It's difficult to believe that the government could spend that much money [...]
Compared with what, the bailout in the US?
Australia, remember, has the Future Fund, which is essentially the retirement benefits of public servants. It's not there to spend, but it is there to invest. This is an investment.
Moreover, at least some of this money will likely be redirected funds in the budgets of existing quangos who are already working on the technical issues, such as the CSIRO and NICTA.
No, I know both languages fairly well, I know they're almost incomparable and am constantly annoyed by people who assert that C++ is just C with a few bits added.
It's a little-known fact, for example, that C++ has rules which say that the compiler can assume that two pointers aren't aliased under certain circumstances, where C compilers can't make that assumption because of C's weaker type system. Pointer aliasing is one of those issues that can prevent the compiler from generating SIMD or vector instructions.
Secondly, there is one clear advantage of C++ over C here: Vector operations can be exploited by library writers in a seamless way. Someone could, for example, rewrite std::valarray to exploit the new instructions fairly easily, and existing programs which use it will Just Work(tm).
Having said that, it's more likely that the first libraries to use them will be those based on BLAS.
Re:Structural engineering welcomes this.
on
Larrabee ISA Revealed
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· Score: 2, Informative
As a structural engineering in training who is starting to cut his teeth in writing structural analysis software, these are truly interesting times in the personal computer world.
There's one drawback to the current crop of CPUs, though. More cores per die means less cache per core. So depending on what you're doing, this could actually degrade performance (all other things being equal) over older SMP machines.
The research is largely paid for by the Australian tax payer [...]
If by "largely", you mean 60%, that's correct. Some 40% of the CSIRO budget comes from sales (e.g. publishing), commercial spinoffs, public-private partnerships and royalties.
When you put it like that, it sounds dumb. But we're not talking about toppling skyscrapers, we're talking about hobby rockets of a similar design to those that Hamas periodically fires into Israel. And which, I might add, are extremely useless as weapons: only a dozen or so people have been killed in the last 10 years by this kind of rocket.
Poor, naive people who did Economics 101 but never made it to Economics 102.
"Merit" is a very easy word to say, but a very hard concept to pin down. When pay raises are on the line, you need an objective way to tell who are the good teachers and who aren't. As soon as you do that, you instantly provide a way for bad teachers to game the system.
Grammar is not even close to being the most difficult problem in language technology. Ambiguity is all-pervasive, from phonology to sociology. Of all of these ambiguities, sentence structure is, by far, the most tractable.
Just as we don't require that non-comment lines start at column 3 on each punched card any more, Lojban is obsolete.
If they can, then this exposes a contradiction in the system (since you didn't really do it). Use this contradiction to prove that it was you who did it. Mission accomplished.
If they can't, then they have no proof that you didn't do it.
It has one advantage over many others: It minimises the number of writes required to do most file system operations. On a flash memory device, that's important.
By comparison, it would be insane to try to put a Berkeley FFS on a flash card.
This is what linguists refer to the "tabloid headline question mark". Its use is to say something inflammatory and only tangentially related to the story in order to get readers.
Examples:
"Is Jennifer pregnant?" "Steve Ballmer: Love child of Satan?"
Think about a computation such as X - Y. If X and Y have the 3 first same digit, then you will have 0 significant bit for the result.
Any numeric analyst worth their pay will have thought hard about every calculation. If there's a subtraction, then either it won't be two floating-point numbers of similar magnitude, or the result won't be crucial (e.g. it might be an error estimate rather than the actual result).
If the characteristics of the hardware are known, then algorithms can be designed to suit them. This is just another tool in the toolbox.
if you do anything more complicated than adding and multiplying, then you need accurate computation.
Because, of course, IEEE-754 floating point numbers are renowned for their accuracy.
Freedom was very eloquently defined by the founder of the Democrats, Thomas Jefferson [...]
That's one definition, and it's from a slaveowner. As the man himself said, "Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other." With truly no restraints, justice will always take a back seat.
"Freedom" has been defined by probably a thousand philosophers over the years. Jefferson's definition is but one of many.
"Freedom" is always defined as whatever the person defining "freedom" wants. That's why nobody agrees on what "freedom" actually means.
For example, I make $75000 a year writing software. The government takes about $20k, so I only get to spend $55k doing the stuff I want.
I don't know what country you live in, but taxation is the price that you pay for living in civilised society.
You did not earn your $75k all by yourself. Every day, you rely on things that the government has paid for. If you commute, then you use the road network or the public transport system. Even if you don't, you use the electricity grid, the water distribution system and the sewerage system.
"Liberty" means exactly what it's always meant: The right to live like "I" want to live, to value what "I" value, to think what "I" think and to do what "I" want to do.
Under such a system, others are free to choose to live in a way other than "I" do. They'll get a rough deal, but that's their free choice for not being more like "I" am.
Slashdot Mirror
"A week is a long time in politics." -- Harold Wilson
Compared with what, the bailout in the US?
Australia, remember, has the Future Fund, which is essentially the retirement benefits of public servants. It's not there to spend, but it is there to invest. This is an investment.
Moreover, at least some of this money will likely be redirected funds in the budgets of existing quangos who are already working on the technical issues, such as the CSIRO and NICTA.
No, I know both languages fairly well, I know they're almost incomparable and am constantly annoyed by people who assert that C++ is just C with a few bits added.
It's a little-known fact, for example, that C++ has rules which say that the compiler can assume that two pointers aren't aliased under certain circumstances, where C compilers can't make that assumption because of C's weaker type system. Pointer aliasing is one of those issues that can prevent the compiler from generating SIMD or vector instructions.
First off, there is no such language as "C/C++".
Secondly, there is one clear advantage of C++ over C here: Vector operations can be exploited by library writers in a seamless way. Someone could, for example, rewrite std::valarray to exploit the new instructions fairly easily, and existing programs which use it will Just Work(tm).
Having said that, it's more likely that the first libraries to use them will be those based on BLAS.
There's one drawback to the current crop of CPUs, though. More cores per die means less cache per core. So depending on what you're doing, this could actually degrade performance (all other things being equal) over older SMP machines.
If by "largely", you mean 60%, that's correct. Some 40% of the CSIRO budget comes from sales (e.g. publishing), commercial spinoffs, public-private partnerships and royalties.
When you put it like that, it sounds dumb. But we're not talking about toppling skyscrapers, we're talking about hobby rockets of a similar design to those that Hamas periodically fires into Israel. And which, I might add, are extremely useless as weapons: only a dozen or so people have been killed in the last 10 years by this kind of rocket.
Poor, naive people who did Economics 101 but never made it to Economics 102.
"Merit" is a very easy word to say, but a very hard concept to pin down. When pay raises are on the line, you need an objective way to tell who are the good teachers and who aren't. As soon as you do that, you instantly provide a way for bad teachers to game the system.
...the kind with PhDs in computer science and the kind without.
Grammar is not even close to being the most difficult problem in language technology. Ambiguity is all-pervasive, from phonology to sociology. Of all of these ambiguities, sentence structure is, by far, the most tractable.
Just as we don't require that non-comment lines start at column 3 on each punched card any more, Lojban is obsolete.
Exactly!
Either they can prove it, or they can't.
If they can, then this exposes a contradiction in the system (since you didn't really do it). Use this contradiction to prove that it was you who did it. Mission accomplished.
If they can't, then they have no proof that you didn't do it.
It has one advantage over many others: It minimises the number of writes required to do most file system operations. On a flash memory device, that's important.
By comparison, it would be insane to try to put a Berkeley FFS on a flash card.
Or develop it.
More to the point, standards (even if only de facto standards) are good. FAT is a wheel that you don't have to invent here.
Oh, that's easy. Just say that you did it, and defy them to prove otherwise.
Luxury!
We used to have to do it in six minutes using only a wax tablet, if we were lucky!
And Helen Mirren!
This is what linguists refer to the "tabloid headline question mark". Its use is to say something inflammatory and only tangentially related to the story in order to get readers.
Examples:
"Is Jennifer pregnant?"
"Steve Ballmer: Love child of Satan?"
Quite. Any numerical method which is implicitly stable may well still work well enough on this hardware.
Any numeric analyst worth their pay will have thought hard about every calculation. If there's a subtraction, then either it won't be two floating-point numbers of similar magnitude, or the result won't be crucial (e.g. it might be an error estimate rather than the actual result).
If the characteristics of the hardware are known, then algorithms can be designed to suit them. This is just another tool in the toolbox.
Because, of course, IEEE-754 floating point numbers are renowned for their accuracy.
That's one definition, and it's from a slaveowner. As the man himself said, "Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other." With truly no restraints, justice will always take a back seat.
"Freedom" has been defined by probably a thousand philosophers over the years. Jefferson's definition is but one of many.
Conceptual Mathematics by Lawvere and Schanuel is the one maths book that I wish I'd been exposed to in high school.
You do know I was making a joke, right?
"Freedom" is always defined as whatever the person defining "freedom" wants. That's why nobody agrees on what "freedom" actually means.
I don't know what country you live in, but taxation is the price that you pay for living in civilised society.
You did not earn your $75k all by yourself. Every day, you rely on things that the government has paid for. If you commute, then you use the road network or the public transport system. Even if you don't, you use the electricity grid, the water distribution system and the sewerage system.
There is no such thing as a "self-made man".
"Liberty" means exactly what it's always meant: The right to live like "I" want to live, to value what "I" value, to think what "I" think and to do what "I" want to do.
Under such a system, others are free to choose to live in a way other than "I" do. They'll get a rough deal, but that's their free choice for not being more like "I" am.
Nothing's better than monosodium glutamate and lark's vomit.
This is one of those cases where it's an advantage to be part of the student union. They almost all have a free student legal service.