I too would settle for unlimited wireless internet access everywhere. While we are at it I would settle for a few million and a supermodel wife who is also a contortionist.
i've said this before. If you really are desperate for a job go to a smallish town (for example where I live - Knxoville Tn). Most of those places have lots of sysadmin jobs/programming jobs that just can't be outsourced - they must hire local. You will be writing fairly boring code (hotel management sofware, automation, etc).
No, you won't be in a places with 10 compusa type stores, no you won't have large Opera/theatre. Nor will you make much money (in the 20-30k range - still good for this area though). Don't ask for the moon (one of the people who graduated with me always asked for 35k and did not get a job untill he dropped to about 20k - be realistic in what you ask for)
They will only care about your technical skills for the hire - but they won't garner you any extra money. They don't want a whizbang programmer, they want a programmer.
Assuming this is a rc airplane engine be aware that they do not burn gasoline. The burn a fuel that is a combination of niromethane (10-20%), alchohol (60-70%), and oil (10-20% either synthetic or natural)(pick a combination of numbers that adds to 100%). The exhaust isn't nearly as bad as say, a lawnmower, and has a fairly distinct smell. The goo one gets around the exhaust is unburned oil.
I wouldn't go that far. One thing many seem to forget is the bussiness part of it. Yes, from a consumers point of view this is stupid. No real raeson why I whouls not be allowed to run some crappy servers. But they view servers as money making (should they kill stuff like sshd and the like then I would more or less agree).
What the bussiness deal offers many is the ability to write it off your income tax if it is a bussiness expense (that is you actually own/operate a bussiness). You can't write a personal line off. The focus they (and many others) are looking at is a bussiness, consumers are a by-product. If that is the case then it makes sense. If you main investment ins consumers - well it's stupid then. It is not an attempt to limit bandwidth usage but to maximise profits (though some places use it to limit bandwidth which is stupid also). This is the way our (and I assume others) local phone service works. This is probably one of the least stupid setup's I have seen in high-speed access.
hmm, yess. I see Bush planning on killing a program several years after he leaves office. One of the nice things bout here is don't like clinton? at most you have 8 years, don't like bush - at most again 8 years. Kinda hard for bush to kill a 10-15 year program before it finishes when it started in his term.
Plus I like that funding an alternate energy source is considered bad because of something they might do in the furture. Be happy it's being funded.
I tend to find many Perl users to be just as antagonistic about using Perl. When I first changed a program from Perl to Python because of the size of code (nearing 5000 line in Perl) I was told, rather smugly, that anytime I wrote a Perl program at 5000 lines I was not using Perl correctly - and many proceded to heckle me. Ohh yea, 1000 lines of obfuscated Perl is the greatest thing ever. You can see many similar type posts here from Perl people.
Most people, however agreed with my decision. Most of the python people agree when I write smaller script in Perl.
And to adress the RegEx thing - it depends on what you are doing. One of the things I regulary write at work are "little languages". That is too complicated for somethin like "getops" too small for lexx/yacc. The way python deals with grouping and storing the matches in an object are extremely nice in writing a small recursive decent parser. Perl was MUCH more messy. Smaller Regex stuff Perl just flew and was simple to write/read. More complicated and Pyhton once again came out ahead.
I've never really seen Java or C++ as being a competitor of python. Java is more a client/server application environment. C++ is more applicable with extremely large products (I could not image writing 100,000 lines of python - it would at least need to compile well to native code). I find myslef much more often deciding if the application needs Python or Perl (I see thier diferences based on scaling the size/complexity of code - Perl for small-medium, python for medium-large).
I've been on a tour of Y-12 national security plant (one of the original manhattan project sites that created the fissionable material). One of the areas we were not allowed to go to (we only could even look at it becuase we were Oak Ridge National Labs employees and had gone through rudimentary clearance already) was a 25 foot tall fence with another few feet of barbed wire, about a 10 foot gap of rock with a small path through it, followed by another fence. At each corner of the structure was a hardened machine gun bunker (manned, we were not told if there were anything under the rocks). We were told any unauthorized entrance would be killed. No idea what was in the building (I always wondered if the stupid answer we give was true in this case - "If I told you I would have to kill you").
not necesarialy. Say the cable company distributes cable boxes based on region. So that all of the Magnolia area of Knoxville gets serial numbers that serial mod 20 is 0. They can then look at that and realise that the average household makes about 10,000 a year and adjust appropriatly. This doesn't absolutely mean person to person difference - but region difference is possible (such as wal-mart selling different stuff in each store based on location).
Actually Opera allows resumed browsing to be the deafult if you wish. It will remeber the state of each windows when it is closed and start there. In the program crashes it automatically asks if you want this to be true. Though there is no timeout on it.
I just switched my uncle from AOL to bellsouth DSL. I have tried for over a year to get him to change and told him he would regret not doing it sooner - but he always said "I've been with AOL for 8 years, I know how to use it and it does everything I want".
Well, not only has the spam finally gotten to him but two other main problems.
First is that AOL is oversubscribed in my area so about every thirty or so minutes it drops the connection. He then has to wait a period of time with busy signals. This has cost him recently some very good ebay bids. He collects basketball cards and has missed two cards he had been searching for about 3 years because AOL kicked him before the end of the bidding (one with 1 minute left). If they are not doing this intentionaly it happens to all the AOL subscribers I know here.
Second is just stability in general. He ran windows 98 - typically he blue screened about twice a month or so. Since upgrading to the latest version of AOL he has blue screened about 3-5 times a week - only when AOL is running.
He has had DSL for about 3 weeks now - it took less than 3 days for him to feel comfortable with using individual clients instead of AOL's bundle, almost never crashes, and has little problem with spam. Not to mention the speed increase from a 56k to DSL:) I have shown him different clients he can run locally that he could not easily with AOL (it would timeout if you didn't use thier software about every 15 mins or so). He now has good access to binary newsgroups.
He is now pushing his friends to switch to either cable or DSL. They are as fed up as he is with AOL but they do not know any one that can give them good advice - they do now (I didn't count as they felt that I could not tell them what was easy and what was not - something my uncle thought also).
I firmly beleive that AOL is going to suffer from this more and more.
This, to me, is actually the strongest point of Open Source projects.
Bug fixing is not it: I have had many open source (GNU, BSD, etc) that is bug riddled and I have had many closed source that is bug free. I can make arguments that each does best (many eyes - more cought : most motivated - best cought) and each can have examples of good performance and bad performance.
But one thing, by definition, that a closed source program can never do is fork. If photoshop does nearly everything you need, except say do a widgett. And this widgett is the most important thing to you but useless to anyone else you will never get said widgett (not economically feasable for adobe). With an Open source you can relatively easily fork a widgett project.
In a well run Open Source project many eyes is very usefull. A lot of people testing is very usefull. But a closed source project can equal that if they choose to spend the money. But a closed source project can never fork in the way an open source project can.
This is actually similar to what a religious person may think. You can not prove nor dis-prove that God does not exists (or Gods). Nor can I prove nor disprove that live can not exist in those conditions.
This is where science seperates itself froma beleive or faith. Science has no evidence what so ever that life can exist in those conditions, in fact, it has evidence that it can not (put any known life in that situation and it dies). Thus science will say that "life can not exist". But that does not mean it is correct. I would even go so far as to say the most interesting problems/discoveries in history has been when science says "can not" and someone goes "bullshit" and proves it wrong (I know as a researcher that would always be my hope of doing that someday).
To use the religious analogy: there is no evidence that a christian God exists therefore nothing I do/say should depend on it. Good science (question everything) is done this way (along with other things). Personal beleive: God exists and decides what we do/do not know and nearly everything about our lives. The two do not cancel each other.
I would strongly guess that this is what nearly all the people involved beleive - evidence shows that life will not exist there. But they can greatly beleive that life does though, and continue looking (while some decry the wasted resources on looking for something that does not exist).
off topic: I have always wondered how would one cook one of the animals (seen crabs on tv) that live near the volcanic outputs?
I once read that the movie studio's get the same from a ticket sale whether or not it is a mantinee or not (at the time something like 50 cents or a dollar per ticket - it was a few years back).
Since I don't work in the industry I don't know if that was a local thing (suppsoedly not) or if it is still the case (probably is).
So unfortunatly this will only hurt the local theateres who I bet would like less interference from the MPAA.
I have to disagree, come to Knoxville, Tennessee. We have a shortage of programmers. Go to smaller areas of Tennessee and you will find the same, most likely any of the millions of acres of realativly rural America also has this problem. You will make in the low 30's (average salary is about 16-18 so it's good money for here). Sure your not in the center of tech, you don't have a large city, and you will be surrounded by rednecks. But you will have a house, food, and a few toys (jetskis, cars, computers - you can afford some decent ones). Heck, you may find that you actually like living in slower rural areas.
More properly you can't find a job in the places you want to live - there are plenty if you are willing to go anywhere. Nor will you make "big bucks" - you will make more than a large portion of our population though.
If you have a.doc that doesn't do something it can't handle. i've had enough trouble opening time sheets and such from secretaries that I can' use it. It does not have 100% compatibility.
well, I work in high performance computing (cluster computing more specifically). So squezing the last little bit out of the machines IS my job:)
Of course, I know exactly what the hardware for my clusters is (if you can't guess, I ran an athlon cluster, a pIII xeon cluster, and a p4 - the afore mentioned machines the benchmarks were ran on). When one of a users job takes 4 days to run even a 5% speedup is signifigant (much more signifigant than a recompile). They also tend to try and optimize thier algorithm based on architecture and how the specific compiler optimizes code. For the ones that are good at it it's really neat stuff.
I perfectly agree with what you are saying when it is about general purpose code. Unfortunatly (or fortunatly if, like me, you enjoy doing it) there are a handfull of jobs where this stuff becomes really important.
hmm? no - it's not surprising. But OTOH I will not use an inferior product becuase "they are working on it" (and I also thought I was relativly clear I did not blame the developers of gcc, I said they will get it done in time and they will - they have a very good product that beats many of the commercial products out there). Nor will I pretend they have better performance than what they do. Nor will I allow a misinformed post to go unanswered. That is one of the great strengths of Open source - community feedback is used. Once they get it done - i realise it is not easy - I will be EXTREMELY happy to use it (and I have donated money to projects such as this from time to time). I think I made that clear with my posts - and if not, I do now.
no, the safest bet is to optimize around intel. A large portion of machines are intel. The numbers show that a programed optimised for an intel run pretty good in athlon, athlon optimized run crappy on intel. Gcc will only optimize for PIII's and below well. P4 optimizations also run pretty good (that is close to the optimized veriosn for them) on pIII's and below and athlons. Thus the safest "bet" would be to optimize around the P4 (as pIII vs p4 optimizations may make only 5-10% on a pIII/athlon but 100-300% on a p4 this is even more true).
Should the gcc people optimize well for the p4 (and they will) then I will say the bet goes back with them. Of course this is assuming that the only thing to worry about is speed of generated code (which in many cases is not the most important).
NASCAR (stock car) grew out of bootleggers during prohibition seeing who had the fastest car. Many of the very early drivers were mainly bootleggers. Other racing events had different beginnings.
Not neccessarily the most fair test. First the test were ran on an athlon system. Intel compilers optimized mostly based on the Intel architecture.
For example, we ran several benchmarks at work on three computers with gcc 3.1 and the intel compilers. Basically gcc and intel were fairly equal on the pIII xeons (intel had the edge). Gcc was somewhat faster on the athlon 700, and the intel compilers blew gcc away on our p4 2.4 ghz.
So what conclusions can you make? neither intel or gcc are better than the other. As we expected it depends on several factors - one of the main is hardware (wow, who woulda thunk hardware affects optimization:) ). In fact on the P4's with multi-threaded floating point operations we saw well over 300%, none of the tests were worse than 100% faster. On the athlon Gcc was slightly better except in one case were it was signifigantly faster. Eventually we found that gcc 2.x or 3.x does not have good p4 optimization yet (we asked on the devel lists trying to get better numbers as we didn't want to pay for the intel compilers). Of course this was about 6-10 months ago so they could have gotten optimizations in by now.
If I had to choose one or the other as "generally producing faster code" I would ask "what hardware are we talking about". And that GREATLY influences the answer.
While I agree that if this is the case they will get a lot of flak for this. But they really should not.
In the first explosion NASA ignored many engineers advice, even ignoring a no-go from them. In this case it was one guy. In thier position - one guy saying this - many saying not a problem - I would have gone with the no problem people also. For some reason (probably that the media focuses on them) people focus on the one or two people that had a correct conclusion and why didn't any one listen to them. Well, that's becuase we can't see the future and they were a VAST minority. You also saw this after 9/11 - one report to the govt was worded exactly as this occured. Of course it was ignored because it was one of thousands of possible terrorist attacks. If you document all possible outcomes one must be correct.
The appropriate quote: "even a blind squirril finds a nut sometimes"
while I agree with the rest of what you said governemnt enforce monopolies are NOT any form of capitalism. Neither is what Enron did (though you didn't say this, many do). It's even arguable that the govt BREAKING up any and all monopolies is capitolism - basically enforcing competition.
The real problem here is that they want all the benefits of a govt protected instituion and all the benefits of a private - with none of the bad stuff that goes with it. That's just looney fucked up utopian economy.
Slashdot Mirror
A primus song about about South Park: Mephisto and Kevin.
I too would settle for unlimited wireless internet access everywhere. While we are at it I would settle for a few million and a supermodel wife who is also a contortionist.
i've said this before. If you really are desperate for a job go to a smallish town (for example where I live - Knxoville Tn). Most of those places have lots of sysadmin jobs/programming jobs that just can't be outsourced - they must hire local. You will be writing fairly boring code (hotel management sofware, automation, etc).
No, you won't be in a places with 10 compusa type stores, no you won't have large Opera/theatre. Nor will you make much money (in the 20-30k range - still good for this area though). Don't ask for the moon (one of the people who graduated with me always asked for 35k and did not get a job untill he dropped to about 20k - be realistic in what you ask for)
They will only care about your technical skills for the hire - but they won't garner you any extra money. They don't want a whizbang programmer, they want a programmer.
Assuming this is a rc airplane engine be aware that they do not burn gasoline. The burn a fuel that is a combination of niromethane (10-20%), alchohol (60-70%), and oil (10-20% either synthetic or natural)(pick a combination of numbers that adds to 100%). The exhaust isn't nearly as bad as say, a lawnmower, and has a fairly distinct smell. The goo one gets around the exhaust is unburned oil.
it's a stupid model,
I wouldn't go that far. One thing many seem to forget is the bussiness part of it. Yes, from a consumers point of view this is stupid. No real raeson why I whouls not be allowed to run some crappy servers. But they view servers as money making (should they kill stuff like sshd and the like then I would more or less agree).
What the bussiness deal offers many is the ability to write it off your income tax if it is a bussiness expense (that is you actually own/operate a bussiness). You can't write a personal line off. The focus they (and many others) are looking at is a bussiness, consumers are a by-product. If that is the case then it makes sense. If you main investment ins consumers - well it's stupid then. It is not an attempt to limit bandwidth usage but to maximise profits (though some places use it to limit bandwidth which is stupid also). This is the way our (and I assume others) local phone service works. This is probably one of the least stupid setup's I have seen in high-speed access.
hmm, yess. I see Bush planning on killing a program several years after he leaves office. One of the nice things bout here is don't like clinton? at most you have 8 years, don't like bush - at most again 8 years. Kinda hard for bush to kill a 10-15 year program before it finishes when it started in his term.
Plus I like that funding an alternate energy source is considered bad because of something they might do in the furture. Be happy it's being funded.
I tend to find many Perl users to be just as antagonistic about using Perl. When I first changed a program from Perl to Python because of the size of code (nearing 5000 line in Perl) I was told, rather smugly, that anytime I wrote a Perl program at 5000 lines I was not using Perl correctly - and many proceded to heckle me. Ohh yea, 1000 lines of obfuscated Perl is the greatest thing ever. You can see many similar type posts here from Perl people.
Most people, however agreed with my decision. Most of the python people agree when I write smaller script in Perl.
And to adress the RegEx thing - it depends on what you are doing. One of the things I regulary write at work are "little languages". That is too complicated for somethin like "getops" too small for lexx/yacc. The way python deals with grouping and storing the matches in an object are extremely nice in writing a small recursive decent parser. Perl was MUCH more messy. Smaller Regex stuff Perl just flew and was simple to write/read. More complicated and Pyhton once again came out ahead.
I've never really seen Java or C++ as being a competitor of python. Java is more a client/server application environment. C++ is more applicable with extremely large products (I could not image writing 100,000 lines of python - it would at least need to compile well to native code). I find myslef much more often deciding if the application needs Python or Perl (I see thier diferences based on scaling the size/complexity of code - Perl for small-medium, python for medium-large).
I've been on a tour of Y-12 national security plant (one of the original manhattan project sites that created the fissionable material). One of the areas we were not allowed to go to (we only could even look at it becuase we were Oak Ridge National Labs employees and had gone through rudimentary clearance already) was a 25 foot tall fence with another few feet of barbed wire, about a 10 foot gap of rock with a small path through it, followed by another fence. At each corner of the structure was a hardened machine gun bunker (manned, we were not told if there were anything under the rocks). We were told any unauthorized entrance would be killed. No idea what was in the building (I always wondered if the stupid answer we give was true in this case - "If I told you I would have to kill you").
That's why they are biologists instead of computer scientists.
not necesarialy. Say the cable company distributes cable boxes based on region. So that all of the Magnolia area of Knoxville gets serial numbers that serial mod 20 is 0. They can then look at that and realise that the average household makes about 10,000 a year and adjust appropriatly. This doesn't absolutely mean person to person difference - but region difference is possible (such as wal-mart selling different stuff in each store based on location).
Actually Opera allows resumed browsing to be the deafult if you wish. It will remeber the state of each windows when it is closed and start there. In the program crashes it automatically asks if you want this to be true. Though there is no timeout on it.
I just switched my uncle from AOL to bellsouth DSL. I have tried for over a year to get him to change and told him he would regret not doing it sooner - but he always said "I've been with AOL for 8 years, I know how to use it and it does everything I want".
:) I have shown him different clients he can run locally that he could not easily with AOL (it would timeout if you didn't use thier software about every 15 mins or so). He now has good access to binary newsgroups.
Well, not only has the spam finally gotten to him but two other main problems.
First is that AOL is oversubscribed in my area so about every thirty or so minutes it drops the connection. He then has to wait a period of time with busy signals. This has cost him recently some very good ebay bids. He collects basketball cards and has missed two cards he had been searching for about 3 years because AOL kicked him before the end of the bidding (one with 1 minute left). If they are not doing this intentionaly it happens to all the AOL subscribers I know here.
Second is just stability in general. He ran windows 98 - typically he blue screened about twice a month or so. Since upgrading to the latest version of AOL he has blue screened about 3-5 times a week - only when AOL is running.
He has had DSL for about 3 weeks now - it took less than 3 days for him to feel comfortable with using individual clients instead of AOL's bundle, almost never crashes, and has little problem with spam. Not to mention the speed increase from a 56k to DSL
He is now pushing his friends to switch to either cable or DSL. They are as fed up as he is with AOL but they do not know any one that can give them good advice - they do now (I didn't count as they felt that I could not tell them what was easy and what was not - something my uncle thought also).
I firmly beleive that AOL is going to suffer from this more and more.
This, to me, is actually the strongest point of Open Source projects.
Bug fixing is not it: I have had many open source (GNU, BSD, etc) that is bug riddled and I have had many closed source that is bug free. I can make arguments that each does best (many eyes - more cought : most motivated - best cought) and each can have examples of good performance and bad performance.
But one thing, by definition, that a closed source program can never do is fork. If photoshop does nearly everything you need, except say do a widgett. And this widgett is the most important thing to you but useless to anyone else you will never get said widgett (not economically feasable for adobe). With an Open source you can relatively easily fork a widgett project.
In a well run Open Source project many eyes is very usefull. A lot of people testing is very usefull. But a closed source project can equal that if they choose to spend the money. But a closed source project can never fork in the way an open source project can.
This is actually similar to what a religious person may think. You can not prove nor dis-prove that God does not exists (or Gods). Nor can I prove nor disprove that live can not exist in those conditions.
This is where science seperates itself froma beleive or faith. Science has no evidence what so ever that life can exist in those conditions, in fact, it has evidence that it can not (put any known life in that situation and it dies). Thus science will say that "life can not exist". But that does not mean it is correct. I would even go so far as to say the most interesting problems/discoveries in history has been when science says "can not" and someone goes "bullshit" and proves it wrong (I know as a researcher that would always be my hope of doing that someday).
To use the religious analogy: there is no evidence that a christian God exists therefore nothing I do/say should depend on it. Good science (question everything) is done this way (along with other things). Personal beleive: God exists and decides what we do/do not know and nearly everything about our lives. The two do not cancel each other.
I would strongly guess that this is what nearly all the people involved beleive - evidence shows that life will not exist there. But they can greatly beleive that life does though, and continue looking (while some decry the wasted resources on looking for something that does not exist).
off topic: I have always wondered how would one cook one of the animals (seen crabs on tv) that live near the volcanic outputs?
I once read that the movie studio's get the same from a ticket sale whether or not it is a mantinee or not (at the time something like 50 cents or a dollar per ticket - it was a few years back).
Since I don't work in the industry I don't know if that was a local thing (suppsoedly not) or if it is still the case (probably is).
So unfortunatly this will only hurt the local theateres who I bet would like less interference from the MPAA.
I have to disagree, come to Knoxville, Tennessee. We have a shortage of programmers. Go to smaller areas of Tennessee and you will find the same, most likely any of the millions of acres of realativly rural America also has this problem. You will make in the low 30's (average salary is about 16-18 so it's good money for here). Sure your not in the center of tech, you don't have a large city, and you will be surrounded by rednecks. But you will have a house, food, and a few toys (jetskis, cars, computers - you can afford some decent ones). Heck, you may find that you actually like living in slower rural areas.
More properly you can't find a job in the places you want to live - there are plenty if you are willing to go anywhere. Nor will you make "big bucks" - you will make more than a large portion of our population though.
If you have a .doc that doesn't do something it can't handle. i've had enough trouble opening time sheets and such from secretaries that I can' use it. It does not have 100% compatibility.
well, I work in high performance computing (cluster computing more specifically). So squezing the last little bit out of the machines IS my job :)
Of course, I know exactly what the hardware for my clusters is (if you can't guess, I ran an athlon cluster, a pIII xeon cluster, and a p4 - the afore mentioned machines the benchmarks were ran on). When one of a users job takes 4 days to run even a 5% speedup is signifigant (much more signifigant than a recompile). They also tend to try and optimize thier algorithm based on architecture and how the specific compiler optimizes code. For the ones that are good at it it's really neat stuff.
I perfectly agree with what you are saying when it is about general purpose code. Unfortunatly (or fortunatly if, like me, you enjoy doing it) there are a handfull of jobs where this stuff becomes really important.
hmm? no - it's not surprising. But OTOH I will not use an inferior product becuase "they are working on it" (and I also thought I was relativly clear I did not blame the developers of gcc, I said they will get it done in time and they will - they have a very good product that beats many of the commercial products out there). Nor will I pretend they have better performance than what they do. Nor will I allow a misinformed post to go unanswered. That is one of the great strengths of Open source - community feedback is used. Once they get it done - i realise it is not easy - I will be EXTREMELY happy to use it (and I have donated money to projects such as this from time to time). I think I made that clear with my posts - and if not, I do now.
no, the safest bet is to optimize around intel. A large portion of machines are intel. The numbers show that a programed optimised for an intel run pretty good in athlon, athlon optimized run crappy on intel. Gcc will only optimize for PIII's and below well. P4 optimizations also run pretty good (that is close to the optimized veriosn for them) on pIII's and below and athlons. Thus the safest "bet" would be to optimize around the P4 (as pIII vs p4 optimizations may make only 5-10% on a pIII/athlon but 100-300% on a p4 this is even more true).
Should the gcc people optimize well for the p4 (and they will) then I will say the bet goes back with them. Of course this is assuming that the only thing to worry about is speed of generated code (which in many cases is not the most important).
NASCAR (stock car) grew out of bootleggers during prohibition seeing who had the fastest car. Many of the very early drivers were mainly bootleggers. Other racing events had different beginnings.
Not neccessarily the most fair test. First the test were ran on an athlon system. Intel compilers optimized mostly based on the Intel architecture.
:) ). In fact on the P4's with multi-threaded floating point operations we saw well over 300%, none of the tests were worse than 100% faster. On the athlon Gcc was slightly better except in one case were it was signifigantly faster. Eventually we found that gcc 2.x or 3.x does not have good p4 optimization yet (we asked on the devel lists trying to get better numbers as we didn't want to pay for the intel compilers). Of course this was about 6-10 months ago so they could have gotten optimizations in by now.
For example, we ran several benchmarks at work on three computers with gcc 3.1 and the intel compilers. Basically gcc and intel were fairly equal on the pIII xeons (intel had the edge). Gcc was somewhat faster on the athlon 700, and the intel compilers blew gcc away on our p4 2.4 ghz.
So what conclusions can you make? neither intel or gcc are better than the other. As we expected it depends on several factors - one of the main is hardware (wow, who woulda thunk hardware affects optimization
If I had to choose one or the other as "generally producing faster code" I would ask "what hardware are we talking about". And that GREATLY influences the answer.
While I agree that if this is the case they will get a lot of flak for this. But they really should not.
In the first explosion NASA ignored many engineers advice, even ignoring a no-go from them. In this case it was one guy. In thier position - one guy saying this - many saying not a problem - I would have gone with the no problem people also. For some reason (probably that the media focuses on them) people focus on the one or two people that had a correct conclusion and why didn't any one listen to them. Well, that's becuase we can't see the future and they were a VAST minority. You also saw this after 9/11 - one report to the govt was worded exactly as this occured. Of course it was ignored because it was one of thousands of possible terrorist attacks. If you document all possible outcomes one must be correct.
The appropriate quote: "even a blind squirril finds a nut sometimes"
Opera 7.01 displays the page quite nicely. Of course the "about" thing doesn't work :).
Crony capitalism at its worst.
while I agree with the rest of what you said governemnt enforce monopolies are NOT any form of capitalism. Neither is what Enron did (though you didn't say this, many do). It's even arguable that the govt BREAKING up any and all monopolies is capitolism - basically enforcing competition.
The real problem here is that they want all the benefits of a govt protected instituion and all the benefits of a private - with none of the bad stuff that goes with it. That's just looney fucked up utopian economy.