It has nothing to do with zealotry. The reason mutable solutions should be avoided is because as long as you don't use them, your code is trivially parallelizable. The moment you mutate something, all code that touches that mutation must be run serially. This is a massive performance hit when you move your code to clusters and multi-core machines.
All machines are rapidly becoming multi-core, so this will become an issue very soon in every problem domain, not just high performance computing.
Re:"You are a pirate!" - Microsoft
on
Computer Voodoo?
·
· Score: 1
I switched to Linux permanently after this happened to me on a particularly grumpy day. I had played with it for a couple years, but never really had much motivation to use Linux over Windows. Then one day, I found that Windows had shut itself down on my server machine and was refusing to reboot because I was a pirate. Had the server failed due to a hardware issue, then that would be one thing, but here it was refusing to run under it's own volition and accusing me of pirating software while denying me access to my home network from work (which is what it was supposed to be doing). I switched all my machines to Linux that week (save for 1 XP machine I use for testing on windows, being as I'm a developer), and honestly have been much happier for it the last couple years.
Which is like saying "This is a square, not a quadrilateral".
Not in my view... more like saying "this is a trapazoid, not a rhombus..." er, or something like that...
While similar, Democracies are really, really bad governments historically, and there is a reason that there are no true democracies (as countries. Democracies make pretty good 5-15 person organizations). Republics take most of the fragility out of the system. Large populaces are very hot headed and gullible in the short term. Without tempering and slowing things down they blow themselves up very quickly and collapse into Fascism.
For instance, if the US were a democracy, on 9/12/2001 the middle east would have been a glass parking lot, Bush would be king and the constitution would be toilet paper. Being as we are a Republic, people can still kill each other freely in the middle east, Bush has term limits, and hey, we can use the extra toilet paper.
No one is pretending that the current administration didn't play up the role of WMD's. All politicians repeat their soundbites ad nauseum, as most people are morons and can't keep 2 sentances in their head at the same time. That doesn't mean the most repeated reason is the only reason, or neccissarily even the primary reason.. it's just the one that sounds the best or is the most passionate. I was very awake during the run-up to the war and was surprised even then at the whole 1984 style "these have always been the reasons we've hated Iraq" crap spewing from the people. As the war became more unpopular, the "revisionist" history became even worse, to the point that the entire nation seems to have a screw loose arguing over non-issues and historical trivia, to the point where they bring up "well you believe that WMD's exist *AND* Jehovah you stoopid christian; neener neener!" in the middle of evolution debates. And yes, I just used a semicolon, Jehovah and neener neener in the same sentance, and that amuses me, but that is beside the point.
Case in point, misleading the people, even only the stupid ones, is a matter of course, not a crime. The president does not need any approval whatsoever from the electorate to invade a country. He can say he did it for pop tarts and ice cream if he wants. This is a Republic, not a Democracy. Now, were he to lie to a grand jury about it... well, recent history shows we'd probably aquit him for that too unfortunately.
IIRC the "stated reason" took a couple of days to express verbally, but since it can't be squeezed into a soundbite, it's not the "real" reason. Here's a nice, abbreviated laundry list.
1) Unpopular Sanctions 2) Continuing need to bomb and kill civilians to get to strategic tartgets that were enabling Iraqui attacks on UN 3) Breach of Cease fire on occassion too numerous to count. 4) Failure to comply with terms of surrender. 5) Ejection of UN Weapons inspectors verifying claims of no prohibited weapons. 6) Failure to supply proof of compliance with destruction of prohibited weapons as negotiated in surrender. 7) Mounting pressure by humanitarian groups to end sanctions which the government was compensating for by raping the economy and starving it's citizens. 8) Continuous flip-flopping of compliance in order to keep negotiations tied up rather than face war. 9) Secret importing of supplies used to boost it's conventional arsenal that could be used for non conventional weapons. 10) Rising oil prices mounting pressure on the international community to eliminate sanctions. 11) Verbalized threats against the US, Britain. and the UN by Saddam. 12) Ongoing human rights violations against the citizens of Iraq by the Iraqui government. 13) Strategically good location for other Middle Eastern affairs. 14) Long history of proven, and often successful, biological, chemical and nuclear programs. 15) Intelligence hinting that some of the above programs were likely active. 16) And all right about this time, some very nasty ICBM tech went missing from off the coast.
There are many more.
In the decade that followed Gulf War I, we bombed Iraq, on average, over 50 times per year for blatent attacks against the UN. The motivation behind taking out that government might have included the possibility of WMD, or Strategically locating bases, or high oil prices, but there were so many reasons to wipe out that country that the refutation of any single one is pointless and is only undertaken by morons who must distil everthing into soundbites, the volume of the argument being a testament to how prolific such morons are.
Anyone who thought we went to war because Saddam might have had some mustard gas was and is a moron.
We went to war because Iraq continuously breached the negotiated cease fire for a decade and we got tire of air bombing them on a weekly basis and supporting an embargo that was internationally unpopular.
For cognition, however, you need only model the overall important behavior of the circuit, not the details. An anagolous problem would be, given an adder circuit, model the behavior in a computer... Actually modeling the way signals propogate through the adder is extremely computationally expensive if all you are interested in is adding numbers together.
Knowing *WHAT* to model about a neurons behavior is the important part in order to be able to figure out the OP's calculation with any degree of accurracy, and we are a way from figuring that out. Given, however, the current scale of the state of the art, vs. the goal of human-level cognition, a 20-30 year timeline for being able to accomplish cognition in silicon seems a reasonable although ambitious estimate. The estimate of it requiring a machine the size of the moon, however, seems vastly inflated.
yup. The neurons have alot of chemical work to do before being able to fire again. Most soures I've seen measure the neurons rate of fire in Hz, not even kHz as you suggest, and certainly not the GHz of the OP.
I leave my box up 24/7. I often need to access my boxen from other boxen, which is why they stay up, so I TS in (on windows) or SSH or VNC in on Linux. Many times I will leave a browser open for days or weeks, mostly because I'm not thinking about it. If these were game consoles or other commodities, then I would see your point, but they are computers, and the reason I own them is because I need them to compute, 24/7. So, yes, this is a real world problem.
Things are easy to install on Windows??? Am I hearing you right??
I want to install an app that does XYZ in windows.... I shall compare the
Windows: There is no repository of applications. No "stable" application repository where the apps have proven themselves to play nice with others. No "ustable" repository. No nothing. Therefore there is no way to search for xyz apps. You best hope is to google for apps that do that kind of thing.
Linux: I query for apps that do xyz and I get a nice list of both commercial and non commercial apps available for that purpose, along with their level of stability.
Windows: Once I have identified an app, on windows I must either go to the website of the software vendor and download an installer to run, or maybe order a CD from a website or catalog and have it mailed to me, or get off my ass and drive to a software store where I phisically pick up the bits and sneakernet them to my machine. I then go through a process of locking up my machine for a time whilst a not-very-standardized install process magically does stuff to my machine, that 15% of the time can never be undone.
Linux: Having searched for and found an app, I click install. If I have to buy a licence to use it, I will get a url link to give my credit card info to so it will work.
I'm sure glad Windows streamlines everything for me.
What makes a system running only pine, lynx and vi years ago more useable than a system running only those apps today? The big bloated apps of today did not exist back then (or, if they did, they were *bad*). On the other hand, some of those good old small tools have undergone some massive useability advances.
But if they did not release Vista, those new PC sales would slowly transition to their competitors (Mac, linux, solaris) as XP became more dated... at which time they would be dead.
They do have an option of simply releasing early and often and evolving XP... essentially delivering Vista over the course of years to it's customers. That's a very nice and user friendly model, but has the drawback of not having big media fanfare every few years.
Hell, other than a new GUI API, there really isn't much Vista can do that XP can't.
XP, on the other hand, is a bit faster on lower end hardware, and less RAM consumptive on any hardware. Not to mention that XP has better accessibility functions and that most features of Vista will likely be backported to XP anyway. Arguably, the security model of XP could even be considered better, as the whole LUA thing is a gaping hole IMHO because your social engineering your own users to do the wrong thing.
But Vista has one big advantage... it will be supported further into the future, so you're going to have to buy it eventually if you want to stick with Windows.
GF's machine. She wanted access to some spreadsheets of mine and owns office which she normally uses on her laptop. In this case, I was using her desktop.
Needless to say. MS Office was not a workable solution because it didn't play nice with standards. Any number of alternative solutions were available, none of them Microsoft's. Other products that use a proprietary format can at least fall back to accepted standards as an alternative to work in normal environments... Microsoft Office does not. When even the small, open source products provide a trivial solution (or at least make a valiant attempt) to what in my mind is a fairly mundane computing task, I would expect a mature product to be up to the task. Microsoft's suite is not. For my purposes it is an inferior product, as I don't care how well it can intermix fonts and indent my letter, if I can't even read my letters, written to a standard, with their product, then their product sucks.
I was using a Windows box the other day. Overall, the OS seemed solid and polished, so I installed MS Office.
Office opened up, I typed some characters... simple first steps. All seemed to be in order, so I go to try it out with some of my documents.
I go to open a document I have opened with a few other Word Processors.. nothing. Word can't read any of my standard ODF documents. All my other word processing software can read Word docs, but Microsoft can't read the basic, common denominator standard. So much for that.
So, on to spreadsheets. Open up an open document format spreadsheet with Excell. Excell somehow thinks this is a CSV formatted file of all things. I can't use any of my existing spreadsheets on this new software.
Rather than spen untold painful hours converting everything, I uninstalled office and installed OOo for Windows. It seems that MS has alot of work to do to bring their office suite up to par with current standards. As it is, it seems barely useable, *IF* you can get access to a Windows machine and only if that machine has MS Office installed, which is a fairly rare combination from where I stand. I wonder why I don't see more "Windows isn't ready for the desktop" comments, because from my vantage point, that's the impression I get every time I struggle to use the damn stuff.
However, DocBook has the capability to write the documentation once and, via xslt, give you a nice website, print form and help file for an application.
Slashdot Mirror
It has nothing to do with zealotry. The reason mutable solutions should be avoided is because as long as you don't use them, your code is trivially parallelizable. The moment you mutate something, all code that touches that mutation must be run serially. This is a massive performance hit when you move your code to clusters and multi-core machines.
All machines are rapidly becoming multi-core, so this will become an issue very soon in every problem domain, not just high performance computing.
I switched to Linux permanently after this happened to me on a particularly grumpy day. I had played with it for a couple years, but never really had much motivation to use Linux over Windows. Then one day, I found that Windows had shut itself down on my server machine and was refusing to reboot because I was a pirate. Had the server failed due to a hardware issue, then that would be one thing, but here it was refusing to run under it's own volition and accusing me of pirating software while denying me access to my home network from work (which is what it was supposed to be doing). I switched all my machines to Linux that week (save for 1 XP machine I use for testing on windows, being as I'm a developer), and honestly have been much happier for it the last couple years.
Which is like saying "This is a square, not a quadrilateral".
Not in my view... more like saying "this is a trapazoid, not a rhombus..." er, or something like that...
While similar, Democracies are really, really bad governments historically, and there is a reason that there are no true democracies (as countries. Democracies make pretty good 5-15 person organizations). Republics take most of the fragility out of the system. Large populaces are very hot headed and gullible in the short term. Without tempering and slowing things down they blow themselves up very quickly and collapse into Fascism.
For instance, if the US were a democracy, on 9/12/2001 the middle east would have been a glass parking lot, Bush would be king and the constitution would be toilet paper. Being as we are a Republic, people can still kill each other freely in the middle east, Bush has term limits, and hey, we can use the extra toilet paper.
Invading Iraq cannot be compared to invading France. Iraquis have been know to resist invasions!
There are still people who believe those reasons, and that's what I was originally refuting.
;)
And those are the people I was originally calling morons
No one is pretending that the current administration didn't play up the role of WMD's. All politicians repeat their soundbites ad nauseum, as most people are morons and can't keep 2 sentances in their head at the same time. That doesn't mean the most repeated reason is the only reason, or neccissarily even the primary reason.. it's just the one that sounds the best or is the most passionate. I was very awake during the run-up to the war and was surprised even then at the whole 1984 style "these have always been the reasons we've hated Iraq" crap spewing from the people. As the war became more unpopular, the "revisionist" history became even worse, to the point that the entire nation seems to have a screw loose arguing over non-issues and historical trivia, to the point where they bring up "well you believe that WMD's exist *AND* Jehovah you stoopid christian; neener neener!" in the middle of evolution debates. And yes, I just used a semicolon, Jehovah and neener neener in the same sentance, and that amuses me, but that is beside the point.
Case in point, misleading the people, even only the stupid ones, is a matter of course, not a crime. The president does not need any approval whatsoever from the electorate to invade a country. He can say he did it for pop tarts and ice cream if he wants. This is a Republic, not a Democracy. Now, were he to lie to a grand jury about it... well, recent history shows we'd probably aquit him for that too unfortunately.
IIRC the "stated reason" took a couple of days to express verbally, but since it can't be squeezed into a soundbite, it's not the "real" reason. Here's a nice, abbreviated laundry list.
1) Unpopular Sanctions
2) Continuing need to bomb and kill civilians to get to strategic tartgets that were enabling Iraqui attacks on UN
3) Breach of Cease fire on occassion too numerous to count.
4) Failure to comply with terms of surrender.
5) Ejection of UN Weapons inspectors verifying claims of no prohibited weapons.
6) Failure to supply proof of compliance with destruction of prohibited weapons as negotiated in surrender.
7) Mounting pressure by humanitarian groups to end sanctions which the government was compensating for by raping the economy and starving it's citizens.
8) Continuous flip-flopping of compliance in order to keep negotiations tied up rather than face war.
9) Secret importing of supplies used to boost it's conventional arsenal that could be used for non conventional weapons.
10) Rising oil prices mounting pressure on the international community to eliminate sanctions.
11) Verbalized threats against the US, Britain. and the UN by Saddam.
12) Ongoing human rights violations against the citizens of Iraq by the Iraqui government.
13) Strategically good location for other Middle Eastern affairs.
14) Long history of proven, and often successful, biological, chemical and nuclear programs.
15) Intelligence hinting that some of the above programs were likely active.
16) And all right about this time, some very nasty ICBM tech went missing from off the coast.
There are many more.
In the decade that followed Gulf War I, we bombed Iraq, on average, over 50 times per year for blatent attacks against the UN. The motivation behind taking out that government might have included the possibility of WMD, or Strategically locating bases, or high oil prices, but there were so many reasons to wipe out that country that the refutation of any single one is pointless and is only undertaken by morons who must distil everthing into soundbites, the volume of the argument being a testament to how prolific such morons are.
Anyone who thought we went to war because Saddam might have had some mustard gas was and is a moron.
We went to war because Iraq continuously breached the negotiated cease fire for a decade and we got tire of air bombing them on a weekly basis and supporting an embargo that was internationally unpopular.
Although there is something to be said against throwing your pearls before swine. It wastes your time and annoys the pigs.
This is why email is an obsolete protocol. I cannot believe we stick to these flawed protocols and bitch about the consequences.
For cognition, however, you need only model the overall important behavior of the circuit, not the details. An anagolous problem would be, given an adder circuit, model the behavior in a computer... Actually modeling the way signals propogate through the adder is extremely computationally expensive if all you are interested in is adding numbers together.
Knowing *WHAT* to model about a neurons behavior is the important part in order to be able to figure out the OP's calculation with any degree of accurracy, and we are a way from figuring that out. Given, however, the current scale of the state of the art, vs. the goal of human-level cognition, a 20-30 year timeline for being able to accomplish cognition in silicon seems a reasonable although ambitious estimate. The estimate of it requiring a machine the size of the moon, however, seems vastly inflated.
yup. The neurons have alot of chemical work to do before being able to fire again. Most soures I've seen measure the neurons rate of fire in Hz, not even kHz as you suggest, and certainly not the GHz of the OP.
I leave my box up 24/7. I often need to access my boxen from other boxen, which is why they stay up, so I TS in (on windows) or SSH or VNC in on Linux. Many times I will leave a browser open for days or weeks, mostly because I'm not thinking about it. If these were game consoles or other commodities, then I would see your point, but they are computers, and the reason I own them is because I need them to compute, 24/7. So, yes, this is a real world problem.
Things are easy to install on Windows??? Am I hearing you right??
I want to install an app that does XYZ in windows.... I shall compare the
Windows: There is no repository of applications. No "stable" application repository where the apps have proven themselves to play nice with others. No "ustable" repository. No nothing. Therefore there is no way to search for xyz apps. You best hope is to google for apps that do that kind of thing.
Linux: I query for apps that do xyz and I get a nice list of both commercial and non commercial apps available for that purpose, along with their level of stability.
Windows: Once I have identified an app, on windows I must either go to the website of the software vendor and download an installer to run, or maybe order a CD from a website or catalog and have it mailed to me, or get off my ass and drive to a software store where I phisically pick up the bits and sneakernet them to my machine. I then go through a process of locking up my machine for a time whilst a not-very-standardized install process magically does stuff to my machine, that 15% of the time can never be undone.
Linux: Having searched for and found an app, I click install. If I have to buy a licence to use it, I will get a url link to give my credit card info to so it will work.
I'm sure glad Windows streamlines everything for me.
What makes a system running only pine, lynx and vi years ago more useable than a system running only those apps today? The big bloated apps of today did not exist back then (or, if they did, they were *bad*). On the other hand, some of those good old small tools have undergone some massive useability advances.
But if they did not release Vista, those new PC sales would slowly transition to their competitors (Mac, linux, solaris) as XP became more dated... at which time they would be dead.
They do have an option of simply releasing early and often and evolving XP... essentially delivering Vista over the course of years to it's customers. That's a very nice and user friendly model, but has the drawback of not having big media fanfare every few years.
XP is close.
Hell, other than a new GUI API, there really isn't much Vista can do that XP can't.
XP, on the other hand, is a bit faster on lower end hardware, and less RAM consumptive on any hardware. Not to mention that XP has better accessibility functions and that most features of Vista will likely be backported to XP anyway. Arguably, the security model of XP could even be considered better, as the whole LUA thing is a gaping hole IMHO because your social engineering your own users to do the wrong thing.
But Vista has one big advantage... it will be supported further into the future, so you're going to have to buy it eventually if you want to stick with Windows.
spybot is one of the worst. I had to disable it on my GF's computer because it was making it slower than the spyware was.
First sentance is a bit sarcastic ;)
GF's machine. She wanted access to some spreadsheets of mine and owns office which she normally uses on her laptop. In this case, I was using her desktop.
Needless to say. MS Office was not a workable solution because it didn't play nice with standards. Any number of alternative solutions were available, none of them Microsoft's. Other products that use a proprietary format can at least fall back to accepted standards as an alternative to work in normal environments... Microsoft Office does not. When even the small, open source products provide a trivial solution (or at least make a valiant attempt) to what in my mind is a fairly mundane computing task, I would expect a mature product to be up to the task. Microsoft's suite is not. For my purposes it is an inferior product, as I don't care how well it can intermix fonts and indent my letter, if I can't even read my letters, written to a standard, with their product, then their product sucks.
I was using a Windows box the other day. Overall, the OS seemed solid and polished, so I installed MS Office.
Office opened up, I typed some characters... simple first steps. All seemed to be in order, so I go to try it out with some of my documents.
I go to open a document I have opened with a few other Word Processors.. nothing. Word can't read any of my standard ODF documents. All my other word processing software can read Word docs, but Microsoft can't read the basic, common denominator standard. So much for that.
So, on to spreadsheets. Open up an open document format spreadsheet with Excell. Excell somehow thinks this is a CSV formatted file of all things. I can't use any of my existing spreadsheets on this new software.
Rather than spen untold painful hours converting everything, I uninstalled office and installed OOo for Windows. It seems that MS has alot of work to do to bring their office suite up to par with current standards. As it is, it seems barely useable, *IF* you can get access to a Windows machine and only if that machine has MS Office installed, which is a fairly rare combination from where I stand. I wonder why I don't see more "Windows isn't ready for the desktop" comments, because from my vantage point, that's the impression I get every time I struggle to use the damn stuff.
You're just not conditioned enough. I am lulled to sleep by the sound of whirring, healthy servers :)
Unfortunately though, My girlfriend is not, so the servers now sleep outside the bedroom.
However, DocBook has the capability to write the documentation once and, via xslt, give you a nice website, print form and help file for an application.
Idle proc cycles are the devil's playground
For the record though, these are *BAD* habits in C++. Use the destructor, Luke.
That's an obfuscated goto, and IMHO worse.