Well, the gcc is seriously broken in at least two interesting ways, both of which are fixed by The LLVM Project:
the GPL, which provides counter-incentive to major contributions from corporate funded development; the LLVM fix: a BSD style, fully free, as in "free"(not as in "beer" or any other not-quite-free internet-libertarian-testament-to-education-failure construct) not encumbered in any way license, the success of which is evidenced by substantial corporate contribution to the LLVM project from several different companies, and
the ancient monolithic architecture, which provides a very high barrier to entry for even highly motivated potential contributors, and which stifles compiler innovation. the LLVM fix: a modular architecture, with a well defined Intermediate Representation which can be used between arbitrary compiler stages, and a project principle that each modular component should be implemented a library which an be linked into arbitrary higher level programs, so that compiler components can be shared with the debugger and the IDE, or example, the success of which is evidenced by XCode 4, and the reuse of LLVM components in the LLDB Debugger Project, and in other ways.
Making a faster compiler which emits code with superior optimization (e.g. runs faster on given target hardware) than gcc just gives The LLVM Project bragging rights, which is a "nice to have" but probably not really an essential technical feature (it may be an essential marketing feature for the project, though).
Note also that recent research suggests that the human optics system may be a type known as blocked tetrachromatic instead of trichromatic (with one set of frequencies blocked by the optics system) and that some women may be functionally tetrachromatic due to the fact that women have two X chromosomes, one of which occasionally carries a mutated gene for one of the light receptors (which would really make them blocked pentachormats since the 4th functional receptor is different from the 4th "blocked" receptor of the human baseline condition, so they've got five photo receptor types, like butterflies, only with one of them blocked) .
Looking for Madam Tetrachromat .
"I'm glad the church recognizes the value of bleeding-edge Renaissance science. Maybe next year they will find out the importance of electricity, birth control, or logic."
If C level executives want to be involved, or even briefed, on what PC you're picking for a hardware refresh, sell short. If you only *think* they want such a briefing, then spend a little time polishing up your resume this week. You're about to be fired.
It's the same as the erasure of Jefferson. They can't win the long game, unless they can erase the principle of the separation of church and state, and the scientific method of discovery, from a generation, really, only a slight majority of a generation. They can't do it wholesale, so they start undermining the roots. Once they have erased enough history, they'll be able to establish their religious theocracy, launch the nukes, and ascend to heaven in a fountain of heart-bursting joy.
"I am not whining at you. I try to respectfully point out that insulting people that disagree with you is not a good start for that great mission of Truth and Dialog you talk about."
No. People who repeatedly deny objective, verifiable facts need to be openly mocked.
So, assuming you're not the same Anonymous Coward, and assuming your story is true, it's not clear why you're calling me names. Your situation also involves the police ignoring a serious situation, but other than this tangent it's not related. Perhaps you have mistaken me for someone who favors police incompetence or injustice? The direct implication of my comment to the previous Anonymous Coward is that he cannot claim the moral high ground in the situation he described unless he takes action, and persists in an effort to help the victim, rather than whining to Slashdot, anonymously. Your situation is unfortunate, and the police response pathetic. You shouldn't go around assuming that people are not sympathetic to your plight and calling them names, however. It's likely to undermine your case.
So, you agree with somebody who will let the child next door continue to be beaten, because the cops didn't immediately solve the problem upon his first complaint? And you support the position that he can whine to Slashdot about it, anonymously, rather than act? And you think it's fine that they include in that whining a thinly veiled attempt to pin the responsibility for the child abuse on a corporation that's not involved in any way?
Really? Are you sure about that? Take this discussion thread to a psychologist and see what they think about your own need for counseling.
You don't know that additional trade secrets might yet be discovered from the prototype device, or from photographs made of it. Consider that somebody smarter than Brian Lam might eventually have got their hands of the device.
Like some other people, you do not seem particularly susceptible to reason,
You have demonstrated a pattern of making shit up,
Your morality appears to fall outside the legally accepted norm in our society,
You're rude.
I'm occasionally guilty of being rude, too, but in myself and others I expect rudeness be justified on some reasonable basis (such as the persistence of a counter party do a discussion in failing to acknowledge simple objective facts which refute their argument). In your case, your attitude isn't justified.
There are a bunch of window lickers around here today, aren't there? It's hard to keep up with the spewing random garbage. Simple facts don't soak in with these people, who want desperately to believe that the Gizmodo is the hero in this story.
It has been clearly established to anyone following this story that under applicable California law and case precedent, this phone will be considered to be stolen the moment Gizmodo bought it from a person who didn't own it. "Finders Keepers" is not the law. Furthermore, it's really not clear that the Apple employee wasn't the target of a sting. There's enough shady behavior going on here that one certainly shouldn't rule out the possibility that somebody bought him a few drinks and lifted his phone.
You haven't done a very good job of processing that stuff, then. The specific details of the relevant California law have been widely published. The property would be considered stolen by any competent judge, particularly after Gizmodo paid a party which didn't own it to obtain possession for themselves.
Why are all the Anonymous Cowards idiots? Where are the whistle blowers?
Well, not exactly. The value to Gizmodo is some fraction of their expected revenue from their expected marginal increase in web advertisement sales from the exclusive "scoop" (based on previous estimates I've seen about ad revenue for sites that get a million or two hits on something like this, they could reasonably expect to make between $20k and $200k for such a scoop, those with more experience in this area could easily narrow the range of this 10x estimate). It's hard to support the notion that Gizmodo considered the potential liability costs, here. I'm pretty sure they didn't ask an attorney for advice, before purchasing property which is clearly considered stolen under California law, so they saved a couple hundred bucks there.
The value to Apple includes many things of much greater value, some of which are undoubtedly difficult to estimate. It's not simply the potential of lost sales from the Osborne Effect of an announcement a few months too early. Apple's revenue and stock price are due partly to making good products, but also partly to careful management of information release about new products. The leaked prototype phones might have features which don't make it into the final phone. The enormous value of free publicity from the previously unreleased information about a new product might be worth literally billions of dollars for the 2010 iPhone -- that value greatly exceeds the cost of an equivalent media buy, because the readers are driven by the perceived information vacuum which precedes the announcements. Then there's the value of advanced knowledge about the next iPhone becoming available to Apple's competitor phone makers. What's an extra three months of lead time on that worth? Suppose the front facing camer is really in the plans, and Apple was in the middle of negotiating some sort of related exclusive network arrangement for iChat based video conferencing with AT&T? Now their competitors have a heads-up and might be able to pressure AT&T to scuttle such a deal. What's that worth? Potentially billions, but again difficult to estimate.
Now, what if the loss of that lead causes Apple to lose traction in the smart phone market, and their market share flattens out or declines over a multi-year period? Are they going to sue Brian Lam for that loss? No, they're going to beg a judge to help them get their prototype phone back, before Brian Lam finds somebody smart enough to do a better analysis on the device and discover more about it, and leak that, too. Only then, once the phone has been recovered, will they consider wether or not to sue Gizmodo out of existence. Heck, they don't even need to win, they just need to engage Gizmodo in a protracted and expensive legal battle.
A commonly accepted secondary definition of pray, which isn't exactly un-common in legal jargon when imploring a judge to rule in your favor, is at work, here.
pray |pr|
verb [ intrans. ]
1.) address a solemn request or expression of thanks to a deity or other object of worship : the whole family is praying for Michael | [ trans. ] pray God this is true.
2.) wish or hope strongly for a particular outcome or situation : after several days of rain, we were praying for sun | [with clause ] I prayed that James wouldn't notice.
Anonymous Liar is more like it. You expect us to believe that you just let the "Police" [sic] blow you off, and the kid's still getting beat and locked in the closet? You're a real coward, or a liar, which is it? Call the District Attorney or the Mayor. The "piece of shit" is typing at your keyboard, pal.
Neither of those guys seem to have even an undergraduate degree in economics, but in their defense, neither appear to have claimed that "a growing number of economists" support this idea -- unless one of them wrote the AP piece. In any case, I wasn't able to turn up any economist who said anything like this, nor any other article on the topic at all. It seems to have been invented from whole cloth at the National Review, and propagated without questioning. Their motivation appears to be to invent a quasi intellectual cudgel to use against certain initiatives of the Obama administration in the area of higher education funding.
Certainly it's possible that somewhere in the vast literature of economics somebody somewhere might have explored this notion, but there doesn't seem to be any apparent evidence for this "growing number" of economists who support this idea.
That aside, some of the arguments offered in the TIME piece are worthy of pondering, but they ignore many of the societal benefits of higher education, or assume those have no value.
In any case, concerning your cowardly anonymous chicken shit rock throwing, like Jon Stewart said famously, fuck off.
So, you clearly don't read... how did you learn to write? The fine article (as quoted by the article summary, you didn't even need to click) states: "The notion that a four-year degree is essential for real success is being challenged by a growing number of economists, policy analysts, and academics. "
The more education people have, the less likely they are to "believe" in "trickle down" economics. I haven't looked into this, yet, but it's a safe bet that the same economists backing this crackpot assertion that a random correlation is causative also propagate the lie of the Efficient Market Hypothesis.
Congratulations, you have been granted the Bogon of the Day Award. You have stated plainly counter-factual claims, which could have been easily verified if you had spent only a mere few seconds of your life checking in with the Google, prior to posting. Furthermore, the fact that you were subsequently up-modded to "Informative" means that you stated your claims in a sufficiently compelling manner as to fool the hard working Slashdot moderators.
Others have or will point out the errors in your claims, or you could consult the Google. I merely present this award, and once again offer congratulations. It's a special thing, to construct the most idiotic post on Slashdot, in a given day.
Slashdot Mirror
the LLVM fix: a BSD style, fully free, as in "free" (not as in "beer" or any other not-quite-free internet-libertarian-testament-to-education-failure construct) not encumbered in any way license, the success of which is evidenced by substantial corporate contribution to the LLVM project from several different companies, and
the LLVM fix: a modular architecture, with a well defined Intermediate Representation which can be used between arbitrary compiler stages, and a project principle that each modular component should be implemented a library which an be linked into arbitrary higher level programs, so that compiler components can be shared with the debugger and the IDE, or example, the success of which is evidenced by XCode 4, and the reuse of LLVM components in the LLDB Debugger Project, and in other ways.
Making a faster compiler which emits code with superior optimization (e.g. runs faster on given target hardware) than gcc just gives The LLVM Project bragging rights, which is a "nice to have" but probably not really an essential technical feature (it may be an essential marketing feature for the project, though).
Note also that recent research suggests that the human optics system may be a type known as blocked tetrachromatic instead of trichromatic (with one set of frequencies blocked by the optics system) and that some women may be functionally tetrachromatic due to the fact that women have two X chromosomes, one of which occasionally carries a mutated gene for one of the light receptors (which would really make them blocked pentachormats since the 4th functional receptor is different from the 4th "blocked" receptor of the human baseline condition, so they've got five photo receptor types, like butterflies, only with one of them blocked) . Looking for Madam Tetrachromat .
Online test: Are You a Tetrachromat?
Yeah, and that's not even counting all the volunteer sysadmins they get from running Windows all over the enterprise.
That's scheduled for about May 22, 2510.
That figures. Typically verbose.
If C level executives want to be involved, or even briefed, on what PC you're picking for a hardware refresh, sell short. If you only *think* they want such a briefing, then spend a little time polishing up your resume this week. You're about to be fired.
In what universe is the "flaimebait"? Rational moderators, please correct this.
It's the same as the erasure of Jefferson. They can't win the long game, unless they can erase the principle of the separation of church and state, and the scientific method of discovery, from a generation, really, only a slight majority of a generation. They can't do it wholesale, so they start undermining the roots. Once they have erased enough history, they'll be able to establish their religious theocracy, launch the nukes, and ascend to heaven in a fountain of heart-bursting joy.
Up-mod this: The Founding Fathers Were Not Christians
No. People who repeatedly deny objective, verifiable facts need to be openly mocked.
So, assuming you're not the same Anonymous Coward, and assuming your story is true, it's not clear why you're calling me names. Your situation also involves the police ignoring a serious situation, but other than this tangent it's not related. Perhaps you have mistaken me for someone who favors police incompetence or injustice? The direct implication of my comment to the previous Anonymous Coward is that he cannot claim the moral high ground in the situation he described unless he takes action, and persists in an effort to help the victim, rather than whining to Slashdot, anonymously. Your situation is unfortunate, and the police response pathetic. You shouldn't go around assuming that people are not sympathetic to your plight and calling them names, however. It's likely to undermine your case.
So, you agree with somebody who will let the child next door continue to be beaten, because the cops didn't immediately solve the problem upon his first complaint? And you support the position that he can whine to Slashdot about it, anonymously, rather than act? And you think it's fine that they include in that whining a thinly veiled attempt to pin the responsibility for the child abuse on a corporation that's not involved in any way?
Really? Are you sure about that? Take this discussion thread to a psychologist and see what they think about your own need for counseling.
You don't know that additional trade secrets might yet be discovered from the prototype device, or from photographs made of it. Consider that somebody smarter than Brian Lam might eventually have got their hands of the device.
I'm occasionally guilty of being rude, too, but in myself and others I expect rudeness be justified on some reasonable basis (such as the persistence of a counter party do a discussion in failing to acknowledge simple objective facts which refute their argument). In your case, your attitude isn't justified.
There are a bunch of window lickers around here today, aren't there? It's hard to keep up with the spewing random garbage. Simple facts don't soak in with these people, who want desperately to believe that the Gizmodo is the hero in this story.
It has been clearly established to anyone following this story that under applicable California law and case precedent, this phone will be considered to be stolen the moment Gizmodo bought it from a person who didn't own it. "Finders Keepers" is not the law. Furthermore, it's really not clear that the Apple employee wasn't the target of a sting. There's enough shady behavior going on here that one certainly shouldn't rule out the possibility that somebody bought him a few drinks and lifted his phone.
Gizmodo knew that the device did not belong to the person who sold it to them.
You haven't done a very good job of processing that stuff, then. The specific details of the relevant California law have been widely published. The property would be considered stolen by any competent judge, particularly after Gizmodo paid a party which didn't own it to obtain possession for themselves.
Why are all the Anonymous Cowards idiots? Where are the whistle blowers?
Well, not exactly. The value to Gizmodo is some fraction of their expected revenue from their expected marginal increase in web advertisement sales from the exclusive "scoop" (based on previous estimates I've seen about ad revenue for sites that get a million or two hits on something like this, they could reasonably expect to make between $20k and $200k for such a scoop, those with more experience in this area could easily narrow the range of this 10x estimate). It's hard to support the notion that Gizmodo considered the potential liability costs, here. I'm pretty sure they didn't ask an attorney for advice, before purchasing property which is clearly considered stolen under California law, so they saved a couple hundred bucks there.
The value to Apple includes many things of much greater value, some of which are undoubtedly difficult to estimate. It's not simply the potential of lost sales from the Osborne Effect of an announcement a few months too early. Apple's revenue and stock price are due partly to making good products, but also partly to careful management of information release about new products. The leaked prototype phones might have features which don't make it into the final phone. The enormous value of free publicity from the previously unreleased information about a new product might be worth literally billions of dollars for the 2010 iPhone -- that value greatly exceeds the cost of an equivalent media buy, because the readers are driven by the perceived information vacuum which precedes the announcements. Then there's the value of advanced knowledge about the next iPhone becoming available to Apple's competitor phone makers. What's an extra three months of lead time on that worth? Suppose the front facing camer is really in the plans, and Apple was in the middle of negotiating some sort of related exclusive network arrangement for iChat based video conferencing with AT&T? Now their competitors have a heads-up and might be able to pressure AT&T to scuttle such a deal. What's that worth? Potentially billions, but again difficult to estimate.
Now, what if the loss of that lead causes Apple to lose traction in the smart phone market, and their market share flattens out or declines over a multi-year period? Are they going to sue Brian Lam for that loss? No, they're going to beg a judge to help them get their prototype phone back, before Brian Lam finds somebody smart enough to do a better analysis on the device and discover more about it, and leak that, too. Only then, once the phone has been recovered, will they consider wether or not to sue Gizmodo out of existence. Heck, they don't even need to win, they just need to engage Gizmodo in a protracted and expensive legal battle.
Anonymous Liar is more like it. You expect us to believe that you just let the "Police" [sic] blow you off, and the kid's still getting beat and locked in the closet? You're a real coward, or a liar, which is it? Call the District Attorney or the Mayor. The "piece of shit" is typing at your keyboard, pal.
By the way, yes the AP wrote the article found by the Slashdot geek. But AP usually obtain their material elsewhere. A quick search turned up the likely source: The Case Against College Education which was written by Ramesh Ponnuru of the National Review. The notion was promoted in the blogosphere (echo chamber?) by Stephen Spruiell in this post at the National Review blog
Neither of those guys seem to have even an undergraduate degree in economics, but in their defense, neither appear to have claimed that "a growing number of economists" support this idea -- unless one of them wrote the AP piece. In any case, I wasn't able to turn up any economist who said anything like this, nor any other article on the topic at all. It seems to have been invented from whole cloth at the National Review, and propagated without questioning. Their motivation appears to be to invent a quasi intellectual cudgel to use against certain initiatives of the Obama administration in the area of higher education funding.
Certainly it's possible that somewhere in the vast literature of economics somebody somewhere might have explored this notion, but there doesn't seem to be any apparent evidence for this "growing number" of economists who support this idea.
That aside, some of the arguments offered in the TIME piece are worthy of pondering, but they ignore many of the societal benefits of higher education, or assume those have no value.
In any case, concerning your cowardly anonymous chicken shit rock throwing, like Jon Stewart said famously, fuck off.
So, you clearly don't read... how did you learn to write? The fine article (as quoted by the article summary, you didn't even need to click) states: "The notion that a four-year degree is essential for real success is being challenged by a growing number of economists, policy analysts, and academics. "
The more education people have, the less likely they are to "believe" in "trickle down" economics. I haven't looked into this, yet, but it's a safe bet that the same economists backing this crackpot assertion that a random correlation is causative also propagate the lie of the Efficient Market Hypothesis.
Congratulations, you have been granted the Bogon of the Day Award. You have stated plainly counter-factual claims, which could have been easily verified if you had spent only a mere few seconds of your life checking in with the Google, prior to posting. Furthermore, the fact that you were subsequently up-modded to "Informative" means that you stated your claims in a sufficiently compelling manner as to fool the hard working Slashdot moderators.
Others have or will point out the errors in your claims, or you could consult the Google. I merely present this award, and once again offer congratulations. It's a special thing, to construct the most idiotic post on Slashdot, in a given day.