Emacs command completion isn't predictive, it's the same technology as ksh, etc. command line completion.
Something predictive would be like the Omron Wnn Japanese input processor which will offer you first the most commonly used completion for the sequence you've just typed. Wnn must be prior art, it was extremely clever because it kept track of what you've typed and selected before and as it learned it got pretty good at offering you first what you wanted to type. Something like the T9 dictionary input mode in cellphones, but for Japanese and it was around *a long* time before 2000 - it was integrated with XEmacs in 1997, I believe, and they were up to version 6 of Wnn by then.
The energy of a photon is directly proportional to the frequency and inversely proportional to the wavelength. Duh, but OK.
The photons in the void must be getting a longer wavelength somehow - perhaps the spacetime continuum is expanding more there than it is where there is ordinary matter. Why? That doesn't answer my question. Are the wavelengths really getting longer? Or just not getting as much shorter than they would have gotten going through a typical amount of dark matter? Inquiring minds want to know!
I'm going to have to read that bloody PDF someone posted a link to.
Would you honestly want only 500Mhz in your laptop? Well, yes. Especially if it ran cool, which it sounds like is the point with low power.
The ancient junk Matsushita notebook I had in Japan was plenty fast enough and was slower than 500MHz. Ran a now ancient version of Turbolinux, and I never had to reboot it the entire time I had it - about a year.
I've gotten a Mac Powerbook Pro for my wife that runs much, much faster but it runs so hot I'm afraid both of it failing in the tropics and it is absolutely a Keep Out Of Reach Of Children thing. It gets HOT. Sadly when you do "cool" things on it like play WoW, it gets even hotter.
If I can get a Mac OS X userland with a cool(er) running and child-safe Linux kernel that runs on this Via... sign me up right now.
Yeah, and perhaps dark matter is the phlogistan of the 21st century, but you'd make a better point if you didn't post anonymously, account or no.
I've read plenty of material on the electric universe and it's no weirder than dark matter and dark energy. I would guess that we're due for a correction in astrophysics sometime. Whether the electric universe is it, I don't know, but the material that I've read has a certain feel to it that makes my skin crawl, similar to claims by Microsoft that Microsoft Windows is more secure than modern Unix.
I became a computer programmer because I do have the ability to look over a body of code and pick out bugs on inspection, so I do tend to trust my intuition. (And before anyone flames me about XEmacs 20.0, my Dick Cheney told me specifically to not bother about testing the code that failed miserably personally because it had already been tested by others -- and I knew that was a mistake at the time, but went ahead anyway. Live and learn, and be assertive when you really are right.)
Understand that space itself expanded from the starting point. All points of space in the universe today where infinitely closer together 13.7 billion years ago. The Big Bang did not expand outward into a mostly empty universe. The Big Bang occurred in a universe that was entirely full of extremely dense matter. As space expanded, the matter became less packed. You get the idea... Inflation. So inflation necessarily means that whereever you go, you're still at the starting point? I suppose it must. It's weird though seeing the past from everywhere around you, but that's a consequence of the speed of light and I've grokked time dilation to some extent. The starting point is both here and everywhere you can see, if you have sensitive enough instruments. That must be the case also. I haven't grokked that.
I wanted to be a physicist until I got smashed with special relativity (and QM) in first year physics in college. Sigh.
(Let the speculations commence...) Make it so, #1.
I already posted my first thought on this. My second thought is that this is more of press release sort of material than the science and mathematics behind it.
Spare me no detail, but let's continue.
The full quote is: "What we've found is not normal, based on either observational studies or on computer simulations of the large-scale evolution of the universe." I'm not sure I would trust either statement.
The article carefully points out that this is the first time we have ever had instruments capable of detecting this void. Better data and more sensitive instruments will definitely shed more light on the situation.[1] Before we better understood the Hubble shift, it was accepted that our galaxy was the largest galaxy of the universe. As instruments got better, that was seen not to be the case.
I do not trust computer simulations to predict anything Outside The Box. I've worked too long in the industry. Sadly, Garbage In, Garbage Out is a phrase I don't see much of recently. There was absolutely no concept of dark matter when I first got interested in astrophysics. I'd be happy to read mispredictions of computer models written around that time, but I don't think they exist. Because...
[1] Follow the money. Science researchers are like politicians in that they are always pursuing the renewal of their grants as a politician pursues reelection. (Been there and done that more than once.) I'm on their side. If the United States had been spending the same amount of money to do scientific research and space exploration instead of killing Iraqi women and children (and millions of others since the 1970's), the world would be a better and safer (and far, far richer) place.
Not if the universe is generally radially symmetric, but due to speed of light issues there's no way we can see that region in real time any way. If farther distance means the farther back in time you see, I'd expect that the center of the big bang would be seen as a giant sphere around us. I have a hard time wrapping my mind around that thought, but I would also expect it to be undetectable. The three degree echo of the big bang comes from all around us. Anything beyond that ought then to be the same in any direction you look.
I'd love to read a paper describing how one _would_ go about detecting where the big bang occurred. Anyone have references? Or is my speculation above considered correct?
That's a better article than the original. Thanks.
I'm confused on one point. (This is not a flame). Why would photons going through a void lose energy? OK, I will accept the statement that photons gain energy going through dark matter, but the losing energy part sounds like the standard BS of baseline budgeting. I got a 5% increase last year, but equal funding and no increase this year so it's a budget cut. Why wouldn't this just be the same thing? Photons get a boost going through dark matter and no boost whatsoever going through a void?
Whatever the merits of the argument, it doesn't look good for Linux to be linked to piracy. Whatever the merits of the argument, it doesn't look good for Microsoft Windows to be linked with the punishment of a felony - is it so awful that the only people who buy it are convicted felons who are forced to buy it?
It wasn't so many years ago that it used to be safe to leave a car with the keys inside You must either be very much older than I or are talking about parts of the USA with which I am not familiar. Older. The "lock your car, take your keys" ad campaign was in the late 60's or early 70's.
In parts on North and East London its not even advisable to leave a bike chained with titanium chains in public. No doubt that is part of the reason why you guys have so many surveillance cameras, not that I think that it would help resolve bicycle theft, but certainly a reason why people would welcome the cameras.
Sigh. And I guess sadder is the fact that I don't blame them.
I KNOW EXACTLY how you feel. I live in Switzerland, and while Switzerland is not quite as good as Japan it is pretty good. I've heard stories about Switzerland and... it's on my very short list of places that I want to visit in Europe. I've never been to Europe before and I love to snow ski. Which is the best month for a hard core skier to be in Switzerland?
(You've got a.ca domain on your advertised email, are you in Canada? I loved the time I visited Banff, but that was almost 2 decades ago now).
A bicycle unattended in my front yard is not express permission for you to take it. I left an unlocked bicycle unattended in my front yard in Tokyo for over two years hoping someone needy would take it (I lived near a woman's university and I truly didn't understand Tokyo at the time) but no one did. It's Japan, so the bicycle is probably still sitting there unlocked even though I moved away 4 1/2 years ago. Not enough other dang gaijin in that neighborhood I suppose. (Bicycle theft is epidemic in places like Tsukuba where there are a higher percentage of foreigners).
Japan is the place where you can buy a bag of CDs, accidentally leave them in a nearby ATM and then later pick them up from the nearest koban where someone dropped them off after they saw you left it behind. I didn't do that, but I witnessed it. Can you imagine the same kind of thing happening in the US? I can't, I'm a native american.
A coworker in Japan was telling me about the time she visited New York with her husband and after buying some things went to a restaurant, left her bags at the table and went away for a moment. In Japan, Nothing Happens when you do things like that, but that was New York and the bags were stolen.
On another occasion when I was living in Tokyo, but working in Kobe (about 5 hours by train after you factor in the local trains) I accidentally left my apartment unlocked for an entire week unattended. Nothing Happened.
The US isn't civilized and hasn't been for a long time. If you look away, you should have the expectation that whatever it was you're not looking at will disappear, because it will. And no, I'm not happy about saying this. I used to love living in California and the USA. It wasn't so many years ago that it used to be safe to leave a car with the keys inside (remember the "lock your car, take your keys" ad campaign?).
So yes, I admire your sentiments, but anywhere outside of the best places in Japan, I've never seen them in practice. I've never been to the UK, but I presume they have worse problems than the US given all the surveillance cameras they've felt the need to install in recent years.
Not that I'm a fan of legalizing meth, mind you. Before the turn of the next to last century, meth was legal. It wasn't until the early 1900's that the country started going seriously downhill.
Drug laws have only created big profits for drug dealers and haven't prevented people seriously interested in drugs from doing them. It's not keeping anyone's children "safe" from drugs.
I consider methamphetamines, as dangerous as they are to be a lot safer than the tranqs so many Americans use. All of the recent school shooting crazies have been on prescribed tranquilizers. What does that have to tell you? I know, I know, this is the USA, it means ban guns. Sigh.
I neither want my children sniffing glue or being force fed tranquilizers or speed like Ritalin and they will be kept far far away from American public schools. The former is my duty as a parent, the latter appears to be the only possible solution to one of the most serious problems in US public schools today.
Take your Prozac and your Ritalin and SHOVE IT (anywhere other than down my children's throats)!
in other words: compiling the code yourself to get better performance is (in the best penn jillette style) BULLSHIT!!! Not always. Once upon a time there was a fork of gcc called pgcc - the Pentium GCC patch. It contained a number of (sometimes dangerous) optimizations tailored towards the old i586 Pentium processor. When it could compile code correctly (which was most but not quite all of the time) it produced noticeable performance improvements over the mainline gcc code (which was called egcs at the time).
Look for some of my postings to xemacs-beta around 1997/1998. I did comparative XEmacs benchmarking with pgcc -vs- stock gcc/stock options and got substantial performance improvements.
I'm certainly willing to believe it's possible - I've been there and done that and posted the results to the world.
It's been years since I've seriously looked at the guts of gcc and whether or not it's significant now, I can't say. My guess is that the work involved in tailoring compiler optimization for a specific flavor of CPU (other than a gross optimization like preferring a specific machine instruction not available on all types) is sufficiently difficult that if the CPU manufacturer doesn't do it, it probably won't be done. My understanding was that the pgcc patch came from Intel, but with the issues it had, I can certainly understand why only portions of it were merged very slowly into the mainline.
try convincing a middle manager of a fortune 100 company about the advantages of self compiled code I do not believe that was ever the issue being discussed. Where did enterprise software come in? I do not doubt your credentials only your presentation and it sounds like you have personal issues that it would be in your best interest to resolve.
As much as I liked the performance of code compiled by pgcc -O6, I never let code it compiled touch my production servers. But that wasn't what we were talking about.
welcome to the real word, kid. Oh, you must be new here. Do you see those two large keys towards the bottom of your keyboard labeled "shift"? You press them while typing on a letter to get an upper case letter. Upper case letters are best used at the beginning of sentences to demarcate them from other text.
Sorry sir, your post isn't +5 informative as much as it should have been flamebait. Fortunately for you, it seems to be yet another free crack for moderators day.
If the distro makers did it that way by default, I think it could be considered as a technical violation of the GPL. The kinds of binaries that a distro maker builds are necessarily of the compile once, run anywhere variety. The kinds of binaries you want to build are tailored for your specific system. That would require in effect a cross-compilation environment.
RPM supports something like that, but it would require rebuilding the world to get all the optimized binaries. It would be easy enough distributing various optimized system configuration files and having the user pick the best one for his system, but I don't think anyone has done that. From what it sounds like, the apt-based Gentoo has, but I have no experience with that distro. It also sounds like it has a highly specialized audience, so there's probably not going to be a lot of competition.
I know disk space and computing power are cheap now, but for a company to offer a distro of binaries tailored for a specific processor would require that each configuration built that way be tested formally and that's expensive.
When I was into that kind of stuff, I ran a system (mostly) built with the pgcc patches at -O6. It flew. But pgcc wasn't stable and there was plenty of code that I had to compile with regular egcs. I've built two complete Linux systems from scratch, the package manager-less Steve/Linux that I ran a small ISP with and Turbolinux 7 for the DEC/Alpha (that sadly never got released). It's a lot of work and unless I ever find an interesting reconditioned non-Intel system, I'll probably never do it again.
But hey, with Linux you get all the source and you can have it any way you want.
Just because someone publishes something that is wrong, doesn't mean you're allowed to publish statements that they're a crackpot. It's libel. This was in the United States, not Great Britain.
It doesn't serve the public interest to make general statements about this person. All it does is damage their reputation. That's libel. It's only libel if it's wrong, which it apparently wasn't, in this case.
I would also contend like other posters have done, that it is in the public interest to call a crackpot a crackpot if said crackpot is purporting to write hard science.
The problem is redneck Jim who has four kids, two of them running around wearing nothing but a diaper and drinking Coca Cola from a baby bottle. The other two are out shooting something or trying to blow something up. Jim is asleep in his recliner, beer in his lap with a plate of glazed chicken wing bones at his side, NASCAR on TV. That doesn't give you any right to set rules over his parenting. "Period" to use the same word you used earlier.
This is the guy who I want to have to go to Walmart with his kids in order to purchase the latest GTA. This is supposed to be a free country and that is not your decision to make.
If you are religious and Christian, remember how the road to hell is paved. If you are not, just read your history books. "Good intentions", like perhaps the Prohibition (whose net effect was to irrevocably establish organized crime in the USA), have rarely (if ever) turned out positive results.
Of course given that it's just a friendly front cover for registry and ini settings, I couldn't install any 3rd party software, but this sounds interesting.
I presume by ini settings you mean the equivalent of ~/.[something]rc files. OK.
The registry seemed like very bad engineering to me. Every so often I'd get ominous popup windows saying such and such program is attempting to modify the registry, allow or ignore. (Never of course, giving a clue as to what the registry actually was). I presume it's some kind of machine global, world writable database file based on other things I've read. That's really asking for trouble when you design things that way.
For people coming from *nix, the loss of the rich command line would be a problem. (Although there are and from at least 3 on always have been alternatives, if only disgusting ones involing a batch file that calls a gwbasic that writes a second batch file called by the 1st after gwbasic. At that point you were pretty much better off using basic as your shell.) Windows took a hit when it "became" the OS and quit packing in a language, but as soon as the web became popular it was largely moot. That, would be me. And yeah, loss of the command line is kind of like a show-stopper to me. I love being able to program in the command interpreter. I ported the Adventure Shell to ksh (a Unix shell, usable a login shell written in shell script, yes I tested that), I wrote a BASIC interpreter that had more features than the BASIC that started Microsoft off to fame and fortune in ksh, I once wrote a shell virus that kind of got away and proved most difficult to eliminate (oops)...
I can see how real shells might be intimidating to some people, I just can't live without one. Anything else seems toyish. But that's OK. My wife can bang on GUI buttons and stuff, but I will teach my sons how to do shell programming.
I suppose we can all thank Microsoft that previously relatively slow interpreted languages that used to be somewhat awkward to program in now run more like greased weasels since the hardware has gotten so much faster to keep up with Microsoft Windows.
If you mean http://research.microsoft.com/users/kajiya/ he's certainly made a name for himself. Yeah, that's him. Brilliant man, though wrong about the future of Prolog.
Have you considered the possibility that people get old and smart and it is you that are wrong? Have you considered the possibility that every generation thinks it can do a better job of parenting than their own parents? Legislating that into law is an extremely bad idea in my opinion and that is what you are advocating.
I'm sorry, but I don't see how these laws are unconstitutional. OK, let me try.
A child is a parents' responsibility. What games a child plays is up to the parents, period! I fully agree, but you apparently do not.
Unfortunately, not all parents are responsible. Some parents give their child birthday money or allowance or whatever and let them buy whatever they want. Fine and they trust their kids. Assume for a moment that they know what they're doing. And according to the first statement I quoted, you must also.
I would like to at least know that his parents are aware of what he is playing.... A 10-yr old child is not! Now you're out of line. By your own rules and mine. It's none of your business and it's not your decision to make. The unconstitutionality of these laws comes from this, I believe.
It is my right as a parent to be able to trust my children and my children's responsibilities as US citizens (they will care about it a lot more too, because they're automatically dual citizens until involuntary military duty rears its ugly head) to obey the rules. You cannot regulate morality. You can't (or shouldn't, except that it's so popular now-a-days) substitute government as a parent. Which I hope makes sense, a government is never going to love and nurture your children as you can as a parent.
I similarly think age laws on otherwise legal items are self-defeating and unconstitutional themselves. A person is allowed to fight and die for his country at 18, but isn't institutionally trustworthy enough to be allowed to purchase alcohol? But they're also just a bad idea. If a child is going to decide to smoke cigarettes, that's what they're going to do. Making them a lawbreaker in the bargain teaches irreverence to the law.
Sadly, we have so many and sometimes conflicting laws that it is probably impossible to go through a single day without breaking some law, be it traffic or otherwise. It is impossible in California to drive without breaking any law (and sometimes dangerous on the freeway). It was designed that way, police departments receive most of their funding from traffic tickets and if you are wearing the wrong color skin in the wrong area or have out of town plates, watch out.
I'm very happy that a judge has finally made some kind of statement. I think it's a minor issue at best, but you have to start somewhere. The real problem is too many laws that are impossible to obey at all times and people in general seem to have just stopped caring.
There is no Constitutional right to bad parenting! There is also no constitutional right to take over parenting someone else's children. I prefer to lean to the side of freedom.
Soft porn is OK. Personally, I'd rather have my kids watching Miniskirt Police than an American cop show.
For those of you unlucky enough to have never seen TV in Japan, Miniskirt Police is a weekly TV show featuring young ladies dressed in very skimpy police-blue miniskirts doing outrageous things. Two that were particularly memorable was crushing empty beer cans with only their breasts (with the act repeated several times in slow motion) and another featured tying model rockets to dresses, firing the rockets off and zooming the camera in on the now visible underwear. A most amusing show...
Er, um, I was only watching to practice my verbal Japanese skills. Really!
E-mail is relatively new? I had e-mail in college (1988-1992) so forgive me if I don't consider it to be new. I said it was relatively new. The telephone has essentially been around forever as far as anyone reading this discussion is concerned. Compared to that, email is relatively new. My children will grow up with email, I didn't.
But that is still far from 90% of all of my email. You must be new here and/or very lucky. I've had my primary email address (it's not @gmail.com) for over ten years and it's been harvested quite a lot now, even though I haven't used it in a public forum since 2000 or so. Spam filters catch most of it, but I have to check the filters every so often due to false positives. Outside of work, almost all of the email I get is spam and the ratio is much higher than 90%.
And this is the biggest supposition on my part, but it seems that people "look forward" to getting email, where as they feel annoyed anytime the phone rings. You're right, but I think that's because it's relatively new technology. There are plenty of people (like me, I'm an old fart, but not that old of a fart) who did not grow up with email. Compare that to the number of people who grew up without telephone service. I predict though that that will begin to change as people become used to the fact that >90% (and getting worse every day) of email is spam. Unless of course if you are one of the lucky few who happen to be shopping for penis enlargement or believe the "you've won the UK lottery!" spam email...
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Emacs command completion isn't predictive, it's the same technology as ksh, etc. command line completion.
Something predictive would be like the Omron Wnn Japanese input processor which will offer you first the most commonly used completion for the sequence you've just typed. Wnn must be prior art, it was extremely clever because it kept track of what you've typed and selected before and as it learned it got pretty good at offering you first what you wanted to type. Something like the T9 dictionary input mode in cellphones, but for Japanese and it was around *a long* time before 2000 - it was integrated with XEmacs in 1997, I believe, and they were up to version 6 of Wnn by then.
I'm going to have to read that bloody PDF someone posted a link to.
No, BSOD.
The ancient junk Matsushita notebook I had in Japan was plenty fast enough and was slower than 500MHz. Ran a now ancient version of Turbolinux, and I never had to reboot it the entire time I had it - about a year.
I've gotten a Mac Powerbook Pro for my wife that runs much, much faster but it runs so hot I'm afraid both of it failing in the tropics and it is absolutely a Keep Out Of Reach Of Children thing. It gets HOT. Sadly when you do "cool" things on it like play WoW, it gets even hotter.
If I can get a Mac OS X userland with a cool(er) running and child-safe Linux kernel that runs on this Via
Yeah, and perhaps dark matter is the phlogistan of the 21st century, but you'd make a better point if you didn't post anonymously, account or no.
I've read plenty of material on the electric universe and it's no weirder than dark matter and dark energy. I would guess that we're due for a correction in astrophysics sometime. Whether the electric universe is it, I don't know, but the material that I've read has a certain feel to it that makes my skin crawl, similar to claims by Microsoft that Microsoft Windows is more secure than modern Unix.
I became a computer programmer because I do have the ability to look over a body of code and pick out bugs on inspection, so I do tend to trust my intuition. (And before anyone flames me about XEmacs 20.0, my Dick Cheney told me specifically to not bother about testing the code that failed miserably personally because it had already been tested by others -- and I knew that was a mistake at the time, but went ahead anyway. Live and learn, and be assertive when you really are right.)
I wanted to be a physicist until I got smashed with special relativity (and QM) in first year physics in college. Sigh.
I already posted my first thought on this. My second thought is that this is more of press release sort of material than the science and mathematics behind it.
Spare me no detail, but let's continue. The full quote is: "What we've found is not normal, based on either observational studies or on computer simulations of the large-scale evolution of the universe." I'm not sure I would trust either statement.
The article carefully points out that this is the first time we have ever had instruments capable of detecting this void. Better data and more sensitive instruments will definitely shed more light on the situation.[1] Before we better understood the Hubble shift, it was accepted that our galaxy was the largest galaxy of the universe. As instruments got better, that was seen not to be the case.
I do not trust computer simulations to predict anything Outside The Box. I've worked too long in the industry. Sadly, Garbage In, Garbage Out is a phrase I don't see much of recently. There was absolutely no concept of dark matter when I first got interested in astrophysics. I'd be happy to read mispredictions of computer models written around that time, but I don't think they exist. Because
[1] Follow the money. Science researchers are like politicians in that they are always pursuing the renewal of their grants as a politician pursues reelection. (Been there and done that more than once.) I'm on their side. If the United States had been spending the same amount of money to do scientific research and space exploration instead of killing Iraqi women and children (and millions of others since the 1970's), the world would be a better and safer (and far, far richer) place.
Not if the universe is generally radially symmetric, but due to speed of light issues there's no way we can see that region in real time any way. If farther distance means the farther back in time you see, I'd expect that the center of the big bang would be seen as a giant sphere around us. I have a hard time wrapping my mind around that thought, but I would also expect it to be undetectable. The three degree echo of the big bang comes from all around us. Anything beyond that ought then to be the same in any direction you look.
I'd love to read a paper describing how one _would_ go about detecting where the big bang occurred. Anyone have references? Or is my speculation above considered correct?
That's a better article than the original. Thanks.
I'm confused on one point. (This is not a flame). Why would photons going through a void lose energy? OK, I will accept the statement that photons gain energy going through dark matter, but the losing energy part sounds like the standard BS of baseline budgeting. I got a 5% increase last year, but equal funding and no increase this year so it's a budget cut. Why wouldn't this just be the same thing? Photons get a boost going through dark matter and no boost whatsoever going through a void?
Someone please enlighten me.
Sigh. And I guess sadder is the fact that I don't blame them.
(You've got a
Japan is the place where you can buy a bag of CDs, accidentally leave them in a nearby ATM and then later pick them up from the nearest koban where someone dropped them off after they saw you left it behind. I didn't do that, but I witnessed it. Can you imagine the same kind of thing happening in the US? I can't, I'm a native american.
A coworker in Japan was telling me about the time she visited New York with her husband and after buying some things went to a restaurant, left her bags at the table and went away for a moment. In Japan, Nothing Happens when you do things like that, but that was New York and the bags were stolen.
On another occasion when I was living in Tokyo, but working in Kobe (about 5 hours by train after you factor in the local trains) I accidentally left my apartment unlocked for an entire week unattended. Nothing Happened.
The US isn't civilized and hasn't been for a long time. If you look away, you should have the expectation that whatever it was you're not looking at will disappear, because it will. And no, I'm not happy about saying this. I used to love living in California and the USA. It wasn't so many years ago that it used to be safe to leave a car with the keys inside (remember the "lock your car, take your keys" ad campaign?).
So yes, I admire your sentiments, but anywhere outside of the best places in Japan, I've never seen them in practice. I've never been to the UK, but I presume they have worse problems than the US given all the surveillance cameras they've felt the need to install in recent years.
Drug laws have only created big profits for drug dealers and haven't prevented people seriously interested in drugs from doing them. It's not keeping anyone's children "safe" from drugs.
I consider methamphetamines, as dangerous as they are to be a lot safer than the tranqs so many Americans use. All of the recent school shooting crazies have been on prescribed tranquilizers. What does that have to tell you? I know, I know, this is the USA, it means ban guns. Sigh.
I neither want my children sniffing glue or being force fed tranquilizers or speed like Ritalin and they will be kept far far away from American public schools. The former is my duty as a parent, the latter appears to be the only possible solution to one of the most serious problems in US public schools today.
Take your Prozac and your Ritalin and SHOVE IT (anywhere other than down my children's throats)!
Look for some of my postings to xemacs-beta around 1997/1998. I did comparative XEmacs benchmarking with pgcc -vs- stock gcc/stock options and got substantial performance improvements.
I'm certainly willing to believe it's possible - I've been there and done that and posted the results to the world.
It's been years since I've seriously looked at the guts of gcc and whether or not it's significant now, I can't say. My guess is that the work involved in tailoring compiler optimization for a specific flavor of CPU (other than a gross optimization like preferring a specific machine instruction not available on all types) is sufficiently difficult that if the CPU manufacturer doesn't do it, it probably won't be done. My understanding was that the pgcc patch came from Intel, but with the issues it had, I can certainly understand why only portions of it were merged very slowly into the mainline. try convincing a middle manager of a fortune 100 company about the advantages of self compiled code I do not believe that was ever the issue being discussed. Where did enterprise software come in? I do not doubt your credentials only your presentation and it sounds like you have personal issues that it would be in your best interest to resolve.
As much as I liked the performance of code compiled by pgcc -O6, I never let code it compiled touch my production servers. But that wasn't what we were talking about. welcome to the real word, kid. Oh, you must be new here. Do you see those two large keys towards the bottom of your keyboard labeled "shift"? You press them while typing on a letter to get an upper case letter. Upper case letters are best used at the beginning of sentences to demarcate them from other text.
Sorry sir, your post isn't +5 informative as much as it should have been flamebait. Fortunately for you, it seems to be yet another free crack for moderators day.
If the distro makers did it that way by default, I think it could be considered as a technical violation of the GPL. The kinds of binaries that a distro maker builds are necessarily of the compile once, run anywhere variety. The kinds of binaries you want to build are tailored for your specific system. That would require in effect a cross-compilation environment.
RPM supports something like that, but it would require rebuilding the world to get all the optimized binaries. It would be easy enough distributing various optimized system configuration files and having the user pick the best one for his system, but I don't think anyone has done that. From what it sounds like, the apt-based Gentoo has, but I have no experience with that distro. It also sounds like it has a highly specialized audience, so there's probably not going to be a lot of competition.
I know disk space and computing power are cheap now, but for a company to offer a distro of binaries tailored for a specific processor would require that each configuration built that way be tested formally and that's expensive.
When I was into that kind of stuff, I ran a system (mostly) built with the pgcc patches at -O6. It flew. But pgcc wasn't stable and there was plenty of code that I had to compile with regular egcs. I've built two complete Linux systems from scratch, the package manager-less Steve/Linux that I ran a small ISP with and Turbolinux 7 for the DEC/Alpha (that sadly never got released). It's a lot of work and unless I ever find an interesting reconditioned non-Intel system, I'll probably never do it again.
But hey, with Linux you get all the source and you can have it any way you want.
I would also contend like other posters have done, that it is in the public interest to call a crackpot a crackpot if said crackpot is purporting to write hard science.
If you are religious and Christian, remember how the road to hell is paved. If you are not, just read your history books. "Good intentions", like perhaps the Prohibition (whose net effect was to irrevocably establish organized crime in the USA), have rarely (if ever) turned out positive results.
I presume by ini settings you mean the equivalent of ~/.[something]rc files. OK.
The registry seemed like very bad engineering to me. Every so often I'd get ominous popup windows saying such and such program is attempting to modify the registry, allow or ignore. (Never of course, giving a clue as to what the registry actually was). I presume it's some kind of machine global, world writable database file based on other things I've read. That's really asking for trouble when you design things that way. For people coming from *nix, the loss of the rich command line would be a problem. (Although there are and from at least 3 on always have been alternatives, if only disgusting ones involing a batch file that calls a gwbasic that writes a second batch file called by the 1st after gwbasic. At that point you were pretty much better off using basic as your shell.) Windows took a hit when it "became" the OS and quit packing in a language, but as soon as the web became popular it was largely moot. That, would be me. And yeah, loss of the command line is kind of like a show-stopper to me. I love being able to program in the command interpreter. I ported the Adventure Shell to ksh (a Unix shell, usable a login shell written in shell script, yes I tested that), I wrote a BASIC interpreter that had more features than the BASIC that started Microsoft off to fame and fortune in ksh, I once wrote a shell virus that kind of got away and proved most difficult to eliminate (oops)
I can see how real shells might be intimidating to some people, I just can't live without one. Anything else seems toyish. But that's OK. My wife can bang on GUI buttons and stuff, but I will teach my sons how to do shell programming.
I suppose we can all thank Microsoft that previously relatively slow interpreted languages that used to be somewhat awkward to program in now run more like greased weasels since the hardware has gotten so much faster to keep up with Microsoft Windows. If you mean
http://research.microsoft.com/users/kajiya/
he's certainly made a name for himself. Yeah, that's him. Brilliant man, though wrong about the future of Prolog.
It is my right as a parent to be able to trust my children and my children's responsibilities as US citizens (they will care about it a lot more too, because they're automatically dual citizens until involuntary military duty rears its ugly head) to obey the rules. You cannot regulate morality. You can't (or shouldn't, except that it's so popular now-a-days) substitute government as a parent. Which I hope makes sense, a government is never going to love and nurture your children as you can as a parent.
I similarly think age laws on otherwise legal items are self-defeating and unconstitutional themselves. A person is allowed to fight and die for his country at 18, but isn't institutionally trustworthy enough to be allowed to purchase alcohol? But they're also just a bad idea. If a child is going to decide to smoke cigarettes, that's what they're going to do. Making them a lawbreaker in the bargain teaches irreverence to the law.
Sadly, we have so many and sometimes conflicting laws that it is probably impossible to go through a single day without breaking some law, be it traffic or otherwise. It is impossible in California to drive without breaking any law (and sometimes dangerous on the freeway). It was designed that way, police departments receive most of their funding from traffic tickets and if you are wearing the wrong color skin in the wrong area or have out of town plates, watch out.
I'm very happy that a judge has finally made some kind of statement. I think it's a minor issue at best, but you have to start somewhere. The real problem is too many laws that are impossible to obey at all times and people in general seem to have just stopped caring. There is no Constitutional right to bad parenting! There is also no constitutional right to take over parenting someone else's children. I prefer to lean to the side of freedom.
Soft porn is OK. Personally, I'd rather have my kids watching Miniskirt Police than an American cop show.
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For those of you unlucky enough to have never seen TV in Japan, Miniskirt Police is a weekly TV show featuring young ladies dressed in very skimpy police-blue miniskirts doing outrageous things. Two that were particularly memorable was crushing empty beer cans with only their breasts (with the act repeated several times in slow motion) and another featured tying model rockets to dresses, firing the rockets off and zooming the camera in on the now visible underwear. A most amusing show
Er, um, I was only watching to practice my verbal Japanese skills. Really!