Do you have any study supporting this claim that "Things are bad in America, but they're better than they are in most other countries and they're better than they've been historically." or is it just a political claim, similar to "CCTV will prevent crime"?
Katy Börner and I have been organizing a workshop on Information Visualization Infrastructures, including graph drawing packages. The results are available at http://vw.indiana.edu/ivsi2004/
There are lots of different tradeofs involved. One being interactive vs. static graphics. Another being the size of the graphs.
For static graphs, such as class hierarchies and such, Graphviz (http://www.graphviz.org/ works fine and is easy to integrate in a system. For some graphs, Graphviz will not work at all so you need to try first.
For large or dense graphs, above 1000 nodes or more than 4 times more edges than vertices (5n etc), node-link diagrams don't work at all. You could use a matrix but people are not used at reading matrices.
If you are a graph wizard and want to analyze large social networks, you can take a look at Pajek (http://vlado.fmf.uni-lj.si/pub/networks/Pajek/) but it is not a free software and runs mostly on Windows.
Other packages are ok for simple things, stereotyped things or more experimental things. You need to try them on your own problem to decide.
Actually, the French National Library has already scanned a large collection of material: 70,000 documents, 80,000 images... mostly in French. They have been doing this for years and are distributing the documents from http://gallica.bnf.fr/
They are stuggling for funding and are frustrated that given the huge number of books they have, they cannot compete with a commercial initiative.
The European national libraries are full of treasures that noone can see, such as the manuscripts of famous European authors. Yet, the European govenments don't provide enough funding to just let these treasures out. I believe that's what Jean-Noel Jeanneney is trying to push, and the funding for this kind of initiative is not that large.
And, if American bashing in Europe is only half what French bashing on/., he may even get the funding this way!
I used BW Garbage Collection on an Information Visualization system here available under the GPL. It works, but with some problems, mainly due to the fact that it doesn't knows enough of the OS, in particular large pages allocated by libraries that it has to scan for pointers. There is nothing that cannot be fixed in theory, but systems are not designed for it right now. On my visualization application, it spends seconds scanning some memory mapped zone opened by NVidia OpenGL implementation (this is a guess from looking at the stack trace in gdb).
For the performance talk, there are interesting figures in the book Garbage Collection and at Boem's site showing that reference counting costs more than garbage collection. However, reference counting is predictable and does not interrupt interactive applications at random moments. In particular for multithreaded applications, reference counts should be guarded by a mutex that is very expensive and can be avoided using a GC.
One possible alternative to C++ with BW is using gcj, the Gnu Java Compiler. It uses the same back-end than G++ for producing optimized code but is closely tied to the BW garbage collection, providing information about how objects are organized in memory, improving the marking-time of the GC. gcj produces code that can be linked with C and C++ without having to resort to JNI.
It seems that somebody already successfully sent a model plane across the atlantic and , although I don't know what "under FAI rules" means.
So now, terrorists can target most places in the world pretty safely. I wonder if this scenario has been taken into account by the Pentagon and what they can do about it.
I have been working quite a lot on trying to improve Java graphics performance, starting from Agile2D [http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/agile2d/], a free implementation of Java Graphics2D based on OpenGL made by Jon Meyer for the Human-Computer Interaction Lab of the University of Maryland.
The fact is, using a recent accelerated graphics card (Quadro4 500 GoGL on a Laptop Dell M50), I have speedups of 10 to 200 times compared to the native Java implementation ON THE SAME PLATFORM. These numbers improve on desktops with GeForce 4 or ATI equivalents.
I am currently improving Agile2D and it is getting better at fonts and most other things as well. However, Agile2D cannot completely replace Java graphics right now because the repaint management of Swing is not designed to be modified, leading to refresh problems that I haven't been able to fix so far.
This means that -- as Apple already realized -- Java graphics can be made much faster in a portable way by relying on OpenGL.
Of course, on older graphics platforms, OpenGL is slower than software rendering. But using the "Object Technology", it should be possible to engineer two different implementations of Graphics2D and choose the right one at startup time, especially in Java.
So there is hope for large speedups if Sun switches to hardware rendering or redesign a little bit the Swing RepaintManager to allow external developers to implement the speedups by themselves.
In an invited presentation during the 1999 European Conference on Digital Libraries, Robert Wilensky pointed out that the current publication mechanisms was a bit crazy. It works like that:
the scientific writes the article
the scientific reviews the article (not his own though)
the scientific formats the article
the publisher prints the formated paper
the publisher distributes the paper
the scientific buys the paper
the publisher gets the money
the scientific gets the fame
Now that the web is there to distribute the article, what is the added value of the publisher?
If the SIIA behaves like that, nobody will complain when publishers are replaced by online journals.
Unfortulately, science evaluation is still made by counting the printed publications. When that is changed, the scientific publishers will collapse without anybody complaining.
I am currently building something similar with a mini-itx system. However, in this case, I would have done the end program on a PDA like a Sony CLIE because the PC box is cumbersome and displaying big arrows can be done on a small 320x320 display as well. The PDA should talk to some device with its IR so the barebone PC could be used for that, but without any display!
After several years of failed tentatives in home integration, I believe these applicances are going to solve the problem. Still, we need Lego to provide a "homestorm" box to build these appliances more easily!
Since visualization is on prime time on/. today, I generated a couple of visualizations of the kernel using a tool I designed for visualizing large data structures. Look at it by clicking on the third image here if you want some explanations of the underlying research, or go directly here if you prefer.
It may be due to my foreign origin, but could somebody explain me why the Pentagon listens to Microsoft when they criticize a competitor?
How could they trust any word of Microsoft? How could they publicly accept to hear only one side of the story without at least pretending to be fair and schedule an appointment with pro Open-Source/Free-Software parties?
The fight is unfair and everybody seems to accept it.
I wish there were an OS/FS fund for advertising; I would love to see a full page anti-Microsoft advertising in all the major newspapers, just to show Microsoft that OS/FS can fight on the same grounds and harm them with facts.
But OS/FS are not meant to raise money, just for trying to do as good software as possible or as many free software as possible. Could that - with the enthusiasts of OS/FS - be enough to convince government agencies and private companies and counter Microsoft propaganda?
If you look at the french project "Station de Télémétrie Laser-Lune" at http://wwwrc.obs-azur.fr/cerga/laser/laslune/llr.h tm, you will see it has already been done with good precision (3mm).
You can download all the results already, day by day, from 1996.
Since it's not in english, it can't be real!
Static verification vs. type-safe languages
on
C with Safety - Cyclone
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Hi,
In 1999, the Ariane 5 launcher exploded a few seconds after leaving the ground. The faulty program, written in type-safe Ada, has been submited to a static program analyzer developped by Alain Deutsch at INRIA in France. The analyzer spotted the error right away!
It was a number going out of range after too many iterations and wrapping back to 0.
The verification technique used was based on abstract interpretation.
This is just to say that even a strongly type-checked language can fail and that type checks, whether static or dynamic, are not the only way to catch bugs.
Alain Deutsch has started a company called Polyspace that sells static verifiers for Ada and C (See www.polyspace.com). The idea is not to rewrite C or Ada but to spot potential bugs inside programs.
I have no special interest in this company, (I know Alain Deutsch), but I mean that improving C does not imply removing the type-unsafe onstructs.
This problem is not new. After WW2, Karl R. Popper wrote a book called "Open Society and Its Enemies". Popper is one of the most influential Philosopher of the 20th century and this book is worth reading.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you have any study supporting this claim that "Things are bad in America, but they're better than they are in most other countries and they're better than they've been historically." or is it just a political claim, similar to "CCTV will prevent crime"?
Katy Börner and I have been organizing a workshop on Information Visualization Infrastructures, including graph drawing packages. The results are available at http://vw.indiana.edu/ivsi2004/
There are lots of different tradeofs involved. One being interactive vs. static graphics. Another being the size of the graphs.
For static graphs, such as class hierarchies and such, Graphviz (http://www.graphviz.org/ works fine and is easy to integrate in a system. For some graphs, Graphviz will not work at all so you need to try first.
For large or dense graphs, above 1000 nodes or more than 4 times more edges than vertices (5n etc), node-link diagrams don't work at all. You could use a matrix but people are not used at reading matrices.
For interactive visualization of graphs, Jung (http://jung.sourceforge.net/) and Prefuse (http://prefuse.sourceforge.net/) are fine if you have small graphs ()
If you are a graph wizard and want to analyze large social networks, you can take a look at Pajek (http://vlado.fmf.uni-lj.si/pub/networks/Pajek/) but it is not a free software and runs mostly on Windows.
Other packages are ok for simple things, stereotyped things or more experimental things. You need to try them on your own problem to decide.
Actually, the French National Library has already scanned a large collection of material: 70,000 documents, 80,000 images... mostly in French. They have been doing this for years and are distributing the documents from http://gallica.bnf.fr/
/., he may even get the funding this way!
They are stuggling for funding and are frustrated that given the huge number of books they have, they cannot compete with a commercial initiative.
The European national libraries are full of treasures that noone can see, such as the manuscripts of famous European authors. Yet, the European govenments don't provide enough funding to just let these treasures out. I believe that's what Jean-Noel Jeanneney is trying to push, and the funding for this kind of initiative is not that large.
And, if American bashing in Europe is only half what French bashing on
I used BW Garbage Collection on an Information Visualization system here available under the GPL.
It works, but with some problems, mainly due to the fact that it doesn't knows enough of the OS, in particular large pages allocated by libraries that it has to scan for pointers. There is nothing that cannot be fixed in theory, but systems are not designed for it right now.
On my visualization application, it spends seconds scanning some memory mapped zone opened by NVidia OpenGL implementation (this is a guess from looking at the stack trace in gdb).
For the performance talk, there are interesting figures in the book Garbage Collection
and at Boem's site showing that reference counting costs more than garbage collection.
However, reference counting is predictable and does not interrupt interactive applications at random moments.
In particular for multithreaded applications, reference counts should be guarded by a mutex that is very expensive and can be avoided using a GC.
One possible alternative to C++ with BW is using gcj, the Gnu Java Compiler. It uses the same back-end than G++ for producing optimized code but is closely tied to the BW garbage collection, providing information about how objects are organized in memory, improving the marking-time of the GC.
gcj produces code that can be linked with C and C++ without having to resort to JNI.
It seems that somebody already successfully sent a model plane across the atlantic ,
and
although I don't know what "under FAI rules" means.
So now, terrorists can target most places in the world pretty safely. I wonder if this scenario has been taken into account by the Pentagon and what they can do about it.
I have been working quite a lot on trying to improve Java graphics performance, starting from Agile2D [http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/agile2d/], a free implementation of Java Graphics2D based on OpenGL made by Jon Meyer for the Human-Computer Interaction Lab of the University of Maryland.
The fact is, using a recent accelerated graphics card (Quadro4 500 GoGL on a Laptop Dell M50), I have speedups of 10 to 200 times compared to the native Java implementation ON THE SAME PLATFORM. These numbers improve on desktops with GeForce 4 or ATI equivalents.
I am currently improving Agile2D and it is getting better at fonts and most other things as well.
However, Agile2D cannot completely replace Java graphics right now because the repaint management of Swing is not designed to be modified, leading to refresh problems that I haven't been able to fix so far.
This means that -- as Apple already realized -- Java graphics can be made much faster in a portable way by relying on OpenGL.
Of course, on older graphics platforms, OpenGL is slower than software rendering. But using the "Object Technology", it should be possible to engineer two different implementations of Graphics2D and choose the right one at startup time, especially in Java.
So there is hope for large speedups if Sun switches to hardware rendering or redesign a little bit the Swing RepaintManager to allow external developers to implement the speedups by themselves.
It works like that:
Now that the web is there to distribute the article, what is the added value of the publisher?
If the SIIA behaves like that, nobody will complain when publishers are replaced by online journals.
Unfortulately, science evaluation is still made by counting the printed publications. When that is changed, the scientific publishers will collapse without anybody complaining.
I am currently building something similar with a mini-itx system.
However, in this case, I would have done the end program on a PDA like a Sony CLIE because the PC box is cumbersome and displaying big arrows can be done on a small 320x320 display as well. The PDA should talk to some device with its IR so the barebone PC could be used for that, but without any display!
After several years of failed tentatives in home integration, I believe these applicances are going to solve the problem. Still, we need Lego to provide a "homestorm" box to build these appliances more easily!
Damn!
It's the first time I use Mozilla composer instead of emacs and it uses absolute paths instead of relative!
It is fixed now!
Since visualization is on prime time on /. today, I generated a couple of visualizations of the kernel using a tool I designed for visualizing large data structures.
Look at it by clicking on the third image here if you want some explanations of the underlying research, or go directly here if you prefer.
Enjoy!
It may be due to my foreign origin, but could somebody explain me why the Pentagon listens to Microsoft when they criticize a competitor?
How could they trust any word of Microsoft?
How could they publicly accept to hear only one side of the story without at least pretending to be fair and schedule an appointment with pro Open-Source/Free-Software parties?
The fight is unfair and everybody seems to accept it.
I wish there were an OS/FS fund for advertising; I would love to see a full page anti-Microsoft advertising in all the major newspapers, just to show Microsoft that OS/FS can fight on the same grounds and harm them with facts.
But OS/FS are not meant to raise money, just for trying to do as good software as possible or as many free software as possible.
Could that - with the enthusiasts of OS/FS - be enough to convince government agencies and private companies and counter Microsoft propaganda?
If you look at the french project "Station de Télémétrie Laser-Lune" at http://wwwrc.obs-azur.fr/cerga/laser/laslune/llr.h tm, you will see it has already been done with good precision (3mm).
You can download all the results already, day by day, from 1996.
Since it's not in english, it can't be real!
Hi,
In 1999, the Ariane 5 launcher exploded a few seconds after leaving the ground. The faulty program, written in type-safe Ada, has been submited to a static program analyzer developped by Alain Deutsch at INRIA in France. The analyzer spotted the error right away!
It was a number going out of range after too many iterations and wrapping back to 0.
The verification technique used was based on abstract interpretation.
This is just to say that even a strongly type-checked language can fail and that type checks, whether static or dynamic, are not the only way to catch bugs.
Alain Deutsch has started a company called Polyspace that sells static verifiers for Ada and C (See www.polyspace.com). The idea is not to rewrite C or Ada but to spot potential bugs inside programs.
I have no special interest in this company, (I know Alain Deutsch), but I mean that improving C does not imply removing the type-unsafe onstructs.
This problem is not new. After WW2, Karl R. Popper wrote a book called "Open Society and Its Enemies". Popper is one of the most influential Philosopher of the 20th century and this book is worth reading.