I can't believe that no one has brought up birds. They sit their asses on the power lines all night in some areas. The result? Those damn pigeons seem to be multiplying like rabbits.
Also, the only real and verifiable danger that i know of is from those big mylar ballons. Highly conductive and they have a bad habbit of smacking into powerlines. My bro told my of an incident near his house just a couple of weeks ago in Seattle. It sounded like a large explosion, but the bad part is that the remains of the balloon rain down. The fire dept on the scene says it happens all the time. So I wouldn't want to buy a house with a wooden roof in a neighboor hood with a park/lots of kids with powerlines.
That being said, LaTex comes with a siginificant learning curve, and due to its nature misses some of the features that are important in a business environment (most notably changes tracking).
Yes, just like programming in C (or any other programming language) has a significant learning curve. Thus you should stick to... software legos? That's quite the odd logic you have there. But mostly I wanted to ask you what exactly is the nature of Latex?
There's the bit I posted in the other article. I've reproduced the relevant section here:
Read this article by Glenn Reynolds on malls. The key bit is:
The downside is that the traditional "downtown" has been replaced by
corporate-controlled space. What's wrong with that? Well, in the traditional
downtown, things like the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech apply. In
malls, they generally don't. (One of my former students has written an
interesting
law review article [uwyo.edu] on this subject).
The summary is that if you own a mall, you can restrict what people say at your mall. You ever see those signs that say solicting on these premises is prohibited? No one screams "free speech" in that situation.
So my point wasn't that companies had a free speech right to contact you, which I don't think they do...
Well, here is the main bit wrong with your viewpoint. The right to free speech does not mean that the other person has to be burdened to listen to your free speech. As they say, your right to free speech stops on my doorstep. The key to free speech is who is doing the restricting. If you are on my private property then I may tell you that you have no right free speech on my property.
This DNC list is incredibly important, even if it has a zero percent success rate, because you see it has already done everything it really needed to do. It has told every politician in the US that there are around 50 million people (voters) who care about this. You had better believe that whatever flaws there are will be fixed.
Also, all of your so called ideas are rather ineffectual. They are like gun control laws, the people who they are meant for don't care about the laws anyway. Especially so when the necessary proof is nearly nonexistent.
You and many other people here do not understand what "free speech" means. Read this article by Glenn Reynolds on malls. The key bit is:
The downside is that the traditional "downtown" has been replaced by
corporate-controlled space. What's wrong with that? Well, in the traditional
downtown, things like the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech apply. In
malls, they generally don't. (One of my former students has written an
interesting
law review article on this subject).
Also the bit about non-profits/politicians, well, I wouldn't be suprised if that is one of the first ammendments to this law. It's called the slippery slope, you can't expect to pass the whole thing at once. You have to do it incrementally, and starting with the assholes is the easiest way to initiate the process.
Actually he doesn't. It is you that has assumed a particular definition of average, actually in this case a different definition. Thus the rest of your example is faulty since you have not started with a rigorous foundation.
If some smart traversal- or summing/factoring-method doesn't work because it needs compile time constants, you can't use this method in any language.
Your excessive jargon aside, that is what my point was in the original post. That this code doesn't work efficiently if you don't hard-code compile time constants.
You and the other guy both claim that in the vast majority of cases you know all of the dimensions so you should hard-code these parameters. I seriously doubt this assumption based on personal experience working in an engineering world. The only times when the dimensions of everything was known was when the target was some custom built piece of hardware with an embedded system that could not support anything but plain old C. (VxWorks is excluded because it has far exceeded typical embedded systems.)
You're either comparing apples to oranges, or you're using the wrong tool (compile-time optimizations) for the job (dynamic efficiency).
I'm not comparing anything. Let me ask you this, suppose you have a version with hard coded constants, and you at some point have to fix it to handle parameters given at run time. How much of a speed hit do you take? What would you do if the hit was so large that you had to drop back and code it in something like C? That is a very important question. Algorithms are quite often reused, and having to recode magic constants is not a good practice.
And finally, it is not simply a choice of either knowing the dimensions at compile time or completely random dimensions at run time. Quite often the best you can rely on is that the vector lengths will be e.g. a power of two. Plain old memcpy is a typical algorithm that combines the best of both by doing fixed-length as much as possible.
Exactly what kind of algorithms are you thinking of? That's not often the case, no matter how much you capitalize. When certain algorithms are set to a certain size it is usually because of efficiency, but quite often you will want to run different sizes of datasets. This requires the algorithm to be written in a general manner, recompiling would not be an option.
C won't be dieing anytime soon because once a language hits critical mass it's huge legacy base keeps it going.
And that somehow doesn't apply to fortran?
Do you even know what the phrase means?
How many projects do you know of that are written in fortran?
And please give me examples that were written at least in the 90's.
Also, the legacy fortran base is not an asset for fortran as there are C-interfaces to anything important (e.g., lapack et al).
I don't think so. I've met many engineers, and it seems that fortran is still popular there.
Gee, that's funny I am an Engineer that used to
work at a company that only hired EE's (no CS) and
not a single one of them preferred fortran.
Why don't you enlighten yourself
Why don't you can the attitude?
Sadly, that was meant as a serious suggestion.
You only saw what you assumed it to be.
Cobol dies with the huge computers it was used on. Fortran, OTOH, managed to
grab a large audience of scientists and engineers, who still write new code in
Fortran. It isn't getting replaced by C, which is a less friendly language for
non-programmers; it isn't getting replaced by Java, which isn't good
speed-wise; there's some replacement by C++, but C++ is still a programmers
language.
I'm not the one that brought up Java, I think that using a virtual machine to
run numerical code is moronic.
And like I said earlier, just like Cobol died with the mainframes, fortran
is dieing with the group 1 people who still program in it.
I don't know what country you're from
but my experience is a first hand view of the Engineering world as an Engineer.
Go to any job board and search for Fortran. I tried it on one and got 8 hits. Many of which said "C or Fortran".
C won't be dieing anytime soon because once a language hits critical mass it's huge legacy base keeps it going.
It is not suprising that Fortran may still be taught at places where there are old group 1 professors.
But to be convincing you're going to have to come up with more than one example.
Also, it seems that to secure their position they had to force Fortran 90 to be a requirement. Sad really, quite the disservice to their students.
Why don't you enlighten yourself and compare the history of Cobol to Fortran.
oh about 500 to $1000 dollars is what a fortran lic costs. we have one and share it with 40 people. its a compiler lic not a run time lic, not a per seat lic. it is a processor lic and you can share it.
In other words, only one
person can compile at a time.
Just great. And which is it? $500 or $1000? Or are you guessing?
also if g77 did not exist, I think the number of compilers sold would be at least 100 fold larger, making the price presumably 10 or more times smaller. (the cost of support would not allow it to drop 100 fold) I base this on the empirical fact that indeed fortran compiler lic used to be fairly cheap and ubiquitous prior to g77.
The old theory of supply and demand does not apply to software. As supply goes
up, price stays high. Just ask Microsoft.
In fact without a free alternative
the price could go up even higher. At a previous job the Ada compiler for mips
was about $30k a seat. Why? Because they had no competitors.
Look at the price drops Microsoft has given when threatened with Linux, the free alternative.
Do you even know of any software that people need year after year, that drops in price as the
number of customers increases?
also I think part of the disagreement here is just what is meant by scientific computing. The fact that you mention a graphical interface at all shows you are thinking of personal scientific software or at best larger scale visualization.
You mean to tell me that with all of the data that you supposedly crunch,
that nowhere is there a program to look at the data? Give me a break.
Someone somewhere has to look at your data somehow.
Likewise, as for disk writes being not slow, I have to disagree. And its not
uncommon in processing time seriees or genetic data to have writes exceeding
four gigbytes, which is not something your are going to cache or even copy.
this is compounded because diskwrites across network servers can be quite slow.
Do you even know how something like Linux caches disk writes? They aren't cached
permanently, just queued to be written to disk asynchronously from the program.
Also, how can you possible be talking about speed of execution while simultaneously
talking about writing out 4GBs to network servers? Which is it? Are your programs
cpu limited or disk limited?
So again you are imagining scientific computing to be something entirely
different than I am.
What exactly are you imagining that scientific computing is?
The way you manage to exclude everything it's no wonder the fortran marketplace is vanishingly small.
I shall respond, but first let me point out that
nowhere did I ever talk about features or whether
or not one is better than the other.
In fact, it is because the differences are not substantial that fortran is going to die.
Learning C gives one much greater access to more programming tasks, whereas fortran is considered specialized.
I fully agree that Fortran is NOT for every day programming of word processors, opertating systems, games, device drivers, and GUIs, and that there is a resistance to learning it in schools these days. However I believe the Modern Fortran Language is a better choice for most scientific and numerical programming by non-computer scientists;
Much numerical
programming nowadays is increasingly taking
advantage of graphing toolkits for visualization.
These toolkits are never in Fortran, this makes C the
easier to use language.
... effectively program for multi-processors...
For parallel processing fortran 95 boasts many language level features that give ANY code implicit parallelism and implicit multi-threading and implicit distribution of memory WITHOUT the programmer cognizantly invoking multiple threads or having to use special libraries or overloaded commands.
These types of claims are numerous, and your
example is trivial. I'm afraid that until there
are bench marks to back up your statement no one
will care.
btw, writing to disk with a modern operating system
is not slow, it's basically a memcpy since the
writes are cached and then flushed to disk at a later
time. Also, using mmap is much easier than fwrite.
Also, I would love to see some real code that does
something useful using forall. And if you are going
to explicitly declare your array size (5) in your
code then I don't consider it a realistic case.
More often than not code is written for variable
lengths. Would that affect the performance of a
non-trivial example?
Another parallelism feature is that the F95 header declaration not only declare the "type" of variable,as C does, but also if the routine will change that variable.
This is the standard "static" tag that has been around forever.
I think the world would be better off if g77 did not exist. By doing so they undercut the affordable fortran compiler market and forced everyone to write for the lowest common denominator to have their code comileable by the masses using g77.
This is quite the claim. Would eliminating g77 reduce the price of commerical fortran compilers?
Do you have any idea how much a fortran compiler license usually costs (per developer too).
At my last job the commercial fortran compiler for our platform cost several thousand per developer.
What do you think would happen if we had to chose between C and fortran? Do you have any idea how
much more hardware we could buy with the money that would be burned up by license fees? All your
claims of speed increases become irrelevant when you take the total budget into account.
SOMs.... Such fond memories. I too wrangled with one of these a few years back. In my case it was being used to correlate documents. I created a method to group similar nodes which I dubbed "Amoeba Love Fest".
It seemed to be working fairly well right up to the point we lost VC and they nuked half the company.
I've seen this before and its complete crap. Change the first line to
const int N = rand();
Then see how fast it runs. All that uber special loop expanding trickery usually doesn't work when you don't know the sizes of your arrays beforehand.
Seriously, that is what is really killing fortran. When I was in undergrad about ten years ago they had stopped teaching fortran and had switched to C. Since then everyone falls into a couple of categories. (1) Those who learned fortran first and still use it. (2) Those who learned C first and thus have no reason to ever use Fortran. (3) Those who are forced by their jobs to use Fortran.
Of these, group (1) is all the old foggies who are retiring, leaving group (2) people to continue the work. Typically what is done is C wrappers are made to call the legacy fortran code and all subsequent work is done in C. Group (3) people are always desperately trying to migrate their projects to C.
There is an easy solution, you take whatever good bits he said and repost anonymously for up-modding. You should also state the reason, that the poster is an asshole and should be down-modded. Thus you get the good bits (which quite frankly, I think you would be hard pressed to find) while not encouraging assholes.
Either way, it isn't a slashdot flaw. I fail to see how you can blame the system for the actions of the participants.
Well, your understanding is wrong in many ways. Regardless of how many HD signals are sent, analog cannot be phased out until the consumers have migrated. Second, the broadcasters are not being generous, the HD signals take up less bandwidth due to compression, yes that sounds wrong but think of mailing a bitmap image versus a 95% quality jpeg of twice the size. They plan on utilizing this extra bandwidth for their own monetary benefit. Third you must be quite young to think that people having more than one TV is common. They did not buy color TVs until their black&white TVs were dead. Quick, how many old people do you know with DVD players? Hell, how many of them at least have a VCR?
Also, the FCC morons have changed their so-called mandated deadlines before. A deadline of 2006, or even 2014 estimates of complete phase-out of analog are wishful thinking if anything.
And finally, I can't be bothered to reply anymore unless you actually do research. You cannot assume that the typical American will do anything remotely similar to what you think they would do. You're like the failed divx people who said that people would love it, they wouldn't have to return the disks anymore!
Television broadcasters offering it is one thing, making consumers upgrade is entirely different. Also how many channels is that? One? Do you know that in olden times many people never dumped their black&white TVs until they finally broke. The FCC plans say that analog broadcasts cannot be dropped until there is around an 85% conversion of the consumers to HD TVs. In other words, not for a very long time.
So let me get this straight, one of the users of slashdot is being an asshole, so it is a slashdot flaw? You really must be in high school if you still think like that. Let me explain to you how the world works, there are some people who are builders, they build things that the rest of us want to use. On the other hand, there are some people who are destroyers (in their little ego fantasies of course) who want to destroy everything because they lack the intelligence to be a creator of great things or even little things, generally those people are referred to as assholes.
btw, you should look up the meaning of defame. By merely posting his numerous unintelligent comments he is defaming Miguel.
You do realize that HD TVs cost thousands don't you? That they are also not mainstream? This means that the people who buy this tech are much much more knowledgeable than your average consumer with an old TV and a $100 DVD player. And btw, who exactly is "they"? Is that some kind of "if we make it they will buy it" logic? Good luck.
btw, investing buku millions in a movie and then just "waiting us out" costs them more interest then I'll ever make in a legit job, i.e., ain't gonna happen. And really that's the fundamental difference between the movie and music industries. The movie industries have to pay real cash up-front (not promises of future funds), whereas the music industry claims that it costs them millions to find a hit band. That's why one is forced to bow to their consumers and the other shits on its consumers.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, the only real and verifiable danger that i know of is from those big mylar ballons. Highly conductive and they have a bad habbit of smacking into powerlines. My bro told my of an incident near his house just a couple of weeks ago in Seattle. It sounded like a large explosion, but the bad part is that the remains of the balloon rain down. The fire dept on the scene says it happens all the time. So I wouldn't want to buy a house with a wooden roof in a neighboor hood with a park/lots of kids with powerlines.
Linux. The Java VM. Shall I go on?
Not to mention possibly adding bugs, even worse, numerical bugs. Did he do a full regression test? I doubt it.
Read this article by Glenn Reynolds on malls. The key bit is:
The summary is that if you own a mall, you can restrict what people say at your mall. You ever see those signs that say solicting on these premises is prohibited? No one screams "free speech" in that situation.You mean like scuba? There is a not-as well known as I thought feature of english whereby words such as SCUBA become words like scuba.
This DNC list is incredibly important, even if it has a zero percent success rate, because you see it has already done everything it really needed to do. It has told every politician in the US that there are around 50 million people (voters) who care about this. You had better believe that whatever flaws there are will be fixed.
Also, all of your so called ideas are rather ineffectual. They are like gun control laws, the people who they are meant for don't care about the laws anyway. Especially so when the necessary proof is nearly nonexistent.
Also the bit about non-profits/politicians, well, I wouldn't be suprised if that is one of the first ammendments to this law. It's called the slippery slope, you can't expect to pass the whole thing at once. You have to do it incrementally, and starting with the assholes is the easiest way to initiate the process.
Actually he doesn't. It is you that has assumed a particular definition of average, actually in this case a different definition. Thus the rest of your example is faulty since you have not started with a rigorous foundation.
And finally, it is not simply a choice of either knowing the dimensions at compile time or completely random dimensions at run time. Quite often the best you can rely on is that the vector lengths will be e.g. a power of two. Plain old memcpy is a typical algorithm that combines the best of both by doing fixed-length as much as possible.
Exactly what kind of algorithms are you thinking of? That's not often the case, no matter how much you capitalize. When certain algorithms are set to a certain size it is usually because of efficiency, but quite often you will want to run different sizes of datasets. This requires the algorithm to be written in a general manner, recompiling would not be an option.
And your point is?
Also, the legacy fortran base is not an asset for fortran as there are C-interfaces to anything important (e.g., lapack et al).
Gee, that's funny I am an Engineer that used to work at a company that only hired EE's (no CS) and not a single one of them preferred fortran. Sadly, that was meant as a serious suggestion. You only saw what you assumed it to be. I'm not the one that brought up Java, I think that using a virtual machine to run numerical code is moronic. And like I said earlier, just like Cobol died with the mainframes, fortran is dieing with the group 1 people who still program in it. I don't know what country you're from but my experience is a first hand view of the Engineering world as an Engineer.C won't be dieing anytime soon because once a language hits critical mass it's huge legacy base keeps it going.
It is not suprising that Fortran may still be taught at places where there are old group 1 professors. But to be convincing you're going to have to come up with more than one example. Also, it seems that to secure their position they had to force Fortran 90 to be a requirement. Sad really, quite the disservice to their students.
Why don't you enlighten yourself and compare the history of Cobol to Fortran.
btw, writing to disk with a modern operating system is not slow, it's basically a memcpy since the writes are cached and then flushed to disk at a later time. Also, using mmap is much easier than fwrite.
Also, I would love to see some real code that does something useful using forall. And if you are going to explicitly declare your array size (5) in your code then I don't consider it a realistic case. More often than not code is written for variable lengths. Would that affect the performance of a non-trivial example?
This is the standard "static" tag that has been around forever. This is quite the claim. Would eliminating g77 reduce the price of commerical fortran compilers? Do you have any idea how much a fortran compiler license usually costs (per developer too). At my last job the commercial fortran compiler for our platform cost several thousand per developer. What do you think would happen if we had to chose between C and fortran? Do you have any idea how much more hardware we could buy with the money that would be burned up by license fees? All your claims of speed increases become irrelevant when you take the total budget into account.We should compare notes sometime.
I've seen this before and its complete crap. Change the first line to
const int N = rand();
Then see how fast it runs. All that uber special loop expanding trickery usually doesn't work when you don't know the sizes of your arrays beforehand.
Of these, group (1) is all the old foggies who are retiring, leaving group (2) people to continue the work. Typically what is done is C wrappers are made to call the legacy fortran code and all subsequent work is done in C. Group (3) people are always desperately trying to migrate their projects to C.
That is why fortran is dieing.
Either way, it isn't a slashdot flaw. I fail to see how you can blame the system for the actions of the participants.
Also, the FCC morons have changed their so-called mandated deadlines before. A deadline of 2006, or even 2014 estimates of complete phase-out of analog are wishful thinking if anything.
And finally, I can't be bothered to reply anymore unless you actually do research. You cannot assume that the typical American will do anything remotely similar to what you think they would do. You're like the failed divx people who said that people would love it, they wouldn't have to return the disks anymore!
Television broadcasters offering it is one thing, making consumers upgrade is entirely different. Also how many channels is that? One? Do you know that in olden times many people never dumped their black&white TVs until they finally broke. The FCC plans say that analog broadcasts cannot be dropped until there is around an 85% conversion of the consumers to HD TVs. In other words, not for a very long time.
btw, you should look up the meaning of defame. By merely posting his numerous unintelligent comments he is defaming Miguel.
btw, investing buku millions in a movie and then just "waiting us out" costs them more interest then I'll ever make in a legit job, i.e., ain't gonna happen. And really that's the fundamental difference between the movie and music industries. The movie industries have to pay real cash up-front (not promises of future funds), whereas the music industry claims that it costs them millions to find a hit band. That's why one is forced to bow to their consumers and the other shits on its consumers.