No, you couldn't send texts between networks, at least in the UK. I remember only being able to text other people on Orange (my network). They were all GSM. This would have been in the late nineties.
That's my recollection, too, as an Orange user in 1995. With the 160-character limit and the awkwardness of using the keys–as well as not knowing anyone else on Orange at the time–texting seem like an oddity that I didn't expect to catch-on.
Unix and its relatives have dominated desktop computing for professional astronomers for about thirty years. In the 1980s, Sun workstations and Unix mini-supercomputers displaced Digital Equipment Corp's VAX minicomputers, then, as the performance of x86 overtook most of the RISC CPUs, Linux became useful for professional astronomical image processing applications (e.g., AIPS & IRAF). Over the last 10-15 years, MacOS X has also become a major player.
The adoption of Unix and related open systems standards made porting of applications from one vendor's hardware to another much easier than it was in the days of proprietary operating systems. Of course, Windows did something similar in the wider world, but the x86/Windows combination was later to the show for many scientists and engineers, and, in the early days, not up to the job, both in terms of performance and sophistication of the OS and toolset. Of course, that's changed now, but Unix/Linux (including MacOS) dominates astronomy.
The story's similar for other fields of physical science and engineering, in academia and industry. A generation of such people largely bypassed the world of Windows for serious work, perhaps only using it when they needed to use proprietary commercial applications. Where they write their own code, it's likely to be on Linux or MacOS.
Scaremongering is also a great diversionary tactic.
The "war on terrr" saved how many lives? How many lives would a war on tobacco producers–significant contributors to the top three causes of death–have saved?
not until the Pound sinks to parity with the US Dollar. Seeing as the Pound can currently buy 1.6 US Dollars, that might not be anytime soon.
It's already been there and the fall can be quite fast. In the early-mid '80s the Pound dropped from over $2 to a little over $1. On one trip I took in early '85, the effective rate was less than $1 to the Pound by the time the bank had taken its cut.
Damnation - I just blew my mod points before this story came-up. SuperCharlie has hit the nail on the head.
This has come about because politicians - mostly soft classics/humanities* types with no significant experience of the world outside politics that pays the bills - wanted to make voters think that the junior and high school systems in places like the US and UK were still working after all their meddling. Add some incompetent box-ticking bureaucrats and educators who are content to game the system, and you have the mess that we're in. The best and brightest still make their own way, but many kids arrive in STEM courses at university/college and can't cope with the kind of learning environment that depends on curiosity and initiative in addition to hard work. Some seem to think that regurgitation and rhetoric will win celebrity status - but STEM subjects generally aren't like that.
*These subjects are great in themselves, but we have too many politicians from this kind of background who largely use their subjects as a way of peddling lies.
... when I last compared the assembly generated with a Fortran compiler vs. that for a C++ compiler the Fortran code lacked some hints for conditionals and loops and was not as well optimized (compiled with optimization turned on) as a result the code executed 10-20% slower.
Which compiler/version was this? Did you request that the vendor fix this?
My experience has been based on compilers such as Intel and Sun, but I understand others perform as well. Compiler vendors don't generally neglect FORTRAN, particularly since there is often a common back end for code generation and CPU-specific optimisation.
You might want to re-evaluate that position. Modern CPUs benefit enormously from 'hints' embedded in the machine code generated by compilers. My experience has been that this can have a significant impact on performance given the right circumstances - in fact I've even seen that compiling C with a C++ compiler can give significant performance increases simply because the C++ compiler was more mainstream and so better maintained and optimized. I cannot help but think that a Fortran compiler is so far off the mainstream that the performance of its code will be significantly worse than a C++ compiler.
This is quite wrong; modern FORTRAN compilers perform as well and often better than C++. Standards for parallelism, e.g., using multi-core processors, are often implemented first in FORTRAN.
Of course, you can make any language perform slowly, but in languages such as C++ where there are often hidden system calls (e.g., malloc), it's easier to make such mistakes.
I started using FORTRAN (66 and 77) as a Physics grad. student in the early 80s; since then I've also used C and C++ heavily, dabbled in Perl, Java and Python. As well as developing a lot of code, I've also had to troubleshoot other people's complex systems, particularly C++ and Java. I now describe myself - somewhat tongue-in-cheek - as a "born-again FORTRAN programmer".
Java, C++ etc., are useful for complex applications that are event driven and require independent threads of excution performing many different tasks, but I prefer to avoid these for simple number-crunching tasks unless I need additional layers of abstraction or interaction.
When I write FORTRAN I know what's going on under the hood; I know that memory is not going to be allocated without me knowing - in fact, allocatable arrays are a relatively new addition to the original static allocation model. I can concentrate on the implementation of an algorithm and achieve deterministic performance.
Flexibility comes at a price and C++ and Java applications frequently run into performance problems as they become bloated by hidden activity, particularly where the OS is called behind the scenes (e.g., hidden constructor methods). This is a particular problem for real-time codes where an unplanned trip into the kernel may hurt determinism.
I think FORTRAN still has an important place; with extensions such as OpenMP it has tremendous value for parallel computing on multi-core systems. With MPI it can exploit cluster/grid systems. FORTRAN generally has an edge in performance for HPC codes.
If you're building something from scratch that contains requires numerical computation then consider FORTRAN, if only for computational kernels that are called by other languages such as C++ or Java (e.g., the latter for GUIs, external interaction/communication, with the heavy work in FORTRAN).
In your face ZFS losers!!! The penguin is unstoppable. We have the best coders who can do stuff like this. M$ and $UN are more dead then B$D!!! lol So why didn't the penguin coders do it? AdvFS was developed by Digital as piece of closed source; aren't you rewriting history to suggest that it came from the Linux community?
Declarations/health warnings:
1) I work for Sun and I rather like ZFS:-)
2) In a former life I also used AdvFS and thought
it was a good filesystem; probably the best general
purpose FS around until ZFS.
3) Integrating AdvFS into Linux and exercising it for prime
time won't be an overnight job; perhaps several years
before it can be deemed trustworthy.
...a computer running Linux to experiment on. Kids spend too much time, too early, in front of computers.
I have no problem with kids learning to use them when appropriate (and for my two it'll probably be FORTRAN or Python on Mac OS X, Solaris or Linux) but (notwithstanding quantum effects), let's not forget:
THE REAL WORLD IS ANALOGUE!
Let kids develop abstractions based on that to start with, then translate to the computer. Pouring water from short fat containers into tall thin ones, playing with gears, magnets, gyroscopes, lenses and circuits etc., is the basis for really understanding the world around you. Tinkering with hideously complex bits of sofware is not. OS Kernel implementations are fairly ephemeral; the laws of Physics are not.
Oh, just before you flame me as old-fashioned, I've spent over 25 years of my life in Physics and computers, using or building some of the biggest systems on the planet to do cool things connected to the world outside computers.
This isn't merely light detection, it's polarimety; 203 seconds is impressively fast, since previous attempts have taken several hours. Furthermore, the novel polarimeter they built allows instantaneous measurement of polarisation and position angle. These objects may be changing quickly so conventional optical polarimety won't work.
Declaration of interest: I work for Sun, use DTrace, demonstrate it and see the expressions of stunned delight on the faces of people when they suddenly recognise its power.
> 2) Solaris is not known to be portable beyond Sparc, Sparc64 and ia32. ia64 and AMD64/x86-64 might happen > but as far as I know don't yet exist.
Solaris IS known to be portable beyond SPARC and IA32; for years it ran on IBM Power but support for that seems to have been dropped because of lack of demand. An Itanium port is thought to have been developed and booted but was abandoned. Opteron (AMD64) support is already available in Solaris 10 via the Solaris Express program.
Slashdot Mirror
No, you couldn't send texts between networks, at least in the UK. I remember only being able to text other people on Orange (my network). They were all GSM. This would have been in the late nineties.
That's my recollection, too, as an Orange user in 1995. With the 160-character limit and the awkwardness of using the keys–as well as not knowing anyone else on Orange at the time–texting seem like an oddity that I didn't expect to catch-on.
Unix and its relatives have dominated desktop computing for professional astronomers for about thirty years. In the 1980s, Sun workstations and Unix mini-supercomputers displaced Digital Equipment Corp's VAX minicomputers, then, as the performance of x86 overtook most of the RISC CPUs, Linux became useful for professional astronomical image processing applications (e.g., AIPS & IRAF). Over the last 10-15 years, MacOS X has also become a major player.
The adoption of Unix and related open systems standards made porting of applications from one vendor's hardware to another much easier than it was in the days of proprietary operating systems. Of course, Windows did something similar in the wider world, but the x86/Windows combination was later to the show for many scientists and engineers, and, in the early days, not up to the job, both in terms of performance and sophistication of the OS and toolset. Of course, that's changed now, but Unix/Linux (including MacOS) dominates astronomy.
The story's similar for other fields of physical science and engineering, in academia and industry. A generation of such people largely bypassed the world of Windows for serious work, perhaps only using it when they needed to use proprietary commercial applications. Where they write their own code, it's likely to be on Linux or MacOS.
Scaremongering is also a great diversionary tactic.
The "war on terrr" saved how many lives?
How many lives would a war on tobacco producers–significant contributors to the top three causes of death–have saved?
end-to-end encryption ...
curtains
drapes
shutters
blinds
Not Thunderbirds, but one of the Anderson's other creations - Captain Scarlet - had this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
not until the Pound sinks to parity with the US Dollar. Seeing as the Pound can currently buy 1.6 US Dollars, that might not be anytime soon.
It's already been there and the fall can be quite fast. In the early-mid '80s the Pound dropped from over $2 to a little over $1. On one trip I took in early '85, the effective rate was less than $1 to the Pound by the time the bank had taken its cut.
Mod parent up - it's insightful irony - who the hell moderated it as "troll"?
Damnation - I just blew my mod points before this story came-up. SuperCharlie has hit the nail on the head.
This has come about because politicians - mostly soft classics/humanities* types with no significant experience of the world outside politics that pays the bills - wanted to make voters think that the junior and high school systems in places like the US and UK were still working after all their meddling. Add some incompetent box-ticking bureaucrats and educators who are content to game the system, and you have the mess that we're in. The best and brightest still make their own way, but many kids arrive in STEM courses at university/college and can't cope with the kind of learning environment that depends on curiosity and initiative in addition to hard work. Some seem to think that regurgitation and rhetoric will win celebrity status - but STEM subjects generally aren't like that.
*These subjects are great in themselves, but we have too many politicians from this kind of background who largely use their subjects as a way of peddling lies.
Which compiler/version was this? Did you request that the vendor fix this?
My experience has been based on compilers such as Intel and Sun, but I understand others perform as well. Compiler vendors don't generally neglect FORTRAN, particularly since there is often a common back end for code generation and CPU-specific optimisation.
You might want to re-evaluate that position. Modern CPUs benefit enormously from 'hints' embedded in the machine code generated by compilers. My experience has been that this can have a significant impact on performance given the right circumstances - in fact I've even seen that compiling C with a C++ compiler can give significant performance increases simply because the C++ compiler was more mainstream and so better maintained and optimized. I cannot help but think that a Fortran compiler is so far off the mainstream that the performance of its code will be significantly worse than a C++ compiler.
This is quite wrong; modern FORTRAN compilers perform as well and often better than C++. Standards for parallelism, e.g., using multi-core processors, are often implemented first in FORTRAN.
Of course, you can make any language perform slowly, but in languages such as C++ where there are often hidden system calls (e.g., malloc), it's easier to make such mistakes.
I started using FORTRAN (66 and 77) as a Physics grad. student in the early 80s; since then I've also used C and C++ heavily, dabbled in Perl, Java and Python. As well as developing a lot of code, I've also had to troubleshoot other people's complex systems, particularly C++ and Java. I now describe myself - somewhat tongue-in-cheek - as a "born-again FORTRAN programmer".
Java, C++ etc., are useful for complex applications that are event driven and require independent threads of excution performing many different tasks, but I prefer to avoid these for simple number-crunching tasks unless I need additional layers of abstraction or interaction.
When I write FORTRAN I know what's going on under the hood; I know that memory is not going to be allocated without me knowing - in fact, allocatable arrays are a relatively new addition to the original static allocation model. I can concentrate on the implementation of an algorithm and achieve deterministic performance.
Flexibility comes at a price and C++ and Java applications frequently run into performance problems as they become bloated by hidden activity, particularly where the OS is called behind the scenes (e.g., hidden constructor methods). This is a particular problem for real-time codes where an unplanned trip into the kernel may hurt determinism.
I think FORTRAN still has an important place; with extensions such as OpenMP it has tremendous value for parallel computing on multi-core systems. With MPI it can exploit cluster/grid systems. FORTRAN generally has an edge in performance for HPC codes.
If you're building something from scratch that contains requires numerical computation then consider FORTRAN, if only for computational kernels that are called by other languages such as C++ or Java (e.g., the latter for GUIs, external interaction/communication, with the heavy work in FORTRAN).
"Page's law" is simply a restatement of May's law:
"Software efficiency halves every 18 months, compensating Moore's Law".
David May is a British Computer scientist who was the lead architect for the Transputer. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_May_(computer_scientist)
and page 20 of:
http://www.cs.bris.ac.uk/~dave/iee.pdf
Declarations/health warnings: :-)
1) I work for Sun and I rather like ZFS
2) In a former life I also used AdvFS and thought
it was a good filesystem; probably the best general
purpose FS around until ZFS.
3) Integrating AdvFS into Linux and exercising it for prime
time won't be an overnight job; perhaps several years
before it can be deemed trustworthy.
...a computer running Linux to experiment on. Kids spend too much time, too early, in front of computers.I have no problem with kids learning to use them when appropriate (and for my two it'll probably be FORTRAN or Python on Mac OS X, Solaris or Linux) but (notwithstanding quantum effects), let's not forget:
THE REAL WORLD IS ANALOGUE!
Let kids develop abstractions based on that to start with, then translate to the computer. Pouring water from short fat containers into tall thin ones, playing with gears, magnets, gyroscopes, lenses and circuits etc., is the basis for really understanding the world around you. Tinkering with hideously complex bits of sofware is not. OS Kernel implementations are fairly ephemeral; the laws of Physics are not.
Oh, just before you flame me as old-fashioned, I've spent over 25 years of my life in Physics and computers, using or building some of the biggest systems on the planet to do cool things connected to the world outside computers.
This isn't merely light detection, it's polarimety; 203 seconds is impressively
fast, since previous attempts have taken several hours. Furthermore, the novel
polarimeter they built allows instantaneous measurement of polarisation and position
angle. These objects may be changing quickly so conventional optical polarimety
won't work.
H-P and SGI were knocked-out at the end of round one; Cray, IBM & Sun were selected
for round two.
The whole point of DTrace is that it allows you to gather informationi nerst racehowto.jsp
that you couldn't obtain before. See some examples here:
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/bmc/20040805
here:
http://users.tpg.com.au/adsln4yb/dtrace.html#OneL
and here:
http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/howtoguides/d
Declaration of interest: I work for Sun, use DTrace, demonstrate it and
see the expressions of stunned delight on the faces of people
when they suddenly recognise its power.
jmorris42 (1458) wrote:
> 2) Solaris is not known to be portable beyond Sparc, Sparc64 and ia32. ia64 and AMD64/x86-64 might happen
> but as far as I know don't yet exist.
Solaris IS known to be portable beyond SPARC and IA32; for years it ran on IBM Power but support for that seems to have been dropped because of lack of demand. An Itanium port is thought to have been developed and booted but was abandoned. Opteron (AMD64) support is already available in Solaris 10 via the Solaris Express program.
No way! Head is a wooden ham who gets by in
the U.S. because of his accent.
Before joining Buffy he was best known in the
UK for his role in a long running coffee
commercial love story ("The Gold Blend couple").
Simply NOT Time Lord material, but he might
serve as an Ice Warrior with a bit of make-up.