Weight, which is a Newtonian concept, is not really applicable to an inherently relativistic particle such as the photon. In addition, the effect of gravity on a photon is actually about twice as large as you would expect from Newtonian gravitation. This comes from the weak-field limit of general relativity, and was one of the first tests of the theory. In 1919, Sir Arthur Eddington observed the bending of starlight around the sun during a solar eclipse, and showed that the bending was, lo and behold, about twice as large as the Newtonian prediction, and consistent with general relativity.
Math is rigorous. You need a set of rules that hold in all situations.
Perhaps. But mathematical definitions are not necessarily rigorous. Try to formulate a rigorous definition of a set.
Another interesting case of the non-rigorous use of mathematics was by Dirac. He used the delta-function comfortably for a while, while the mathematicians cried foul (IIRC, the great von Neumann was one of them). Eventually they realized that, while not rigorous, he was right. Of course, he knew he had to be.
I don't discount the worth of rigor--far from it. An attempt at a rigorous argument often exposes implicit assumptions and possible caveats. But those who believe that mathematics is (or is even capable of being) an absolute, water-tight framework are living in a fantasy world (as the great Bertrand Russell unfortunately discovered).
Best single player game in existence... Is still Deus Ex
Agreed. The game was heavily infused with mythological and philosophical influences that lent it a richness not found in any contemporary offerings. The plot and gameplay were, in one word, awesome. I wish there were more games of such caliber.
Running around and blowing stuff up gets old pretty quickly, even if you're running around and blowing stuff up in stunning visual detail. Sure, you can do variations on it like bringing in monsters from hell, and BFGs, et cetera. But it's still a BFG (Boring F****** Game).
Perhaps my favorite line from Deus Ex (reproduced from memory): "Those are some heavy augmentations."
The code deals with arrays that are several orders of magnitude larger than the cache. The data are usually accessed sequentially, so the cache hit rate is as good as can be.
Regardless, the fact remains: given the same code, GCC does a (much) better job than ICC.
I'm always perplexed by such comparisons. Specifically, everyone talks about how awesome ICC is for numerical stuff. Well, I have written a fair amount of C++ code for computational fluid dynamics, and, for my code, GCC has always beaten ICC by a fairly wide margin (typically, 50 percent or more). Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that my code makes heavy use of templates? I don't really know.
Also, in my experience, the C++ standard library that shipped with the previous versions of ICC just wasn't that good. Well, that may be a little harsh, but it was a source of considerable irritation to me that ICC's implementation of valarray did not even use expression templates (hello temporaries!). Yes, I know valarray isn't all that, but it is standard C++ (hence, in principle, code that uses it is portable). Once again, the GCC implementation was very much superior. This may be part of the reason why ICC now uses GCC headers.
(As an aside, I did roll my own implementation of valarray that uses expression templates. I tested it with both GCC and ICC, and GCC still won.)
I am now curious to test whether things are indeed better with ICC 8.1 (the last version I tested was 8.0). Maybe this time it will actually speed my code up rather than slow it down.
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Weight, which is a Newtonian concept, is not really applicable to an inherently relativistic particle such as the photon. In addition, the effect of gravity on a photon is actually about twice as large as you would expect from Newtonian gravitation. This comes from the weak-field limit of general relativity, and was one of the first tests of the theory. In 1919, Sir Arthur Eddington observed the bending of starlight around the sun during a solar eclipse, and showed that the bending was, lo and behold, about twice as large as the Newtonian prediction, and consistent with general relativity.
The blackholes don't actually emit anything. The accretion disk is what does the emitting.
Actually, black holes do emit. It's called Hawking radiation. But you're right in that what we see is coming from the accretion disk.
C is too low
Java too slow
Fortran is... well, Fortan
C# has mono
Perl has gono(rrhea)
None can do what C++ can!
Perhaps. But mathematical definitions are not necessarily rigorous. Try to formulate a rigorous definition of a set.
Another interesting case of the non-rigorous use of mathematics was by Dirac. He used the delta-function comfortably for a while, while the mathematicians cried foul (IIRC, the great von Neumann was one of them). Eventually they realized that, while not rigorous, he was right. Of course, he knew he had to be.
I don't discount the worth of rigor--far from it. An attempt at a rigorous argument often exposes implicit assumptions and possible caveats. But those who believe that mathematics is (or is even capable of being) an absolute, water-tight framework are living in a fantasy world (as the great Bertrand Russell unfortunately discovered).
Running around and blowing stuff up gets old pretty quickly, even if you're running around and blowing stuff up in stunning visual detail. Sure, you can do variations on it like bringing in monsters from hell, and BFGs, et cetera. But it's still a BFG (Boring F****** Game).
Perhaps my favorite line from Deus Ex (reproduced from memory): "Those are some heavy augmentations."
The code deals with arrays that are several orders of magnitude larger than the cache. The data are usually accessed sequentially, so the cache hit rate is as good as can be.
Regardless, the fact remains: given the same code, GCC does a (much) better job than ICC.
I'm always perplexed by such comparisons. Specifically, everyone talks about how awesome ICC is for numerical stuff. Well, I have written a fair amount of C++ code for computational fluid dynamics, and, for my code, GCC has always beaten ICC by a fairly wide margin (typically, 50 percent or more). Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that my code makes heavy use of templates? I don't really know.
Also, in my experience, the C++ standard library that shipped with the previous versions of ICC just wasn't that good. Well, that may be a little harsh, but it was a source of considerable irritation to me that ICC's implementation of valarray did not even use expression templates (hello temporaries!). Yes, I know valarray isn't all that, but it is standard C++ (hence, in principle, code that uses it is portable). Once again, the GCC implementation was very much superior. This may be part of the reason why ICC now uses GCC headers.
(As an aside, I did roll my own implementation of valarray that uses expression templates. I tested it with both GCC and ICC, and GCC still won.)
I am now curious to test whether things are indeed better with ICC 8.1 (the last version I tested was 8.0). Maybe this time it will actually speed my code up rather than slow it down.