Question, how does the Java program get "JITed" without getting intepreted first? Does the VM use ESP to read the mind of whoever wrote the program?
This argument is so old and ridiculous. The only benefit of JIT is that it prevents having to reinterpret the same piece of code over and over if it's executing a loop or procedure multiple times. JIT just makes Java an efficient intepreter rather than a crappy one (which it used to be).
It just so happens that the majority of most programs are bits of code that get executed over and over again, often thousands or millions of times. So even if the first few passes over a bit of code are interpreted, once the JIT kicks in and compiles it, all future passes (quite often the vast majority of passes) are executed from compiled code. And since this compiled code was compiled with the precise details of the current architecture and memory, etc., under consideration, it follows that the code in general will run more efficiently than similar code that was statically compiled. In some situations, this increase in performance more than makes up for the initial loss of performance during the first few interpreted passes of the code.
At least this is all true in theory. In practice, well, it isn't so clear yet. But what is clear is that a JIT at least has this potential.
tomstdenis wrote: Name one thing you can do on a windows desktop that you can't [for technical reasons] do on a Linux powered one?
nharmon responded: Play most computer games released for personal computers?
tomstdenis replied: Technical reason.
I think the fact that most computer games released for personal computers are simply not available for Linux is a pretty good technical reason! You just don't want to admit that there do exist some reasons for running MS Windows over Linux.
If data integrity is that important, one should consider getting a silver or gold archive disc.
Easier said than done! Where does one find gold discs nowadays? The only two companies I know of that has produced them in the past, Kodak and Mitsui, have long since stopped producing them. The overwhelming majority of consumers cares way more about price than data integrity and longevity, so the market trend has been to produce cheaper and cheaper discs at the expense of data integrity. The few of us that care about data integrity and longevity are pretty much SOL.
The velocity of the comet is not relevant in the way you suggest. The only way in which the velocity of the comet is relevant is comparing it with the velocity of the probe in order to determine the impact force. The comet's velocity isn't going to help keep it together.
Somehow, I can't picture a guy whose clothes are still stained and wet, hasn't eaten a decent meal in a week, can't find his wife and kids, and no longer has a house to go back to, is going to give a shit that he can't use his favorite open-source browser.
This isn't about open-source browsers or favourite browsers. It's about unnecessary incompatibility. Picture this poor guy walking (through the water, if you want a melodramatic scene) to the nearest library so that he can take care of these things, only to have this FEMA web page come up that says "sorry, we don't support this browser". Perhaps the library is using Linux boxes with the Firefox browser. Okay, so he gives his friend a phone call and trudges several blocks to his friends house to try it there. His friend has a Mac. "Sorry, we don't support this browser". This person is being seriously inconvenienced! If there were a reason for this inconvenience, such as actual browser capability, then it would be understandable. But the whole point of this thread is that there's no reason for this inconvenience. All it does is make life just a little bit harder for those whose lives are hard enough already.
I say that the ultimate question of "why?" is inherently unanswerable because of the very nature of "why" questions. For every explanation of something, it is always possible to pose a further "why" question as to why it is the way it is. Always. It may be possible to reach a self-contained circular chain (e.g., x -> y -> z -> x), but then the next "why" question becomes "why does this circular chain exist?". "Just because" does not answer that question. Every answer that's discovered (or hypothosized) leads to a higher-order "why" question. You will never reach an answer for which a "why?" question makes no sense to ask. This isn't personal opinion. It's logical reasoning.
Unless God exists by Himself, without the need to be created.
If you're willing to admit that possibility, shouldn't you also be able to admit the possibility that a godless universe exists by itself, without the need to be created? As the parent poster indicated, at SOME point up the chain you must stop and concede that "it is because it is". Otherwise you're stuck with an infinite regression problem. Whether you place that point at God or at the physical universe itself is a matter of taste. But the way I see it, why place it at a level above the physical universe when there's no real evidence that such an extra level exists and when such an extra level doesn't actually help to explain things?
(Neither science nor religion will ever be able to answer the ultimate question of "why?". It's an inherently unanswerable question.)
Walk one meter forward, turn 90 degrees to your right, and run in a circle around your starting position. Don't bother trying to keep your watch up to date with the different timezones you'll be crossing.
Young describes Mercury as an "elusive planet," noting most people, astrologers included, have never seen it.
Surely the article meant astronomers. Since when have astrologers ever taken an interest in actually looking at the night sky (other than to determine, of course, what tomorrow's horiscope brings)?
My vote would go to the boobie trap from the movie Cube that consisted of a moving array of laser beams that sliced a person up likity-split. It was a particularly effective scene because the parallel array of beams only took a second or two to sweep the room, and was very quiet. At first, the audience (except for you, since I'm spoiling it for you - oops!) is wondering if anything really happened. The person is still standing there, apparently unharmed... until another second or two goes by and the sliced slabs of meat that used to be a person start sliding off each other due to gravity. Truly a scene (and a beam) to remember.
The rest of the movie was quite interesting as well, but being a low-budget Canadian artsy movie it isn't for everyone.
Fedore Core 3 comes with an application for juggling molecules. It's called "katomic". It actually allows one to assemble molecules from its constituent atoms. The miracles of modern science never cease to amaze me.
Why do we need two methods of "show me the hidden window" just because some of our windows are in firefox and some in the explorer? What do we gain again from tabbed browsing?
It's called a hierarchy, and it can be quite important. Let's change your situation around a bit, shall we? Let's say you wanted to switch from Word to Outlook. How would you do it without this hierarchy?
One, if a literal interpretation of the Bible is correct, what about all these fossils? Scientists have clear evidence of the evolutionary process throughout history via these fossils...where exactly did they come from if the planet is in fact only 6000-odd years old? I've asked creationists this question, and they've actually replied that they were placed here by God to test our faith.
The way I figure it, if God placed all placed all of those fossils in the ground for us to find, then it seems obvious that he wants us to believe in evolution (regardless as to whether or not it actually happened). We could easily ask of those who don't believe in evolution "why do you so readily ignore and disbelieve the evidence that God himself has placed there for us?"
In my current job I find myself looking up RFCs fairly frequently. I have found that typing the RFC number prefixed by "RFC" (e.g. "RFC2396") into Google and pressing "I'm feeling lucky" always brings me directly to the RFC (rather than a discussion about it or a reference to it). My bookmarks list is slowly shrinking and converging on just one entry: Google.
"How The Mind Works"
on
Mapping the Mind
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· Score: 2, Informative
I highly recommend the book "How The Mind Works" by Steven Pinker. It does an awesome job at explaining the workings of the human mind. He treats the mind as software that was written by evolution. Unlike the book "Mapping The Mind", it doesn't really get into the physical details of the brain at all. After you read the book I guarantee that you'll have a much larger appreciation for the amazing tasks that our mind performs. Truly remarkable book. It's the only non-fiction science book that I felt like reading cover-to-cover in one sitting, and the only non-fiction science book that I'm considering reading a second time.
I know this is intended at a joke, but I saw a research project at Southampton University about 5 years ago that allowed multi-gigabyte images to be viewed over the Internet. Each image was split into small tiles, and lower resolution tiles were made of each segment. The entire image could be viewed at low resolution, and the user could then zoom in to the full resolution on any given area.
You'll forgive me, but given that people have observed things that appear in every measurable way to be black holes, I want a hell of a lot more convincing evidence than that to reject their existence.
Where's your faith? Haven't you heard? Evidence means nothing, and believing evidence is a sign of weakness!
If you only show up as a 'blurry fleck,' how are you supposed to do something obscene?
Well, I was part of this arial photo, in which the stick figure near the centre of the photo was composed of several thousand people. This particular image isn't obscene in any way, but it very well could have been!
(Bonus points for those who can name the event that this was part of!)
My girlfriend's 17" Sony LCD monitor has a single dead pixel, and it's really frikkin' annoying. It's near the middle of the screen, and is always full red. It makes me really nervous about getting an LCD monitor of my own, because such a flaw would drive me mad very quickly.
It's too bad there's no simple way to manually break a few pixels (in a way that doesn't make it look like they were broken on purpose) in order to get the dead-pixel count above the threshold required for a warranty repair/replacement.... Is there?!?
The vi-style regular-expression substitution technique might help::-)
"If you spend time working writing applications that have to do pattern matches and/or replacements, you know about some of the intricacies of \(regular expressions\). For \(many people\) \1 can be an arcane hodgepodge of odd characters that somehow manage to do wonderful things, but \2 don't have enough time (or interest) to really understand how to code \1."
I think infinite bandwidth is more thatn a little misleading! but to take an excerpt from their marketing blurb "The first version of the specification for the technology was completed in October 2000 and the InfiniBand Trade Association is well on its way to establishing a new signaling rate specification beyond 100Gb/s"
100Gb/s? Then they're almost there! I'm sure infinity isn't much bigger than that.
Slashdot Mirror
It just so happens that the majority of most programs are bits of code that get executed over and over again, often thousands or millions of times. So even if the first few passes over a bit of code are interpreted, once the JIT kicks in and compiles it, all future passes (quite often the vast majority of passes) are executed from compiled code. And since this compiled code was compiled with the precise details of the current architecture and memory, etc., under consideration, it follows that the code in general will run more efficiently than similar code that was statically compiled. In some situations, this increase in performance more than makes up for the initial loss of performance during the first few interpreted passes of the code.
At least this is all true in theory. In practice, well, it isn't so clear yet. But what is clear is that a JIT at least has this potential.
nharmon responded: Play most computer games released for personal computers?
tomstdenis replied: Technical reason.
I think the fact that most computer games released for personal computers are simply not available for Linux is a pretty good technical reason! You just don't want to admit that there do exist some reasons for running MS Windows over Linux.
Easier said than done! Where does one find gold discs nowadays? The only two companies I know of that has produced them in the past, Kodak and Mitsui, have long since stopped producing them. The overwhelming majority of consumers cares way more about price than data integrity and longevity, so the market trend has been to produce cheaper and cheaper discs at the expense of data integrity. The few of us that care about data integrity and longevity are pretty much SOL.
Thank you! It's nice to see an actual real-life example of how MD5 hashes aren't as safe as once thought.
The velocity of the comet is not relevant in the way you suggest. The only way in which the velocity of the comet is relevant is comparing it with the velocity of the probe in order to determine the impact force. The comet's velocity isn't going to help keep it together.
This isn't about open-source browsers or favourite browsers. It's about unnecessary incompatibility. Picture this poor guy walking (through the water, if you want a melodramatic scene) to the nearest library so that he can take care of these things, only to have this FEMA web page come up that says "sorry, we don't support this browser". Perhaps the library is using Linux boxes with the Firefox browser. Okay, so he gives his friend a phone call and trudges several blocks to his friends house to try it there. His friend has a Mac. "Sorry, we don't support this browser". This person is being seriously inconvenienced! If there were a reason for this inconvenience, such as actual browser capability, then it would be understandable. But the whole point of this thread is that there's no reason for this inconvenience. All it does is make life just a little bit harder for those whose lives are hard enough already.
I say that the ultimate question of "why?" is inherently unanswerable because of the very nature of "why" questions. For every explanation of something, it is always possible to pose a further "why" question as to why it is the way it is. Always. It may be possible to reach a self-contained circular chain (e.g., x -> y -> z -> x), but then the next "why" question becomes "why does this circular chain exist?". "Just because" does not answer that question. Every answer that's discovered (or hypothosized) leads to a higher-order "why" question. You will never reach an answer for which a "why?" question makes no sense to ask. This isn't personal opinion. It's logical reasoning.
If you're willing to admit that possibility, shouldn't you also be able to admit the possibility that a godless universe exists by itself, without the need to be created? As the parent poster indicated, at SOME point up the chain you must stop and concede that "it is because it is". Otherwise you're stuck with an infinite regression problem. Whether you place that point at God or at the physical universe itself is a matter of taste. But the way I see it, why place it at a level above the physical universe when there's no real evidence that such an extra level exists and when such an extra level doesn't actually help to explain things?
(Neither science nor religion will ever be able to answer the ultimate question of "why?". It's an inherently unanswerable question.)
Walk one meter forward, turn 90 degrees to your right, and run in a circle around your starting position. Don't bother trying to keep your watch up to date with the different timezones you'll be crossing.
Surely the article meant astronomers. Since when have astrologers ever taken an interest in actually looking at the night sky (other than to determine, of course, what tomorrow's horiscope brings)?
We already have a death star right here in our own solar system. All I can say is, be careful when you're travelling in the vicinity of Saturn!
The rest of the movie was quite interesting as well, but being a low-budget Canadian artsy movie it isn't for everyone.
Fedore Core 3 comes with an application for juggling molecules. It's called "katomic". It actually allows one to assemble molecules from its constituent atoms. The miracles of modern science never cease to amaze me.
It's called a hierarchy, and it can be quite important. Let's change your situation around a bit, shall we? Let's say you wanted to switch from Word to Outlook. How would you do it without this hierarchy?
alt+tab Excel - no.
alt+tab Firefox - no.
alt+tab Firefox (tab 2) - no.
alt+tab Firefox (tab 3) - no!
alt+tab Firefox (tab 4) - NO!
alt+tab Firefox (tab 5) - NO!!!
alt+tab Outlook - yes, finally!
The way I figure it, if God placed all placed all of those fossils in the ground for us to find, then it seems obvious that he wants us to believe in evolution (regardless as to whether or not it actually happened). We could easily ask of those who don't believe in evolution "why do you so readily ignore and disbelieve the evidence that God himself has placed there for us?"
In my current job I find myself looking up RFCs fairly frequently. I have found that typing the RFC number prefixed by "RFC" (e.g. "RFC2396") into Google and pressing "I'm feeling lucky" always brings me directly to the RFC (rather than a discussion about it or a reference to it). My bookmarks list is slowly shrinking and converging on just one entry: Google.
I highly recommend the book "How The Mind Works" by Steven Pinker. It does an awesome job at explaining the workings of the human mind. He treats the mind as software that was written by evolution. Unlike the book "Mapping The Mind", it doesn't really get into the physical details of the brain at all. After you read the book I guarantee that you'll have a much larger appreciation for the amazing tasks that our mind performs. Truly remarkable book. It's the only non-fiction science book that I felt like reading cover-to-cover in one sitting, and the only non-fiction science book that I'm considering reading a second time.
You mean like mapquest.com or maps.google.com?
Where's your faith? Haven't you heard? Evidence means nothing, and believing evidence is a sign of weakness!
Actually, the James Webb Telescope will orbit the Sun-Earth L2 point.
Sure, here it is.
Well, I was part of this arial photo, in which the stick figure near the centre of the photo was composed of several thousand people. This particular image isn't obscene in any way, but it very well could have been!
(Bonus points for those who can name the event that this was part of!)
It's too bad there's no simple way to manually break a few pixels (in a way that doesn't make it look like they were broken on purpose) in order to get the dead-pixel count above the threshold required for a warranty repair/replacement. ... Is there?!?
The vi-style regular-expression substitution technique might help: :-)
"If you spend time working writing applications that have to do pattern matches and/or replacements, you know about some of the intricacies of \(regular expressions\). For \(many people\) \1 can be an arcane hodgepodge of odd characters that somehow manage to do wonderful things, but \2 don't have enough time (or interest) to really understand how to code \1."
100Gb/s? Then they're almost there! I'm sure infinity isn't much bigger than that.