The rate of the manufacturer switch to multicore CPUs has exceeded my expectations and really does say something about the seemingly endless advance of the CPU since its invention.
There have been many "the end is near" predictions over the decades, and none have come true. However, when the manufacturers start turning out dual and now quad core commodity parts, you really have to assume that a reasonably solid wall has been hit for once.
Though I have faith there are still depths in silicon to be plumbed, they obviously aren't close enough to fruition to be included on a manufacturers near-term roadmap.
As cool as it may be, parallelism has its limitations and is not the catch-all solution. There simply are some algorithms which do not lend themselves to it, though you could argue that alternative parallel friendly choices may always exist. What effect this parallelism pressure might have on solving problems, or choosing problems to solve, is something worth considering.
Even so, lets hope developers have some prescience about solving (or at least addressing) the problems inherent with concurrency and parallelism. I am already growing tired of listening to game developers working on new titles sidestep the issue and I've experienced some problems with older games which simply can't cope with two cores. Get writting those APIs.;)
The pluralization of an acronym (a lazy man's construct) is purely based on common convention, and the use of an apostrophe is optional. After all, you've just dropped the word in favor of its leading letter, so why concern yourself with the trailing letter which could arguably be implied by context and included in the drop?
If you're frought with concern over using the correct plural form, just use the actual word instead or rewrite the sentence to not require a plural subject.
It would please me greatly to see the end of that naming system. Adult Disney fans, particularly the devout ones, should be rounded up a la Douglas Adams and sent on an important interstellar mission.
I watched the Challenger launch with passive disinterest in the library of my junior highschool.
The librarian had rolled out one of the ubiquitous "TV + giant VCR" stands and parked it in the middle of the reading area. For a librarian that typically insisted on a completely quiet room, this was unusual. I suppose the novelty of the teacher going into space prompted her decision.
Anyway, that unusual situation was enough for me to watch the launch, motivated by the taboo feeling of watching TV in the otherwise serenely quiet library and being a bit of a space nut. Despite that and to corroborate the claim in the article, I was probably one of only a few people actually paying attention to it, as most other students were taking the situation as a license to talk to eachother.
I clearly remember watching it desintergate, fanning out into a cloud -- and my mind not being able to fully comprehend what was happening. I might have even vocalized, but I can only remember the visuals. It seemed to take forever for other people to catch on to what had happened.
I don't follow the research, but I fully expected this 3D model would be the product of xray crystallography, where we could expect a much higher resolution than that of tomography; down to the sub Angstrom level when you're lucky (very unlikely with virues though).
The reason was, as I am aware of the difficulties of collecting useful xray diffraction data on large assemblies (even when they're broken down into constituent parts), and an awareness of the great deal of funding channeled into HIV research, I really expected they would have collected tomographic data long ago.
As this is a trace archive, it stores not just the DNA sequence (ACGT) but also the signal data produced by the machines used in these experiments, which is used to determine the DNA sequence (or basecall).
The signal data is composed of peaks and troughs across 4 channels, corresponding to the 4 base types. A peak in a channel corresponds to a base of that type passing in front of the detector. In your typical sampling configuration, a peak is made up of about 12 data pts.
Now, since each sampled point in the signal is stored as a 4 byte int and the base for that peak is stored as a 1 byte char, then you've got basically a 192:1 ratio of techincally superfluous signal data to actual DNA sequence.
Since there are yet other peices of information in the file, this ratio is actually larger.
Of course, there is a good reason for keeping trace data rather than just the DNA sequences, the notion being that you have more information with which to validate the integrity of what you've done. There have been cases where scientific databases have had their data integrity damaged over time by low quality (ie. mistakes) submissions.
In this case, they're retain the wrong file type, as it doesn't store the original unfiltered data signal, only a heavily filtered and manipulated one. Most modern basecallers start from the original unfiltered data to gain more advantage through better processing, you cannot do this with the file type they are retaining.
Hang on hang on, you're detailing how to find a gene in a genome by direct experiment (something you do when that's all that you've got to work with), when this article is talking about genomic databases and consequently bioinformatics should be used to greater extent.
Rather than go through the entire process you outline, one could avoid a great deal of the wet work but sequencing the protein and then jumping into computer space; searching the genome database for hits.
This assumes you're organism of study has been sequenced, but that isn't uncommon for a number of reasons.
You're an observer looking across a field covered in a fog of a certain turbidity. Now, I disperse a spherical cloud of smoke at some distance from you in that field.
Assuming similar colour and only slightly different turbidity, then you're most helpful factor in noticing the cloud is seeing the edges delineating it. If the cloud covers a very wide field of view, you'll tend to just look through it, unregistered. A combination of low contrast and minimal local variation in structure (edges).
Dungeon Master came out on both the Atari and Amiga simultaneously.This is one game that really gets ignored in the "history lessons" websites produce.
Back then I made it a mission to play every CRPG that was released on the Amiga, and I did so up to and including Eye of the Beholder. Then suddenly became totally bored with the genre, though I was funny to see PC owners getting excited over these "new" 3D RPGs in the 90s.
Probably the most fun I had playing a CPRG was when I played BloodWytch (Amiga) with a friend. In this game, two people could play two separate parties simultaneously. Ganging up against or ambushing monsters was great fun, and we might just have had some of the earliest loot arguments known to rpg gaming.
Dungeon Master came out on both the Atari and Amiga simultaneously. This is one game that really gets ignored in the "history lessons" websites produce.
Back then I made it a mission to play every CRPG that was released on the Amiga, and I did so up to and including Eye of the Beholder. Then suddenly became totally bored with the genre, though I was funny to see PC owners getting excited over these "new" 3D RPGs in the 90s.
Probably the most fun I had playing a CPRG was when I played BloodWytch (Amiga) with a friend. In this game, two people could play two separate parties simultaneously. Ganging up against or ambushing monsters was great fun, and we might just have had some of the earliest loot arguments known to rpg gaming.
The 2600 was regarded as the economy system after only a few years, once competing consoles like the Intellivision and Colecovision were released. Utlimately, it proved to be the better stayer though.
By the time the original Nintendo was released, the 2600 was pretty old in the tooth. I think the largest motivation was that kids wanted something new, with new game franchises, and better graphics.
Heck, speaking as someone that once gave themselves very painful blisters on the palm from Decathalon and then continued to play, resulting in torn blisters, the 2600 always had the worst graphics, but I considered it to have solid games, lots of choice and a good controller. So the idea that people left the console because it had bad games, is incorrect from my experience. Unless bad is functioning as a synonym for old.
...but rather that he had (jokingly) talked about killing another participant.
Re-read the article. He made the joke _after_ both interventions by security, not before. Linear time would suggest they had no bearing on UN security's actions.
Mixins are a good example of AOP doing something powerful. AOP is a particularly good way of augmenting the functionality of objects without actually having to make those objects aware of that functionality by explicitly inheriting an interface.
You can find a good example using a Lockable interface -- to make an y object temporarily immutable -- in the Spring reference documentation.
Few if any competent companies would expect that they can modify the source willy nilly and then expect direct support on what _they_ have done from the distribution vendor. I mean, if you have an understanding of the process of software development and have spent 5 minutes reading about the Open Source movement, then you'll understand that it is a completely impractical, if not irrational, way of working.
When has this approach ever been promoted by the Open Source community? This sounds like only something a PHB could arrive at, following a methodology of gleaning an understanding of OS while walking by the cubicle farm and overhearing casual conversations.
Seriously, to me it seems like Microsoft sat around a table brainstorming for potential negative aspects of OS that they could market to suitably gullible people. I guess they feel sufficiently threatened to roll with even the weak results of that session. I hope the audience laughed at the guy, and told him to go back to counting the cash piles back at Redmond.
That brings up another topic of neurology and psychology: how the brain performs different tasks. If memory serves, an Australian scientist was imaging the brains of volunteers while performing select types of work that were recognised as recruiting very paritcular parts of the brain. He'd score each person's ability at the various tasks, measure how well they could switch between the different disciplines, and took case histories. This focused on what were regarded as two diametric opposites, though I cannot remember their names. (Lets call it geek-thought and non-geek-thought).
What was found was that people fell into a spectrum. Certain people were extremely good at one of these two facets, most were more balanced, and interestingly others very good at switching between the two modes, while others not so. There was a marked correspondence between various professional backgrounds and the modes. Geeks clusted together, along side people with Asperger's. Anecdotally, he also observed that extended sessions in one mode tended to make the switching slower, which might explain why coders sometimes come off reminiscent of Austistics when allowed too long an uninterrupted geek-out session. Finally, some people improved over time once they began being tested and had a measuring stick.
So I blame that on the equations above, though I hope it explained that I was getting at.
Schizophrenia treatens to tie in here with the developing brain and how it changes overtime, but I'm forgetting where, might have been the same scientist's original motivation for the study. Looking for early diagonsis methods.
Your question is a good once and it has been studied. I believe that current science believes that the brain doesn't completely mature until around 20 years of age. In that intervening time, between birth and full maturity, there is a potential for one brain to develop more quickly in certain aspects than the average, and consequently produce very high IQ children. However, as everyone's brain reaches maturity, that gap tends to narrow dramatically. That's not an argument that smart kids don't become smart adults, just that extraordinarily intelligent kids don't seem to maintain that same gap on the majority in adulthood.
Basically, people make the mistake of treating the brain's functional power as a linear equation (something like),
P(t) = m t + Po.
Where the implicit assumption is that the scalar factor m is equal between all people, and the initial condition Po is the soul source of variation in function. So for a kid identified as very smart (a high Po), we reach the false conclusion that following this relationship above, the freakish gap in funciton will remain constant. We ignore that m (which for simplicity's sake I am treating as a simple scalar) is just as significant and allows for what we observe in nature.
At current exchange rates, thats $0.75 to $1.25 US. We didn't fair too badly after all. I know one of the debated points has always been the price of a song. The music industry wants to charge more.
I have a feeling the disagreement was that the music moguls are stuck with the misperception that if the RRP is still $30AUD, then they simply have to divide that price by the averge number of songs to get the download price. This ignores the fact that most Aussie music stores are regularly pricing new CDs at $19.95 and older ones at as little as $10.
It turns out that $10-$20 / [average number of songs per album] actually works out quite close to the publicized pricing, with space for an extra reduction at the top end since it is just an mp3 with real licensing limitations due to the copy protection.
Finally. I would love to hear the whole "behind the scenes" story about why and who made it take so long. It must have been rather frustrating, but professionalism appears to have reigned despite that, I don't recall much gossip leaking out to the public.
Nethack is more immersive that many of the games I've played recently and yet the talking point of new releases always seems to steer back to graphic quality.
Slashdot Mirror
There have been many "the end is near" predictions over the decades, and none have come true. However, when the manufacturers start turning out dual and now quad core commodity parts, you really have to assume that a reasonably solid wall has been hit for once.
Though I have faith there are still depths in silicon to be plumbed, they obviously aren't close enough to fruition to be included on a manufacturers near-term roadmap.
As cool as it may be, parallelism has its limitations and is not the catch-all solution. There simply are some algorithms which do not lend themselves to it, though you could argue that alternative parallel friendly choices may always exist. What effect this parallelism pressure might have on solving problems, or choosing problems to solve, is something worth considering.
Even so, lets hope developers have some prescience about solving (or at least addressing) the problems inherent with concurrency and parallelism. I am already growing tired of listening to game developers working on new titles sidestep the issue and I've experienced some problems with older games which simply can't cope with two cores. Get writting those APIs. ;)
The pluralization of an acronym (a lazy man's construct) is purely based on common convention, and the use of an apostrophe is optional. After all, you've just dropped the word in favor of its leading letter, so why concern yourself with the trailing letter which could arguably be implied by context and included in the drop?
If you're frought with concern over using the correct plural form, just use the actual word instead or rewrite the sentence to not require a plural subject.
The occasional businessman yes, sadly no teenage girls as yet.
It would please me greatly to see the end of that naming system. Adult Disney fans, particularly the devout ones, should be rounded up a la Douglas Adams and sent on an important interstellar mission.
The librarian had rolled out one of the ubiquitous "TV + giant VCR" stands and parked it in the middle of the reading area. For a librarian that typically insisted on a completely quiet room, this was unusual. I suppose the novelty of the teacher going into space prompted her decision.
Anyway, that unusual situation was enough for me to watch the launch, motivated by the taboo feeling of watching TV in the otherwise serenely quiet library and being a bit of a space nut. Despite that and to corroborate the claim in the article, I was probably one of only a few people actually paying attention to it, as most other students were taking the situation as a license to talk to eachother.
I clearly remember watching it desintergate, fanning out into a cloud -- and my mind not being able to fully comprehend what was happening. I might have even vocalized, but I can only remember the visuals. It seemed to take forever for other people to catch on to what had happened.
The reason was, as I am aware of the difficulties of collecting useful xray diffraction data on large assemblies (even when they're broken down into constituent parts), and an awareness of the great deal of funding channeled into HIV research, I really expected they would have collected tomographic data long ago.
The signal data is composed of peaks and troughs across 4 channels, corresponding to the 4 base types. A peak in a channel corresponds to a base of that type passing in front of the detector. In your typical sampling configuration, a peak is made up of about 12 data pts.
Now, since each sampled point in the signal is stored as a 4 byte int and the base for that peak is stored as a 1 byte char, then you've got basically a 192:1 ratio of techincally superfluous signal data to actual DNA sequence.
Since there are yet other peices of information in the file, this ratio is actually larger.
Of course, there is a good reason for keeping trace data rather than just the DNA sequences, the notion being that you have more information with which to validate the integrity of what you've done. There have been cases where scientific databases have had their data integrity damaged over time by low quality (ie. mistakes) submissions.
In this case, they're retain the wrong file type, as it doesn't store the original unfiltered data signal, only a heavily filtered and manipulated one. Most modern basecallers start from the original unfiltered data to gain more advantage through better processing, you cannot do this with the file type they are retaining.
Rather than go through the entire process you outline, one could avoid a great deal of the wet work but sequencing the protein and then jumping into computer space; searching the genome database for hits.
This assumes you're organism of study has been sequenced, but that isn't uncommon for a number of reasons.
You're an observer looking across a field covered in a fog of a certain turbidity. Now, I disperse a spherical cloud of smoke at some distance from you in that field.
Assuming similar colour and only slightly different turbidity, then you're most helpful factor in noticing the cloud is seeing the edges delineating it. If the cloud covers a very wide field of view, you'll tend to just look through it, unregistered. A combination of low contrast and minimal local variation in structure (edges).
Maybe this is why they keep searching for water on Mars? Those crazy scientists and their hijinks.
Back then I made it a mission to play every CRPG that was released on the Amiga, and I did so up to and including Eye of the Beholder. Then suddenly became totally bored with the genre, though I was funny to see PC owners getting excited over these "new" 3D RPGs in the 90s.
Probably the most fun I had playing a CPRG was when I played BloodWytch (Amiga) with a friend. In this game, two people could play two separate parties simultaneously. Ganging up against or ambushing monsters was great fun, and we might just have had some of the earliest loot arguments known to rpg gaming.
Dungeon Master came out on both the Atari and Amiga simultaneously. This is one game that really gets ignored in the "history lessons" websites produce. Back then I made it a mission to play every CRPG that was released on the Amiga, and I did so up to and including Eye of the Beholder. Then suddenly became totally bored with the genre, though I was funny to see PC owners getting excited over these "new" 3D RPGs in the 90s. Probably the most fun I had playing a CPRG was when I played BloodWytch (Amiga) with a friend. In this game, two people could play two separate parties simultaneously. Ganging up against or ambushing monsters was great fun, and we might just have had some of the earliest loot arguments known to rpg gaming.
By the time the original Nintendo was released, the 2600 was pretty old in the tooth. I think the largest motivation was that kids wanted something new, with new game franchises, and better graphics.
Heck, speaking as someone that once gave themselves very painful blisters on the palm from Decathalon and then continued to play, resulting in torn blisters, the 2600 always had the worst graphics, but I considered it to have solid games, lots of choice and a good controller. So the idea that people left the console because it had bad games, is incorrect from my experience. Unless bad is functioning as a synonym for old.
Yah might hav'a problem with yah engines laddie.
(Pirate or Scotty voice, take your pick)
Mixins are a good example of AOP doing something powerful. AOP is a particularly good way of augmenting the functionality of objects without actually having to make those objects aware of that functionality by explicitly inheriting an interface.
You can find a good example using a Lockable interface -- to make an y object temporarily immutable -- in the Spring reference documentation.
Few if any competent companies would expect that they can modify the source willy nilly and then expect direct support on what _they_ have done from the distribution vendor. I mean, if you have an understanding of the process of software development and have spent 5 minutes reading about the Open Source movement, then you'll understand that it is a completely impractical, if not irrational, way of working.
When has this approach ever been promoted by the Open Source community? This sounds like only something a PHB could arrive at, following a methodology of gleaning an understanding of OS while walking by the cubicle farm and overhearing casual conversations.
Seriously, to me it seems like Microsoft sat around a table brainstorming for potential negative aspects of OS that they could market to suitably gullible people. I guess they feel sufficiently threatened to roll with even the weak results of that session. I hope the audience laughed at the guy, and told him to go back to counting the cash piles back at Redmond.
That brings up another topic of neurology and psychology: how the brain performs different tasks. If memory serves, an Australian scientist was imaging the brains of volunteers while performing select types of work that were recognised as recruiting very paritcular parts of the brain. He'd score each person's ability at the various tasks, measure how well they could switch between the different disciplines, and took case histories. This focused on what were regarded as two diametric opposites, though I cannot remember their names. (Lets call it geek-thought and non-geek-thought).
What was found was that people fell into a spectrum. Certain people were extremely good at one of these two facets, most were more balanced, and interestingly others very good at switching between the two modes, while others not so. There was a marked correspondence between various professional backgrounds and the modes. Geeks clusted together, along side people with Asperger's. Anecdotally, he also observed that extended sessions in one mode tended to make the switching slower, which might explain why coders sometimes come off reminiscent of Austistics when allowed too long an uninterrupted geek-out session. Finally, some people improved over time once they began being tested and had a measuring stick.
So I blame that on the equations above, though I hope it explained that I was getting at.
Schizophrenia treatens to tie in here with the developing brain and how it changes overtime, but I'm forgetting where, might have been the same scientist's original motivation for the study. Looking for early diagonsis methods.
Basically, people make the mistake of treating the brain's functional power as a linear equation (something like),
Where the implicit assumption is that the scalar factor m is equal between all people, and the initial condition Po is the soul source of variation in function. So for a kid identified as very smart (a high Po), we reach the false conclusion that following this relationship above, the freakish gap in funciton will remain constant. We ignore that m (which for simplicity's sake I am treating as a simple scalar) is just as significant and allows for what we observe in nature.
Google Images
PDF from company
Note, due to their width, you can only put in one per bank. :)
Ostentation doesn't work so well when inside an opaque case.
As someone that works out of his house, this doesn't help eliminate the interruptions I get during the day.
I have a feeling the disagreement was that the music moguls are stuck with the misperception that if the RRP is still $30AUD, then they simply have to divide that price by the averge number of songs to get the download price. This ignores the fact that most Aussie music stores are regularly pricing new CDs at $19.95 and older ones at as little as $10.
It turns out that $10-$20 / [average number of songs per album] actually works out quite close to the publicized pricing, with space for an extra reduction at the top end since it is just an mp3 with real licensing limitations due to the copy protection.
Finally. I would love to hear the whole "behind the scenes" story about why and who made it take so long. It must have been rather frustrating, but professionalism appears to have reigned despite that, I don't recall much gossip leaking out to the public.
Give me a towel and a wand of polymorph any day.