Your programming example would remove the need for mutexes, but that's about all. Spawning a thread, while faster than an entire process, has cost.
In your example, the context of the current thread would have to be duplicated (how does the compiler know what data operation() will use). They can't run from the same data - what if doSomeThing() modifies a field that operation() uses?
Java's FutureTask requires extra work, but it protects you from concurrent data modifications errors. (Or, it appears to. I'm not familiar with it...)
Your idea is good. We're eventually going to need a revolutionary way to parallelise computation on a larger scale (larger than instruction-level, anyway). But don't forget - at some point, all abstractions leak.
Even if we could split all function/method calls out to separate threads, there will still be waste. Just as instructions must wait for their inputs, so must your functions/methods. To get a well-optimised program, a software engineer will still be stuck with managing the critical path of execution.
Device drivers usually require assembly code to access the hardware directly. The iPod's system architecture is also different to that of a PCs. The serial port is probably not just a device hanging off a PCI/ISA bus.
It's called 'shaken' (pron. shark-n). The cost blows up when your car gets to 10-12 years old. Vehicles are inspected and certain repairs are mandatory or your car is unroadworthy. They even test your car's exhaust to see if it's within spec.
I believe the shaken cost is related to engine size. 'Yellow (number) plate' cars like mine are limited to an engine size of 660cc (40 cubic inches). Fuel, licensing and repairs are all cheaper. It's tiny and gutless, but it's enough to get my and a couple of friends around town.
On a side note, the cars with lots of interior space are more popular with the younger generations. I see lots of Nissan Cube (no bull) cars on the street - a rounded box on wheels.
Terry Pratchett et. al. sum it up nicely in "The Science of Discworld". It's all 'lies to children' - for a certain interpretation of 'lie'.
When you first learn the speed of gravity, you're told it's 9.8m/s^2 (or imperial equivalent). Not that it changes with altitude or where you are on the Earth's surface. Granted the differences are tiny, but they're tiny details that only serve to confuse when you're first learning such concepts.
When I first learnt about diodes, I was told that above a certain voltage, they turn on and current can flow. Not that it's an exponential curve. Not that there's a reverse breakdown region where, at high voltages, diodes can work backwards (Zener diodes exploit this).
It's the same principle when a little kid is told "it's for your own good". Three year-olds don't care about why icecream alone does not a meal make.
When I'm making worksheets for my students , it's a pain to get proper Japanese script on the page. I've resorted to cutting and pasting from Wordpad.:(
Yes, a lot of oil is required to build the infrastructure of, and to run, a turkey farm.
You are forgetting a significant external source of energy: the sun. (sun shines, plants grow, turkeys eat plants)
Right now, turkeys might be the most economical or the easiest source material for their process. It may be better to feed the machine plant material directly.
You then replace processes like: - Extraction of turkey-edible material (e.g. grain) - Transportation of turkey-edible material. - Conversion of turkey-edible material to turkey guts. - Extraction of turkey guts. - Transportation of turkey guts.
It's another prod towards the apathetic that would be content to use Windows 95.
Apathetic? More like masochistic.
Oh the pain I endured trying to use that operating system. It was a brilliant training tool for the public. Years later when showing friends stuff under Linux or NT4, they would worry about me running more than 3 or 4 applications at a time.
"Are you sure you can do that? Isn't it going to crash?"
Flamebait it may be, but that is what they said to me.
> > single guys who drive minivans don't get laid. >
You're last statement doesn't hold true in Japan. Here, sporty cars are declining in popularity. Vehicles with lots of interior space are more popular with young people now. I've seen more sport bodykits on Toyota Taragoes than I care to count.
Ever heard of the Nissan Cube? Seriously, it a box (with rounded corners) on wheels.
It's quite funny seeing these badass mofos driving blocky family vans driving around. Almost looks like they crashed their Skyline and had to borrow their Mum's car...
> (It's all about the spin. Karl Rove would be proud > of me... and that makes me feel so incredibly > dirty right now. Must clean off stain of > Bush/Rove appreciation... IT BURNS!!!!)
While many people / families here are choosing to have fewer children, the government will never open immigration channels to enough people to make up the deficit.
The Japanese are fiercely protective of their way of life and culture. I've encountered many anacronistic and seemingly inefficient ways of getting things done. All still practiced because it's the way it's been done for generations.
Strangely, the Japanese (as individual people) are fascinated by some foreign cultures. They're willing to learn about other cultures, but will not have hordes of foreigners permanently living in the country.
Hell, to become a permanent resident, you (among other things)need to have lived in the country for 5 years and provide letters from your neighbourhood stating that you have not engaged in socially aberrant activities.
To be fair, some western things have been embraced by the populace. e.g. Christmas (children get given presents)
The feeling I get is that Japan is multicultural, as long as you take your culture with you when you leave.
When I was at uni. (5 years ago) any biomedical projects that involved on-skin (or more intrusive) sensors could only be powered by a battery. The signals were then sent to a/the computer via an optically isolated link.
The faculty wanted absolutely no chance that operators or experimental subjects could be exposed to mains voltages. Especially when students were the ones building the devices!:)
I wish Japan would adopt traffic lights with sensors in the first place? All of them here seem to run on a timer. They're no end of frustration. From Tokyo to small country towns, it's all the same. Some lights display a bar graph of how long until the light turns green again, but they don't react to traffic conditions.
It's common to have to stop at a set of lights and have no cars come through on the adjoining road.
No wonder people here run red lights all the time.
A laser rangefinder would be accurate, but expensive and (possibly) not necessary.
A digital camera knows what it's focusing on by the position of the lens. Most figure this out by contrast analysis - the reason that many cameras take a second or so to focus. Hell, my camera writes the focal distance into the EXIF tags on each picture.
Once you know the range of what is being focussed on, the depth of the rest of the image falls into place.
My phone (in Japan, though) can record directly to an SD card. A 256MB card gets me ~80 minutes of 320x240 pixel MPEG-4 video (Sharp V601SH). The video bitrate is about 440kbps.
However, the downsides are:
- Battery life. Recording and encoding video (and showing it on the screen) sucks a lot of power.
- Lens quality / resolution. Although it has an auto-focus lens, a person 10-20m away comes out as an unrecognisable blob about 10 pixels tall.
- Light balance. The camera software has trouble compensating for an overexposed target (at the centre of the image).
If I want to take decent home videos, I'll go out and buy a camcorder. That can't beat the convenience of a phone and camera the size of my palm.
The mass of material required for such an elevator (while smaller than an Earth-centric one) must be pretty large compared to the mass that 1 rocket could launch to the Lagrange point.
I'm glad I haven't heard many fearful and wildly speculative comments about space elevators. The most obvious one would be 'what if the cable breaks?'. Any Chicken Littles in our society would assume that lengths of the cable will fall, crushing sections of cities.
A lunar elevator would show that such fears are unfounded.
If we were to read reports about assumptions that were correct, it just wouldn't be interesting.
It would be like saying, "Yep, Mars is made of red rock and dust." That's not news, it's olds. There are probably heaps of discoveries that aren't brought to our attention because they fit the commonly held assumptions.
The discovery of Titan's flat surface is like the trailer to a movie. It leaves you wanting to know more, wanting to know why. It captures your interest, and so it's considered 'news'.
Although its good (for the type of people that read Slashdot) to know that theories are proven correct, it's just not interesting to the wider populace.
Slashdot Mirror
Your programming example would remove the need for mutexes, but that's about all. Spawning a thread, while faster than an entire process, has cost.
In your example, the context of the current thread would have to be duplicated (how does the compiler know what data operation() will use). They can't run from the same data - what if doSomeThing() modifies a field that operation() uses?
Java's FutureTask requires extra work, but it protects you from concurrent data modifications errors. (Or, it appears to. I'm not familiar with it...)
Your idea is good. We're eventually going to need a revolutionary way to parallelise computation on a larger scale (larger than instruction-level, anyway). But don't forget - at some point, all abstractions leak.
Even if we could split all function/method calls out to separate threads, there will still be waste. Just as instructions must wait for their inputs, so must your functions/methods. To get a well-optimised program, a software engineer will still be stuck with managing the critical path of execution.
Riiight. Got a big enough aquarium?
If not, go away for a week and burglars will be put off by the stench of a rotting carcass in your living room.
The sky is falling! The sky is falling!
Device drivers usually require assembly code to access the hardware directly. The iPod's system architecture is also different to that of a PCs. The serial port is probably not just a device hanging off a PCI/ISA bus.
It's called 'shaken' (pron. shark-n). The cost blows up when your car gets to 10-12 years old. Vehicles are inspected and certain repairs are mandatory or your car is unroadworthy. They even test your car's exhaust to see if it's within spec.
I believe the shaken cost is related to engine size. 'Yellow (number) plate' cars like mine are limited to an engine size of 660cc (40 cubic inches). Fuel, licensing and repairs are all cheaper. It's tiny and gutless, but it's enough to get my and a couple of friends around town.
On a side note, the cars with lots of interior space are more popular with the younger generations. I see lots of Nissan Cube (no bull) cars on the street - a rounded box on wheels.
Terry Pratchett et. al. sum it up nicely in "The Science of Discworld". It's all 'lies to children' - for a certain interpretation of 'lie'.
When you first learn the speed of gravity, you're told it's 9.8m/s^2 (or imperial equivalent). Not that it changes with altitude or where you are on the Earth's surface. Granted the differences are tiny, but they're tiny details that only serve to confuse when you're first learning such concepts.
When I first learnt about diodes, I was told that above a certain voltage, they turn on and current can flow. Not that it's an exponential curve. Not that there's a reverse breakdown region where, at high voltages, diodes can work backwards (Zener diodes exploit this).
It's the same principle when a little kid is told "it's for your own good". Three year-olds don't care about why icecream alone does not a meal make.
How about not bothering to spell Apophis correctly?
No, it's still tactical...
For rather blunt and inept definitions of tactical.
-----
Mollitor: "Vox, break down the door."
Vox: "I'll have you know, I only deal in finesse."
Mollitor: "Very well: finesse the door open."
I can't wait to get my hands on these features.
:(
When I'm making worksheets for my students , it's a pain to get proper Japanese script on the page. I've resorted to cutting and pasting from Wordpad.
Yes, a lot of oil is required to build the infrastructure of, and to run, a turkey farm.
You are forgetting a significant external source of energy: the sun. (sun shines, plants grow, turkeys eat plants)
Right now, turkeys might be the most economical or the easiest source material for their process. It may be better to feed the machine plant material directly.
You then replace processes like:
- Extraction of turkey-edible material (e.g. grain)
- Transportation of turkey-edible material.
- Conversion of turkey-edible material to turkey guts.
- Extraction of turkey guts.
- Transportation of turkey guts.
With:
- Transportation of plant matter.
Oops. I meant SHA...
Remember kids, preview your posts first.
Bah. RSA-640k should be enough key length for everybody.
It's another prod towards the apathetic that would be content to use Windows 95.
Apathetic? More like masochistic.
Oh the pain I endured trying to use that operating system. It was a brilliant training tool for the public. Years later when showing friends stuff under Linux or NT4, they would worry about me running more than 3 or 4 applications at a time.
"Are you sure you can do that? Isn't it going to crash?"
Flamebait it may be, but that is what they said to me.
I second the nomination of Jesus, as long as it's in this incarnation.
>
> single guys who drive minivans don't get laid.
>
You're last statement doesn't hold true in Japan. Here, sporty cars are declining in popularity. Vehicles with lots of interior space are more popular with young people now. I've seen more sport bodykits on Toyota Taragoes than I care to count.
Ever heard of the Nissan Cube? Seriously, it a box (with rounded corners) on wheels.
It's quite funny seeing these badass mofos driving blocky family vans driving around. Almost looks like they crashed their Skyline and had to borrow their Mum's car...
> (It's all about the spin. Karl Rove would be proud
> of me... and that makes me feel so incredibly
> dirty right now. Must clean off stain of
> Bush/Rove appreciation... IT BURNS!!!!)
My eyes! Ze goggles, zey do nothing!
While many people / families here are choosing to have fewer children, the government will never open immigration channels to enough people to make up the deficit.
The Japanese are fiercely protective of their way of life and culture. I've encountered many anacronistic and seemingly inefficient ways of getting things done. All still practiced because it's the way it's been done for generations.
Strangely, the Japanese (as individual people) are fascinated by some foreign cultures. They're willing to learn about other cultures, but will not have hordes of foreigners permanently living in the country.
Hell, to become a permanent resident, you (among other things)need to have lived in the country for 5 years and provide letters from your neighbourhood stating that you have not engaged in socially aberrant activities.
To be fair, some western things have been embraced by the populace. e.g. Christmas (children get given presents)
The feeling I get is that Japan is multicultural, as long as you take your culture with you when you leave.
When I was at uni. (5 years ago) any biomedical projects that involved on-skin (or more intrusive) sensors could only be powered by a battery. The signals were then sent to a/the computer via an optically isolated link.
:)
The faculty wanted absolutely no chance that operators or experimental subjects could be exposed to mains voltages. Especially when students were the ones building the devices!
I wish Japan would adopt traffic lights with sensors in the first place? All of them here seem to run on a timer. They're no end of frustration. From Tokyo to small country towns, it's all the same. Some lights display a bar graph of how long until the light turns green again, but they don't react to traffic conditions.
It's common to have to stop at a set of lights and have no cars come through on the adjoining road.
No wonder people here run red lights all the time.
A laser rangefinder would be accurate, but expensive and (possibly) not necessary.
A digital camera knows what it's focusing on by the position of the lens. Most figure this out by contrast analysis - the reason that many cameras take a second or so to focus. Hell, my camera writes the focal distance into the EXIF tags on each picture.
Once you know the range of what is being focussed on, the depth of the rest of the image falls into place.
My phone (in Japan, though) can record directly to an SD card. A 256MB card gets me ~80 minutes of 320x240 pixel MPEG-4 video (Sharp V601SH). The video bitrate is about 440kbps.
However, the downsides are:
- Battery life. Recording and encoding video (and showing it on the screen) sucks a lot of power.
- Lens quality / resolution. Although it has an auto-focus lens, a person 10-20m away comes out as an unrecognisable blob about 10 pixels tall.
- Light balance. The camera software has trouble compensating for an overexposed target (at the centre of the image).
If I want to take decent home videos, I'll go out and buy a camcorder. That can't beat the convenience of a phone and camera the size of my palm.
The mass of material required for such an elevator (while smaller than an Earth-centric one) must be pretty large compared to the mass that 1 rocket could launch to the Lagrange point.
I'm glad I haven't heard many fearful and wildly speculative comments about space elevators. The most obvious one would be 'what if the cable breaks?'. Any Chicken Littles in our society would assume that lengths of the cable will fall, crushing sections of cities.
A lunar elevator would show that such fears are unfounded.
It would also be good to work out design bugs.
HECS isn't exactly an interest-free loan. Your HECS debt is indexed according to CPI (Consumer Price Index ~ inflation).
If you don't pay anything, the dollar value increases each year, but it's relative value stays the same (in a perfect economic world).
It would be like saying, "Yep, Mars is made of red rock and dust." That's not news, it's olds. There are probably heaps of discoveries that aren't brought to our attention because they fit the commonly held assumptions.
The discovery of Titan's flat surface is like the trailer to a movie. It leaves you wanting to know more, wanting to know why. It captures your interest, and so it's considered 'news'.
Although its good (for the type of people that read Slashdot) to know that theories are proven correct, it's just not interesting to the wider populace.
Yeah, it's the same in Australia.
I wonder why Sony waited until now to open stores in the US...