I see internal compiler errors (assertion-style) and crashes quite regularly, as in multiple times per year. Valid language constructs being rejected or invalid ones accepted happens too, although I don't know the language specs well enough to spot most of those. And occasionally a code generation bug (I can remember two from the last 10 years).
How often you find compiler bugs depends a lot on what part of the compiler you're stressing: you'll encounter more bugs on MIPS than on x86, for example, since x86 has far more users. And if you're trying new C++11 features it's far more likely you'll see a bug than when you're compiling plain C.
My e-mail address was harvested years ago: I have to rely on spam filters anyway, so I don't really worry about publishing it in bug trackers.
Registration is a pain, I agree. However, on a project that I participate in (openMSX) we did decide to stop accepting anonymous bugs reports, since the majority of bug reports lacked essential information to be able to reproduce the bug. If there is no way to contact the user who filed the bug, the only thing a developer can do is close it as non-reproducible ("worksforme" in Bugzilla - a very poor choice of words in my opinion).
How well a project responds to bugs differs a lot per project and also per individual bug. Some are fixed years later, some within a day. Some are marked invalid even though they are valid, others are indeed invalid or are duplicates. The compiler projects (GCC, LLVM, Intel C++) have been relatively good with responding to my bug reports, so I will report new bugs to them when I find any. For some other projects, I don't bother anymore unless it's a data destroyer or security issue.
Trolley buses are operational in more than a few cities without supervision or separation. I don't know if the system could scale to a much larger number of vehicles and more routes, but I don't think safety would be the blocking issue.
What about wireless charging: is it feasible to charge a car while it is moving? It might be cost effective on busy roads; cars would still need a battery but a smaller capacity would suffice if it can be recharged while driving.
Re:I don't believe 1% of computers give wrong answ
on
Whose Bug Is This Anyway?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
He said 1% of computers that were used to play Guild Wars gave wrong answers. Gaming PCs are more likely to be overclocked too far, have under-dimensioned power supplies or overheating issues than the average PC. 1% doesn't sound unrealistically high to me.
If you suspect the compiler is generating invalid machine code, try to make a minimal test case for it. If you succeed, file a bug report and add that test case; the compiler developers will appreciate it. If you don't succeed in finding a minimal test case that triggers the same issue, it's likely not a compiler bug but an issue in your program in some place where you weren't expecting it.
The thinking is that there isn't enough useful work to be done.
There is plenty of useful work to be done: children would benefit from smaller classes, the elderly would like more attention, cities could be made prettier, there are lots of things that can be researched. The problem is that no-one is willing to pay for those things: we're always looking for lower costs, lower taxes, not higher quality of life.
Wouldn't they have to check the systems anyway after discovering they were vulnerable? A break-in points out vulnerabilities in a system, but it is not the cause of those vulnerabilities and if one person can break in, others can as well.
If someone else had found the same vulnerabilities earlier and alerted them without breaking in, would that person be charged for the costs of reviewing the systems?
The payback period for solar panels is measured in decades.
That depends on how much sun hours you get, whether you can install the panels at a good angle, how much you pay for electricity and whether there are subsidies (either for installation or a feed-in tariff). I've heard from several people who did the math for their own home that their payback was less than 10 years.
Who lives in a house that long? The resale value of the house is not increased by solar panels, either.
Panels typically come with a 25 year warranty and while their efficiency declines over the years, they'll still be producing a significant amount of power after those 25 years. If you can provide numbers showing how much the solar panels save a month in electricity for this particular house, I doubt all potential buyers would ignore that advantage.
4. What would the batteries cost (taking into consideration substantial increased demand for rare earths, etc)?
For a home, I think lead-acid batteries would suffice: you wouldn't need particularly light or space efficient batteries.
6. Compare that cost to the installation of a conventional generator, either gas/diesel powered or natural gas/propane powered
If you look only at providing emergency power, a conventional generator is probably cheaper. But solar panels would produce power all year long, reducing your regular electricity bill. And it doesn't have to be all or nothing: you could install some solar panels and during outages you could then cope with a lower capacity conventional generator.
(and I'll grant you some appropriate 'market trade rate' penalty for the carbon produced by the generator.)
Unless you have outages very often, I doubt the amount of carbon output by the generator would be significant.
TV/cable box/modem/router comes out to around 300 W (assuming flat-screen).
During a power outage, would there still be a signal for your cable box or modem to receive? I don't know where the last distribution step gets its power from, but if it's from the same grid as your house, it will be down too during an outage.
If you look at efficiency graphs, you'll see that power supplies are typically the most efficient under moderate load: at low and high load the efficiency drops. A typical desktop or home server is idle most of the time, so idle efficiency will have a big impact on the total efficiency. If you over-dimension your power supply, your idle load might be 10% or less of the max rating, which is far from the optimum of the efficiency curve.
I'd recommend getting a power supply that can deliver a bit more than what you need, for example 450 W if you think you need 350 W max. A bit of margin is useful since you might not have found the actual worst case or you might want to add components later. Also it avoids poor efficiency at the high side of the curve when the system is under load.
No, this is an actual low-power CPU, not a desktop part. Wikipedia does mention rebadged Athlon XPs being sold as "Geode NX 2001", but there were real Geode NXs as well.
a) Pretty much every other app store out there has the same deal
The other apps stores saw Apple taking 30% and still getting plenty of developers, so why would they pick a lower percentage?
In my opinion, the problem is not that Apple takes 30%, but that Apple's store is the only one you can use for iOS devices unless you decide to exploit your own device (aka jailbreaking). If third-party app stores were supported, there could be competition between them and there would be an incentive for them to operate on thinner margins. However, with Android this is possible and I haven't heard yet of flourishing 3rd party app stores there.
Fusion is easy at the stellar scale, since gravity takes care of both ignition and containment. On a smaller scale, we'll have to build and maintain machines for that which costs money. How much is hard to predict when we're still in the prototype stage, but there is no guarantee that fusion power will be cheaper than existing forms of power generation.
The challenge is that other carriers can swoop in and pretend to be regular customers, sending precisely the most expensive calls to a provider but using other routes for the rest of the traffic -- "cherry picking". Carriers will typically deactivate the accounts when they discover the cherry picking, but that is a whack-a-mole game.
From the article it seems that is already happening: those low-cost carriers that do not drop the call often forward it to another carrier, who makes the same tradeoff and forwards it again and in the end no-one connects to the recipient.
The only real solutions I can see is to either have uniform termination costs or have different quoted prices for routing a call depending on where that specific call is going. It seems the FCC is choosing the former, but that's a long-term solution. I'm guessing the latter would require significant changes to the systems directing and billing calls so that wouldn't be a short-term solution either.
You can't just telll the LD carriers "you must complete this call" if doing so costs them more than they charge.
The long distance carriers should take "you must complete this call" into account when setting their price.
Likewise, the small rural phone companies must receive enough revenue to maintain their operation.
Currently high fixed costs of maintaining the infrastructure are covered by higher per-call costs instead of higher monthly fees. Of course higher monthly fees won't be popular with people living in rural areas, but it would more accurately reflect the actual costs.
The only way this is going to get fixed is if sane regulation is brought to bear.
According to the article, there is regulation on paper but it is not enforced.
The domain was registered less than a week ago and some of the registration data doesn't look valid. Also nasa.gov says "The next news conference about the NASA Mars rover Curiosity will be held at 9 a.m. Monday, Dec. 3, [...] Rumors and speculation that there are major new findings from the mission at this early stage are incorrect." So it's probably a fake.
My nephews want to play Subway Shuffle every time I bring my iPod Touch. It's a train shuffle game, but with the added twist that each train can only move along tracks of its own color. It's probably a bit too complex for a 3 year old, but in one or two years time your daughter would probably be able to solve the simpler levels. The higher levels are quite challenging even for adults.
2000 W is quite typical for an electric kettle, so 3 kW is not crazy. Of course the kettle runs for only a few minutes, so while you can certainly get over 10 kW peak usage, 10 kW sustained is still enormous.
So, get rid of it. Create a game with a tutorial area, a mid level and an endgame that kills you. Then you restart the game, skip the tutorial and try a different path.
You can end a character without killing it: in our pen and paper role playing group we've had several characters that retired from the adventuring life. It can be an individual goal that has been achieved (avenged my brother's death) or a group goal (defeated the big evil), but at some point it just makes more sense for a character to settle down than to continue as an adventurer.
It could even be done on a world scale: if all players together defeat the big evil or if one faction defeats the other, the server could be put in "archive mode" where you can still log in and enjoy the views but have no further conflicts to resolve. The players would then create a new character and save a different world.
I think the reason no MMO dares to do this is that such an end of a cycle is a moment at which players will ask themselves whether they want to continue playing in the next cycle or drop out. It's a pity in my opinion, as it reduces the meaning of the player's actions, since nothing ever really changes in the game world. It seems to be a trend in mobile games as well: "games" designed to keep the players busy rather than give them memorable experiences.
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I see internal compiler errors (assertion-style) and crashes quite regularly, as in multiple times per year. Valid language constructs being rejected or invalid ones accepted happens too, although I don't know the language specs well enough to spot most of those. And occasionally a code generation bug (I can remember two from the last 10 years).
How often you find compiler bugs depends a lot on what part of the compiler you're stressing: you'll encounter more bugs on MIPS than on x86, for example, since x86 has far more users. And if you're trying new C++11 features it's far more likely you'll see a bug than when you're compiling plain C.
My e-mail address was harvested years ago: I have to rely on spam filters anyway, so I don't really worry about publishing it in bug trackers.
Registration is a pain, I agree. However, on a project that I participate in (openMSX) we did decide to stop accepting anonymous bugs reports, since the majority of bug reports lacked essential information to be able to reproduce the bug. If there is no way to contact the user who filed the bug, the only thing a developer can do is close it as non-reproducible ("worksforme" in Bugzilla - a very poor choice of words in my opinion).
How well a project responds to bugs differs a lot per project and also per individual bug. Some are fixed years later, some within a day. Some are marked invalid even though they are valid, others are indeed invalid or are duplicates. The compiler projects (GCC, LLVM, Intel C++) have been relatively good with responding to my bug reports, so I will report new bugs to them when I find any. For some other projects, I don't bother anymore unless it's a data destroyer or security issue.
Trolley buses are operational in more than a few cities without supervision or separation. I don't know if the system could scale to a much larger number of vehicles and more routes, but I don't think safety would be the blocking issue.
What about wireless charging: is it feasible to charge a car while it is moving? It might be cost effective on busy roads; cars would still need a battery but a smaller capacity would suffice if it can be recharged while driving.
He said 1% of computers that were used to play Guild Wars gave wrong answers. Gaming PCs are more likely to be overclocked too far, have under-dimensioned power supplies or overheating issues than the average PC. 1% doesn't sound unrealistically high to me.
If you suspect the compiler is generating invalid machine code, try to make a minimal test case for it. If you succeed, file a bug report and add that test case; the compiler developers will appreciate it. If you don't succeed in finding a minimal test case that triggers the same issue, it's likely not a compiler bug but an issue in your program in some place where you weren't expecting it.
The thinking is that there isn't enough useful work to be done.
There is plenty of useful work to be done: children would benefit from smaller classes, the elderly would like more attention, cities could be made prettier, there are lots of things that can be researched. The problem is that no-one is willing to pay for those things: we're always looking for lower costs, lower taxes, not higher quality of life.
Wouldn't they have to check the systems anyway after discovering they were vulnerable? A break-in points out vulnerabilities in a system, but it is not the cause of those vulnerabilities and if one person can break in, others can as well.
If someone else had found the same vulnerabilities earlier and alerted them without breaking in, would that person be charged for the costs of reviewing the systems?
The payback period for solar panels is measured in decades.
That depends on how much sun hours you get, whether you can install the panels at a good angle, how much you pay for electricity and whether there are subsidies (either for installation or a feed-in tariff). I've heard from several people who did the math for their own home that their payback was less than 10 years.
Who lives in a house that long? The resale value of the house is not increased by solar panels, either.
Panels typically come with a 25 year warranty and while their efficiency declines over the years, they'll still be producing a significant amount of power after those 25 years. If you can provide numbers showing how much the solar panels save a month in electricity for this particular house, I doubt all potential buyers would ignore that advantage.
If her fridge uses over 300 W average (not peak), I suggest she invests in buying a new fridge.
4. What would the batteries cost (taking into consideration substantial increased demand for rare earths, etc)?
For a home, I think lead-acid batteries would suffice: you wouldn't need particularly light or space efficient batteries.
6. Compare that cost to the installation of a conventional generator, either gas/diesel powered or natural gas/propane powered
If you look only at providing emergency power, a conventional generator is probably cheaper. But solar panels would produce power all year long, reducing your regular electricity bill. And it doesn't have to be all or nothing: you could install some solar panels and during outages you could then cope with a lower capacity conventional generator.
(and I'll grant you some appropriate 'market trade rate' penalty for the carbon produced by the generator.)
Unless you have outages very often, I doubt the amount of carbon output by the generator would be significant.
TV/cable box/modem/router comes out to around 300 W (assuming flat-screen).
During a power outage, would there still be a signal for your cable box or modem to receive? I don't know where the last distribution step gets its power from, but if it's from the same grid as your house, it will be down too during an outage.
If you look at efficiency graphs, you'll see that power supplies are typically the most efficient under moderate load: at low and high load the efficiency drops. A typical desktop or home server is idle most of the time, so idle efficiency will have a big impact on the total efficiency. If you over-dimension your power supply, your idle load might be 10% or less of the max rating, which is far from the optimum of the efficiency curve.
I'd recommend getting a power supply that can deliver a bit more than what you need, for example 450 W if you think you need 350 W max. A bit of margin is useful since you might not have found the actual worst case or you might want to add components later. Also it avoids poor efficiency at the high side of the curve when the system is under load.
No, this is an actual low-power CPU, not a desktop part. Wikipedia does mention rebadged Athlon XPs being sold as "Geode NX 2001", but there were real Geode NXs as well.
I'm running a Debian 686-pae kernel on a Geode NX without problems. It seems the Geode LX doesn't support pae though.
a) Pretty much every other app store out there has the same deal
The other apps stores saw Apple taking 30% and still getting plenty of developers, so why would they pick a lower percentage?
In my opinion, the problem is not that Apple takes 30%, but that Apple's store is the only one you can use for iOS devices unless you decide to exploit your own device (aka jailbreaking). If third-party app stores were supported, there could be competition between them and there would be an incentive for them to operate on thinner margins. However, with Android this is possible and I haven't heard yet of flourishing 3rd party app stores there.
Fusion is easy at the stellar scale, since gravity takes care of both ignition and containment. On a smaller scale, we'll have to build and maintain machines for that which costs money. How much is hard to predict when we're still in the prototype stage, but there is no guarantee that fusion power will be cheaper than existing forms of power generation.
The challenge is that other carriers can swoop in and pretend to be regular customers, sending precisely the most expensive calls to a provider but using other routes for the rest of the traffic -- "cherry picking". Carriers will typically deactivate the accounts when they discover the cherry picking, but that is a whack-a-mole game.
From the article it seems that is already happening: those low-cost carriers that do not drop the call often forward it to another carrier, who makes the same tradeoff and forwards it again and in the end no-one connects to the recipient.
The only real solutions I can see is to either have uniform termination costs or have different quoted prices for routing a call depending on where that specific call is going. It seems the FCC is choosing the former, but that's a long-term solution. I'm guessing the latter would require significant changes to the systems directing and billing calls so that wouldn't be a short-term solution either.
Are huge TVs a US thing? I never saw a DLP TV in anyone's home, only at trade shows.
You can't just telll the LD carriers "you must complete this call" if doing so costs them more than they charge.
The long distance carriers should take "you must complete this call" into account when setting their price.
Likewise, the small rural phone companies must receive enough revenue to maintain their operation.
Currently high fixed costs of maintaining the infrastructure are covered by higher per-call costs instead of higher monthly fees. Of course higher monthly fees won't be popular with people living in rural areas, but it would more accurately reflect the actual costs.
The only way this is going to get fixed is if sane regulation is brought to bear.
According to the article, there is regulation on paper but it is not enforced.
The domain was registered less than a week ago and some of the registration data doesn't look valid. Also nasa.gov says "The next news conference about the NASA Mars rover Curiosity will be held at 9 a.m. Monday, Dec. 3, [...] Rumors and speculation that there are major new findings from the mission at this early stage are incorrect." So it's probably a fake.
My nephews want to play Subway Shuffle every time I bring my iPod Touch. It's a train shuffle game, but with the added twist that each train can only move along tracks of its own color. It's probably a bit too complex for a 3 year old, but in one or two years time your daughter would probably be able to solve the simpler levels. The higher levels are quite challenging even for adults.
The "100%" comes from a tweet by Peter R de Vries, a crime reporter. The spokeswoman for the institute that did the actual DNA matching (NFI) said there is no such thing as 100% certainty. (both links are in Dutch)
2000 W is quite typical for an electric kettle, so 3 kW is not crazy. Of course the kettle runs for only a few minutes, so while you can certainly get over 10 kW peak usage, 10 kW sustained is still enormous.
So, get rid of it. Create a game with a tutorial area, a mid level and an endgame that kills you. Then you restart the game, skip the tutorial and try a different path.
You can end a character without killing it: in our pen and paper role playing group we've had several characters that retired from the adventuring life. It can be an individual goal that has been achieved (avenged my brother's death) or a group goal (defeated the big evil), but at some point it just makes more sense for a character to settle down than to continue as an adventurer.
It could even be done on a world scale: if all players together defeat the big evil or if one faction defeats the other, the server could be put in "archive mode" where you can still log in and enjoy the views but have no further conflicts to resolve. The players would then create a new character and save a different world.
I think the reason no MMO dares to do this is that such an end of a cycle is a moment at which players will ask themselves whether they want to continue playing in the next cycle or drop out. It's a pity in my opinion, as it reduces the meaning of the player's actions, since nothing ever really changes in the game world. It seems to be a trend in mobile games as well: "games" designed to keep the players busy rather than give them memorable experiences.
If he's getting paid Facebook stock that he can't sell for two years, there's no telling how much it will be worth by the time he can sell it.