I am a dedicated hater of the national type system, and all the people who believe its good for them live in a lie. I will never buy a product if its specifications are described using a national type system.
Re:...and the .NET Framework is language-neutral
on
Does C# Measure Up?
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· Score: 1
Even though there are many languages in.NET, it does not "shine" on diversity. All of the languages are limited to the CLR, removing many options that exists in truely compilable languages. Thus,.NET has a limited application area compared to all the other languages.
In my company, we spend several man years each year to optimize the speed of the algorithms in a complex 10000000 line application written in C++. Coding that with C#, we would be usually 10 times slower as the starting point of the optimization, and most likely could not compete against a competitors FORTRAN-version of the application.
.NET is nothing but Java-clone with patent-protection in the right hands.
I agree so completely with you on the issue of the fusion researcher. Luckily, the writer understood to list "science journalist" before that - perhaps it was not all irony. IMHO, Fusion research is just about the best job in science.
Another important job listed in there that will eventually lead to savings of billions per annum is the metric system advocate. However, I do not consider that a science job, it is a political job to comply with international agreements. It may take another 100 years to convert the US, but it will happen and the savings will be huge.
My wife has had a somewhat poor job in science, too. She worked for her Ph.D. by killing rats (by injecting cold salt water to their hearts and chopping their heads off), and sliced their brains to 400 um slices, inserted some rather toxic neuromodulators and measured the responses of the brain slices for long hours. Once her Ph.D. was getting completed, his boss left the university to work in the medical industry, and the research unit was finished -- and she never got her degree, just spent several years killing rats in rather obnoxious way and working with poisoneous chemicals.
ftp.exe on certain versions of Windows leaves the computer in a rather strange state if let the server to cut the connection due to a time out. The whole kernal TCP/IP stack gets rather confused and the whole net interface is down until you kill the ftp client. After that Windows gladly continues to respond to pings etc. It may be a rather confusing situation if you are not prepared to this kind of corewars. I am almost sure that things like these get intentionally designed into the Windows to make ftp etc. standard ways of communication a bit less common in the workplace.
Finland is only partially covered by glaciers, and polar bears and penguins are uncommon in the southern part of the country. The arctic region is called Lapland, the home of lap dancing. Natives travel by wolf or husky-dragged sleds, even though one guy persistently uses reindeers. Natives are on alert from the flesh-eating reindeer that hunt the penguins nesting in the arctic coconut palmtrees. Pohjanmaa ("the Northern Land", ridiculously flat plains of Northwestern Coast in the central Finland) are under water for three months at every spring when the damns broke, killing thounsands. Local houses are built on top of poles, and all the families still alive own boats.
Polar bears have excellent sight and sense of smell. They are also very curious and always trying to find more food. Surprisingly, there is no record of a polar bear attacking a living human in Finland in the last 35 weeks. Loud noise, firecrackers and fire are commonly used to scare polar bears away, and a mere $699 for an official ABP (anti-bear-pack) including a multitude of bear intervention measures. Polar bears can be differentiated from the gray and black bears by their subtle color differencies. The easiest to differenciate is the local polar bear variant, the finbear, from its blue striping on otherwise white fur (ed. most laps still think it is white stripes on blue, even though a Swedish scientist has genetically proven the striping, giving an indication of the stubborn nature of the Finns).
Tornados, blizzards, snowstorms, and earthquakes are more common in the spring (up to June or even early July), glacierquakes a bit less frequent at that time, but a couple feet snowfall in a few days is not uncommon even on other times of the year. Spring blizzards typically last for a week or so, during which time it is impossible to travel anywhere. Snowfall records for a single day is 3.14 metres, but about 1.41 meter is usual.
The English word finish is originated by James Cook meaning the end of the Finnish winter, which usually comes a bit late, but in some years well before the start of the next winter. All the Finns, including young children and hospitalized (ed. if there was a hospital in Finland) elderly, drink plenty of potato-vodka poisoned with ammonium chloride as an anti-freeze measure, surprisingly inaffecting their marvelous, most definatly world-class sled-driving skills. Helsinki, hosting the only school, shopping mall, and museum in Finland, is also the Capital city hosting the King of Finland, Urho. Only noblemen and their huskies can vote.
The phone system is based on mobile phones, since the native people steal any copper wiring and use it for snow shoes repair and jewelry for the huskies.
The national computer is running Microsoft Windows 3.11 for workgroups, making the country only of its kind in being a 100% Microsoft market.
Please consider, that there is absolutely no sunlight during the long winters. The natives navigate using ever-light bon-fires, which are now considered to be banned by the EU due to the planned cut in CO2 pollution - possibly leaving Finland completely dark during the winters.
Then again, what motivation would that employee have for exposing the cover up?
There is that strange thing somewhere in Europe called honesty. Not everyone wants or dares to become a part of a conspiracy, even one machined by one's emploeyer - even considering the good causes of Microsoft.
In accordance with an ISO Council decision, the decimal sign is a comma in all ISO documents. ISO 31-0:1992
The ISO 31-0 recommendation of using a space as a thousand marker is a good rule to follow in English.
It is the Americans with inches, acres, letter size paper, decimal point etc. who do not care about the international standards and agreed procedures -- not us Europeans. We did your homework a hundred years ago, just like you were supposed to. No sane person would call Europeans weird for just following the international agreements on decimal comma.
I want to remind, that without international standards and people following to them we will have more lost mars probes, and continual cost and risk increase in many, many industrial areas for unneccessary unit and format conversions.
Let's replace the destroyed water pumps with Coca-Cola machines at every street corner. Why not give a push for American companies rather than resort to this old-style water thing. For the service of most diverse Iraqians we would add a few Pepsi machines here and there.
First it was our research people a year ago hitting their heads to the 31-bit barrier in many many different problems. Some weirdo multiprocess kludges were born to overcome the limitations.
Now our legacy products are getting used with more and more data. These things are heavy enough to resist the re-engineering attempt to multiple processes.
Our product support people are getting more and more calls from customers who are using too much data. Both the customers and the support people seem to be surprised when they hear that the out of memory error is due to the limitations of 31-bit address spaces. 640k^H^H^H^H2 GB is not enough for everyone. We need our 64-bit address spaces.
Again, we can give a bit or two to Bill Gates as a sacrifice!
Re:The future of money is already in Finland
on
The Future of Money
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· Score: 1
Here in Finland we have been using debet and credit cards for the last 20 years. Short summary: it is much better than cash. However, I believe that the system would be even better if it would be a governmental replacement of money instead of just a small part of the private bank system, leading to marginal increase of costs because every bank has their own card system with same technology, but different costs for the end user.
Many of the debit cards have something called a virtual wallet intended for mini payments, but loading money just costs too much, 0.5 euros, 3 % or something, totally crippling this mechanism.
To be widely successful, a new system should have no additional costs when compared to cash. If it involves additional costs, people are not going to change. Many people are willing to change money (=a lot of positive associations) only for something that is better in every aspect.
It is nice to have the sharp features aligned with the pixel boundaries while still maintaining approximately the geometric relations. Perhaps a deformable match of the high frequency features with the pixel boundaries could be a solution for showing glyphs most accurately on pixelized displays?
Deformable matches are used in advanced medical applications between 3d volumetric images: CT, MRI, PET, etc.
You may run a simplified simulation of a simple insect (not including the vision system, though). A plot based on neural models may be a little thin.
The current best practise in computer game AI is cheating. Proper cheating keeps the game interesting until the end. Cheating will be the most important method for plot guidance and AI behavior even 30 years from now; it is computationally cheap, (almost) unnoticeable when done right, suits players with different skill levels, and keeps the game interesting to the very end.
You can use the 64-processor version for not only the simulation of, but also for the real-life purpose of melting iron. A double Itanium2 HP ZX6000 is heating up my office like no computer before. When I turned the ZX6000 on, my daughters' self-made art (taped on the wall) started flapping in the warm air. To me it looks like Itanium2 is server room hardware, at least until we get the 130 nm version.
The C++ code look stupid, so it is quite fair that the java code is stupid, too. Most code written looks stupid, especially code written by physicists (I have been rewriting and redesigned research code written by different world-class physicists for the last 10 years professionally). IMHO, the benchmark looks quite close the code that could be created by a physicists. They don't necessarily care a damn about the carbage collection. They just want the job done and write it down as simple and concreate as possible. Of course, real physicist don't natively write in java, they use matlab, fortran, and C++ (with code looking almost exactly like it was still fortran).
I ported the code to python without making any changes in its structure, even though it is most definately not the optimal python way. IMHO, it is the fairest way to compare the language. Keep the source as close to original as possible. No language or compiler specific optimizations anywhere. What comes to that break statement, it is a braindead idea and most definately not "optimal" code for a broken c++ compiler. But again, it could have been written by an expert physicist in real life.
This benchmark is valid for analyzing cpu speed (and the 1-level cache inside the cpu). However, it fails in measuring memory system speed which is probably the most important factor to modern scientific computations. I believe, that when larger memory operations are done, the speed advance of c++ becomes even greater.
P.S. I have written a chess program in C++, java and python, so I know the basics of optimization in each language.
Perhaps it is their way in protecting themselves against legal action from Microsoft. How can Microsoft publicly attack something called clit or cuntlits? That would hit the news and would be remembered for a long time.
RH8 CD has too many references to manuals
on
Red Hat Linux 8 Bible
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Earlier RedHats used to have nice README files in many places. Today, RH 8.0 usually has only a reference to the paper manual. This is really annoying. I hate paper and wish I could obtain the information directly on cd. To me it is obvious that RH is protecting their business (not for the benefit of the customer) by trying to sell the full set with the manual rather than having people to just copy their cd. This behavior is creating market for other unnecessary books, too.
It is a common assumption that 64-bit is for servers only. I am working on a quite widely used medical imaging & physics application that is suffering from the 2 GB (and even 4 GB) barrier at the client side. The CT/PET/MR image data with symbolic images, triangle meshes, dosimetric data, etc. are just too much for the 32-bit memory space. Our db servers are fine with 32-bit memory space, but the clients must be upgraded pretty soon now.
I am not aware of a widely-adopted international standard for interhuman communication. However, to comply with most used scientific and engineering practices, I have written my academic work (all the publications, both the M.Sc. and Ph.D. thesis) in English. In addition to that I write all the documents (at work) in English. I choose the variable names and write comments in English. I try to do my best - even though I realize that my English is not as good as it should be for these purposes. I, alone, could work more efficiently in Finnish, but to be compatible with the rest of the world, I chose to responsible and do operate in English. Being responsible is common practice here. Linus did not write the comments in the kernel in Finnish or Swedish, but chose to write them in English.
... interstates at 65 kph (60,000,000 mmph for the metric nazis who prefer mm so damned much).
I guess the nazis used the metric system. In my opinion that is irrelevant. Still, it is the current international standard. The use of kilometers is just fine, but the hour should be avoided as a unit of time. The correct international unit for car speed would be m/s.
I am not saying that you should immediately change the whole system, but a minimal wish would be to avoid the usage of inches and feet in the scientific and international language and reserve the local units for local use. Remember, there is the science.slashdot.org flooded with imperial units. The scientific world is already converted to the international standards and it is quite confusing to have imperial units here.
There is no future for imperial units in the internet. The internet is not a state of USA. Slashdot is an international forum.
Conversion to the sane unit system is a one time cost only, with millions of years of benefit after that. We used inches for some woodwork here in Finland some 20 years ago. Recently, we had two extra rooms built. I was glad to notice that even they had converted to metric. I asked about the conversion from the 50-year-old construction worker, and he told that it was not a big deal to say 50x100 instead of 2x4. If the conversion is easy for the old construction people, it should be manageable to the young neards at slashdot.
You claim that having a special unit system is about "learning to live together". It is quite the contrary. Adopting the common unit system is all what learning to live together is about. Having an own unit system is stupid and most arrogant.
You should also learn the basics of the SI system. cm is not a recommended unit, mm should be used instead. So, that's 431.8 mm.
If your boss hits you, you should consider calling your company hot line for abuse. You have really no reason to tolerate behavior like that.
IMHO, Real Neards do not use imperial units. We know that standards are good, and even if people can, with some cost, to adapt several unit systems, they will cause additional costs for computer systems and may even create new expensive failure modes.
It is most likely cheaper to build the reactor cover before the accident rather than waiting for one and then trying to figure out how to cover it. Also, the workers will receive far less radiation.
Also, in Soviet Ukraine (nor anywhere else in the right-minded world) people do not use feet to measure distance. Feet are strictly reserved for walking purposes.
Come on, you are supposed to be the information age intellects. Where is your nerd-pride? Pounds, feets and inches, oh dear!
Slashdot Mirror
Remember that an increase in longevity produces a significant drop in the density of teenagers.
215 MPH, that is 345 km/h, or 96 m/s.
60 MPH, that is 97 km/h, or 26 m/s.
I am a dedicated hater of the national type system, and all the people who believe its good for them live in a lie. I will never buy a product if its specifications are described using a national type system.
In my company, we spend several man years each year to optimize the speed of the algorithms in a complex 10000000 line application written in C++. Coding that with C#, we would be usually 10 times slower as the starting point of the optimization, and most likely could not compete against a competitors FORTRAN-version of the application.
Another important job listed in there that will eventually lead to savings of billions per annum is the metric system advocate. However, I do not consider that a science job, it is a political job to comply with international agreements. It may take another 100 years to convert the US, but it will happen and the savings will be huge.
My wife has had a somewhat poor job in science, too. She worked for her Ph.D. by killing rats (by injecting cold salt water to their hearts and chopping their heads off), and sliced their brains to 400 um slices, inserted some rather toxic neuromodulators and measured the responses of the brain slices for long hours. Once her Ph.D. was getting completed, his boss left the university to work in the medical industry, and the research unit was finished -- and she never got her degree, just spent several years killing rats in rather obnoxious way and working with poisoneous chemicals.
ftp.exe on certain versions of Windows leaves the computer in a rather strange state if let the server to cut the connection due to a time out. The whole kernal TCP/IP stack gets rather confused and the whole net interface is down until you kill the ftp client. After that Windows gladly continues to respond to pings etc. It may be a rather confusing situation if you are not prepared to this kind of corewars. I am almost sure that things like these get intentionally designed into the Windows to make ftp etc. standard ways of communication a bit less common in the workplace.
Finland is only partially covered by glaciers, and polar bears and penguins are uncommon in the southern part of the country. The arctic region is called Lapland, the home of lap dancing. Natives travel by wolf or husky-dragged sleds, even though one guy persistently uses reindeers. Natives are on alert from the flesh-eating reindeer that hunt the penguins nesting in the arctic coconut palmtrees. Pohjanmaa ("the Northern Land", ridiculously flat plains of Northwestern Coast in the central Finland) are under water for three months at every spring when the damns broke, killing thounsands. Local houses are built on top of poles, and all the families still alive own boats.
Polar bears have excellent sight and sense of smell. They are also very curious and always trying to find more food. Surprisingly, there is no record of a polar bear attacking a living human in Finland in the last 35 weeks. Loud noise, firecrackers and fire are commonly used to scare polar bears away, and a mere $699 for an official ABP (anti-bear-pack) including a multitude of bear intervention measures. Polar bears can be differentiated from the gray and black bears by their subtle color differencies. The easiest to differenciate is the local polar bear variant, the finbear, from its blue striping on otherwise white fur (ed. most laps still think it is white stripes on blue, even though a Swedish scientist has genetically proven the striping, giving an indication of the stubborn nature of the Finns).
Tornados, blizzards, snowstorms, and earthquakes are more common in the spring (up to June or even early July), glacierquakes a bit less frequent at that time, but a couple feet snowfall in a few days is not uncommon even on other times of the year. Spring blizzards typically last for a week or so, during which time it is impossible to travel anywhere. Snowfall records for a single day is 3.14 metres, but about 1.41 meter is usual.
The English word finish is originated by James Cook meaning the end of the Finnish winter, which usually comes a bit late, but in some years well before the start of the next winter. All the Finns, including young children and hospitalized (ed. if there was a hospital in Finland) elderly, drink plenty of potato-vodka poisoned with ammonium chloride as an anti-freeze measure, surprisingly inaffecting their marvelous, most definatly world-class sled-driving skills. Helsinki, hosting the only school, shopping mall, and museum in Finland, is also the Capital city hosting the King of Finland, Urho. Only noblemen and their huskies can vote.
The phone system is based on mobile phones, since the native people steal any copper wiring and use it for snow shoes repair and jewelry for the huskies. The national computer is running Microsoft Windows 3.11 for workgroups, making the country only of its kind in being a 100% Microsoft market.
Please consider, that there is absolutely no sunlight during the long winters. The natives navigate using ever-light bon-fires, which are now considered to be banned by the EU due to the planned cut in CO2 pollution - possibly leaving Finland completely dark during the winters.
There is that strange thing somewhere in Europe called honesty. Not everyone wants or dares to become a part of a conspiracy, even one machined by one's emploeyer - even considering the good causes of Microsoft.
In accordance with an ISO Council decision, the decimal sign is a comma in all ISO documents. ISO 31-0:1992
The ISO 31-0 recommendation of using a space as a thousand marker is a good rule to follow in English.
It is the Americans with inches, acres, letter size paper, decimal point etc. who do not care about the international standards and agreed procedures -- not us Europeans. We did your homework a hundred years ago, just like you were supposed to. No sane person would call Europeans weird for just following the international agreements on decimal comma. I want to remind, that without international standards and people following to them we will have more lost mars probes, and continual cost and risk increase in many, many industrial areas for unneccessary unit and format conversions.
How much is that "Gram" thing in inches, anyway?
Let's replace the destroyed water pumps with Coca-Cola machines at every street corner. Why not give a push for American companies rather than resort to this old-style water thing. For the service of most diverse Iraqians we would add a few Pepsi machines here and there.
Now our legacy products are getting used with more and more data. These things are heavy enough to resist the re-engineering attempt to multiple processes.
Our product support people are getting more and more calls from customers who are using too much data. Both the customers and the support people seem to be surprised when they hear that the out of memory error is due to the limitations of 31-bit address spaces. 640k^H^H^H^H2 GB is not enough for everyone. We need our 64-bit address spaces.
Again, we can give a bit or two to Bill Gates as a sacrifice!
Many of the debit cards have something called a virtual wallet intended for mini payments, but loading money just costs too much, 0.5 euros, 3 % or something, totally crippling this mechanism.
To be widely successful, a new system should have no additional costs when compared to cash. If it involves additional costs, people are not going to change. Many people are willing to change money (=a lot of positive associations) only for something that is better in every aspect.
Deformable matches are used in advanced medical applications between 3d volumetric images: CT, MRI, PET, etc.
The current best practise in computer game AI is cheating. Proper cheating keeps the game interesting until the end. Cheating will be the most important method for plot guidance and AI behavior even 30 years from now; it is computationally cheap, (almost) unnoticeable when done right, suits players with different skill levels, and keeps the game interesting to the very end.
Wap is quite useful for loading the midlets (mobile java applications) to the phone. Other than that, it is still pretty much useless for now.
You can use the 64-processor version for not only the simulation of, but also for the real-life purpose of melting iron. A double Itanium2 HP ZX6000 is heating up my office like no computer before. When I turned the ZX6000 on, my daughters' self-made art (taped on the wall) started flapping in the warm air. To me it looks like Itanium2 is server room hardware, at least until we get the 130 nm version.
I ported the code to python without making any changes in its structure, even though it is most definately not the optimal python way. IMHO, it is the fairest way to compare the language. Keep the source as close to original as possible. No language or compiler specific optimizations anywhere. What comes to that break statement, it is a braindead idea and most definately not "optimal" code for a broken c++ compiler. But again, it could have been written by an expert physicist in real life.
This benchmark is valid for analyzing cpu speed (and the 1-level cache inside the cpu). However, it fails in measuring memory system speed which is probably the most important factor to modern scientific computations. I believe, that when larger memory operations are done, the speed advance of c++ becomes even greater.
P.S. I have written a chess program in C++, java and python, so I know the basics of optimization in each language.
time python -O almabench.py user: 22m19.354s
gcc -ffast-math -O3 almabench.cpp -lm time ./a.out
user: 0m50.348s
C++ is only 27 times faster than Python for planetary simulations.
Almabench.py is my own conversion from the cpp source. I will send it to the author for possible addition to the benchmark.
Perhaps it is their way in protecting themselves against legal action from Microsoft. How can Microsoft publicly attack something called clit or cuntlits? That would hit the news and would be remembered for a long time.
Earlier RedHats used to have nice README files in many places. Today, RH 8.0 usually has only a reference to the paper manual. This is really annoying. I hate paper and wish I could obtain the information directly on cd. To me it is obvious that RH is protecting their business (not for the benefit of the customer) by trying to sell the full set with the manual rather than having people to just copy their cd. This behavior is creating market for other unnecessary books, too.
It is a common assumption that 64-bit is for servers only. I am working on a quite widely used medical imaging & physics application that is suffering from the 2 GB (and even 4 GB) barrier at the client side. The CT/PET/MR image data with symbolic images, triangle meshes, dosimetric data, etc. are just too much for the 32-bit memory space. Our db servers are fine with 32-bit memory space, but the clients must be upgraded pretty soon now.
I am not aware of a widely-adopted international standard for interhuman communication. However, to comply with most used scientific and engineering practices, I have written my academic work (all the publications, both the M.Sc. and Ph.D. thesis) in English. In addition to that I write all the documents (at work) in English. I choose the variable names and write comments in English. I try to do my best - even though I realize that my English is not as good as it should be for these purposes. I, alone, could work more efficiently in Finnish, but to be compatible with the rest of the world, I chose to responsible and do operate in English. Being responsible is common practice here. Linus did not write the comments in the kernel in Finnish or Swedish, but chose to write them in English.
I guess the nazis used the metric system. In my opinion that is irrelevant. Still, it is the current international standard. The use of kilometers is just fine, but the hour should be avoided as a unit of time. The correct international unit for car speed would be m/s.
I am not saying that you should immediately change the whole system, but a minimal wish would be to avoid the usage of inches and feet in the scientific and international language and reserve the local units for local use. Remember, there is the science.slashdot.org flooded with imperial units. The scientific world is already converted to the international standards and it is quite confusing to have imperial units here.
There is no future for imperial units in the internet. The internet is not a state of USA. Slashdot is an international forum.
You claim that having a special unit system is about "learning to live together". It is quite the contrary. Adopting the common unit system is all what learning to live together is about. Having an own unit system is stupid and most arrogant.
You should also learn the basics of the SI system. cm is not a recommended unit, mm should be used instead. So, that's 431.8 mm.
If your boss hits you, you should consider calling your company hot line for abuse. You have really no reason to tolerate behavior like that.
IMHO, Real Neards do not use imperial units. We know that standards are good, and even if people can, with some cost, to adapt several unit systems, they will cause additional costs for computer systems and may even create new expensive failure modes.
Also, in Soviet Ukraine (nor anywhere else in the right-minded world) people do not use feet to measure distance. Feet are strictly reserved for walking purposes.
Come on, you are supposed to be the information age intellects. Where is your nerd-pride? Pounds, feets and inches, oh dear!
Imperial units must die!