Your NTFS vs OS X x86 thing really makes no sense. The former requires reverse-engineering and reimplementing a large, complex system. The latter requires breaking a small, simple system in a few key places. It's the difference between building a bridge (which is hard), and surgically bringing one down (which is easy).
Dvorak's was a dumbass when I read his shit in magazines a decade ago, and he's still a dumbass. Maybe he was right about the Apple switch. A monkey flings enough shit at a wall, some of it has got to stick.
It's not really that much. 200 mph = 90 meters per second. Say you're moving a 1000 kg mass. Assuming constant force of gravity to simplify the math, that works out to 1000 kg * 9.81 m/s^2 * 90 m/s = 882kW, or about 1,100 horsepower.
The Dual G5 is a workstation, with a workstation CPU, pitted against other workstation CPUs. There would be no way the test would be fair if they compared a dual G5 machine to the Athlon64 or Pentium 4, because neither of those CPUs support SMP.
The benchmarks were run with OS X and Linux. GCC is the standard compiler for those platforms. Thus, GCC is the compiler that should be used for those benchmarks, if some idea about real world performance is desired.
An article that puts the word "socket"* in quotes is definitely an article that does not belong on Slashdot:)
*) No, it is not wrong for me to use quotation marks around "socket" when I bitched about the author using quotation marks around "socket". The author was quoting to define the word "socket". I was quoting because I was reffering to "socket" the word, not socket the thing.
$4500 for a student working for two months over the summer isn't that bad of a deal. That's like $13 bucks an hour, which is a lot more than you'd get working places where most college students work.
120mm heatsinks with 120mm fans are great for keeping even a high-end processor cool with little noise. Turbulence noise increases with the sixth power of air velocity. To move the same amount of air, a 80mm fan has to push air over twice as fast as a 120mm fan. So a large, slow 120mm fan is very much quieter than a smaller faster 80mm fan.
Only *five* times? Try 500 times. That fan looks to be about a foot in diameter. If it pushes about 25 cubic meters per second, then the gas velocity through it is ~800mph. Yay for supersonic flow in your case!
Complete and utter bullshit. Accepted economic theory is that workers are NOT nearly as mobile as corporations, which puts them at a significant disadvantage if they are not protected. Tarrifs and trade restrictions are the accepted way to do this
I don't know what economic theory you're reading, but there are few things economists agree upon, and a mutual hatred of taxes, tarrifs, and trade restrictions is one of them. This has been true ever since "The Wealth of Nations" was written.
It's not surprising that you've got big entities who also have academic divisions. The schism between academia and the commercial world isn't nearly as big as its made out to be, though it is bigger in computer science than in other engineering fields. This is especially true of very large or very small companies, both of which see a particular benefit in utilizing the advancements of academia. The former, because they are so big that they can only grow through innovation, and the latter because they are so small they can only survive through innovation.
This is like real life. And I disagree that this is something we shouldn't be promoting anyway. There are a lot of areas where its impossible to define a detailed specification before hand. Take your average DARPA project. In many cases, nobody knows what the final solution should look like, or even what is possible given current technology. In such situations, the specifications are vague and often changing, because the process of doing the research makes the end result more clear.
Part of the reason that these ICFP contests are held are to demonstrate the strengths of functional languages. Traditionally, exploratory programming and rapid refactoring has been considered one of these strengths. Thus it makes sense to have a contest to demonstrate these strengths, especially when the conditions of the contest are applicable to so many real world scenarios.
The government i the one that sets tarrifs, trade restrictions, immigration restrictions, etc.
All of which are anathema to a modern economy.
They've done nothing to prevent it
By that logic, the government is responsible for everything. That's a horrible way to define the role of government in a free society. I don't remember anything in the Constitution that says our government is responsible for ensuring that obsolete workers keep their jobs anyway.
even though accepted economic theory is that it is their job to take care of it in one way or another.
Wrong! Accepted economic theory holds that the government must take care of a specific set of things (namely, any public goods, like defense, the environment, etc). It points out while it is less efficient for government to do these things than for the free market to do them, the free market solutions don't work, so it doesn't matter if they're more efficient.
Jobs, on the other hand, are not a public good (according to the economic definition of public good). Therefore, the government does not need to regulate it, because the free market can do a fine job of it. Accepted economic theory says nothing about tarrifs and trade restrictions other than that they are inefficient and shouldn't be avoided at all costs.
No. Humans are significantly different from all other animals, in that humans do things not dictated by instinct.
So do apes.
Higher brain functions make humans "unnatural".
It's becoming increasingly clear that humans differ not in that we have higher brain functions and other animals don't, but rather that our higher brain functions are more developed than that of other animals. But let me play along anyway. So you're saying that you can categorize creatures by the sort of brain functions they exhibit. So a monkey is higher than a worm, and a human is higher than a monkey. Well, by your logic, an (early) embryo is lower than all three, because unlike even a worm, it has no senses at all.
What humans create is mechanical, what "God" created was complex biological systems. There is a major distinction.
Not if you don't believe that God created everything but humans. Even if God created the universe, and let nature take its course, then humans are still natural. If something arises naturally, then anything it creates must too be natural. Again, anthills are the work of the organized labor of thousands of creatures. Yet, they are natural. So too is a human house natural.
Not true. There are many ways to look at it (that don't really involve morality), that would find destroying one to save many more is not necessarily worthwhile.
Like? All appeals to hold life invioble are necessarily moral in nature. They require an appeal to an unprovable, presumably "higher" truth.
That's a very naive way of thinking, but unfortunately all too common. In the third world, a lot of the time it's not the resource that's the problem, but distribution. Food is easy to get. There is a huge surplus of it in the world. It's getting the food to where it needs to go that's the problem. The same is often true for healthcare. When told that 60% of people in a country lack access to health services, the "obvious" solution is "build more hospitals!" However, in many countries, the hospitals are underutilized as it is! No, the real solution is harder, more complex, and more subtle. It involves getting people educated to go to clinics instead of local healers, figuring out transportation networks to get people too those clinics, and figuring out sustainable funding mechanisms to keep the clinics operating. Even then, it's often not enough, and you've got to use "clever" solutions to get people to the hospitals.
Saying "the only way to deal with starvation is food" is also very short-sighted. Nothing is free. Governments either pay for food with money, or by mortgaging their independence (in the form of accepting external controls in order to accept foreign aid). Either way, buying food isn't sustainable. It'll work temporarily, but the problem will just come back the next day (and probably worse because the population will have grown), and if the world economy hits a downturn (which reduces foreign aid), your people will starve anyway. The only way to get your population fed is to ensure that they have the resources to feed themselves.
Basically, yes. There was a time when the caste system was enforced by law. One day, the anulled that law, and poof, it's no longer enforced. I didn't say it didn't still have an impact on society, I said it was no longer enforced.
It is in capabilities where we are fundamentally different.
Our differences are a matter of degree, not quality. That makes us quantitatively different, not fundementally different.
Not any more than sperm or eggs.
You're missing the point entirely. It's not as if fertilized eggs are any more genetically complete than eggs or sperm or kidney cells. They have a different genetic makeup, but all three have an equally complete set. All three contain all the knowledge to create a human being. The only difference is that right now only fertilized eggs can be turned into people. But that's just a factor of what we use to turn embryos into people (wombs) at this point in time. In a situation where that is no longer true, this distinction will no longer hold.
Let me approach the point this way. Scientists are not killing babies. Embryos are not yet babies, but they could be. So what you're really complaining about is the fact that scientists are not putting the embryos into a place (ie: a womb), where they could turn into babies. If there existed a technology to turn a kidney cell into a baby, using your logic someone could fault scientists for not putting the kidney cell into that machine. That's the sort of innane conclusions you reach when you try to protect something based on what it could become, rather than based on what it actually is.
As written, these are self-refuting statements.
Not self-refuting, rather mutually contridictory, but the point is well taken. I intended to add a "in general" in there. I don't believe that in general the ends justify the means, but rather that particular ends to justify particular means.
Rational? Using what basis of morality? And does this only apply to those who cannot defend themselves, or will you apply it to everyone?
Rationality requires no morality. Morality is a construction of man, that differs from person to person. Rationality is universal.
So would the embroys, if they but had the chance to live.
So would my steak, if it had been given the chance to live. So would the bacteria that you so callously wash off in the sink. Self-preservation is not unique to man. But we kill cows and bacteria all the time, because life is not sacrosenct. We avoid killing people, because that would have negative social ramifications, but we do not consider even human life to be invioble. The fact that human life is vioble is written into our very laws.
But if you can justify destroying those who cannot defend themselves, I'm sure we can come up with a justification for ignoring your protestations.
There is no "themselves" there. The word "self" refers to sentient creatures. Embryos are not sentient. They have no "self".
As for my protestations, you miss the point. You said that I shouldn't mind if you decide to kill me. My point was that I have a good reason to mind (self-preservation), one that has nothing to do with my believing that life is inviolate. The fact that you could come up with justifications really has no bearing on either mine or your original point.
But I'll play along again. Depending on your justifications, you could very well be right. If, after all, I was about to shoot your child, well, most people would consider you quite justified in killing me. We see yet again that human life is not inviolate at all, but rather that its taking is justifiable for a number of reasons.
And who are the elite who decide?
You're dodging my point, which is that life is just a priority among many. Not that it "should be" (I have no interest in "should be"), but that it is whether we like it or not. Who decides where it stands on the list of priorities is really irrelevent to my point.
I don't hate India. Silly people on Slashdot hate India. Either that, or blame our "By-the-Big-Corporation-for-the-Big-Corporation government". What does the government have to do with outsourcing (companies do it, not the government)? What does India's caste system (which is no longer enforced) have to do with things anyway? And how does the caste system help provide cheap programmers?
Geez, the lack of logic and knowledge is frightening.
The way I see it, open source isn't too much different from software projects in academia. Academic projects are more formal, perhaps more esoteric, but like OSS projects, done for the love of the work, the furthering of the field, and usually open source as well. If they are not similar, they are at least good complements to each other.
From this point of view, closed-source folks criticizing open source folks for lack of innovation is comical. The vast majority of closed source "innovation" derives from academia. Tell me, what has Microsoft, or Sun, or the like done in the last decade that is truely original? Don't get me wrong, they're great at making good implementations of existing ideas, but they don't make anything new. You think there is anything in Longhorn that hasn't been seen before? You think there is anything in Solaris 10 that hasn't been seen before?
If commercial folks want to mock open source folks for lacking innovation, will they please sit patiently while the academic folks mock them?
Slashdot Mirror
Your NTFS vs OS X x86 thing really makes no sense. The former requires reverse-engineering and reimplementing a large, complex system. The latter requires breaking a small, simple system in a few key places. It's the difference between building a bridge (which is hard), and surgically bringing one down (which is easy).
Can you tell a difference between a PC using an intel chip or an amd? no.
Yes, you can. The one using AMD is faster and cheaper and uses less electricity.
2, 4, 5, 1, 3. Though, I estimate things will skip over 1 and go straight to 3.
Dvorak's was a dumbass when I read his shit in magazines a decade ago, and he's still a dumbass. Maybe he was right about the Apple switch. A monkey flings enough shit at a wall, some of it has got to stick.
That's like $100m a year. Its a pittance.
It's not really that much. 200 mph = 90 meters per second. Say you're moving a 1000 kg mass. Assuming constant force of gravity to simplify the math, that works out to 1000 kg * 9.81 m/s^2 * 90 m/s = 882kW, or about 1,100 horsepower.
The Dual G5 is a workstation, with a workstation CPU, pitted against other workstation CPUs. There would be no way the test would be fair if they compared a dual G5 machine to the Athlon64 or Pentium 4, because neither of those CPUs support SMP.
The benchmarks were run with OS X and Linux. GCC is the standard compiler for those platforms. Thus, GCC is the compiler that should be used for those benchmarks, if some idea about real world performance is desired.
It really wouldn't make a difference. The low-level benchmarks are CPU hogs, OS performance has almost no impact on them.
An article that puts the word "socket"* in quotes is definitely an article that does not belong on Slashdot :)
*) No, it is not wrong for me to use quotation marks around "socket" when I bitched about the author using quotation marks around "socket". The author was quoting to define the word "socket". I was quoting because I was reffering to "socket" the word, not socket the thing.
That's nothing. that is a big-ass fan. 2550 RPM and 3000lb of air per second. Yes, that's 2,352,941 CFM (at sea-level)...
FYI, that's a GE90. The power to run that fan is probably upwards of 50-60 megawatts
$4500 for a student working for two months over the summer isn't that bad of a deal. That's like $13 bucks an hour, which is a lot more than you'd get working places where most college students work.
120mm heatsinks with 120mm fans are great for keeping even a high-end processor cool with little noise. Turbulence noise increases with the sixth power of air velocity. To move the same amount of air, a 80mm fan has to push air over twice as fast as a 120mm fan. So a large, slow 120mm fan is very much quieter than a smaller faster 80mm fan.
Only *five* times? Try 500 times. That fan looks to be about a foot in diameter. If it pushes about 25 cubic meters per second, then the gas velocity through it is ~800mph. Yay for supersonic flow in your case!
Complete and utter bullshit. Accepted economic theory is that workers are NOT nearly as mobile as corporations, which puts them at a significant disadvantage if they are not protected. Tarrifs and trade restrictions are the accepted way to do this
I don't know what economic theory you're reading, but there are few things economists agree upon, and a mutual hatred of taxes, tarrifs, and trade restrictions is one of them. This has been true ever since "The Wealth of Nations" was written.
It's not surprising that you've got big entities who also have academic divisions. The schism between academia and the commercial world isn't nearly as big as its made out to be, though it is bigger in computer science than in other engineering fields. This is especially true of very large or very small companies, both of which see a particular benefit in utilizing the advancements of academia. The former, because they are so big that they can only grow through innovation, and the latter because they are so small they can only survive through innovation.
This is like real life. And I disagree that this is something we shouldn't be promoting anyway. There are a lot of areas where its impossible to define a detailed specification before hand. Take your average DARPA project. In many cases, nobody knows what the final solution should look like, or even what is possible given current technology. In such situations, the specifications are vague and often changing, because the process of doing the research makes the end result more clear.
Part of the reason that these ICFP contests are held are to demonstrate the strengths of functional languages. Traditionally, exploratory programming and rapid refactoring has been considered one of these strengths. Thus it makes sense to have a contest to demonstrate these strengths, especially when the conditions of the contest are applicable to so many real world scenarios.
The government i the one that sets tarrifs, trade restrictions, immigration restrictions, etc.
All of which are anathema to a modern economy.
They've done nothing to prevent it
By that logic, the government is responsible for everything. That's a horrible way to define the role of government in a free society. I don't remember anything in the Constitution that says our government is responsible for ensuring that obsolete workers keep their jobs anyway.
even though accepted economic theory is that it is their job to take care of it in one way or another.
Wrong! Accepted economic theory holds that the government must take care of a specific set of things (namely, any public goods, like defense, the environment, etc). It points out while it is less efficient for government to do these things than for the free market to do them, the free market solutions don't work, so it doesn't matter if they're more efficient.
Jobs, on the other hand, are not a public good (according to the economic definition of public good). Therefore, the government does not need to regulate it, because the free market can do a fine job of it. Accepted economic theory says nothing about tarrifs and trade restrictions other than that they are inefficient and shouldn't be avoided at all costs.
No. Humans are significantly different from all other animals, in that humans do things not dictated by instinct.
So do apes.
Higher brain functions make humans "unnatural".
It's becoming increasingly clear that humans differ not in that we have higher brain functions and other animals don't, but rather that our higher brain functions are more developed than that of other animals. But let me play along anyway. So you're saying that you can categorize creatures by the sort of brain functions they exhibit. So a monkey is higher than a worm, and a human is higher than a monkey. Well, by your logic, an (early) embryo is lower than all three, because unlike even a worm, it has no senses at all.
What humans create is mechanical, what "God" created was complex biological systems. There is a major distinction.
Not if you don't believe that God created everything but humans. Even if God created the universe, and let nature take its course, then humans are still natural. If something arises naturally, then anything it creates must too be natural. Again, anthills are the work of the organized labor of thousands of creatures. Yet, they are natural. So too is a human house natural.
Not true. There are many ways to look at it (that don't really involve morality), that would find destroying one to save many more is not necessarily worthwhile.
Like? All appeals to hold life invioble are necessarily moral in nature. They require an appeal to an unprovable, presumably "higher" truth.
That's a very naive way of thinking, but unfortunately all too common. In the third world, a lot of the time it's not the resource that's the problem, but distribution. Food is easy to get. There is a huge surplus of it in the world. It's getting the food to where it needs to go that's the problem. The same is often true for healthcare. When told that 60% of people in a country lack access to health services, the "obvious" solution is "build more hospitals!" However, in many countries, the hospitals are underutilized as it is! No, the real solution is harder, more complex, and more subtle. It involves getting people educated to go to clinics instead of local healers, figuring out transportation networks to get people too those clinics, and figuring out sustainable funding mechanisms to keep the clinics operating. Even then, it's often not enough, and you've got to use "clever" solutions to get people to the hospitals.
Saying "the only way to deal with starvation is food" is also very short-sighted. Nothing is free. Governments either pay for food with money, or by mortgaging their independence (in the form of accepting external controls in order to accept foreign aid). Either way, buying food isn't sustainable. It'll work temporarily, but the problem will just come back the next day (and probably worse because the population will have grown), and if the world economy hits a downturn (which reduces foreign aid), your people will starve anyway. The only way to get your population fed is to ensure that they have the resources to feed themselves.
Basically, yes. There was a time when the caste system was enforced by law. One day, the anulled that law, and poof, it's no longer enforced. I didn't say it didn't still have an impact on society, I said it was no longer enforced.
It is in capabilities where we are fundamentally different.
Our differences are a matter of degree, not quality. That makes us quantitatively different, not fundementally different.
Not any more than sperm or eggs.
You're missing the point entirely. It's not as if fertilized eggs are any more genetically complete than eggs or sperm or kidney cells. They have a different genetic makeup, but all three have an equally complete set. All three contain all the knowledge to create a human being. The only difference is that right now only fertilized eggs can be turned into people. But that's just a factor of what we use to turn embryos into people (wombs) at this point in time. In a situation where that is no longer true, this distinction will no longer hold.
Let me approach the point this way. Scientists are not killing babies. Embryos are not yet babies, but they could be. So what you're really complaining about is the fact that scientists are not putting the embryos into a place (ie: a womb), where they could turn into babies. If there existed a technology to turn a kidney cell into a baby, using your logic someone could fault scientists for not putting the kidney cell into that machine. That's the sort of innane conclusions you reach when you try to protect something based on what it could become, rather than based on what it actually is.
As written, these are self-refuting statements.
Not self-refuting, rather mutually contridictory, but the point is well taken. I intended to add a "in general" in there. I don't believe that in general the ends justify the means, but rather that particular ends to justify particular means.
Rational? Using what basis of morality? And does this only apply to those who cannot defend themselves, or will you apply it to everyone?
Rationality requires no morality. Morality is a construction of man, that differs from person to person. Rationality is universal.
So would the embroys, if they but had the chance to live.
So would my steak, if it had been given the chance to live. So would the bacteria that you so callously wash off in the sink. Self-preservation is not unique to man. But we kill cows and bacteria all the time, because life is not sacrosenct. We avoid killing people, because that would have negative social ramifications, but we do not consider even human life to be invioble. The fact that human life is vioble is written into our very laws.
But if you can justify destroying those who cannot defend themselves, I'm sure we can come up with a justification for ignoring your protestations.
There is no "themselves" there. The word "self" refers to sentient creatures. Embryos are not sentient. They have no "self".
As for my protestations, you miss the point. You said that I shouldn't mind if you decide to kill me. My point was that I have a good reason to mind (self-preservation), one that has nothing to do with my believing that life is inviolate. The fact that you could come up with justifications really has no bearing on either mine or your original point.
But I'll play along again. Depending on your justifications, you could very well be right. If, after all, I was about to shoot your child, well, most people would consider you quite justified in killing me. We see yet again that human life is not inviolate at all, but rather that its taking is justifiable for a number of reasons.
And who are the elite who decide?
You're dodging my point, which is that life is just a priority among many. Not that it "should be" (I have no interest in "should be"), but that it is whether we like it or not. Who decides where it stands on the list of priorities is really irrelevent to my point.
I don't hate India. Silly people on Slashdot hate India. Either that, or blame our "By-the-Big-Corporation-for-the-Big-Corporation government". What does the government have to do with outsourcing (companies do it, not the government)? What does India's caste system (which is no longer enforced) have to do with things anyway? And how does the caste system help provide cheap programmers?
Geez, the lack of logic and knowledge is frightening.
TeX? Macsyma? Emacs? They were both killer apps in their day, and even now, they have features that just plain cannot be matches by the competition.
The way I see it, open source isn't too much different from software projects in academia. Academic projects are more formal, perhaps more esoteric, but like OSS projects, done for the love of the work, the furthering of the field, and usually open source as well. If they are not similar, they are at least good complements to each other.
From this point of view, closed-source folks criticizing open source folks for lack of innovation is comical. The vast majority of closed source "innovation" derives from academia. Tell me, what has Microsoft, or Sun, or the like done in the last decade that is truely original? Don't get me wrong, they're great at making good implementations of existing ideas, but they don't make anything new. You think there is anything in Longhorn that hasn't been seen before? You think there is anything in Solaris 10 that hasn't been seen before?
If commercial folks want to mock open source folks for lacking innovation, will they please sit patiently while the academic folks mock them?