Scientists solve next years problem on last years computer...
Scientists solve next years problem using last year's computer using programming techniques from 20-30 years ago. Hence, why a lot of scientific code bases are near indecipherable unless you can manage to find out who wrote the original code and you can track them down.
I become apoplectic with software engineers who just don't vest themselves in the science.
They don't need to. The science is your job. It is the engineer's job to translate your science into coherent software. It doesn't matter if your computing thermal dynamics or fluid dynamics. Solving non-linear systems isn't unique to any branch of science.
The perpetually want a set of requirements. And they get upset if a new requirement is added later.
Yes, because you can't build a house if you keep changing the blueprints. Software with enough forethought will allow for a lot of flexibility, but if you keep changing what you want then there is a good chance that they'll miss the deadline. Programmers don't get angry when you change requirements, they get angry when you change requirements and the deadline doesn't change with it.
I see software as a way to explore a space. Model it. Determine what more modeling is needed. You are constantly trying to do something that usually is beyond what is computationally possible so you have to figure out what approximation is going to work. What has to be done at full scale and what can be done at lower resolution. Mock up stuff.
That's not software engineering. That's hacking. Messing around.
The engineers who don't see it as a process just are impediments.
If you're trying to use engineers in this regard, you're doing it wrong. You bring in software engineers when you want to build a solid maintainable piece of software. Using them as you're own personal hacking group isn't going to be very productive as they don't have your domain knowledge. Nor is it fair to expect them to. Just like it wouldn't be fair of them to expect you to have full knowledge of all Web 2.0 technologies and be able to roll out a full interactive website, for example.
Think of it this way. You don't go to an architect and tell them to start building a house when you haven't even figured out the blue print yet.
Scientists want lots of simple things fast then see what is working and add new simple extensions.
Which invariably fails, as most scientists don't have the programming background to do this effectively. What usually happens, is some cobbled together barely tested, fragile as hell piece of code gets created and is then added to a larger project which itself is poorly tested and fragile. This usually results in weeks to months of integration issues, compiler and compiler setting issues, bug chasing, MPI race conditions and errors, and other such activities.
If you really are doing something quick and dirty and will only be used for your personal little pet project, you don't go and get a group of software engineers to do it for you. If you're working on something that will eventually be used in a production system, whether it is stand-alone or part of a larger system, that's when you want to bring in the engineers.
They don't want to wait 4 months for some delivered code based on specs it took 2 months to write.
Which explains the spaghetti-coded train-wreck status of most scientific code bases today. You can do it quick, or you can do it right.
Hence scientist tend to write their own code.
And it shows. Any software engineering student writing code like the science code bases I've seen would be flunked out.
I've got no problems with scientists prototyping their own code. In fact, that serves as a good starting point for engineers to build a more robus
I mean, is NASA really writing software that might readily apeal to "consumer demand"?
Yes. Yes they are. Consumers aren't just Joe and Jane Sixpak, but research organizations, government agencies, etc. . The harder these applications are to use, the more time is wasted trying to figure out what the variable "T" really means.
Here's the problem with that line of thinking: It's stupid, short-sighted, and ultimately incorrect.
Having worked with many scientific code bases I can tell you from first-hand experience that this "just for me" code will be taken and shoe-horned into an already atrocious mess of code. That code will be used to validate research, or far worse, potentially be used as or become part of a decision aid or workflow. This makes any existing code bases or workflows your personal train-wreck of programming exercise gets included into more fragile and bug prone, and serves to exacerbate the issues that already exist.
If you're writing code, write it correctly. Or for $DIETY's sake, at least write it in a coherent manner so someone else can come in and fix it. We don't need any more examples of how to NOT to write code in the scientific community.
It's unlikely that this country can halt its decline. We're at the stage where the general populace is apathetic and under educated. Also an increasingly concentrated group of people are making too much money and acquiring too much power to want to change anything and will actively fight anything that can cause any real improvements.
It's not just energy. It's resources in general. Growth and progress happen faster when you have abundant cheap resources to exploit.
With increasing population and depleting resources, abundant and cheap are going away. Soon, sustainability will be the driving force instead of growth. Even if there is a breakthrough with fusion energy, that doesn't change the fact that there is only so much copper, rare earth's, land, fresh water, etc. .
My comment wasn't about people voting themselves dollars. My comment was about how those that are well off really have no clue about how broken some of the social support systems are in this country.
The overwhelming view of republicans is that those that make use of social services are stupid lazy leeches who do nothing but act as a drain on our country. But a great deal of middle class and upper middle class republicans (and people in general) don't seem to realize just how precarious their lives of comfort are. Once calamity strikes (job loss, chronic illness, etc.), a well off family may find themselves needing to rely on those social services that they may have once denigrated so loudly as being the bastion of the stupid and lazy. They will get to revel in the social stigma in this country that goes along with being on the low end of the economic spectrum. And if they're really lucky they will get to enjoy a welfare Christmas.
If you're well off and you came from a well off family, then chances are you've never been exposed to the catastrofuck that passes off as an excuse for social support in this country. Once you have been though, your entire outlook changes.
The Laffer curve is a miserable failure, as anyone with even the slightest knowledge of economic history can deduce.
The only private investments tax cuts will spur will be in paying accountants to find new and unique ways to hide the taxable income in esoteric financial constructs designed specifically for the wealthy.
Balancing the budget requires cutting spending AND raising taxes.
I'm just glad to see that the game industry is exactly the same as it was when I left it 8 years ago. It builds character. Puts hair on your chest. And at the end, your most likely to be eaten by a Grue.
More seriously, this kind of thing will continue to happen until game developers push back. Unlikely, to say the least. Too many naive kids want into the game industry.
It's just like Hollywood, without the guilds/unions protecting employees and even less prospect of becoming a star.
Every single form of government can (and at some point does) lead to totalitarianism. Ideologies are perfect. Humans are not. So no matter what form of government is implemented it eventually corrodes under the human tide of greed and corruption.
Communism fails in practice (on a large scale) because it goes against human nature. Humans are not nice, altruistic beings. It takes an iron fist to make humans in general conform to any system like communism. This leads to communism having a very short lifespan before the system corrupts.
At the same time, democracy is not a magic shield against this either. A rather stark example is Nazi Germany, which went from a democracy to authoritarian dictatorship in just a handful of years.
All it takes is apathy and/or fear to slide a government into authoritarianism. Concentrate wealth and power at the top and you have a perfect setup for stripping away freedom and rights. Get enough talking heads and charismatic people on your side, and you'll even have the people you're screwing over help you attain your goals.
Americans like to believe that their government is all that is right and good in the world, and that it is not in fact a hypocritical institution like every other government on the face of the planet. We are th GOOD GOVERNMNET(tm). We don't do bad things like assassinations or back-room deals or torture or extraordinary renditions or any number of things BAD GOVERNMENTS(tm) do. And our government is only too happy to oblige by covering up or glossing over or secreting away any information that may show them in a different light.
The reality is that our hands are just as dirty as everyone else's. We just use a better soap.
Find a scientific paper that claims global warming is 100% proven. You won't find one. And you won't find any credible climate scientist claiming global warming is a 100% proven fact either. That's not how science works.
The science strongly suggests human activities are causing the warming, and there is a lot of science and research behind this. This isn't about which team has the best supporters. It's about the science. If you think you can refute the science then publish some papers. But building strawman personifications of your view of "supporters" to knock around is hardly firm ground to build your case.
You might want to look at the data collected by NASA, NOAA, and various other agencies since it seems like you haven't bothered to. The warming continues, and it continues at a significant pace.
You also apparently do not understand the basics of climate science. A sudden increase in CO2 does not result in a sudden increase in temperature. It builds over time as it takes a while for the heat to build up in the normal sinks (like the ocean). Hence why, even if we stopped all CO2 production right this instant, the planet would continue to warm by an additional degree or two.
The science does back up your idle hand waving. Do you have any Nature articles or something to back up your claims?
The problem is, you're not very familiar with climate research. There are many excellent books on the subject the give very good explanations as to why climate can be predicted and the methods used to do so.
If you can, on the other hand, write a concise thesis showing how that research is flawed and it can stand up to scientific review, then by all means do so (and prepare for multiple science awards). However, keep in mind that many sciences involve chaotic systems and yet they use models to give accurate predictions.
Just because a system is chaotic does not mean it cannot be modeled or predicted reliably over an extended period of time.
Wall street doesn't prevent us from having engineers, but they certainly aren't helping. Why pay for an American engineer when you can get 5 Indian engineers for the same price? It's just capitalism at work.
You know, everyone goes on and on about stopping the spending. What about raising taxes? Letting the Bush tax cuts expire would have made a huge dent in the deficit, and adding a percentage point or two onto the highest earners would do very well in righting the ship over the long term. Fact is, taxes haven't been this low in decades (especially for the highest earners) which, if you think about, is pretty stupid considering all the military actions (can't call them wars after all) going on all over the world.
The best would be to cut spending and increase taxes. But with today's congress, we will get neither.
How are terrorist attacks the greatest threat to a nuclear plant?
First, you have to get inside the nuclear plant. Then you have to know about the particular plant you're trying to sabotage. Then you have to have the actual know how to get around all the fail-safes in place in order to trigger a cooling failure. And you have to do all of this without anyone noticing.
It takes a lot more planning and ingenuity to sabotage a nuclear plant than simply walking in and randomly blowing yourself up. Nuclear plants are built to be tough, with multiple redundancies and fail-safes in place. Even flying a 747 into a nuclear plant isn't a guarantee.
If terrorists want an easy target that can cause a lot of damage, oil refineries are a much better. Extremely toxic. Start a raging inferno at a refinery and the surrounding area immediately becomes a superfund site. If the chemicals make it into the water table, you could make the entire surrounding area uninhabitable for years to decades. Not only that, but hitting a refinery usually jacks up all related petroleum prices (gasoline and such), especially if you live in a country where ecological rules prevent new refineries from being built all that often. So you cause widespread damage, possible long term casualties, and hit the economy/populace with higher prices in some of the most sought after and consumed commodities.
Better yet, just attack a major food production center. Less well guarded, mass casualties if done right.
If a terrorist group wants to make a point, hitting a nuke plant isn't the best target. I'd be more concerned over the centralized food and water production systems than nuke plants.
And I'm sure you have tons of research and data to back up your claims?
Even ignoring all the data and research currently available, there is some rather large and tangible evidence that temperatures are warming, namely Greenland and pretty much all areas north of the article circle. Perhaps you may need a refresher in physics, but it takes A LOT of energy to melt the amount of ice that's disappeared over the past few decades just in those two areas alone.
The people who have politicized the science are the same people who politicized the science when anything affecting big industry negatively shows up. They've been at it a long time. Asbestos, tobacco, acid rain, ozone depletion, scrubbers on power plants, and any other major scientific controversy you'd care to think of has been well opposed by these groups with a lot of funding by the industries affected. In fact, many of the manufactured FUD organizations that were around in the 50's and 60's are still around today, doing the exact same thing. If you ever ever seen the movie, "Thank You For Smoking" you get a glimpse of what they do, and they do it very very well.
Of course, if you think their is a global climate conspiracy, then there is no way to convince you otherwise. So enjoy your beliefs. I'm sticking with the science.
It's called bystander apathy, and it's the reason why women can be attacked in broad daylight in the middle of New York City and not a single person will do anything about it. The mentality of "If no one else is doing anything to help, why should I?" is well understood and documented, but that doesn't make it an any less repulsive aspect of our society and psychology.
But if it makes you sleep easier at night to justify your actions by the perceived hypocrisy of others, then by all means curl up with that blanket of moral bankruptcy and lull yourself to sleep. You won't be the first or the last to do so.
The Grand Experiment is failing. We've allowed too much money and power to move upward. We've grown complacent and apathetic. As a society we've become so self-centered that unless something directly interferes with our happy little lives, most people just don't care.
This isn't really shocking or surprising. This has happened to one degree or another to every great power throughout history.
Another problem is that you're not going to hire people with a good knowledge of electronics for minimum wage + commissions. "You don't need that...thingy you're looking for. What you really need is an over-expensive cell-phone plan!".
RadioShack lost it's luster a long time ago, and I'm pretty surprised it's still around. All my parts now come from online stores where I can get bulk packs of components for the same price as a single component from RadioShack.
The dirty secret of parallel programming is that it's *NOT* so widely needed. I think a lot of academics got funding to study automatic parallelization or other parallel techniques, and they latch on to multicore as a justification for it, but it's not.
It is widely needed, but perhaps not by you.
There is only one GOOD reasons to use multithreading -- because your work is compute-bound.
Ok, now you're confusing the issue. Are you talking about parallel programming or multi-threaded programming? Parallel programming is larger in scope the simple multi-threaded programming.
So in the end, who are the people who still need to develop multithreaded algorithms? There are very few. I think they're just the people who write high-performance multithreaded libraries.
No, there are quite a few and many of them make quite a lot of money to do so. Do you think the programmers at ILM, 3DS, Pixar, and NASA are just sitting around doing nothing? Does your MT algorithm library also know how to optimize for the GPU as well? Are you sure that a one size fits all approach will work for every application out there?
To be clear, parallel programming also encompasses programming platforms like super-computers, which I assure you does not have a simple MT algorithm library to magically optimize applications. A whole new level of complexity is added with the introduction of GPUs. It gets even more complicated if you deal with non-symmetric distributions or dynamic regridding.
The world of parallel programming is quite large with a lot of big companies and brainpower invested to maximize efficiency and utilization. I think you're greatly underestimating how important and vast the field is.
Slashdot Mirror
Scientists solve next years problem on last years computer...
Scientists solve next years problem using last year's computer using programming techniques from 20-30 years ago. Hence, why a lot of scientific code bases are near indecipherable unless you can manage to find out who wrote the original code and you can track them down.
I become apoplectic with software engineers who just don't vest themselves in the science.
They don't need to. The science is your job. It is the engineer's job to translate your science into coherent software. It doesn't matter if your computing thermal dynamics or fluid dynamics. Solving non-linear systems isn't unique to any branch of science.
The perpetually want a set of requirements. And they get upset if a new requirement is added later.
Yes, because you can't build a house if you keep changing the blueprints. Software with enough forethought will allow for a lot of flexibility, but if you keep changing what you want then there is a good chance that they'll miss the deadline. Programmers don't get angry when you change requirements, they get angry when you change requirements and the deadline doesn't change with it.
I see software as a way to explore a space. Model it. Determine what more modeling is needed. You are constantly trying to do something that usually is beyond what is computationally possible so you have to figure out what approximation is going to work. What has to be done at full scale and what can be done at lower resolution. Mock up stuff.
That's not software engineering. That's hacking. Messing around.
The engineers who don't see it as a process just are impediments.
If you're trying to use engineers in this regard, you're doing it wrong. You bring in software engineers when you want to build a solid maintainable piece of software. Using them as you're own personal hacking group isn't going to be very productive as they don't have your domain knowledge. Nor is it fair to expect them to. Just like it wouldn't be fair of them to expect you to have full knowledge of all Web 2.0 technologies and be able to roll out a full interactive website, for example.
Think of it this way. You don't go to an architect and tell them to start building a house when you haven't even figured out the blue print yet.
Scientists want lots of simple things fast then see what is working and add new simple extensions.
Which invariably fails, as most scientists don't have the programming background to do this effectively. What usually happens, is some cobbled together barely tested, fragile as hell piece of code gets created and is then added to a larger project which itself is poorly tested and fragile. This usually results in weeks to months of integration issues, compiler and compiler setting issues, bug chasing, MPI race conditions and errors, and other such activities.
If you really are doing something quick and dirty and will only be used for your personal little pet project, you don't go and get a group of software engineers to do it for you. If you're working on something that will eventually be used in a production system, whether it is stand-alone or part of a larger system, that's when you want to bring in the engineers.
They don't want to wait 4 months for some delivered code based on specs it took 2 months to write.
Which explains the spaghetti-coded train-wreck status of most scientific code bases today. You can do it quick, or you can do it right.
Hence scientist tend to write their own code.
And it shows. Any software engineering student writing code like the science code bases I've seen would be flunked out.
I've got no problems with scientists prototyping their own code. In fact, that serves as a good starting point for engineers to build a more robus
I mean, is NASA really writing software that might readily apeal to "consumer demand"?
Yes. Yes they are. Consumers aren't just Joe and Jane Sixpak, but research organizations, government agencies, etc. . The harder these applications are to use, the more time is wasted trying to figure out what the variable "T" really means.
Here's the problem with that line of thinking: It's stupid, short-sighted, and ultimately incorrect.
Having worked with many scientific code bases I can tell you from first-hand experience that this "just for me" code will be taken and shoe-horned into an already atrocious mess of code. That code will be used to validate research, or far worse, potentially be used as or become part of a decision aid or workflow. This makes any existing code bases or workflows your personal train-wreck of programming exercise gets included into more fragile and bug prone, and serves to exacerbate the issues that already exist.
If you're writing code, write it correctly. Or for $DIETY's sake, at least write it in a coherent manner so someone else can come in and fix it. We don't need any more examples of how to NOT to write code in the scientific community.
It's unlikely that this country can halt its decline. We're at the stage where the general populace is apathetic and under educated. Also an increasingly concentrated group of people are making too much money and acquiring too much power to want to change anything and will actively fight anything that can cause any real improvements.
It's not just energy. It's resources in general. Growth and progress happen faster when you have abundant cheap resources to exploit.
With increasing population and depleting resources, abundant and cheap are going away. Soon, sustainability will be the driving force instead of growth. Even if there is a breakthrough with fusion energy, that doesn't change the fact that there is only so much copper, rare earth's, land, fresh water, etc. .
My comment wasn't about people voting themselves dollars. My comment was about how those that are well off really have no clue about how broken some of the social support systems are in this country.
The overwhelming view of republicans is that those that make use of social services are stupid lazy leeches who do nothing but act as a drain on our country. But a great deal of middle class and upper middle class republicans (and people in general) don't seem to realize just how precarious their lives of comfort are. Once calamity strikes (job loss, chronic illness, etc.), a well off family may find themselves needing to rely on those social services that they may have once denigrated so loudly as being the bastion of the stupid and lazy. They will get to revel in the social stigma in this country that goes along with being on the low end of the economic spectrum. And if they're really lucky they will get to enjoy a welfare Christmas.
If you're well off and you came from a well off family, then chances are you've never been exposed to the catastrofuck that passes off as an excuse for social support in this country. Once you have been though, your entire outlook changes.
The difference between a middle class republican and a middle class democrat is a single unexpected calamity.
The Laffer curve is a miserable failure, as anyone with even the slightest knowledge of economic history can deduce.
The only private investments tax cuts will spur will be in paying accountants to find new and unique ways to hide the taxable income in esoteric financial constructs designed specifically for the wealthy.
Balancing the budget requires cutting spending AND raising taxes.
No, that just means it's campaign season.
I'm just glad to see that the game industry is exactly the same as it was when I left it 8 years ago. It builds character. Puts hair on your chest. And at the end, your most likely to be eaten by a Grue.
More seriously, this kind of thing will continue to happen until game developers push back. Unlikely, to say the least. Too many naive kids want into the game industry.
It's just like Hollywood, without the guilds/unions protecting employees and even less prospect of becoming a star.
Every single form of government can (and at some point does) lead to totalitarianism. Ideologies are perfect. Humans are not. So no matter what form of government is implemented it eventually corrodes under the human tide of greed and corruption.
Communism fails in practice (on a large scale) because it goes against human nature. Humans are not nice, altruistic beings. It takes an iron fist to make humans in general conform to any system like communism. This leads to communism having a very short lifespan before the system corrupts.
At the same time, democracy is not a magic shield against this either. A rather stark example is Nazi Germany, which went from a democracy to authoritarian dictatorship in just a handful of years.
All it takes is apathy and/or fear to slide a government into authoritarianism. Concentrate wealth and power at the top and you have a perfect setup for stripping away freedom and rights. Get enough talking heads and charismatic people on your side, and you'll even have the people you're screwing over help you attain your goals.
Americans like to believe that their government is all that is right and good in the world, and that it is not in fact a hypocritical institution like every other government on the face of the planet. We are th GOOD GOVERNMNET(tm). We don't do bad things like assassinations or back-room deals or torture or extraordinary renditions or any number of things BAD GOVERNMENTS(tm) do. And our government is only too happy to oblige by covering up or glossing over or secreting away any information that may show them in a different light.
The reality is that our hands are just as dirty as everyone else's. We just use a better soap.
Find a scientific paper that claims global warming is 100% proven. You won't find one. And you won't find any credible climate scientist claiming global warming is a 100% proven fact either. That's not how science works.
The science strongly suggests human activities are causing the warming, and there is a lot of science and research behind this. This isn't about which team has the best supporters. It's about the science. If you think you can refute the science then publish some papers. But building strawman personifications of your view of "supporters" to knock around is hardly firm ground to build your case.
You might want to look at the data collected by NASA, NOAA, and various other agencies since it seems like you haven't bothered to. The warming continues, and it continues at a significant pace.
You also apparently do not understand the basics of climate science. A sudden increase in CO2 does not result in a sudden increase in temperature. It builds over time as it takes a while for the heat to build up in the normal sinks (like the ocean). Hence why, even if we stopped all CO2 production right this instant, the planet would continue to warm by an additional degree or two.
The science does back up your idle hand waving. Do you have any Nature articles or something to back up your claims?
The problem is, you're not very familiar with climate research. There are many excellent books on the subject the give very good explanations as to why climate can be predicted and the methods used to do so.
If you can, on the other hand, write a concise thesis showing how that research is flawed and it can stand up to scientific review, then by all means do so (and prepare for multiple science awards). However, keep in mind that many sciences involve chaotic systems and yet they use models to give accurate predictions.
Just because a system is chaotic does not mean it cannot be modeled or predicted reliably over an extended period of time.
Wall street doesn't prevent us from having engineers, but they certainly aren't helping. Why pay for an American engineer when you can get 5 Indian engineers for the same price? It's just capitalism at work.
You know, everyone goes on and on about stopping the spending. What about raising taxes? Letting the Bush tax cuts expire would have made a huge dent in the deficit, and adding a percentage point or two onto the highest earners would do very well in righting the ship over the long term. Fact is, taxes haven't been this low in decades (especially for the highest earners) which, if you think about, is pretty stupid considering all the military actions (can't call them wars after all) going on all over the world.
The best would be to cut spending and increase taxes. But with today's congress, we will get neither.
How are terrorist attacks the greatest threat to a nuclear plant?
First, you have to get inside the nuclear plant. Then you have to know about the particular plant you're trying to sabotage. Then you have to have the actual know how to get around all the fail-safes in place in order to trigger a cooling failure. And you have to do all of this without anyone noticing.
It takes a lot more planning and ingenuity to sabotage a nuclear plant than simply walking in and randomly blowing yourself up. Nuclear plants are built to be tough, with multiple redundancies and fail-safes in place. Even flying a 747 into a nuclear plant isn't a guarantee.
If terrorists want an easy target that can cause a lot of damage, oil refineries are a much better. Extremely toxic. Start a raging inferno at a refinery and the surrounding area immediately becomes a superfund site. If the chemicals make it into the water table, you could make the entire surrounding area uninhabitable for years to decades. Not only that, but hitting a refinery usually jacks up all related petroleum prices (gasoline and such), especially if you live in a country where ecological rules prevent new refineries from being built all that often. So you cause widespread damage, possible long term casualties, and hit the economy/populace with higher prices in some of the most sought after and consumed commodities.
Better yet, just attack a major food production center. Less well guarded, mass casualties if done right.
If a terrorist group wants to make a point, hitting a nuke plant isn't the best target. I'd be more concerned over the centralized food and water production systems than nuke plants.
And I'm sure you have tons of research and data to back up your claims?
Even ignoring all the data and research currently available, there is some rather large and tangible evidence that temperatures are warming, namely Greenland and pretty much all areas north of the article circle. Perhaps you may need a refresher in physics, but it takes A LOT of energy to melt the amount of ice that's disappeared over the past few decades just in those two areas alone.
The people who have politicized the science are the same people who politicized the science when anything affecting big industry negatively shows up. They've been at it a long time. Asbestos, tobacco, acid rain, ozone depletion, scrubbers on power plants, and any other major scientific controversy you'd care to think of has been well opposed by these groups with a lot of funding by the industries affected. In fact, many of the manufactured FUD organizations that were around in the 50's and 60's are still around today, doing the exact same thing. If you ever ever seen the movie, "Thank You For Smoking" you get a glimpse of what they do, and they do it very very well.
Of course, if you think their is a global climate conspiracy, then there is no way to convince you otherwise. So enjoy your beliefs. I'm sticking with the science.
It's called bystander apathy, and it's the reason why women can be attacked in broad daylight in the middle of New York City and not a single person will do anything about it. The mentality of "If no one else is doing anything to help, why should I?" is well understood and documented, but that doesn't make it an any less repulsive aspect of our society and psychology.
But if it makes you sleep easier at night to justify your actions by the perceived hypocrisy of others, then by all means curl up with that blanket of moral bankruptcy and lull yourself to sleep. You won't be the first or the last to do so.
The Grand Experiment is failing. We've allowed too much money and power to move upward. We've grown complacent and apathetic. As a society we've become so self-centered that unless something directly interferes with our happy little lives, most people just don't care.
This isn't really shocking or surprising. This has happened to one degree or another to every great power throughout history.
Another problem is that you're not going to hire people with a good knowledge of electronics for minimum wage + commissions. "You don't need that...thingy you're looking for. What you really need is an over-expensive cell-phone plan!".
RadioShack lost it's luster a long time ago, and I'm pretty surprised it's still around. All my parts now come from online stores where I can get bulk packs of components for the same price as a single component from RadioShack.
The dirty secret of parallel programming is that it's *NOT* so widely needed. I think a lot of academics got funding to study automatic parallelization or other parallel techniques, and they latch on to multicore as a justification for it, but it's not.
It is widely needed, but perhaps not by you.
There is only one GOOD reasons to use multithreading -- because your work is compute-bound.
Ok, now you're confusing the issue. Are you talking about parallel programming or multi-threaded programming? Parallel programming is larger in scope the simple multi-threaded programming.
So in the end, who are the people who still need to develop multithreaded algorithms? There are very few. I think they're just the people who write high-performance multithreaded libraries.
No, there are quite a few and many of them make quite a lot of money to do so. Do you think the programmers at ILM, 3DS, Pixar, and NASA are just sitting around doing nothing? Does your MT algorithm library also know how to optimize for the GPU as well? Are you sure that a one size fits all approach will work for every application out there?
To be clear, parallel programming also encompasses programming platforms like super-computers, which I assure you does not have a simple MT algorithm library to magically optimize applications. A whole new level of complexity is added with the introduction of GPUs. It gets even more complicated if you deal with non-symmetric distributions or dynamic regridding.
The world of parallel programming is quite large with a lot of big companies and brainpower invested to maximize efficiency and utilization. I think you're greatly underestimating how important and vast the field is.
If he starts talking about long pork, run away. Or shoot to kill.
The rich have more than enough means to get around your system, while the poor have enough means to suffer from it.
Libraries. Libraries and librarians have been fighting the good fight against censorship and banning books for a long time. And it's free.