Of course, you can do a bit more computing with 8 Q-bits than you can with 8 of the more mundane bits that the rest of us are using.
... only if it is attached to a server farm to find the real answer from the combinatorial mess produced by the Q
Well, yeah, but that's the same situation with most "computers". I like to point out to users that the actual "computer" is just the CPU chip plus a few memory chips in the middle of one board in their box. The rest is all interface stuff so that the computer can get electricity and information from the outside world, and send back the results of the computations. The interface stuff is often several thousand times as big as the actual computer.
We can expect that it'll be the same with quantum computers. A single Q-bit requires quite a bit of surrounding support structure to work at all. Decoding the mess produced by the "computation" requires additional support from conventional computers. Whether it's worthwhile, we have yet to see.
Hey, if you liked programming for a one-byte machine, maybe you should join the quantum computer research effort. They're just now looking forward to the creation of their first 8-bit "computer" in the very near future.;-)
Of course, you can do a bit more computing with 8 Q-bits than you can with 8 of the more mundane bits that the rest of us are using.
Project Manhattan was a desperate gamble in the middle of the war, with the added benefit that America wasn't being bombed on its own soil like Germany was.
We might also note that the US and UK were bombing Germany's research sites, and especially targeted facilities that dealt with things like isotope separation and heavy water. Roosevelt's administration was actively trying to prevent German development of the atomic bomb. It was a lot harder for the Germans to target American research sites.
Of course, there's also a bit of historic irony that a in the 1940s, a surprising number of the physicists with knowledge related to atomic bombs were Jewish. So Germany was killing or driving into exile a good part of the technical crowd that could have built them an atomic bomb. The US was picking up as many of them as it could entice to cross the Atlantic. Enticing them was fairly easy, of course, for obvious reasons.
(It occurs to me that I haven't read of Jewish physicists who fled to Britain and worked there. I suppose there were some. Or maybe not. After all, America was far from the battlefields, and would have been a much safer place to continue your research.;-)
That article used the phrase "Assassin's Mace", which I've seen before, and claimed it's a translation of the Chinese (presumably Mandarin) "shashou jian". I tried looking these words up, and I'm a bit baffled by the results.
The term "sha1shou3" is, of course, the ordinary Mandarin for "killer"; "assassin" would be "xiong1shou3". Is there a dictionary that swaps or otherwise confuses these words? They're not really synonyms. Why would someone translate "shashou" (with any tones;-) as "assassin"? Is there a different set of tones that would give it that meaning?
I couldn't find a Chinese word for "mace" at all, except in the sense of the spice and the modern pepper spray. Of course, I know the word "jian1", which is merely the Mandarin word for your standard (two-edged) sword of any length. That's a totally different sort of weapon from a mace, which isn't an edged weapon.
We aren't allowed to use Chinese characters (or any non-8859-1) chars here on/., and it's hard to discuss such things without using the native character set. But does anyone know what Chinese the phrase "shashong jian" might have come from, that could reasonably be translated as "assassin's mace"? Did they get the pinyin wrong, and everyone else copied it?
Or is this yet another case of a wildly incorrect translation by someone not very familiar with Chinese and not overly concerned with accuracy? There are, of course, a lot of memes floating around that are badly garbled mistranslations of the Chinese, and I wonder if this is yet another. If so, it's a weird one, because how many native speakers of English would even recognize a mace if they saw one? And why would an assassin use a mace? I'd think a dirk would be a lot better. Assassins usually rely on stealth, and it's hard to be inconspicuous when carrying a mace.
Or if the "jian" is the common "jian1" sword, why would someone (mis)translate it as "mace"?
The "Assassin's Mace" thing gets some 14,600 google hits, and it does seem to be a known phrase in at least some circles, so it has to have come from somewhere.
Amazing what you can find if you look hard enough and who you can upset by connecting the dots. I've got a map freely available from the DOE National Renewable Energy Lab that would give these guys nightmares!
There's a long history of this. Back in the 1970s, there was a funny "security" story, in which the US Dept of Defense (DoD) contracted with a couple of university researchers to study what could be learned about American military forces from publicly-available sources. The researchers went about it by collecting publications, mostly newspapers and other news publications, but also some government publications. They organized the information, wrote up their report, and submitted it to the DoD. Within only a few days, it had a secret classification.
Of course, "secret" is the lowest DoD classification. But this was still considered pretty funny by everyone who heard about it, and a lot of comedians got a set of jokes out of it. It was widely reported as an example of the absurdities in the government's classification system.
Nowadays I suppose you'd mostly use google, including google's maps, to do such a study quickly. And your report would still get classified, despite the fact that it could be replicated by a lot of school children in many countries.
Since when have OS designers optimised their code to milk every cycle from the available CPUs?
This isn't just an OS-level problem. It's a failure among programmers of all sorts.
I've been involved in software development since the late 1970s, and for the start I've heard the argument "We don't have to worry about code speed or size, because today's machines are so fast and have so much memory. This was just as common back when machines were 1,000 times slower and had 10,000 times less memory than today.
It's the reason for Henry Petroski's famous remark that "The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry."
Programmers respond to faster cpu speed and more memory by making their software use more cpu cycles and more memory. They always have, and there's no sign that this is going to change. Being efficient is hard, and you don't get rewarded for it, because managers can't measure it. So it's better to add flashy eye candy and more features, which people can see.
If we want efficient code, we have to figure out ways to reward the programmers that write it. I don't see any sign that people anywhere are interested in doing this. Anyone have suggestions for how it might be done?
Larry M. Wortzel "overreacts" because he needs something to justify his job, his pay, and this will get him some attention which could lead to bigger and better things.
Indeed. And fixing the problem here can't be done by attacking him and others who take the approach of "Shoot the messenger" in cases like this. It might be fairly obvious to a lot of us that we want people finding such problems and telling us about them. The alternative is that we don't hear about a problem until someone exploits it. But fixing it requires changing the social and organizational systems that reward people like Mr Wortzel for their attacks on bearers of bad news.
Upton Sinclair is quoted as saying "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it." This is the case here. Mr Wortzel is probably going to benefit from his actions. Attacking him will do little; it'll only turn him into a sort of martyr.
The real culprits are the organizations that hire people like him; All too often, they reward people who try to suppress information about problems. We should be publicly pointing out the stupidity of this sort of attack, and the stupidity of discouraging release of such information. And we need to find ways of punishing the people who reward those who attack bad-news messengers.
(But the sort of nested logic in that last sentence is difficult to get across in political and management settings, so it may be hopeless. It's far too complex for most people. We need a bumper-sticker slogan for the situation.;-)
Have you ever read any W3C standards? There are a lot of parts that are left to the discretion of the implementation.
And there are a lot of parts that are written in sufficiently ambiguous English that the developers have to decide which possible interpretation to use.
This is, of course, mainly the fault of the English language. When writing specs, it's easy to read a passage with the meaning that you intend, and not notice that the wording is ambiguous. This is a general problem in all human languages, but since English lost most of its inflectional endings some centuries back, it has somewhat worse problems than most other languages. (Iff you want to see a real winner in this category, take a look at Mandarin. You wouldn't believe that a language so fraught with homophones could ever be used to communicate anything at all.;-)
There was a really cute example of this at the Language Log blog recently. The article's title is self-referential, in the sense that it commits the error that is the article's topic. The word "slander" in the title is not a verb; it's a noun. You need to read the discussion to understand what it's talking about. To fully understand it, you should also google the phrase "crash blossom", which comes from an especially spectacular failure at news headline writing due to English ambiguity.
Anyway, it's nearly impossible to write standards that don't have ambiguities. About the best that can be done is what the POSIX group did: They asked for submissions of what they termed "weirdnix", which was a POSIX-compliant implementation of a feature that was technically compliant with the wording of the standard, but did something in a way that would be surprising to programmers and would make the code non-portable. They used such submissions to rephrase the standards to eliminate the ambiguities that allowed such bad implementations. They didn't totally succeed, of course. Success isn't possible when written in a language like English.
(Many people have suggested that Microsoft consciously implemented "weirdnix" in their POSIX library. It's fairly easy to write code that works the same on all POSIX-compliant libraries except Windows. It's very difficult to write POSIX code that works both on MS Windows and on other POSIX-compliant systems.;-)
Nothing is as bad for the future of America as Fox says.
Heh. And we might also add the reminder that slashdot is an international forum. For the other 95% of the world's population, it would be useful for the summary to mention that this is about American Health Care Reform. Most of the rest of the "developed" world considers it a non-story, because their health care was long ago made more "user friendly" than the bizarre Americans system. (And the parts of the world not called "developed" generally have little hope of having any sort of meaningful health-care system any time soon for anyone but the wealthy few.;-)
I've often thought that the/. classification system really should include hints as to what parts of the world a story applies to. There are a lot of stories like this one that are very important to a part of the world, but insignificant to most of the rest. It would be useful if we could filter on such things.
I can assure you that the majority of webmasters test their sites in IE and some of them in Firefox (definitely not all of them).
...because they know that the user base not using IE/Firefox/Safari is too small to care for.
Picky quibble: "webmasters" are sorta irrelevant; it's the web developers that mostly determine the test methods. I'm actually both, for a handful of sites (so maybe I'm sorta irrelevant, too;-). But when I'm wearing my "web master" hat, my main concern is that the web server correctly deliver the content, and that's hardly a function of the content's markup. I don't care at all how the developers do their testing, and when I'm testing on someone else's machine, I'd look very askance at any presumption on the webmaster's part to tell me how I should test my own pages. If I were such a webmaster's boss, I'd consider giving him/her a serious talking-to about the responsibilities of the job.
But when I put on my "web developer" hat, my personal choices for primary test browsers are Safari, Opera, and Firefox, usually in that order. IE is much later, after I've verified that the markup works in the major standards-compliant browsers.
My choice of Safari and Opera first over Firefox is due to what I consider a design failure in Firefox: I routinely "click" on things using Ctl/Cmd-click, to get them to open in a new tab. That way I can quickly switch between the two tabs. Unfortunately, this doesn't work with FF, which always handles clicks on buttons (i.e., <input type=submit...>) by opening the page in the same tab regardless of whether the Ctl or Cmd button was used. So testing with FF is materially slower, and it gets used later, after the major problems are worked out in Safari and Opera.
Actually, Opera presents another misbehavior that sometimes makes me test with FF first: When you tell it to show the page's source, it insists on opening the source in a new tab, next to the rendered page. This means that I can't see them in separate windows side by side and quickly compare the rendered version with the actual source. Safari and Firefox both do this right, showing the source in a new window, though I do have to remember to use Opt-Cmd-U with Safari and just Cmd-U or Ctl-U with FF, depending on whether it's on my Macbook or linux machine.
These two things make Safari my usual first choice, because it's standards-compliant and it lets me open anything in a new window with a single 2-or 3-key combo.
My main wish here would probably be that all the folks building browsers would just make all those key combos and behaviors configurable. If I could spend an hour or so making my common operations use the same keys on all my test browsers, it would save me a lot of "Oops!" time wasters during a lot of testing. Trying to remember the correct "show the source" key combo in a dozen browsers can materially slow down testing.
Of course, it's possible that all this stuff is configurable, and I'm just too dumb to find it. I have found some key-config windows for all of them, but they are always very sketchy, and never include things like the above that a developer would want to configure. And it's not that I object to the builtin key combos; it would just make my life a lot easier if I could make them the same on all my installed browsers.
(Another bit of weirdness is that I keep finding that the most important test version of IE is IE6. Later releases are both more standard and less common in my server logs, so it's useful to test against the least standard IE, which is IE6. But my server logs also show that none of my sites attracts a "typical" set of visitors. If I exclude the known search bots, IE is less common in my logs than Firefox, Safari or Opera. This may be because I don't have any "business" oriented sites. Whatever; I just find many reasons to ignore IE until I have everything working for standards-compliant browsers. Then
I don't think that the Scandinavian countries really qualify as all that rich, though. Other than the small amount of North Sea oil, they're the textbook case of people in a marginal habitat with few resources, but who have done a surprisingly good job of things, mostly due to behaving a bit more sensibly that much of the rest of the world. They weren't always that way, though. Watch just about any Bergman film for examples.;-)
It's also not surprising to find the percentages of the Scandinavian countries' populations who are living and working in countries further south. OTOH, I've been in that part of the world in the summer, and it's a really pleasant place to be during those few months. But it's easy to see the signs that they're not all that rich.
I am not on the list, therefore one does not end up on the list for no reason. QED.
Heh; very funny.
Now, for a possibly close parallel, consider all the people who have ended up on the Homeland Security folks' "no fly list" simply because someone with a name vaguely like theirs was fingered by some unspecified person. This apparently is the sort of logic that the US security people use to build the no-fly list. A simple similarity of names suffices to get you treated as an Enemy. And, more to the point, this shoddiness in building enemy lists is becoming well known to the rest of the world, and is now a significant part of the world's image of the US government.
In any case, how do you know you're not on the US's drone assassination list? Do you have a verifiable copy of the list? If precedent is any indication, and name very much like yours just might be on that list. And precedent also says that a similarity in their written form of a name to your spelling of your name is easily enough to get you fingered as an Enemy.
If you don't believe any of this, fine, but consider that what the ACLU has done is attempt to get verification that the US governments handling of the drone assassination list isn't actually as shoddy as the TSA's no-fly list has turned out to be. And the US government has stonewalled their requests. In just about any "court of public opinion", this would be taken as a tacit admission that what people suspect is true.
In other words, whether you believe it or not, this sort of story is causing a major PR hit to the US's reputation. Discussions like we're reading here are also read abroad, and add the the information that a good number of US citizens agree with such shoddy list building. The only practical way to fix this is to present the evidence that the drone assassination list is being handled responsibly. The US government has refused to cooperate with this, by failing to provide the documentation that the ACLU wants. This tells most anyone who's paying attention all they need to know about the US government's attitude toward the lives of people in the rest of the world.
(Actually, it's not just the rest of the world; much of the US population has become aware of the way the no-fly lists have been mismanaged. This has added significantly to the American distrust of their government's security people. Some people in the government do worry about this, but they're pretty much helpless to do anything about it. And I find myself worrying that some people I know who are doing relief work in remote parts of the world may be the victim of a US drone killing. I've read nothing about this issue that even starts to reassure me that relief workers won't be targeted as "enemy combatants". If they can be classified as enemies in a domestic airport, they could easily be so classified while working in some poor, obscure corner of the world.)
"No person shall be . . . deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law"
It seems pretty clear that to many people here, a non-citizen isn't a "person". OTOH, in the US at least, a registered corporation is a "person". So corporations should be protected but visiting tourists shouldn't.
At least that's the idea that many are expressing here.
I seem to recall something about having a right to a fair trial if I'm a US citizen.
You should probably reread the Constitution. As many lawyers have pointed out, the passage guaranteeing "due process" makes no mention of citizenship. And historians have pointed out that the various denials of due process in US history have generally targeted primarily US citizens. Thus, when Lincoln abrogated the Constitutional protections, he did so almost entirely to imprison people who were still legally citizens, since the US government didn't recognize their states' succession. Similarly, the WWII denials of due process in the Internments resulted in imprisoning people who were almost all citizens.
It's an old story. Such things are justified as being against "foreign enemies", but the actual targets and victims usually turn out to be mostly the country's own citizens.
Whether this will happen this time around, we can't really say. But history says we should be very suspicious of how our rulers intend to use such things.
Name one other country that allows anyone to cross into its borders regardless of the reason.
Actually, the borders between the Scandinavian countries have been quite open for a long time. We even have the curious situation that all of them except Norway are now in the EU. You'd think this would make the Norway/Sweden border somewhat controlled, but there are lots of roads crossing the border that are usually uncontrolled. (Of course, many of them aren't what you'd call major highways.;-)
I saw this some years back, when I happened to be in Sweden, near the border, and people decided to drive to the next town for lunch - in Norway. When we reached the border, there was the expected "Norge" sign, and a small building off to the side that was obviously for a border guard. But the driver didn't even slow down. When I asked, he said "Oh, there's never anyone there." The attitude seems to be that such things are just for show, to keep the more rabid political types happy, but nobody would bother wasting money actually enforcing border controls at minor crossings. That's done at airports and (major) seaports, but there's little point in such theatre anywhere else. I just checked, and you can sorta see this with google maps. Using the "satellite" view, zoom in on any of the border-crossing roads, where you'll see a small widening and a tiny building - but no vehicles of any sort.
I have heard that people take the borders seriously in some other parts of the world.;-)
Of course, one might question whether areas such as Sweden properly qualify as "countries" these days, now that they're more like "states" within first the Scandinavian Union and then the EU. OTOH, I haven't noticed people calling the EU a "country", so I'm not sure what the proper classification is. Do borders such as Norway/Sweden or Sweden/Finland qualify as international any more? They do still maintain separate citizenship rolls, and at least make a pretense of being "countries".
In the other direction, there's the case of the "two Chinas", each of which insist (in public) that they are all one country, and the other part is just occupied by an illigitimate government. They have some fairly strict border controls, despite the fact that they are officially a single country to both governments.
So maybe "country" isn't the right criterion when it comes to border crossings. Maybe the local political power structures are a better explanation of what's allowed and what's not.
The only thing coming out of Washington that is good for 'We The People', is gridlock. When they actually do stuff, it always seems to cost us more.
Well, that just might be the intent. After all, for several decades now the US government has been mostly run by people who consider corporate profits the most important thing in the world. Of course, we've long used the term "pork" to refer to Congress passing laws designed to funnel money to companies in their district. This story is just a more blatant recent version of this, where the money is funneled to construction companies while openly ignoring questions about whether it'll even work. The real answer, of course, is "Who cares?", since the actual goal was enriching the officers and stockholders of the construction firms.
The other growing example of this is the US pseudo-debate over health care. If you listen to this "debate" at all, it rapidly becomes clear that they almost never discuss health care itself. Rather, they always talk about the money, primarily insurance money. The main consideration in both Congress and the White House is that the existing insurance companies and the flock of other medical management firms, which do no actual medical work at all, maintain or increase their income. Actual medical care is far down in the list of priorities. Even when corporations such as hospitals are discussed, the "issues" are things like profits, mergers & acquisitions, etc.; they rarely deal with any actual medical issues.
It was especially blatant in the recent "bank bailout". Many analysts reported that the government's support money went almost entirely into three things: officer bonuses, share dividends and acquisitions of smaller financial firms. Almost nothing went into fixing the problems that had got the financial system in trouble. So this was yet again a way of funneling money into the corporate owners, with no concern for whether it solved any actual problems.
But none of this should be surprising. We've even read here frequently how the only important thing is corporate profit, and corporations exist for no other purpose. When this is the major source of almost all campaign funding, you should expect exactly what we've got. And it's the main ideology in US politics these days, in both major parties and several minor parties.
Hmmm... It looks like I should have hit Preview once more.;-)
Funny thing is that my last Preview didn't have that problem with the runaway <b> tag. I went to the end of the text and added a bit more text, which should have been in the non-bold part, and hit Submit. Then I noticed what had gone wrong.
I wonder if I accidentally fat-fingered something that somehow edited a remote part of the textarea window. Or maybe it's just another of the many weirdnesses in Slashcode 2. I have seen it get very confused when I try some rather simple HTML tricks. But a </b> tag seems too innocuous to screw up. Oh well, guess I'll never know.
The code you have provided a link to will not run on Windows 9.
Yeah, and this gets to the point of my basic criticism: Writing the program in a different language is not an example of a simpler version of the program "in C" (as was advertised).
Criticising C because its object files are larger than carefully-tailored assembly code isn't a relevant criticism. C wasn't designed to produce the world's most compact object files. It was designed (look it up) to produce reasonably small programs that are reasonably portable.
That portability part is extremely important; it was why the language came into existence in the first place. K&R (and friends) at Bell Labs had written most of their first version of unix in assembly language. Then they got a better machine, and wanted it there. They faced a huge rewrite job. They decided that they wanted to do this only once more, so they would do most of the rewrite in a higher-level language. They had the B language, which was fairly good for doing the low-level things needed in an OS kernel, and as they went, they modified it so that they could rewrite more of the kernel in what they finally renamed "C" (because it had become a somewhat different language than B).
They admitted right from the start that C didn't produce code quite as compact or fast as they could write in assembly. But they decided that it was a worthwhile tradeoff, because new machines were coming along eery few months, and they got quick porting from this new higher-level language.
So saying that we can do better (i.e., smaller and faster) in assembly isn't very interesting. We've known that since the 1950s when the first "higher-level" languages were developed. Proudly announcing the fact now is just silly, and makes you look like some sort of idiot.
Comparing the results of different compilers and/or runtime libraries is a lot more interesting. Smaller and/or faster code is interesting and useful. But it's only one of the criteria for "good" code. Telling people how to minimize the size or maximize the speed of code in language X is useful for people using X. But saying "rewrite it in assembly language" is mostly just silly. Most of us know that, and we're not gonna do it very often, because it violates most of our other criteria for the code we're writing.
(Lately I've been writing a lot of code in perl, python, and other language that are a lot bigger and slower than C. There are often good reasons for doing this. Sometimes I give up and redo something in C for performance reasons. This article does nothing to teach me about doing that better. It's been many years since I've had a valid reason to rewrite something in assembly language. Portability is always more important than what assembly would give me. But YMMV, of course.)
Yeah, but the 45-byte program doesn't say "Hello World". In fact, there's no example that I can find in TFA that outputs that message or any other. So the summary is incorrect on its face. TFA doesn't show a simpler "Hello World" program; it doesn't show any sort of "Hello World" program at all.
I feel cheated, and tricked into reading an article that didn't do what was advertised.
(It's not the author's fault, of course; the author didn't claim to be writing the sort of program that the summary talked about. Though I was a bit disappointed that only the first few examples were in C. The article was almost entirely about assembly-language programs. So again, I was a bit disappointed, since I was hoping to learn something about making C programs smaller. This was done only in the first example, and it was made smaller by removing its call on write() so it didn't output anything at all. I already understood that I can make programs smaller by removing all functionality.;-)
Blunt and brutal as it sounds,...... I've occasionally run across this reasoning told as a joke, shown it to friends whose business is supporting Windows, and told that it's no joke at all. The typical response is along the lines of: Hey, I've installed linux for a few customers. Each time, it only took me an hour or so, and that's all I got paid for. Then I never heard from them again until they wanted someone for another hour to do an install on a new machine. OTOH, with my Windows clients, I typically get paid for at least a full day to install anything, and then I get called back for half- or full-days whenever the system shoots itself in the foot. We'd be fools to advocate a system like linux when Windows produces two to three orders of magnitude more billable time for us. Of course, we all use linux and/or OS X at home, but that's not where the support business is.
As long as the suckers^Wclients continue to act like they do and fall for the "market leader" sales propaganda, this isn't going to change. It's been like this in the computing industry since at least the 1960s, so don't expect it to change during your lifetime.
There's nothing subjective about pretending that the Maya calendar ends in 2012, it is pure stupidity. You might as well imagine that our calendar predicts the end of the world in 9999.
Actually, it's even stupider than that. On the critical day in 2012, the Mayan calendar's high-order digit merely goes from 12 to 13 (in their base-20 numbering system). So it's more like predicting the end of the world on the first day of 2999, because the 2 changes to 3.
Of course, we did have a lot of silly predictions about the recent overflow from 1999 to 2000. But that was mostly based on a very credible problem with computer handling of dates, and it turned out that the message got out soon enough that a few billion dollars were spent paying people to hunt down some thousands of bugs and fix them beforehand. Even then, some Y2K bugs did pop up, and as predicted, they were mostly in business software written in COBOL. But I don't recall any actual predictions on the order of the end of the world; it was mostly just predicting that the computer field would be really embarrassed on the Big Day.
The real worry with the Mayan calendar is when the all three digits of the date reach 19, and they'll need another digit in their date. But that won't happen for quite a few millennia. (Or is it milleniums?) Of course, there will probably still be a lot of 20th-century COBOL code still in use by the business world then...
There's a horizontal scrollbar right under the "Tell Me More" buttons.
Hmmm... I still had the window showing that page, and it didn't have a scrollbar there. I tried to reply, and saw a FF behavior that has happened several times today: All the tabs in the slashdot window went into their "busy" mode with little spinning icons replacing the "/." icon in the tab, and FF displayed the "busy" pointer symbol. (This was on my Macbook.) After waiting a while, and verifying that FF was using 99% of the cpu, I finally killed it "with extreme prejudice" (kill -9).
When I restarted it, it first gave me its apology about something gone wrong with its attempt to restore my sessions. I hit the "restore" button, and all the previous windows were rebuilt. I found the showing the browserchoice.eu page - and it had a scrollbar where you said it did.
Very curious... If I get this behavior again, maybe I'll let it report to headquarters. Usually I don't bother with that, since I figure that they have enough to do, but it does seem to be a failure state that has recurred, and a few FF updates haven't fixed it.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, yeah, but that's the same situation with most "computers". I like to point out to users that the actual "computer" is just the CPU chip plus a few memory chips in the middle of one board in their box. The rest is all interface stuff so that the computer can get electricity and information from the outside world, and send back the results of the computations. The interface stuff is often several thousand times as big as the actual computer.
We can expect that it'll be the same with quantum computers. A single Q-bit requires quite a bit of surrounding support structure to work at all. Decoding the mess produced by the "computation" requires additional support from conventional computers. Whether it's worthwhile, we have yet to see.
Hey, if you liked programming for a one-byte machine, maybe you should join the quantum computer research effort. They're just now looking forward to the creation of their first 8-bit "computer" in the very near future. ;-)
Of course, you can do a bit more computing with 8 Q-bits than you can with 8 of the more mundane bits that the rest of us are using.
Project Manhattan was a desperate gamble in the middle of the war, with the added benefit that America wasn't being bombed on its own soil like Germany was.
We might also note that the US and UK were bombing Germany's research sites, and especially targeted facilities that dealt with things like isotope separation and heavy water. Roosevelt's administration was actively trying to prevent German development of the atomic bomb. It was a lot harder for the Germans to target American research sites.
Of course, there's also a bit of historic irony that a in the 1940s, a surprising number of the physicists with knowledge related to atomic bombs were Jewish. So Germany was killing or driving into exile a good part of the technical crowd that could have built them an atomic bomb. The US was picking up as many of them as it could entice to cross the Atlantic. Enticing them was fairly easy, of course, for obvious reasons.
(It occurs to me that I haven't read of Jewish physicists who fled to Britain and worked there. I suppose there were some. Or maybe not. After all, America was far from the battlefields, and would have been a much safer place to continue your research. ;-)
That article used the phrase "Assassin's Mace", which I've seen before, and claimed it's a translation of the Chinese (presumably Mandarin) "shashou jian". I tried looking these words up, and I'm a bit baffled by the results.
The term "sha1shou3" is, of course, the ordinary Mandarin for "killer"; "assassin" would be "xiong1shou3". Is there a dictionary that swaps or otherwise confuses these words? They're not really synonyms. Why would someone translate "shashou" (with any tones ;-) as "assassin"? Is there a different set of tones that would give it that meaning?
I couldn't find a Chinese word for "mace" at all, except in the sense of the spice and the modern pepper spray. Of course, I know the word "jian1", which is merely the Mandarin word for your standard (two-edged) sword of any length. That's a totally different sort of weapon from a mace, which isn't an edged weapon.
We aren't allowed to use Chinese characters (or any non-8859-1) chars here on /., and it's hard to discuss such things without using the native character set. But does anyone know what Chinese the phrase "shashong jian" might have come from, that could reasonably be translated as "assassin's mace"? Did they get the pinyin wrong, and everyone else copied it?
Or is this yet another case of a wildly incorrect translation by someone not very familiar with Chinese and not overly concerned with accuracy? There are, of course, a lot of memes floating around that are badly garbled mistranslations of the Chinese, and I wonder if this is yet another. If so, it's a weird one, because how many native speakers of English would even recognize a mace if they saw one? And why would an assassin use a mace? I'd think a dirk would be a lot better. Assassins usually rely on stealth, and it's hard to be inconspicuous when carrying a mace.
Or if the "jian" is the common "jian1" sword, why would someone (mis)translate it as "mace"?
The "Assassin's Mace" thing gets some 14,600 google hits, and it does seem to be a known phrase in at least some circles, so it has to have come from somewhere.
Amazing what you can find if you look hard enough and who you can upset by connecting the dots. I've got a map freely available from the DOE National Renewable Energy Lab that would give these guys nightmares!
There's a long history of this. Back in the 1970s, there was a funny "security" story, in which the US Dept of Defense (DoD) contracted with a couple of university researchers to study what could be learned about American military forces from publicly-available sources. The researchers went about it by collecting publications, mostly newspapers and other news publications, but also some government publications. They organized the information, wrote up their report, and submitted it to the DoD. Within only a few days, it had a secret classification.
Of course, "secret" is the lowest DoD classification. But this was still considered pretty funny by everyone who heard about it, and a lot of comedians got a set of jokes out of it. It was widely reported as an example of the absurdities in the government's classification system.
Nowadays I suppose you'd mostly use google, including google's maps, to do such a study quickly. And your report would still get classified, despite the fact that it could be replicated by a lot of school children in many countries.
Since when have OS designers optimised their code to milk every cycle from the available CPUs?
This isn't just an OS-level problem. It's a failure among programmers of all sorts.
I've been involved in software development since the late 1970s, and for the start I've heard the argument "We don't have to worry about code speed or size, because today's machines are so fast and have so much memory. This was just as common back when machines were 1,000 times slower and had 10,000 times less memory than today.
It's the reason for Henry Petroski's famous remark that "The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry."
Programmers respond to faster cpu speed and more memory by making their software use more cpu cycles and more memory. They always have, and there's no sign that this is going to change. Being efficient is hard, and you don't get rewarded for it, because managers can't measure it. So it's better to add flashy eye candy and more features, which people can see.
If we want efficient code, we have to figure out ways to reward the programmers that write it. I don't see any sign that people anywhere are interested in doing this. Anyone have suggestions for how it might be done?
Indeed. And fixing the problem here can't be done by attacking him and others who take the approach of "Shoot the messenger" in cases like this. It might be fairly obvious to a lot of us that we want people finding such problems and telling us about them. The alternative is that we don't hear about a problem until someone exploits it. But fixing it requires changing the social and organizational systems that reward people like Mr Wortzel for their attacks on bearers of bad news.
Upton Sinclair is quoted as saying "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it." This is the case here. Mr Wortzel is probably going to benefit from his actions. Attacking him will do little; it'll only turn him into a sort of martyr.
The real culprits are the organizations that hire people like him; All too often, they reward people who try to suppress information about problems. We should be publicly pointing out the stupidity of this sort of attack, and the stupidity of discouraging release of such information. And we need to find ways of punishing the people who reward those who attack bad-news messengers.
(But the sort of nested logic in that last sentence is difficult to get across in political and management settings, so it may be hopeless. It's far too complex for most people. We need a bumper-sticker slogan for the situation. ;-)
Have you ever read any W3C standards? There are a lot of parts that are left to the discretion of the implementation.
And there are a lot of parts that are written in sufficiently ambiguous English that the developers have to decide which possible interpretation to use.
This is, of course, mainly the fault of the English language. When writing specs, it's easy to read a passage with the meaning that you intend, and not notice that the wording is ambiguous. This is a general problem in all human languages, but since English lost most of its inflectional endings some centuries back, it has somewhat worse problems than most other languages. (Iff you want to see a real winner in this category, take a look at Mandarin. You wouldn't believe that a language so fraught with homophones could ever be used to communicate anything at all. ;-)
There was a really cute example of this at the Language Log blog recently. The article's title is self-referential, in the sense that it commits the error that is the article's topic. The word "slander" in the title is not a verb; it's a noun. You need to read the discussion to understand what it's talking about. To fully understand it, you should also google the phrase "crash blossom", which comes from an especially spectacular failure at news headline writing due to English ambiguity.
Anyway, it's nearly impossible to write standards that don't have ambiguities. About the best that can be done is what the POSIX group did: They asked for submissions of what they termed "weirdnix", which was a POSIX-compliant implementation of a feature that was technically compliant with the wording of the standard, but did something in a way that would be surprising to programmers and would make the code non-portable. They used such submissions to rephrase the standards to eliminate the ambiguities that allowed such bad implementations. They didn't totally succeed, of course. Success isn't possible when written in a language like English.
(Many people have suggested that Microsoft consciously implemented "weirdnix" in their POSIX library. It's fairly easy to write code that works the same on all POSIX-compliant libraries except Windows. It's very difficult to write POSIX code that works both on MS Windows and on other POSIX-compliant systems. ;-)
Nothing is as bad for the future of America as Fox says.
Heh. And we might also add the reminder that slashdot is an international forum. For the other 95% of the world's population, it would be useful for the summary to mention that this is about American Health Care Reform. Most of the rest of the "developed" world considers it a non-story, because their health care was long ago made more "user friendly" than the bizarre Americans system. (And the parts of the world not called "developed" generally have little hope of having any sort of meaningful health-care system any time soon for anyone but the wealthy few. ;-)
I've often thought that the /. classification system really should include hints as to what parts of the world a story applies to. There are a lot of stories like this one that are very important to a part of the world, but insignificant to most of the rest. It would be useful if we could filter on such things.
Ya got that right.
I don't think that the Scandinavian countries really qualify as all that rich, though. Other than the small amount of North Sea oil, they're the textbook case of people in a marginal habitat with few resources, but who have done a surprisingly good job of things, mostly due to behaving a bit more sensibly that much of the rest of the world. They weren't always that way, though. Watch just about any Bergman film for examples. ;-)
It's also not surprising to find the percentages of the Scandinavian countries' populations who are living and working in countries further south. OTOH, I've been in that part of the world in the summer, and it's a really pleasant place to be during those few months. But it's easy to see the signs that they're not all that rich.
Hey, English isn't a pro-drop language! ;)
Is too! ;-)
(Or is that "Is so!"? Oh, the problems from growing up bidialectal.)
The targets of the drones are known and verified terrorist/enemy combatants.
And how do we know this?
(Note I said "know", not "believe". ;-)
I am not on the list, therefore one does not end up on the list for no reason. QED.
Heh; very funny.
Now, for a possibly close parallel, consider all the people who have ended up on the Homeland Security folks' "no fly list" simply because someone with a name vaguely like theirs was fingered by some unspecified person. This apparently is the sort of logic that the US security people use to build the no-fly list. A simple similarity of names suffices to get you treated as an Enemy. And, more to the point, this shoddiness in building enemy lists is becoming well known to the rest of the world, and is now a significant part of the world's image of the US government.
In any case, how do you know you're not on the US's drone assassination list? Do you have a verifiable copy of the list? If precedent is any indication, and name very much like yours just might be on that list. And precedent also says that a similarity in their written form of a name to your spelling of your name is easily enough to get you fingered as an Enemy.
If you don't believe any of this, fine, but consider that what the ACLU has done is attempt to get verification that the US governments handling of the drone assassination list isn't actually as shoddy as the TSA's no-fly list has turned out to be. And the US government has stonewalled their requests. In just about any "court of public opinion", this would be taken as a tacit admission that what people suspect is true.
In other words, whether you believe it or not, this sort of story is causing a major PR hit to the US's reputation. Discussions like we're reading here are also read abroad, and add the the information that a good number of US citizens agree with such shoddy list building. The only practical way to fix this is to present the evidence that the drone assassination list is being handled responsibly. The US government has refused to cooperate with this, by failing to provide the documentation that the ACLU wants. This tells most anyone who's paying attention all they need to know about the US government's attitude toward the lives of people in the rest of the world.
(Actually, it's not just the rest of the world; much of the US population has become aware of the way the no-fly lists have been mismanaged. This has added significantly to the American distrust of their government's security people. Some people in the government do worry about this, but they're pretty much helpless to do anything about it. And I find myself worrying that some people I know who are doing relief work in remote parts of the world may be the victim of a US drone killing. I've read nothing about this issue that even starts to reassure me that relief workers won't be targeted as "enemy combatants". If they can be classified as enemies in a domestic airport, they could easily be so classified while working in some poor, obscure corner of the world.)
"No person shall be . . . deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law"
It seems pretty clear that to many people here, a non-citizen isn't a "person". OTOH, in the US at least, a registered corporation is a "person". So corporations should be protected but visiting tourists shouldn't.
At least that's the idea that many are expressing here.
I seem to recall something about having a right to a fair trial if I'm a US citizen.
You should probably reread the Constitution. As many lawyers have pointed out, the passage guaranteeing "due process" makes no mention of citizenship. And historians have pointed out that the various denials of due process in US history have generally targeted primarily US citizens. Thus, when Lincoln abrogated the Constitutional protections, he did so almost entirely to imprison people who were still legally citizens, since the US government didn't recognize their states' succession. Similarly, the WWII denials of due process in the Internments resulted in imprisoning people who were almost all citizens.
It's an old story. Such things are justified as being against "foreign enemies", but the actual targets and victims usually turn out to be mostly the country's own citizens.
Whether this will happen this time around, we can't really say. But history says we should be very suspicious of how our rulers intend to use such things.
It's The Robots versus The Lawyers.
First thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.
[Citation needed]
Name one other country that allows anyone to cross into its borders regardless of the reason.
Actually, the borders between the Scandinavian countries have been quite open for a long time. We even have the curious situation that all of them except Norway are now in the EU. You'd think this would make the Norway/Sweden border somewhat controlled, but there are lots of roads crossing the border that are usually uncontrolled. (Of course, many of them aren't what you'd call major highways. ;-)
I saw this some years back, when I happened to be in Sweden, near the border, and people decided to drive to the next town for lunch - in Norway. When we reached the border, there was the expected "Norge" sign, and a small building off to the side that was obviously for a border guard. But the driver didn't even slow down. When I asked, he said "Oh, there's never anyone there." The attitude seems to be that such things are just for show, to keep the more rabid political types happy, but nobody would bother wasting money actually enforcing border controls at minor crossings. That's done at airports and (major) seaports, but there's little point in such theatre anywhere else. I just checked, and you can sorta see this with google maps. Using the "satellite" view, zoom in on any of the border-crossing roads, where you'll see a small widening and a tiny building - but no vehicles of any sort.
I have heard that people take the borders seriously in some other parts of the world. ;-)
Of course, one might question whether areas such as Sweden properly qualify as "countries" these days, now that they're more like "states" within first the Scandinavian Union and then the EU. OTOH, I haven't noticed people calling the EU a "country", so I'm not sure what the proper classification is. Do borders such as Norway/Sweden or Sweden/Finland qualify as international any more? They do still maintain separate citizenship rolls, and at least make a pretense of being "countries".
In the other direction, there's the case of the "two Chinas", each of which insist (in public) that they are all one country, and the other part is just occupied by an illigitimate government. They have some fairly strict border controls, despite the fact that they are officially a single country to both governments.
So maybe "country" isn't the right criterion when it comes to border crossings. Maybe the local political power structures are a better explanation of what's allowed and what's not.
The only thing coming out of Washington that is good for 'We The People', is gridlock. When they actually do stuff, it always seems to cost us more.
Well, that just might be the intent. After all, for several decades now the US government has been mostly run by people who consider corporate profits the most important thing in the world. Of course, we've long used the term "pork" to refer to Congress passing laws designed to funnel money to companies in their district. This story is just a more blatant recent version of this, where the money is funneled to construction companies while openly ignoring questions about whether it'll even work. The real answer, of course, is "Who cares?", since the actual goal was enriching the officers and stockholders of the construction firms.
The other growing example of this is the US pseudo-debate over health care. If you listen to this "debate" at all, it rapidly becomes clear that they almost never discuss health care itself. Rather, they always talk about the money, primarily insurance money. The main consideration in both Congress and the White House is that the existing insurance companies and the flock of other medical management firms, which do no actual medical work at all, maintain or increase their income. Actual medical care is far down in the list of priorities. Even when corporations such as hospitals are discussed, the "issues" are things like profits, mergers & acquisitions, etc.; they rarely deal with any actual medical issues.
It was especially blatant in the recent "bank bailout". Many analysts reported that the government's support money went almost entirely into three things: officer bonuses, share dividends and acquisitions of smaller financial firms. Almost nothing went into fixing the problems that had got the financial system in trouble. So this was yet again a way of funneling money into the corporate owners, with no concern for whether it solved any actual problems.
But none of this should be surprising. We've even read here frequently how the only important thing is corporate profit, and corporations exist for no other purpose. When this is the major source of almost all campaign funding, you should expect exactly what we've got. And it's the main ideology in US politics these days, in both major parties and several minor parties.
Hmmm ... It looks like I should have hit Preview once more. ;-)
Funny thing is that my last Preview didn't have that problem with the runaway <b> tag. I went to the end of the text and added a bit more text, which should have been in the non-bold part, and hit Submit. Then I noticed what had gone wrong.
I wonder if I accidentally fat-fingered something that somehow edited a remote part of the textarea window. Or maybe it's just another of the many weirdnesses in Slashcode 2. I have seen it get very confused when I try some rather simple HTML tricks. But a </b> tag seems too innocuous to screw up. Oh well, guess I'll never know.
OK; that looks good, so I'll hit Submit ...
The code you have provided a link to will not run on Windows 9.
Yeah, and this gets to the point of my basic criticism: Writing the program in a different language is not an example of a simpler version of the program "in C" (as was advertised).
Criticising C because its object files are larger than carefully-tailored assembly code isn't a relevant criticism. C wasn't designed to produce the world's most compact object files. It was designed (look it up) to produce reasonably small programs that are reasonably portable.
That portability part is extremely important; it was why the language came into existence in the first place. K&R (and friends) at Bell Labs had written most of their first version of unix in assembly language. Then they got a better machine, and wanted it there. They faced a huge rewrite job. They decided that they wanted to do this only once more, so they would do most of the rewrite in a higher-level language. They had the B language, which was fairly good for doing the low-level things needed in an OS kernel, and as they went, they modified it so that they could rewrite more of the kernel in what they finally renamed "C" (because it had become a somewhat different language than B).
They admitted right from the start that C didn't produce code quite as compact or fast as they could write in assembly. But they decided that it was a worthwhile tradeoff, because new machines were coming along eery few months, and they got quick porting from this new higher-level language.
So saying that we can do better (i.e., smaller and faster) in assembly isn't very interesting. We've known that since the 1950s when the first "higher-level" languages were developed. Proudly announcing the fact now is just silly, and makes you look like some sort of idiot.
Comparing the results of different compilers and/or runtime libraries is a lot more interesting. Smaller and/or faster code is interesting and useful. But it's only one of the criteria for "good" code. Telling people how to minimize the size or maximize the speed of code in language X is useful for people using X. But saying "rewrite it in assembly language" is mostly just silly. Most of us know that, and we're not gonna do it very often, because it violates most of our other criteria for the code we're writing.
(Lately I've been writing a lot of code in perl, python, and other language that are a lot bigger and slower than C. There are often good reasons for doing this. Sometimes I give up and redo something in C for performance reasons. This article does nothing to teach me about doing that better. It's been many years since I've had a valid reason to rewrite something in assembly language. Portability is always more important than what assembly would give me. But YMMV, of course.)
Yeah, but the 45-byte program doesn't say "Hello World". In fact, there's no example that I can find in TFA that outputs that message or any other. So the summary is incorrect on its face. TFA doesn't show a simpler "Hello World" program; it doesn't show any sort of "Hello World" program at all.
I feel cheated, and tricked into reading an article that didn't do what was advertised.
(It's not the author's fault, of course; the author didn't claim to be writing the sort of program that the summary talked about. Though I was a bit disappointed that only the first few examples were in C. The article was almost entirely about assembly-language programs. So again, I was a bit disappointed, since I was hoping to learn something about making C programs smaller. This was done only in the first example, and it was made smaller by removing its call on write() so it didn't output anything at all. I already understood that I can make programs smaller by removing all functionality. ;-)
Blunt and brutal as it sounds, ... ... I've occasionally run across this reasoning told as a joke, shown it to friends whose business is supporting Windows, and told that it's no joke at all. The typical response is along the lines of: Hey, I've installed linux for a few customers. Each time, it only took me an hour or so, and that's all I got paid for. Then I never heard from them again until they wanted someone for another hour to do an install on a new machine. OTOH, with my Windows clients, I typically get paid for at least a full day to install anything, and then I get called back for half- or full-days whenever the system shoots itself in the foot. We'd be fools to advocate a system like linux when Windows produces two to three orders of magnitude more billable time for us. Of course, we all use linux and/or OS X at home, but that's not where the support business is.
As long as the suckers^Wclients continue to act like they do and fall for the "market leader" sales propaganda, this isn't going to change. It's been like this in the computing industry since at least the 1960s, so don't expect it to change during your lifetime.
There's nothing subjective about pretending that the Maya calendar ends in 2012, it is pure stupidity. You might as well imagine that our calendar predicts the end of the world in 9999.
Actually, it's even stupider than that. On the critical day in 2012, the Mayan calendar's high-order digit merely goes from 12 to 13 (in their base-20 numbering system). So it's more like predicting the end of the world on the first day of 2999, because the 2 changes to 3.
Of course, we did have a lot of silly predictions about the recent overflow from 1999 to 2000. But that was mostly based on a very credible problem with computer handling of dates, and it turned out that the message got out soon enough that a few billion dollars were spent paying people to hunt down some thousands of bugs and fix them beforehand. Even then, some Y2K bugs did pop up, and as predicted, they were mostly in business software written in COBOL. But I don't recall any actual predictions on the order of the end of the world; it was mostly just predicting that the computer field would be really embarrassed on the Big Day.
The real worry with the Mayan calendar is when the all three digits of the date reach 19, and they'll need another digit in their date. But that won't happen for quite a few millennia. (Or is it milleniums?) Of course, there will probably still be a lot of 20th-century COBOL code still in use by the business world then ...
There's a horizontal scrollbar right under the "Tell Me More" buttons.
Hmmm ... I still had the window showing that page, and it didn't have a scrollbar there. I tried to reply, and saw a FF behavior that has happened several times today: All the tabs in the slashdot window went into their "busy" mode with little spinning icons replacing the "/." icon in the tab, and FF displayed the "busy" pointer symbol. (This was on my Macbook.) After waiting a while, and verifying that FF was using 99% of the cpu, I finally killed it "with extreme prejudice" (kill -9).
When I restarted it, it first gave me its apology about something gone wrong with its attempt to restore my sessions. I hit the "restore" button, and all the previous windows were rebuilt. I found the showing the browserchoice.eu page - and it had a scrollbar where you said it did.
Very curious ... If I get this behavior again, maybe I'll let it report to headquarters. Usually I don't bother with that, since I figure that they have enough to do, but it does seem to be a failure state that has recurred, and a few FF updates haven't fixed it.