The original Itanium was a disaster, the second generation was what the first should have been but wasn't, the third actually looks very respectable. Intel would be stupid to eliminate a product they've actually got functional.
And for high-end use, the Itanium is a genuinely useful CPU. Because the performance of a cluster is a function of the communication delays, very high-end clusters WANT to have very high-end CPUs. You can only do so much with piles of PCs before the inefficiencies due to (a) distance and (b) an inefficient architecture really set in. There's also (c) - a crap instruction set - but the Itanium doesn't help much there because although it is somewhat better, nobody has built a particularly good compiler for it yet. Optimization on the Itanium remains a challenge.
Admittedly, it's not the design I would have chosen - I far prefer many of the design decisions made in the Inmos Transputer and the Intel iWarp, since those were designed specifically for the purpose of clustering and started from that position. I also prefer the elegance of the MIPS64 instruction set over the unnecessary burden of anything Intel has done, but again I'm in the minority. I'd also have threaded compute elements and produced virtual cores, rather than threaded instructions on physical cores, since threading the compute elements would allow you to distribute the heat better, wouldn't prevent you accessing elements that are wholly independent of those in use and would reduce unnecessary swapping. But what do I know, I've only been observing what actually works vs what the customers want for 35 years. Customers are just as stupid as beancounters and pointy-haired bosses.
Well, I'm not talking any specific implementation of C (those are all dialects and not pure C) but the specification itself. It is a third-generation language with no features taken from the first, second, fourth or fifth generations. It could be argued that it blurs the line between procedural and functional, but it takes nothing from stack languages, object languages or other classes. (AspectC uses aspect-oriented programming, but it's a C dialect again and not C.)
In that sense, the specification is "pure" because it fits into a well-defined niche in the programming family tree, the same niche it has always inhabited and which it inherited from B and the B family of languages.
Are any actual implementations pure? Hell no! They mash concepts from all over the place, plus novel ideas of their own. (In the case of Microsoft's C, I'd say the novels were pulp fiction.) It's no different from the standards of CORBA, SQL, etc - a baseline that's nice, neat and never used because you really need the extensions that nobody is ever going to cooperate on.
If implementations were pure, you might still need tools like autogen/automake/autoconf or CMake, but those tools would be lighter and simpler and wouldn't need to spend 3/4s of the time just figuring out what the compiler and runtime library can do, they'd only need to bother with extensions and external libraries.
I used Ada some time back. It's a nice object-based language (not OO, object-based) but its strictness could sometimes be infuriating. Good, but infuriating.
I wouldn't want C to go in the direction of Ada - yes, the safety of C needs improving, but I regard C as being increasingly a universal starting point, a theoretical third-generation language rather than an actual one. There are now many dialects of C and many spin-off languages, some using that starting point better than others. It's a bit like the Cambrian Explosion, only the offshoots can still borrow from the central stem.
Ada, however, is highly architectured, like Occam. Architectured languages are intended for very specific purposes and fulfill those purposes extremely well. Well, when they've been architectured correctly, that is. They've traded in the theoretical base point and the benefits of evolution for the benefits of being highly predictable and highly dependable within their niches. A well-written Ada program has levels of assurance on reliability that no C program could have -- or ever should have, because to have that level of assurance would kill off the very thing that makes C so powerful, which is the rate at which it evolves and de-standardizes. (Destandardization means you can exploit and assimilate new ideas faster. C is The Borg.)
A marginally more realistic, but just as paranoid scenario: If everything's made in one region, there's essentially one gateway and therefore anyone interested in rigging the market value need turn but a single tap.
Alternative: If everything's made in one place, with few-to-no fab plants elsewhere, then one region has ALL the expertise and experience. The lack of alternatives mean that the manufacturers can dictate R&D and the future direction of the markets. Once skills elsewhere have rusted sufficiently, no rivalry will be possible.
Alternative: By concentrating development of a critical component of modern systems, the region has the power to "selectively" distribute produce according to who is friendly and who isn't. They get to play kingmaker as the various economic powers work out what they're wanting to do.
Security Essentials detects a lot of malware that you really don't care about and misses the really nasty stuff. It's considerably slower than either of the anti-virus toolkits I've mentioned elsewhere (Dr Web, Kaspersky). The most recent Flash is broken for Firefox, no date set for the fix, so keeping it up to date depends on what you use. Java isn't a big deal, provided it is only enabled for trusted sites. Java applications only have the same power as regular applications if signed, unsigned Java code is heavily restricted. If you restrict inbound and outbound connections to only authorized app/port combinations, there's nothing of significance Java can do.
Since most applications of any worth (Libre Office, for example, but well over 70% of what I run overall) has at least one Java component, you need Java. Using Jrockit is better than using the regular Java engines.
Back when I was 18, I found a library computer had been infected by a virus. I copied the infected program and found a clean version off the local public domain archives. Wrote a binary diff and extracted the inserted hook plus the attached virus. Looked at the code through a disassembler. It was ok, but that wasn't the important bit. The important bit is that I'd done software gene splicing.
Or perhaps the older generation is just tired of complaining and getting nowhere, so have given up. (It is ALWAYS bad news when the customers are apathetic because of poor service.) However, older generally also means not updating as often and one thing I have definitely seen is that there has been a sharp deterioration in the quality of products.
Dr Web and Kaspersky seem to be the two best choices. Both'll run under Linux and Windows, which is good. I am unsure of the value of personal firewalls on Windows, as it is unclear as to what they're supposed to stop. There ARE Windows versions of AIDE (which will tell you if any file has been modified) and Snort (which will tell you if there is any suspect network traffic, especially any that fits known malware patterns), but it's unclear whether they'd do what you'd want.
Nonono! You've got it wrong! Sonic mind-control is from the Cyberman story "The Invasion". It is imperative that all super-genius barely-legal sex-starved girls from the 26th century be located IMMEDIATELY!
Well, yes, as you then get a recording that has all the correct parameters and characteristics. The disadvantage is that smaller microphones haven't the same quality, so you lose some of the sound. Likewise, headphones lack the response and dynamic range. At present, anyways. There have been efforts to improve on these, so someday it likely will be possible to get the same audio quality from headphones as you do from high-end speakers.
Why? For every language you learn, your brain will gain about 5 years before showing the effects of aging.
Cultures that lose their language eventually die and, in cases such as the Bo, the population itself loses the will to live. We know that biodiversity is essential for a healthy ecosystem so why not assume linguistic/cultural diversity follows the same rule?
To your first point, that's why I specified intelligence as an alternative. To your second point, that is why I specified raising the nation's standards so that you wouldn't NEED any other rules besides "citizen" and "breathing".
The point of Plato's argument is that politicians should NOT be voted in on their sales skills. If politicians cannot think, they should not be in office. If politicians do not think, they should not be left in office. The world is in a mess because these do not happen. Stupid people should not be allowed to run things.
By education, I mean learning how to research, how to reason and how to navigate conflicting information. But never, EVER "WHAT" to think. If you are being told what to think, you are not being educated. Education is about skills, not results. Results are usually wrong - and if they aren't, they won't apply in future for some other reason. Results also waste brain space. Brains are good for logic, brains are NOT good for memorizing large tables. Books are good for memorizing large tables. Leave the memorizing to books.
That requires having the tools necessary to reason and analyze the arguments. Those sorts of skills require education far in advance of anything provided at High School and often in advance of much that is provided even in undergraduate university courses. Teaching the necessary skills to actually comprehend society, the effects and limits of government, and how politicians seek to manipulate your inner fears - that's a 3-4 year program in itself.
Not that I would oppose such a program, or making it mandatory in order to have the right to vote, but that's the only way you can really have people be educated enough to make a decision. Googling the terms, flittering through wikipedia - that's not "education", that's nothing.
Having an opinion is worthless unless it's an informed opinion, which (and again I will point to Plato's Republic, as I always do in these discussions) requires that the populace be educated at a level proportional to the decisions being made.
A small turnout is too easily manipulated, so you need as large a turnout as possible, but it must be a turnout with the capacity to think.
Personally, I'd argue that making voting mandatory but restricting the electorate to those with a given minimum level of education and/or minimum intelligence would be the smart move, but change the rules for being in school from being mandatory for under 16s to being mandatory for under BSc/BAs regardless of age. (Likewise, eliminate the age of responsibility/majority - unlike cheese and wine, people do not improve with age alone - and replace it with a proficiency of responsibility. I don't care if you're 16, 60 or 600.)
I disagree on the relaxing. Never waste a good opportunity, never let your brain run on idle. Yes, you're only young once, but there's other options. If you don't go for a work solution, push your horizons. Explore, learn, develop. Learn a new language by going overseas and immersing in an alien culture. The more alien the better. The object wouldn't be to have something directly practical, the object would be to develop your mental faculties, to go from a problem-space to a solution-space efficiently, and to exploit the hell out of the neurological benefits of such experiences.
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The original Itanium was a disaster, the second generation was what the first should have been but wasn't, the third actually looks very respectable. Intel would be stupid to eliminate a product they've actually got functional.
And for high-end use, the Itanium is a genuinely useful CPU. Because the performance of a cluster is a function of the communication delays, very high-end clusters WANT to have very high-end CPUs. You can only do so much with piles of PCs before the inefficiencies due to (a) distance and (b) an inefficient architecture really set in. There's also (c) - a crap instruction set - but the Itanium doesn't help much there because although it is somewhat better, nobody has built a particularly good compiler for it yet. Optimization on the Itanium remains a challenge.
Admittedly, it's not the design I would have chosen - I far prefer many of the design decisions made in the Inmos Transputer and the Intel iWarp, since those were designed specifically for the purpose of clustering and started from that position. I also prefer the elegance of the MIPS64 instruction set over the unnecessary burden of anything Intel has done, but again I'm in the minority. I'd also have threaded compute elements and produced virtual cores, rather than threaded instructions on physical cores, since threading the compute elements would allow you to distribute the heat better, wouldn't prevent you accessing elements that are wholly independent of those in use and would reduce unnecessary swapping. But what do I know, I've only been observing what actually works vs what the customers want for 35 years. Customers are just as stupid as beancounters and pointy-haired bosses.
Well, I'm not talking any specific implementation of C (those are all dialects and not pure C) but the specification itself. It is a third-generation language with no features taken from the first, second, fourth or fifth generations. It could be argued that it blurs the line between procedural and functional, but it takes nothing from stack languages, object languages or other classes. (AspectC uses aspect-oriented programming, but it's a C dialect again and not C.)
In that sense, the specification is "pure" because it fits into a well-defined niche in the programming family tree, the same niche it has always inhabited and which it inherited from B and the B family of languages.
Are any actual implementations pure? Hell no! They mash concepts from all over the place, plus novel ideas of their own. (In the case of Microsoft's C, I'd say the novels were pulp fiction.) It's no different from the standards of CORBA, SQL, etc - a baseline that's nice, neat and never used because you really need the extensions that nobody is ever going to cooperate on.
If implementations were pure, you might still need tools like autogen/automake/autoconf or CMake, but those tools would be lighter and simpler and wouldn't need to spend 3/4s of the time just figuring out what the compiler and runtime library can do, they'd only need to bother with extensions and external libraries.
I used Ada some time back. It's a nice object-based language (not OO, object-based) but its strictness could sometimes be infuriating. Good, but infuriating.
I wouldn't want C to go in the direction of Ada - yes, the safety of C needs improving, but I regard C as being increasingly a universal starting point, a theoretical third-generation language rather than an actual one. There are now many dialects of C and many spin-off languages, some using that starting point better than others. It's a bit like the Cambrian Explosion, only the offshoots can still borrow from the central stem.
Ada, however, is highly architectured, like Occam. Architectured languages are intended for very specific purposes and fulfill those purposes extremely well. Well, when they've been architectured correctly, that is. They've traded in the theoretical base point and the benefits of evolution for the benefits of being highly predictable and highly dependable within their niches. A well-written Ada program has levels of assurance on reliability that no C program could have -- or ever should have, because to have that level of assurance would kill off the very thing that makes C so powerful, which is the rate at which it evolves and de-standardizes. (Destandardization means you can exploit and assimilate new ideas faster. C is The Borg.)
A marginally more realistic, but just as paranoid scenario: If everything's made in one region, there's essentially one gateway and therefore anyone interested in rigging the market value need turn but a single tap.
Alternative: If everything's made in one place, with few-to-no fab plants elsewhere, then one region has ALL the expertise and experience. The lack of alternatives mean that the manufacturers can dictate R&D and the future direction of the markets. Once skills elsewhere have rusted sufficiently, no rivalry will be possible.
Alternative: By concentrating development of a critical component of modern systems, the region has the power to "selectively" distribute produce according to who is friendly and who isn't. They get to play kingmaker as the various economic powers work out what they're wanting to do.
Personally, I think they should have named this standard MMXII.
Because C is an ultra-clean procedural language. The entire purpose of using it is the purity. C with OOP can be found in ObjectiveC, C++, C# and D.
I hear C5 was dog-slow and users suffered humiliation.
So long as you charge them for rent and price the videos sensibly, you should be able to afford a new wife fairly quickly.
Security Essentials detects a lot of malware that you really don't care about and misses the really nasty stuff. It's considerably slower than either of the anti-virus toolkits I've mentioned elsewhere (Dr Web, Kaspersky). The most recent Flash is broken for Firefox, no date set for the fix, so keeping it up to date depends on what you use. Java isn't a big deal, provided it is only enabled for trusted sites. Java applications only have the same power as regular applications if signed, unsigned Java code is heavily restricted. If you restrict inbound and outbound connections to only authorized app/port combinations, there's nothing of significance Java can do.
Since most applications of any worth (Libre Office, for example, but well over 70% of what I run overall) has at least one Java component, you need Java. Using Jrockit is better than using the regular Java engines.
Back when I was 18, I found a library computer had been infected by a virus. I copied the infected program and found a clean version off the local public domain archives. Wrote a binary diff and extracted the inserted hook plus the attached virus. Looked at the code through a disassembler. It was ok, but that wasn't the important bit. The important bit is that I'd done software gene splicing.
Or perhaps the older generation is just tired of complaining and getting nowhere, so have given up. (It is ALWAYS bad news when the customers are apathetic because of poor service.) However, older generally also means not updating as often and one thing I have definitely seen is that there has been a sharp deterioration in the quality of products.
Dr Web and Kaspersky seem to be the two best choices. Both'll run under Linux and Windows, which is good. I am unsure of the value of personal firewalls on Windows, as it is unclear as to what they're supposed to stop. There ARE Windows versions of AIDE (which will tell you if any file has been modified) and Snort (which will tell you if there is any suspect network traffic, especially any that fits known malware patterns), but it's unclear whether they'd do what you'd want.
...as they get off my lawn!
Nonono! You've got it wrong! Sonic mind-control is from the Cyberman story "The Invasion". It is imperative that all super-genius barely-legal sex-starved girls from the 26th century be located IMMEDIATELY!
Oi! With the Bristol Channel and the English Channel, that would mean the UK's already used up its quota!
Well, yes, as you then get a recording that has all the correct parameters and characteristics. The disadvantage is that smaller microphones haven't the same quality, so you lose some of the sound. Likewise, headphones lack the response and dynamic range. At present, anyways. There have been efforts to improve on these, so someday it likely will be possible to get the same audio quality from headphones as you do from high-end speakers.
Why? For every language you learn, your brain will gain about 5 years before showing the effects of aging.
Cultures that lose their language eventually die and, in cases such as the Bo, the population itself loses the will to live. We know that biodiversity is essential for a healthy ecosystem so why not assume linguistic/cultural diversity follows the same rule?
If the system is always raised to the point where anyone can vote, then those who "cannot" vote do so by choice, which is itself a vote.
To your first point, that's why I specified intelligence as an alternative. To your second point, that is why I specified raising the nation's standards so that you wouldn't NEED any other rules besides "citizen" and "breathing".
The point of Plato's argument is that politicians should NOT be voted in on their sales skills. If politicians cannot think, they should not be in office. If politicians do not think, they should not be left in office. The world is in a mess because these do not happen. Stupid people should not be allowed to run things.
By education, I mean learning how to research, how to reason and how to navigate conflicting information. But never, EVER "WHAT" to think. If you are being told what to think, you are not being educated. Education is about skills, not results. Results are usually wrong - and if they aren't, they won't apply in future for some other reason. Results also waste brain space. Brains are good for logic, brains are NOT good for memorizing large tables. Books are good for memorizing large tables. Leave the memorizing to books.
No, I'm complex. Or maybe quaternion.
That requires having the tools necessary to reason and analyze the arguments. Those sorts of skills require education far in advance of anything provided at High School and often in advance of much that is provided even in undergraduate university courses. Teaching the necessary skills to actually comprehend society, the effects and limits of government, and how politicians seek to manipulate your inner fears - that's a 3-4 year program in itself.
Not that I would oppose such a program, or making it mandatory in order to have the right to vote, but that's the only way you can really have people be educated enough to make a decision. Googling the terms, flittering through wikipedia - that's not "education", that's nothing.
I dunno. Crud Puppy might make an excellent governor.
Having an opinion is worthless unless it's an informed opinion, which (and again I will point to Plato's Republic, as I always do in these discussions) requires that the populace be educated at a level proportional to the decisions being made.
A small turnout is too easily manipulated, so you need as large a turnout as possible, but it must be a turnout with the capacity to think.
Personally, I'd argue that making voting mandatory but restricting the electorate to those with a given minimum level of education and/or minimum intelligence would be the smart move, but change the rules for being in school from being mandatory for under 16s to being mandatory for under BSc/BAs regardless of age. (Likewise, eliminate the age of responsibility/majority - unlike cheese and wine, people do not improve with age alone - and replace it with a proficiency of responsibility. I don't care if you're 16, 60 or 600.)
I disagree on the relaxing. Never waste a good opportunity, never let your brain run on idle. Yes, you're only young once, but there's other options. If you don't go for a work solution, push your horizons. Explore, learn, develop. Learn a new language by going overseas and immersing in an alien culture. The more alien the better. The object wouldn't be to have something directly practical, the object would be to develop your mental faculties, to go from a problem-space to a solution-space efficiently, and to exploit the hell out of the neurological benefits of such experiences.