In a bunch of other words: yes, but... The standard model for gravity is used for a number of reasons, first among them that it fits better than the others. It's only off by about a factor of five (working with a universe of 20% normal matter, 80% dark matter). It doesn't devolve into some easily disprovable logical contradictions like most of the others. It's easy to say "yes, but..." It's much harder to propose a theory of gravity that stands up to close inspection of the world's physicists, astronomers and tenure committees. Here on slashdot we aren't (all) physicists, mathemeticians or professors seeking tenure so let's have some fun and talk about some alternatives. I'm no expert either, but I like to play with these ideas and it turns out they can be interesting.
The force of gravity is presumed to fall off as the inverse of the distance squared. If rather than this smooth integral it's a more complex function that would explain a lot. It would however complicate many other things. It should be possible to find describe the observable phenomena with a complex function of gravity over distance rather than missing mass - but then you wind up with a complicated answer that requires considerably more proof than a simpler one and is more subject to disproof. It's still one of my personal favorites. It can pay off to not get too emotionally attached to one theory though, because theories evolve as we learn.
Then there's the fact that we're evolving our understanding from the bottom of a gravity well of our planet, sun, local cluster, galaxy, local galactic cluster, local galactic string. We're looking at the Universe from the middle of dust clouds on all those levels, across vast voids between we cannot measure the properties of, and the properties of the voids may be as important as the properties of the masses in the larger scheme. We're speculating about the evolution of nearly 14 billion years from a viewpoint of mathematics born less than 3000 years ago (Euclid). We may as well be children studying wave motion by splashing in a puddle. We may discover things, but the discovery of all things seems unlikely. We are building a ship in a bottle here. We're composing a powerpoint presentation on a cellphone. Beside our own biases, we're watching the game through a knothole in the fence. It's possible that mass alters time in some way that creates the appearance of gravitic lensing effects that are not there. It's possible that gravity has some time function we're not aware of - a number of experiments to find "gravity waves" have been proposed, but afaik none have borne fruit. It's possible (and close to proven) that at least some of the "constants" in the equations are variable according to some not-understood function, and that in the foreign lands beyond the star of our birth the local rules are different.
We know that gravity affects both space and time. We know we don't fully understand the effects of either. Our Voyager probes, for example, appear to be slowing down at the edge of System Sol for no reason we can explain. Gravity slingshots have somewhat different results than predicted. Even on this minute immediate local level we don't fully understand gravity and its relation to spacetime, though we get closer with every measure. It's possible we're looking at the Universe through some edge effects that alter our view in ways we don't understand yet. When we come to understand them better we may be able to apply corrective lenses. In the mean time some explain the difference between theory and observation with "missing mass" which, if it does nothing else, quantifies the difference between the prediction and the observation in a way that can be modeled, manipulated and explained to the press without sounding too much like you're making the whole thing up. Ultimately it adds to understanding by quantifying the depth of our ignorance with a specific map to the undiscovered country to test new theories against. Like any good lie it can be usef
It's not actually proof of anything. It is rather a graphical representation of the where the invisible mass would have to be to explain the difference between observed phenomena and our gravity model. Let us consider it not a proof, but a map of our ignorance. A lovely, mysterious misty map - which just happens to be in the form of Cthulu or the Flying Spaghetti monster, by mere coincidence.
Hey, whoa. The Intel C compiler does compile Linux targets. I hadn't looked at that in a long time. Does Microsoft's? I haven't used that in 20 years - it's probably different than I remember. Back in the day if it compiled for both the server and the desktop version of Windows they considered it "cross platform". Back then they liked to pretend non-Wintel environments didn't exist. I'm trying to imagine people wanting to use a Microsoft compiler to compile their Linux, and I'm just not seeing it. Maybe you could draw me a word picture of just what such a person would look like.
Regardless, the issue was compilers, trust, AMD, Intel and MeeGo. Since GCC is a credible, trustable open source compiler it's likely to be used to compile the open-source OS MeeGo, at least for AMD-centric or cross-platform distributions of MeeGo. And of course if Intel can squeeze out a few extra watts by using the compiler that's highly optimized for their platform, that's what they'll use for their reference implementation. Nobody gets hurt by that.
As for compile time, I really doubt that's relevant. All of the modern compiler toolchains have distributed compilation now, don't they? And source files just aren't that big. So it's a problem of how many cores you throw at it and how fast your storage is.
As to executables performance, well, the HPC folks are using Linux aren't they? Like 91.8% of them? Don't they use GCC? In my experience poor application performance is better blamed on the craftsman than the tool.
They have to because we're going mobile with or without them. This much has been clear for years. They're trying to come up to speed, and Fusion looks like a credible effort but it's not going to be under anyone's tree this year - and iPads and iPhones and Android phones and tablets on ARM will be. Oak Trail from Intel looks promising but we'll need actual power and performance figures to know for sure.
Windows? It's not coming with us. It will wither slowly in the first world. It has a long tail. Familiarity is important. But the next billion users? Almost all of them will come online having never used it, or a machine that can use it - and they'll do fine.
This is a Linux. The compiler is open source. If AMD has a trusting trust problem, they have the bit-diddlers to implement a basic C compiler and assembler in raw machine code. And of course they can add all the optimizations to the compiler that apply. Linux is about as level a playing field as it can get.
If AMD wanted to improve use of their products they probably need do no more than go to SourceForge's most popular projects and offer optimization tips to the developers - and maybe some test hardware.
Well for people who are worried about the actual ability for the disabled to use the web, rather than just legal compliance, I doubt the real solution is far away. No doubt Google is working on a google translate for the differently abled that will assist people without requiring every website on the Internet to be revised.
OK, when the ships lift we've now got one volunteer to stay behind. We're going to need six or seven billion of those, so to simplify things when the call for volunteers to go on the ships goes out please remember not to raise your hand.
Probably got confused with MIPS. Hopefully somebody here will wander over and fix it. I don't have time to get involved in a wikipedia edit war today.
BTW: if you were looking for funny mods you could have gone down the SI Pebiflops fork, or the onion-belt milliflops fork. This line isn't going to get you there.
It doesn't explicitly say, because the interconnect is proprietary. But with Infiniband the nodes can address the RAM on the other nodes. I would assume this to be the case here also.
Well, son, an executable is what happens when a compiler and a source file fall in love and decide to start a family. The little object source is all limp and lifeless until he's tickled with a chmod u+x. Now some irresponsible folks just let their executables wander all over the place unrestrained, but more mindful traditionalists put them in an appropriate bin for proper care, like/usr/bin or/usr/local/bin. That way when the shell comes looking for the executable it will be on the standard path and won't have to be manually rounded up.
Look, this isn't about you. We're here in an Ask Slashdot discussion thread where C# is outside the solution set, and it's all you guys can talk about. Hey, if you're so smart, so perceptive, so insightful, why can you not find the topic of the discussion you're posting in? The guy does not want to code for the.NET platform. Your argumentum about how it's the best thing since bacon is pointless intellectual masturbation. If you have nothing to offer to help the man, could you please get the hell out of the way?
This is probably why he doesn't want to write C# code. He's not inclined to hang with you short-bus kids with ADD who can do everything except focus on the task at hand.
This is what happens when I omit the tags. Sorry. No, I'm not interested in Miguel de Icaza's attempts to get Microsoft's patent-encumbered technologies into Linux - always one generation behind. That's not cross platform, it's just porting the chew-your-leg off environment to Linux so you can have that fun experience over there too. I'm starting to believe that stupid is contagious. No wonder why he doesn't want to learn the Microsoft stack. He doesn't want to catch it.
Why can't you find the topic? This is an Ask Slashdot, and the question isn't "How can you defend C#?" The question is "What's the best language to learn that's not in the Microsoft set?"
I mean Jeez. Talk about being unhelpful. If I could I'd mod every single one of you off-topic. What part of "C# is outside the solution set" got away from you?
I doubt he cares about the future of.NET programming. After reviewing this thread I've come to the conclusion that his desire might be reasonable. He wants to spend his days hanging out with people who can narrow their answers to the scope of the freaking question. Obviously that wouldn't be working with any of the.NET C# fans in this thread.
Except for the whole non-portability thing. And the chewing a leg off every five years because they forgot to plan a migration strategy thing. Other than that, yeah.
OK, it's my TFS and it's not even badly munged. You're way down here it the bottom of the comments, and you seem to be the only one who "gets it". So you get my "informative?" reply.
Microsoft doesn't make their own hardware. They partnered with Sharp to produce the actual equipment. Of couse Sharp jobbed it out to some company we've never heard of, Elcoteq.
Because Elcoteq is a small, publicly held company that must report significant fiscal events we get to know that the Kins were "more than a third" of their Sharp business, which has a definite figure:
"Elcoteq has already delivered to Sharp the Kin smartphones for the U.S. markets with revenues amounting to more than one-third of the original guidance for Sharp business in 2010," it said in a statement, adding that the total guidance for the Sharp business came to 150 million euros ($183.5 million).
So cost on the Kin hardware was a minimum of $60,000,000. Kudos to MS for being prepared for a runaway hit. A hit isn't Kin though. Even if they shipped 10,000 units so far - far above field estimates - that's $6,000 per unit just for the hardware cost - never mind the advertising which was many times that.
Yeah, I think Verizon can be forgiven for trying to make something of the mush they're holding. It's better than feeding the Kins into a chipper and environmentalizing all that Lithium and other toxic metals.
There are a couple of problems though. In their quarterly statement, Microsoft said that the Kin team was folded into the WP7 team when the product was discontinued. That story doesn't jive with a new version of KinWare that doesn't use Cellular Data communications. That's a significant rewrite. They'll need some people for that. If they did it, then they lied to their investors and the SEC about abandoning Kin. If they didn't do it, then the story about Zombie Kin is a lie, or VZW took ownership of the IP in an unlikely way.
The thing is not backwards compatible - so it loses the awesome three points of share that WinMo had. Those were people who had LOB phone apps that aren't going to fall into the same trap twice.
To build a user base you need developers. These numbers aren't going to draw them. To fund ad-paid apps you need a lot of eyeballs to sell, and this level of acceptance isn't going to be profitable for anybody.
So yeah - Microsoft can dump a billion dollars a year more on their mobile bonfire forever. That isn't going to make the phones good, or popular, or make the stock go up.
If there are component shortages and they can't keep them in stock why is Amazon selling a phone for a penny, in stock, with free expedited shipping? This looks more like a manufactured scarcity to me.
Slashdot Mirror
In a word: yes.
In a bunch of other words: yes, but... The standard model for gravity is used for a number of reasons, first among them that it fits better than the others. It's only off by about a factor of five (working with a universe of 20% normal matter, 80% dark matter). It doesn't devolve into some easily disprovable logical contradictions like most of the others. It's easy to say "yes, but..." It's much harder to propose a theory of gravity that stands up to close inspection of the world's physicists, astronomers and tenure committees. Here on slashdot we aren't (all) physicists, mathemeticians or professors seeking tenure so let's have some fun and talk about some alternatives. I'm no expert either, but I like to play with these ideas and it turns out they can be interesting.
The force of gravity is presumed to fall off as the inverse of the distance squared. If rather than this smooth integral it's a more complex function that would explain a lot. It would however complicate many other things. It should be possible to find describe the observable phenomena with a complex function of gravity over distance rather than missing mass - but then you wind up with a complicated answer that requires considerably more proof than a simpler one and is more subject to disproof. It's still one of my personal favorites. It can pay off to not get too emotionally attached to one theory though, because theories evolve as we learn.
Then there's the fact that we're evolving our understanding from the bottom of a gravity well of our planet, sun, local cluster, galaxy, local galactic cluster, local galactic string. We're looking at the Universe from the middle of dust clouds on all those levels, across vast voids between we cannot measure the properties of, and the properties of the voids may be as important as the properties of the masses in the larger scheme. We're speculating about the evolution of nearly 14 billion years from a viewpoint of mathematics born less than 3000 years ago (Euclid). We may as well be children studying wave motion by splashing in a puddle. We may discover things, but the discovery of all things seems unlikely. We are building a ship in a bottle here. We're composing a powerpoint presentation on a cellphone. Beside our own biases, we're watching the game through a knothole in the fence. It's possible that mass alters time in some way that creates the appearance of gravitic lensing effects that are not there. It's possible that gravity has some time function we're not aware of - a number of experiments to find "gravity waves" have been proposed, but afaik none have borne fruit. It's possible (and close to proven) that at least some of the "constants" in the equations are variable according to some not-understood function, and that in the foreign lands beyond the star of our birth the local rules are different.
We know that gravity affects both space and time. We know we don't fully understand the effects of either. Our Voyager probes, for example, appear to be slowing down at the edge of System Sol for no reason we can explain. Gravity slingshots have somewhat different results than predicted. Even on this minute immediate local level we don't fully understand gravity and its relation to spacetime, though we get closer with every measure. It's possible we're looking at the Universe through some edge effects that alter our view in ways we don't understand yet. When we come to understand them better we may be able to apply corrective lenses. In the mean time some explain the difference between theory and observation with "missing mass" which, if it does nothing else, quantifies the difference between the prediction and the observation in a way that can be modeled, manipulated and explained to the press without sounding too much like you're making the whole thing up. Ultimately it adds to understanding by quantifying the depth of our ignorance with a specific map to the undiscovered country to test new theories against. Like any good lie it can be usef
It's not actually proof of anything. It is rather a graphical representation of the where the invisible mass would have to be to explain the difference between observed phenomena and our gravity model. Let us consider it not a proof, but a map of our ignorance. A lovely, mysterious misty map - which just happens to be in the form of Cthulu or the Flying Spaghetti monster, by mere coincidence.
Hey, whoa. The Intel C compiler does compile Linux targets. I hadn't looked at that in a long time. Does Microsoft's? I haven't used that in 20 years - it's probably different than I remember. Back in the day if it compiled for both the server and the desktop version of Windows they considered it "cross platform". Back then they liked to pretend non-Wintel environments didn't exist. I'm trying to imagine people wanting to use a Microsoft compiler to compile their Linux, and I'm just not seeing it. Maybe you could draw me a word picture of just what such a person would look like.
Regardless, the issue was compilers, trust, AMD, Intel and MeeGo. Since GCC is a credible, trustable open source compiler it's likely to be used to compile the open-source OS MeeGo, at least for AMD-centric or cross-platform distributions of MeeGo. And of course if Intel can squeeze out a few extra watts by using the compiler that's highly optimized for their platform, that's what they'll use for their reference implementation. Nobody gets hurt by that.
As for compile time, I really doubt that's relevant. All of the modern compiler toolchains have distributed compilation now, don't they? And source files just aren't that big. So it's a problem of how many cores you throw at it and how fast your storage is.
As to executables performance, well, the HPC folks are using Linux aren't they? Like 91.8% of them? Don't they use GCC? In my experience poor application performance is better blamed on the craftsman than the tool.
They have to because we're going mobile with or without them. This much has been clear for years. They're trying to come up to speed, and Fusion looks like a credible effort but it's not going to be under anyone's tree this year - and iPads and iPhones and Android phones and tablets on ARM will be. Oak Trail from Intel looks promising but we'll need actual power and performance figures to know for sure.
Windows? It's not coming with us. It will wither slowly in the first world. It has a long tail. Familiarity is important. But the next billion users? Almost all of them will come online having never used it, or a machine that can use it - and they'll do fine.
This is a Linux. The compiler is open source. If AMD has a trusting trust problem, they have the bit-diddlers to implement a basic C compiler and assembler in raw machine code. And of course they can add all the optimizations to the compiler that apply. Linux is about as level a playing field as it can get.
If AMD wanted to improve use of their products they probably need do no more than go to SourceForge's most popular projects and offer optimization tips to the developers - and maybe some test hardware.
Well for people who are worried about the actual ability for the disabled to use the web, rather than just legal compliance, I doubt the real solution is far away. No doubt Google is working on a google translate for the differently abled that will assist people without requiring every website on the Internet to be revised.
Google is working on it.
OK, when the ships lift we've now got one volunteer to stay behind. We're going to need six or seven billion of those, so to simplify things when the call for volunteers to go on the ships goes out please remember not to raise your hand.
Not only is there already such a virus, the PC usually comes with it preinstalled.
Probably got confused with MIPS. Hopefully somebody here will wander over and fix it. I don't have time to get involved in a wikipedia edit war today.
BTW: if you were looking for funny mods you could have gone down the SI Pebiflops fork, or the onion-belt milliflops fork. This line isn't going to get you there.
It doesn't explicitly say, because the interconnect is proprietary. But with Infiniband the nodes can address the RAM on the other nodes. I would assume this to be the case here also.
It'll do until something better comes along.
FLoating point OPerationS per second. Now if you'll excuse me I need to go to the ATM machine if I can remember my PIN number.
Well, son, an executable is what happens when a compiler and a source file fall in love and decide to start a family. The little object source is all limp and lifeless until he's tickled with a chmod u+x. Now some irresponsible folks just let their executables wander all over the place unrestrained, but more mindful traditionalists put them in an appropriate bin for proper care, like /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin. That way when the shell comes looking for the executable it will be on the standard path and won't have to be manually rounded up.
I've played with it and it will do. Ruby I don't know, but it seems workable and there are Jobs postings for it so somebody needs it.
May as well manually drag this discussion back on topic.
Look, this isn't about you. We're here in an Ask Slashdot discussion thread where C# is outside the solution set, and it's all you guys can talk about. Hey, if you're so smart, so perceptive, so insightful, why can you not find the topic of the discussion you're posting in? The guy does not want to code for the .NET platform. Your argumentum about how it's the best thing since bacon is pointless intellectual masturbation. If you have nothing to offer to help the man, could you please get the hell out of the way?
This is probably why he doesn't want to write C# code. He's not inclined to hang with you short-bus kids with ADD who can do everything except focus on the task at hand.
This is what happens when I omit the tags. Sorry. No, I'm not interested in Miguel de Icaza's attempts to get Microsoft's patent-encumbered technologies into Linux - always one generation behind. That's not cross platform, it's just porting the chew-your-leg off environment to Linux so you can have that fun experience over there too. I'm starting to believe that stupid is contagious. No wonder why he doesn't want to learn the Microsoft stack. He doesn't want to catch it.
Why can't you find the topic? This is an Ask Slashdot, and the question isn't "How can you defend C#?" The question is "What's the best language to learn that's not in the Microsoft set?"
I mean Jeez. Talk about being unhelpful. If I could I'd mod every single one of you off-topic. What part of "C# is outside the solution set" got away from you?
The OP wants help, not argument.
I doubt he cares about the future of .NET programming. After reviewing this thread I've come to the conclusion that his desire might be reasonable. He wants to spend his days hanging out with people who can narrow their answers to the scope of the freaking question. Obviously that wouldn't be working with any of the .NET C# fans in this thread.
Except for the whole non-portability thing. And the chewing a leg off every five years because they forgot to plan a migration strategy thing. Other than that, yeah.
But if you don't want to, you don't.
OK, it's my TFS and it's not even badly munged. You're way down here it the bottom of the comments, and you seem to be the only one who "gets it". So you get my "informative?" reply.
Microsoft doesn't make their own hardware. They partnered with Sharp to produce the actual equipment. Of couse Sharp jobbed it out to some company we've never heard of, Elcoteq.
Because Elcoteq is a small, publicly held company that must report significant fiscal events we get to know that the Kins were "more than a third" of their Sharp business, which has a definite figure:
"Elcoteq has already delivered to Sharp the Kin smartphones for the U.S. markets with revenues amounting to more than one-third of the original guidance for Sharp business in 2010," it said in a statement, adding that the total guidance for the Sharp business came to 150 million euros ($183.5 million).
So cost on the Kin hardware was a minimum of $60,000,000. Kudos to MS for being prepared for a runaway hit. A hit isn't Kin though. Even if they shipped 10,000 units so far - far above field estimates - that's $6,000 per unit just for the hardware cost - never mind the advertising which was many times that.
Yeah, I think Verizon can be forgiven for trying to make something of the mush they're holding. It's better than feeding the Kins into a chipper and environmentalizing all that Lithium and other toxic metals.
There are a couple of problems though. In their quarterly statement, Microsoft said that the Kin team was folded into the WP7 team when the product was discontinued. That story doesn't jive with a new version of KinWare that doesn't use Cellular Data communications. That's a significant rewrite. They'll need some people for that. If they did it, then they lied to their investors and the SEC about abandoning Kin. If they didn't do it, then the story about Zombie Kin is a lie, or VZW took ownership of the IP in an unlikely way.
Nothing about what's happening here makes sense.
The thing is not backwards compatible - so it loses the awesome three points of share that WinMo had. Those were people who had LOB phone apps that aren't going to fall into the same trap twice.
To build a user base you need developers. These numbers aren't going to draw them. To fund ad-paid apps you need a lot of eyeballs to sell, and this level of acceptance isn't going to be profitable for anybody.
So yeah - Microsoft can dump a billion dollars a year more on their mobile bonfire forever. That isn't going to make the phones good, or popular, or make the stock go up.
They're already in the bargain bin.
If there are component shortages and they can't keep them in stock why is Amazon selling a phone for a penny, in stock, with free expedited shipping? This looks more like a manufactured scarcity to me.