Hi. I'm a GCC maintainer. I don't work on this part of the compiler, but I can speak to this point:
Its opptimized for the x86.
Nearly all of the optimizations in GCC are not machine-specific. Those kinds of optimizations, ones which are specific to the processor, are called peephole optimizations, and while every little bit helps, they don't make that much of a difference. The big ones are done at an intermediate level, before the compiler "knows" what processor it's using and starts to chunk out the opcodes.
More specifically, unlike the Linux kernel, glibc, and other major projects, GCC is not designed for and targeted primarily at Intel chips. The x86 is just one more back-end like any other; sometimes it falls behind and sometimes it pulls ahead, development-wise.
Those chages may not have been rolled back in to the tree yet,
Some have, some have but won't be in the upcoming 3.0 release in a few weeks, and some are yet to come.
The biggest problem is that many of the really cool optimizations -- the ones that make a big difference and aren't CPU-specific -- have been patented by IBM and other major players.
Shrek and Final Fantasy - THAT is computer animation.
Speaking of which... remember the story that/. ran on using Linux to do more and more rendering in modern movies? (I have to ask because the collective memory of/. lasts about six stories.)
When Shreak enters Duloc (which looks suspiciously like Kings Island) and interrupts Lord F's speech opening the tourney, all the knights turn around in surprise. There's a brief shot of one knight with a penguin on his breastplate.
Aside from that, you just gotta love any movie that can spoof all the fairy tales we ever heard as kids, plus The Matrix, The Lord of the Dance, The Six Million Dollar Man, The Princess Bride, and the WWF.:-)
I couldn't agree with you more. These things are not called prototypes because the word sounds cool. They fail. A lot. And the engineers learn something from every failure.
(Remember that whole "scientific method" thing, all you Computer Science majors here? The bit about designing an experiment, and when it fails, feeding the results back into the next attempt? When was the last time any of you wrote a non-trivial program that didn't have a serious flaw? How long did it take you to find the flaw? Probably longer than the few seconds it took NASA...)
``There's a reason we have three of these (prototypes),'' NASA spokesman Fred Johnson said. ``It's an experimental flight test. If we knew the outcome we wouldn't be learning anything.''
Why do you think we refer to difficult tasks as rocket science?:-)
The SmarTruck, built by the US army [...] able to spill oil [...] behind itself
Only the Bush administration would be able to approve this and pull it off. The next SmarTruck after this will feature high-pressure hoses blasting oil for hundreds of feet to knock down walls, launching "hot-oil ballons" over hills to burst on enemy's heads, and creating an even bigger demand for more oil drilling.
This isn't meant for use as a weapon. It's meant to ensure Bush stays rich even after we have orbiting solar power sats sending us terawatts of free power via microwave beams.
ESPN put this article in which Schilling accused Glanville of "slanderous lies being spewn, about the kind-hearted (computer) dwarf of mine. Stout and strong, yet gentle is he. But he will not allow his good name to be dragged through the mud by a reckless goof of a Paladin."
My respect for the average ESPN baseball player just went up a very small notch.
I've just finished reading the Warlord trilogy by Bernard Cornwell. While it's set in a period (4th and 5th century) considerably older than medieval times, this article immediately reminded me of the trilogy.
One of my favorite things about the books? The insults that the (native) British and Saxon warriors trade before a battle. One of them insults an enemy's mother, and his response was, "At this moment my mother is heating cauldrons for your bones. We are in need of glue, and the bones of sheep, we are told, make the best glue."
Beats the crap outa the typical trash talk found on modern battlefields.:-)
This issue/suggestion has come up every single time there's a spam story (and thus, the SPAM logo is used). Somebody always, and correctly, brings up the Hormel Policy Statement and points out the problem with the logo.
The post is always, and correctly, modded up to 5, because we wouldn't like to see/. get sued.
The/. maintainers blissfully ignore the recommendations altogether. Do they even glance over the comments anymore? Even at Highest Scores First, Threaded, cutoff at +4, they should still have seen this recommendation half a dozen times by now.
If everyone suddenly stopped posting comments, how long would it take them to even notice?
They probably are reasoning that if they give details, other people will do the same thing. However, anyone who's interested in this sort of nonsense probably already knows.
No sense in making it easier for the crackers. "Here's what's broken! We've just narrowed your list of 384 possible exploits to try down to one!"
Perhaps some of the users might have an idea for a fix, or at least a way to protect their own work. Heck, we don't even know the nature of the breach, do we? Was data stolen? Corrupted? What? Inquiring minds have a legitimate need to know.
No, not yet. I know some of the people working SF, they already know how to fix this sort of thing and don't need/. posters telling them how to do their job (including me *grin*). And if I were in their place, I would first fix the server, then fix the other servers that haven't been compromised yet, and only then announce what the problem was.
We /did/ get a record number of trailer downloads
on
Lord of the Trailers
·
· Score: 2
How many downloads of the original LotR trailer from their crappy website were there in the first 24 hours? One point someodd million? I distinctly recall it was well over the number of TPM downloads.
The only way I could see this going badly wrong is when the television images used are recent enough that the joke isn't apparent
That sounds stupid since the show in question is Law & Order. To clarify: I wouldn't really have a problem with new episodes doing this. I might have a problem watching reruns of a two-year old episode with a character drinking soda out of a cup featuring a currently-running movie painted across the cup.
I think this would be hilarious. I'd even like to extend it to non-syndicated shows (e.g., Tom Baker's Doctor offering Davros a green M&M instead of a jelly baby), but that's the kicker with syndication. [Side note: anybody else catch the syndication joke in Spy Kids?]
The only way I could see this going badly wrong is when the television images used are recent enough that the joke isn't apparent, e.g., the Duke selling me a Coors is one thing, former Secretary of State Albright selling me a Coors is something else.
When you can make an April Fool's joke on your corporate website claiming that the gold CD of TR mistakenly contained code that makes Lara's breasts too big, you might just fall into this kind of category...:-)
<pedantic moralism> Tomb Raider should spend less time highlighting her breasts, and more time highlighting good, clean fun like... raiding... um... raiding and desecrating tombs and cemetaries... for treasure... uh, nevvamind </pedantic moralism>
She hated it. She complained, she bitched, she tried to get around it. She also lived long enough to be grateful about it without developing a drug problem or getting pregnant.
The difficult truth of parenting is that you *must* be willing to be the bad guy if you have to be.
I once heard a guy say that sometimes his teenage daughter would say that she hated him for making more rules. His response (he said) was along the lines of, "I love you and respect you so much that I'm going to make sure you can handle freedom when you're an adult, and if that means that you hate me, then that's a price I'm willing to pay."
every dialog appeared in the top-right (which is a long way away at hi-res). In fact, the dialog placement seemed almost random.
Maybe there was a window_placement=random setting somewhere in the global window manager config?
This is currently my biggest problem with KDE2. It doesn't matter where a prorgam tells a subwindow to appear, or where a user tells a window to appear with a -geometry option, the window will damn well appear where the KDE WM tells it to. Which is one of random, smart, or cascade. That's it. There's no choice for "leave it the hell alone."
But hey, I can't complain much. It's not like it's coredumping...
I swear, he must've read perhaps eight words of the article when he wrote that it's the "default" OS. More than once it's made perfectly clear that OS 9 remains the default setting.
/.'s proofreaders must not get paid very well... (When I left work two days ago for lunch, I overheard a conversation in the hallway; one guy was finishing up relating a technical piece of news which was clearly ridiculously bogus, and the other co-worker said, "So, you read that on/. right?" and both guys laughed when the first one answered, "yeah, and the Weekly World News." I would've laughed if I hadn't been drinking soda pop.)
It's pretty lame when your name becomes synonymous with "lack of journalistic standards." Kindof expected for infotainment magazines like WWN, but this is supposed to be a legit site...
Thanks! I had it bookmarked once, but lost it (don't know why). I couldn't even remember Brin's name when I posted that.
I posted a thank-you followup to/. earlier today under a different story, and it got marked Offtopic (politeness is now negative karma on slashdot; the Buddha is spinning in his grave). Let's see if this one gets Redundant or something.
you were born a jedi you die a jedi no getting there inbetween.
I wish I could find that great article by a well-known hard SF writer who slammed EpI for this (and other) reasons. One of the great things about the original movies, he said, was that anyone could aspire to become a Jedi. Old Ben even offered to teach Han Solo (who just scoffed).
Suddenly, with Episode I, you have to be born with the ability to {become a Jedi, inherit the throne, lead your people}. No fair studying and meditating; it's either the true blue blood or nothing at all.
The only clue as to what this stuff does is this tidbit in the AP article:
It addresses the problem of a so-called ``superparamagnetic effect,'' in which data gets lost when the magnetic regions of a disk get too small.
I guess that sortof helps. A little.
So, I take it that antiferromagnetically-coupled dust mites increase the blargle factor of a magnetic region? (For some suitable meaning/value of blargle.)
It's Protector Brennan, making slight alternations to make certain that the probes don't eventually travel to planets with possibly-hostile alien species, thereby alerting them to the existence of humans.
I got woken up by a guy with a vaguely New York accent wanting for me to change long distance plans, and implying that without that level of "protection," something terrible could happen during my next telephone call. Now it all makes sense.
I sysadmin for a government research lab. You'd better believe every
week is an IT crisis week. If it's not crackers in China looking for revenge
for the embassy accident, it's some dumbfsck college kid trying to telnet
past the routers or something.
Those aren't the crises, though (the routers keep those jerks out). The
actual crises begin when the logfiles
get too big to fit on the backup tape. Then I have to scrounge around to find
more tapes, 'cause they won't let me buy any more on the government budget
(yes dammit I'd raise my own grandmother's taxes if it means I have money to
buy backup tapes), and then I have to decide whether the stuff currently on
the tapes can be sacrificed for the holy cause (backups! backups always take priority!). This decision-making process usually requires
some caffeine, and the single soda machine within reach charges a freaking
dollar for a 20-oz bottle, so there's another twelve or thirteen dollars gone.
Slashdot Mirror
Hi. I'm a GCC maintainer. I don't work on this part of the compiler, but I can speak to this point:
Nearly all of the optimizations in GCC are not machine-specific. Those kinds of optimizations, ones which are specific to the processor, are called peephole optimizations, and while every little bit helps, they don't make that much of a difference. The big ones are done at an intermediate level, before the compiler "knows" what processor it's using and starts to chunk out the opcodes.
More specifically, unlike the Linux kernel, glibc, and other major projects, GCC is not designed for and targeted primarily at Intel chips. The x86 is just one more back-end like any other; sometimes it falls behind and sometimes it pulls ahead, development-wise.
Some have, some have but won't be in the upcoming 3.0 release in a few weeks, and some are yet to come.
The biggest problem is that many of the really cool optimizations -- the ones that make a big difference and aren't CPU-specific -- have been patented by IBM and other major players.
Speaking of which... remember the story that /. ran on using Linux to do more and more rendering in modern movies? (I have to ask because the collective memory of /. lasts about six stories.)
When Shreak enters Duloc (which looks suspiciously like Kings Island) and interrupts Lord F's speech opening the tourney, all the knights turn around in surprise. There's a brief shot of one knight with a penguin on his breastplate.
Aside from that, you just gotta love any movie that can spoof all the fairy tales we ever heard as kids, plus The Matrix, The Lord of the Dance, The Six Million Dollar Man, The Princess Bride, and the WWF. :-)
Real? Of course not. More accurate than the "real" media? Definitely.
my bugs don't explode in a giant supersonic fireball and rain shrapnel on the test site.
Clearly you're using the wrong programming language. I understand that this is perfectly normal in, say, Perl. :-)
...on dot-commers continuing to choose unemployment benefits in stock options:
http://www.theonion.com/onion3720/dot-commers_stoc k.html
I couldn't agree with you more. These things are not called prototypes because the word sounds cool. They fail. A lot. And the engineers learn something from every failure.
(Remember that whole "scientific method" thing, all you Computer Science majors here? The bit about designing an experiment, and when it fails, feeding the results back into the next attempt? When was the last time any of you wrote a non-trivial program that didn't have a serious flaw? How long did it take you to find the flaw? Probably longer than the few seconds it took NASA...)
Why do you think we refer to difficult tasks as rocket science? :-)
Only the Bush administration would be able to approve this and pull it off. The next SmarTruck after this will feature high-pressure hoses blasting oil for hundreds of feet to knock down walls, launching "hot-oil ballons" over hills to burst on enemy's heads, and creating an even bigger demand for more oil drilling.
This isn't meant for use as a weapon. It's meant to ensure Bush stays rich even after we have orbiting solar power sats sending us terawatts of free power via microwave beams.
:-)
My respect for the average ESPN baseball player just went up a very small notch.
I've just finished reading the Warlord trilogy by Bernard Cornwell. While it's set in a period (4th and 5th century) considerably older than medieval times, this article immediately reminded me of the trilogy.
One of my favorite things about the books? The insults that the (native) British and Saxon warriors trade before a battle. One of them insults an enemy's mother, and his response was, "At this moment my mother is heating cauldrons for your bones. We are in need of glue, and the bones of sheep, we are told, make the best glue."
Beats the crap outa the typical trash talk found on modern battlefields. :-)
This issue/suggestion has come up every single time there's a spam story (and thus, the SPAM logo is used). Somebody always, and correctly, brings up the Hormel Policy Statement and points out the problem with the logo.
The post is always, and correctly, modded up to 5, because we wouldn't like to see /. get sued.
The /. maintainers blissfully ignore the recommendations altogether. Do they even glance over the comments anymore? Even at Highest Scores First, Threaded, cutoff at +4, they should still have seen this recommendation half a dozen times by now.
If everyone suddenly stopped posting comments, how long would it take them to even notice?
No sense in making it easier for the crackers. "Here's what's broken! We've just narrowed your list of 384 possible exploits to try down to one!"
No, not yet. I know some of the people working SF, they already know how to fix this sort of thing and don't need /. posters telling them how to do their job (including me *grin*). And if I were in their place, I would first fix the server, then fix the other servers that haven't been compromised yet, and only then announce what the problem was.
How many downloads of the original LotR trailer from their crappy website were there in the first 24 hours? One point someodd million? I distinctly recall it was well over the number of TPM downloads.
Yeah, all your fanbase belongs to us. :-)
Sigh. What I get for posting without coffee...
That sounds stupid since the show in question is Law & Order. To clarify: I wouldn't really have a problem with new episodes doing this. I might have a problem watching reruns of a two-year old episode with a character drinking soda out of a cup featuring a currently-running movie painted across the cup.
Now, for more coffee.
I think this would be hilarious. I'd even like to extend it to non-syndicated shows (e.g., Tom Baker's Doctor offering Davros a green M&M instead of a jelly baby), but that's the kicker with syndication. [Side note: anybody else catch the syndication joke in Spy Kids?]
The only way I could see this going badly wrong is when the television images used are recent enough that the joke isn't apparent, e.g., the Duke selling me a Coors is one thing, former Secretary of State Albright selling me a Coors is something else.
When you can make an April Fool's joke on your corporate website claiming that the gold CD of TR mistakenly contained code that makes Lara's breasts too big, you might just fall into this kind of category...
<pedantic moralism>
Tomb Raider should spend less time highlighting her breasts, and more time highlighting good, clean fun like... raiding... um... raiding and desecrating tombs and cemetaries... for treasure... uh, nevvamind
</pedantic moralism>
I once heard a guy say that sometimes his teenage daughter would say that she hated him for making more rules. His response (he said) was along the lines of, "I love you and respect you so much that I'm going to make sure you can handle freedom when you're an adult, and if that means that you hate me, then that's a price I'm willing to pay."
This guy was a retired CIA agent, too.
Maybe there was a window_placement=random setting somewhere in the global window manager config?
This is currently my biggest problem with KDE2. It doesn't matter where a prorgam tells a subwindow to appear, or where a user tells a window to appear with a -geometry option, the window will damn well appear where the KDE WM tells it to. Which is one of random, smart, or cascade. That's it. There's no choice for "leave it the hell alone."
But hey, I can't complain much. It's not like it's coredumping...
I swear, he must've read perhaps eight words of the article when he wrote that it's the "default" OS. More than once it's made perfectly clear that OS 9 remains the default setting.
/.'s proofreaders must not get paid very well... (When I left work two days ago for lunch, I overheard a conversation in the hallway; one guy was finishing up relating a technical piece of news which was clearly ridiculously bogus, and the other co-worker said, "So, you read that on /. right?" and both guys laughed when the first one answered, "yeah, and the Weekly World News." I would've laughed if I hadn't been drinking soda pop.)
It's pretty lame when your name becomes synonymous with "lack of journalistic standards." Kindof expected for infotainment magazines like WWN, but this is supposed to be a legit site...
Thanks! I had it bookmarked once, but lost it (don't know why). I couldn't even remember Brin's name when I posted that.
I posted a thank-you followup to /. earlier today under a different story, and it got marked Offtopic (politeness is now negative karma on slashdot; the Buddha is spinning in his grave). Let's see if this one gets Redundant or something.
I wish I could find that great article by a well-known hard SF writer who slammed EpI for this (and other) reasons. One of the great things about the original movies, he said, was that anyone could aspire to become a Jedi. Old Ben even offered to teach Han Solo (who just scoffed).
Suddenly, with Episode I, you have to be born with the ability to {become a Jedi, inherit the throne, lead your people}. No fair studying and meditating; it's either the true blue blood or nothing at all.
Okay, that makes more sense. I appreciate it.
I guess that sortof helps. A little.The only clue as to what this stuff does is this tidbit in the AP article:
So, I take it that antiferromagnetically-coupled dust mites increase the blargle factor of a magnetic region? (For some suitable meaning/value of blargle.)
It's Protector Brennan, making slight alternations to make certain that the probes don't eventually travel to planets with possibly-hostile alien species, thereby alerting them to the existence of humans.
I got woken up by a guy with a vaguely New York accent wanting for me to change long distance plans, and implying that without that level of "protection," something terrible could happen during my next telephone call. Now it all makes sense.
Same problem here. I found that by viewing the "console output" and watching the Python libraries complain, the problem seemed to be with SSL.
No idea, what, though. All it gave me was "Error 0," and when I reported this to RHN's bugs list, I got no response.
I sysadmin for a government research lab. You'd better believe every week is an IT crisis week. If it's not crackers in China looking for revenge for the embassy accident, it's some dumbfsck college kid trying to telnet past the routers or something.
Those aren't the crises, though (the routers keep those jerks out). The actual crises begin when the logfiles get too big to fit on the backup tape. Then I have to scrounge around to find more tapes, 'cause they won't let me buy any more on the government budget (yes dammit I'd raise my own grandmother's taxes if it means I have money to buy backup tapes), and then I have to decide whether the stuff currently on the tapes can be sacrificed for the holy cause (backups! backups always take priority!). This decision-making process usually requires some caffeine, and the single soda machine within reach charges a freaking dollar for a 20-oz bottle, so there's another twelve or thirteen dollars gone.
Don't talk to me about "planned" crisis week.