Code a simple example in OpenGL. It's fairly easy to get started. Get a tetrahedron on the screen. Then make it bounce and spin and deform in real time.
Just face it, you're getting too old for slashdot:) About half the people arguing with you are just trying to justify all the money they spent or are spending on education. Yes, you need calculus in academic disciplines, including computer science. You also need it in highly technical or scientific fields, like rocketry, engineering, image processing, etc. Of course, learning computer science does not necessarily teach anyone how to make good software, and in some cases an inverse correlation may be observed.
I think it's really sad how our society basically devalues skilled labour. That's what writing good software is, after all. The attitude of businesses seems to be that people are more or less replaceable and therefore expendable, and people have responded by outrageously increasing their qualifications. This costs society a lot of money in wasted time, lost productivity, lost income, and stunted career progression. The quality of education has also deteriorated under the extremely high demand. This is inflation in education: the amount of it goes up as its value drops.
It does not make sense for most software developers to have a four year computer science degree. It's hard to see what they could need beyond a solid understanding of algorithms and data structures, and exposure to different programming languages. You could learn it in two years, but it would be quite hard. Or you could learn the basics in one year and do a year of apprenticeship and two years as a journeyman to get it all. But it doesn't work that way anymore, because a great many businesses refuse to bear the costs of educating their employees. It's stupid short-term thinking, and they pay for it in other ways, but all of the career risk has been pushed onto the labour force.
So what are you missing? The value of an education is really what you make of it. I guess the best way to explain it is with an analogy. If you were to get an English degree you would study Shakespeare. It may or may not help you write a good play. If you were talented, you might pick up something from Shakespeare. Or you could study Shakespeare with great dedication, and practice writing until your work really compares. Or you could bullshit, plagiarize, and plead your way though a degree and go on to write travesty after travesty to be inflicted on an unsuspecting public. In any case, someone with a BA in English had better know Shakespeare. That's just expected, because it's part of a body of knowledge. It may or may not be related to the skills that employers are looking for.
Universities exist to maintain and expand bodies of knowledge. That's it. To the extent that they have been used as a "shortcut" for employee training or certification, it is highly unfortunate and detrimental to society as a whole. I wouldn't deny the right of an education to anyone, but society has misconstrued its purpose.
Too many games are retarded, and a lot of people who play them are probably retarded too. It's like any other form of mass entertainment. Supposedly "mature" games are mostly mindless violence. I think "mature" means "appeals to 13 year olds instead of 10 year olds" here. It's one or two steps up from "My Pony Party". Do you want a good game for the Wii? Try Muramasa. It has a good story, incredible art, and it's a lot of fun to play. Is that a mature game? I would say so. It's a lot more mature than sawing people to death (what the hell?). Developers: stop complaining that your retarded shit doesn't sell. I'm sure lots of even more retarded shit sells like hotcakes, and that seems mighty unfair, but nobody cares nor should they care. Try making something that isn't totally brain dead.
Ageism in tech is very real, and even if you're not seeing it yet, you will in another 10 years. By that time it will be too late. Get on the management track while you can.
Hyperthreading shows you eight fake cores which map to four real cores. I benchmarked it extensively. Computationally intensive routines with a small memory footprint can gain up to 20%. Bandwidth or memory intensive routines can lose up to 50%. In the extreme case, 8 threads on virtual cores can be half the speed of 4 threads on 4 real cores on a Core i7. Keep in mind, this is on a crazy application that generates lots of data.
If your algorithm is designed to break up the problem to exploit the cache then hyperthreading is a bigger mess. The data for thread 1 and thread 2 (out of 8) might be complementary, but the operating system will run those threads different actual cores, because all it sees is the virtual cores. This can be very inefficient if you need the whole cache.
Perhaps worst of all, you are stuck always running 8 threads. 2-6 threads may not be distributed evenly across the real cores, leading to inconsistent performance. Therefore, you may lose performance by attempting to scale the problem further than it is efficient to do so. With real cores, I can decide (based on problem size) the correct number of core to use.
In conclusion, hyperthreading has its uses, but operating systems are oblivious to it and that's a major problem with more than one core.
Atom cpus are not especially profitable. They're cheap. Intel is handing them off to TSMC and probably hoping like hell that the market still craves high performance. Unless more software is parallelized, things are going to be bad!
Note: I parallelized my software and the Core i7 is awesome. Superlinear speedup is easy to achieve with a dedicated L2 cache. The Phenom II would also give great performance. So I would bet that Atom and other underpowered cpus are a fad. They will not look very good next to a mobile Core i7 that is 20x faster when all cores are used.
Tell her to fuck off. Seriously, is this a joke ? Why would you let her go through your binder ? Do you just do anything someone says to be nice ? Go to her office and demand your notes back. Don't leave until she gives them to you. Take it up with the head department. Ask them what kind of fucking crock "school" they have. Is it a degree mill where you pay for a piece of paper ? You can get those with mail order you know. What a fucking joke.
I disagree. AMD is in an ok position, not great obviously, but their platform is competitive. The Core i7 is a better processor than the Phenom II, but I don't expect its price to come down any time soon. Intel will milk the high margins for as long as they can and sell old Core 2 quads to consumers for at least this year.
Given the choice between a Core 2 Quad and a Phenom II, you should pick the Phenom. No question about it. The Core 2 quad has a split cache so multithreaded performance is crap. The cores have to transfer data through the slow memory interface, which limits parallel speedup in a lot of cases. This wasn't really an issue when Intel released the processor, but in the near future it will be a serious issue because the parallel software is coming.
Did anyone see the Associated Press coverage? link.
"An effort at damage control has snowballed into a public relations disaster for a Swiss bank seeking to crack down on a renegade Web site for posting classified information about some of its wealthy clients."
Apparently, company information is "classified information", and WikiLeaks is a "renegade" website. I guess it is compared to the Associated Press. Here's a high school example of propaganda. Perhaps it was written by a high school student.
These guys are the next world power. America: you had a good run, but in the end it was more about SUVs and extra fries than liberty and democracy. Just think, we'll all be choking on this "harmony" and "what's good for society is good for you" shit for the next 100 years. Not something to look forward to.
I think you mean surveillance state. The U.S. government monitors all phone calls and internet traffic. A full police state may or may not follow, although the goverment has flirted with imprisoning people with no legal process (Jose Padilla, Yaser Hamdi). They also tortured Padilla. It will be interesting to see what happens. The government has already asserted its right to ignore laws, such as FISA, the anti-torture statutes, and the war crimes act of 1996, and it seems willing to interpret the constitution in such a narrow way as to render its fundamental protections meaningless. I hope you get your country back, but I don't have a lot of hope for the next decade or so.
So if this passes and the teleco's get their immunity can they be forced to show what they did?
No. The point of this legislation is to stop people from finding out what they did. The government broke the law by ordering mass surveillance of the public. The telephone companies broke the law by helping them to do it. This legislation is about shutting down civil suits filed by the public against the phone companies for alleged criminal acts. It is the only venue left for finding out what happened. The law also grants retroactive criminal immunity so that future governments can't prosecute anybody involved.
Application vulnerabilities (in web browsers, chat clients, etc) can turn a local root exploit into a remote root exploit. This is a mess for everybody.
Let us rejoice in the three virtues of a programmer: laziness, impatience, and hubris:) Seriously, I don't want to wait for computers and neither should you. And I don't want to wade through piles of junk to find good information. These are basic things. The only difference now is if people now have a little less tolerance for crap.
Studies like this always start out by assuming things about young people, only to find out they know nothing. How is that a surprise ? Gee, teenagers don't pay attention since when, 4000 BC ? Complaints about this were found on clay tablets from Babylon. I seriously doubt people are going to get a clue.
Perhaps I am the only person who thinks this, but is seems to me that threads are not a very good low-level primitive for concurrent programming. They inherently assume that whatever is running on the different processors is independent. As a result, writing a tightly coupled parallel algorithm is "hard".
I would much rather the operating system switch 4 or 16 synchronized cores completely over to me. Add prefixes to the assembly instructions so that I can explicitly execute instructions on processor 1, 2, 3, etc, in a shared memory model. Add logic similar to simultaneous multithreading to keep unused cores saturated with instructions from other threads when possible. This would help the programmer extract parallelism from tightly coupled algorithms. There seems to be no real multithreaded analogue to assembly language, and I think that is a big part of the problem. If we had such a thing it would be much easier to write tightly coupled parallel code, and higher level parallelization (from compilers) would follow inevitably.
Of course I'm not saying this is some sort of magic bullet. We would still need to split up computations and use threads as best as possible, but I think this is an obvious tool that we are missing.
It's like when mathematics is called a science, which it is not.
The scientific method can be (and often is) applied to determine likely mathematical truths. Even in the last step, when one is scrounging about for ways to prove something, the scientific method is useful. Hypothesize and test examples! Without that, I imagine mathematicians would waste a lot more time than they already do:)
I am skeptical of the ability of any wireless standard to handle a large network with many nodes. Won't the clients interfere ? With switches and routers you can build a tree. I suppose you could do that with 802.11 as well with different parts of a building, etc, but can it handle 500 people in a room all using the connection ?
Contrary to the opinions expressed by others here, I think that video games make a great contribution to educating young people about the realities of war. In your average war game, the fighting begins with no real purpose (indeed, such things are often considered irrelevant by the players) and the only real costs of mounting casualties are to the players' egos, and to the effectiveness of their side as they begin to "win" or "lose". How does this not reflect the attitudes and outlooks of the people who lead us to war ? The analogy goes further - at the conclusion of each match, the contestants (whether they have won or lost) are encouraged, by pride and by their own excitement, to "try again", perhaps on a new battlefield with a familiar group of people but a different set of alliances and opponents. The modern war video game is in many ways a most accurate model of modern warfare, and I think it behooves parents and leaders alike to encourage young people to play these games, and to reflect for themselves on what the games might mean to them.
Because it might be useful to have something stored locally. I travel a lot with my laptop and I would like this. I would also appreciate the convenience of not having to fire up a web browser for wikipedia. You can search articles from the command line. You could also potentially write a better search feature, ie: bolt on some code to combine and summarize multiple related articles. The approach the guy used (a bunch of small bz2 files) is interesting and potentially useful. I'd say this was one of the better articles to hit Slashdot lately, and I'm glad I read it.
Maybe this path will ultimately bring proprietary drivers to Linux in force, but I think Linus has made the right decision. We should start looking for other ways to convince companies to write open, GPL drivers.
It's funny, but the original purpose of advertising was to tell an interested consumer details about your product. For example, I would read an ad by Intel or AMD about their new processor architectures, and how they improved on the previous generation of processors. The entire problem with advertising is that there is no longer any respect for "consumers". Marketers have decided to simply manipulate people instead of informing them. That's why we get a jackass in a clean room suit dancing around telling us that Pentiums make the internet faster. Ironically enough, people pay to go to vendor conferences and workshops which are essentially advertising, so I guess I can't fault the economics of it all.
Slashdot Mirror
Code a simple example in OpenGL. It's fairly easy to get started. Get a tetrahedron on the screen. Then make it bounce and spin and deform in real time.
That's why I picked it. Actually, I always liked the Zork games.
Just face it, you're getting too old for slashdot :) About half the people arguing with you are just trying to justify all the money they spent or are spending on education. Yes, you need calculus in academic disciplines, including computer science. You also need it in highly technical or scientific fields, like rocketry, engineering, image processing, etc. Of course, learning computer science does not necessarily teach anyone how to make good software, and in some cases an inverse correlation may be observed.
I think it's really sad how our society basically devalues skilled labour. That's what writing good software is, after all. The attitude of businesses seems to be that people are more or less replaceable and therefore expendable, and people have responded by outrageously increasing their qualifications. This costs society a lot of money in wasted time, lost productivity, lost income, and stunted career progression. The quality of education has also deteriorated under the extremely high demand. This is inflation in education: the amount of it goes up as its value drops.
It does not make sense for most software developers to have a four year computer science degree. It's hard to see what they could need beyond a solid understanding of algorithms and data structures, and exposure to different programming languages. You could learn it in two years, but it would be quite hard. Or you could learn the basics in one year and do a year of apprenticeship and two years as a journeyman to get it all. But it doesn't work that way anymore, because a great many businesses refuse to bear the costs of educating their employees. It's stupid short-term thinking, and they pay for it in other ways, but all of the career risk has been pushed onto the labour force.
So what are you missing? The value of an education is really what you make of it. I guess the best way to explain it is with an analogy. If you were to get an English degree you would study Shakespeare. It may or may not help you write a good play. If you were talented, you might pick up something from Shakespeare. Or you could study Shakespeare with great dedication, and practice writing until your work really compares. Or you could bullshit, plagiarize, and plead your way though a degree and go on to write travesty after travesty to be inflicted on an unsuspecting public. In any case, someone with a BA in English had better know Shakespeare. That's just expected, because it's part of a body of knowledge. It may or may not be related to the skills that employers are looking for.
Universities exist to maintain and expand bodies of knowledge. That's it. To the extent that they have been used as a "shortcut" for employee training or certification, it is highly unfortunate and detrimental to society as a whole. I wouldn't deny the right of an education to anyone, but society has misconstrued its purpose.
Too many games are retarded, and a lot of people who play them are probably retarded too. It's like any other form of mass entertainment. Supposedly "mature" games are mostly mindless violence. I think "mature" means "appeals to 13 year olds instead of 10 year olds" here. It's one or two steps up from "My Pony Party". Do you want a good game for the Wii? Try Muramasa. It has a good story, incredible art, and it's a lot of fun to play. Is that a mature game? I would say so. It's a lot more mature than sawing people to death (what the hell?). Developers: stop complaining that your retarded shit doesn't sell. I'm sure lots of even more retarded shit sells like hotcakes, and that seems mighty unfair, but nobody cares nor should they care. Try making something that isn't totally brain dead.
Backup your internal HDD to an external one, and if your data is really important, have two externals and swap one off-site once a week.
For the vast majority of home users this is still the best advice.
Ageism in tech is very real, and even if you're not seeing it yet, you will in another 10 years. By that time it will be too late. Get on the management track while you can.
Hyperthreading shows you eight fake cores which map to four real cores. I benchmarked it extensively. Computationally intensive routines with a small memory footprint can gain up to 20%. Bandwidth or memory intensive routines can lose up to 50%. In the extreme case, 8 threads on virtual cores can be half the speed of 4 threads on 4 real cores on a Core i7. Keep in mind, this is on a crazy application that generates lots of data.
If your algorithm is designed to break up the problem to exploit the cache then hyperthreading is a bigger mess. The data for thread 1 and thread 2 (out of 8) might be complementary, but the operating system will run those threads different actual cores, because all it sees is the virtual cores. This can be very inefficient if you need the whole cache.
Perhaps worst of all, you are stuck always running 8 threads. 2-6 threads may not be distributed evenly across the real cores, leading to inconsistent performance. Therefore, you may lose performance by attempting to scale the problem further than it is efficient to do so. With real cores, I can decide (based on problem size) the correct number of core to use.
In conclusion, hyperthreading has its uses, but operating systems are oblivious to it and that's a major problem with more than one core.
Atom cpus are not especially profitable. They're cheap. Intel is handing them off to TSMC and probably hoping like hell that the market still craves high performance. Unless more software is parallelized, things are going to be bad!
Note: I parallelized my software and the Core i7 is awesome. Superlinear speedup is easy to achieve with a dedicated L2 cache. The Phenom II would also give great performance. So I would bet that Atom and other underpowered cpus are a fad. They will not look very good next to a mobile Core i7 that is 20x faster when all cores are used.
Tell her to fuck off. Seriously, is this a joke ? Why would you let her go through your binder ? Do you just do anything someone says to be nice ? Go to her office and demand your notes back. Don't leave until she gives them to you. Take it up with the head department. Ask them what kind of fucking crock "school" they have. Is it a degree mill where you pay for a piece of paper ? You can get those with mail order you know. What a fucking joke.
I disagree. AMD is in an ok position, not great obviously, but their platform is competitive. The Core i7 is a better processor than the Phenom II, but I don't expect its price to come down any time soon. Intel will milk the high margins for as long as they can and sell old Core 2 quads to consumers for at least this year.
Given the choice between a Core 2 Quad and a Phenom II, you should pick the Phenom. No question about it. The Core 2 quad has a split cache so multithreaded performance is crap. The cores have to transfer data through the slow memory interface, which limits parallel speedup in a lot of cases. This wasn't really an issue when Intel released the processor, but in the near future it will be a serious issue because the parallel software is coming.
"Black Holes Lead Galaxy Growth" - this is great news for our economy.
Did anyone see the Associated Press coverage? link.
"An effort at damage control has snowballed into a public relations disaster for a Swiss bank seeking to crack down on a renegade Web site for posting classified information about some of its wealthy clients."
Apparently, company information is "classified information", and WikiLeaks is a "renegade" website. I guess it is compared to the Associated Press. Here's a high school example of propaganda. Perhaps it was written by a high school student.
These guys are the next world power. America: you had a good run, but in the end it was more about SUVs and extra fries than liberty and democracy. Just think, we'll all be choking on this "harmony" and "what's good for society is good for you" shit for the next 100 years. Not something to look forward to.
Welcome to the Police State.
I think you mean surveillance state. The U.S. government monitors all phone calls and internet traffic. A full police state may or may not follow, although the goverment has flirted with imprisoning people with no legal process (Jose Padilla, Yaser Hamdi). They also tortured Padilla. It will be interesting to see what happens. The government has already asserted its right to ignore laws, such as FISA, the anti-torture statutes, and the war crimes act of 1996, and it seems willing to interpret the constitution in such a narrow way as to render its fundamental protections meaningless. I hope you get your country back, but I don't have a lot of hope for the next decade or so.
So if this passes and the teleco's get their immunity can they be forced to show what they did?
No. The point of this legislation is to stop people from finding out what they did. The government broke the law by ordering mass surveillance of the public. The telephone companies broke the law by helping them to do it. This legislation is about shutting down civil suits filed by the public against the phone companies for alleged criminal acts. It is the only venue left for finding out what happened. The law also grants retroactive criminal immunity so that future governments can't prosecute anybody involved.
Application vulnerabilities (in web browsers, chat clients, etc) can turn a local root exploit into a remote root exploit. This is a mess for everybody.
Let us rejoice in the three virtues of a programmer: laziness, impatience, and hubris :) Seriously, I don't want to wait for computers and neither should you. And I don't want to wade through piles of junk to find good information. These are basic things. The only difference now is if people now have a little less tolerance for crap.
Studies like this always start out by assuming things about young people, only to find out they know nothing. How is that a surprise ? Gee, teenagers don't pay attention since when, 4000 BC ? Complaints about this were found on clay tablets from Babylon. I seriously doubt people are going to get a clue.
Perhaps I am the only person who thinks this, but is seems to me that threads are not a very good low-level primitive for concurrent programming. They inherently assume that whatever is running on the different processors is independent. As a result, writing a tightly coupled parallel algorithm is "hard".
I would much rather the operating system switch 4 or 16 synchronized cores completely over to me. Add prefixes to the assembly instructions so that I can explicitly execute instructions on processor 1, 2, 3, etc, in a shared memory model. Add logic similar to simultaneous multithreading to keep unused cores saturated with instructions from other threads when possible. This would help the programmer extract parallelism from tightly coupled algorithms. There seems to be no real multithreaded analogue to assembly language, and I think that is a big part of the problem. If we had such a thing it would be much easier to write tightly coupled parallel code, and higher level parallelization (from compilers) would follow inevitably.
Of course I'm not saying this is some sort of magic bullet. We would still need to split up computations and use threads as best as possible, but I think this is an obvious tool that we are missing.
It's like when mathematics is called a science, which it is not.
:)
The scientific method can be (and often is) applied to determine likely mathematical truths. Even in the last step, when one is scrounging about for ways to prove something, the scientific method is useful. Hypothesize and test examples! Without that, I imagine mathematicians would waste a lot more time than they already do
I am skeptical of the ability of any wireless standard to handle a large network with many nodes. Won't the clients interfere ? With switches and routers you can build a tree. I suppose you could do that with 802.11 as well with different parts of a building, etc, but can it handle 500 people in a room all using the connection ?
Contrary to the opinions expressed by others here, I think that video games make a great contribution to educating young people about the realities of war. In your average war game, the fighting begins with no real purpose (indeed, such things are often considered irrelevant by the players) and the only real costs of mounting casualties are to the players' egos, and to the effectiveness of their side as they begin to "win" or "lose". How does this not reflect the attitudes and outlooks of the people who lead us to war ? The analogy goes further - at the conclusion of each match, the contestants (whether they have won or lost) are encouraged, by pride and by their own excitement, to "try again", perhaps on a new battlefield with a familiar group of people but a different set of alliances and opponents. The modern war video game is in many ways a most accurate model of modern warfare, and I think it behooves parents and leaders alike to encourage young people to play these games, and to reflect for themselves on what the games might mean to them.
Because it might be useful to have something stored locally. I travel a lot with my laptop and I would like this. I would also appreciate the convenience of not having to fire up a web browser for wikipedia. You can search articles from the command line. You could also potentially write a better search feature, ie: bolt on some code to combine and summarize multiple related articles. The approach the guy used (a bunch of small bz2 files) is interesting and potentially useful. I'd say this was one of the better articles to hit Slashdot lately, and I'm glad I read it.
Maybe this path will ultimately bring proprietary drivers to Linux in force, but I think Linus has made the right decision. We should start looking for other ways to convince companies to write open, GPL drivers.
It's funny, but the original purpose of advertising was to tell an interested consumer details about your product. For example, I would read an ad by Intel or AMD about their new processor architectures, and how they improved on the previous generation of processors. The entire problem with advertising is that there is no longer any respect for "consumers". Marketers have decided to simply manipulate people instead of informing them. That's why we get a jackass in a clean room suit dancing around telling us that Pentiums make the internet faster. Ironically enough, people pay to go to vendor conferences and workshops which are essentially advertising, so I guess I can't fault the economics of it all.
Or, you know, you could just ignore them and not go to prison.