> We will aim to enforce this at the kernel level, hence > the CC to Jamie S who leads our security team.
WTF? Why is that needed? To keep jr devs from accidentally re-enabling it? Or, in fine/. conspiratorial tradition, is the keylogging built into the kernel?!
So yes, operational weather forecasts and big well-funded projects that can afford to use it will continue to use Fortran and benefit from faster software.
I don't mean for this to be pick on LourensV day, but I have another small nit to pick. You're presuming operational weather forecasting is well funded? I don't think funding has anything to do with it. Often it's what the original author knew which chose the language. And have you seen what's been done to NOAA's budget over they last decade?? Well funded. LOL.
FORTRAN is used because it's easy to get your head around so you can focus on the science not the coding. Much in the same way as Python is meant to be, as a matter of fact.
How's that threading library in Python 2/3 doing? Still not able to actually make more than one thread and has to spawn new processes instead? Python is quite nice, and I welcome the improvements, but it still has a long way to go. Hopefully this a bit of funding will bring that a little closer to reality.
You're probably right, but you're also missing the point. Most scientists are not programmers who specialise in numerical methods and software optimisation.
Which is exactly why FORTRAN is an excellent choice for them instead of something else fast (close to assembler) like C/C++, and why so many of the top fluid dynamics models continue to use it. It is simple (perhaps a function of its age) and because of that it is simple to do things like break up the calculation for MPI or tell the compiler to "vectorize this" or "automatically make it multi-threaded" in a way which is still a long from maturity for other languages.
Can you guess which language MATLAB was originally written in? You know that funny row,column order on indexes? Any ideas on the history of that?
R is great an all, and is brilliant in its niche, but how's that RAM limitation thing going? It's not a solution for everything.
MATLAB is pretty good too, as is Octave and SciLab, and it has gotten a whole lot faster recently, but ever try much disk I/O or array resizing for something which couldn't be vectorized? Becomes slow as molasses.
If that still isn't good enough, they can either 1) choose a smaller data set and limit the scope of their investigations until things fit,
heh. I don't think you know these people.
2) buy or rent a (virtual) machine with more CPU and more memory,
Many problems are I/O limited and require real machines with high speed low latency network traffic. VMs just don't cut it for many parallelized tasks which need to pass messages quickly.
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but your post sounds a bit like you think you're pretty good on the old computers, but don't know the first thing about FORTRAN and are feeling a bit defensive about that, and attacking something out of ignorance.
> sunspot activity indicates we're in for some global cooling > which will counteract the obvious global warming our CO2 output is producing
and yet, we're just coming out of a sun spot minimum, and temperatures didn't cool at all. It may be that one is balancing the other right now. The thing to watch is what happens during the next sun spot maximum?
> then, in a decade or two when sunspot activity picks up, the > temperature and violence of the atmosphere will shoot back up, > and we'll be totally caught by surprise
FFT tells us it's an 11 year cycle. No need to wait a decade or two, just for the next big El Nino year when we aren't in a sun spot minimum.
Microsoft believes that working on its proposal can shed light on how to solve certain problems such as handling changes in network bandwidth or keeping cellular and Wi-Fi connections open in parallel to allow easy failover from one to the other.
... and then patent the method before someone else does...
I know I shouldn't post to to ultimate slashdot troll topic, but since you wondered the why..
I have absolutely no idea what the weather in Fahrenheit means other than doing some mental arithmetic.
It's actually amazingly simple, even without the 'double it and add 30' approximation from C to F:
F is just a normalized scale for the question of "how warm is it outside today?" given in a range from 0-100%. The historical reason is that 0 is the coldest ambient he ever found in winter for the lower calibration tick, and 100 the hottest ambient temperature he ever found in the european summer. Everything in between is just a graduated division of those two end points. If I recall the story well, he had some fun 6 months+ climbing mountains in the alps and travelling to the Med to get those two tick marks on his prototype thermomitor.
For the question of "how warm is it outside today?" relating it to the boiling point of a collection of water molecules, or relating it to heat death at 0K is of no use. For questions of chemistry those become very useful to tie to.
So use whatever works best in its own context, or more to the point, people shouldn't get all rabid about what is useful to other people find useful, especially if they don't know why it is useful to the other person. (a failure of imagination, see also trying to convince people why their religion is not the one true one; it's not always about logic or being useful in the context you can imagine looking at it from)
Just because you publish and given away a copy of a work does not mean you have released any claim to copyright on it. This is not trademark law where protect it or lose it applies.
> Climate models and predictions aren't just based on the > greenhouse effect, they assume complicated feedback > mechanisms for which there is much less evidence.
You don't need evidence if you have the laws of physics and chemistry on your side.
> What science is unclear about is what the cost/benefit tradeoff > of various warming scenarios and actions will be, and that is > more important than temperatures.
Money is not more important to the biology of life.
No matter how much you train with it it won't improve your hearing. But it might make you a more interesting person.
Actually to wrench this back on-topic, it might be a really good synthetic test input for your non-medial hearing helper android app, since it can save to.wav files.
Even better, this is far enough out there that it could help make your non-medical home hearing test app (I'd pay $0.99 for that) less of a target for selling a medical device without a license lobbying^W lawsuits.
Slashdot Mirror
> We will aim to enforce this at the kernel level, hence
> the CC to Jamie S who leads our security team.
WTF? Why is that needed? To keep jr devs from accidentally re-enabling it? Or, in fine /. conspiratorial tradition, is the keylogging built into the kernel?!
why the fuck do people post what their captcha was?
I believe it's called "treason".
I don't mean for this to be pick on LourensV day, but I have another small nit to pick. You're presuming operational weather forecasting is well funded? I don't think funding has anything to do with it. Often it's what the original author knew which chose the language.
And have you seen what's been done to NOAA's budget over they last decade?? Well funded. LOL.
FORTRAN is used because it's easy to get your head around so you can focus on the science not the coding. Much in the same way as Python is meant to be, as a matter of fact.
How's that threading library in Python 2/3 doing? Still not able to actually make more than one thread and has to spawn new processes instead? Python is quite nice, and I welcome the improvements, but it still has a long way to go. Hopefully this a bit of funding will bring that a little closer to reality.
Which is exactly why FORTRAN is an excellent choice for them instead of something else fast (close to assembler) like C/C++, and why so many of the top fluid dynamics models continue to use it. It is simple (perhaps a function of its age) and because of that it is simple to do things like break up the calculation for MPI or tell the compiler to "vectorize this" or "automatically make it multi-threaded" in a way which is still a long from maturity for other languages.
Can you guess which language MATLAB was originally written in? You know that funny row,column order on indexes? Any ideas on the history of that?
R is great an all, and is brilliant in its niche, but how's that RAM limitation thing going? It's not a solution for everything.
MATLAB is pretty good too, as is Octave and SciLab, and it has gotten a whole lot faster recently, but ever try much disk I/O or array resizing for something which couldn't be vectorized? Becomes slow as molasses.
heh. I don't think you know these people.
Many problems are I/O limited and require real machines with high speed low latency network traffic. VMs just don't cut it for many parallelized tasks which need to pass messages quickly.
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but your post sounds a bit like you think you're pretty good on the old computers, but don't know the first thing about FORTRAN and are feeling a bit defensive about that, and attacking something out of ignorance.
what we need now is an overzealous federal prosecutor looking to make an name for themselves and perhaps perform some act of societal penance.
won't anybody help?
> How cynical. I prefer money being spent this way as opposed to
> it going to taxes that gets spent on god knows what.
irony of the week award here -- we have a winner!
man, you people are all so negative an synical. it's like.. a bummer
You are.
> sunspot activity indicates we're in for some global cooling
> which will counteract the obvious global warming our CO2 output is producing
and yet, we're just coming out of a sun spot minimum, and temperatures didn't cool at all. It may be that one is balancing the other right now. The thing to watch is what happens during the next sun spot maximum?
> then, in a decade or two when sunspot activity picks up, the
> temperature and violence of the atmosphere will shoot back up,
> and we'll be totally caught by surprise
FFT tells us it's an 11 year cycle. No need to wait a decade or two, just for the next big El Nino year when we aren't in a sun spot minimum.
> A woman I work with had a baby and didn't even take a month
> off, she was back at work full time.
maybe she didn't want to risk losing her benefits?
just sayin'
with all due respect to the good professor, that's a pretty stupid comparison to make.
> (not to mention how much more it would cost)
you mean with or without the radiation disaster and evacuation?
... and yet it happened with Java. It happened with StarOffice.
It is possible, even if it's just the parts that can be and not the parts that can't be (like StarOffice's DB was)
Stop making excuses for a can't do attitude.
xcalib -a -i
"I've said it before and I'll say it again, Democracy simply doesn't work."
-- Kent Brockman, Channel 6 News
I know I shouldn't post to to ultimate slashdot troll topic, but since you wondered the why..
It's actually amazingly simple, even without the 'double it and add 30' approximation from C to F:
F is just a normalized scale for the question of "how warm is it outside today?" given in a range from 0-100%. The historical reason is that 0 is the coldest ambient he ever found in winter for the lower calibration tick, and 100 the hottest ambient temperature he ever found in the european summer. Everything in between is just a graduated division of those two end points.
If I recall the story well, he had some fun 6 months+ climbing mountains in the alps and travelling to the Med to get those two tick marks on his prototype thermomitor.
For the question of "how warm is it outside today?" relating it to the boiling point of a collection of water molecules, or relating it to heat death at 0K is of no use. For questions of chemistry those become very useful to tie to.
So use whatever works best in its own context, or more to the point, people shouldn't get all rabid about what is useful to other people find useful, especially if they don't know why it is useful to the other person. (a failure of imagination, see also trying to convince people why their religion is not the one true one; it's not always about logic or being useful in the context you can imagine looking at it from)
Just because you publish and given away a copy of a work does not mean you have released any claim to copyright on it. This is not trademark law where protect it or lose it applies.
Try reading some of the many fine primers available at the SFLC. http://www.softwarefreedom.org/
I thought the 40 char width was a nice touch. Keepin it old school.
> They are all Clean
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
> You don't need evidence if you have the laws of physics
> and chemistry on your side.
that should read "you don't need reams of evidence"
> Climate models and predictions aren't just based on the
> greenhouse effect, they assume complicated feedback
> mechanisms for which there is much less evidence.
You don't need evidence if you have the laws of physics and chemistry on your side.
> What science is unclear about is what the cost/benefit tradeoff
> of various warming scenarios and actions will be, and that is
> more important than temperatures.
Money is not more important to the biology of life.
Send an email to support@slashdot.com with the word "UNSUBSCRIBE" somewhere in the body.
AutoZen: http://www.linuxlabs.com/autozen.shtml
No matter how much you train with it it won't improve your hearing. But it might make you a more interesting person.
Actually to wrench this back on-topic, it might be a really good synthetic test input for your non-medial hearing helper android app, since it can save to .wav files.
Even better, this is far enough out there that it could help make your non-medical home hearing test app (I'd pay $0.99 for that) less of a target for selling a medical device without a license lobbying^W lawsuits.
> If yours was the way science operates we'd still operate out of caves.
consider if you will where we place our neutrino detectors.