Back in the day, the cutting masters from which LPs were pressed were inferior (the sound had to be modified to make it fit on the LP - longer tracks had to have their levels cut so that the track pitch could be reduced to enable them to be pressed). There is absolutely no way any objective person could believe that the compromised masters, which were modified in order to fit on vinyl, were in any way superior to the clean digital copies - except for pop music which was exposed to the loudness problem.
These days I would have assumed that the same problem would exist so I don't get this about modern LPs at all. If I want the sound of an LP I'll listen to a CD while scrunching a packet of Rice Krispies next to my ear.
I have used another major static analysis tool at work, one of Coverity's competitors. And more than once have had the "if you had paid attention to the static analysis reports this problem could have been solved much more quickly and cheaply" discussion. In one case several weeks were spent chasing a particularly subtle and nasty memory tramper - which was found to be showing up in the analysis results.
False positives are certainly a concern. There is a tradeoff here in terms of dealing with the time spent (re)structuring the program so that they do not occur - a matter for the project lead. The same is true of compiler warnings. Best invest the time to clean them up and configure your build so that it breaks if they occur. You'll kick yourself later if you hit a bug that was revealed by a warning which was ignored.
I know that static analysis cannot catch all problems (duh) but I was curious, as this seems like a fairly classic example of accessing tainted data which in many circumstances the analyzers can spot. The blog post referenced above explains why this is.
I wonder why exactly Coverity did not catch the heartbleed bug. Most likely, the scan wasn't set up to deal with OpenSSL's use of it's own internal heap management routines. That's something that I would have thought should be fixed right away.
Article says "In comparison, a lithium-ion battery typically starts out with a storage capacity of 200 mAh/g but maintains it for the life of the battery, Pyun says."
Hmm. I have lithium ion batteries that can't hold a charge at all.
And it's only partially to do with how they're used. Lithium ion batteries lose capacity while in storage. Which is why you should never buy a used, or a new-old-stock one.
Certainly, the project has obtained its objective of being a simpler, faster compiler free of the FSF's politics.
But it isn't "better than GCC". It is targeted pretty much exclusively at x86 and looking at the project's website many features are missing from other architectures (such as the assembly parser I note). I also see no sign of advanced GCC features such as stack smashing protection, mudflap and so on.
The GPL approach is "Here is something nice I made - you can use it, but if you you have to let me play with you stuff.
This is a grossly inaccurate mischaracterisation.
The GPL approach is just like the BSD "Here is something nice I made - have it and do what you like, hope you have fun!". You can do whatever you want with the code. You can modify it, add features to it etc. You don't have to share the source unless you redistribute it. You repay the community who created the original work with your own enhancements to it.
The idea makes sense in theory. Build binaries that are going to be smaller (32-bit binaries have smaller pointers compared with 64-bit) and faster (because the code is smaller, in theory cache should be used more efficiently and accesses to external memory should be reduced).
But I suspect the problem is that the benefits simply outweigh the inconvenience of having to run with an entirely separate ABI. I doubt the average significant C program spends a lot of time doing direct addressing, and as such I suspect the size benefits of using 32-bit pointers is overstated.
so that the upper chamber stops being a reasonably impartial bunch of old guys who do what's right because its right
Read a few history books for cryin' out loud. There was (and to some extent, still is) nothing reasonable about the House of Lords. Back in the day many of the peers were hereditary ie only there because of their bloodline. At crucial points they interfered to try to block the democratically elected government - over welfare reform (back in Lloyd George's day) over Irish independence/Home Rule, and a zillion other things. Recently they even made noises about blocking gay marriage.
This is an institution with no mandate and no accountability to the electorate. It defies belief that someone could characterize their out of touch interference as some sort of positive influence.
As drives get larger (4TB is now readily available) they are not getting any faster.
Correspondingly, matters such as RAID rebuilds become a real issue. It takes about 12 hours for our NetApp 2020 unit to rebuild a 1TB drive, and that's with relatively low load; so a 2 day rebuild time is probably not far away. The probability of a further failure within that timeframe means you're taking a risk.
The article claims that nobody has published a study of hard drive failure rates before. Wrong, of course - Google did some time ago.
The guy ends the article by talking about SSDs as if they are some sort of unknown quantity. The failure modes of SSDs are much more consistent and better understood even at this early stage. Flash blocks become unusable after a fairly fixed number of rewrites. The drives measure the total number of historic writes to the drive and failure can be predicted ahead of time.
I knew Starship Troopers was a satire after I saw it, shortly after it first came out. I thought everyone knew. Some people are obviously slow on the uptake.
The GOP (and the Dems) turned the 2012 Presidential election into a referendum on Obamacare - and they lost.
If most people oppose the legislation why did they vote for the guy who made it his singular legislative achievement; and why did the guy who vowed to repeal it lose ?
What about laptop chargers too ? Every laptop I've owned has had a different charger plug. In some cases machines made by the same manufacturer have different plugs. Have a set of standard charger ratings and a standard way for the laptop to detect it.
"I feel it would be irresponsible to give my clients digital files as their permanent masters, knowing they would eventually disappear or become unusable, so I won't do it."
The hilarious thing about this is that I don't think anyone even makes analogue tape machines, right now. I checked Fostex, Studer, and Tascam. No tape machines being made.
Given this.. how easy will it be to play an analogue reel to reel tape in a few short years ?
Hell, I currently have no easy means to play my 4-track double speed/dbx cassette multitracks from years ago, and I have to go out of my way if I want to play an LP.
But, I can still access a tar file produced by a machine from 20 years ago, and I'd expect to have no trouble accessing a tar file from 20 years ago. Digital makes it easy to move your data as new technology comes out. Each time you copy your analogue tape you lose some of the original recording.
This is exactly - exactly - what happened at Chernobyl. When the needle hit the end of the scale the bureaucratic idiot in charge insisted that this should be considered the correct reading.
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On the contrary. What we have in filesystems at the moment is fragmentation.
We need people pitching in with stabilizing and fixing one major FS in Linux. It looks to me as if that should be btrfs.
Back in the day, the cutting masters from which LPs were pressed were inferior (the sound had to be modified to make it fit on the LP - longer tracks had to have their levels cut so that the track pitch could be reduced to enable them to be pressed). There is absolutely no way any objective person could believe that the compromised masters, which were modified in order to fit on vinyl, were in any way superior to the clean digital copies - except for pop music which was exposed to the loudness problem.
These days I would have assumed that the same problem would exist so I don't get this about modern LPs at all. If I want the sound of an LP I'll listen to a CD while scrunching a packet of Rice Krispies next to my ear.
Use dbpoweramp/PerfectRip.
When ripping it checksums the CDs and confirms that they match in a database where others have submitted their checksums of the same CD.
I have CDs which date back to the 80s which, according to this checksum, are bit-for-bit accurate.
Try doing that with an LP.
I have used another major static analysis tool at work, one of Coverity's competitors. And more than once have had the "if you had paid attention to the static analysis reports this problem could have been solved much more quickly and cheaply" discussion. In one case several weeks were spent chasing a particularly subtle and nasty memory tramper - which was found to be showing up in the analysis results.
False positives are certainly a concern. There is a tradeoff here in terms of dealing with the time spent (re)structuring the program so that they do not occur - a matter for the project lead. The same is true of compiler warnings. Best invest the time to clean them up and configure your build so that it breaks if they occur. You'll kick yourself later if you hit a bug that was revealed by a warning which was ignored.
I know that static analysis cannot catch all problems (duh) but I was curious, as this seems like a fairly classic example of accessing tainted data which in many circumstances the analyzers can spot. The blog post referenced above explains why this is.
Ah I should have checked that. Thanks.
OpenSSL is on the list of projects scanned by Coverity.
I wonder why exactly Coverity did not catch the heartbleed bug. Most likely, the scan wasn't set up to deal with OpenSSL's use of it's own internal heap management routines. That's something that I would have thought should be fixed right away.
Act as registers ? Huh ?
Article says "In comparison, a lithium-ion battery typically starts out with a storage capacity of 200 mAh/g but maintains it for the life of the battery, Pyun says."
Hmm. I have lithium ion batteries that can't hold a charge at all.
And it's only partially to do with how they're used. Lithium ion batteries lose capacity while in storage. Which is why you should never buy a used, or a new-old-stock one.
That's part of why LLVM is better than gcc today.
Certainly, the project has obtained its objective of being a simpler, faster compiler free of the FSF's politics.
But it isn't "better than GCC". It is targeted pretty much exclusively at x86 and looking at the project's website many features are missing from other architectures (such as the assembly parser I note). I also see no sign of advanced GCC features such as stack smashing protection, mudflap and so on.
The GPL approach is "Here is something nice I made - you can use it, but if you you have to let me play with you stuff.
This is a grossly inaccurate mischaracterisation.
The GPL approach is just like the BSD "Here is something nice I made - have it and do what you like, hope you have fun!". You can do whatever you want with the code. You can modify it, add features to it etc. You don't have to share the source unless you redistribute it. You repay the community who created the original work with your own enhancements to it.
Agreed. And look who's behind it - Poettering. Run for your lives!
Oops, I meant the other way round. The inconvenience outweighs the benefit.
The idea makes sense in theory. Build binaries that are going to be smaller (32-bit binaries have smaller pointers compared with 64-bit) and faster (because the code is smaller, in theory cache should be used more efficiently and accesses to external memory should be reduced).
But I suspect the problem is that the benefits simply outweigh the inconvenience of having to run with an entirely separate ABI. I doubt the average significant C program spends a lot of time doing direct addressing, and as such I suspect the size benefits of using 32-bit pointers is overstated.
so that the upper chamber stops being a reasonably impartial bunch of old guys who do what's right because its right
Read a few history books for cryin' out loud. There was (and to some extent, still is) nothing reasonable about the House of Lords. Back in the day many of the peers were hereditary ie only there because of their bloodline. At crucial points they interfered to try to block the democratically elected government - over welfare reform (back in Lloyd George's day) over Irish independence/Home Rule, and a zillion other things. Recently they even made noises about blocking gay marriage.
This is an institution with no mandate and no accountability to the electorate. It defies belief that someone could characterize their out of touch interference as some sort of positive influence.
On the contrary.
As drives get larger (4TB is now readily available) they are not getting any faster.
Correspondingly, matters such as RAID rebuilds become a real issue. It takes about 12 hours for our NetApp 2020 unit to rebuild a 1TB drive, and that's with relatively low load; so a 2 day rebuild time is probably not far away. The probability of a further failure within that timeframe means you're taking a risk.
From Section 5, Conclusions :
"In this study we report on the failure characteristics of consumer-grade disk drives ... "
The article claims that nobody has published a study of hard drive failure rates before. Wrong, of course - Google did some time ago.
The guy ends the article by talking about SSDs as if they are some sort of unknown quantity. The failure modes of SSDs are much more consistent and better understood even at this early stage. Flash blocks become unusable after a fairly fixed number of rewrites. The drives measure the total number of historic writes to the drive and failure can be predicted ahead of time.
I knew Starship Troopers was a satire after I saw it, shortly after it first came out. I thought everyone knew. Some people are obviously slow on the uptake.
First, it is opposed by more people than favor it
That's a curious notion.
The GOP (and the Dems) turned the 2012 Presidential election into a referendum on Obamacare - and they lost.
If most people oppose the legislation why did they vote for the guy who made it his singular legislative achievement; and why did the guy who vowed to repeal it lose ?
I was more thinking there could be a range of standard PSU sizes ie. 30W, 75W, 90W, 150W etc.
A fine idea.
What about laptop chargers too ? Every laptop I've owned has had a different charger plug. In some cases machines made by the same manufacturer have different plugs. Have a set of standard charger ratings and a standard way for the laptop to detect it.
"I feel it would be irresponsible to give my clients digital files as their permanent masters, knowing they would eventually disappear or become unusable, so I won't do it."
The hilarious thing about this is that I don't think anyone even makes analogue tape machines, right now. I checked Fostex, Studer, and Tascam. No tape machines being made.
Given this .. how easy will it be to play an analogue reel to reel tape in a few short years ?
Hell, I currently have no easy means to play my 4-track double speed/dbx cassette multitracks from years ago, and I have to go out of my way if I want to play an LP.
But, I can still access a tar file produced by a machine from 20 years ago, and I'd expect to have no trouble accessing a tar file from 20 years ago. Digital makes it easy to move your data as new technology comes out. Each time you copy your analogue tape you lose some of the original recording.
This is exactly - exactly - what happened at Chernobyl. When the needle hit the end of the scale the bureaucratic idiot in charge insisted that this should be considered the correct reading.
There is a long tradition of backwards compatibility in the telephone network in the UK.
A phone made 100 years ago will still work. Unbalanced ringing and pulse dialling are all supported.