As with yourself, All of my software is multi-threaded, I write for Windows. To some extent, I'm taking on the responsibility of writing a multi-threaded solution, but to some extent, I think it's the case that these solutions are weakly multi-threaded. One thread does most of the work - the other threads are *useful*, they simplify the design of the code, but that's all.
Clock speeds have, for the foreseeable future, hit the wall but transistor counts are still going up.
Clock speeds have been the way forward to date because they require no change in the way programs are written, yet provide performance improvements.
Now that the only way to improve performance is to harness increased transistor counts, multi-cores are in, but this means a programming paradgym shift is needed, because current programming languages are insufficiently descriptive to permit compilers to generate usefully multi-threaded code.
Either the programmer must take responsibility for such behaviour, or new languages are required. A subtle yet fundamental change is on the way; we're about to shift from the single-threaded approach to the multi-threaded approach.
I'm quite serious about the economic and political issues. You may not *like* what I write;./ is notoriously left-wing - but flamebait is *not* an appropriate description.
"...and the whole area is covered by free wireless internet"
Free? so the council isn't paying for it?
Oh - you mean the council *is* paying for it. So that means it's being paid for by tax.
So...let's get the right; the council has said "we're going to charge you money and provide WiFi and if you don't like what we offer, well that's just too bad - you can pay a second time for a commerical provider (if one dares to come along, given they know that to use their service you'll be paying twice)."
Oh...and it's a State run service. So it's not going to be particularly resistant to things like, say, intelligence service requests for private user information, because it's the State which provides most of the money which the council runs on. Such things aren't likely I'd say to be *overtly* used to influence behaviour in such cases, but you know as well as I do it has a significant influence and is most certainly a conflict of interest - where the people who might ask for information just happen to also be rather closely involved with the people who give you funding.
No - all in all, if it's all the same to you, I'd prefer other people (a council in this case) did *not*, on my behalf, take my money and decide what they want to spend it on. I'd like them to do that as little as possible, because, frankly, I think they don't do a very good job - people are never as diligent or efficient as spending *other* people's money as they are at spending their own.
Spending other people's money is a significant issue, not be lightly undertaken.
Space exploration and colonization is absolutely vital and must be undertaken.
However, there are many ways to achieve this.
It concerns me that there seems to be such gung-ho enthusisam for pushing what will be vast amounts of tax-raised money into NASA. NASA I'm sure has an unlimited capacity to absorb funds; but I'm not sure it has an equal capacity to produce results in equal measure.
Why not just use the same money to place contracts with the major private space companies? why have a State run organisation at all?
> As a resident of downtown Tempe, I hope the > rollout isn't successful, as I would much prefer > to see a more community-based effort, such as in > Seattle, Austin, and New York City.
What do you do if the community-based effort turns out to be awful? there's nothing special about being community-based which means they're going to offer a brilliant service; they're more likely than commerical companies, in some respects, but less likely in others, to fail.
If it's commerical, there's going to be competition, and you can change provider.
> In a time of mobility, what use are trade unions? > If I don't like an employer, I find another.
Your ability to do so is limited by unions. A union essentially exists to obtain for its members pay and priviledges in excess of those warrented by the work they do. In doing so, in particular by making it hard to fire people, companies are discourage from hiring, because once hired, it is hard to dismiss.
Unions are essentially parasitic. You have to remember that by increasing wages beyond the point where they would naturally be, the products and services offered by the company are more expensive; and so EVERYONE ELSE who uses these products and services pays more.
A union brings benefits to its members at the cost of the general public and the economy as a whole.
> Wow, you spell like a Brit, but you have no > concept of how a union works? If you're in a > union, the contract isn't between you and the > company, it's between the union and the company.
> Their right to strike is enshrined by law, > provided due ballots have taken place (which I > believe is the case)
I think the right to strike is an anacronism. It was appropriate when workers lacked rights and were exploited; these days, with for example the highly skilled IBM employees, it's *actually* a State enforced injustice whereby one party in a well-understood and mutually-accepted contract can violate the agreement in the contract.
This issue is in fact what's destroying Ford and General Motors, for example. The CEO of Ford a few years ago summed it up very nicely: "I can't fire any of these workers". Ford desperately needs to cut it's workforce, but it cannot, because of the strength of the unions there and their ability to strike. Ford is probably now on an inexorable decline and will eventually fail; the unions really are not operating in their own best interest, but they lack the insight and foresight to see this.
...if even one goes missing, he spends ages searching for it.
IBM make so much money because they keep themselves efficient. If you stop doing that, you eventually stop making money. It's not reasonable to argue "we're doing well now, so we don't need to fire people". Anyways, since these are the people who are going to lose their jobs, you can know a priori their perception of the state of the company is biased; they'd be inhuman for it not to be.
Personally, my take in this is very simple; you enter into a contract with another person (a company, as it happens, in this case, which makes no difference) and either of you are free to behave as you like as long as you honour your contract.
It is improper for one individual to use extraordinary means (going on strike in this case) because they don't like what the other person is doing, when they've agreed to the contract between them.
The sum result is that the products bought will be more expensive than they would otherwise be.
What exactly is the benefit of this? American companies benefit by having more trade? but they're *paying* for that additional trade in their taxes, because the State has to pay more to buy the more expensive products.
In fact, I'd like all third-party hidden-startup applications, which generally are unwanted and adopt this method since they know they'd be removed, to be illegal. I get VERY annoyed when other people feel fit to try to force their software into *MY* computer. How would they feel if I came into their front room and took over the remote control?
> "With funds on loan from the Chinese government, > Chinese equipment giant, [...] Huawei is > curently selling EVDO phones for about $130 and > WCDMA phones about $250 which is about 30% than > everyone else on the market. [...] And that > means bad news for already struggling telecom > industry."
But *great* news for everyone who uses telecoms, since they're now able to buy formerly expensive kit at knock down prices, *subsidized by the Chinese State*.
If the Chinese State wants to pump money into the US economy, cool! all the companies who use telecoms (far, far more than those who provide telecomes) will have that much more money available to undertake work since they didn't have to spend it buying expensive telecoms kit - which means, over the whole of the economy, a whole bunch of new jobs.
The key to high quality software is controlling the complexity in the inter-function domain; the ordering of and the relationships between functions.
Converting natural language to software does NOT address this problem. Natural languages are not expressive or fluent at rigiourously addressing complexity issues. Rather, formal methods address this problem; even weak formal methods such as state machines produce enourmous benefits to code quality, since they force the author to consider all possible outcomes from all function calls and at the same time, by rigiously, logically and consistently exposing the behaviour of the program, permit far easier code modification by later authors.
We have now reached our cruising speed of 23,000mph. We will shortly be flying into a comet, so please enter your chairs are in the upright, locked position and extinguish all smoking materials.
Slashdot Mirror
I mean in general.
As with yourself, All of my software is multi-threaded, I write for Windows. To some extent, I'm taking on the responsibility of writing a multi-threaded solution, but to some extent, I think it's the case that these solutions are weakly multi-threaded. One thread does most of the work - the other threads are *useful*, they simplify the design of the code, but that's all.
--
Toby
It's more a case of it's the only way forward.
Clock speeds have, for the foreseeable future, hit the wall but transistor counts are still going up.
Clock speeds have been the way forward to date because they require no change in the way programs are written, yet provide performance improvements.
Now that the only way to improve performance is to harness increased transistor counts, multi-cores are in, but this means a programming paradgym shift is needed, because current programming languages are insufficiently descriptive to permit compilers to generate usefully multi-threaded code.
Either the programmer must take responsibility for such behaviour, or new languages are required. A subtle yet fundamental change is on the way; we're about to shift from the single-threaded approach to the multi-threaded approach.
--
Toby
-1 Flamebait from +2?
./ is notoriously left-wing - but flamebait is *not* an appropriate description.
I'm quite serious about the economic and political issues. You may not *like* what I write;
--
Toby
"...and the whole area is covered by free wireless internet"
Free? so the council isn't paying for it?
Oh - you mean the council *is* paying for it. So that means it's being paid for by tax.
So...let's get the right; the council has said "we're going to charge you money and provide WiFi and if you don't like what we offer, well that's just too bad - you can pay a second time for a commerical provider (if one dares to come along, given they know that to use their service you'll be paying twice)."
Oh...and it's a State run service. So it's not going to be particularly resistant to things like, say, intelligence service requests for private user information, because it's the State which provides most of the money which the council runs on. Such things aren't likely I'd say to be *overtly* used to influence behaviour in such cases, but you know as well as I do it has a significant influence and is most certainly a conflict of interest - where the people who might ask for information just happen to also be rather closely involved with the people who give you funding.
No - all in all, if it's all the same to you, I'd prefer other people (a council in this case) did *not*, on my behalf, take my money and decide what they want to spend it on. I'd like them to do that as little as possible, because, frankly, I think they don't do a very good job - people are never as diligent or efficient as spending *other* people's money as they are at spending their own.
--
Toby
Junction is five minutes bicycle ride from here.
--
Toby
Holy Men In Tights?
--
Toby
But wow, that'd be *cool* :)
--
Toby
"Electric Cars as Fast as Ferrets" ...and I'm thinking, what, tiny electric motors for burrowing robots?
--
Toby
Spending other people's money is a significant issue, not be lightly undertaken.
Space exploration and colonization is absolutely vital and must be undertaken.
However, there are many ways to achieve this.
It concerns me that there seems to be such gung-ho enthusisam for pushing what will be vast amounts of tax-raised money into NASA. NASA I'm sure has an unlimited capacity to absorb funds; but I'm not sure it has an equal capacity to produce results in equal measure.
Why not just use the same money to place contracts with the major private space companies? why have a State run organisation at all?
--
Toby
I think someone is taking himself - and open source - too seriously.
People write code because they enjoy it.
99.9% of the time what they do has no meaningful impact on 99.9% of existance.
People who write code because they think they're going to change the world never do.
--
Toby
> As a resident of downtown Tempe, I hope the
> rollout isn't successful, as I would much prefer
> to see a more community-based effort, such as in
> Seattle, Austin, and New York City.
What do you do if the community-based effort turns out to be awful? there's nothing special about being community-based which means they're going to offer a brilliant service; they're more likely than commerical companies, in some respects, but less likely in others, to fail.
If it's commerical, there's going to be competition, and you can change provider.
--
Toby
> In a time of mobility, what use are trade unions? > If I don't like an employer, I find another.
Your ability to do so is limited by unions. A union essentially exists to obtain for its members pay and priviledges in excess of those warrented by the work they do. In doing so, in particular by making it hard to fire people, companies are discourage from hiring, because once hired, it is hard to dismiss.
Unions are essentially parasitic. You have to remember that by increasing wages beyond the point where they would naturally be, the products and services offered by the company are more expensive; and so EVERYONE ELSE who uses these products and services pays more.
A union brings benefits to its members at the cost of the general public and the economy as a whole.
--
Toby
And by doing so, everything IBM produces is cheaper.
Everyone who uses IBM products and services can do that much more business because with the capital they have...which creates more jobs.
--
Toby
> Wow, you spell like a Brit, but you have no
> concept of how a union works? If you're in a
> union, the contract isn't between you and the
> company, it's between the union and the company.
That's merely a device.
You're right about the Brit bit.
--
Toby
> Their right to strike is enshrined by law,
> provided due ballots have taken place (which I
> believe is the case)
I think the right to strike is an anacronism. It was appropriate when workers lacked rights and were exploited; these days, with for example the highly skilled IBM employees, it's *actually* a State enforced injustice whereby one party in a well-understood and mutually-accepted contract can violate the agreement in the contract.
This issue is in fact what's destroying Ford and General Motors, for example. The CEO of Ford a few years ago summed it up very nicely: "I can't fire any of these workers". Ford desperately needs to cut it's workforce, but it cannot, because of the strength of the unions there and their ability to strike. Ford is probably now on an inexorable decline and will eventually fail; the unions really are not operating in their own best interest, but they lack the insight and foresight to see this.
--
Toby
...if even one goes missing, he spends ages searching for it.
IBM make so much money because they keep themselves efficient. If you stop doing that, you eventually stop making money. It's not reasonable to argue "we're doing well now, so we don't need to fire people". Anyways, since these are the people who are going to lose their jobs, you can know a priori their perception of the state of the company is biased; they'd be inhuman for it not to be.
Personally, my take in this is very simple; you enter into a contract with another person (a company, as it happens, in this case, which makes no difference) and either of you are free to behave as you like as long as you honour your contract.
It is improper for one individual to use extraordinary means (going on strike in this case) because they don't like what the other person is doing, when they've agreed to the contract between them.
--
Toby
This is insane.
The sum result is that the products bought will be more expensive than they would otherwise be.
What exactly is the benefit of this? American companies benefit by having more trade? but they're *paying* for that additional trade in their taxes, because the State has to pay more to buy the more expensive products.
--
Toby
AOL buying TW was the greatest travesty of the dot com boom.
--
Toby
RP is a complete pig to remove.
Wonder if it's now illegal?
In fact, I'd like all third-party hidden-startup applications, which generally are unwanted and adopt this method since they know they'd be removed, to be illegal. I get VERY annoyed when other people feel fit to try to force their software into *MY* computer. How would they feel if I came into their front room and took over the remote control?
--
Toby
"The debate around Monolithic (Linux) and Micro (Mach) kernels continues..."
There is no debate. It has been well accepted that micro-kernels are the way to go.
--
Toby
> "With funds on loan from the Chinese government,
> Chinese equipment giant, [...] Huawei is
> curently selling EVDO phones for about $130 and
> WCDMA phones about $250 which is about 30% than
> everyone else on the market. [...] And that
> means bad news for already struggling telecom
> industry."
But *great* news for everyone who uses telecoms, since they're now able to buy formerly expensive kit at knock down prices, *subsidized by the Chinese State*.
If the Chinese State wants to pump money into the US economy, cool! all the companies who use telecoms (far, far more than those who provide telecomes) will have that much more money available to undertake work since they didn't have to spend it buying expensive telecoms kit - which means, over the whole of the economy, a whole bunch of new jobs.
--
Toby
> Leading computer scientists, such as David
> Patterson, the head of the ACM are outraged and
> worried.
Everyone who's budget is cut is outraged and worried.
--
Toby
bitterness=9,profanity on
:)
major lol
--
Toby
The key to high quality software is controlling the complexity in the inter-function domain; the ordering of and the relationships between functions.
Converting natural language to software does NOT address this problem. Natural languages are not expressive or fluent at rigiourously addressing complexity issues. Rather, formal methods address this problem; even weak formal methods such as state machines produce enourmous benefits to code quality, since they force the author to consider all possible outcomes from all function calls and at the same time, by rigiously, logically and consistently exposing the behaviour of the program, permit far easier code modification by later authors.
--
Toby
"This is your captain speaking.
:)
We have now reached our cruising speed of 23,000mph. We will shortly be flying into a comet, so please enter your chairs are in the upright, locked position and extinguish all smoking materials.
Thankyou for flying EasyJet."
--
Toby