Well, maybe not... and plus, I think Tenchi is just as socially inept than Shinji anyways...
Though it's a painful thing to realize, Tenchi is surrounded by people at least few orders of magnitude more rational and balanced than the cast of Evangelion. And no, I don't include Eva and Angels.
You forgot the original goal of Microsoft -- to demonstrate to everyone in thew world that a dork extraordinaire Bill Gates is mentally superior to everyone else.
Just a goal to make the company richer does not require series of crusades against everything advanced in computing like what Microsoft did over most of its history.
However, MS should be told tha tFUD has no value at these events and that spewing FDU can only harm their efforts at the conference..
Not at all. Microsoft's participation in conferences usually is orchestrated in the form of propaganda. Hearing enemy's propaganda often and confidently pronounced does not make people believe it but gives them the impression that enemy is stronger. This is how it works, and there is no need to create more pressure on people that are most likely bombarded by Microsoft propaganda at work already.
...to invite a token neo-Nazi to every discussion about Jewish culture, a token Communist to every WTO conference, and Bush to every discussion about re-liberalization of US.
Face it, Open Source and Microsoft are enemies. They may be competitors, alternatives, etc. second, but their basic nature makes them enemies because they have absolutely incompatible goals. If there is anything to talk about between those two, it should be done in conferences specialized in the areas where both compete, and there both sides can be expected to throw bucketloads of shit at each other in front of unusupected audience of potential users. However the conference that is specifically about Open Source has absolutely no need to have a representative of the worst enemy of it.
As long as they have _some_ reliable feed from the equipment (and it definitely is somewhere after pre-amplifiers and mixers) all they need is to digitize and record it in real time (professional sound card + large hard drive or RAID), then just dump it to a CD (regular CD, if you forgot what it is, does not use any compression). If you are in a hurry, use CD-R.
This is a payback for currency system abuse
on
Giant Sucking Noise
·
· Score: 4, Informative
After WWII US dollar became the only currency left standing -- every other country that had an economy good enough to support international trade in its own currency was devastated, US remained ok (because it was separated from a war by the oceans, and please shut up about what others "owe" to the worst military among allies in WWII).
What followed was a horrible abuse of this "de-facto international currency" status, the (number of dollars abroad)/(amount of products traded abroad for dollars) was significantly lower than the (number of dollars in US)/(amount of products traded in US). In other words, everything was cheaper abroad and expensive in US, so US simply printed dollars (or, to be more precise, created them as Federal Reserve loans) and injected them in this system. The system worked through osmosis, it became easier to buy products abroad, sell them in US, pocket the profit and call yourself a rich company while producing nothing, and merely exploiting the slowness of trickling of dollars abroad by making it a bit faster.
Of course, due to this difference in prices, and efficiency of non-export parts of foreign countries' economies, US citizens could hear blood-curdling stories about low salaries abroad, when they were counted against US dollars, however it was nothing but a propaganda trick -- the prices difference was not taken into account, and the lack of reliable currency conversion rates for countries and products not involved in trade with US allowed for absolutely ridiculous numbers. Just look at GNP figures and think, how is it possible to have such a disparity, yet people don't starve everywhere abroad. So for US citizen there was no visible difference between indeed starving people in Cambodia and rather prosperous people of India.
However everything comes to an end. "Osmosis economy" can't run forever, and just buying stuff while racking up trade deficit becomes more dangerous, and other currencies (mostly Euro) issued beyond the US control are becoming used in international trade. However US companies can't expand the production within the country -- educational system and media prepared only consumers for them, there aren't enough people that can and are willing to produce something, they would rather accept sliding quality of life for themselves. So US proclaims itself to have "service economy" (aka doing each other's laundry) and "high technology" (aka having a lot of engineers). The problem is, "service economy" is big fat zero unless it supports production of something, and engineers in US meet just as much competition from foreign engineers as US workers did before, therefore all the outsourcing you can see.
So US as a whole became an arrogant, unskilled and incapable of supporting itself nation by abusing currency machinations -- something that often happened to individuals and now happened to the country as a whole. And here is the sucky part -- crook that lost his money does not harm millions of people that ARE capable of productive work yet happened to live in a country where the macroeconomic processes deny them this work.
If US wants to restore its currency system to something usable, sooner or later it must significantly devalue dollar, and possibly tie it to valuable commodities (say, gold) and stop the "osmosis" forever. If US wants to restore its production capability it must rebuild its educational system. And if US wants to get people capable of doing productive work now and not in 20 years, it must reduce barriers to immigration. All of those measures will without any doubt decrease "quality of life" -- at leasr temporarily, and at least for some parts of the population. However the only alternative to them is accelerating slide into poverty, and turning the country's economy into an equivalent of giant failed dotcom, like flooz.com x 1e6.
I'll bite. In your model, who decides what sicknesses get priority in the research queue?
Whoever it will be, he can't make worse decisions than biotech companies make now.
Do you believe that our federal cash flows, in the absence of massive increases in taxation, can support the level of parallel development currently taken on by the pharmaceutical industry we all so love to demonize?
Absolutely! It's not like sick people voluntarily choose to die when they can't afford medicine, so this or other way in a working system the demand is fixed and depends only on the population's susceptability to diseases. So it's a fixed tax on the society as a whole no matter how you look at it, all "health insurance" and other mechanisms do is redistributing this cost over the society to even it out -- in other words, making it an equivalent of a tax.
I don't think your model would work. No country in the world relies chiefly on public funding for medical research; the vast majority rely on public funds for basic research and massive private investment (accompanied by massive private returns) for applied research.
All biological research is fundamental, "applied" part necessary to develop drugs is mostly testing of proposed drugs, and government does most of that anyway.
This is why the founders included patents and copyright in the Constitution.
Can Americans stop constantly appealing to the authority of their "founding fathers"? If those people seen what their country turned into, they would not recognize any of their ideas in the curent form.
Sure. Because a company should spend $500M over ten years developing a drug to save millions of lives without assurance of recouping that cost through limited, government-granted monopolies in the market.
Simple solution -- things that have wide effect on public welfare should be funded by the government directly, not by forcing citizens to do it in a convoluted and humiliating ways through monopolies.
2. It *is* a part of "the language". The fact that printf is a function rather than an operator doesn't matter.
No, it is not. C compiler writer may never know how printf looks like, yet his compiler will be fully compliant. I think, latest "standard" for Unix from TOG declares that Unix must implement STREAMS, and include CDE (how convenient! TOG owns it!), what does not prevent me from spitting into their general direction and call FreeBSD and Linux flavors of Unix despite them having neither.
BTW, atrocity called Standard C++ Library has nothing to do with C++ language either, regardless of how many times ANSI committee declares it a part of the C++ standard.
1. stdlib != libc 2. It's still not a part of language 3. When I compile a program for embedded system, the second last thing I care about is what ANSI thinks about it (the last one is what personally Bill Gates thinks about it).
What is the standard C library except an API specification to an OS?
Standard C library is not a standard library of C language for Unix, it's a standard library of the Unix system that is used with C language (and every other language on Unix). Of course, for applications portability purpose it was ported to other systems, however it's still not really a part of the language design -- say, variable arguments list is a part of C design, but [v[s[n]]]printf strictly speaking isn't.
The article is an act of mental masturbation, and typically for such acts it takes one property of the unfortunate subject of such "research" and builds a whole theory based on it, regardless of its relevance and applicability.
Languages are supposed to be designed to allow a programmer to express the implementation of his design. The OS design is supposed to give the program implemented by a programmer means to perform various actions that the programs may need. Between those two things there are libraries that include implementations of various procedures that programs perform.
This clearly separates what is the environment common for all programs and carries no application programmer's ideas at all, what is designed specifically to be used by a programmer for his specific purpose, and what lies in between, and may be close to the specifics of application (say, SDL) or to be an interface to the OS (libc).
In this way VMs are OS-like components that run over the OS, and the fact that many VMs are tied to their languages does not mean that this is a good design. In my opinion the fact that there are ties between OS and language beyond straightforward "OS is written in a language" and "language operates within an OS" are what I call "noosphere pollution". It's true that many people when they develop a new OS or language want to make "The Grestest Program Ever" and spill their ideas into areas where they do not belong. This is at best misguided attempt to coerce others into their model of thinking, at worst an attempt to create a system so closed and convoluted inside that no one ever will be able to affect it, leaving the initial developer the only "true expert" in the area. And unless that developer has influence of Microsoft or at least Sun, usually the response is "Screw you, and your giant blob of code!" because it's not possible that developers will happen to agree with every single idea developed by a single person, or a small group of them, even if most of those ideas are sane (do you hear me, Pike?).
Good (or semi-good) operating systems are designed with a very clear separation between themselves and languages that are used. Nothing required Unix to be separate from C, yet if one looks at the system calls interface and libc he will see nothing that can tie the two together like siamese twins -- there is no builtin type in C that corresponds to any Unix internal structure -- no directories, files, sockets, inodes, etc, all those things are represented by language-neutral and OS-neutral integers, and only libc makes actual OS-specific primitives visible for the programmer. This is why Unix is used with many languages, and C is used with many OS, or without any OS at all.
This demonstrates the strength of the C and Unix designs, authors were confident enough that their ideas can stand on their own so they didn't add any hidden (and not-so-hidden) strings to trap the user in a messy OS-language symbiotic monster.
Later people started making giant libraries that LOOK like OS libraries but are tied to some environment that has nothing to do with OS, and tied to a language that they can't be separated from. This was a step back -- it wouldn't if those libraries were more modular, but one glance at monstrosity like MFC gives an idea how much Microsoft wanted "to rule them all". But no, that wasn't enough -- languages with ridiculously large and complex VMs, totally inaccessible from anything but themselves appeared, imitating the behavior of interpreted languages. Java, now C#, I am sure there will be more of this. But there is a difference -- perl has to have a complex interface inside because it is an interpreter and can't just call OS. Java chosen to have an interface deliberately different from anything else, and to build VM and libraries that implement the ideas of its creators and nothing else. And of course, control freak Microsoft didn't make anyone wait before it made its own version -- with some lip service about "multiple languages" that looks like "multiple languages as long as they have Microsoft object model rammed into the middle of them, or it will be a pure hell to use".
So IMO the "siamese twins" designs are inferior to clearly defined and well-designed interfaces, and are the realm of hacks and control freaks -- with some exceptions for interpreters and things like Forth that are specifically designed not to scale beyond systems where any full-blown OS is too much (Forth developers may take it as an insult, but I believe that it's a good thing that such a closed system stops scaling where its applicability ends).
And how does it help considering that the only usable general-purpose language is C?
Really, threads exist for one reason -- because OS developers write shitty schedulers, and because applications programmers don't understand their own data models and write shitty libraries. Most of things that "innovative" threads libraries do are various ways to implement serial communications between processes with asyncronous (or syncronous to asyncronous in your example) handling of events/messages. This is what pipes are for -- and yes, they work between threads, too. Just not in Windows.
No, the smarter ones in the richer nations will go to college, and learn how to make The Next Big Thing. Its the dumb ones that'll go to burger king.
There won't be "Next Big Thing", just like there never was. There were discoveries and achievements in engineering that were never known by anyone but a small group of people, and only then vultures were swarming all over them. But they never were "next" -- until the moment they were done no one took them seriously. Of course, punduits later claimed that they foreseen it before, but those were just lucky punduits that happened to be right as opposed to equally stupid punduits that proclaimed the imminent arrival of something else, only to be promptly forgotten. So there is no "Next Big Thing", there are only "Currently Popular Fads".
And it wouldn't be such a problem if vultures weren't getting better and better at reacting. It's like measuring the shoreline length and discovering that it's a fractal -- when all vultures are slow they more or less chase the overall progress and get some prey along the way. But some vultures get smarter and follow progress faster and more precisely. Then the whole crowd is running following all the little bays... then the "leaders" are getting even faster, run around every rock, into every cave... in the end the direction of the crowd is totally uniform and absolutely unrelated to the actual big picture, they are ready to support anything, and nothing at all, they are impatient and ultimately remain hungry because prey is nowhere close to the direction where they are flying. If only those new vultures abandoned the speed they would certainly find something, but they are more concerned about not allowing a faster competitor to get their piece before them.
And this is why they remain hungry.
Oh, BTW, biotech is not any better than dotcoms. Am I the lucky punduit here by any chance?
...that cryptographers and mathematicians still have to remind people the most basic things about security. It's especially sad that they have to remind those things to programmers.
I was in USSR since my birth in 1969 and until 1993 when I moved to US.
All I can say is -- we can have this discussion here because here TALK IS CHEAP, and nothing is supposed to depend on it. It's almost the same in Russia now. It may look less barbaric to have the government that never listens to anyone, and breeds just enough humanlike cattle to vote for itself than the government that restricts speech because it has a lot of educated humans that may listen to it.
But the problem is, I don't want to talk to the cattle. I want my arguments to be heard by people that may happen to be in control, and here it's not possible. People that disagree with government can just as well talk to each other in prison because no one anywhere close to power would listen to them.
even myrinet and mpi is glacial compared to the SGI numalink network and running code multithreaded
Don't mix shitty parallel computation libraries and actual performance. Multithreaded applications without MPI are, of course, faster than anything with MPI, however it says absolutely nothing about:
Multithreades vs. multiple processes.
Myrinet
Network programming
Clustering
NUMA implementations that reduce everything to SMP with a cache that gets flushed a lot
I was seven at that time, lived about one hundred miles from Chernobyl. On that April morning (around 5 o'clock) we woke up. The air was too thick, hot... The skies were rather strange reddish color...
And Communists were flying on giant dragons across those skies, spreading purple glow from their mouths...
I have lived about 95km from there at the time, and nothing of the kind happened. If it did, I (and you if you actually was there) would be dead.
The rest of the message id even more bullshit, so I won't even touch that.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, maybe not... and plus, I think Tenchi is just as socially inept than Shinji anyways...
Though it's a painful thing to realize, Tenchi is surrounded by people at least few orders of magnitude more rational and balanced than the cast of Evangelion. And no, I don't include Eva and Angels.
I mean, 1995 old. Before BSOD even was invented.
Damn oil companies! Who would think that they are going to eat Sony's lunch.
You forgot the original goal of Microsoft -- to demonstrate to everyone in thew world that a dork extraordinaire Bill Gates is mentally superior to everyone else.
Just a goal to make the company richer does not require series of crusades against everything advanced in computing like what Microsoft did over most of its history.
However, MS should be told tha tFUD has no value at these events and that spewing FDU can only harm their efforts at the conference..
Not at all. Microsoft's participation in conferences usually is orchestrated in the form of propaganda. Hearing enemy's propaganda often and confidently pronounced does not make people believe it but gives them the impression that enemy is stronger. This is how it works, and there is no need to create more pressure on people that are most likely bombarded by Microsoft propaganda at work already.
...to invite a token neo-Nazi to every discussion about Jewish culture, a token Communist to every WTO conference, and Bush to every discussion about re-liberalization of US.
Face it, Open Source and Microsoft are enemies. They may be competitors, alternatives, etc. second, but their basic nature makes them enemies because they have absolutely incompatible goals. If there is anything to talk about between those two, it should be done in conferences specialized in the areas where both compete, and there both sides can be expected to throw bucketloads of shit at each other in front of unusupected audience of potential users. However the conference that is specifically about Open Source has absolutely no need to have a representative of the worst enemy of it.
As long as they have _some_ reliable feed from the equipment (and it definitely is somewhere after pre-amplifiers and mixers) all they need is to digitize and record it in real time (professional sound card + large hard drive or RAID), then just dump it to a CD (regular CD, if you forgot what it is, does not use any compression). If you are in a hurry, use CD-R.
After WWII US dollar became the only currency left standing -- every other country that had an economy good enough to support international trade in its own currency was devastated, US remained ok (because it was separated from a war by the oceans, and please shut up about what others "owe" to the worst military among allies in WWII).
What followed was a horrible abuse of this "de-facto international currency" status, the (number of dollars abroad)/(amount of products traded abroad for dollars) was significantly lower than the (number of dollars in US)/(amount of products traded in US). In other words, everything was cheaper abroad and expensive in US, so US simply printed dollars (or, to be more precise, created them as Federal Reserve loans) and injected them in this system. The system worked through osmosis, it became easier to buy products abroad, sell them in US, pocket the profit and call yourself a rich company while producing nothing, and merely exploiting the slowness of trickling of dollars abroad by making it a bit faster.
Of course, due to this difference in prices, and efficiency of non-export parts of foreign countries' economies, US citizens could hear blood-curdling stories about low salaries abroad, when they were counted against US dollars, however it was nothing but a propaganda trick -- the prices difference was not taken into account, and the lack of reliable currency conversion rates for countries and products not involved in trade with US allowed for absolutely ridiculous numbers. Just look at GNP figures and think, how is it possible to have such a disparity, yet people don't starve everywhere abroad. So for US citizen there was no visible difference between indeed starving people in Cambodia and rather prosperous people of India.
However everything comes to an end. "Osmosis economy" can't run forever, and just buying stuff while racking up trade deficit becomes more dangerous, and other currencies (mostly Euro) issued beyond the US control are becoming used in international trade. However US companies can't expand the production within the country -- educational system and media prepared only consumers for them, there aren't enough people that can and are willing to produce something, they would rather accept sliding quality of life for themselves. So US proclaims itself to have "service economy" (aka doing each other's laundry) and "high technology" (aka having a lot of engineers). The problem is, "service economy" is big fat zero unless it supports production of something, and engineers in US meet just as much competition from foreign engineers as US workers did before, therefore all the outsourcing you can see.
So US as a whole became an arrogant, unskilled and incapable of supporting itself nation by abusing currency machinations -- something that often happened to individuals and now happened to the country as a whole. And here is the sucky part -- crook that lost his money does not harm millions of people that ARE capable of productive work yet happened to live in a country where the macroeconomic processes deny them this work.
If US wants to restore its currency system to something usable, sooner or later it must significantly devalue dollar, and possibly tie it to valuable commodities (say, gold) and stop the "osmosis" forever. If US wants to restore its production capability it must rebuild its educational system. And if US wants to get people capable of doing productive work now and not in 20 years, it must reduce barriers to immigration. All of those measures will without any doubt decrease "quality of life" -- at leasr temporarily, and at least for some parts of the population. However the only alternative to them is accelerating slide into poverty, and turning the country's economy into an equivalent of giant failed dotcom, like flooz.com x 1e6.
I'll bite. In your model, who decides what sicknesses get priority in the research queue?
Whoever it will be, he can't make worse decisions than biotech companies make now.
Do you believe that our federal cash flows, in the absence of massive increases in taxation, can support the level of parallel development currently taken on by the pharmaceutical industry we all so love to demonize?
Absolutely! It's not like sick people voluntarily choose to die when they can't afford medicine, so this or other way in a working system the demand is fixed and depends only on the population's susceptability to diseases. So it's a fixed tax on the society as a whole no matter how you look at it, all "health insurance" and other mechanisms do is redistributing this cost over the society to even it out -- in other words, making it an equivalent of a tax.
I don't think your model would work. No country in the world relies chiefly on public funding for medical research; the vast majority rely on public funds for basic research and massive private investment (accompanied by massive private returns) for applied research.
All biological research is fundamental, "applied" part necessary to develop drugs is mostly testing of proposed drugs, and government does most of that anyway.
This is why the founders included patents and copyright in the Constitution.
Can Americans stop constantly appealing to the authority of their "founding fathers"? If those people seen what their country turned into, they would not recognize any of their ideas in the curent form.
Sure. Because a company should spend $500M over ten years developing a drug to save millions of lives without assurance of recouping that cost through limited, government-granted monopolies in the market.
Simple solution -- things that have wide effect on public welfare should be funded by the government directly, not by forcing citizens to do it in a convoluted and humiliating ways through monopolies.
Riker? He is lecherous far beyond human limits, so he should be a "nonhuman creature", too.
2. It *is* a part of "the language". The fact that printf is a function rather than an operator doesn't matter.
No, it is not. C compiler writer may never know how printf looks like, yet his compiler will be fully compliant. I think, latest "standard" for Unix from TOG declares that Unix must implement STREAMS, and include CDE (how convenient! TOG owns it!), what does not prevent me from spitting into their general direction and call FreeBSD and Linux flavors of Unix despite them having neither.
BTW, atrocity called Standard C++ Library has nothing to do with C++ language either, regardless of how many times ANSI committee declares it a part of the C++ standard.
Once you've said PC, you've excluded those other electronic devices.
And once I have said my PC, I have excluded everything running Windows.
1. stdlib != libc
2. It's still not a part of language
3. When I compile a program for embedded system, the second last thing I care about is what ANSI thinks about it (the last one is what personally Bill Gates thinks about it).
Majority of electronic devices with microprocessors run no OS at all -- should we start assuming that PCs don't run it, too just because of that?
Most of Slashdot posters are mentally deficient, too, BTW.
What is the standard C library except an API specification to an OS?
Standard C library is not a standard library of C language for Unix, it's a standard library of the Unix system that is used with C language (and every other language on Unix). Of course, for applications portability purpose it was ported to other systems, however it's still not really a part of the language design -- say, variable arguments list is a part of C design, but [v[s[n]]]printf strictly speaking isn't.
The article is an act of mental masturbation, and typically for such acts it takes one property of the unfortunate subject of such "research" and builds a whole theory based on it, regardless of its relevance and applicability.
Languages are supposed to be designed to allow a programmer to express the implementation of his design. The OS design is supposed to give the program implemented by a programmer means to perform various actions that the programs may need. Between those two things there are libraries that include implementations of various procedures that programs perform.
This clearly separates what is the environment common for all programs and carries no application programmer's ideas at all, what is designed specifically to be used by a programmer for his specific purpose, and what lies in between, and may be close to the specifics of application (say, SDL) or to be an interface to the OS (libc).
In this way VMs are OS-like components that run over the OS, and the fact that many VMs are tied to their languages does not mean that this is a good design. In my opinion the fact that there are ties between OS and language beyond straightforward "OS is written in a language" and "language operates within an OS" are what I call "noosphere pollution". It's true that many people when they develop a new OS or language want to make "The Grestest Program Ever" and spill their ideas into areas where they do not belong. This is at best misguided attempt to coerce others into their model of thinking, at worst an attempt to create a system so closed and convoluted inside that no one ever will be able to affect it, leaving the initial developer the only "true expert" in the area. And unless that developer has influence of Microsoft or at least Sun, usually the response is "Screw you, and your giant blob of code!" because it's not possible that developers will happen to agree with every single idea developed by a single person, or a small group of them, even if most of those ideas are sane (do you hear me, Pike?).
Good (or semi-good) operating systems are designed with a very clear separation between themselves and languages that are used. Nothing required Unix to be separate from C, yet if one looks at the system calls interface and libc he will see nothing that can tie the two together like siamese twins -- there is no builtin type in C that corresponds to any Unix internal structure -- no directories, files, sockets, inodes, etc, all those things are represented by language-neutral and OS-neutral integers, and only libc makes actual OS-specific primitives visible for the programmer. This is why Unix is used with many languages, and C is used with many OS, or without any OS at all.
This demonstrates the strength of the C and Unix designs, authors were confident enough that their ideas can stand on their own so they didn't add any hidden (and not-so-hidden) strings to trap the user in a messy OS-language symbiotic monster.
Later people started making giant libraries that LOOK like OS libraries but are tied to some environment that has nothing to do with OS, and tied to a language that they can't be separated from. This was a step back -- it wouldn't if those libraries were more modular, but one glance at monstrosity like MFC gives an idea how much Microsoft wanted "to rule them all". But no, that wasn't enough -- languages with ridiculously large and complex VMs, totally inaccessible from anything but themselves appeared, imitating the behavior of interpreted languages. Java, now C#, I am sure there will be more of this. But there is a difference -- perl has to have a complex interface inside because it is an interpreter and can't just call OS. Java chosen to have an interface deliberately different from anything else, and to build VM and libraries that implement the ideas of its creators and nothing else. And of course, control freak Microsoft didn't make anyone wait before it made its own version -- with some lip service about "multiple languages" that looks like "multiple languages as long as they have Microsoft object model rammed into the middle of them, or it will be a pure hell to use".
So IMO the "siamese twins" designs are inferior to clearly defined and well-designed interfaces, and are the realm of hacks and control freaks -- with some exceptions for interpreters and things like Forth that are specifically designed not to scale beyond systems where any full-blown OS is too much (Forth developers may take it as an insult, but I believe that it's a good thing that such a closed system stops scaling where its applicability ends).
And how does it help considering that the only usable general-purpose language is C?
Really, threads exist for one reason -- because OS developers write shitty schedulers, and because applications programmers don't understand their own data models and write shitty libraries. Most of things that "innovative" threads libraries do are various ways to implement serial communications between processes with asyncronous (or syncronous to asyncronous in your example) handling of events/messages. This is what pipes are for -- and yes, they work between threads, too. Just not in Windows.
No, the smarter ones in the richer nations will go to college, and learn how to make The Next Big Thing. Its the dumb ones that'll go to burger king.
There won't be "Next Big Thing", just like there never was. There were discoveries and achievements in engineering that were never known by anyone but a small group of people, and only then vultures were swarming all over them. But they never were "next" -- until the moment they were done no one took them seriously. Of course, punduits later claimed that they foreseen it before, but those were just lucky punduits that happened to be right as opposed to equally stupid punduits that proclaimed the imminent arrival of something else, only to be promptly forgotten. So there is no "Next Big Thing", there are only "Currently Popular Fads".
And it wouldn't be such a problem if vultures weren't getting better and better at reacting. It's like measuring the shoreline length and discovering that it's a fractal -- when all vultures are slow they more or less chase the overall progress and get some prey along the way. But some vultures get smarter and follow progress faster and more precisely. Then the whole crowd is running following all the little bays... then the "leaders" are getting even faster, run around every rock, into every cave... in the end the direction of the crowd is totally uniform and absolutely unrelated to the actual big picture, they are ready to support anything, and nothing at all, they are impatient and ultimately remain hungry because prey is nowhere close to the direction where they are flying. If only those new vultures abandoned the speed they would certainly find something, but they are more concerned about not allowing a faster competitor to get their piece before them.
And this is why they remain hungry.
Oh, BTW, biotech is not any better than dotcoms. Am I the lucky punduit here by any chance?
...that cryptographers and mathematicians still have to remind people the most basic things about security. It's especially sad that they have to remind those things to programmers.
I was in USSR since my birth in 1969 and until 1993 when I moved to US.
All I can say is -- we can have this discussion here because here TALK IS CHEAP, and nothing is supposed to depend on it. It's almost the same in Russia now. It may look less barbaric to have the government that never listens to anyone, and breeds just enough humanlike cattle to vote for itself than the government that restricts speech because it has a lot of educated humans that may listen to it.
But the problem is, I don't want to talk to the cattle. I want my arguments to be heard by people that may happen to be in control, and here it's not possible. People that disagree with government can just as well talk to each other in prison because no one anywhere close to power would listen to them.
HP-UX is its name. HP-SUX is what its quality indicates ;-)
even myrinet and mpi is glacial compared to the SGI numalink network and running code multithreaded
Don't mix shitty parallel computation libraries and actual performance. Multithreaded applications without MPI are, of course, faster than anything with MPI, however it says absolutely nothing about:
"Definitely not a number"?
I was seven at that time, lived about one hundred miles from Chernobyl. On that April morning (around 5 o'clock) we woke up. The air was too thick, hot... The skies were rather strange reddish color...
And Communists were flying on giant dragons across those skies, spreading purple glow from their mouths...
I have lived about 95km from there at the time, and nothing of the kind happened. If it did, I (and you if you actually was there) would be dead.
The rest of the message id even more bullshit, so I won't even touch that.