An 8 year old doesn't need to start worrying about focal length and ISO - they need to be inspired and excited to learn and create. And in any case, you are talking about DLSRs at that point, which is obviously not an option to provide to every student (and is a complete "single tasking" device). If they want to get more serious about photography they can take a class in high school, the same as has already been the case.
You are right that a DSLR is nothing I would give a 8 year old into it's hand and say "go wild", but you said learning photography, so I thought of older kids.;) My fault. And yes I would provide like 3 DSLRs for a special curse, where the kids work together and switch roles. But well, I would say learning taking pictures in auto mode a simple used digital camera would suffice, just because it's cheap. I doesn't really hurt if it breaks, can't say that for an device costing several hundred dollars. Same goes for brushes, crayons and so on. Those things will break or at least wear out. But it doesn't matter.
This all goes double for movies - there are perfectly capable (especially for 8-13 year olds!) video editing apps for the iPad that used to cost 100x more money to be able to use on a PC (and require a MUCH higher learning curve) 5-10 years ago.
You don't have any kids, do you? I want to assume you have tried a tablet (not smartphone) before, at least, but I have a hard time believing you have spent any significant amount of time trying to teach young children anything. It's amazing what amount of creativity a tablet like an iPad with some cheap $5-$10 software can inspire in even elementary school-age kids. The first time you see an 8-9 year old write, film, edit, and dub a short movie all by herself entirely with an iPad you quickly understand how powerful of a creative learning device it can be.
So the problems seems more like "What easy and capable (enough) software I can get for a specific platform?" I suspect tablets to be better on this part. It rises the question why the PC doesn't have this kind of software (yet).
Also, try giving a 5 year old a set of paint and brushes and leaving him to his own devices for 30 minutes. I can almost guarantee disaster there. Now try doing it with 10 or more 5 year olds - I think they'd call that "Kindergeddon".
The key is to not let alone kids of that age armed with those devices.;) At least not for the first couple times.
Do the same thing with a simple child-focued paint app and you may still have your sanity after it's over. Does that mean children should never learn to use real paint, crayons, colored pencils, etc? Of course not. Digital art is just another technique, and can be a valuable tool to teach the basics (which are similar no matter the medium).
To be honest, I would expect the child to accidentally break the tablet. A five year old isn't that coordinated yet.;) Of course digital art has it's place. I am even a proponent and "creator" of it.
This kind of device is nothing I would ever consider for creating content, not even for using just a sequencer or to take pictures.
And you probably don't use wax crayons to create content any more, either. How is that relevant to a child?
It may be relevant or not I don't use it, cause it feels somewhat clumsy. Now this is just my view, but I have had many easier ways to create content than touching on a small screen.
Your personal preference isn't very applicable here - even for adults, many many MANY millions in fact DO use them to take pictures and video. In fact, the percentage of photos taken with smartphones was esti
Well it's important to learn how to use real objects in my opinion. Yes we worked with scissors and glue, we learned gardening, painting (as far a child of that age can do), playing real music instruments, learned how to work with wood. Show me how you'd do this with a tablet. And I was in no way bored.
Learning photography with a smartphone or a tablet... Are you serious? Movie making, with a tablet? Seriously? Don't you think a real camera would be a better fit? Real lenses and everything can be set manually: focal length, focus, sensitivity (ISO), exposure time, aperture, white balance. More over you will get WAY better pictures. Of course you would not give every kid one, but you couldn't either, because you have to help them all the time. Everything else is just showing them how to turn the device towards the object to be filmed and pushing a button. That's just trivial.
I highly doubt multi-touch devices are a substitution for real painting (be it with fingers or brushes or whatever).
And yes I own and use a smartphone and guess what? This kind of device is nothing I would ever consider for creating content, not even for using just a sequencer or to take pictures.
What should "real time dynamic geography with GPS" be? Please give me a specific example. Don't you think it would be preferable to teach those kids reading analog maps? That way they learn to perceive their surroundings and improve their visual thinking, too.
I have never seen any interesting physics simulation that could be enhance by an accelerometer, please give an example. More over we did most experiments in real live and if something was too advanced a short film presented by the teacher was quite sufficient. Why should we need 30 screens in class essentially showing the same?
Exercises: We used to have the questions written on the table or in a (work)book. Answered them, then the teacher read aloud the solutions and we checked with ours. If we didn't understand why our answers were wrong, we could simply raise our hands and ask for assistance. There is nothing tedious in there.
I am not lazy, I just can't make up any advantage that would outweight the disadvantages.
If I would want to replace a book, I would use an ebook reader. Does what it's supposed to do (and almost nothing else), can be read in bright sunlight, last quite long on one charge and is way less expensive than a table or notebook.
If they are planning to use it as a professional they will buy it. I don't see your point here. People use the tools that is the most appropriate for them. And people will more likely accept a slightly lower user experience if they won't use a tool regularly if they can save several hundred dollars. Or they try to pirate it, but that is not the point in this discussion.
I thought we talked about normal people. Please name a use case where GIMP is not sufficient for a kid or a non-professional? If they want Photoshop they have to buy it. Now guess how many non-professionals would actually _buy_ Photoshop. And again, no explanation whatsoever where you are basing your claims on. "They want", "is unintuitive for them" how do you know? Again, we are talking about what Jon Doe is doing. So most likely no HDR, no manual color correction. Don't get me wrong, I would say Photoshop may have a more streamlined work flow, but a) you really notice it, if you start doing more advanced stuff and b) it comes with a price tag and features Jon Doe will most likely never use.
Thousand of dollars for what kind of software? A simple laptop costs a couple hundred. And can be taken "anywhere", too. What do "normal people" use for content creation? Office packages like libre office or MS office. First one is free. What else? Image processing, GIMP is free and good enough for "normal people". Movie cutting... kdenlive is good enough for normal people. Maybe a sequencer for musicians? How about reaper, $60?
So can you me please explain what multi-thousend dollar applications those "normal people" now don't need anymore?
UML is abstract, but it is in no way a programming language.
On the other hand: As soon as you have implemented your components in the language you use, you can use them as a higher level abstraction and compose your system out of those components. And yes, you need some experience to decide how a component has to look and function like, to be fit for reuse.
Well there are concepts for being even more abstract than say C# or Java. For example Domain Specific Languages. But I don't really like them, you introduce the next layer above all other. More over there is the possibility of model to model transformations, so you can automatically translate from one language to another. But again this is so complex, I haven't seen a working implementation yet.
Interpretation is something everyone has to do for themselves. If you just accept the interpretation of other people you can be really easily influenced in what you believe or feel. This thing between ones ears is there to get used, not just to consume what other people tell you.
"'Agile' has been treated as a silver bullet – not as what it really is – just another design methodology – while much of what is supposed to happen with an agile software development project – especially regular and repeated testing of prototypes - has been conspicuously absent."
So no surprise it failed. If you throw away the most important bits that are supposed to ensure some quality and functionality, what you expect what happens?
Actually parallelization IS why GPUs are fast. You have some restrictions but it's the parallel execution which gives you the boost in performance.
The things a GPU can do are not so limited as you might think.
The statement about "if" pausing all processors is wrong. On my card 64 work items are executed in lockstep on 16 processors in something called a wavefront. Now I have way more processors on the card. Furthermore only when the if statement in the control flow is evaluated true for some work items and false for others you get hit by degraded performance, as you then need to execute both paths sequentially. If the if statement is evaluated the same for the whole wave front you don't loose anything. This works on attributes of the work items or other run time data, too.
There is a good possibility for race conditions in OpenCL code. Depending on the algorithms and optimizations one has to synchronize or use different places for input and output.
Actually this is what is done on GPUs. Think of it this way: You have a number of "processors" which share one control flow. The number of "processors" sharing one control flow on a AMD 79xx is 64. Now all these "processors" evaluate the if-statement. If it's true for some and false for other "processors" than both paths are executed sequentially. Those "processors" which would normally not run -because they belong to the other branch- are masked, so they don't execute the instructions. If the if-statement is evaluated true or false for all "processors" in this group only one path is taken.
Note: Actually there are 16 processors working parallel but they execute 4 times, each time on a different work item. So the correct word for "processor" would be work item.
Yes, you will somehow need to branch at one point - well at least I can't think of a way without branching - but not every branch makes your program crawl like a snail. For example the amount of work done in the branches really does matter. If you can't avoid branching try to do as little as possible in the branches.;)
I for one would write the current position of a "hit" into the same position of a second array. Otherwise write a zero. So your branches are quite minimal:
Now you can sort secondArray to get rid of the zeros. The result is something similar to a list of all rows your query should fetch. Now you can grab the content of the rows and write them to a buffer and send it to the cpu.
Well, you don't have to trick the GPU in thinking it processes pixels. You can do general purpose computation with a language quite similar to C99.
You are right in that way, that you partition your problem in many subelements. In OpenCL those are called work items. But those are more like identical threads than pixels. Sometimes one maps the work items on a 2d or 3d grid if the problem domain fits. (e.g. image manipulation, physics simulation)
Actually it's not that hard implementing "normal" algorithms on a GPU. For example the bitcoin mining algorithm can be implemented quite straight forward. It may even look almost the same as a C method programmed for a CPU. The programming is a bit difficult as you have many restrictions to obey to get good performance out of a GPU.
The point is GPUs are fast doing the same operation on multiple data. (e.g. multiplying a vector with a scalar) The emphasize is on _same operation_, which might not be the case for every problem one can solve parallel. You will loose speed as soon your elements of a wavefront (e.g. 16 threads, executed in lockstep) diverge into multiple execution paths. This happens if you have something like an "if" in your code and one for one work item the condition is evaluated to true and for another it's evaluated to false. Your wavefront will only be executed one path at a time, so your code becomes kind of "sequential" at this point. You will loose speed, too, if the way you access your GPU memory does not fulfill some restrictions. And by the way: I'm not speaking about some mere 1% performance loss but quite a number.;) So generally speaking: not every problem one can solve in parallel can be efficiently solved by a GPU.
There is something similar to caches in OpenCL: it's called local data storage, but it's the programmers job to use them efficiently. Memory access is always slow if it's not registers you are accessing, be it CPU or GPU. When using a GPU you can hide part of the memory latency by scheduling way more threads than you can physically run and always switch to those who aren't waiting for memory. This way you waste less cycles waiting for memory.
I support your view writing for GPU takes quite a bit of effort.;)
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Yes, for example caches. ;) I think one would more likely run this software on a vm and log syscalls, maybe even inspect registers.
Of course I'm serious.
Sorry was a bit snappy there.
An 8 year old doesn't need to start worrying about focal length and ISO - they need to be inspired and excited to learn and create. And in any case, you are talking about DLSRs at that point, which is obviously not an option to provide to every student (and is a complete "single tasking" device). If they want to get more serious about photography they can take a class in high school, the same as has already been the case.
You are right that a DSLR is nothing I would give a 8 year old into it's hand and say "go wild", but you said learning photography, so I thought of older kids. ;) My fault. And yes I would provide like 3 DSLRs for a special curse, where the kids work together and switch roles. But well, I would say learning taking pictures in auto mode a simple used digital camera would suffice, just because it's cheap. I doesn't really hurt if it breaks, can't say that for an device costing several hundred dollars. Same goes for brushes, crayons and so on. Those things will break or at least wear out. But it doesn't matter.
This all goes double for movies - there are perfectly capable (especially for 8-13 year olds!) video editing apps for the iPad that used to cost 100x more money to be able to use on a PC (and require a MUCH higher learning curve) 5-10 years ago.
You don't have any kids, do you? I want to assume you have tried a tablet (not smartphone) before, at least, but I have a hard time believing you have spent any significant amount of time trying to teach young children anything. It's amazing what amount of creativity a tablet like an iPad with some cheap $5-$10 software can inspire in even elementary school-age kids. The first time you see an 8-9 year old write, film, edit, and dub a short movie all by herself entirely with an iPad you quickly understand how powerful of a creative learning device it can be.
So the problems seems more like "What easy and capable (enough) software I can get for a specific platform?" I suspect tablets to be better on this part. It rises the question why the PC doesn't have this kind of software (yet).
Also, try giving a 5 year old a set of paint and brushes and leaving him to his own devices for 30 minutes. I can almost guarantee disaster there.
Now try doing it with 10 or more 5 year olds - I think they'd call that "Kindergeddon".
The key is to not let alone kids of that age armed with those devices. ;) At least not for the first couple times.
Do the same thing with a simple child-focued paint app and you may still have your sanity after it's over. Does that mean children should never learn to use real paint, crayons, colored pencils, etc? Of course not. Digital art is just another technique, and can be a valuable tool to teach the basics (which are similar no matter the medium).
To be honest, I would expect the child to accidentally break the tablet. A five year old isn't that coordinated yet. ;) Of course digital art has it's place. I am even a proponent and "creator" of it.
This kind of device is nothing I would ever consider for creating content, not even for using just a sequencer or to take pictures.
And you probably don't use wax crayons to create content any more, either. How is that relevant to a child?
It may be relevant or not I don't use it, cause it feels somewhat clumsy. Now this is just my view, but I have had many easier ways to create content than touching on a small screen.
Your personal preference isn't very applicable here - even for adults, many many MANY millions in fact DO use them to take pictures and video. In fact, the percentage of photos taken with smartphones was esti
Well it's important to learn how to use real objects in my opinion. Yes we worked with scissors and glue, we learned gardening, painting (as far a child of that age can do), playing real music instruments, learned how to work with wood. Show me how you'd do this with a tablet. And I was in no way bored.
Learning photography with a smartphone or a tablet... Are you serious? Movie making, with a tablet? Seriously? Don't you think a real camera would be a better fit? Real lenses and everything can be set manually: focal length, focus, sensitivity (ISO), exposure time, aperture, white balance. More over you will get WAY better pictures. Of course you would not give every kid one, but you couldn't either, because you have to help them all the time. Everything else is just showing them how to turn the device towards the object to be filmed and pushing a button. That's just trivial.
I highly doubt multi-touch devices are a substitution for real painting (be it with fingers or brushes or whatever).
And yes I own and use a smartphone and guess what? This kind of device is nothing I would ever consider for creating content, not even for using just a sequencer or to take pictures.
What should "real time dynamic geography with GPS" be? Please give me a specific example. Don't you think it would be preferable to teach those kids reading analog maps? That way they learn to perceive their surroundings and improve their visual thinking, too.
I have never seen any interesting physics simulation that could be enhance by an accelerometer, please give an example. More over we did most experiments in real live and if something was too advanced a short film presented by the teacher was quite sufficient. Why should we need 30 screens in class essentially showing the same?
Exercises: We used to have the questions written on the table or in a (work)book. Answered them, then the teacher read aloud the solutions and we checked with ours. If we didn't understand why our answers were wrong, we could simply raise our hands and ask for assistance. There is nothing tedious in there.
I am not lazy, I just can't make up any advantage that would outweight the disadvantages.
If I would want to replace a book, I would use an ebook reader. Does what it's supposed to do (and almost nothing else), can be read in bright sunlight, last quite long on one charge and is way less expensive than a table or notebook.
That is most likely correct, but he wrote about using Photoshop for business, so most likely not Photoshop Elements.
Please be more specific: What is greatly expanded and how?
Even my 7 year old computer is way more powerful.
Oh and you didn't explain which multi-thousand dollar software those people now don't have to buy anymore, because they are using an iPad now.
If they are planning to use it as a professional they will buy it. I don't see your point here. People use the tools that is the most appropriate for them. And people will more likely accept a slightly lower user experience if they won't use a tool regularly if they can save several hundred dollars. Or they try to pirate it, but that is not the point in this discussion.
I thought we talked about normal people. Please name a use case where GIMP is not sufficient for a kid or a non-professional? If they want Photoshop they have to buy it. Now guess how many non-professionals would actually _buy_ Photoshop. And again, no explanation whatsoever where you are basing your claims on. "They want", "is unintuitive for them" how do you know? Again, we are talking about what Jon Doe is doing. So most likely no HDR, no manual color correction. Don't get me wrong, I would say Photoshop may have a more streamlined work flow, but a) you really notice it, if you start doing more advanced stuff and b) it comes with a price tag and features Jon Doe will most likely never use.
Any source for this claim? Sounds a lot like: "I do, so should the rest."
Thousand of dollars for what kind of software? A simple laptop costs a couple hundred. And can be taken "anywhere", too. What do "normal people" use for content creation? Office packages like libre office or MS office. First one is free. What else? Image processing, GIMP is free and good enough for "normal people". Movie cutting... kdenlive is good enough for normal people. Maybe a sequencer for musicians? How about reaper, $60?
So can you me please explain what multi-thousend dollar applications those "normal people" now don't need anymore?
UML is abstract, but it is in no way a programming language.
On the other hand: As soon as you have implemented your components in the language you use, you can use them as a higher level abstraction and compose your system out of those components. And yes, you need some experience to decide how a component has to look and function like, to be fit for reuse.
Well there are concepts for being even more abstract than say C# or Java. For example Domain Specific Languages. But I don't really like them, you introduce the next layer above all other. More over there is the possibility of model to model transformations, so you can automatically translate from one language to another. But again this is so complex, I haven't seen a working implementation yet.
Or spying on the larger proportion of civilians in allied countries.
Interpretation is something everyone has to do for themselves. If you just accept the interpretation of other people you can be really easily influenced in what you believe or feel. This thing between ones ears is there to get used, not just to consume what other people tell you.
BTW: TL;DR is an abbreviation not an acronym.
Dear /.TV please consider not using this kind of background music. It's quite distracting.
Quite bad troll attempt.
It's like you throw validation and verification out of the waterfall model or the v model. Do you think it would work?
"'Agile' has been treated as a silver bullet – not as what it really is – just another design methodology – while much of what is supposed to happen with an agile software development project – especially regular and repeated testing of prototypes - has been conspicuously absent."
So no surprise it failed. If you throw away the most important bits that are supposed to ensure some quality and functionality, what you expect what happens?
I am a quite sure condensation is the cause of this undesired behavior. But to further back up this thesis I have to conduct extensive research.
Actually parallelization IS why GPUs are fast. You have some restrictions but it's the parallel execution which gives you the boost in performance.
The things a GPU can do are not so limited as you might think.
The statement about "if" pausing all processors is wrong. On my card 64 work items are executed in lockstep on 16 processors in something called a wavefront. Now I have way more processors on the card. Furthermore only when the if statement in the control flow is evaluated true for some work items and false for others you get hit by degraded performance, as you then need to execute both paths sequentially. If the if statement is evaluated the same for the whole wave front you don't loose anything. This works on attributes of the work items or other run time data, too.
There is a good possibility for race conditions in OpenCL code. Depending on the algorithms and optimizations one has to synchronize or use different places for input and output.
Actually this is what is done on GPUs. Think of it this way: You have a number of "processors" which share one control flow. The number of "processors" sharing one control flow on a AMD 79xx is 64. Now all these "processors" evaluate the if-statement. If it's true for some and false for other "processors" than both paths are executed sequentially. Those "processors" which would normally not run -because they belong to the other branch- are masked, so they don't execute the instructions. If the if-statement is evaluated true or false for all "processors" in this group only one path is taken.
Note: Actually there are 16 processors working parallel but they execute 4 times, each time on a different work item. So the correct word for "processor" would be work item.
Yes, you will somehow need to branch at one point - well at least I can't think of a way without branching - but not every branch makes your program crawl like a snail. For example the amount of work done in the branches really does matter. If you can't avoid branching try to do as little as possible in the branches. ;)
I for one would write the current position of a "hit" into the same position of a second array. Otherwise write a zero. So your branches are quite minimal:
if(hit) {
secondArray[id] = id;
} else {
secondArray[id] = 0;
}
Now you can sort secondArray to get rid of the zeros. The result is something similar to a list of all rows your query should fetch. Now you can grab the content of the rows and write them to a buffer and send it to the cpu.
Well, you don't have to trick the GPU in thinking it processes pixels. You can do general purpose computation with a language quite similar to C99.
You are right in that way, that you partition your problem in many subelements. In OpenCL those are called work items. But those are more like identical threads than pixels. Sometimes one maps the work items on a 2d or 3d grid if the problem domain fits. (e.g. image manipulation, physics simulation)
Actually it's not that hard implementing "normal" algorithms on a GPU. For example the bitcoin mining algorithm can be implemented quite straight forward. It may even look almost the same as a C method programmed for a CPU. The programming is a bit difficult as you have many restrictions to obey to get good performance out of a GPU.
Close, but not quite correct.
The point is GPUs are fast doing the same operation on multiple data. (e.g. multiplying a vector with a scalar) The emphasize is on _same operation_, which might not be the case for every problem one can solve parallel. You will loose speed as soon your elements of a wavefront (e.g. 16 threads, executed in lockstep) diverge into multiple execution paths. This happens if you have something like an "if" in your code and one for one work item the condition is evaluated to true and for another it's evaluated to false. Your wavefront will only be executed one path at a time, so your code becomes kind of "sequential" at this point. You will loose speed, too, if the way you access your GPU memory does not fulfill some restrictions. And by the way: I'm not speaking about some mere 1% performance loss but quite a number. ;) So generally speaking: not every problem one can solve in parallel can be efficiently solved by a GPU.
There is something similar to caches in OpenCL: it's called local data storage, but it's the programmers job to use them efficiently. Memory access is always slow if it's not registers you are accessing, be it CPU or GPU. When using a GPU you can hide part of the memory latency by scheduling way more threads than you can physically run and always switch to those who aren't waiting for memory. This way you waste less cycles waiting for memory.
I support your view writing for GPU takes quite a bit of effort. ;)
Because it's the VPN giving you a comparable value about the amount of work done, _really_. m(