With the very same fervour U.S. citizens seem to be fighting against governmental influence, you will see European fight for social insurance and laws limiting working hours.
PBS? How many people watch it in contrast to the BBC, RAI, ARD/ZDF, France Televisions?
Yes, California is relatively similar to Europe. But AFAIK, California is quite an oddball in the US anyway.
> [...], individual states would have more freeway in implementing more social programs within their own state [...]
How can they have more freeway than given by the 10th amendment?
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
> If it works as well as everyone in favor of it says is does, then other states will eventually adopt it as well.
The problem is, social systems do not work for everyone in favour. They work in favour for those in need. When a state adopts universal healthcare, it will simultaneously become more attractive for the less fortunate and unattractive for companies and the wealthy. What stops a company or someone with $250k+ income relocating from Massachusetts to New Hampshire?
> I think that the one major difference is the universal (or social if you prefer) healthcare that exists in most European countries.
Not only universal healthcare, also social welfare and a government funded school and university system, and a public funded television. More Co-determination-rights for employees, stricter employment laws (working hours, lay-off, equal employment). Privacy and data protection laws come also to mind.
> If evolution explains where all species came from, then shouldn't a snapshot from any time period that the earth has existed show evolution in virtually all species?
No, it means, there could be, provided that it wouldn't be such a rare chance, that fossils comes into existence. Living things, that die the usual way, are decomposed within mere decades.
I don't know about other languages, but in Japanese, you enter the latin transliteration and get a list of possible representations in japanese / chinese characters, instead of drawing the character like you can do on other devices. That said, since firmware 2.0, the iphone has handwriting recognition.
> Only a handful of Nokias do last time I went to look at developing things that work over Bluetooth.
A handful? If I see it correctly all Symbian mobiles after S60 2nd Ed FP1 (without OBEX) and Nokia OS S40 3rd Ed seem to have JSR-82.The support must have been there from around 2004-2005, so I guess you looked to early.
My personal view: Snow Crash - Fun, when Matrix wasn't a movie (or at least had no sequel) and computers weren't so mainstream, that you could identify yourself with hacker-rebel / cyberpunk attitude.
The Diamond Age - In some way the anti-thesis to Snow Crash (no more cyber-rebels), in other ways the continuation (fragmented society). In my eyes a better depiction of what globalisation and nanotechnology can mean (E.g. Socially, not locally separated societies, a reevaluation of the worth of resources (like diamonds) and production). The end seemed a bit rushed to me which, in my eyes, applies to practically all of Neal Stephenson's books, regardless of their length.
Cryptonomicon - read it, but fail to make a call on it, because I simply can't remember it so clearly. But maybe that says enough.
The Baroque Cycle - A great insight on Neal Stephenson's view on evolution of economics or more specific currency. I think, it greatly depends on the historical knowledge of the reader, otherwise you won't get several historical references. I loved the first half (or first two books) of the first volume, which was very funny to me and had me laughing out loud. The latter parts were okay, but had me a bit disappointed after such a great beginning. Maybe it also was a lack of historical knowledge on my part. To me, it felt a bit dragging on: I think the main reason, why it is a 3 Volume (6 book cycle) is not because it is an story, which takes time to be told (like, say, Dune), but because the author wanted to make a epic book cycle and take his time to tell some (for some reason) intertwined stories.
Personally, I liked "The Diamond Age" best, but maybe it is dated again. It is about what I like most about SciFi: The impact of technology on society.
> Well, python+numpy in a single cpu environment can be very fast, depending on what you want to calculate.
So can be MATLAB, as long as it matrix-multiplication, which is practically reduced to a single call to an external C++ library. Java, in contrast, has native implementations of numeric algorithms, which are on par with C(++) ones.
> But you completely miss the point; for really computing intensive work you have to go parallel,
I am well aware of that. I assume you've seen, that the Java version of FFT is, like the C version, running multi-threaded on a single computer. So, I guess you are talking about computer cluster. In that case, I/O latency and bandwidth should be the limiting factor, which should be fairly language independent. Also, communication should be only a small part of the computation time, which makes the impact even smaller.
> and I have yet to see anything in Java that works efficiently in a parallel environment.
Not so long ago, people argued the same way in favour for Fortran over C++, but as someone put it so eloquently: The absence of proof is not the proof of absence.
From what I gather from a quick search: The results of Java MPI bindings didn't look too favourable. MPJava, however, suggests that comparable performance is possible (within 10% of the Fortran/MPI results in NAS PB Conjugate Gradient benchmark).
> I have been involved in developing code for simulating cosmic-ray acceleration in expanding supernova remnants, this in Python.
Well, Python is a different game than Java or C#, which both have a much better JIT-compiler.
I mainly program in C++ (real-time data processing), but I feel hard-pressed to believe, that Java has to be severely slower than C++ in numeric computations. The Java implementations of FFT and LinPack suggest, that comparable performance should be possible. The SciMark 2.0 should also be more up to par, when you replace the synchronized Random in the benchmark with a Java implemented Mersenne Twister.
> I'm just positively amazed that Slashdot, in theory home of programmer geeks anywhere, should have such a violent dislike of C++.
Because C++ is not a pure language. It is a multi-paradigm language (imperative, OO and functional) with both a high and low-level language features and people seem to hate the aspect they which they don't prefer.
The close-to-the-metal types hate the high-level aspects and rather use C. Disregarding the fact, that changing the code from C to C++ is purely syntactical and runs without any detriment in performance. Exactly the prime idea behind C++.
The high-level people dislike C++ exactly for this approach. They don't like that the basics are so clearly visible, and are even the default. You have to hop through some loops, before you get to a higher abstraction layer. E.g. you have to use external libraries and/or special classes for memory management.
Personally, I like C++ for exactly that reason. I can start on a fairly abstract layer with pure virtual interfaces, smart pointer, signal slots and there is not a single (raw) pointer or a manual deallocation to see (or other manual resource deallocation). Granted, it is more verbose than in a pure high level language, but that is what the machine has to do.
And if there is a performance bottleneck, I can seamless go down in the abstraction level from simple inline functions, over imperative functions with pointer arithmetic, down to inline assembler and can even guarantee a certain timing, if necessary.
>shifting the source of power from an inefficient source to a more efficient one is an improvement. most cars average around 20% efficiency while even coal plants get around 35%.
Diesel cars have an energy efficiency of 45% But that means that 45% of the energy stored in the petrol is converted to movement energy.
Cogas plants can have an efficiency of 60% (if you can make use of the heat: 85%). This figure is the amount energy of coal converted to electric energy (via movement). It still has to be distributed to the cars (7% power grid), used to charge the battery (4% charger) and converted back to movement (10%) results in 48% efficiency (68% heat).
I (knowingly) neglected the transport of the energy to both the car and the factory, and the use of regenerative braking in possible hybrid diesel and fully electrical cars as both would go far behind a back of the hand calculation.
But you can see, if you are going with just a 30% efficient coal plant, you better stick with a new diesel car, than an EV.
No. It was not. It was Leninism, later either Stalinism or Maoism. A certain "interpretation" of communism. Note, how your quotes comes directly from the section, which shows Lenins position.
> All the stuff about violent revolutions and dictatorships of the proletariat came directly from Marx.
Yes. That is true. You have, however, read it more carefully. It is a text from almost a hundred years ago, and even in that time, they used a peculiar vocabulary. That is why there is a special page in Wikipedia for the term "Dictatorship of the proletariat" (from which you quoted).
First, note how Marx calls the current government as "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie". Germany was at that time a parliamentary democracy. Similar to Anarchists (which at that time were a bit more common than they are today), they argue, that since a state has a military and a police to enforce its rules on the people, is repressive, a "dictatorship",("maintain its rule by means of the terror").
They simply argue, that for a translational phase, communists are in need of such a state, which can defend itself, the same way the current one can.
To quote Karl Kautsky (also from the very same page):
The term, `dictatorship of the proletariat', hence not the dictatorship of a single individual, but of a class, ipso facto precludes the possibility that Marx in this connection had in mind a dictatorship in the literal sense of the term
To my knowledge, they did it to cut cost in transport and storage and increase responsiveness to demand: Shipping incurs a delay of roughly 2-3 months, with all it downsides.
Before they started producing at least on the continent they intended to sell, they had billions of dollars worth of merchandise in transfer and couldn't respond fast enough to local demand.
Also, they had calculate a price which covered for changes in the exchange rate in the producing country and sold country.
Then you have obviously never been a fan of Peter Gabriel, as his stuff was always "designed to educate us" and to "show us all his social conscience".
> That's what I like about guys like the Stones, they may do the odd charity gig, but it's all about the rock and roll, and not about albums designed to educate us
Yeah. Because Rock is all about just making music, getting famous and rich. Never mind, Bob Dylan, Woodstock, or others.
-Why would character movement need to run at a certain rate? It sounds like the thread should spend most of its time blocked waiting for user input.
You usually have a game-physics engine running, which practically integrates the movements of the characters (character movement) or generally updates the world model (position and state of all objects). Even without input, the world moves on. The fixed rate is usually taken, because it is simpler than a varying time-step rate.
-What's so special about the audio thread? Shouldn't it just handle events from other threads without communicating back?
Audio is the most sensible thing to timing issues: Contrary to video (or simulation), you cannot drop arbitrary pieces of sound without the user immediately noticing.
-How do semaphores affect SMP cache efficiency? Is the CPU notified to keep the data in shared cache?
Not specially, they are simply a special case of the problem: How to access data Several threads may compete for the same data, but if they are accessing the same data in one cache-line, it will lead to lots of communication (thrashing the cache). In CUDA, a thread-manager is aware of the memory layout and will decide, which parts of memory will be processed by which shaders/ALUs/CPUs. Thereby, it is also possible to make more efficient use of the caches.
-What is a "3D world drawer"? Is it where god keeps us in his living room?
Drawer as in "someone, who draws", or 3D world painter. It draws/paints the state of the world as updated by the simulation thread. This can happen asynchronously, as you will not notice, if a frame is dropped occasionally.
That is hardly a conceptual problem of the language C++, but more one of the toolchain and/or ABI, and can be improved on by rewriting the old GNU linker in C++:). And maybe someday the GNU binutils will gain incremental linking.
> If I change a header file in C++, that's it, I'm off to make coffee, but with C# you can change just about anything and the code is recompiled in seconds.
I usually take that as a sign, that there is too much dependencies among the classes. This is a problem in any language, in C++, it just becomes more immediately apparent through compile times.
Secondly, changing a header usually means, I'm going to change the interface of the class (adding functions, changing signatures). If I'm going to do that, it means that I made a mistake in the design of the interface, and I have to take the punishment:).
That said, I can't deny that I liked the next to zero compile time of Java.
Slashdot Mirror
It is a matter of scale and acceptance.
With the very same fervour U.S. citizens seem to be fighting against governmental influence, you will see European fight for social insurance and laws limiting working hours.
PBS? How many people watch it in contrast to the BBC, RAI, ARD/ZDF, France Televisions?
Yes, California is relatively similar to Europe. But AFAIK, California is quite an oddball in the US anyway.
> [...], individual states would have more freeway in implementing more social programs within their own state [...]
How can they have more freeway than given by the 10th amendment?
> If it works as well as everyone in favor of it says is does, then other states will eventually adopt it as well.
The problem is, social systems do not work for everyone in favour. They work in favour for those in need. When a state adopts universal healthcare, it will simultaneously become more attractive for the less fortunate and unattractive for companies and the wealthy.
What stops a company or someone with $250k+ income relocating from Massachusetts to New Hampshire?
> I think that the one major difference is the universal (or social if you prefer) healthcare that exists in most European countries.
Not only universal healthcare, also social welfare and a government funded school and university system, and a public funded television.
More Co-determination-rights for employees, stricter employment laws (working hours, lay-off, equal employment). Privacy and data protection laws come also to mind.
> "Their problem is that unlike Australia, they [offer] truly unlimited plans."
Except that the following countries also provide unlimited plans: Canada, Japan, Korea, Germany, The Netherlands, Sweden, Singapore ...
Wait... if I am not mistaken, it is faster to list the (quasi-industrialised) countries, which don't provide unlimited plans: Australia, New Zealand.
Considering that blue-ray is 1080p, but limited to 54Mbps, I think one can safely assume, that 1Gbps is not entirely necessary for that kind of thing.
Super HiVision, on the other hand, would be a different matter.
> If evolution explains where all species came from, then shouldn't a snapshot from any time period that the earth has existed show evolution in virtually all species?
No, it means, there could be, provided that it wouldn't be such a rare chance, that fossils comes into existence. Living things, that die the usual way, are decomposed within mere decades.
> what evolution predicts can't be proven because it is conveniently impossible for us to be around long enough to see any new species develop.
Speciation has been observed.
The principle of evolution is not only a theory, which withstood the test of time, but one, which has been proven to work in other fields.
I don't know about other languages, but in Japanese, you enter the latin transliteration and get a list of possible representations in japanese / chinese characters, instead of drawing the character like you can do on other devices.
That said, since firmware 2.0, the iphone has handwriting recognition.
> Reiser has a codebase of an insane
wc -l says otherwise (2.6.25.9):
> Only a handful of Nokias do last time I went to look at developing things that work over Bluetooth.
A handful? If I see it correctly all Symbian mobiles after S60 2nd Ed FP1 (without OBEX) and Nokia OS S40 3rd Ed seem to have JSR-82.The support must have been there from around 2004-2005, so I guess you looked to early.
A search today revealed a handful of pages with mobiles supporting JSR-82
My personal view:
Snow Crash - Fun, when Matrix wasn't a movie (or at least had no sequel) and computers weren't so mainstream, that you could identify yourself with hacker-rebel / cyberpunk attitude.
The Diamond Age - In some way the anti-thesis to Snow Crash (no more cyber-rebels), in other ways the continuation (fragmented society). In my eyes a better depiction of what globalisation and nanotechnology can mean (E.g. Socially, not locally separated societies, a reevaluation of the worth of resources (like diamonds) and production). The end seemed a bit rushed to me which, in my eyes, applies to practically all of Neal Stephenson's books, regardless of their length.
Cryptonomicon - read it, but fail to make a call on it, because I simply can't remember it so clearly. But maybe that says enough.
The Baroque Cycle - A great insight on Neal Stephenson's view on evolution of economics or more specific currency. I think, it greatly depends on the historical knowledge of the reader, otherwise you won't get several historical references. I loved the first half (or first two books) of the first volume, which was very funny to me and had me laughing out loud. The latter parts were okay, but had me a bit disappointed after such a great beginning. Maybe it also was a lack of historical knowledge on my part. To me, it felt a bit dragging on: I think the main reason, why it is a 3 Volume (6 book cycle) is not because it is an story, which takes time to be told (like, say, Dune), but because the author wanted to make a epic book cycle and take his time to tell some (for some reason) intertwined stories.
Personally, I liked "The Diamond Age" best, but maybe it is dated again. It is about what I like most about SciFi: The impact of technology on society.
> Well, python+numpy in a single cpu environment can be very fast, depending on what you want to calculate.
So can be MATLAB, as long as it matrix-multiplication, which is practically reduced to a single call to an external C++ library. Java, in contrast, has native implementations of numeric algorithms, which are on par with C(++) ones.
> But you completely miss the point; for really computing intensive work you have to go parallel,
I am well aware of that. I assume you've seen, that the Java version of FFT is, like the C version, running multi-threaded on a single computer. So, I guess you are talking about computer cluster.
In that case, I/O latency and bandwidth should be the limiting factor, which should be fairly language independent. Also, communication should be only a small part of the computation time, which makes the impact even smaller.
> and I have yet to see anything in Java that works efficiently in a parallel environment.
Not so long ago, people argued the same way in favour for Fortran over C++, but
as someone put it so eloquently: The absence of proof is not the proof of absence.
From what I gather from a quick search: The results of Java MPI bindings didn't look too favourable.
MPJava, however, suggests that comparable performance is possible (within 10% of the Fortran/MPI results in NAS PB Conjugate Gradient benchmark).
> I have been involved in developing code for simulating cosmic-ray acceleration in expanding supernova remnants, this in Python.
Well, Python is a different game than Java or C#, which both have a much better JIT-compiler.
I mainly program in C++ (real-time data processing), but I feel hard-pressed to believe, that Java has to be severely slower than C++ in numeric computations. The Java implementations of FFT and LinPack suggest, that comparable performance should be possible. The SciMark 2.0 should also be more up to par, when you replace the synchronized Random in the benchmark with a Java implemented Mersenne Twister.
> I'm just positively amazed that Slashdot, in theory home of programmer geeks anywhere, should have such a violent dislike of C++.
Because C++ is not a pure language. It is a multi-paradigm language (imperative, OO and functional) with both a high and low-level language features and people seem to hate the aspect they which they don't prefer.
The close-to-the-metal types hate the high-level aspects and rather use C. Disregarding the fact, that changing the code from C to C++ is purely syntactical and runs without any detriment in performance. Exactly the prime idea behind C++.
The high-level people dislike C++ exactly for this approach. They don't like that the basics are so clearly visible, and are even the default. You have to hop through some loops, before you get to a higher abstraction layer. E.g. you have to use external libraries and/or special classes for memory management.
Personally, I like C++ for exactly that reason. I can start on a fairly abstract layer with pure virtual interfaces, smart pointer, signal slots and there is not a single (raw) pointer or a manual deallocation to see (or other manual resource deallocation).
Granted, it is more verbose than in a pure high level language, but that is what the machine has to do.
And if there is a performance bottleneck, I can seamless go down in the abstraction level from simple inline functions, over imperative functions with pointer arithmetic, down to inline assembler and can even guarantee a certain timing, if necessary.
>shifting the source of power from an inefficient source to a more efficient one is an improvement. most cars average around 20% efficiency while even coal plants get around 35%.
Diesel cars have an energy efficiency of 45%
But that means that 45% of the energy stored in the petrol is converted to movement energy.
Cogas plants can have an efficiency of 60% (if you can make use of the heat: 85%).
This figure is the amount energy of coal converted to electric energy (via movement).
It still has to be distributed to the cars (7% power grid), used to charge the battery (4% charger) and converted back to movement (10%) results in 48% efficiency (68% heat).
I (knowingly) neglected the transport of the energy to both the car and the factory, and the use of regenerative braking in possible hybrid diesel and fully electrical cars as both would go far behind a back of the hand calculation.
But you can see, if you are going with just a 30% efficient coal plant, you better stick with a new diesel car, than an EV.
http://xkcd.com/234/
> That was true communism.
No. It was not. It was Leninism, later either Stalinism or Maoism. A certain "interpretation" of communism. Note, how your quotes comes directly from the section, which shows Lenins position.
> All the stuff about violent revolutions and dictatorships of the proletariat came directly from Marx.
Yes. That is true. You have, however, read it more carefully. It is a text from almost a hundred years ago, and even in that time, they used a peculiar vocabulary. That is why there is a special page in Wikipedia for the term "Dictatorship of the proletariat" (from which you quoted).
First, note how Marx calls the current government as "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie". Germany was at that time a parliamentary democracy. Similar to Anarchists (which at that time were a bit more common than they are today), they argue, that since a state has a military and a police to enforce its rules on the people, is repressive, a "dictatorship",("maintain its rule by means of the terror").
They simply argue, that for a translational phase, communists are in need of such a state, which can defend itself, the same way the current one can.
To quote Karl Kautsky (also from the very same page):
To my knowledge, they did it to cut cost in transport and storage and increase responsiveness to demand: Shipping incurs a delay of roughly 2-3 months, with all it downsides.
Before they started producing at least on the continent they intended to sell, they had billions of dollars worth of merchandise in transfer and couldn't respond fast enough to local demand.
Also, they had calculate a price which covered for changes in the exchange rate in the producing country and sold country.
Wrong generation: 1939 calling
Does that statistic include Windows Vista with an "XP downgrade license"?
Then you have obviously never been a fan of Peter Gabriel, as his stuff was always "designed to educate us" and to "show us all his social conscience".
> That's what I like about guys like the Stones, they may do the odd charity gig, but it's all about the rock and roll, and not about albums designed to educate us
Yeah. Because Rock is all about just making music, getting famous and rich.
Never mind, Bob Dylan, Woodstock, or others.
-Why would character movement need to run at a certain rate? It sounds like the thread should spend most of its time blocked waiting for user input.
You usually have a game-physics engine running, which practically integrates the movements of the characters (character movement) or generally updates the world model (position and state of all objects). Even without input, the world moves on. The fixed rate is usually taken, because it is simpler than a varying time-step rate.
-What's so special about the audio thread? Shouldn't it just handle events from other threads without communicating back?
Audio is the most sensible thing to timing issues: Contrary to video (or simulation), you cannot drop arbitrary pieces of sound without the user immediately noticing.
-How do semaphores affect SMP cache efficiency? Is the CPU notified to keep the data in shared cache?
Not specially, they are simply a special case of the problem: How to access data
Several threads may compete for the same data, but if they are accessing the same data in one cache-line, it will lead to lots of communication (thrashing the cache).
In CUDA, a thread-manager is aware of the memory layout and will decide, which parts of memory will be processed by which shaders/ALUs/CPUs. Thereby, it is also possible to make more efficient use of the caches.
-What is a "3D world drawer"? Is it where god keeps us in his living room?
Drawer as in "someone, who draws", or 3D world painter. It draws/paints the state of the world as updated by the simulation thread.
This can happen asynchronously, as you will not notice, if a frame is dropped occasionally.
One acronym: CUDA
That is hardly a conceptual problem of the language C++, but more one of the toolchain and/or ABI, and can be improved on by rewriting the old GNU linker in C++ :). And maybe someday the GNU binutils will gain incremental linking.
More critical is that the grammar of C++ is undecidable.
> If I change a header file in C++, that's it, I'm off to make coffee, but with C# you can change just about anything and the code is recompiled in seconds.
:).
I usually take that as a sign, that there is too much dependencies among the classes. This is a problem in any language, in C++, it just becomes more immediately apparent through compile times.
Secondly, changing a header usually means, I'm going to change the interface of the class (adding functions, changing signatures). If I'm going to do that, it means that I made a mistake in the design of the interface, and I have to take the punishment
That said, I can't deny that I liked the next to zero compile time of Java.
Or you make a backup.