Try doing that in LabVIEW. When the smallest property of those bundles change (i.e. more number of wires in the bundle, or a different data type for one wire), you have to change a number of things to make the things connecting to that bundle work again.
Sounds like someone has not learned you can index bundles by name, not just by position in the struct. You are treating them like an array but you can also treat them like hash's.
But agreed it's not as simple in some cases as writing code.
On the other hand if you were writing the syncronization of multiple threads by hand your head can explode but in labview you don't even think about it most of the time.
it's a terrible generla purpose programming language. it's a great data aquiristion language and RAD gui builder.
plus it's the only language I know where it's safe to let the enduser mess with the gui.
that makes it perfect for experimental laboratory environements.
Python has mad fortran all the mor valuable. the combination of fortran and python is a match made in heaven.
fortran is a wonderfully good algorithmic language but it is terrible at everything else. python is great at everything else, but slow as a dog.
one of fortrans strengths when combined with python is oddly enough it's simplicity and lack of sophistication. unlike c++ It compiles so fast that you can feasibly have python write fortran on the fly optimized for the algorithm and compile it, all during run time.
Fortran is good for non-computer scientist in part because it is quite hard for a typo to be a logic error. (e.g. = instead of ==) as a result it's comparatively easy to debug compared to C.
but it can't do all the fun memory management tricks, introspection, or objects that advanced languages do.
But with f2py you can push all of that into python and then just have it call short simple fortran routines for speed.
Your knowledge of Labview and Igor seems limited and out of date. Labview is far more sophisticated now that the primitive description you use. (for example, you can bundle all the wires into a single "object" wire) so there's no "endless" drawing of connections like you describe. It becomes more like drawing UML, except when you are done making the vi, it actually runs.
Igor is a very nice fast system. the command line syntax is a little archane but not terrible hard. But it has complete gui controls so you can use it before you memorize all the commands. It's not worse than GNU plot or matlab or perl data language or scipy or R in terms of having syntax oddities. it seems like all grpahics packages try to compromise between powerful short commands and completeness. (sort of the perl ethos out of neccessity to make it interactive rather than a structured program)
but it's not as good a general programming language as say Scipy. But it is more user freindly.
Labview can be frustrating because sometimes it is faster to write code. But here is one big advantage labview has over everything I have used for data acquisition. It's the only code I'm willing to modify during an experiment. it's not possible to make a syntax error, it is very hard to make big errors when simply moving or split, and you don't have to worry about the thread g wires in an existing program, and most importantly for DAQ since you dont' explicitly program the thread syncronization you cant screw it up with changes. So it's not too scarey to change a working program in the lab to do something a little extra right in the middle of some expensive instrument time.
Labview is a extremely crappy language for data analysis. It's designed for live instruments and real time work not off line anaylis.
right now I'm a big fan of scipy but it too has it's frustrations. it's wildley incomplete, undocumented, and they just changed all the 3d graphics to a much better but way too complicated system and the old programs can't be maintained with the new releases.
The programs he names: labview, igor, matlab, are not simply data analysis tools but also have hardware control modules. You can run your data acquisition from Igor, and matlab and of course Lab view.
things like R or octave or scipy dont' have control and acquisition modules that I know of.
That said, it seems to me that since scipy is in python that any python DAQ system would fit the bill of a scientific software system.
So the real question is, what DAQ's are available for python.
and the answer is going to be, that daq softwares tend to get written to drive specific hardware systems. e.g. labview makes a whole suite of DAQ boards. there's oscilloscopes and so forth.
As a scientist you don't want to get bogged down building a custom daq. SO the real bottom line is what commercial DAQs are open in design.
The only system I know that might possibly be in the open is the OASIS daq's developed for flow cytometry. these are mass produced and were developed at the National Labs. But I don't know how it is lic.
of course, one can always use an oscilloscope or DAQ made to be controlled by GPIB or simmilar common language. In that case it's pretty easy to write your own as long as you can find a suitable open source GPIB output driver.
Back when I was designing magnetic bubble memory we used to use monopole equations to represent the bubbles.
No violation of physics here because they were always paired. But the pairs in the media are well separated so it's a btter approximation to use two monopoles than a dipole.
That is to say, each bubble is really a cyllinder running from the bottom of the thin film to the top just like it is in vertical recording HD. You can treat the top as a monopole and the bottom as an opposite monopole and get a very good model of bubble-to-bubble interactions.
I'm also guess here. A decade ago, Los Alamos pioneered Accelerator Transmutation of Waste. There the idea was you bombard high level waste with a particle beam to, ironically, make it even higher level waste. The clever thing was this. The higher the radioactivity the shorter the half life.
The plan was to convert things with halflifes of 50,000 years to half lifes of hours. An insanely clever idea. But it never got much funding.
I'm guessing that this Fission/fussion system is probably playing the same game. Fusion makes for heavier nuclii, which if they are not stable, tend to be even short lived as a general trend.
so they seem to be empahsizing that people who dowload more buy more. This is BS.
The pool people can be divided into three piles: those who: 1) acquire a lot of music 2) acquire just a little 3) acquire none.
The first two piles of people contain pirates and non-pirates. The third pile is strictly non-pirates.
thus even if the first two piles of people were equally divided between pirates and non-pirates, then the third pile would severely dillute the non-pirates per capita purchase rates.
to this non-pirates buy 25% less statistic is gibberish signifying nothing.
If they are correct, what are the chances they are wrong (or right)?
They are precisely equal to: (1/1000)^N where N is number of indpendent studies agreeing with the conclusion and having no contraditory ones.
For example, the ideas that the earth is round or that man evolved from apes or that smoking kills you is therefore not very well established since there are a lot of contradictory works that reduce that.
Operating versus capital
on
Less Is Moore
·
· Score: 1
Proof that Moore's law is driven by economics as much as (or even more than) technological discovery/innovation?
You have a good point that this could be a test of your hypothesis. The purchase of a computer to a company or governement is frequently considered a "capital" purchase. Even though over time, the cost of computing is dominated by the operating cost of software, power, upgrades and IT.
However since capital is usually scare in organizations it tends to drive acqusitiion decisions. People buying things that they can't easily replace will tend to seek higher perfromance equipment.
But that may be about to change. things like cloud computing let people push their computer budgets into operating budgets. If they are lucky they might even become "overhead" contracts paid for bythe company rather than by the project.
So there is a huge incentive now to further comoditize computing to the point where people compete at the bottom of the barrel rather than at the high end.
Dell has sought to prevent that. For example, you can't buy those el cheapo dell's you see advertised in the back of the sunday paper glossy if you work in the govenrment or a large corporation.
But the netbooks now are cracking that facade since you can buy those on a gov't contract. dell will have to respond at some point.
it's a new economics. Will it drive moore's law too?
No it's just that in the rat's the puff they are not able to measure any memory loss with aging because they already lost it.
There's a huge difference between "memory" and "cognative skill". To operate at a rat, requires a lot of different skills. Huge chunks of their brain are devoted to 0) fleaing predators 1) not eating poison 2) navigating and memorizing paths by smell and touch, not sight or time.
it's entirely plausible that different drugs could shift the relative effort in these areas and improve their skills in other areas. FOr example, perhaps they are less perpetually afraid and thus better able to concentrate on memorization.
The two programs that drive me bonkers are mc and vi. Why? because I'm not savvy to their syntax and their is no obvious way to get out of them once you launch them. Control-c and control-d and control-z all seem to get captured by mc.
So many times I've accidentally typed mc when I meant something else!
Of course by now I've memorized that:q gets me out of vi.
I suppose you could give the same lament about emacs but one never accidentally types "emacs". Most unix command lines are 2 letters so one has the muscle memory habit of typing them. So it's very easy to type mc or (less frequently) vi accidentally.
It might be that the cooling element can withstand much higher temperatures than the chip itself can. Thus there is a benefit to decrease the temperature inside the chip, even if it that does make the other side of the cooling device much hotter, since the heat will not be doing any damage on that side.
Yes, absolutely, but that's why I said "to be more than transiently" effctive. You can only do that for so long before you are first limited by heat capacity, then conduction, and finally convection. Then you can't sustain the differential any longer. If we assume the heat capacity of the far side is roughly (in terms of being accessibly within a diffusion length) of the chip itself then the time it takes to heat it to saturation will be at most a handful of times longer than it took to heat the original chip. You can substitute what you like for "handful", say 2x or 10x, but since the original chip heats in seconds, where not talking much of anything except for transient imporvement.
at somepoint it has to expand the surface area or rate of convection.
The thing I don't full understand here is how a cooling device that is the same area as the chip itself accomplishes much. It moves the heat.
It seems to me that to be more than traniently effective you still need tansfer the heat to something with greater surface area. And if the attached heatsink fins have the same surface area as before, what has been accomplished?
Arguably, if you can make the fins hotter they will radiate faster, so that could be one strategy. Or one way to gain is if you could extract work (current) from the heat. then it really would give a net cool. Usually however peltier devices actually add their own heat loads in addition to the heat transfer. Don't know about these, but the second law puts a limit on how much heat you can convert to work.
So where is the gain coming from? moving more heat with less added heat? that won't bode well for future improvements. Is it hotter heat sinks. or is it somehow managing to increase the sufface area?
But taken as a whole, the mac was really a pioneering achievement,
And the IBM PC with MS-DOS settled it;)
More accurately, an IBM PC with windows 3 is what settled it. Up till then DOS was not really a full time gui. And prior to windows 3, windows was really just Dos is a dress.
Pioneers get the arrows, settlers get the land, is the operating phrase of most major technology companies. Apple did not invent the mp3 player, but they most definitely settled it. They did not invent postscript, but they definitely established it. And they did not invent the GUI but they settled it.
But taken as a whole, the mac was really a pioneering achievement, When you consider what was available at the time. Sure Xerox had their star systems, people used floppies and so on. But to put it all together in (relatively) cheap system that did not have a command line at all and sell it to consumers was a huge risk. And one that took a lot of innovations to make all work together. It had an original OS. It used software driven instruments to do everything (apple desktop bus. disk timing, character generators, etc...)
a huge leap and worthy of the boldness of that ad.
I'm not opposed to paying but the problem I have is the bundle.
I get comcast interent but I don't get comcast cable tv. So they CHARGE Me $19 extra. I Could almost get cable tv for close to "free" (just $10 more for both).
Likewise for my mom whose on a fixed income but needs the comforts of phone, TV and the uncomplicated reliability of non-dailup internet, I can't find a scheme that lets me use skype.
for example, if I want to use sky I still need to have a DSL connection which means paying for basic phone service from Qwest (even though with skype we don't need that).
I want her to have a basic pay-as-you go cell phone for safety in her car, but there's no point in paying for that when, give that I'm paying Qwest for a land line, I might was well get their bundled Wireless.
And so it goes.
How come I can't just get ala carte DSL. How come I can't just get cable internet.
that is without the extra fees for not buying the bundle.
James Coburn plays the psychiatrist in the movie "the president's analyst". Someone wants to know what the president is thinking so he has to run. When he finally realizes that all his telephone conversations are bugged he asks "who could bug every telephone call in the country".
Who could bug every e-mail conversation in the whitehouse?
Slashdot Mirror
cool. thanks. I wish someone would make some python wrappers for these!
Try doing that in LabVIEW. When the smallest property of those bundles change (i.e. more number of wires in the bundle, or a different data type for one wire), you have to change a number of things to make the things connecting to that bundle work again.
Sounds like someone has not learned you can index bundles by name, not just by position in the struct. You are treating them like an array but you can also treat them like hash's.
But agreed it's not as simple in some cases as writing code.
On the other hand if you were writing the syncronization of multiple threads by hand your head can explode but in labview you don't even think about it most of the time.
it's a terrible generla purpose programming language. it's a great data aquiristion language and RAD gui builder.
plus it's the only language I know where it's safe to let the enduser mess with the gui.
that makes it perfect for experimental laboratory environements.
Python has mad fortran all the mor valuable. the combination of fortran and python is a match made in heaven.
fortran is a wonderfully good algorithmic language but it is terrible at everything else. python is great at everything else, but slow as a dog.
one of fortrans strengths when combined with python is oddly enough it's simplicity and lack of sophistication. unlike c++ It compiles so fast that you can feasibly have python write fortran on the fly optimized for the algorithm and compile it, all during run time.
Fortran is good for non-computer scientist in part because it is quite hard for a typo to be a logic error. (e.g. = instead of ==) as a result it's comparatively easy to debug compared to C.
but it can't do all the fun memory management tricks, introspection, or objects that advanced languages do.
But with f2py you can push all of that into python and then just have it call short simple fortran routines for speed.
Your knowledge of Labview and Igor seems limited and out of date. Labview is far more sophisticated now that the primitive description you use. (for example, you can bundle all the wires into a single "object" wire) so there's no "endless" drawing of connections like you describe. It becomes more like drawing UML, except when you are done making the vi, it actually runs.
Igor is a very nice fast system. the command line syntax is a little archane but not terrible hard. But it has complete gui controls so you can use it before you memorize all the commands. It's not worse than GNU plot or matlab or perl data language or scipy or R in terms of having syntax oddities. it seems like all grpahics packages try to compromise between powerful short commands and completeness. (sort of the perl ethos out of neccessity to make it interactive rather than a structured program)
but it's not as good a general programming language as say Scipy. But it is more user freindly.
Labview can be frustrating because sometimes it is faster to write code. But here is one big advantage labview has over everything I have used for data acquisition. It's the only code I'm willing to modify during an experiment. it's not possible to make a syntax error, it is very hard to make big errors when simply moving or split, and you don't have to worry about the thread g wires in an existing program, and most importantly for DAQ since you dont' explicitly program the thread syncronization you cant screw it up with changes. So it's not too scarey to change a working program in the lab to do something a little extra right in the middle of some expensive instrument time.
Labview is a extremely crappy language for data analysis. It's designed for live instruments and real time work not off line anaylis.
right now I'm a big fan of scipy but it too has it's frustrations. it's wildley incomplete, undocumented, and they just changed all the 3d graphics to a much better but way too complicated system and the old programs can't be maintained with the new releases.
The programs he names:
labview, igor, matlab, are not simply data analysis tools but also have hardware control modules. You can run your data acquisition from Igor, and matlab and of course Lab view.
things like R or octave or scipy dont' have control and acquisition modules that I know of.
That said, it seems to me that since scipy is in python that any python DAQ system would fit the bill of a scientific software system.
So the real question is, what DAQ's are available for python.
and the answer is going to be, that daq softwares tend to get written to drive specific hardware systems. e.g. labview makes a whole suite of DAQ boards. there's oscilloscopes and so forth.
As a scientist you don't want to get bogged down building a custom daq. SO the real bottom line is what commercial DAQs are open in design.
The only system I know that might possibly be in the open is the OASIS daq's developed for flow cytometry. these are mass produced and were developed at the National Labs. But I don't know how it is lic.
of course, one can always use an oscilloscope or DAQ made to be controlled by GPIB or simmilar common language. In that case it's pretty easy to write your own as long as you can find a suitable open source GPIB output driver.
plutonium is toxic as hell and has a 24,000 year half life, for example.
Back when I was designing magnetic bubble memory we used to use monopole equations to represent the bubbles.
No violation of physics here because they were always paired. But the pairs in the media are well separated so it's a btter approximation to use two monopoles than a dipole.
That is to say, each bubble is really a cyllinder running from the bottom of the thin film to the top just like it is in vertical recording HD. You can treat the top as a monopole and the bottom as an opposite monopole and get a very good model of bubble-to-bubble interactions.
I'm also guess here. A decade ago, Los Alamos pioneered Accelerator Transmutation of Waste. There the idea was you bombard high level waste with a particle beam to, ironically, make it even higher level waste. The clever thing was this. The higher the radioactivity the shorter the half life.
The plan was to convert things with halflifes of 50,000 years to half lifes of hours. An insanely clever idea. But it never got much funding.
I'm guessing that this Fission/fussion system is probably playing the same game. Fusion makes for heavier nuclii, which if they are not stable, tend to be even short lived as a general trend.
so they seem to be empahsizing that people who dowload more buy more. This is BS.
The pool people can be divided into three piles:
those who:
1) acquire a lot of music
2) acquire just a little
3) acquire none.
The first two piles of people contain pirates and non-pirates. The third pile is strictly non-pirates.
thus even if the first two piles of people were equally divided between pirates and non-pirates, then the third pile would severely dillute the non-pirates per capita purchase rates.
to this non-pirates buy 25% less statistic is gibberish signifying nothing.
If they are correct, what are the chances they are wrong (or right)?
They are precisely equal to:
(1/1000)^N
where N is number of indpendent studies agreeing with the conclusion and having no contraditory ones.
For example, the ideas that the earth is round or that man evolved from apes or that smoking kills you is therefore not very well established since there are a lot of contradictory works that reduce that.
Proof that Moore's law is driven by economics as much as (or even more than) technological discovery/innovation?
You have a good point that this could be a test of your hypothesis. The purchase of a computer to a company or governement is frequently considered a "capital" purchase. Even though over time, the cost of computing is dominated by the operating cost of software, power, upgrades and IT.
However since capital is usually scare in organizations it tends to drive acqusitiion decisions. People buying things that they can't easily replace will tend to seek higher perfromance equipment.
But that may be about to change. things like cloud computing let people push their computer budgets into operating budgets. If they are lucky they might even become "overhead" contracts paid for bythe company rather than by the project.
So there is a huge incentive now to further comoditize computing to the point where people compete at the bottom of the barrel rather than at the high end.
Dell has sought to prevent that. For example, you can't buy those el cheapo dell's you see advertised in the back of the sunday paper glossy if you work in the govenrment or a large corporation.
But the netbooks now are cracking that facade since you can buy those on a gov't contract. dell will have to respond at some point.
it's a new economics. Will it drive moore's law too?
So does Chow Yung fat, do a little macbre dance to "clowns to the left, jokers to the right"? That would be interesting.
As I recall the black plague was caused by mice and rates delivering fleas to the predators.
Marijuana is memory enhancing? What?
No it's just that in the rat's the puff they are not able to measure any memory loss with aging because they already lost it.
There's a huge difference between "memory" and "cognative skill". To operate at a rat, requires a lot of different skills. Huge chunks of their brain are devoted to 0) fleaing predators 1) not eating poison 2) navigating and memorizing paths by smell and touch, not sight or time.
it's entirely plausible that different drugs could shift the relative effort in these areas and improve their skills in other areas. FOr example, perhaps they are less perpetually afraid and thus better able to concentrate on memorization.
So F10 for QUIT is too hard...
C'mon man...
Unless of course you are using ssh and the F keys don't work. C'mon man... think.
Why would I configure my F-keys in ssh just so that they will work in a program I never ever intend to use? that would be insane.
there is no program I use (deliberately) that requires F-keys.
The two programs that drive me bonkers are mc and vi. Why? because I'm not savvy to their syntax and their is no obvious way to get out of them once you launch them. Control-c and control-d and control-z all seem to get captured by mc.
So many times I've accidentally typed mc when I meant something else!
Of course by now I've memorized that :q gets me out of vi.
I suppose you could give the same lament about emacs but one never accidentally types "emacs". Most unix command lines are 2 letters so one has the muscle memory habit of typing them. So it's very easy to type mc or (less frequently) vi accidentally.
Right, but then there's nothing new here either since using peltiers to make the fins hotter is nothing new.
It might be that the cooling element can withstand much higher temperatures than the chip itself can. Thus there is a benefit to decrease the temperature inside the chip, even if it that does make the other side of the cooling device much hotter, since the heat will not be doing any damage on that side.
Yes, absolutely, but that's why I said "to be more than transiently" effctive. You can only do that for so long before you are first limited by heat capacity, then conduction, and finally convection. Then you can't sustain the differential any longer. If we assume the heat capacity of the far side is roughly (in terms of being accessibly within a diffusion length) of the chip itself then the time it takes to heat it to saturation will be at most a handful of times longer than it took to heat the original chip. You can substitute what you like for "handful", say 2x or 10x, but since the original chip heats in seconds, where not talking much of anything except for transient imporvement.
at somepoint it has to expand the surface area or rate of convection.
The thing I don't full understand here is how a cooling device that is the same area as the chip itself accomplishes much. It moves the heat.
It seems to me that to be more than traniently effective you still need tansfer the heat to something with greater surface area. And if the attached heatsink fins have the same surface area as before, what has been accomplished?
Arguably, if you can make the fins hotter they will radiate faster, so that could be one strategy. Or one way to gain is if you could extract work (current) from the heat. then it really would give a net cool. Usually however peltier devices actually add their own heat loads in addition to the heat transfer. Don't know about these, but the second law puts a limit on how much heat you can convert to work.
So where is the gain coming from? moving more heat with less added heat? that won't bode well for future improvements. Is it hotter heat sinks. or is it somehow managing to increase the sufface area?
But taken as a whole, the mac was really a pioneering achievement,
And the IBM PC with MS-DOS settled it ;)
More accurately, an IBM PC with windows 3 is what settled it. Up till then DOS was not really a full time gui. And prior to windows 3, windows was really just Dos is a dress.
Pioneers get the arrows, settlers get the land, is the operating phrase of most major technology companies. Apple did not invent the mp3 player, but they most definitely settled it. They did not invent postscript, but they definitely established it. And they did not invent the GUI but they settled it.
But taken as a whole, the mac was really a pioneering achievement, When you consider what was available at the time. Sure Xerox had their star systems, people used floppies and so on. But to put it all together in (relatively) cheap system that did not have a command line at all and sell it to consumers was a huge risk. And one that took a lot of innovations to make all work together. It had an original OS. It used software driven instruments to do everything (apple desktop bus. disk timing, character generators, etc...)
a huge leap and worthy of the boldness of that ad.
I'm not opposed to paying but the problem I have is the bundle.
I get comcast interent but I don't get comcast cable tv. So they CHARGE Me $19 extra. I Could almost get cable tv for close to "free" (just $10 more for both).
Likewise for my mom whose on a fixed income but needs the comforts of phone, TV and the uncomplicated reliability of non-dailup internet, I can't find a scheme that lets me use skype.
for example, if I want to use sky I still need to have a DSL connection which means paying for basic phone service from Qwest (even though with skype we don't need that).
I want her to have a basic pay-as-you go cell phone for safety in her car, but there's no point in paying for that when, give that I'm paying Qwest for a land line, I might was well get their bundled Wireless.
And so it goes.
How come I can't just get ala carte DSL. How come I can't just get cable internet.
that is without the extra fees for not buying the bundle.
anyone know how to just buy DSL without a phone?
James Coburn plays the psychiatrist in the movie "the president's analyst". Someone wants to know what the president is thinking so he has to run. When he finally realizes that all his telephone conversations are bugged he asks "who could bug every telephone call in the country".
Who could bug every e-mail conversation in the whitehouse?
is there an analog for this on the mac. I keep getting spikes in finder usage and long spinning beach balls when almost nothing is going on.