Support pylons of the Golden Gate Bridge, have several of them collide at the entrance to the Long Beach shipping terminal, blocking access for a few weeks, run over the deep water loading ports for crude oil. Run over a deep water drilling rig. I can think of any number of terrorist activities one could do. And remember, time and time again, no one really thinks of security until that "oh s___, we've been hacked" moment.
Except they could already do that with a manned vessel if it was at all feasible.
The SYNC system has nothing to do with the powertrain. It's only used for infotainment and climate control.
So you're saying it'll still have a shit transmission.
Ford seems to have their priorities seriously screwed up if that is the case. Shouldn't they make sure the powertrain works before working on the infotainment system.
Just curious, did you lift your foot from the gas while changing gear? I've never driven a (semi-)automatic gearbox car, and wondered if keeping the foot to the floor gas wise affected it's behaviour on when to change gear.
Personally, I'm happy driving stick, clutch and all. No computer to blame for bad gear changes.
The point of ABS is to give you control at the cost of stopping distance.
At the cost of stopping distance in professional race driver hands, but not in the hands of the 99% of mere mortals who can't get the maximum out of braking. For most people, ABS should help reduce breaking distances, as tyres have less friction on the road once they're skidding.
But when the road is covered in ice and snow, you don't need more power
Sure you do: you're compressing the snow. That means more rolling resistance.
Ice might work in your favour, being hard, but then again you need studs to drive on it, which work by puncturing it, so that hardness might also work against you. Can't win:(.
Compressing the snow? Not much power needed for that.
Power is needed for 1) Fast acceleration and 2) High top speed. Traction limits the first, whereas common sense limits the second.
$ apt-cache search saucy linux-generic-lts-saucy - Generic Linux kernel image and headers linux-generic-lts-saucy-eol-upgrade - Complete Generic Linux kernel and headers linux-headers-3.11.0-13 - Header files related to Linux kernel version 3.11.0 linux-headers-generic-lts-saucy - Generic Linux kernel headers linux-image-generic-lts-saucy - Generic Linux kernel image linux-lts-saucy-tools-3.11.0-13 - Linux kernel version specific tools for version 3.11.0-13 linux-lts-saucy-tools-common - Linux kernel version specific tools for version 3.11.0 linux-signed-generic-lts-saucy - Complete Signed Generic Linux kernel and headers linux-signed-generic-lts-saucy-eol-upgrade - Complete Signed Generic Linux kernel and headers linux-signed-image-generic-lts-saucy - Signed Generic Linux kernel image linux-tools-generic-lts-saucy - Generic Linux kernel tools linux-tools-lts-saucy - Linux kernel versioned Tools
Ubuntu maintain backported kernels and Xorg from the later Ubuntu releases, so that current hardware can be supported in a sane manner while keeping the apps stable.
So, my 12.04 laptop is running the kernel and Xorg stack from 13.04 (no doubt 13.10 kernel and Xorg is in the works) all in a 12.04 LTS supported manner.
It doesn't even run binary arithmatic. The whole thing works in decimal units (using a 4 bit ALU) and does pounds/shilling/pence in hardware. Hence why it was originally retired in 1972 (when the UK currency went decimal) I guess.
The material released from Fukushima has got into the water, and into the food people eat and the dirt children play in. It gets inside the body and stays there for decades.
That's why there's an exclusion zone.
It's shocking how ignorant people are about how these things work, and yet still post with imagined authority on Slashdot and get modded up by others who know equally as little.
True, IANANS, but I also like to think I've got a less than sensationalist perspective on the whole affair.
To put the whole incident into perspective, you have to look at the tsunami decimating the entire coastal region, wiping out entire towns and villages, killing thousands and thousands of people. I can't image the salt water influx has done much good for the regional farm land and water tables.
I suspect Fukushima is more a financial burden than a public health burden in the grand scheme of things.
It is not a write through cache. The drive firmware copies frequently read files to flash.
The problem with that claim is that it doesn't jive with it being OS-agnostic. To know what a file are, you have to understand the file system. I can guarantee you that this drive does not understand XFS with external journal, which is what I use.
If you mean frequently read blocks, that's doable, but to have a counter for every block of a 2TB drive would take up far more memory than this device has.
What is feasible is a caching system which expires blocks that haven't been read in a certain amount of time. But that would contradict the claim that it boosts boot speed, because those blocks are generally only read once, at boot time, and would get expunged.
It doesn't have to track every block on the drive, only those it has seen. And it wouldn't need a counter to each block, a simple seen/not-seen is enough. The controller could use an algorithm like:
1. Block first seen - Mark the block address in some list of seen blocks. 2. Block seen list full - Drop the LRU seen block from the list. 3. Block seen again - If the block is in the list of seen blocks, migrate the block contents to the cache. 4. Not enough cache space, evict the LRU block in the cache.
The block seen list need only be maintained in controller memory, to save wear and tear on FLASH, with the FLASH reserved for cached block data and meta-data.
Optimisations could be in place to spot things like sequential reads (which may not benefit from caching) and implementing write back caching for already cached blocks.
Ubuntu got popular because the ordinary people who cannot figure out how a command line works could use it. It looked quite a bit like Windows, which was a good thing. A task bar at the bottom, and a menu with a lot of functionality. Unity is too different, and made it slower too. So, many people seem to switch to Linux Mint.
I mean, even the close/minimize/maximize buttons had to be switched around to the top left... WHY?
Having the task bar at the side makes perfect sense on modern aspect ratio displays. Todays laptops are very genererous in width, but not so generous in height, so wasting height with a taskbar doesn't make sense if it can live on the side. When working in Windows, I move the taskbar to the side, which makes an enormous difference in usable screen on small laptops.
Putting the window decorations on the left just moves them closer to the left taskbar. Left? Right? Arbitrary really.
They're making incredibly unpopular design changes without giving people any real option to do things their own way and driving their own userbase away. Unity and other ass backwardsness pissed me off SO MUCH that I learned to use Arch Linux just to get away from it.
Its the "we're going our own way" decisions - like Mir instead of Wayland, etc. This leaves you thinking - If I keep with Ubuntu I will be out on a limb, forced to use Unity, etc.
How is anyone forced to use Unity in Ubuntu? There's still Kubuntu, lubuntu etc. And even with straight Ubuntu, you can still install whatever desktop you want, and select it at login.
I personally don't mind Unity, I can pretty much work with whatever desktop is installed by default, as I use the apps and not the shell. So long as I can switch easily between apps, who cares.
And I guess most none-technical people just don't care either way. If it works, it works.
I was seriously dissapointed in the raspberry pi. The price is good, but that is about it...
Once I got the pi up and going, I realized that much of the marketing hype about being an 'open' development platform for learning about computers was total garbage. You cannot get a schematic of the board, you cannot get the complete spec. sheet for the processor nor can you get much of the source code. It was not the product that I had hoped it was.
RPi was never sold on it's "openness". It was sold on: - Being accessible. Being cheap was part of that. - Using free software. Being Linux based, and using open programming tools, there are no software licenses to buy. - Having access to hardware IO. The GPIO pins, along with simple programming of said pins, allows a mix of hardware and software projects that would probably not be practical with regular PC. Being so cheap makes them almost disposable should it get fried by mistake.
My RPi has not done much since I bought it, but that is more down to my laziness than any short coming of the hardware. It is merrily sitting next to my television, though flashing it's lights and waiting for me to spring into action.
Because they are fucking it up. Royally. They've enjoyed having a de-facto monopoly position for a long time, but since the rise of mobile devices, everything is becoming even more web-centric and cross-platform than before.
Nothing de-facto about it, they are a criminally convicted monopolist.
In fact, their monopoly is the only thing that keeps them afloat. Windows is still shipped on 90+% of new desktops/laptops. Office makes up a good chunk of those as a bundle. Desktop dominance gave them a foothold in the server market, which they exploited. IE kept people tied to Windows for a long time, but that is crumbling now proper standards are being followed.
Windows and Office are slowly losing their status as requirements to get anything done in business, and they're definitely not needed for home computing any more. Geeks already know this, but the rest of the world is catching on too.
Yay!
I'm slowly bringing the missus to the new world order. All her work is done using LibreOffice, and the next step is to move her onto a Linux desktop.
Yup, they missed the boat. Anyone who has used a SSD will go back to using a regular HD when they stop making SSDs, and the last available one breaks.
SSDs really are the bee's knees.
I though I would be one of those people.
But my latest work laptop has 16GB of RAM, which is basically enough to cache pretty much anything I touch during the day. So once the cache is hot, I don't notice any slowdows from the HDD.
As a result, the laptop is perfectly usable with a HDD once booted (I only ever suspend to RAM). And even then, Ubuntu 12.04 boots pretty quickly from cold, though things like Lotus Notes and Eclipse can be slow to start up.
By contrast, my old WinXP based laptop was totally transformed by an SSD, to the point that I genuinely didn't even notice it thrashing to swap when it ran out of RAM.
Enriched uranium allows it to react faster to the decay which promotes more neutrons, which causes more decay, which causes even more neutrons, and the process continues. Chernobyl - This is also what happened in Japan due to the tsunami, just not a complete failure like Chernobyl (Thank god / science / whatever you believe in that's good)
What are you on about? The Fukushima reactors were scrammed minutes before the tsunami arrived, in response to the original earthquake. The meltdown was the result of the cooling system failure and the residual decay heat. Absolutely nothing like Chernobyl or an atomic weapon.
In summary, get a cheap old laptop/netbook, and configure it accordingly. A laptop with a broken screen can be had cheap as chips.
Bad advice... You're wasting a LOT of power, and you're spending a lot more money, for a device with lesser capabilities.
A lot of power? Hardly. A few watts, especially as the screen is never on these days. I've never measured the power draw, but it probably doesn't go above 10-15W, and that's not much more than newer routers that have to power those internal hubs.
Any wasted power would be on the order of $10-$20 dollars a year? Big deal.
You not only need to buy the laptop, you're also buying USB ethernet adapters, and a separate network switch to connect to it, while home APs/routers have all that built-in.
And 99% (made up figure) of users don't use any of the internal switch ports. Most people connect to the interweb using wireless connections these days. And an Eee PC has a wireless port built in, with an ethernet port for the upstream modem connection. I have the USB ethernet connection to break out to a further wireless router, but I don't necessarily need it, and will retire it now I'm happy with the functioning of the AP functionality.
Just get something with a USB port that is compatible with DD-WRT or OpenWRT. I know an 8-port D-LINK DIR-632(a) has been available for $40 on Amazon for the past 6 months, which I'm sure ends up FAR cheaper than your solution, and will lower your power bill.
Perhaps, but then it has no built in UPS, and if you also use the machine as a NAS, a UPS comes in handy as well.
Cheap home routers tend to have crappy power supplies and inadequate cooling.
I've an old Asus EEE PC 701, augmented with a USB upstream ethernet, that does perfect service as a router with OpenWRT. Built in UPS (which I presume also conditions the power for the mainboard).
Uptime: 612d 3h 48m 4s, though I'll power it down soon to swap the RAM with a machine more deserving of the 2GB installed in there currently.
In summary, get a cheap old laptop/netbook, and configure it accordingly. A laptop with a broken screen can be had cheap as chips.
All a nuclear device would do in space is heat it up, pretty rapidly, maybe enough to thermal-stress-fracture it into several pieces, but nevertheless a nuclear weapon in space is not going to blow an asteroid (or anything else) to bits.
The heat would vapourize the rock, which would at least expand and exert some force on the rest of the asteroid. If the nuke was embedded in the asteroid before exploding, the vapourised rock would expand inside the asteroid, and probably significantly fracture the asteroid, perhaps into several pieces. And those individual pieces, as well as being less mass than the combined mass before (because of the mass lost to vapourised rock) would also be on a different trajectory to before, and so perhaps missing earth entirely. I think that's the point.
Also, don't think of asteroids as necessarily solid rock like you'd find on earth. They are just as likely to be coalesced space rubble, and not very tightly bound together due to insufficient gravity.
The problem is you need to handle two approaches in your parallel programming: (1) Multithreaded across multiple cores, and (2) vectorization. These are the two facets to today’s multicore programming, and your code needs to handle both aspects correctly.
WTF would you need vectorization in a DB for?
I'd stake my dog's life that scalability differenes are not down to compiler switches and SIMD instruction selection. Amdahl's law is more likely to be applicable, and as DBs have many serialization points (disk IO, lock management) it is these that are more likely to affect scalability rather than compiler flags. Xeon Phi? Come on!
Slashdot Mirror
Support pylons of the Golden Gate Bridge, have several of them collide at the entrance to the Long Beach shipping terminal, blocking access for a few weeks, run over the deep water loading ports for crude oil. Run over a deep water drilling rig. I can think of any number of terrorist activities one could do. And remember, time and time again, no one really thinks of security until that "oh s___, we've been hacked" moment.
Except they could already do that with a manned vessel if it was at all feasible.
The SYNC system has nothing to do with the powertrain. It's only used for infotainment and climate control.
So you're saying it'll still have a shit transmission.
Ford seems to have their priorities seriously screwed up if that is the case. Shouldn't they make sure the powertrain works before working on the infotainment system.
Just curious, did you lift your foot from the gas while changing gear? I've never driven a (semi-)automatic gearbox car, and wondered if keeping the foot to the floor gas wise affected it's behaviour on when to change gear.
Personally, I'm happy driving stick, clutch and all. No computer to blame for bad gear changes.
I do!
A pardon implies that he was actually guilty of something worthy of criminalization .
Quite. A pardon for Turing does nothing to condemn the law he was convicted under.
Repealling the law in the first place condemned the law surely?
Wasn't it "aerospace engineers" working in non-metric units that lost the Mars Climate Orbiter?
I don't think NASA would employ someone still working in inches.
The point of ABS is to give you control at the cost of stopping distance.
At the cost of stopping distance in professional race driver hands, but not in the hands of the 99% of mere mortals who can't get the maximum out of braking. For most people, ABS should help reduce breaking distances, as tyres have less friction on the road once they're skidding.
Sure you do: you're compressing the snow. That means more rolling resistance.
Ice might work in your favour, being hard, but then again you need studs to drive on it, which work by puncturing it, so that hardness might also work against you. Can't win :(.
Compressing the snow? Not much power needed for that.
Power is needed for 1) Fast acceleration and 2) High top speed. Traction limits the first, whereas common sense limits the second.
For 13.10 kernel on 12.04:
$ apt-cache search saucy
linux-generic-lts-saucy - Generic Linux kernel image and headers
linux-generic-lts-saucy-eol-upgrade - Complete Generic Linux kernel and headers
linux-headers-3.11.0-13 - Header files related to Linux kernel version 3.11.0
linux-headers-generic-lts-saucy - Generic Linux kernel headers
linux-image-generic-lts-saucy - Generic Linux kernel image
linux-lts-saucy-tools-3.11.0-13 - Linux kernel version specific tools for version 3.11.0-13
linux-lts-saucy-tools-common - Linux kernel version specific tools for version 3.11.0
linux-signed-generic-lts-saucy - Complete Signed Generic Linux kernel and headers
linux-signed-generic-lts-saucy-eol-upgrade - Complete Signed Generic Linux kernel and headers
linux-signed-image-generic-lts-saucy - Signed Generic Linux kernel image
linux-tools-generic-lts-saucy - Generic Linux kernel tools
linux-tools-lts-saucy - Linux kernel versioned Tools
Ubuntu maintain backported kernels and Xorg from the later Ubuntu releases, so that current hardware can be supported in a sane manner while keeping the apps stable.
So, my 12.04 laptop is running the kernel and Xorg stack from 13.04 (no doubt 13.10 kernel and Xorg is in the works) all in a 12.04 LTS supported manner.
It doesn't even run binary arithmatic. The whole thing works in decimal units (using a 4 bit ALU) and does pounds/shilling/pence in hardware. Hence why it was originally retired in 1972 (when the UK currency went decimal) I guess.
The material released from Fukushima has got into the water, and into the food people eat and the dirt children play in. It gets inside the body and stays there for decades.
That's why there's an exclusion zone.
It's shocking how ignorant people are about how these things work, and yet still post with imagined authority on Slashdot and get modded up by others who know equally as little.
True, IANANS, but I also like to think I've got a less than sensationalist perspective on the whole affair.
To put the whole incident into perspective, you have to look at the tsunami decimating the entire coastal region, wiping out entire towns and villages, killing thousands and thousands of people. I can't image the salt water influx has done much good for the regional farm land and water tables.
I suspect Fukushima is more a financial burden than a public health burden in the grand scheme of things.
Sigh, more misdirection and sleight of hand from the nuclear power lobby.
The risk to health in Japan is from ingestion ... . Conflating these real risks with bananas and flights is unethical and misleading.
What do you normally do with your bananas? I certainly ingest mine.
And I don't think athletes will be ingesting much water from the storage tanks, broken or not.
It is not a write through cache. The drive firmware copies frequently read files to flash.
The problem with that claim is that it doesn't jive with it being OS-agnostic. To know what a file are, you have to understand the file system. I can guarantee you that this drive does not understand XFS with external journal, which is what I use.
If you mean frequently read blocks, that's doable, but to have a counter for every block of a 2TB drive would take up far more memory than this device has.
What is feasible is a caching system which expires blocks that haven't been read in a certain amount of time. But that would contradict the claim that it boosts boot speed, because those blocks are generally only read once, at boot time, and would get expunged.
It doesn't have to track every block on the drive, only those it has seen. And it wouldn't need a counter to each block, a simple seen/not-seen is enough. The controller could use an algorithm like:
1. Block first seen - Mark the block address in some list of seen blocks.
2. Block seen list full - Drop the LRU seen block from the list.
3. Block seen again - If the block is in the list of seen blocks, migrate the block contents to the cache.
4. Not enough cache space, evict the LRU block in the cache.
The block seen list need only be maintained in controller memory, to save wear and tear on FLASH, with the FLASH reserved for cached block data and meta-data.
Optimisations could be in place to spot things like sequential reads (which may not benefit from caching) and implementing write back caching for already cached blocks.
But this'd all be OS and FS agnostic.
Ubuntu got popular because the ordinary people who cannot figure out how a command line works could use it. It looked quite a bit like Windows, which was a good thing. A task bar at the bottom, and a menu with a lot of functionality. Unity is too different, and made it slower too. So, many people seem to switch to Linux Mint.
I mean, even the close/minimize/maximize buttons had to be switched around to the top left... WHY?
Having the task bar at the side makes perfect sense on modern aspect ratio displays. Todays laptops are very genererous in width, but not so generous in height, so wasting height with a taskbar doesn't make sense if it can live on the side. When working in Windows, I move the taskbar to the side, which makes an enormous difference in usable screen on small laptops.
Putting the window decorations on the left just moves them closer to the left taskbar. Left? Right? Arbitrary really.
They're making incredibly unpopular design changes without giving people any real option to do things their own way and driving their own userbase away. Unity and other ass backwardsness pissed me off SO MUCH that I learned to use Arch Linux just to get away from it.
Its the "we're going our own way" decisions - like Mir instead of Wayland, etc. This leaves you thinking - If I keep with Ubuntu I will be out on a limb, forced to use Unity, etc.
How is anyone forced to use Unity in Ubuntu? There's still Kubuntu, lubuntu etc. And even with straight Ubuntu, you can still install whatever desktop you want, and select it at login.
I personally don't mind Unity, I can pretty much work with whatever desktop is installed by default, as I use the apps and not the shell. So long as I can switch easily between apps, who cares.
And I guess most none-technical people just don't care either way. If it works, it works.
If it compiles, it must be right.
If it runs, ship it!
I was seriously dissapointed in the raspberry pi. The price is good, but that is about it...
Once I got the pi up and going, I realized that much of the marketing hype about being an 'open' development platform for learning about computers was total garbage. You cannot get a schematic of the board, you cannot get the complete spec. sheet for the processor nor can you get much of the source code. It was not the product that I had hoped it was.
RPi was never sold on it's "openness". It was sold on:
- Being accessible. Being cheap was part of that.
- Using free software. Being Linux based, and using open programming tools, there are no software licenses to buy.
- Having access to hardware IO. The GPIO pins, along with simple programming of said pins, allows a mix of hardware and software projects that would probably not be practical with regular PC. Being so cheap makes them almost disposable should it get fried by mistake.
My RPi has not done much since I bought it, but that is more down to my laziness than any short coming of the hardware. It is merrily sitting next to my television, though flashing it's lights and waiting for me to spring into action.
Because they are fucking it up. Royally. They've enjoyed having a de-facto monopoly position for a long time, but since the rise of mobile devices, everything is becoming even more web-centric and cross-platform than before.
Nothing de-facto about it, they are a criminally convicted monopolist.
In fact, their monopoly is the only thing that keeps them afloat. Windows is still shipped on 90+% of new desktops/laptops. Office makes up a good chunk of those as a bundle. Desktop dominance gave them a foothold in the server market, which they exploited. IE kept people tied to Windows for a long time, but that is crumbling now proper standards are being followed.
Windows and Office are slowly losing their status as requirements to get anything done in business, and they're definitely not needed for home computing any more. Geeks already know this, but the rest of the world is catching on too.
Yay!
I'm slowly bringing the missus to the new world order. All her work is done using LibreOffice, and the next step is to move her onto a Linux desktop.
Yup, they missed the boat. Anyone who has used a SSD will go back to using a regular HD when they stop making SSDs, and the last available one breaks.
SSDs really are the bee's knees.
I though I would be one of those people.
But my latest work laptop has 16GB of RAM, which is basically enough to cache pretty much anything I touch during the day. So once the cache is hot, I don't notice any slowdows from the HDD.
As a result, the laptop is perfectly usable with a HDD once booted (I only ever suspend to RAM). And even then, Ubuntu 12.04 boots pretty quickly from cold, though things like Lotus Notes and Eclipse can be slow to start up.
By contrast, my old WinXP based laptop was totally transformed by an SSD, to the point that I genuinely didn't even notice it thrashing to swap when it ran out of RAM.
SSD good. RAM better!
Enriched uranium allows it to react faster to the decay which promotes more neutrons, which causes more decay, which causes even more neutrons,
and the process continues.
Chernobyl - This is also what happened in Japan due to the tsunami, just not a complete failure like Chernobyl (Thank god / science / whatever you believe in that's good)
What are you on about? The Fukushima reactors were scrammed minutes before the tsunami arrived, in response to the original earthquake. The meltdown was the result of the cooling system failure and the residual decay heat. Absolutely nothing like Chernobyl or an atomic weapon.
Bad advice... You're wasting a LOT of power, and you're spending a lot more money, for a device with lesser capabilities.
A lot of power? Hardly. A few watts, especially as the screen is never on these days. I've never measured the power draw, but it probably doesn't go above 10-15W, and that's not much more than newer routers that have to power those internal hubs.
Any wasted power would be on the order of $10-$20 dollars a year? Big deal.
You not only need to buy the laptop, you're also buying USB ethernet adapters, and a separate network switch to connect to it, while home APs/routers have all that built-in.
And 99% (made up figure) of users don't use any of the internal switch ports. Most people connect to the interweb using wireless connections these days. And an Eee PC has a wireless port built in, with an ethernet port for the upstream modem connection. I have the USB ethernet connection to break out to a further wireless router, but I don't necessarily need it, and will retire it now I'm happy with the functioning of the AP functionality.
Just get something with a USB port that is compatible with DD-WRT or OpenWRT. I know an 8-port D-LINK DIR-632(a) has been available for $40 on Amazon for the past 6 months, which I'm sure ends up FAR cheaper than your solution, and will lower your power bill.
Perhaps, but then it has no built in UPS, and if you also use the machine as a NAS, a UPS comes in handy as well.
Cheap home routers tend to have crappy power supplies and inadequate cooling.
I've an old Asus EEE PC 701, augmented with a USB upstream ethernet, that does perfect service as a router with OpenWRT. Built in UPS (which I presume also conditions the power for the mainboard).
Uptime: 612d 3h 48m 4s, though I'll power it down soon to swap the RAM with a machine more deserving of the 2GB installed in there currently.
In summary, get a cheap old laptop/netbook, and configure it accordingly. A laptop with a broken screen can be had cheap as chips.
...a few seconds to collapse!
Prefab blocks, erected on site, what could possibly go wrong?
All a nuclear device would do in space is heat it up, pretty rapidly, maybe enough to thermal-stress-fracture it into several pieces, but nevertheless a nuclear weapon in space is not going to blow an asteroid (or anything else) to bits.
The heat would vapourize the rock, which would at least expand and exert some force on the rest of the asteroid. If the nuke was embedded in the asteroid before exploding, the vapourised rock would expand inside the asteroid, and probably significantly fracture the asteroid, perhaps into several pieces. And those individual pieces, as well as being less mass than the combined mass before (because of the mass lost to vapourised rock) would also be on a different trajectory to before, and so perhaps missing earth entirely. I think that's the point.
Also, don't think of asteroids as necessarily solid rock like you'd find on earth. They are just as likely to be coalesced space rubble, and not very tightly bound together due to insufficient gravity.
The problem is you need to handle two approaches in your parallel programming: (1) Multithreaded across multiple cores, and (2) vectorization. These are the two facets to today’s multicore programming, and your code needs to handle both aspects correctly.
WTF would you need vectorization in a DB for?
I'd stake my dog's life that scalability differenes are not down to compiler switches and SIMD instruction selection. Amdahl's law is more likely to be applicable, and as DBs have many serialization points (disk IO, lock management) it is these that are more likely to affect scalability rather than compiler flags. Xeon Phi? Come on!