when you focus on getting gcc to be cross-platform
I still don't see why there aren't advanced CPU specific forks of the gcc. Is it just lack of developer interest or something related to the attitude of the main tree developers?
I do agree that portability is highly recommendable and that it is one of the strong points of GCC.
I code computationally intensive number crunching code and I had to buy Intel's compiler for Intel and Compaq's compiler for Alpha just to get some performance. And I'm talking about 10-20% difference.
I travel extensively and spend long periods of time abroad often in rather "rustic" apartments with no TVs or DVD standalone units.
All work and no play, however, makes Jack a dull boy so I often take my favourite DVDs (sometimes I rent more recent films) with me and watch them on my laptop.
It isn't an IMAX experience but it sure is better than nothing.
The problem is, the experiments so far have been equivocal.
It is worth noticing that the effect of electromagnetic fields on a human body have been studied long before the cellphones became an issue.
There is plenty of evidence from decades long studies showing that electromagnetic fields under the high power lines, for instance, have no adverse an effect on your health. Yet there are people who insist that since the study was "only" decades long, there is still a possibility that the powerlines cause cancer. Yeah, it is possible but very unlikely.
In the same way, there is also plenty of evidence that inoculating children against common disesases not in general harmful but a wise course of action.
Yet, there are people who refuse to have their children inoculated against polio, for instance, because in very rare cases the shot can actually cause harm to the child. The odds are very much against such a reaction, but the chance exists nevertheless.
The problem here is blindness to numbers and failure to understand what very small probabilities actually mean. People "feel" that flying is more dangerous than driving your own car across the continent. Telling them the probabilities of having a fatal accident on the road and in the air will not change their mind. They say: "Yeah, but still what if the plane crashes" without realizing that there is a big if in that sentence. They would only accept a unequivocal result.
In the same way, people wait and wait and wait for a study that would prove unequivocally that the cellphones are safe or that they are not. Well, there is most likely never going to be such a study and if there is, it's more likely a fraud. The best we can ever say is that cellphones are most likely harmless. I'd trust this enough to give cellphones to my kids.
And we do need to accept that it is reasonable for people to be concerned.
Indeed, but those concerns must be met with a reasonable and objective analysis of the physics (like why the ionization is not an issue with this kind of radiation) and the probabilities involved.
Patric McGoohan had a serious phobia about physical contact the only episode in which his character showed any romantic interest in women was in the "Do not forsake me, oh my darling" in which the character was actually played by someone else.
Hey! You're right. How come The Village missed that particular trick? The Number Six would have talked in no time if he would have been convinced he had a wife.
I don't claim to be a physicist. I am a physicist.
What makes you think that a hole can be opened in the "spacetime" in the first place?
I hope so. I am not an expert in general relativity and, in fact, I would appreciate if such an expert would correct me if I am wrong with this.
Are you sure there is a "spacetime" at all?
Well, unless all the experimental evidence for the relativistic phenomena is totally wrong, I would say that the spacetime is a very strong hypothesis.
I was once caught off guard by a philosophy student in my physics class. She asked me if the trouble with waves and particles is a "Wittgensteinian problem". That is, do we lack the proper language (=what is both a particle and a wave) to describe what's going on at the quantum level.
The more dense (colder) air in an enclosed space behaves like you would expect from any mass. When you brake, it flows forward. When you accelerate, it flows backwards. A lighter mass like helium simply floats in another direction to compensate for the change.
and, most importantly, be within the reach of students
Ok, yeah, right.
As a non-native English speaker I obviously misinterpreted that sentence. "Within the reach of students" can mean either theoretically or experimentally.;-)
which leaves out Stern-Gerlach or Michelson-Morley
Uh, what's the target group? I teach general freshman physics at my university and discuss both SG and MM experiments in detail.
Anyway, I nominate the first nuclear explosion as the greatest ever experiment. Until a hole is successfully opened in the spacetime, splitting the atom is the greatest scientific achievement ever.
There is, in fact, a fabulous book on this subject. What makes it such a great book is that it doesn't depict the making of the atomic so much as a rigorous scientific project, but rather as a social, political, random and very much a human achievement.
alot of the cell phones today are spread spectrum phones - so they spread their energy out - so the Watts/Hz is pretty small
You're right. However, the same total energy is still radiated out even if it is spread over a larger frequency range. The total energy absorbed by the brain is an integral (too bad there aren't math html tags...) of the power per frequency weighed by the (unknown?) frequency dependent absorption coefficient of the skull and the brainmatter.
A worst-case estimate can be obtained by assuming that the brain absorbs all frequencies at an efficiency of 1. Even then the total power, a few milliwatts, is not nearly enough to heat the relatively massive brain in any significant way. Local heat generation is quickly dissipated by the rest of the brain. Furthermore, in reality most of the energy is not even absorbed by the brain, thus giving plenty of safety margin.
As far as I can see the only way the cellphones can have an adverse health effect on the user is that some kind of a weird, extremely unlikely interference takes place inside your skull.
why on earth should they suddenly become essential?
Who said anything about essential? Cellphones are simply damn convenient.
If I am expecting a call, I don't have to babysit my landline phone but can do something useful somewhere else instead. If I don't want to be disturbed at a certain time, I can switch my cellphone off or to silent and all the calls are automatically forwarded to the cellphone's answering machine. Text messaging is an excellent way for communicating non-urgent messages.
and how much are made available for the general public (as in _readable articles with a sound conclusion) ?
What the general public does not understand that there really never is "a sound conclusion" in science. Whenever us scientists talk about conclusions, we mean "These are our conclusions given the present evidence".
also in europe people think it's perfectly save to even give your children these devices.
Yeah, so.
At present there is no hard, concrete evidence that would suggest that the cellphone radiation is harmful. This is backed by common sense physics (see my previous post).
Slashdot Mirror
I still don't see why there aren't advanced CPU specific forks of the gcc. Is it just lack of developer interest or something related to the attitude of the main tree developers?
I do agree that portability is highly recommendable and that it is one of the strong points of GCC.
I code computationally intensive number crunching code and I had to buy Intel's compiler for Intel and Compaq's compiler for Alpha just to get some performance. And I'm talking about 10-20% difference.
How was my post redundant? This is unfair moderation in action.
The congressman's letter was already posted twice.
Just out of curiosity, what was your CPU choice? CPU cooling makes most of the noise these days...
All work and no play, however, makes Jack a dull boy so I often take my favourite DVDs (sometimes I rent more recent films) with me and watch them on my laptop.
It isn't an IMAX experience but it sure is better than nothing.
The Church of Scientology will most likely sue these people for stealing their proprietary and highly secret E-meter technology.
Sue the god and win the case by forfeit when he (the defendant) fails to show up.
More likely a soft, marshmellowy thing.
Senator Hollings seems to be everywhere these days...
It is worth noticing that the effect of electromagnetic fields on a human body have been studied long before the cellphones became an issue.
There is plenty of evidence from decades long studies showing that electromagnetic fields under the high power lines, for instance, have no adverse an effect on your health. Yet there are people who insist that since the study was "only" decades long, there is still a possibility that the powerlines cause cancer. Yeah, it is possible but very unlikely.
In the same way, there is also plenty of evidence that inoculating children against common disesases not in general harmful but a wise course of action. Yet, there are people who refuse to have their children inoculated against polio, for instance, because in very rare cases the shot can actually cause harm to the child. The odds are very much against such a reaction, but the chance exists nevertheless.
The problem here is blindness to numbers and failure to understand what very small probabilities actually mean. People "feel" that flying is more dangerous than driving your own car across the continent. Telling them the probabilities of having a fatal accident on the road and in the air will not change their mind. They say: "Yeah, but still what if the plane crashes" without realizing that there is a big if in that sentence. They would only accept a unequivocal result.
In the same way, people wait and wait and wait for a study that would prove unequivocally that the cellphones are safe or that they are not. Well, there is most likely never going to be such a study and if there is, it's more likely a fraud. The best we can ever say is that cellphones are most likely harmless. I'd trust this enough to give cellphones to my kids.
And we do need to accept that it is reasonable for people to be concerned.
Indeed, but those concerns must be met with a reasonable and objective analysis of the physics (like why the ionization is not an issue with this kind of radiation) and the probabilities involved.
You forgot the "cx".
I doubt that. I just watched the entire series.
Patric McGoohan had a serious phobia about physical contact the only episode in which his character showed any romantic interest in women was in the "Do not forsake me, oh my darling" in which the character was actually played by someone else.
Hey! You're right. How come The Village missed that particular trick? The Number Six would have talked in no time if he would have been convinced he had a wife.
Yet we know that mathematics can never be completely self-consistent...
Nevertheless, I would still nominate the explosion over the reactor. It has the proper flair of a breakthrough physics experiment.
What makes you think that a hole can be opened in the "spacetime" in the first place?
I hope so. I am not an expert in general relativity and, in fact, I would appreciate if such an expert would correct me if I am wrong with this.
Are you sure there is a "spacetime" at all?
Well, unless all the experimental evidence for the relativistic phenomena is totally wrong, I would say that the spacetime is a very strong hypothesis.
I was once caught off guard by a philosophy student in my physics class. She asked me if the trouble with waves and particles is a "Wittgensteinian problem". That is, do we lack the proper language (=what is both a particle and a wave) to describe what's going on at the quantum level.
The more dense (colder) air in an enclosed space behaves like you would expect from any mass. When you brake, it flows forward. When you accelerate, it flows backwards. A lighter mass like helium simply floats in another direction to compensate for the change.
Ok, yeah, right.
As a non-native English speaker I obviously misinterpreted that sentence. "Within the reach of students" can mean either theoretically or experimentally. ;-)
Uh, what's the target group? I teach general freshman physics at my university and discuss both SG and MM experiments in detail.
Anyway, I nominate the first nuclear explosion as the greatest ever experiment. Until a hole is successfully opened in the spacetime, splitting the atom is the greatest scientific achievement ever.
There is, in fact, a fabulous book on this subject. What makes it such a great book is that it doesn't depict the making of the atomic so much as a rigorous scientific project, but rather as a social, political, random and very much a human achievement.
You're right. However, the same total energy is still radiated out even if it is spread over a larger frequency range. The total energy absorbed by the brain is an integral (too bad there aren't math html tags...) of the power per frequency weighed by the (unknown?) frequency dependent absorption coefficient of the skull and the brainmatter.
A worst-case estimate can be obtained by assuming that the brain absorbs all frequencies at an efficiency of 1. Even then the total power, a few milliwatts, is not nearly enough to heat the relatively massive brain in any significant way. Local heat generation is quickly dissipated by the rest of the brain. Furthermore, in reality most of the energy is not even absorbed by the brain, thus giving plenty of safety margin.
As far as I can see the only way the cellphones can have an adverse health effect on the user is that some kind of a weird, extremely unlikely interference takes place inside your skull.
Carly's kind of hot, too.
Like 911 (or 112 in Europe)?
why on earth should they suddenly become essential?
Who said anything about essential? Cellphones are simply damn convenient.
If I am expecting a call, I don't have to babysit my landline phone but can do something useful somewhere else instead. If I don't want to be disturbed at a certain time, I can switch my cellphone off or to silent and all the calls are automatically forwarded to the cellphone's answering machine. Text messaging is an excellent way for communicating non-urgent messages.
Simply put: cellphones give you more freedom.
What the general public does not understand that there really never is "a sound conclusion" in science. Whenever us scientists talk about conclusions, we mean "These are our conclusions given the present evidence".
also in europe people think it's perfectly save to even give your children these devices.
Yeah, so.
At present there is no hard, concrete evidence that would suggest that the cellphone radiation is harmful. This is backed by common sense physics (see my previous post).