Gary Rubin

That's exactly what I thought of.

Uh, oh. Ben, were you not reading the CLAD thread yesterday, or did you just feel like rattling some cages? Edited to add link.

I always enjoy the trajectory of LAVA discussions; you never know exactly where they're going to lead.

I would agree with Yair, et al, here. I think that you took enough practice tests to get a feel for their language, and you therefore had a good feel for each question's intent. The intent of the question, and what the question actually says are not always the same thing, as shown by Yair's examples. I share the opinion that D and (120,30) are the most likely answers, but not necessarily the right answers.

I see what you mean. I read that one as being the most wrong answer. In my mind, coercion dots show that data types are not consistent. I would probably used the word "compatible" where you used "consistent".

Don't you mean inconsistent?

The answer they're looking for is D, right? And you're going to tell me that a data buffer is not always created?

I would certainly be interested in reading that...

Reminds me of one of my classes in college. One of my liberal arts requirements was a Roots of Western Civ. class. We read things like the Odyssey, Gilgamesh, and parts of the bible. The professor was a Classics professor who had studied ancient Greek. He disagreed with the English translation of many parts of the bible.

By simply choosing a version of the bible, I think you'd be opening yourself up to lots of flaming by people who subscribe to other versions... That said, I think it's a cool idea!

Congratulations Ben! Why has nobody posted a "Knights who say 'NI!'" video clip yet?

Thisis a song on the topic by a local kids' band...

Someone in the UK can correct me, but when I was in Wales in 1996, I seem to remember that there was odd mixing of the systems there. Dried goods and fresh produce were measured in different systems (oz. vs. kg)? And distances on roads were measured in km, but on distances on footpaths were in yards or miles? I don't remember exactly, but I recall thinking at the time that it was strange.

Did you just refer to yourself as an engineer? Won't they take away your physics degree for that?

I was going to suggest the same. You can then go into your settings and remove the watch.

Doesn't he work for you? Can't you just go take it?

Or you could just forget about the whole budget thing and go with one of these.

I wouldn't consider myself a purist either, but my current project is very performance sensitive. Also working in Matlab has made me think in terms of vectorized calculations.

I was referring mostly to the difference between your two test codes. One does an operation inside a loop, the other performs the same operation on a vector. Of course, most of the time you're using a loop, you have no choice in the matter because of the need to iterate. That said, one example is a phase wrap on a vector. The logic is: if a>180, a = a-360. if a<-180, a=a+360. Because LV's Select does not allow the boolean input to be a vector, my first thought was to use a for loop. Instead, I was able to come up with a more efficient vectorized approach using modulos.

Ok, I get the factor of ~2 speedup from the 5.08 seconds to the 2.887 seconds, but I'm pretty surprised at the last line. I think I would have have expected no difference, as both cores should already be fully committed by virtue of the code loop being parallelized. And now you see why I avoid for loops whenever possible. The Boolean to 0,1 likely has an allocation associated with it, which is why you don't want to do that in a loop...

Oh, right. I guess the shift register would get in the way... I haven't played with that feature yet (or LV2009, for that matter). Actually, that got me thinking. I wonder what the performance difference is between your original looped approach from a couple days ago and the unlooped one. And does that change significantly if you multithread the looped one?

Ah, I like that one! Especially if you're using LV9 on a multicore system and can multithread the loop.

It appears that if your own post is the last post in the topic, you cannot add another reply. Instead it becomes an edit to your previous post. Is this a bug or a feature?

No disagreement here. I still try to avoid using them if I can. The output of your example just provides a mask that indicated when the data is valid. I don't think that's his desired output.

I think that only does half the job. You'd still need to look for 2 consecutive 0's.