So, let me get this straight...you're an astrophysicist who runs SPEC for his research? Somehow, I find that hard to believe. Probably, you run some other kind of numerical code, compiled with whatever compiler you can afford for your chosen architecture, run with data sets that only you have.
There is only one benchmark that can tell you how your app will behave...compiling and running your app. Choosing blindly on the basis of a SPEC benchmark, which has been completely tweaked by the chip vendor, is useless.
Consider the Mathematica demonstration: Wolfram has no reason not to optimize the hell out of their Xeon/Pentium versions, because that is a huge market for them. Yet, their G5 code blew their Xeon/Pentium code away.
I originally wanted to mod you down as overrated, but thought it was more important to point out that Benjamin Franklin was *by no means* a Federalist.
Benjamin Franklin had always been interested in a *uni*cameral legislature, and an executive by rotating committee. Nothing could be further from the ideas of the Federalists.
The opposition Jefferson was talking about had used the Alien and Sedition acts and aggressive use of libel statutes in an effort to suppress any pro-French, anti-Federalist sentiment. John Adams and Franklin in particular were at opposite ends of the spectrum. Read _American Aurora_ if you want a view from the (oppositely biased) Democratic-Republican trenches.
These figures completely IGNORE the presence of other Federal taxes that affect paychecks, namely Social Security and Medicare. That household which you claim has no income tax almost certainly has a 7.65% federal payroll tax, which is reduced to zero for wages above $87,000.
Not to mention sales tax, gas tax, etc., which are taxes on consumption which are proportionately higher for low-income households.
This number, typically quoted by Wall Street editorial page writers, and assorted other conservative commentators conveniently and completely IGNORES the fact that there are other Federal payroll taxes than Federal Income Tax.
Perhaps you have heard of the Social Security Tax, and Medicare tax? These also come out of paychecks, but have caps of roughly $90k annual wages. So the people up in the top bracket have a marginal rate on these taxes of ZERO percent.
Add in 7.65 percent to your lower income bracket tax rates, and it no longer looks so imbalanced, does it? Keep in mind also that this tax only applies to wages, not unearned income or capital gains.
K-Mart had/has nowhere near the death-grip power over suppliers and the very aggressive supply-chain management that Walmart has. K-mart's discounts were sporadic and well-advertised, meaning that customers cherry-picked the specials, leaving those shelves bare, because K-mart's supply chain couldn't always predict demand for these one-shot discounts. Walmart slowly squeezes down prices (and costs) over time, and keeps supply lines chugging along.
In addition to location advantages that an AC mentioned, Walmart just plain ate their lunch, just like Dell has eaten the lunch of just about every other PC maker.
Syntactic sugar is harmful when it is just sugar. When it radically transforms your programming language to fit the problem domain like a glove, then it is an extremely powerful tool.
A program that looks like the problem is easy to understand for anyone who knows what the problem is.
Without syntactic sugar, all Java code looks like Java code, no matter what problem it solves. So there is a barrier to seeing the underlying task that is being accomplished.
You could call programmer-defined types as syntactic sugar, which has the same hazard: unless the next programmer understands what your types are, he presumably can't understand your problem. But all users of OOP languages know that this isn't true. Imagine the argument: "all programs should use just the built-in types, so that every program can be read more easily."
Well-designed user-defined types make the program easier to understand because you have created a language of types which reflects the problem domain. Well-designed user-defined code structures do the same thing, with a potentially huge gain in clarity.
Admittedly, poorly-designed code structures can make the program hard to understand. But poorly-designed programs always are hard to understand.
Talking about Lisp macros as if they were syntactic sugar misses an important point: the syntactic sugar is defined using the full Lisp language. It's potentially *very smart* sugar. You apparently understand this (you mention domain-specific languages), but I think it is important to emphasize that Lisp macros can be about code transfiguration, instead of just code sweetening.
The possibility of wireless matching landline speeds is a "not now, not ever." The miracle of glass fiber blows any possible wireless link out of the water. Wireless has GHz carrier frequencies, optical has multi-THz. There is just an unbelievable amount of bandwidth on that fiber. And practically zero crosstalk between multiple glass fibers in a cable bundle. Need more channels? Light up one of those many glass fibers you left dark in the cable. Or, put another optical carrier in that fiber. Yes, it costs money, but so does adding wireless access points.
You really think society can work without money? Then why the hell was it even invented 3000+ years ago?
I don't know what the hell you do, but I go to work each day because my paychecks keep clearing. That's good for me because it lets me get a place to live and food to eat in exchange for my having worked for a company that doesn't give me either. In fact, a company that makes stuff that only other companies want to have. My landlord doesn't want what I produce. Neither does the grocery store. But someone does, and they give my company money for it, and my company gives money to me, and I give money to everyone else who has stuff that I need.
You think there's going to be some kind of utopia where I go to the grocery store, and they just give me food because I "deserve" it, and the farmers and crop pickers keep busting their ass and gave their food to the grocery store because they felt like it? Hell no.
Free to use, except for all that money to keep the snow off during the winter. And to cut the grass during the summer. And to patrol for broken down cars and accidents. And to try to limit speeding. And re-painting the lines periodically. And fixing potholes. And painting bridges so they don't rust. And to weigh trucks so they don't cause even more roadwear than they do when they are loaded to the legal limit.... Yeah, all that's free.
Most public roads in the U.S. are maintained via general government revenues, of which tickets are only a small fraction (consider the cost of the patrol car and policeman who pulled you over, or the meter maid who wrote your parking ticket, and how much of your ticket goes toward that). Most construction is also out of general revenues, although nominally the money comes from gasoline taxes. Only a small fraction comes from tolls, and other use fees.
This helps explain why Germany, with gasoline taxed to be about 8 times as expensive as the U.S. has highways on which you could drive 200 miles per hour. Because they paid through the nose for it.
Japan has a land area of about 378,000 km^2, or 146,000 mi^2. That is between Arizona and Montana in area; only about 15% smaller than California. Connecticut is about 5,500 mi^2. So Japan is over 25x the size of Connecticut.
"I do not think that BASIC is a good learning language"
BASIC is a fine learning language: the only question is what you learn. You learn that computers are machines that you can tell what to do and they will do it. You learn that computers follow your instructions precisely even if your instructions don't make any sense. You learn that computers can do math and manipulate text. What more do you want?
What you don't learn is how to write large programs that scale well and follow sound architectural practices. Who says a 9-year old has to learn this? Almost no 9-year old is going to have the patience to write a program that goes beyond BASIC's capabilities. Almost no 9-year old is going to have the patience to get a C++/Java program to compile without the instant gratification that BASIC can provide.
Do you think building blocks and Lego blocks are bad learning toys because you can't build houses or skyscrapers with them? You learn a lot by trying to build a 10 foot tower with wood blocks and *failing*. But once you have the basic inspiration, you are prepared to learn more about structural engineering. Trying to get a kid to learn first about concrete and rebar is a sure way to kill his interest.
What keeps "transporter technology" from being patented is that the inventor has to describe the invention in enough detail to enable a practitioner "skilled in the art" to make and use the invention.
No one can describe transporter technology in enough detail so that someone else could reproduce it, so there isn't a valid patent there.
In theory, the patent is the protection an inventor needs to prevent potential investors from simply stealing the idea without compensation. (In practice, you can steal a patented idea just as easily, and a penniless inventor can't afford to sue you.)
Well, that's your problem right there. If you've got some unique package of talents (and you probably do, unless you've been wasting your time), then you've got to market your product (YOU) effectively. Find out who needs you, and convince them.
Marketing is not some unique gift/defect that only a few people need to possess, it is an essential skill everyone needs to develop if they don't want to be a drone.
I have no idea how the parent got modded to +5, Insightful, because it makes a fundamental error: it assumes that "Labor" is a homogenous good.
Labor of some semi-trained person answering a telephone call from an ignoramus who can't open the box his new cable modem came in is not the same thing as the labor of a skilled programmer with knowledge of a technical domain. The supply of one is ample in India and the Philippines, while the other is not. Lumping these together as "labor" misses the whole point.
If you want to avoid being interchangable with someone in India, get yourself a competitive advantage so you *aren't* interchangeable.
Basically your someone who actually wants to learn everything about how your particular distro works.
Be thankful, if there werent people like this you wouldn't have heating, lighting, medical science or anything else more advanced than charred meat and possibly the wheel.
This is a bit extreme. Learning about any kind of computer OS is an exercise in the most ephemeral kind of knowledge known to man. Ask me about Apple II monitor commands and how useful my knowledge of them will be to all mankind even after my demise. Yes, they seemed vital and exciting to me in high school, but I now wish I had practiced more piano or learned a foreign language instead.
Some people do indeed know a lot more about Linux distributions than I do. For instance, the people RedHat pays for this to be their job.
In primitive societies, everyone was expected to be able to make their own arrows from scratch. We've progressed quite a bit since then, and one important way is through division of labor and specialization. I specialize in my field, you specialize in yours, but if my field isn't computer operating systems, any time I spend learning them is time taken away from more productive activity.
Don't flatter the slashdot mobs who believe that being a leet Linux hacker will somehow let them contribute in any useful way even to open source projects. Most open source projects progress because a focused core team (which may evolve over time) spend a large amount of time getting the project to a usable state. Lots of wannabees reading the source does not further the cause.
Funny, MAXIMIZE braking power and MINIMIZE heat produced are exact opposites. That braking takes away kinetic energy that has to go somewhere, namely in heating things up, such as the ablative heat shields that got vaporized.
Given that the maximum rotational speed of the Earth is roughly 1000 mph (24000 miles around the equator, 24 hours to rotate around), I'm interested in where the other 23000 mph comes from.
4000 mph relative to the Earth is the average velocity of the capsule over the flight.
The gravitational potential is (-m Me G)/r. Me G = 3.84 x 10^14 m^3/(sec^2 kg)
If we ignore the moon's gravitational well, and start at rest 384400 km away (avg. Earth moon distance), then the change in potential energy will be m 58 x 10^6 m^2/(sec^2 kg). This will equal the gain in kinetic energy, 1/2 m v^2, resulting in a v of 11000 m/sec. or 24000 miles per hour.
It is true that launches and orbits are chosen to take advantage of the Earth's rotation. Launch sites are usually equatorial, and orbits usually follow the Earth's rotation.
Just to be clear, I was referring to the achievements of the West (i.e., U.S.) in 1970 being matched by the Chinese in 2006. Of course China in 1970 was a grand mess.
Slashdot Mirror
You're "happy to use GCC," and get good correlation to SPEC results from the official site, which for Intel are not GCC results?
Get your story straight.
So, let me get this straight...you're an astrophysicist who runs SPEC for his research? Somehow, I find that hard to believe. Probably, you run some other kind of numerical code, compiled with whatever compiler you can afford for your chosen architecture, run with data sets that only you have.
There is only one benchmark that can tell you how your app will behave...compiling and running your app. Choosing blindly on the basis of a SPEC benchmark, which has been completely tweaked by the chip vendor, is useless.
Consider the Mathematica demonstration: Wolfram has no reason not to optimize the hell out of their Xeon/Pentium versions, because that is a huge market for them. Yet, their G5 code blew their Xeon/Pentium code away.
It's not just one failure, the distro failed the Mom test completely.
1) He had to install OpenOffice *himself* before Mom got on.
2) He had to prompt Mom, after waiting for her to find MS Office, that she should be looking for something else.
So, she *couldn't* find the MS Office substitute, and *wouldn't* have been able to find it in Lindows, because it isn't installed by default.
How is that passing the test at all? The computer didn't catch fire while she was using it?
No, the order is not rung up in this scam. The cashier uses his pocket instead of the cash drawer and does not generate a receipt.
Result: Inventory "shrinks" by one $10 item, cashier $10 richer.
The interesting bullet point that Steve Jobs included in his keynote was that both architectures were using GCC 3.3 for the SPEC testing.
I wonder how much faster SPEC becomes when Intel gets to use their own compiler?
I originally wanted to mod you down as overrated, but thought it was more important to point out that Benjamin Franklin was *by no means* a Federalist.
Benjamin Franklin had always been interested in a *uni*cameral legislature, and an executive by rotating committee. Nothing could be further from the ideas of the Federalists.
The opposition Jefferson was talking about had used the Alien and Sedition acts and aggressive use of libel statutes in an effort to suppress any pro-French, anti-Federalist sentiment. John Adams and Franklin in particular were at opposite ends of the spectrum. Read _American Aurora_ if you want a view from the (oppositely biased) Democratic-Republican trenches.
These figures completely IGNORE the presence of other Federal taxes that affect paychecks, namely Social Security and Medicare. That household which you claim has no income tax almost certainly has a 7.65% federal payroll tax, which is reduced to zero for wages above $87,000.
Not to mention sales tax, gas tax, etc., which are taxes on consumption which are proportionately higher for low-income households.
This number, typically quoted by Wall Street editorial page writers, and assorted other conservative commentators conveniently and completely IGNORES the fact that there are other Federal payroll taxes than Federal Income Tax.
Perhaps you have heard of the Social Security Tax, and Medicare tax? These also come out of paychecks, but have caps of roughly $90k annual wages. So the people up in the top bracket have a marginal rate on these taxes of ZERO percent.
Add in 7.65 percent to your lower income bracket tax rates, and it no longer looks so imbalanced, does it? Keep in mind also that this tax only applies to wages, not unearned income or capital gains.
K-Mart had/has nowhere near the death-grip power over suppliers and the very aggressive supply-chain management that Walmart has. K-mart's discounts were sporadic and well-advertised, meaning that customers cherry-picked the specials, leaving those shelves bare, because K-mart's supply chain couldn't always predict demand for these one-shot discounts. Walmart slowly squeezes down prices (and costs) over time, and keeps supply lines chugging along.
In addition to location advantages that an AC mentioned, Walmart just plain ate their lunch, just like Dell has eaten the lunch of just about every other PC maker.
Syntactic sugar is harmful when it is just sugar. When it radically transforms your programming language to fit the problem domain like a glove, then it is an extremely powerful tool.
A program that looks like the problem is easy to understand for anyone who knows what the problem is.
Without syntactic sugar, all Java code looks like Java code, no matter what problem it solves. So there is a barrier to seeing the underlying task that is being accomplished.
You could call programmer-defined types as syntactic sugar, which has the same hazard: unless the next programmer understands what your types are, he presumably can't understand your problem. But all users of OOP languages know that this isn't true. Imagine the argument: "all programs should use just the built-in types, so that every program can be read more easily."
Well-designed user-defined types make the program easier to understand because you have created a language of types which reflects the problem domain. Well-designed user-defined code structures do the same thing, with a potentially huge gain in clarity.
Admittedly, poorly-designed code structures can make the program hard to understand. But poorly-designed programs always are hard to understand.
Talking about Lisp macros as if they were syntactic sugar misses an important point: the syntactic sugar is defined using the full Lisp language. It's potentially *very smart* sugar. You apparently understand this (you mention domain-specific languages), but I think it is important to emphasize that Lisp macros can be about code transfiguration, instead of just code sweetening.
The possibility of wireless matching landline speeds is a "not now, not ever." The miracle of glass fiber blows any possible wireless link out of the water. Wireless has GHz carrier frequencies, optical has multi-THz. There is just an unbelievable amount of bandwidth on that fiber. And practically zero crosstalk between multiple glass fibers in a cable bundle. Need more channels? Light up one of those many glass fibers you left dark in the cable. Or, put another optical carrier in that fiber. Yes, it costs money, but so does adding wireless access points.
You really think society can work without money? Then why the hell was it even invented 3000+ years ago?
I don't know what the hell you do, but I go to work each day because my paychecks keep clearing. That's good for me because it lets me get a place to live and food to eat in exchange for my having worked for a company that doesn't give me either. In fact, a company that makes stuff that only other companies want to have. My landlord doesn't want what I produce. Neither does the grocery store. But someone does, and they give my company money for it, and my company gives money to me, and I give money to everyone else who has stuff that I need.
You think there's going to be some kind of utopia where I go to the grocery store, and they just give me food because I "deserve" it, and the farmers and crop pickers keep busting their ass and gave their food to the grocery store because they felt like it? Hell no.
Free to use, except for all that money to keep the snow off during the winter. And to cut the grass during the summer. And to patrol for broken down cars and accidents. And to try to limit speeding. And re-painting the lines periodically. And fixing potholes. And painting bridges so they don't rust. And to weigh trucks so they don't cause even more roadwear than they do when they are loaded to the legal limit. ... Yeah, all that's free.
Most public roads in the U.S. are maintained via general government revenues, of which tickets are only a small fraction (consider the cost of the patrol car and policeman who pulled you over, or the meter maid who wrote your parking ticket, and how much of your ticket goes toward that). Most construction is also out of general revenues, although nominally the money comes from gasoline taxes. Only a small fraction comes from tolls, and other use fees.
This helps explain why Germany, with gasoline taxed to be about 8 times as expensive as the U.S. has highways on which you could drive 200 miles per hour. Because they paid through the nose for it.
PC133 SDRAM? How wide is that path, and how fast are these machines compared to a desktop Sparc?
Japan has a land area of about 378,000 km^2, or 146,000 mi^2. That is between Arizona and Montana in area; only about 15% smaller than California. Connecticut is about 5,500 mi^2. So Japan is over 25x the size of Connecticut.
"I do not think that BASIC is a good learning language"
BASIC is a fine learning language: the only question is what you learn. You learn that computers are machines that you can tell what to do and they will do it. You learn that computers follow your instructions precisely even if your instructions don't make any sense. You learn that computers can do math and manipulate text. What more do you want?
What you don't learn is how to write large programs that scale well and follow sound architectural practices. Who says a 9-year old has to learn this? Almost no 9-year old is going to have the patience to write a program that goes beyond BASIC's capabilities. Almost no 9-year old is going to have the patience to get a C++/Java program to compile without the instant gratification that BASIC can provide.
Do you think building blocks and Lego blocks are bad learning toys because you can't build houses or skyscrapers with them? You learn a lot by trying to build a 10 foot tower with wood blocks and *failing*. But once you have the basic inspiration, you are prepared to learn more about structural engineering. Trying to get a kid to learn first about concrete and rebar is a sure way to kill his interest.
What keeps "transporter technology" from being patented is that the inventor has to describe the invention in enough detail to enable a practitioner "skilled in the art" to make and use the invention.
No one can describe transporter technology in enough detail so that someone else could reproduce it, so there isn't a valid patent there.
In theory, the patent is the protection an inventor needs to prevent potential investors from simply stealing the idea without compensation. (In practice, you can steal a patented idea just as easily, and a penniless inventor can't afford to sue you.)
"most of us geeks are not good at marketing"
Well, that's your problem right there. If you've got some unique package of talents (and you probably do, unless you've been wasting your time), then you've got to market your product (YOU) effectively. Find out who needs you, and convince them.
Marketing is not some unique gift/defect that only a few people need to possess, it is an essential skill everyone needs to develop if they don't want to be a drone.
I have no idea how the parent got modded to +5, Insightful, because it makes a fundamental error: it assumes that "Labor" is a homogenous good.
Labor of some semi-trained person answering a telephone call from an ignoramus who can't open the box his new cable modem came in is not the same thing as the labor of a skilled programmer with knowledge of a technical domain. The supply of one is ample in India and the Philippines, while the other is not. Lumping these together as "labor" misses the whole point.
If you want to avoid being interchangable with someone in India, get yourself a competitive advantage so you *aren't* interchangeable.
Yeesh.
Basically your someone who actually wants to learn everything about how your particular distro works.
Be thankful, if there werent people like this you wouldn't have heating, lighting, medical science or anything else more advanced than charred meat and possibly the wheel.
This is a bit extreme. Learning about any kind of computer OS is an exercise in the most ephemeral kind of knowledge known to man. Ask me about Apple II monitor commands and how useful my knowledge of them will be to all mankind even after my demise. Yes, they seemed vital and exciting to me in high school, but I now wish I had practiced more piano or learned a foreign language instead.
Some people do indeed know a lot more about Linux distributions than I do. For instance, the people RedHat pays for this to be their job.
In primitive societies, everyone was expected to be able to make their own arrows from scratch. We've progressed quite a bit since then, and one important way is through division of labor and specialization. I specialize in my field, you specialize in yours, but if my field isn't computer operating systems, any time I spend learning them is time taken away from more productive activity.
Don't flatter the slashdot mobs who believe that being a leet Linux hacker will somehow let them contribute in any useful way even to open source projects. Most open source projects progress because a focused core team (which may evolve over time) spend a large amount of time getting the project to a usable state. Lots of wannabees reading the source does not further the cause.
Funny, MAXIMIZE braking power and MINIMIZE heat produced are exact opposites. That braking takes away kinetic energy that has to go somewhere, namely in heating things up, such as the ablative heat shields that got vaporized.
Given that the maximum rotational speed of the Earth is roughly 1000 mph (24000 miles around the equator, 24 hours to rotate around), I'm interested in where the other 23000 mph comes from.
4000 mph relative to the Earth is the average velocity of the capsule over the flight.
The gravitational potential is (-m Me G)/r.
Me G = 3.84 x 10^14 m^3/(sec^2 kg)
If we ignore the moon's gravitational well, and start at rest 384400 km away (avg. Earth moon distance), then the change in potential energy will be m 58 x 10^6 m^2/(sec^2 kg). This will equal the gain in kinetic energy, 1/2 m v^2, resulting in a v of 11000 m/sec. or 24000 miles per hour.
It is true that launches and orbits are chosen to take advantage of the Earth's rotation. Launch sites are usually equatorial, and orbits usually follow the Earth's rotation.
Just to be clear, I was referring to the achievements of the West (i.e., U.S.) in 1970 being matched by the Chinese in 2006. Of course China in 1970 was a grand mess.