Since I am bored and can’t go out and ride my bike in the rain I used XCode to write a C program on my iMac to multiply two 4086 x 4086 matrices of 64 bit floating point numbers. I used a complex, robust random number generating algorithm to fill the arrays. This takes 17 seconds. Then I multiplied the two arrays to fill a third array. This takes 0.102632 seconds. You have to wonder how the authors could have gotten such crappy results even using crappy languages.
Posts by Billy Bob Gascan
17 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Nov 2011
Moore's Law is deader than corduroy bell bottoms. But with a bit of smart coding it's not the end of the road
How bad is Catalina? It's almost Apple Maps bad: MacOS 10.15 pushes Cupertino's low bar for code quality lower still
Florida Man to be fined $1.25 per robocall... all 96 million of them
W*nkers of the world unite to save the planet one jerk-off at a time
10 PRINT "Happy 50th Birthday, BASIC" : GOTO 10
Thursday 1st May 2014 22:24 GMT
Re: Horrible Travesty of BASIC
The fact is that improvements to BASIC that allowed it to do "sophisticated" things like declare local variables, use pointers, be compiled, etc. arrived in a piecemeal fashion in a whole bunch of implementations during the 1990s This contributed to the fact that BASIC is a hodgepodge of hundreds of different languages. The fact is that GOTSUB NN and other BASIC syntax is incomprehensible. I'm not bitter, I'm very grateful that I never had to program in BASIC, except my stint converting BASIC programs into C to improve their performance.
Also I mis-spoke about getting my big break in the industry. Actually, I ran the company owner's interpreted BASIC program on a data sample he gave me and in 45 minutes I gave up. My C version ran the whole job in 20 seconds, so it didn't run in 1% of the time, it ran in less than 0.0074 of the time. He told me that the program would complete its task in a hour so this was probably more like 0.00555... as much time.
Thursday 1st May 2014 15:38 GMT
There Really is no such thing as BASIC
Because the original version of BASIC was so bad, various dialects were created to add the features of a real language. These were added in an unorganized and uncoordinated fashion, resulting in a Tower of Babel of BASIC dialects, see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_BASIC_dialects
What a nightmare to program in a language with hundreds and hundreds of incompatible dialects! Good bye BASIC. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.
Thursday 1st May 2014 14:31 GMT
Horrible Travesty of BASIC
BASIC was a RETARDED language. It was a toy language created for writing toy programs on toy computers. All of the variables were global. It didn't support any of the features of a real language, like pointers. You could use it to write a small program but it couldn't be used to write structured programs. If you tried to write a large program you got spaghetti code. The syntax was crap. And it was interpreted. I got my first big break in programming by re-writing a BASIC program in C for my potential employer. My C version ran in one percent of the time and I was hired. C was available at the same time as BASIC and is still the backbone of modern programming while BASIC has (thankfully) been cast upon the ash heap of history. I am so glad that I learned C instead of BASIC and that my exposure to it was limited because it sucked.
The Sun ERUCTATES huge ball of GAS at 4 MILLION MPH
Boffins find new 2012 glyph on 'secret' Mayan brick
Sunday 27th November 2011 18:36 GMT
Confused Ignorant Journalists
There are a bunch of really buggered up English language versions of this story on the web. It turns out that the brick only has a Calendar Round not even a Long Count on it and it has no distance glyphs to indicate it refers to the future. A Calendar Round is a combination of a 260 day ritual calendar and a 365 day vague solar year with no leap year. It can only specify a date as far as 18,980 days or 51.9641 solar years. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_calendar#Calendar_Round
The Calendar Round on the brick is 4 Ahau 3 K'ank'n. Yes this is the same CR as the one that will occur on 13.0.0.0.0. Does this mean any thing? No, Not according to David Stuart, one of the world's leading experts on Mayan epigraphy and participant in the Palenque congress. Still the media went wild and reported that it did.
This is B**l Sh*t.
Friday 25th November 2011 18:12 GMT
13.0.0.0.0 is December 21, 2012 using the GMT correlation *NOT* December 23. Those idiot anthropologists (or whoever wrote that press release) don't have any idea what they're talking about. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerican_Long_Count_calendar#Correlations_between_Western_calendars_and_the_Long_Count
Friday 25th November 2011 16:01 GMT
BALDERDASH: "the expiration of the thirteenth and final Baktun of the current long count on or about December 21 next year" - This is CODSWALLOP. THERE IS NO 13 Bak'tun CYCLE in the Long Count. There are NO calendric inscriptions that use 13 Bak'tuns and a large number of them (in the form of distance inscriptions, particularly at Palenque and Long Reckonings in the Dresden Codex) that use 20 Bak'tuns in a Piktun. The first Piktun won't be completed until Friday, October 13, 4772. There are no Mayan doomsday prophesies. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerican_Long_Count_calendar.
NASA: 2012 solar flares could DEVASTATE CITIES!
Saturday 12th November 2011 17:21 GMT
Mayan Balderdash
The "Mayan calendar long-count completes" is codswallop. It's actually the "Maya" calendar. The Long Count doesn't end in 2012 or ever for that matter. There's no five thousand year cycle in the Long Count. December 21, 2012 is the completion of a bak'tun - a period of 144,000 days. 12.19.19.17.19 is followed by 13.0.0.0.0. There are no Mayan prophesies regarding anything happening on this date. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerican_Long_Count_calendar
Who cares about all about the complete crap promoted by new-age morons regarding this date anyway? But at least you could get your story straight regarding the Long Count.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
