nJava's automatic Unicode support is a bitch too. ";
s += "Half the time you don't need it but you get it anyway \"for free\", ";
s += "but all those Unicode conversions take time! ";
s += "\nEven something like String.toUpperCase() is expensive. ";
s += "(You would think that Sun would be doing this in a loop: ";
s += "\nif (\'a\'=myChar&&myChar=\'z\') myChar-=(\'a\'-\'A\'); ";
s += "\nbut they don't do that. It's more complicated! ";
s += "String.toUpperCase() is actually testing for the German \"ß\" ";
s += "so it can convert it to a pair of letters \"SS\"! ";
s += "It also worries about Chinese characters, Arabic, all that stuff. ";
s += "For Strings that only need to be machine-readable, ";
s += "this is an unnecessary performance hit ";
s += "because you aren't going to have Kanji and Swedish characters ";
s += "in things like database identifiers. ";
s += "\nBut Sun has deprecated all non-Unicode stuff from its API. ";
s += "So often you have to use byte[] arrays ";
s += "or write your own non-politically correct ";
s += "ASCII-only String conversion routines. ";
s += "\nIt IS possible to write very efficient Java code ";
s += "but to do so requires some expertise ";
s += "and you have to pay very close attention to the code you're writing. ";
s += "Code monkeys don't do this. ";
s += "They have no idea what they're doing. ";
s += "Inefficient Java programs are really easy to write ";
s += "because the API hides many details from you ";
s += "and so you often don't realize the performance impact of your decisions. ";
s += "In fact the JVM gets blamed a lot for the lousy performance of ";
s += "many Java programs, but the real culprit is the API which in many ";
s += "places makes too many decisions on its own. It caters to ";
s += "lazy people who don't like to learn how to do things the right way.";
s += "\nWe found a long String concatenation series like this ";
s += "in one of our most frequently called routines, in its innermost loop. ";
s += "Thousands and thousands of += appends were being used to build up a ";
s += "huge String that kept getting copied, replaced, and garbage collected ";
s += "with each +=. Once we fixed it, we got something like a 5000% ";
s += "performance increase. \nGo figure!";
System.out.println(s);
}
}
To anyone taking this guy seriously: don't waste your time responding. Instead, grab a brewsky, kick back, turn on the tube, and watch the unfolding progression of America's shiny brand new war!
There was a really clever idea (~10-15 years ago?) for using muons to catalyze cold fusion that never panned out (or at least, it lost all its funding). Except that the method DOES generate helium at room temperature, unlike all the palladium-electrode methods. And it was a really cool idea.
In muon-catalyzed cold fusion, you inject a muon into a cold mixture of hydrogen molecules (D-T or D-D) to create a singly-ionized muonic hydrogen molecule that consists of deuterium and tritium. They share the muon just as if it were a bound electron. But muons are 200 times heavier than electrons, so their orbitals are much, much tighter and so the nuclei are brought much closer together than in ordinary singly-ionized hydrogen. Since the charges are brought so much closer, enough energy is released to disperse the D-T molecule's electrons (which would only get in the way). And the muon screens the repulsive charges of the nuclei so well that they are brought close enough to each other to tunnel through the remaining potential barrier and fuse via strong interactions, forming helium. The muon generally survives this process and is free to catalyze it again with another D-T or D-D molecule.
The problem with muon-catalyzed fusion is that muons are expensive to make (they're about ~100 MeV) and the fusion reaction generates only a few MeV. So you have to recycle your muons over and over again just to get your initial investment back. The muon is actually quite recyclable, but you have to use it fast because it decays to an electron + neutrino + antineutrino in something on the order of a microsecond. (Which is a pretty long time actually.) Muons are also lost when they stick to the helium instead of going off to catalyze the next reaction. This is the bigger problem. In fact, muon-alpha sticking is how you eventually lose most of your muons. They did manage to recycle muons to catalyze about 150 fusions, but that's not enough to make break-even.
Still, people have made helium with this method! That's a hell of a lot more than you can say for the palladium electrode voodoo that completely ruined the reputation of "cold fusion".
Haha, yeah. I had that thought too when I saw it. Skyscrapers are a terrible image to use right now. They symbolize vulnerability.
But think of what you could do with the metaphor. You could represent Code Red and Nimda as passenger jets!
Nobody can seriously believe what you've posted. Because it makes no sense.
Except to Jerry Falwell and his sidekick Pat Robertson.... HAHAHA
They're dead.
Not a single one of them gives a sh1t if we eventually decide to get on with our lives. There is an understandable impulse to not forget those who died. But get some perspective: these will be the least forgettable 6000 deaths we've ever seen. Everyone's been crying for almost three weeks now. We can get on with our lives without "dishonoring the memories" of anyone. The events of this past month have made a lot of people like you come out of the woodwork and it's amazing and disturbing to see how many idiots like you there are.
You should really be ashamed of yourself. You're trying to enforce this mourning period to last as long as it possibly can as though you're really enjoying it, and you loudly disapprove of every ounce of joy and normalcy you find left in the world. Stop tsk-tsking people who aren't constantly talking about terrorism, and go do something that will really help. Spend some money on consumer goods. Buy some stocks. Hell, go take unnecessary flights. And please stop throwing a fit every time you see things getting back to normal.
I'm just amazed that political correctness has now been taken over by conservatives! Damn!
BTW- support Bill Maher and sign the petition to keep Politically Incorrect on the air!
When did this happen? I actually like the new icon. The old one was a little disparaging to Hormel.
I could never stand SPAM anyway. I guess I'd eat it if I were trapped in a fallout shelter. Maybe.
In related news, the inventor of the boxcutter committed suicide today, after renouncing his invention and blaming himself for the terrorist attacks which it made possible. "It was all my fault," he said. "If I hadn't invented that stupid boxcutter then none of this would have happened."
Attorney General John Ashcroft agreed, as he proposed a new set of restrictions on boxcutters, including a provision that no boxcutter blade should be sharp enough to cut more than 2 mm through a stick of butter at 120 degrees F. The restrictions also include new penalties for those who commit crimes with boxcutters. "We need to cut down on boxcutter-crime," said Ashcroft. "This is a different world now, calling for a lower level of tolerance, like zero. This extra security may inconvenience us when we have to open a box, but that's the price of getting serious in this new war of fighting terrorism."
Meanwhile, critics decried the move, claiming that with the new restrictions, only federal law enforcement agencies will be able to open boxes. Meanwhile, according to a new Fox News poll, 80% of Americans support restrictions on boxcutters that would make them as blunt as plastic knives. 59% approve of restrictions on sales of boxcutters to people who look Arabic or who wear turbans. And 70% said that anyone who buys a boxcutter should have a hair and semen sample stored in a federal DNA database.
"How often do I ever have to open a box?" said Virginia Redneck, mother of two. "Only terrorists need to do that. This is one piece of my freedom that I am willing to give up for an extra meaningless measure of pretend safety."
Shares of companies which manufacture letter-openers lost 15-25% this afternoon after heavy trading.
This is admittedly an old story; I don't know if M$ is still legally implementing this particular "innovative" license restriction nowadays. Does anybody know?
It takes an incredible amount of conceit to imagine that the U.S.A. is the only possible source of encryption software in the world. What makes these idiots think that Bin Laden is going to continue to upgrade his software (and therefore subject himself to potential back doors which his current software lacks)? And back doors are useless against stenography anyway.
It would make more sense to put "backdoors" in airplanes to prevent crazy pilots from getting control of them in the first place! I can't think of any non-stupid way to implement this. (Do we really want airplanes to be remotely pilotable? But it can't be a worse idea than restrictions on cryptography.
Maybe they should pass a law that from now on, terrorists must encrypt their communications with CSS.
The density can be calculated two ways. The real density is infinite (all the mass is at a point in the center)
Apparent density (which is the only density you can really calculate) varies proportionally to M/R^3 where M is mass and R is the radius from the center to event horizon. But with black holes, R is directly proportional to M (R=2GM/c^2). So this "density" falls off as 1/R^2 or 1/M^2 (take your pick). But this is not real density. Remember the "volume" is proportional to M^3. But this isn't the hole's own volume. It's the volume contained within its event horizon, which is much different.
The surface gravity at the event horizon can be arbitrarily low, because it varies INVERSELY with the mass of the hole: g=(c^4)/(4*G*M). A 2-million-sun black hole has a mass of 5.2x10^36 kg. I get a "surface gravity" (at the event horizon) of about 6000 g when I plug that in. (This is about 7.7 million km from the hole.) Which is pretty sad, actually. Surface gravity at the surface of a mere sun-sized black hole would be 2.6 million times greater than this. But you would have to get much closer to the smaller hole to reach its own event horizon. A small black hole's field falls off very quickly because the mass is comparatively small. A supermassive black hole, OTOH, has a relatively weak field that persists in strength for many light years outward.
For a black hole to have a surface gravity of about 1g, it would need to weigh as much as 16 billion stars (only a few percent of the mass of a typical galaxy). Such a hole would have a radius of 50 billion km (about 1/3 of the distance from the Sun to the Earth). The hole in M87 is only about half this size. Meaning that you would experience a surface gravity of 2g at the event horizon, and you would probably not even realize you fell in for several hours after wandering inside- unless you could look through your spaceship's window and see the weird optical effects on stars. By the time you would experience the "spaghettification" effect from tidal forces, you would almost be at the singularity anyway. A smaller hole can spaghettify you before you even cross the event horizon.
Are those clinics federally funded?
No, they are not. If they were, then your silly position might have some logical consistency. Sorry.
I haven't seen any evidence that the only way (or even the fastest way) to find these treatments is through federal funding of emroyinc stem cell research.
But even if it were eventually found to be the fastest and only way (which is probably the case) I have a feeling it wouldn't matter. I doubt that any evidence presented to you would affect your established opinion one bit.
Crazy to you because you accept that it's OK to kill a `less' valuable life in order to save another more `valuable' life. It seems you're forcing YOUR views on how valuable a life is on ME too.
Although the fact that your "less valuable life" will be killed anyway, whether research proceeds or not, doesn't seem to matter to you.
I'm saying find other roads to these cures; it's not moral.
And you sneer at me about wishful thinking! Has it occurred to you that there might be no other roads to those cures, as you cheer the blocking of this one?
The FDA stands in the way of lots of promosing research that could be speed along if loosing a certin number of test subjects was acceptable.
Aah, here we see the true nature of your strange morality.
All your illogical fuming aside, you still have not offered any convincing anti-ESR arguments that aren't empty rehashes of the right-to-life argument. And the fact remains that by blocking federal funding of any effective embryological research, Bush will not save the life of a single embryo.
I've seeen this stupid argument 500 times already in this thread.
Private investment -> companies file patents on each and every biological cell or structure their researchers are the first to encounter -> the field locks up as one avenue of research after another is patented. This does not happen with public funding.
If only we had _unlimited federal_ funding in the _US_ we might not have disease. People might not have to die. We'd live forever.
Well, if we had limited but unconditional funding, we might have new skin for burn victims, or new kidney cells for diabetes patients, or real treatment for spinal cord injuries so that patients could walk again. While a cure for Alzheimer's might not help us "live forever", everyone agrees that it would be a nice thing to have during the last 10-15 years of life. You are disingenuously reducing the issue at stake to simply making people live longer, which is not the promise of stem cell research at all and would be a dubious benifit at most.
It's wrong to take another human life to save another. I know many Slashdot readers don't consider embryos to be alive (and their all going to be destroyed anyways), but a lot of people do. A lot of people aren't willing to overlook the means because of the ends.
Then where is your outrage against the fertility clinics themselves, who are the source of all these embryos? There isn't a peep from you morons on this subject. Because if the purpose is to make a baby, you are willing to overlook the means because of the ends. You concentrate all your energies on who gets them after they're not needed anymore- stem cell researchers, or the garbage can? Now they'll all be thrown out, thanks to you. Meanwhile fertility clinics continue their operations without any interference or harassment, since you take it for granted that abortion clinics are the source of all these embryos anyway- which they are not.
What if someone decided that it was OK to harvest organs from orphans less then a year old?
We'd say they were nuts. (What are you singling out orphans for, anyway?) But if it was a kidney, and if it were, say, to save a twin's life, then maybe some of us would agree that the transplantation made sense. We'd have to weigh the situation and make a reasonable decision based on it, something which you seem to assume is impossible.
I mean, is a three month old baby alive? It can't talk, it can't sue anyone, it can't even feed it self. If no one put food in front of it, it would die.
This is a really strange definition of being "alive". I think we can all agree that if a live 3 year old baby fails your criteria for being alive, the baby is still alive- your definition is just stupid and needs more work.
So why can't we SAVE the lives of `wanted' children with `unwanted' children? Because it's wrong, it's murder. Some may accuse me of forcing my right-wing extremist conservative religious views on other people, but you have to draw the line somewhere.
So you have drawn your line in the craziest place imaginable, because of your hocus pocus religious beliefs, and now you demand that the world conform to your wishes and adopt your line as its own. Who gave you the impression that the line was yours and yours alone to draw anyway? The truth is that no line you draw will ever be in the correct place in all cases. You leave yourself no room to account for exceptions, special cases, and emergencies. Quit drawing silly lines for us.
I guess well all just have to spend our tax money on boring things like cancer research. Ugh. How many lives will THAT save?
Don't be so smug. Cancer and embryology are closely related fields. Bush has stuck a knife into the heart of U.S. cancer research with this ignorant and superstitious decision.
People always make fun of Stalin for declaring computer science to be a "false science" and squashing all research in it in his own country. Bush apparently thinks this is a mistake worth repeating.
You guys have the typical American attitude that the world stops at our borders. You probably think that Dubya's stupid, incoherent, and superstitious decision is going to kill stem cell research worldwide the way it's been killed here, don't you? As if no scientific research takes place anywhere else in the world except here in America, because we're so wonderful and advanced. Just look at our high school students' test scores in math and science. Look at all our native-born scientists (all ten of them). And just look at our president. We're very scientifically literate.
By not giving his $60 million to Stanford, Clarke can instead give it to a research facility that can do useful research with the money- without being hampered by illogical directives from a president who is openly hostile to scientific research. Bush has prohibited all potentially meaningful stem cell research in this country. But stem cell research (or cryptography research, or any scientific research for that matter) is not going to stop just because it's been prohibited in the U.S. by American zealotry and corruption.
Stanford is still getting money from Clarke- just $60 million less of it. They're still getting much more than that from him for other research (that the American government has not yet forbidden). Anybody who chooses to waste $60 million, by donating it to researchers who have been forbidden by the American government from making effective use of it, is a fool.
In related news, Russia is warning its programmers to avoid traveling to the U.S.A. I feel so proud to be an American.