We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).
Some interesting perspective from Matt Strassler, who's a particle physicist at Harvard.
He points out that this is still an *indirect* observation of gravitational waves (and not the first one) and that the results look sensibly in line with some predictions from inflation. And that while this is a tremendous experiment, it's not any kind of "smoking gun", and we really need to wait for replication to get properly excited.
> Can anyone find a free copy that we can examine?
Archive link
I'm still trying to find a way to use the GPU for computations without having to jump through crazy hoops to do it. Also, multithreading in general is often a PITA to get right...
This.
It still seems like it's really hard to write maintainable, extendable code that does parallel execution in anything more than a trivial way (break up a calc into independent pieces with no interaction).
Does anyone know if there's been any interesting work on new language paradigms for this sort of thing? It feels like the community is waiting for some kind of change in semantics that'd make this easier for the bulk of developers who aren't parallel execution gurus. Like object oriented coding was for the ability to scale code by developing intelligible interfaces: not something you couldn't do with earlier paradigms, but it made it easier.
> makes an analogy with the (marginalized, demonized) economists who warned of a coming economic collapse in 2007.
Hrm... like Paul Krugman, the economic who warned of collapse and yet received a Nobel prize?
Top Ten Things Overheard At The ANSI C Draft Committee Meetings: (7) Well, it's an excellent idea, but it would make the compilers too hard to write.
