Jerry Yang did the right thing, in my opinion. He must hold on to his core search and advertising business. However, he would do well to diversify as soon as possible. Consider that both Microsoft and Intel have been riding on last century's legacy technology (x86 and Windows) for a long time. That sweet ride can't last forever. Now that the industry is transitioning from sequential processing to massively parallel computing, and given that neither Microsoft nor Intel have delivered on the real promise of multicore processors, Yahoo has the opportunity of a lifetime to sneak behind those two slow-moving behemoths and steal their pot of gold. Someone should tell Jerry before it's too late. Multicore processors is where the real action is at. Whoever solves the parallel-programming/multicore-design problem will rule the computer industry in this century.
To cover some of your thoughts here, Zeno's paradoxes have been resolved by modern math and its concept of limits.
Yeah. So says the elite. I don't buy any of it, of course, since I think it's all crap, and by this, I mean both Zeno and modern mathematicians' "refutation" of Zeno. Zeno and Parmenides only proved that the universe is discrete even though they did not see it that way. Mathematicians cling to a continuous universe even though it leads to an infinite regress. Again, more incestuous crap that passes elitist peer review.
more power to you.
And less to you and the elitists and their clueless sycophants. See ya.
If I belong to the same group of brainwashed people like Einstein who feel curled up dimensions is a very interesting interpreation of experimental data, I have no problem with that.
I do. Einstein or not, physicists have made no progress in understanding the mechanism of gravity in close to a century. They still have no clue as to why bodies fall. To do so, they would need to go beyond Einstein and may even need to step on Einstein. Unfortunately, the elitist peer review system that you admire so much will never allow it, seeing that Einstein is now worshipped as a god by the members of the elite. Einstein tried to explain gravity in terms of the geometry of spacetime but did you know that nothing can move in spacetime? That is right. This is the reason that Sir Karl Popper wrote in "Conjectures and Refutations" that spacetime is "Einstein's block universe in which nothing ever happens." Popper was comparing spacetime to Parmenides' block universe, the same Eleatic guy who taught (with his famous pupil Zeno) that change does not exist.
So, this is what peer review gets you, a block universe where nothing changes. ahahaha... Too funny. Where is Thomas Kuhn when we need him? We need a new revolution in physics.
Instead of studying hard to understand elitist views
You mean, instead of accepting to be brainwashed by the elite.
curled up dimensions explains certain phenomena
No they do not. Curled up dimensions is a ridiculous concept on the face of it since a dimension is an abstract thing meaning, a degree of freedom, i.e., a direction. A dimension is not a physical structure that can be curled up, weighed, accelerated or what have you. Besides, since it is not observable by definition, it is not science, right? Again, Feyerabend was right. "The most stupid procedures and the most laughable results in their domain are surrounded with an aura of excellence." This sort of crap is what you get from elitist peer review and the one true religion.
For an example see string theory, no one has any real idea whether it's actually correct, and they haven't really done anything useful with it yet, but all of it's alternatives are derided as quackery. String theorists are "peers" in the review process.
I don't know about you, but most of my articles were double-blind. I didn't know who my reviewers were, and they didn't know who I was.
So? Your reviewers did not become reviewers until they showed that their thought processes were acceptable to the elite. It is still an incestuous and elitist process. Not to mention extremely dangerous to the freedom of society. No group should have a bully (government imposed) pulpit that they can use to enforce their ideas upon others. Let the free market of ideas decide.
The journals do a good job, for the most part, at keeping out well-paying stupidity. If your article is genuinely bad, you'll have a hard time getting it published anywhere high-profile. Really--you can come in with as much money as you want, and you still won't be considered relevant. If you disagree, please provide at least two examples.
The journals are not needed. There should be no censorship at all except for cases of criminal behavior. Everything should be published and the worldwide market of ideas is the right mechanism to decide what to retain and what to reject. That is why the internet is so important for the cross-pollination of ideas. Money is no object. Almost anybody and everybody who has access to a computer and the internet can publish their work, free of charge. Survival of the fittest. It is a beautiful thing.
Scientific journals, OTOH, discourage cross-pollination and encourage intellectual incest within a small group. Nobody but those within the group have the power to decide whether or not ideas generated by the group are valid. This is the reason that, even though a lot of what passes for science lately is laughable BS of the stinking kind, it is still surrounded with an aura of excellence. Why? Because the elite has managed to establish istself as the authority and uses the government (and government guns) to impose its authority on society and the classroom. It is the one true religion, all over again.
On the contrary, my work (Project COSA) has never been more popular. COSA is about to burst onto the multicore scene like a locomotive. Surprise, surprise.
The only purpose of peer review is not quality control but control, period. It is a mechanism used by an elitist group to keep outsiders at bay. Thus science becomes immune to public scrutiny, not a very good thing. As Paul Feyerabend said, (paraphrasing) we did not get rid of the dictatorship of the one true religion to fall under the tyranny of another.
Peer review is an incestuous process that works for a while but eventually engenders ridiculously hideous monsters. Examples are time travel, cats that are both dead and alive when nobody is looking, parallel universes, dimensions that curled up into little balls so tiny as to be unobservable, etc... This is the reason that Feyerabend wrote in Against Method that "the most stupid procedures and the most laughable results in their domain are surrounded with an aura of excellence. It is time to cut them down in size and give them a more modest position in society."
The good news is that the internet is quickly making old style peer review obsolete. Like it or not, the entire world is our peer. If you got something good to offer, fight like hell to promote it and, if it's any good, the world will acknowledge your effort and compensate you accordingly. Just come out into the playground and show us what you got.
Most peer reviewed scientific papers are boring crap anyway. Your worth should not be how many papers you've published but what have you done that is useful?
The point of this is that if your application suits it, this is a very cheap way to get supercomputer performance without paying for your own supercomputer (cluster) or time on an existing one.
No doubt about it. In spite of my admittedly negative criticism, I applaud these guys because I think this shows the amazing potential of multicore parallel computing to bringing supercomputing power to the desktop and even to the laptop and the cellphone. However, this potential will not arrive unless we can find a way to design a universal multicore processor architecture that is at home in all possible parallel environments, not just vector parallel systems. IOW, we need a parallel processor that can handle anything we can throw at it with equal ease. Unfortunately, both the industry and academia are pushing the field toward so-called heterogeneous processors, hideous monsters that will be a nightmare to write code for. Check out Nightmare on Core Street for good explanation of the multicore crisis and how it can be solved.
It is obvious that, if a computer is using GPUs exclusively, it is limited to vector or data parallel processing. And it is no surprise that it is being used by an outfit that specializes in visual processing, which is ideally suited to data parallel processing. Change the benchmark program to code that has a lot of data dependencies and this "supercomputer" will choke to a crawl.
Labview and schematic hardware diagrams already exist. Cosa is nothing new or innovative.
Labview is data flow visual programming language that uses threads and a script language, AFAIK. COSA is a thread-less, control flow software construction and OS model in the tradition of synchronous reactive languages. Nobody is claiming that COSA is new although several aspects of it are. In fact, the COSA site/blog repeatedly emphasizes that the parallelism of COSA is not rocket science and has been around ever since programmers began to use 2 buffers and a loop to simulate parallelism in such applications as neural networks, cellular automata, video games and VHDL. Notice that threads are not needed and thus none of the problems associated with multithreading exists in COSA. What is new is the claim that this form of parallelism is what computing should have been from the start and that it is the answer to every problem that plagues the computer industry from unreliability and low productivity to parallel programming and multicore processor design. Read the COSA Saga for more.
Unfortunately, I wasn't born with a silver spoon in my mouth. Nobody can design and create a new CPU, operating system and a set of graphical dev tools in their spare time. Otherwise, we would not be having this conversation.
Since state is encapsulated atomically, the interpreter is assured that function calls cause no side-effects,
This is an often repeated claim of Erlang fanatics. The truth is that, in Erlang, the functions themselves are the states. To say that there are no side effects in Erlang is a lie. Functions affect other functions (states) and if they are called in the wrong order, bad things will happen. Another problem with Erlang and functional programming in general, is that it does not support fine-grain parallelism. There are a lot of highly useful things that cannot be properly parallelized without fine-grain parallel processing, things like search and sort routines (I am still waiting for an effective parallel quick sort routine in Erlang). A third problem with Erlang is that, like multithreading, it is not deterministic. Determinism an essential requirement of reliable software. In addition, functional programming is not intuitive and many programmers find it hard to get used ot. So you people in Sweden and at Ericsson should stop promoting Erlang as the solution to the parallel programming problem. It is not.
I'm curious... where can I download an actual functional implementation of this miracle of CS?
Miracles don't come cheap. If they did, Intel and Microsoft would not invest tens of millions in research labs at major universities around the globe (not to mention their own labs) to come up with one. Fork up a few millions dollars and your wish will be granted.
We are talking about realworld here, and not about math.
Keep in mind that the idea that calculus is the mathematics of the continuum is a complete lie perpetrated by mathematicians. Numbers are discrete by definition. There is nothing continuous about calculus, otherwise I could not use a quintessentially discrete machine like a digital computer to perform calculus operations. I do it all the time. The real reason that math seems to fit physical phenomena so well is that both are discrete. However, as one approaches a certain level (the Planck level), the correspondence between calculus and reality disappears and so-called continuum math becomes useless.
Continuity has always been illogical. Black holes, wormholes, etc... it's all worthless crackpottery. And the snake oil purveyors who insist (even in the face of solid refutation) on feeding this crap to an unsuspecting public should be held accountable. After all, it's the public who ultimately pays their salaries and the public deserves to receive good service for its money.
Continuity (infinite divisibility) is the basis of black holes and wormholes. It is nonsense for the simple reason that it leads to an infinite regress. Heck, space itself (i.e. distance) does not exist for the same simple reason. Distance is an illusion of perception. Spacetime is worse because nothing can move in it by definition. In Conjectures and Refutations, Sir Karl Popper compared spacetime to "Einstein's block universe in which nothing happens". All those physicists out there who are still making a living off of continuum physics are a bunch of crackpots. And that includes time travel believer Stephen Hawking. There is a lot of bullshit in the physics community that passes for science. Don't let mainstream physicists do your thinking for you. Click on the following links and get enlightened.
The Bible is all about aliens (gods) and their relationships with humanity. The very first commandment is a warning against worshipping other aliens besides Yahweh:
Thou shall have no other god before me.
Apparently, those aliens looked at nations as their wives, the way a man might look at a woman. Yahweh seems to have known that other powerful non-human creatures were lurking around and so did the Israelites. The Old Testament is full of passages showing that Yahweh considered Israel to be his wife. And a jealous husband he was! Food for thought.
If the answer is no (and it is), then you, Stephen Hawking, quantum computing crackpot David Deutsch, and a bunch of other famous physicists and scientists are bona fide crackpots. That is all there is to it. Take it or leave it.
Also, mod me down and see if I care. You can muffle the truth or hide it. The truth always wins out in the end. ahahaha...
You can jump up and down and foam at the mouth as much as you want, it remains that "nothing can move in spacetime" is as true now as it ever was. Spacetime does not allow time travel. It forbids it! Why? By definition, that why. Contradict this truth at your own detriment and see if I care.
My position is clear: Hawking is a time travel crackpot and so are his followers. I am not in the habit of kissing ass and tell it like I see it. If you don't like what I write, don't read it.
OK. Name one thing that Stephen Hawking has invented that created any wealth other than the sales of his books and related articles.
Isn't Stephen Hawking the guy who, like Carl Sagan, David Deutsch, Kip Thorne and many others, believes that Einstein's GR does not forbid time travel? Yep. It remains that nothing can move in spacetime by definition. Surprise! This is the reason that Sir Karl Popper (or falsification fame) compared spacetime to "Einstein's block universe in which nothing ever happens". It is also the reason that Robert Geroch wrote the following in his book "Relativity from A to B":
There is no dynamics within space-time itself: nothing ever moves therein; nothing happens; nothing changes. [...] In particular, one does not think of particles as "moving through" space-time, or as "following along" their world-lines. Rather, particles are just "in" space-time, once and for all, and the world-line represents, all at once the complete life history of the particle.
Isn't it Hawking's job to understand and know these things? Read Nasty Little Truth About Spacetime Physics to learn the truth about spacetime physics and time travel crackpots. It is time we stopped putting fallible humans on a pedestal and turn them into the superior gods that they are not.
Sorry, but I don't think so. A neural network (or a cellular automaton) is not a data flow program. A more accurate label for non-algorithmic programming would be control flow programming. It's not about the data but the control signals. That being said, I don't like the name 'control flow' either. This software model is better described as a non-algorithmic, synchronous reactive model. The word 'flow' does not convey its true meaning.
What is this "non-algorithmic software model" you speak of? Your blogs don't seem to give a specific example of anything.
Good question. I agree that the definitions should be more visible on the blogs.
In an algorithmic program, every element (instruction or operation) sends a signal to a successor element saying essentially, "I'm done, now it's your turn". Communication is thus one-dimensional. That is to say, an element can have only one predecessor and one successor.
In a non-algorithmic program, by contrast, communication is multidimensional, i.e., there is no limit to the number of successors or predecessors that an element can have.
Non-algorithmic programs are intrinsically parallel and deterministic. Two examples of non-algorithmic systems are: neural networks and logic circuit simulations. I believe that computing will not come of age until processors (both single and multicore) are designed to directly support non-algorithmic software.
My point is that a thread is a thread. If using multiple concurrent threads is harmful, so is using a single thread. Single threading is less harmful than multithreading but harmful nonetheless. The thread is the reason for every ill that ails computing, from the reliability crisis to the parallel programming crisis. There is a way to design and program computers that does not involve threads at all. It's called the non-algorithmic software model. This is the way we should have been doing it in the first place. To find out why algorithmic software (threading) is the work of the devil, read the articles at the links below:
150 years after Babbage and Lady Ada introduced the algorithmic computing model, it is time to change. The longer we wait to realize the folly of our ways, the worst our problems are going to get.
Nvidia makes SIMD (single instruction, multiple data) multicore processors while Intel, AMD and the other players make MIMD (multiple instructions, multiple data) multicore processors. These two architectures are incompatible, requiring different programming models. The former uses a fine grain approach to parallelism while the latter is coarse-grained. This makes for an extremely complex programming environment, something that is sure to negatively affect productivity. The idea that the industry must somehow resign itself to an uneasy marriage between the two approaches is nonsense. Logic dictates that universality should be the main goal of multicore research. The market is crying for a super fast, fine-grain and easy to program, MIMD multicore architecture that can handle any kind of parallel computing task. Neither Nvidia, Intel, AMD or the others even come close to delivering what the market wants. And as we all know, what the market wants, the market will get. So my point is that Nvidia should not rest on its laurels because their technology is bound to become obsolete as soon as someone figures out how to make the right multicore processor and kicks everybody's ass in the process. Read Nightmare on Core Street for a good analysis of where the changing multicore landscape is going. In the meantime, I advise everybody in the multicore business to thread carefully. Big money is in the balance. And I mean, BIG MONEY.
Slashdot Mirror
Jerry Yang did the right thing, in my opinion. He must hold on to his core search and advertising business. However, he would do well to diversify as soon as possible. Consider that both Microsoft and Intel have been riding on last century's legacy technology (x86 and Windows) for a long time. That sweet ride can't last forever. Now that the industry is transitioning from sequential processing to massively parallel computing, and given that neither Microsoft nor Intel have delivered on the real promise of multicore processors, Yahoo has the opportunity of a lifetime to sneak behind those two slow-moving behemoths and steal their pot of gold. Someone should tell Jerry before it's too late. Multicore processors is where the real action is at. Whoever solves the parallel-programming/multicore-design problem will rule the computer industry in this century.
To cover some of your thoughts here, Zeno's paradoxes have been resolved by modern math and its concept of limits.
Yeah. So says the elite. I don't buy any of it, of course, since I think it's all crap, and by this, I mean both Zeno and modern mathematicians' "refutation" of Zeno. Zeno and Parmenides only proved that the universe is discrete even though they did not see it that way. Mathematicians cling to a continuous universe even though it leads to an infinite regress. Again, more incestuous crap that passes elitist peer review.
more power to you.
And less to you and the elitists and their clueless sycophants. See ya.
If I belong to the same group of brainwashed people like Einstein who feel curled up dimensions is a very interesting interpreation of experimental data, I have no problem with that.
I do. Einstein or not, physicists have made no progress in understanding the mechanism of gravity in close to a century. They still have no clue as to why bodies fall. To do so, they would need to go beyond Einstein and may even need to step on Einstein. Unfortunately, the elitist peer review system that you admire so much will never allow it, seeing that Einstein is now worshipped as a god by the members of the elite. Einstein tried to explain gravity in terms of the geometry of spacetime but did you know that nothing can move in spacetime? That is right. This is the reason that Sir Karl Popper wrote in "Conjectures and Refutations" that spacetime is "Einstein's block universe in which nothing ever happens." Popper was comparing spacetime to Parmenides' block universe, the same Eleatic guy who taught (with his famous pupil Zeno) that change does not exist.
So, this is what peer review gets you, a block universe where nothing changes. ahahaha... Too funny. Where is Thomas Kuhn when we need him? We need a new revolution in physics.
Instead of studying hard to understand elitist views
You mean, instead of accepting to be brainwashed by the elite.
curled up dimensions explains certain phenomena
No they do not. Curled up dimensions is a ridiculous concept on the face of it since a dimension is an abstract thing meaning, a degree of freedom, i.e., a direction. A dimension is not a physical structure that can be curled up, weighed, accelerated or what have you. Besides, since it is not observable by definition, it is not science, right? Again, Feyerabend was right. "The most stupid procedures and the most laughable results in their domain are surrounded with an aura of excellence." This sort of crap is what you get from elitist peer review and the one true religion.
For an example see string theory, no one has any real idea whether it's actually correct, and they haven't really done anything useful with it yet, but all of it's alternatives are derided as quackery. String theorists are "peers" in the review process.
Well said. I wish I had some mod points.
I don't know about you, but most of my articles were double-blind. I didn't know who my reviewers were, and they didn't know who I was.
So? Your reviewers did not become reviewers until they showed that their thought processes were acceptable to the elite. It is still an incestuous and elitist process. Not to mention extremely dangerous to the freedom of society. No group should have a bully (government imposed) pulpit that they can use to enforce their ideas upon others. Let the free market of ideas decide.
The journals do a good job, for the most part, at keeping out well-paying stupidity. If your article is genuinely bad, you'll have a hard time getting it published anywhere high-profile. Really--you can come in with as much money as you want, and you still won't be considered relevant. If you disagree, please provide at least two examples.
The journals are not needed. There should be no censorship at all except for cases of criminal behavior. Everything should be published and the worldwide market of ideas is the right mechanism to decide what to retain and what to reject. That is why the internet is so important for the cross-pollination of ideas. Money is no object. Almost anybody and everybody who has access to a computer and the internet can publish their work, free of charge. Survival of the fittest. It is a beautiful thing.
Scientific journals, OTOH, discourage cross-pollination and encourage intellectual incest within a small group. Nobody but those within the group have the power to decide whether or not ideas generated by the group are valid. This is the reason that, even though a lot of what passes for science lately is laughable BS of the stinking kind, it is still surrounded with an aura of excellence. Why? Because the elite has managed to establish istself as the authority and uses the government (and government guns) to impose its authority on society and the classroom. It is the one true religion, all over again.
On the contrary, my work (Project COSA) has never been more popular. COSA is about to burst onto the multicore scene like a locomotive. Surprise, surprise.
The only purpose of peer review is not quality control but control, period. It is a mechanism used by an elitist group to keep outsiders at bay. Thus science becomes immune to public scrutiny, not a very good thing. As Paul Feyerabend said, (paraphrasing) we did not get rid of the dictatorship of the one true religion to fall under the tyranny of another.
Peer review is an incestuous process that works for a while but eventually engenders ridiculously hideous monsters. Examples are time travel, cats that are both dead and alive when nobody is looking, parallel universes, dimensions that curled up into little balls so tiny as to be unobservable, etc... This is the reason that Feyerabend wrote in Against Method that "the most stupid procedures and the most laughable results in their domain are surrounded with an aura of excellence. It is time to cut them down in size and give them a more modest position in society."
The good news is that the internet is quickly making old style peer review obsolete. Like it or not, the entire world is our peer. If you got something good to offer, fight like hell to promote it and, if it's any good, the world will acknowledge your effort and compensate you accordingly. Just come out into the playground and show us what you got.
Most peer reviewed scientific papers are boring crap anyway. Your worth should not be how many papers you've published but what have you done that is useful?
The point of this is that if your application suits it, this is a very cheap way to get supercomputer performance without paying for your own supercomputer (cluster) or time on an existing one.
No doubt about it. In spite of my admittedly negative criticism, I applaud these guys because I think this shows the amazing potential of multicore parallel computing to bringing supercomputing power to the desktop and even to the laptop and the cellphone. However, this potential will not arrive unless we can find a way to design a universal multicore processor architecture that is at home in all possible parallel environments, not just vector parallel systems. IOW, we need a parallel processor that can handle anything we can throw at it with equal ease. Unfortunately, both the industry and academia are pushing the field toward so-called heterogeneous processors, hideous monsters that will be a nightmare to write code for. Check out Nightmare on Core Street for good explanation of the multicore crisis and how it can be solved.
It is obvious that, if a computer is using GPUs exclusively, it is limited to vector or data parallel processing. And it is no surprise that it is being used by an outfit that specializes in visual processing, which is ideally suited to data parallel processing. Change the benchmark program to code that has a lot of data dependencies and this "supercomputer" will choke to a crawl.
Labview and schematic hardware diagrams already exist. Cosa is nothing new or innovative.
Labview is data flow visual programming language that uses threads and a script language, AFAIK. COSA is a thread-less, control flow software construction and OS model in the tradition of synchronous reactive languages. Nobody is claiming that COSA is new although several aspects of it are. In fact, the COSA site/blog repeatedly emphasizes that the parallelism of COSA is not rocket science and has been around ever since programmers began to use 2 buffers and a loop to simulate parallelism in such applications as neural networks, cellular automata, video games and VHDL. Notice that threads are not needed and thus none of the problems associated with multithreading exists in COSA. What is new is the claim that this form of parallelism is what computing should have been from the start and that it is the answer to every problem that plagues the computer industry from unreliability and low productivity to parallel programming and multicore processor design. Read the COSA Saga for more.
Unfortunately, I wasn't born with a silver spoon in my mouth. Nobody can design and create a new CPU, operating system and a set of graphical dev tools in their spare time. Otherwise, we would not be having this conversation.
Since state is encapsulated atomically, the interpreter is assured that function calls cause no side-effects,
This is an often repeated claim of Erlang fanatics. The truth is that, in Erlang, the functions themselves are the states. To say that there are no side effects in Erlang is a lie. Functions affect other functions (states) and if they are called in the wrong order, bad things will happen. Another problem with Erlang and functional programming in general, is that it does not support fine-grain parallelism. There are a lot of highly useful things that cannot be properly parallelized without fine-grain parallel processing, things like search and sort routines (I am still waiting for an effective parallel quick sort routine in Erlang). A third problem with Erlang is that, like multithreading, it is not deterministic. Determinism an essential requirement of reliable software. In addition, functional programming is not intuitive and many programmers find it hard to get used ot. So you people in Sweden and at Ericsson should stop promoting Erlang as the solution to the parallel programming problem. It is not.
I'm curious... where can I download an actual functional implementation of this miracle of CS?
Miracles don't come cheap. If they did, Intel and Microsoft would not invest tens of millions in research labs at major universities around the globe (not to mention their own labs) to come up with one. Fork up a few millions dollars and your wish will be granted.
We are talking about realworld here, and not about math.
Keep in mind that the idea that calculus is the mathematics of the continuum is a complete lie perpetrated by mathematicians. Numbers are discrete by definition. There is nothing continuous about calculus, otherwise I could not use a quintessentially discrete machine like a digital computer to perform calculus operations. I do it all the time. The real reason that math seems to fit physical phenomena so well is that both are discrete. However, as one approaches a certain level (the Planck level), the correspondence between calculus and reality disappears and so-called continuum math becomes useless.
Continuity has always been illogical. Black holes, wormholes, etc... it's all worthless crackpottery. And the snake oil purveyors who insist (even in the face of solid refutation) on feeding this crap to an unsuspecting public should be held accountable. After all, it's the public who ultimately pays their salaries and the public deserves to receive good service for its money.
Continuity (infinite divisibility) is the basis of black holes and wormholes. It is nonsense for the simple reason that it leads to an infinite regress. Heck, space itself (i.e. distance) does not exist for the same simple reason. Distance is an illusion of perception. Spacetime is worse because nothing can move in it by definition. In Conjectures and Refutations, Sir Karl Popper compared spacetime to "Einstein's block universe in which nothing happens". All those physicists out there who are still making a living off of continuum physics are a bunch of crackpots. And that includes time travel believer Stephen Hawking. There is a lot of bullshit in the physics community that passes for science. Don't let mainstream physicists do your thinking for you. Click on the following links and get enlightened.
Nasty Little Truth About Spacetime Physics
Nasty Little Truth About Space
Don't believe me either. Figure it out on your own.
The Bible is all about aliens (gods) and their relationships with humanity. The very first commandment is a warning against worshipping other aliens besides Yahweh:
Thou shall have no other god before me.
Apparently, those aliens looked at nations as their wives, the way a man might look at a woman. Yahweh seems to have known that other powerful non-human creatures were lurking around and so did the Israelites. The Old Testament is full of passages showing that Yahweh considered Israel to be his wife. And a jealous husband he was! Food for thought.
If the answer is no (and it is), then you, Stephen Hawking, quantum computing crackpot David Deutsch, and a bunch of other famous physicists and scientists are bona fide crackpots. That is all there is to it. Take it or leave it.
Also, mod me down and see if I care. You can muffle the truth or hide it. The truth always wins out in the end. ahahaha...
You can jump up and down and foam at the mouth as much as you want, it remains that "nothing can move in spacetime" is as true now as it ever was. Spacetime does not allow time travel. It forbids it! Why? By definition, that why. Contradict this truth at your own detriment and see if I care.
My position is clear: Hawking is a time travel crackpot and so are his followers. I am not in the habit of kissing ass and tell it like I see it. If you don't like what I write, don't read it.
OK. Name one thing that Stephen Hawking has invented that created any wealth other than the sales of his books and related articles.
Isn't Stephen Hawking the guy who, like Carl Sagan, David Deutsch, Kip Thorne and many others, believes that Einstein's GR does not forbid time travel? Yep. It remains that nothing can move in spacetime by definition. Surprise! This is the reason that Sir Karl Popper (or falsification fame) compared spacetime to "Einstein's block universe in which nothing ever happens". It is also the reason that Robert Geroch wrote the following in his book "Relativity from A to B":
There is no dynamics within space-time itself: nothing ever moves therein; nothing happens; nothing changes. [...] In particular, one does not think of particles as "moving through" space-time, or as "following along" their world-lines. Rather, particles are just "in" space-time, once and for all, and the world-line represents, all at once the complete life history of the particle.
Isn't it Hawking's job to understand and know these things? Read Nasty Little Truth About Spacetime Physics to learn the truth about spacetime physics and time travel crackpots. It is time we stopped putting fallible humans on a pedestal and turn them into the superior gods that they are not.
That's also called dataflow programming.
Sorry, but I don't think so. A neural network (or a cellular automaton) is not a data flow program. A more accurate label for non-algorithmic programming would be control flow programming. It's not about the data but the control signals. That being said, I don't like the name 'control flow' either. This software model is better described as a non-algorithmic, synchronous reactive model. The word 'flow' does not convey its true meaning.
What is this "non-algorithmic software model" you speak of? Your blogs don't seem to give a specific example of anything.
Good question. I agree that the definitions should be more visible on the blogs.
In an algorithmic program, every element (instruction or operation) sends a signal to a successor element saying essentially, "I'm done, now it's your turn". Communication is thus one-dimensional. That is to say, an element can have only one predecessor and one successor.
In a non-algorithmic program, by contrast, communication is multidimensional, i.e., there is no limit to the number of successors or predecessors that an element can have.
Non-algorithmic programs are intrinsically parallel and deterministic. Two examples of non-algorithmic systems are: neural networks and logic circuit simulations. I believe that computing will not come of age until processors (both single and multicore) are designed to directly support non-algorithmic software.
My point is that a thread is a thread. If using multiple concurrent threads is harmful, so is using a single thread. Single threading is less harmful than multithreading but harmful nonetheless. The thread is the reason for every ill that ails computing, from the reliability crisis to the parallel programming crisis. There is a way to design and program computers that does not involve threads at all. It's called the non-algorithmic software model. This is the way we should have been doing it in the first place. To find out why algorithmic software (threading) is the work of the devil, read the articles at the links below:
Parallel Programming, Math and the Curse of the Algorithm
Why Software Is Bad and What We Can Do to Fix It
Nightmare on Core Street
150 years after Babbage and Lady Ada introduced the algorithmic computing model, it is time to change. The longer we wait to realize the folly of our ways, the worst our problems are going to get.
Nvidia makes SIMD (single instruction, multiple data) multicore processors while Intel, AMD and the other players make MIMD (multiple instructions, multiple data) multicore processors. These two architectures are incompatible, requiring different programming models. The former uses a fine grain approach to parallelism while the latter is coarse-grained. This makes for an extremely complex programming environment, something that is sure to negatively affect productivity. The idea that the industry must somehow resign itself to an uneasy marriage between the two approaches is nonsense. Logic dictates that universality should be the main goal of multicore research. The market is crying for a super fast, fine-grain and easy to program, MIMD multicore architecture that can handle any kind of parallel computing task. Neither Nvidia, Intel, AMD or the others even come close to delivering what the market wants. And as we all know, what the market wants, the market will get. So my point is that Nvidia should not rest on its laurels because their technology is bound to become obsolete as soon as someone figures out how to make the right multicore processor and kicks everybody's ass in the process. Read Nightmare on Core Street for a good analysis of where the changing multicore landscape is going. In the meantime, I advise everybody in the multicore business to thread carefully. Big money is in the balance. And I mean, BIG MONEY.