Yeah, but the handling of unicode is impossibly bad. It can't be fixed with a simple library, because you need to be able to handle literal strings. You could do it with a macro that calls a library...but that's *really* inefficient. The best time to handle it is at compile time.
I'd also like garbage collection, but that means severe restrictions on pointers, which will break lots of old code. Treating literals as utf-8 strings works fine for all code that adhered to ascii characters, and didn't play fast and loose with the chars, just because an implementation allowed them to. It will even work in most cases where the literal strings are actually byte strings, as long as you don't try to evaluate them. (Well, validate them or print them.)
That said, I do recognize the need for 8-bit integers. They should be called bytes, though, not chars.
FWIW, judging from past history, you should wait for the third update. Pity, though. You won't be able to freeze it there, and the fourth or fifth will break it again.
Then again, I haven't use anything of there's for nearly a decade now. They *might* have changed. (In fact I'll bet the EULA is worse than the last one I was willing to accept.)
When HP was run by engineers, it was a totally fabulous company, i.e., a company that made truly fabulous products. Their calculators were not only excellent calculators, they were sturdy. And they kept getting better for quite a long time. At one point I read of one of the calculators that fell off a car's hood on an Alaskan Highway in the fall, and wasn't found until after the snow had melted. The case needed to be replaced, but it still worked.
It's true that RPN isn't the friendliest notation, but it was the easiest to implement, so their calculators could do things YEARS before the competition could. (It was inevitable that technology would catch up to the point that it was the right choice to abandon RPN, but at the start it was the only way to go.) And there isn't ANY other complaint about those calculators that was valid.
DEC was a good company while it was run by engineers. Amdahl was a good company. Cray was a good company. (Well, OK, I was never in the market for either of those, but they had excellent reputations. And they were up against IBM.)
Companies run by engineers are frequently VERY good companies. More of them aren't, of course, but that's true no matter who's running them. Most companies fail quickly.
The problem with companies run by engineers is they tend to be taken over by bean-counters. These people nickle-and-dime the creative process to death. So it starts failing. Then it's taken over by marketers, and they sell the now-substandard product by being convincing.
That, of course, isn't the only way through the cycle. Sometimes the products become commodities. If they do, then it's appropriate for the bean-counters and marketers to have their terms in succession. The products can't currently be improved much, so it's important to minimize costs and maximize sales. This may be what happened to the HP calculators. (But notice that it took the company a lot longer to degenerate.) Now, of course, I'd be reluctant to buy a computer that was built by HP. I'd rather buy from a white-box company. The quality would be better. The white-box company survives by good quality products, while HP is now surviving on marketing. (Yeah, that's an over-generalization. But it's still correct in outline.)
There are rational libertarians. They aren't the majority. I don't know if there are any rational Libertarians.
To say that someone who takes the most common stand taken by a group of people who apply that label to themselves as representative of that belief is unreasonable is, itself, unreasonable. To take the well-reasoned view of a small minority who apply that label to themselves is much more unreasonable.
So, yes, I would say that libertarians believe the the supremacy of the Free Market!! at all costs. This doesn't mean that I believe it to be the belief of all libertarians, but rather that of most of them, or at least most of those with loud voices. I say this despite considering myself more of a libertarian than any other political grouping, and definitely not believing it myself.
Don't denounce people for pointing out the flaws in the political group that you most strongly identify with, change either the group or your identification. Do you feel you must defend the US when others point out that it illegally tortures people? It does. If you deny that fact, you are refusing to face reality. And most citizens are profoundly unhappy about it. Unfortunately, the most common reaction is to deny the facts. This doesn't do anything to fix the problem. Recognizing the problem doesn't do much, but at least it's better than that.
I agree that there are libertarians who believe as you do. But it's not the most common belief among libertarians. Much more common is the worship of the Free Market to the extent of denying that it has any faults or any circumstances in which it doesn't apply. (And they never thing that this would authorize murder for hire. That would create cognitive dissonance.)
What's your rate of infections by viruses? If you're running a MSWind network, that might be a fair test. If it's zero, you may be doing pretty well.
This wouldn't work on a Linux or Unix network, as there basically aren't any viruses to probe the network, but on MSWind they might do a fair job of testing you.
N.B.: I'm *NOT* a sysadmin, so I may be talking through my hat. But at least it sounds like a fair first test. If viruses are getting through, you KNOW your network is pervious.
P.S.: Whenever I see a MSWind machine in a medical office, I shudder. I'm relatively sure those are insecure. If there were alternatives, I'd change doctors quickly, even though I like my current doctors as medical practitioners. Many of them are XP's. so I'm fairly sure they aren't well secured. (Could be air breaks, but I doubt it.)
Sorry, but that's clearly wrong. If there was no copyright on binary code, then it would be perfectly legal to copy most proprietary software. And it isn't.
And it doesn't even apply to patents. Intel got the concept of patents extended to software by arguing that a ROM was a machine, and the software a configuration of switches. (Be an interesting argument to claim that patents didn't apply to source code, as the justification for extending patents to software didn't cover source code. Don't know if anybody's tried it.)
You're clearly not a lawyer. I'm not one either, but I do know that copyright doesn't regulate use. It regulates copying, and, I think, to some extent distribution. It doesn't regulate possession or use.
The GPL also doesn't regulate use. It depends strictly on the copyright law. It grants you rights additional to those that you would have in it's absence, but only if you agree to it's terms.
P.S.: Quite possibly there *should* be a legal concept of abandonware. I personally feel that if something is out of publication for over two years that it should be deemed free of copyright until a new printing is made and being sold. (And that copies made during the period before it was being sold be allowed to continue to be sold.) But that's a "should be" rather than an "is". And there may well be good reasons why the approach I've outlined isn't practical. (E.g., an author may be trying to sell a work to a publisher, and all the publishers are refusing to buy. But that could be handled by self-publication. I'm sure, e.g., Lulu would help.)
It really depends on what you mean. If you mean strict RISC, it was too late the day the term was coined. If, OTOH, you mean a nearly orthogonal architecture that is general purpose (plus the ability to call on specialized functions from attached processor chips), that seem, to me, a real possibility.
Before you jump, though, you must decide on what is the longest word size your computer will address and what is the smallest unit it will address. The larger (and the smaller) you go, the harder the task will be. If all you need is bytes and 64 bit words, then it's quite doable with current technology. (Actually, this is as of a decade ago.) If you want bit level addressability and 128 bit words...you're probably on the cutting edge of possibility right now. (Note that I didn't say practicality.)
The think is, an almost orthogonal architecture expands its requirements tremendously as you increase the dynamic range of operations. If you only operate on bits and bytes, it's nearly trivial. (8-bit computers). When the longest word is a double byte, each opcode needs to come in three variants. If you do bits, bytes, double-bytes, and quad-bytes, then each must come in four variants. Four variants can be specified in two bits. Now if you want to have 64 commands in four variants, that's one byte for the opcode. Then each but none of those include specification for the addresses on which it is operating. For economy we define the lower 4K bytes of address space to be the registers. And we make all addresses the same length. but how long? Well, we've got 64 instructions, we could divide it in half and have 32 that address different lengths of addresses. Or we could break symmetry, and have, say, 8 that address a 64 bit address space, 8 that address a 24 bit address space, and 48 that address the 4K registers. (Note that the registers vary in size depending on which instruction mode is addressing them.)
So it could (easily?) be done. Whether something that strict is desirable is a different matter.
OTOH, I do agree that the current processors are overly complex.
P.S.: The precise allotment I used wouldn't be a good approach. I didn't bother to figure things out carefully at all, but just laid it out on the fly. E.g., Why 48 operations on the registers? Just because I had that many bits available. I didn't bother to figure out what they would be.
OTOH, and interesting approach might be to implement, say, Parrot in hardware. (That's a feasible target and fairly well specified already.) But I'm not sure that it's what you mean by RISC.
(P.S.: I'm talking well out of my field here, if it wasn't obvious.)
Yeah, I know that as you stated the question the answer is clearly no, but you have an invalid presupposition. This means, under logic, I can derive any conclusion I feel like.
No, it's not safe to make that assumption. It's a plausible argument, and it *might* be true. But I'd put the odds at less than 50%. I have enough uncertainty that my error bars are pretty large though, so say somewhere between 35% and 65%,
In other words, I wouldn't be surprised if your argument was correct, but that's definitely not my default assumption. Just for one example, a homeowner who shoots a robber is clearly committing assault whether the robber is advancing on them or trying to flee. And claiming that one is being threatened dangerously doesn't mean that is what actually happened. It doesn't even mean that is what the person speaking really believes happened (though they will certainly believe that in a few years, and possibly sooner, if they repeat the story often enough).
Now if you argue that the person was an intruder, and deserved what happened to him...I might agree with you. The law, however, wouldn't. And we're in that case presuming that we are in the branch of the tree where the home-owner fired. Without further analysis I put the chances of that at 50%(plus or minus 15%).
As you can see, the arguments here are, to me, too speculative to assign *any* definite conclusion WRT the point you raise.
Well, a bit more than a typo but: Ideally char would become a reserved word, and current usage be preserved by a temporary waiver that allowed "char" to be made equivalent to the new byte type. changes to: Ideally char would become a reserved word, and current usage be preserved by a temporary waiver that allowed a macro for "char" to be made equivalent to the new byte type.
Where are you going to get the maintenance programmers? You *WILL* need them. You must adjust the system whenever the laws change.
I think, that were I in charge, I'd be recommending a conversion of Java. C & C++ are decent choices, but they don't yet have a consensus on how to handle Unicode strings. It's true the current system doesn't handle them, but I'd consider it a gross mistake if the converted system doesn't. And the files will nearly HAVE to have the strings stored as utf-8, if only from space considerations. (But also because converting ASCII into utf-8 is dead simple.)
That said, a project this size could build a unicode library as a trivial addition. But ensuring that this was handled properly everywhere would be difficult, and when coding in C it's easy to slip and use char instead of whatever you choose to use for unicode. And literals WILL need to be run through a macro, or they will end up being of char type. (I *KNOW* that C and C++ ignore this. That's a mistake.)
P.S.: This argument for why Java should be chosen over C/C++ is silly and trivial... in the sense that the standards committee could solve it extremely quickly and have the "intermediate standard" implemented the same day. (The "intermediate standard" wouldn't actually handle anything besides ASCII, but the literals would be defined to be utf-8 strings. With no requirement to handle anything outside the 7-bit ASCII set of characters. Then a proposed standard could be argued out which detailed how to allow other chars into the literals. Ideally char would become a reserved word, and current usage be preserved by a temporary waiver that allowed "char" to be made equivalent to the new byte type. The proposed standard would redefine this somehow...to be thrashed out, as a unicode char. (Could be the same as "wide character" of the current standard.) Etc.
But until the unicode mess has been sorted out, I can't consider C/C++ suitable for any code that needs to be maintained over time.
I think you've misanalysed that. They work in civil service because they're afraid of change. When change is *going to happen* they reanalyze their job options. Maybe there would be less change to be dealt with if they changed to somewhere else, where people already knew how the system worked.
The effects are largely the same, but that actions to mitigate the problem are very different. E.g., long ago I used to set up duplicate systems...the new one and the old. It was a big hassle, but it solved several kinds of problem (at, admittedly, a cost). It ensured that people could ease into the new system, so we didn't have people leaving because they were afraid of it. (OK, it was a small office. If I'd been dealing with more people, I'm sure that would have happened, and a couple of people *did* take early retirement.)
People in civil service don't dislike working anymore than anyone else does. They dislike being bored, just like everyone else. But they have a greater fear of change. Otherwise they'd leave for better pay when the economy was booming. The combination of a dislike of being bored and a fear of change presents problems in dealing with their work. Most of it is rather boring, so they dislike it, but they aren't afraid of it.
P.S.: I'm not sure that civil servants are much different for the workers in other large bureaucracies. You might want to think about it. (I don't have much experience, as I was a civil servant for over 20 years, and had only an extremely little experience with other large bureaucracies.... And I spent just about all my desire for change in dealing with technology. I sure didn't like it when other parts of my job changed. Administrators, however, seemed to like to reorganize things every couple of years. My guess it that they had just gotten too bored with the old organization, because despite what they proclaimed the new organization never worked any better (or much differently) than the old one.
Some job categories, however, don't have any real option to institute change. We had an accountant who regularly took trips to Las Vegas. She MUST have known the odds. But I guess she needed the change. When she retired she made a silly mistake and took too much of her retirement pay as a lump sum, and had to pay punitive taxes on it. An *accountant*! And she was a good accountant.
Myself, I developed the habit of switching computer languages. I still do it excessively. I've good marvellous arguments as to why I do it, but I frequently find myself wondering just why. Do I really believe the arguments? But the rest of my life is quite stable.
And Godzilla attacks Tokyo, and Mothra has these two little japanese princess figures that advise or cajole him. (If I haven't gotten my monsters mixed up.)
When I lived in Japan back around 1960 I saw LOTS of Japanese SciFi flicks. (Some with subtitles, some with English dubbed.) They *always* attacked Japan. Only in films made originally in English did they attack the US,
Movie makers know that their audiences are ethno-centric and state-centric (whatever the word for that should be). In fact Hollywood movies often take place in the West, and frequently in California. And Hollywood monsters frequently attack west-coast cities. So we're even more parochial than that. But the film-makers USUALLY figure out their audiences prejudices...or at least try to...and sculpt the story around that.
P.S.: A part of this effect may be that it's easier to make a film about what you understand. But that isn't most of it.
No, but ANY personal web page would do the job. Facebook isn't necessary, or even desirable. (They collect and leak information about you that you don't was to reveal to everyone. A page secured with a password that can be stored as a cookie doesn't have that problem.)
Facebook is popular because it is popular. No other reason. A good website template would provide all the benefits that it provides with a lot fewer of the costs. The problem is that different people have different definitions of "good". And the "good" of the hosting site doesn't equate to the "good" of the site owner. So the templates pushed (or offered for free) by the hosting sites don't do the job.
Additionally that kind of distribution wouldn't get the mob effect, where everyone is moving to the popular site. Because you don't need to move.
So.... Facebook's success has been driven by a combination of a decent template (though I hate Flash enough that I don't have it installed), a model that provided cheap access, and happening to catch the social current at the right time. Their successor will need to be different enough to be exciting, and similar enough to also serve the same functions well. But it will also need to be lucky. And it will also be a temporary success.
OK then, I'll say it. Apple is too dependent on Steve Jobs, and he has severe health issues. So Apple is no longer a dynamically efficient company. Hope the next time they find a replacement they find someone who at least understands the industry. Scully himself admitted that he turned out to not be the right person for the job, and I think the principle reason was that he didn't understand the industry.
You've pointed out your belief that "the MMR vaccine is about as safe as stabbing your child with a rusty pitchfork.". Expecting others to believe it just because you do is silly. I have not seen any creditable evidence that there is *any* valid reason for such a belief.
That's the theory, and certainly I was never allergic to leather until I stopped eating beef. But not all pollen is collected by bees. E.g., oak pollen is not collected by bees. There are lots of others.
Yes, it appears that if you eat something, your allergies to it tend to be suppressed. I don't know if this is repeatable. I could experiment with eating lots of beef again, but my wife disapproves. (She's afraid of mad cow disease...and since it can take a long time to develop... . I disagree with that reason, but there are lots of other reasons why it's a good idea.)
So local honey will (probably) tend to suppress allergies to the kinds of plants that the bees collected the pollen from. But not to other things.
Well, for one thing if a post-pubescent male catches mumps it's not only likely to be extremely painful, it's also quite possible that he will be sterile from that point on.
It's much less serious if you are pre-puberty. This doesn't make it safe.
And, yes, I grew up before there were vaccines for those diseases. When I caught the mumps I had so high a fever I was wrapped in wet blankets, and I was blessedly unconscious for most of over a day. (The parts I remember are NOT pleasant.)
OTOH, I was vaccinated against whooping cough. But my father still shared a little rhyme with me:
A-way down yonder not so very far off A blue jay died of the whooping cough He whooped and he whooped with the whooping cough 'till he whooped his head and his tail right off.
You might want to thing about why that rhyme was created.
I'd guess that you are allergic to horse serum, or possibly to eggs.
As for the mercury, you're being silly. Not only is the quantity of mercury that was in the vaccines too small to be significant against other environmental sources (e.g. fish), but they stopped using it over a decade ago.
OTOH, if you are allergic to horse serum, it may be quite likely your kids are too. So even though you made the decision for a totally silly reason, it might be the right decision. (But have them checked by an allergist. If they are sensitive, and they ever need to go to an emergency room or have an operation, this could be very important.)
Many drug companies and tobacco companies are parts of the same conglomerate, and there's plenty of evidence of tobacco industry wide conspiracy to suppress evidence.
For the drug companies, I admit there's a lot less evidence. But then the evidence against the tobacco companies only surfaced after a congressional investigation after decades of collusion. And it was quite awhile after that investigation that the evidence became available to the public.
I don't see any reason to not believe that the drug companies are in conspiracy...the question would be "about what?". This is because unlike the tobacco companies, they generally have divergent interests. So the collusion would probably be along the lines of managing what kind of evidence they had to produce to get a drug approved, and to what extent they could suppress negative evidence. And this is likely to not even be illegal. It's still conspiracy against the public good, however.
It may be an unpleasant way to characterize her, but isn't it also a true one?
I suspect that it was removed either by a fan or hers, or to avoid lawsuits. It certainly wasn't because it was objectively false.
Vandalize? Sorry. I think we mean different things by that term. If Wikipedia is supposed to be an encyclopedia of facts posted by internet users, that comment seems to fall precisely in line with the stated purpose.
The early live polio vaccine was dangerous to those who hadn't already had the Salk vaccine. I forget the percentage, but a certain percent of those vaccinated would develop polio. If you'd already had the Salk vaccine, however, your present immunity would be sufficient to protect you against the weakened virus in the Sabin vaccine.
But they must have eventually solved the problem, because the Salk vaccine was discontinued long before they stopped giving the Sabin vaccine.
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Yeah, but the handling of unicode is impossibly bad. It can't be fixed with a simple library, because you need to be able to handle literal strings. You could do it with a macro that calls a library...but that's *really* inefficient. The best time to handle it is at compile time.
I'd also like garbage collection, but that means severe restrictions on pointers, which will break lots of old code. Treating literals as utf-8 strings works fine for all code that adhered to ascii characters, and didn't play fast and loose with the chars, just because an implementation allowed them to. It will even work in most cases where the literal strings are actually byte strings, as long as you don't try to evaluate them. (Well, validate them or print them.)
That said, I do recognize the need for 8-bit integers. They should be called bytes, though, not chars.
FWIW, judging from past history, you should wait for the third update. Pity, though. You won't be able to freeze it there, and the fourth or fifth will break it again.
Then again, I haven't use anything of there's for nearly a decade now. They *might* have changed. (In fact I'll bet the EULA is worse than the last one I was willing to accept.)
I can't believe I read that!
When HP was run by engineers, it was a totally fabulous company, i.e., a company that made truly fabulous products. Their calculators were not only excellent calculators, they were sturdy. And they kept getting better for quite a long time. At one point I read of one of the calculators that fell off a car's hood on an Alaskan Highway in the fall, and wasn't found until after the snow had melted. The case needed to be replaced, but it still worked.
It's true that RPN isn't the friendliest notation, but it was the easiest to implement, so their calculators could do things YEARS before the competition could. (It was inevitable that technology would catch up to the point that it was the right choice to abandon RPN, but at the start it was the only way to go.) And there isn't ANY other complaint about those calculators that was valid.
DEC was a good company while it was run by engineers. Amdahl was a good company. Cray was a good company. (Well, OK, I was never in the market for either of those, but they had excellent reputations. And they were up against IBM.)
Companies run by engineers are frequently VERY good companies. More of them aren't, of course, but that's true no matter who's running them. Most companies fail quickly.
The problem with companies run by engineers is they tend to be taken over by bean-counters. These people nickle-and-dime the creative process to death. So it starts failing. Then it's taken over by marketers, and they sell the now-substandard product by being convincing.
That, of course, isn't the only way through the cycle. Sometimes the products become commodities. If they do, then it's appropriate for the bean-counters and marketers to have their terms in succession. The products can't currently be improved much, so it's important to minimize costs and maximize sales. This may be what happened to the HP calculators. (But notice that it took the company a lot longer to degenerate.) Now, of course, I'd be reluctant to buy a computer that was built by HP. I'd rather buy from a white-box company. The quality would be better. The white-box company survives by good quality products, while HP is now surviving on marketing. (Yeah, that's an over-generalization. But it's still correct in outline.)
There are rational libertarians. They aren't the majority. I don't know if there are any rational Libertarians.
To say that someone who takes the most common stand taken by a group of people who apply that label to themselves as representative of that belief is unreasonable is, itself, unreasonable. To take the well-reasoned view of a small minority who apply that label to themselves is much more unreasonable.
So, yes, I would say that libertarians believe the the supremacy of the Free Market!! at all costs. This doesn't mean that I believe it to be the belief of all libertarians, but rather that of most of them, or at least most of those with loud voices. I say this despite considering myself more of a libertarian than any other political grouping, and definitely not believing it myself.
Don't denounce people for pointing out the flaws in the political group that you most strongly identify with, change either the group or your identification. Do you feel you must defend the US when others point out that it illegally tortures people? It does. If you deny that fact, you are refusing to face reality. And most citizens are profoundly unhappy about it. Unfortunately, the most common reaction is to deny the facts. This doesn't do anything to fix the problem. Recognizing the problem doesn't do much, but at least it's better than that.
I agree that there are libertarians who believe as you do. But it's not the most common belief among libertarians. Much more common is the worship of the Free Market to the extent of denying that it has any faults or any circumstances in which it doesn't apply. (And they never thing that this would authorize murder for hire. That would create cognitive dissonance.)
What's your rate of infections by viruses? If you're running a MSWind network, that might be a fair test. If it's zero, you may be doing pretty well.
This wouldn't work on a Linux or Unix network, as there basically aren't any viruses to probe the network, but on MSWind they might do a fair job of testing you.
N.B.: I'm *NOT* a sysadmin, so I may be talking through my hat. But at least it sounds like a fair first test. If viruses are getting through, you KNOW your network is pervious.
P.S.: Whenever I see a MSWind machine in a medical office, I shudder. I'm relatively sure those are insecure. If there were alternatives, I'd change doctors quickly, even though I like my current doctors as medical practitioners. Many of them are XP's. so I'm fairly sure they aren't well secured. (Could be air breaks, but I doubt it.)
Actually no, but effectively true.
The thing is, although the GPL doesn't expire, the requirement to use it does. So there's not much difference.
Sorry, but that's clearly wrong. If there was no copyright on binary code, then it would be perfectly legal to copy most proprietary software. And it isn't.
And it doesn't even apply to patents. Intel got the concept of patents extended to software by arguing that a ROM was a machine, and the software a configuration of switches. (Be an interesting argument to claim that patents didn't apply to source code, as the justification for extending patents to software didn't cover source code. Don't know if anybody's tried it.)
You're clearly not a lawyer. I'm not one either, but I do know that copyright doesn't regulate use. It regulates copying, and, I think, to some extent distribution. It doesn't regulate possession or use.
The GPL also doesn't regulate use. It depends strictly on the copyright law. It grants you rights additional to those that you would have in it's absence, but only if you agree to it's terms.
P.S.: Quite possibly there *should* be a legal concept of abandonware. I personally feel that if something is out of publication for over two years that it should be deemed free of copyright until a new printing is made and being sold. (And that copies made during the period before it was being sold be allowed to continue to be sold.) But that's a "should be" rather than an "is". And there may well be good reasons why the approach I've outlined isn't practical. (E.g., an author may be trying to sell a work to a publisher, and all the publishers are refusing to buy. But that could be handled by self-publication. I'm sure, e.g., Lulu would help.)
It really depends on what you mean. If you mean strict RISC, it was too late the day the term was coined. If, OTOH, you mean a nearly orthogonal architecture that is general purpose (plus the ability to call on specialized functions from attached processor chips), that seem, to me, a real possibility.
Before you jump, though, you must decide on what is the longest word size your computer will address and what is the smallest unit it will address. The larger (and the smaller) you go, the harder the task will be. If all you need is bytes and 64 bit words, then it's quite doable with current technology. (Actually, this is as of a decade ago.) If you want bit level addressability and 128 bit words...you're probably on the cutting edge of possibility right now. (Note that I didn't say practicality.)
The think is, an almost orthogonal architecture expands its requirements tremendously as you increase the dynamic range of operations. If you only operate on bits and bytes, it's nearly trivial. (8-bit computers). When the longest word is a double byte, each opcode needs to come in three variants. If you do bits, bytes, double-bytes, and quad-bytes, then each must come in four variants. Four variants can be specified in two bits. Now if you want to have 64 commands in four variants, that's one byte for the opcode. Then each but none of those include specification for the addresses on which it is operating. For economy we define the lower 4K bytes of address space to be the registers. And we make all addresses the same length. but how long? Well, we've got 64 instructions, we could divide it in half and have 32 that address different lengths of addresses. Or we could break symmetry, and have, say, 8 that address a 64 bit address space, 8 that address a 24 bit address space, and 48 that address the 4K registers. (Note that the registers vary in size depending on which instruction mode is addressing them.)
So it could (easily?) be done. Whether something that strict is desirable is a different matter.
OTOH, I do agree that the current processors are overly complex.
P.S.: The precise allotment I used wouldn't be a good approach. I didn't bother to figure things out carefully at all, but just laid it out on the fly. E.g., Why 48 operations on the registers? Just because I had that many bits available. I didn't bother to figure out what they would be.
OTOH, and interesting approach might be to implement, say, Parrot in hardware. (That's a feasible target and fairly well specified already.) But I'm not sure that it's what you mean by RISC.
(P.S.: I'm talking well out of my field here, if it wasn't obvious.)
Yes.
Yeah, I know that as you stated the question the answer is clearly no, but you have an invalid presupposition. This means, under logic, I can derive any conclusion I feel like.
No, it's not safe to make that assumption. It's a plausible argument, and it *might* be true. But I'd put the odds at less than 50%. I have enough uncertainty that my error bars are pretty large though, so say somewhere between 35% and 65%,
In other words, I wouldn't be surprised if your argument was correct, but that's definitely not my default assumption. Just for one example, a homeowner who shoots a robber is clearly committing assault whether the robber is advancing on them or trying to flee. And claiming that one is being threatened dangerously doesn't mean that is what actually happened. It doesn't even mean that is what the person speaking really believes happened (though they will certainly believe that in a few years, and possibly sooner, if they repeat the story often enough).
Now if you argue that the person was an intruder, and deserved what happened to him...I might agree with you. The law, however, wouldn't. And we're in that case presuming that we are in the branch of the tree where the home-owner fired. Without further analysis I put the chances of that at 50%(plus or minus 15%).
As you can see, the arguments here are, to me, too speculative to assign *any* definite conclusion WRT the point you raise.
Well, a bit more than a typo but:
Ideally char would become a reserved word, and current usage be preserved by a temporary waiver that allowed "char" to be made equivalent to the new byte type.
changes to:
Ideally char would become a reserved word, and current usage be preserved by a temporary waiver that allowed a macro for "char" to be made equivalent to the new byte type.
Where are you going to get the maintenance programmers? You *WILL* need them. You must adjust the system whenever the laws change.
I think, that were I in charge, I'd be recommending a conversion of Java. C & C++ are decent choices, but they don't yet have a consensus on how to handle Unicode strings. It's true the current system doesn't handle them, but I'd consider it a gross mistake if the converted system doesn't. And the files will nearly HAVE to have the strings stored as utf-8, if only from space considerations. (But also because converting ASCII into utf-8 is dead simple.)
That said, a project this size could build a unicode library as a trivial addition. But ensuring that this was handled properly everywhere would be difficult, and when coding in C it's easy to slip and use char instead of whatever you choose to use for unicode. And literals WILL need to be run through a macro, or they will end up being of char type. (I *KNOW* that C and C++ ignore this. That's a mistake.)
P.S.: This argument for why Java should be chosen over C/C++ is silly and trivial ... in the sense that the standards committee could solve it extremely quickly and have the "intermediate standard" implemented the same day. (The "intermediate standard" wouldn't actually handle anything besides ASCII, but the literals would be defined to be utf-8 strings. With no requirement to handle anything outside the 7-bit ASCII set of characters. Then a proposed standard could be argued out which detailed how to allow other chars into the literals. Ideally char would become a reserved word, and current usage be preserved by a temporary waiver that allowed "char" to be made equivalent to the new byte type. The proposed standard would redefine this somehow...to be thrashed out, as a unicode char. (Could be the same as "wide character" of the current standard.) Etc.
But until the unicode mess has been sorted out, I can't consider C/C++ suitable for any code that needs to be maintained over time.
I think you've misanalysed that. They work in civil service because they're afraid of change. When change is *going to happen* they reanalyze their job options. Maybe there would be less change to be dealt with if they changed to somewhere else, where people already knew how the system worked.
The effects are largely the same, but that actions to mitigate the problem are very different. E.g., long ago I used to set up duplicate systems...the new one and the old. It was a big hassle, but it solved several kinds of problem (at, admittedly, a cost). It ensured that people could ease into the new system, so we didn't have people leaving because they were afraid of it. (OK, it was a small office. If I'd been dealing with more people, I'm sure that would have happened, and a couple of people *did* take early retirement.)
People in civil service don't dislike working anymore than anyone else does. They dislike being bored, just like everyone else. But they have a greater fear of change. Otherwise they'd leave for better pay when the economy was booming. The combination of a dislike of being bored and a fear of change presents problems in dealing with their work. Most of it is rather boring, so they dislike it, but they aren't afraid of it.
P.S.: I'm not sure that civil servants are much different for the workers in other large bureaucracies. You might want to think about it. (I don't have much experience, as I was a civil servant for over 20 years, and had only an extremely little experience with other large bureaucracies. ... And I spent just about all my desire for change in dealing with technology. I sure didn't like it when other parts of my job changed. Administrators, however, seemed to like to reorganize things every couple of years. My guess it that they had just gotten too bored with the old organization, because despite what they proclaimed the new organization never worked any better (or much differently) than the old one.
Some job categories, however, don't have any real option to institute change. We had an accountant who regularly took trips to Las Vegas. She MUST have known the odds. But I guess she needed the change. When she retired she made a silly mistake and took too much of her retirement pay as a lump sum, and had to pay punitive taxes on it. An *accountant*! And she was a good accountant.
Myself, I developed the habit of switching computer languages. I still do it excessively. I've good marvellous arguments as to why I do it, but I frequently find myself wondering just why. Do I really believe the arguments? But the rest of my life is quite stable.
And Godzilla attacks Tokyo, and Mothra has these two little japanese princess figures that advise or cajole him. (If I haven't gotten my monsters mixed up.)
When I lived in Japan back around 1960 I saw LOTS of Japanese SciFi flicks. (Some with subtitles, some with English dubbed.) They *always* attacked Japan. Only in films made originally in English did they attack the US,
Movie makers know that their audiences are ethno-centric and state-centric (whatever the word for that should be). In fact Hollywood movies often take place in the West, and frequently in California. And Hollywood monsters frequently attack west-coast cities. So we're even more parochial than that. But the film-makers USUALLY figure out their audiences prejudices...or at least try to...and sculpt the story around that.
P.S.: A part of this effect may be that it's easier to make a film about what you understand. But that isn't most of it.
No, but ANY personal web page would do the job. Facebook isn't necessary, or even desirable. (They collect and leak information about you that you don't was to reveal to everyone. A page secured with a password that can be stored as a cookie doesn't have that problem.)
Facebook is popular because it is popular. No other reason. A good website template would provide all the benefits that it provides with a lot fewer of the costs. The problem is that different people have different definitions of "good". And the "good" of the hosting site doesn't equate to the "good" of the site owner. So the templates pushed (or offered for free) by the hosting sites don't do the job.
Additionally that kind of distribution wouldn't get the mob effect, where everyone is moving to the popular site. Because you don't need to move.
So. ... Facebook's success has been driven by a combination of a decent template (though I hate Flash enough that I don't have it installed), a model that provided cheap access, and happening to catch the social current at the right time. Their successor will need to be different enough to be exciting, and similar enough to also serve the same functions well. But it will also need to be lucky. And it will also be a temporary success.
OK then, I'll say it. Apple is too dependent on Steve Jobs, and he has severe health issues. So Apple is no longer a dynamically efficient company. Hope the next time they find a replacement they find someone who at least understands the industry. Scully himself admitted that he turned out to not be the right person for the job, and I think the principle reason was that he didn't understand the industry.
You've pointed out your belief that "the MMR vaccine is about as safe as stabbing your child with a rusty pitchfork.". Expecting others to believe it just because you do is silly. I have not seen any creditable evidence that there is *any* valid reason for such a belief.
That's the theory, and certainly I was never allergic to leather until I stopped eating beef. But not all pollen is collected by bees. E.g., oak pollen is not collected by bees. There are lots of others.
Yes, it appears that if you eat something, your allergies to it tend to be suppressed. I don't know if this is repeatable. I could experiment with eating lots of beef again, but my wife disapproves. (She's afraid of mad cow disease...and since it can take a long time to develop ... . I disagree with that reason, but there are lots of other reasons why it's a good idea.)
So local honey will (probably) tend to suppress allergies to the kinds of plants that the bees collected the pollen from. But not to other things.
Well, for one thing if a post-pubescent male catches mumps it's not only likely to be extremely painful, it's also quite possible that he will be sterile from that point on.
It's much less serious if you are pre-puberty. This doesn't make it safe.
And, yes, I grew up before there were vaccines for those diseases. When I caught the mumps I had so high a fever I was wrapped in wet blankets, and I was blessedly unconscious for most of over a day. (The parts I remember are NOT pleasant.)
OTOH, I was vaccinated against whooping cough. But my father still shared a little rhyme with me:
A-way down yonder not so very far off
A blue jay died of the whooping cough
He whooped and he whooped with the whooping cough
'till he whooped his head and his tail right off.
You might want to thing about why that rhyme was created.
I'd guess that you are allergic to horse serum, or possibly to eggs.
As for the mercury, you're being silly. Not only is the quantity of mercury that was in the vaccines too small to be significant against other environmental sources (e.g. fish), but they stopped using it over a decade ago.
OTOH, if you are allergic to horse serum, it may be quite likely your kids are too. So even though you made the decision for a totally silly reason, it might be the right decision. (But have them checked by an allergist. If they are sensitive, and they ever need to go to an emergency room or have an operation, this could be very important.)
Many drug companies and tobacco companies are parts of the same conglomerate, and there's plenty of evidence of tobacco industry wide conspiracy to suppress evidence.
For the drug companies, I admit there's a lot less evidence. But then the evidence against the tobacco companies only surfaced after a congressional investigation after decades of collusion. And it was quite awhile after that investigation that the evidence became available to the public.
I don't see any reason to not believe that the drug companies are in conspiracy...the question would be "about what?". This is because unlike the tobacco companies, they generally have divergent interests. So the collusion would probably be along the lines of managing what kind of evidence they had to produce to get a drug approved, and to what extent they could suppress negative evidence. And this is likely to not even be illegal. It's still conspiracy against the public good, however.
Unhh...*why* isn't it in the public interest? Any reason because "People will notice!"?
I'll agree, however, that it might well not be in Wikipedia's interest.
It may be an unpleasant way to characterize her, but isn't it also a true one?
I suspect that it was removed either by a fan or hers, or to avoid lawsuits. It certainly wasn't because it was objectively false.
Vandalize? Sorry. I think we mean different things by that term. If Wikipedia is supposed to be an encyclopedia of facts posted by internet users, that comment seems to fall precisely in line with the stated purpose.
OK.
The early live polio vaccine was dangerous to those who hadn't already had the Salk vaccine. I forget the percentage, but a certain percent of those vaccinated would develop polio. If you'd already had the Salk vaccine, however, your present immunity would be sufficient to protect you against the weakened virus in the Sabin vaccine.
But they must have eventually solved the problem, because the Salk vaccine was discontinued long before they stopped giving the Sabin vaccine.