College age students make decisions all the time about the proper use of firearms. Ever seen the average age of a U.S. soldier? It's 19 years old. They handle them responsibly, because they are trained to do so. It's not guns that are the problem. It's a lack of training and awareness, mixed with a "think of the children" paranoia.
Additionally, as it stands now, FORTRAN is one of the main languages of Supercomputing. Sure, C and C++ have made some headway, but the old die-hard codes out there are still tooling along in FORTRAN. As much as I hate it, there are a lot of scientists still using it, and you have to weight the time it would take them to rewrite it versus the net benefit gained. So, as the parent states... FORTRAN should at least have a brief overview, as the odds are good that anyone entering the computer science field (NOT application programming... there IS a difference) will see it in the future.
But why not? If they went to school, studied hard, and succeeded in a difficult field, how do you encourage people to do the same unless there is some sort of reward? Paying everyone equal is akin to communism. The hardest working suffer at the hands of the lazy and incapable.
Is there a solution to the woeful lack of qualified mathematics teachers that the Teachers' Union will find acceptable?"
Of course not. Union's don't reward ability. Union's tend to focus on the lowest common denominator holding onto their job. Pay for performance usually increases performance. Paying someone equally for less performance usually discourages people from using their abilities. I've never understood why teacher's aren't paid for performance, especially considering the responsibility they have. So long as excellent scientists and mathematicians are paid the same as incapable football coaches, there will be no massive rush to enter high school teaching.
Mod me troll if you like, but rewards based on abilities and performance usually yield better results.
No, we do have a clue. We understand that Stevens runs these crazy ideas. The reason he is re-elected is because despite his problems, he brings much more funding to Alaska than any replacement possibly could. All we would do by replacing him is throw money away. Additionally, we haven't exactly had a better option. Basically it comes down to the evil you know vs. the evil you don't.
Don't assume that just because the majority of people vote differently than you do that they're all ignorant... That type of thought leads to far worse governments than ours.
...and paranoid recluses who hate the idea of big government.
Being anti-big government does not a paranoid person require. Many of our founding fathers warned against the corruption that comes with big government. The more power you centralize, the less the individuals have. However, I do agree that the republicans no longer stand for conservatives. Yes, we as Alaskans hate taxes and love guns, but why shouldn't we? Guns keep an honest government honest, and taxes reduce productivity and success.
The problem isn't with Alaskans entirely, but with how far we as a nation have strayed from the intents of our founding fathers. They came out of a period where their rights had been abused, and created rules to avoid that. Now, over decades, we have slowly been removing the rules which limit that abuse, and stand to repeat history.
In most cases, researchers request a specific number of cores, based on experience of how well their code scales. Some codes to auto-scale, depending on available cores, but these are rarer. The way it works is in a batch queue system... Users submit a job required 2000 cores, and wait until that many are available. Then, when the cores become available, their job runs for 6-48hrs or more, depending on the job. In most cases, a large number of researchers are often in contention for computing time, and wait their turn in line. The good ones tend to understand the system better, and will submit workloads that reflect the current available resources, thus limiting the time their work spends sitting in the queue.
If anything is "News for Nerds", it is applications for and scalability of Supercomputers. Just because it doesn't come from NBC or Fox News doesn't mean it is uninteresting, or that it isn't news. A big benefit of the internet is that average people can post news and stories, without the funding of a major news corporation.
Additionally, many of these computers don't run just 1 application. IBM's blue gene, and many other Dept. of Energy/Defense/* computers run a large number of research applications, ranging from 10's to 1000's of cores. It is very rare that a single program gets to run on such a large machine for any length of time by itself, so in most cases, programs don't have to scale to 100,000 PE's, but rather they scale to hundreds or a few thousand. Far more applications can scale well to hundreds than thousands, and still have reasonable speedup.
Re:Storytelling Ability Is the Primary Requirement
on
Game Writing
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Developers always spend a lot of time worrying about the technical aspects of Game Writing. In fact, coding is the easy part.
Do you have any idea how arrogant that statement is? Not to be a troll, but I can't count the number of times Liberal Art majors in College tried to act holier than thou because they experienced the "symbolism" of a story, and felt it was so much more important than science or math.
Yes, I realize that storytelling is important to games as well, but don't try to act like "coding is the easy part". Most people don't even stop to read the text in these games, particularly MMORPG's. More realistically, people tend to care about their level, their gear, and how quickly they can kill another player. Don't try to marginalize the skill and dedication of programmer's just because you FEEL that the story is harder to write than the code.
Well, programming languages come and go...of course, some of the "classics" are still in limited use (cobol, Pascal, C) but for the most part programming languages go the way of the dodo eventually.
I hate to see C lumped in there. Most supercomputing and parallel code in the world is written in C or Fortran. Sure, there is the rogue C++, Python, or something, but for now, parallel program runs mostly C/Fortran. They're fast, efficient, and well entrenched. One of the things that is available is addon languages which obfuscate the more difficult tasks. UPC (Unified Parallel C) and Co-Array Fortran have helped IMMENSELY to handle these problems. But I wouldn't expect C or Fortran to go away any time soon...
And in regards to your "Post Office" system, most parallel code already runs that way in MPI, so it is not a new practice.
And many of them have font options to auto-capitalize all text. Then you can type normally, or in lower case, and get the desired result, as well as use something like this. I don't have any idea what this software specifically is good for, but perhaps this would solve your loss of Caps-Lock.
Actually, ripping a DVD is circumventing a digital rights management system. There is a difference between copyright infringement and reverse engineering encryption. It is the removal of encryption that is illegal, not the act of copying media which you have legally purchased. It's a subtle trick, but there is a difference, and the MPAA/RIAA slid that one in there for a reason. Fair use says you can backup your own media, but you can't do that unless you break the law to decrypt it.
Aside from that little caveat, this is piracy, not fair use we're talking about. Pirate's Bay is looking to steal from everyone that produced marketable goods. They aren't paying and making backups, they are depriving a programmer of income by distributing it en masse. If any site in the world understands the labor involved in software development, you'r think it would be slashdot...I fail to see how making a living developing software is deemed wrong, and stealing software is ok here...
I know OSX/Linux/etc. are more secure, cheaper, more reliable, easier to use, whatever other argument you want to throw out there. I understand and accept that. But they are not what I WANT.
Aside from the actual argument of Windows vs Linux, I am curious in your personal take on it, and why you chose what you did based on YOUR beliefs... So maybe you can clarify.
So, you are willingly throwing money at something that you yourself claim is an inferior product? Look, if you want to use windows because it has more games available, or more apps you use available, fine, so be it. That is a reasonable argument. However, saying "I know my product sucks, and I like to pay more for it", is not logical. It is foolish. By choosing the worst product simply to rebel against the geek chic not only damages you, but damages others. By giving a company with an inferior product more bullying power, you are damaging the computer industry as a whole, and not just making a statement.
Maybe I don't understand, but why would you ever willingly pay for a product that you claim is inferior, insecure, and unstable, when the alternative is free? It makes no sense. Please, help me understand.
This little group plays a game of mentioning their "real" meaning within quotes, and then disagreeing with it. They assume that because they normally get modded down, that they MUST have something insightful to say, so they are trying to cheat the mod system. Read it, and you'll see. It's his own blog.
All three of the cases you listed involved the person getting shot doing something illegal first. In one they rammed police vehicles, in another they shot at the police, in the third they were dealing drugs. Police then proceeded to shoot them. Don't act like the cops are going off like girls gone wild, these were criminals that were somehow breaking the law. This over-generalized "cops are evil" is ridiculous. Yes, there are bad cops, but the number of good cops doing their job everyday is rarely reported, and there are plenty of them out there NOT breaking laws.
As funny as the cop/donut jokes are, there is usually a good explanation. It's very hard for police officers to stop for food for long. If they get called out in the middle of eating, it's pretty hard to have it bagged up for them before leaving. Donuts, they can just grab and walk out (since they're usually pre-paid for anyhow). Yes, it is a common stereotype, but more due to practicality than anything else.
Actually, it's not at all difficult to break into the average SuSE/RedHat fresh out of the box install. You don't even need an account on the machine to get root. Perhaps the real secrets here are physical access to the machine, or a stupid operator. Either will get you total control of the machine.
Then you probably don't do HPC. Yes, most desktop users are perfectly content with their clock speeds currently, and their single core systems (I am content with my home system), but in HPC, it's never enough. There are always bigger simulations, real time needs, etc. that will require more cores, more power, more flops.
No, you're correct. I don't believe that only 1 in 30 can pull the trigger, but rather, 1 in 30 can do it without feeling bad about it. That's the scarier portion of it.
Well, from that line of thought, I agree. I have to say, that is one of the most well thought out responses I've seen on/., and thanks for further explaining. You're right, in that throughout history we have shown that the sociopathic can be contained, but only when they cross a certain line that enough people find unacceptable, and I think the most important thing, as you pointed out, is that sociopaths can only operate when there is a certain amount of apathy from the masses.
The problem with your logic is that sociopaths exist in much higher ratio's than you seem to believe. See, according to http://www.psychiatric-disorders.com/personality/a ntisocial.php and other sources, nearly 3.6% of the US population is sociopaths. Essentially, the only thing keeping 1/30th of the population from this behavior is laws. While sociopaths may not care whether you live or die, they do care whether or not they go to jail. That means 1 in 30 people CAN squeeze that trigger, and not really feel too bad about it. These aren't some rarity, meant to be warded off by the masses. This is a common behavior disorder, and odds are, many people you know have it.
Slashdot Mirror
College age students make decisions all the time about the proper use of firearms. Ever seen the average age of a U.S. soldier? It's 19 years old. They handle them responsibly, because they are trained to do so. It's not guns that are the problem. It's a lack of training and awareness, mixed with a "think of the children" paranoia.
Additionally, as it stands now, FORTRAN is one of the main languages of Supercomputing. Sure, C and C++ have made some headway, but the old die-hard codes out there are still tooling along in FORTRAN. As much as I hate it, there are a lot of scientists still using it, and you have to weight the time it would take them to rewrite it versus the net benefit gained. So, as the parent states... FORTRAN should at least have a brief overview, as the odds are good that anyone entering the computer science field (NOT application programming... there IS a difference) will see it in the future.
But why not? If they went to school, studied hard, and succeeded in a difficult field, how do you encourage people to do the same unless there is some sort of reward? Paying everyone equal is akin to communism. The hardest working suffer at the hands of the lazy and incapable.
Of course not. Union's don't reward ability. Union's tend to focus on the lowest common denominator holding onto their job. Pay for performance usually increases performance. Paying someone equally for less performance usually discourages people from using their abilities. I've never understood why teacher's aren't paid for performance, especially considering the responsibility they have. So long as excellent scientists and mathematicians are paid the same as incapable football coaches, there will be no massive rush to enter high school teaching.
Mod me troll if you like, but rewards based on abilities and performance usually yield better results.
No, we do have a clue. We understand that Stevens runs these crazy ideas. The reason he is re-elected is because despite his problems, he brings much more funding to Alaska than any replacement possibly could. All we would do by replacing him is throw money away. Additionally, we haven't exactly had a better option. Basically it comes down to the evil you know vs. the evil you don't.
Don't assume that just because the majority of people vote differently than you do that they're all ignorant... That type of thought leads to far worse governments than ours.
...and paranoid recluses who hate the idea of big government.Being anti-big government does not a paranoid person require. Many of our founding fathers warned against the corruption that comes with big government. The more power you centralize, the less the individuals have. However, I do agree that the republicans no longer stand for conservatives. Yes, we as Alaskans hate taxes and love guns, but why shouldn't we? Guns keep an honest government honest, and taxes reduce productivity and success.
The problem isn't with Alaskans entirely, but with how far we as a nation have strayed from the intents of our founding fathers. They came out of a period where their rights had been abused, and created rules to avoid that. Now, over decades, we have slowly been removing the rules which limit that abuse, and stand to repeat history.
In most cases, researchers request a specific number of cores, based on experience of how well their code scales. Some codes to auto-scale, depending on available cores, but these are rarer. The way it works is in a batch queue system... Users submit a job required 2000 cores, and wait until that many are available. Then, when the cores become available, their job runs for 6-48hrs or more, depending on the job. In most cases, a large number of researchers are often in contention for computing time, and wait their turn in line. The good ones tend to understand the system better, and will submit workloads that reflect the current available resources, thus limiting the time their work spends sitting in the queue.
If anything is "News for Nerds", it is applications for and scalability of Supercomputers. Just because it doesn't come from NBC or Fox News doesn't mean it is uninteresting, or that it isn't news. A big benefit of the internet is that average people can post news and stories, without the funding of a major news corporation.
Additionally, many of these computers don't run just 1 application. IBM's blue gene, and many other Dept. of Energy/Defense/* computers run a large number of research applications, ranging from 10's to 1000's of cores. It is very rare that a single program gets to run on such a large machine for any length of time by itself, so in most cases, programs don't have to scale to 100,000 PE's, but rather they scale to hundreds or a few thousand. Far more applications can scale well to hundreds than thousands, and still have reasonable speedup.
Developers always spend a lot of time worrying about the technical aspects of Game Writing. In fact, coding is the easy part.
Do you have any idea how arrogant that statement is? Not to be a troll, but I can't count the number of times Liberal Art majors in College tried to act holier than thou because they experienced the "symbolism" of a story, and felt it was so much more important than science or math.
Yes, I realize that storytelling is important to games as well, but don't try to act like "coding is the easy part". Most people don't even stop to read the text in these games, particularly MMORPG's. More realistically, people tend to care about their level, their gear, and how quickly they can kill another player. Don't try to marginalize the skill and dedication of programmer's just because you FEEL that the story is harder to write than the code.
Well, programming languages come and go...of course, some of the "classics" are still in limited use (cobol, Pascal, C) but for the most part programming languages go the way of the dodo eventually.
I hate to see C lumped in there. Most supercomputing and parallel code in the world is written in C or Fortran. Sure, there is the rogue C++, Python, or something, but for now, parallel program runs mostly C/Fortran. They're fast, efficient, and well entrenched. One of the things that is available is addon languages which obfuscate the more difficult tasks. UPC (Unified Parallel C) and Co-Array Fortran have helped IMMENSELY to handle these problems. But I wouldn't expect C or Fortran to go away any time soon...
And in regards to your "Post Office" system, most parallel code already runs that way in MPI, so it is not a new practice.
They're not the only GUI toolkit developer in town ya know...
And many of them have font options to auto-capitalize all text. Then you can type normally, or in lower case, and get the desired result, as well as use something like this. I don't have any idea what this software specifically is good for, but perhaps this would solve your loss of Caps-Lock.
I don't want to get lost in a world that won't provide me with food, shelter, clothing or sex.
Wait, you are reading slashdot right?
It's only been a week. He hasn't beaten the addiction yet :)
Actually, ripping a DVD is circumventing a digital rights management system. There is a difference between copyright infringement and reverse engineering encryption. It is the removal of encryption that is illegal, not the act of copying media which you have legally purchased. It's a subtle trick, but there is a difference, and the MPAA/RIAA slid that one in there for a reason. Fair use says you can backup your own media, but you can't do that unless you break the law to decrypt it.
Aside from that little caveat, this is piracy, not fair use we're talking about. Pirate's Bay is looking to steal from everyone that produced marketable goods. They aren't paying and making backups, they are depriving a programmer of income by distributing it en masse. If any site in the world understands the labor involved in software development, you'r think it would be slashdot...I fail to see how making a living developing software is deemed wrong, and stealing software is ok here...
I know OSX/Linux/etc. are more secure, cheaper, more reliable, easier to use, whatever other argument you want to throw out there. I understand and accept that. But they are not what I WANT.
Aside from the actual argument of Windows vs Linux, I am curious in your personal take on it, and why you chose what you did based on YOUR beliefs... So maybe you can clarify.
So, you are willingly throwing money at something that you yourself claim is an inferior product? Look, if you want to use windows because it has more games available, or more apps you use available, fine, so be it. That is a reasonable argument. However, saying "I know my product sucks, and I like to pay more for it", is not logical. It is foolish. By choosing the worst product simply to rebel against the geek chic not only damages you, but damages others. By giving a company with an inferior product more bullying power, you are damaging the computer industry as a whole, and not just making a statement.
Maybe I don't understand, but why would you ever willingly pay for a product that you claim is inferior, insecure, and unstable, when the alternative is free? It makes no sense. Please, help me understand.
Actually, he wasn't. This is part of his little game... Read here: http://slashdot.org/~CPMO/journal/155166
This little group plays a game of mentioning their "real" meaning within quotes, and then disagreeing with it. They assume that because they normally get modded down, that they MUST have something insightful to say, so they are trying to cheat the mod system. Read it, and you'll see. It's his own blog.
All three of the cases you listed involved the person getting shot doing something illegal first. In one they rammed police vehicles, in another they shot at the police, in the third they were dealing drugs. Police then proceeded to shoot them. Don't act like the cops are going off like girls gone wild, these were criminals that were somehow breaking the law. This over-generalized "cops are evil" is ridiculous. Yes, there are bad cops, but the number of good cops doing their job everyday is rarely reported, and there are plenty of them out there NOT breaking laws.
As funny as the cop/donut jokes are, there is usually a good explanation. It's very hard for police officers to stop for food for long. If they get called out in the middle of eating, it's pretty hard to have it bagged up for them before leaving. Donuts, they can just grab and walk out (since they're usually pre-paid for anyhow). Yes, it is a common stereotype, but more due to practicality than anything else.
Actually, it's not at all difficult to break into the average SuSE/RedHat fresh out of the box install. You don't even need an account on the machine to get root. Perhaps the real secrets here are physical access to the machine, or a stupid operator. Either will get you total control of the machine.
Then you probably don't do HPC. Yes, most desktop users are perfectly content with their clock speeds currently, and their single core systems (I am content with my home system), but in HPC, it's never enough. There are always bigger simulations, real time needs, etc. that will require more cores, more power, more flops.
No, you're correct. I don't believe that only 1 in 30 can pull the trigger, but rather, 1 in 30 can do it without feeling bad about it. That's the scarier portion of it.
Well, from that line of thought, I agree. I have to say, that is one of the most well thought out responses I've seen on /., and thanks for further explaining. You're right, in that throughout history we have shown that the sociopathic can be contained, but only when they cross a certain line that enough people find unacceptable, and I think the most important thing, as you pointed out, is that sociopaths can only operate when there is a certain amount of apathy from the masses.
The problem with your logic is that sociopaths exist in much higher ratio's than you seem to believe. See, according to http://www.psychiatric-disorders.com/personality/a ntisocial.php and other sources, nearly 3.6% of the US population is sociopaths. Essentially, the only thing keeping 1/30th of the population from this behavior is laws. While sociopaths may not care whether you live or die, they do care whether or not they go to jail. That means 1 in 30 people CAN squeeze that trigger, and not really feel too bad about it. These aren't some rarity, meant to be warded off by the masses. This is a common behavior disorder, and odds are, many people you know have it.