. However, any _compiler_ worth its salt will try to use every bit of microcode it can to optimize for a given architecture or microarchitecture
Actually, compilers try to avoid micro-coded instructions like the plague. On most x86 processors, micro-coded instructions can only issue out of a single issue slot at a fixed rate, and hence their use drastically lowers performance. Modern compilers generally treat the x86 like a RISC with a weird condition register and fancier addressing modes.
It's actually quite likely. CPU errata tend to effect corner cases. Eg: CPU returns wrong data if you read from an I/O port while servicing a TLB miss (or something like that). These bugs tend to be highly timing and sequence dependent, and its very likely that no two OSs use exactly the same sequence that triggers the bug.
Entertainingly enough, academia is also one of the few places where you still see real capitalists (and they might even eat lunch with the socialists!). The business world has been taken over by a pseudo-capitalism that's perfectly in favor of anti-capitalistic things like subsidies and government monopolies as long as it benefits them. The populace has been absorbed by some sort of neo-populism (exemplified by talking heads like Lou Dobbs). University economics departments are some of the few places where you'll find people who stick to capitalistic principles, instead of some conveniently-defined mutation thereof.
A person in China wanting to purchase a CD (from for example, Amazon.com) would not be able to afford it - because that CD would still cost the same US$$ to purchase from China/India/Fiji/Indonesia that it would to purchase it from the UK or from the USA.
A person in China working in a sweatshop is not in the market for CDs.
What you are actually advocating is that people in the "Third World" should not expect the same standard of living as people in the "First World"
Of course they shouldn't. What the hell planet do you live on where everyone can expect the same standard of living?
Those corporations should be required to pay the same wages in US$$ as they should be paying in Europe or the USA.
Then you'd have a few factory workers living like kings*, and a whole lot of unemployed people who would otherwise have work now being unable to sustain their families. Yeah, that's a great idea!
*) A median American salary of $45,000 is enough to buy a house in the most exclusive gated community in Bangladesh, send your children to private English schools, and maintain a cook, a maid, a nanny, and someone to handle odd-jobs.
Why shouldn't I find it acceptable? Out of a sense of guilt for being born into a different class of society? Where is the rationality in feeling guilt for the workings of random chance? Is it fair that I make more in an hour than a Bengali textile worker does in a month? No, but that's just the nature of the world. There is no point in pretending that the world can be some sort of utopian place where the efforts of all are rewarded on the same level. By sheer bad luck, many people in the world will get a very bad lot in life. The only things that can be done is to maximize the quality of life of these people within the scope of what is realistic. And in that context there is no reason to feel guilty for buying shoes made by someone making $25 a month, because the brutal reality is that the alternative for her would've been working just as hard on a small village farm, just to feed herself.
And the real issue is way beyond the short-term comparison between a low-paying job and even lower-paying farm work. Industrialization, as painful as it is, is the only way to move a country like Bangladesh forward. Urbanization, commerce, industry, serve not only immediate monetary needs, but change the fundamental nature of society, modernizing it, disabusing people of backwards notions, integrating people within the larger world in which we live. Fifty years ago, most Bengalis were working hard for low pay in village farms. Now, many are working hard for low pay in industry, but belong to unions and can get to a hospital in an emergency and maybe send their children to school. Fifty years hence, who knows?*
*) Fifty-years hence Bangladesh will probably still be exceedingly poor, but for reasons completely unrelated to economics. The government is fantastically corrupt, and eating into a large portion of whatever progress industry and commerce have been bringing to the country.
While sweatshop labor is not something that spoiled westerners find particularly comfortable, there is a flip-side to the issue. That flip-side is that at least these people are working, and usually at least making enough to feed their families. The alternatives are worse, to say the least.
Bleeding-heart westerners often this ridiculous notion that workers should be treated well everywhere in the world. This is an idealism that does more harm than good. It is far preferable to have 100 workers working for a barely livable wage than to have 20 workers working for a fair wage. The simple fact is that the cost of progress is high, but the cost of allowing progress to pass you by is even higher. Consider the textile industry in a place like Bangladesh (where my parents are from). Most westerners would look at the working conditions in these places and be appalled. Yet, most Bengalis will tell you that the textile industry has been on the whole good for the country. It has employed women who would otherwise be toiling away in rural areas for no pay at all. It brings them into urbanized areas, which as filthy as they are, are still preferable to the rural backwaters which they left behind. It brings them closer to clinics and schools, however poor they are, wheras before they would've had no access to these services at all.
Westerners remember with horror the days when their own cities were like this, and feel that allowing such conditions to exist in the modern world is not acceptable. But the world is not modern for everybody. While it's 2007 for people in the US and Europe, it's 1920 for people in places like Bangladesh. There is no alternative for these societies but to deal with the price of progress, in the hopes that one day they can enter the modern world. If they are successful in this endeavor, then decades from now they too can have the luxury of being able to turn down work just because the conditions are below standard.
Intel's and NVIDIA's software guys are generally recognized as being pretty competent. ATI's guys have a decidedly worse reputation, which really is deserved given their historical performance (or lack thereof).
Beats me. It's just that almost every serious programmer I know prefers the sharp 1-pixel thick rendering of non-antialiased fonts. I personally think anti-aliasing is easier on the eyes too, but I'm young enough that I never did much coding on a system without AA.
Emacs is a programmers editor. Most programmers don't like to stare at anti-aliased code. That said, I'm firmly in the anti-aliased camp, which is fine for me because the various Mac builds support anti-aliasing (I believe the Windows ports do as well).
Emacs is a really powerful tool once you get the hang of it. It has absolutely unparalleled support for chopping/dicing/splicing and otherwise throwing text around really fast without ever taking your hands of the keyboard. And Emacs has language-aware modes for a whole bunch of different languages.
I used to use vi when I was on linux, and it was an excellent tool. When I first got my Macs, I used TextMate, which was all the rage among Mac users. Somebody turned me on to Emacs not too long ago, and I haven't looked back. It's just very well-designed for working on large amounts of code, and scales way better than TextMate ever did (tabs become useless when you're working on dozens of files!).
That said, the learning curve for Emacs is *steep*. It's definitely a "hands off the mouse" kind of system. It took me a month and 2000 lines of code before I was really comfortable with it, and I still haven't tapped a fraction of its full power!
Entertainingly enough, even native English speakers can never get prepositions correct. A more correct translation follows.
ISRO, [the] Indian Space Research Organization, is planning to send a robot [on a] mission to the moon. It is probably going to be made by students and profs. of IIT-Kanpur (for those who don't know, it's the Indian equivalent [of] MIT). The two-legged robot, fitted with sophisticated sensors and high-resolution cameras, is capable of recording information and images using laser beams. It can also detect the distance [to] a hindrance, enter a small crater, [and] bring surface samples and return high resolution images to the lunar vehicle. [] It seems to be pretty good. Although it needs some more sophistication, the cost of it is less than $50,000. Now [that's] a penny relative to the obscene amounts of money NASA spends every day. That [money] can be saved to make this world a whole lot better. Way to go ISRO.
Some of the sentences are incredibly tortured, but not incorrect per se./not a native English speaker
"The market has spoken" argument carries a very big implicit assumption: that the market in question is free under the rules of capitalistic theory. Very few markets are free in the real world. The market for intellectual property is inherently not a free market --- the whole idea of copyright is that a copyright is a temporary monopoly over a particular work; a subversion of the free market in order to provide an incentive for creation of new works.
Thus, you're applying a theory to a market which is inherently incompatible with the assumptions of that theory. Any conclusion you reach is meaningless.
Yeah, the midseason breaks are full of stupid. Sci-Fi Friday was awesome (two hours of StarGate, then BSG), but they kept dicking with the formula (long haituses) before breaking it up entirely.
FireFly was great, but BSG is good too. The shows were very different. The sci-fi aspects and dialogue in FireFly were better, while the drama and plots are better in BSG.
I actually quite like the "science" in BSG. It's very minimal, and it avoids driving the plot. ST: VOY drove me insane with all the shit science they just made up. Obviously, science fiction is supposed to be fictional science, but good in good Sci-Fi like BSG, it seems like the science has internally-consistent rules, while in a lot of bad Sci-Fi (unfortunately most modern Star Trek shows, save for DS9), the writers pay no attention to consistency, and just make up new pseudo-scientific things to work themselves out of complicated plots.
I agree with this one to an extent. This season of BSG has been a little slow, but I just watched the second half of season 3 on iTunes, and it was quite good. They explore a lot of themes that I haven't really seen explored in a mainstream sci-fi show (eg: the union thing), and most of it is genuinely interesting.
I just watched the first 10 episodes of Voyager, season 2, and it floors me that it made it another five seasons beyond that. I also just caught up on the current season of BSG, and I'm equally floored that they only have one more left. How can such utter dreck be allowed to continue, while a great show can't?
You're basically saying that you never have to prioritize your principles, which must be nice for you. What is this magical set of COMPLETELY ORTHOGONAL principles that you've devised? Of course, if you're principles aren't indeed pairwise consistent, then what the heck do you do when they conflict? Because that's precisely when you have to accept a small fascism to fight a bigger one.
But that's the whole point. You can't talk about the importance of freedom and then not allow people to dismiss it.
I don't personally care if an immigrant doesn't believe in our principles of freedom. What I care about is what happens when they impose those beliefs on the rest of us. It happens through various vectors, through complaints in newspapers (the Muhammad cartoons in the Netherlands), parents complaining about certain things in schools, and ultimately through voting. We're not seeing much of it now in the United States, particularly from Muslims, who are highly apolitical, but we will eventually.
Everything about societies based on the ideals of the French revolution is designed to maintain the sovereignty of the people.
The American democracy predates the substantially more liberal Continental democratic revolutions. The American democracy is built on the British model, and in intention, is much closer to a republic than a democracy (though Andrew Jackson did a pretty good job of fucking that up). The Constitution is designed expressly to prevent the people from exercising power in stupid ways. This is a Good Thing.
The same thing goes for freedom of thought. There may be people that don't believe in it, and they should be free to believe that.
Sure, but what I don't want is people who think that way to change the culture, ruining it for the rest of us. You've gotta stop people from peeing in the pool, freedom or not...
Freedom is ultimately about discovering new things about the world and about ourselves. Freedom means not closing off any avenues.
No it's not. It's about protecting Life, Liberty, and Property. Those three words are the most succinct summery of the philosophical basis of the US Constitution that I've ever found.
I'm sorry, but you're not going to convince me that the only way to protect freedom of speech is to let it die at the hands of foreign cultures that don't care about it.
As for homegrown conservatives, that's probably a bigger issue in the US than immigrants, but the opposite is true for France. And it's really frightening to me that you don't conside immigrants to be as big a threat as homegrown conservatives. Muslims are every bit as conservative as Baptists, and believe a lot of the same ridiculous positions (ie: don't believe in evolution, don't believe in secular government, etc). They're much less of a threat to freedom in the US, because they're not nearly as politically active as conservative Christians, but that's not going to be the case forever. And of course Hispanics might be even worse, because not only are they Catholic and conservative, but they tend to be poorer than the other two groups, which amplifies the conservatism, and on top of all of that, they're politically active. If you're a self-respecting liberal who believes in birth control rights and whatnot, you're going to be wary of the influence of Hispanics on our culture...
Yes, it is a choice between liberalism and fascism, but in this situation, the small fascism of more careful immigration policy protects liberalism from the greater fascism of cultures who honestly couldn't care less about liberal European ideals.
I'm a big fan of liberalism, and an open culture. I like immigrants, (I am one!), and I know they can contribute great things to a society. However, I also know that many people in many cultures have a distinctly illiberal view of the world, and some wish to impose their illiberal views on their new country. Like all sources of illiberalism, this one must be fought.
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I'm not saying that they don't need to patch it, I'm just saying that it's very likely that people on other platforms have never run into it.
. However, any _compiler_ worth its salt will try to use every bit of microcode it can to optimize for a given architecture or microarchitecture
Actually, compilers try to avoid micro-coded instructions like the plague. On most x86 processors, micro-coded instructions can only issue out of a single issue slot at a fixed rate, and hence their use drastically lowers performance. Modern compilers generally treat the x86 like a RISC with a weird condition register and fancier addressing modes.
It's actually quite likely. CPU errata tend to effect corner cases. Eg: CPU returns wrong data if you read from an I/O port while servicing a TLB miss (or something like that). These bugs tend to be highly timing and sequence dependent, and its very likely that no two OSs use exactly the same sequence that triggers the bug.
Since microcode isn't hardware, fixing it shouldn't require any changes to the hardware.
Everybody publishes errata. AMD's are at: http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/white _papers_and_tech_docs/25759.pdf (starting on page 12)
Entertainingly enough, academia is also one of the few places where you still see real capitalists (and they might even eat lunch with the socialists!). The business world has been taken over by a pseudo-capitalism that's perfectly in favor of anti-capitalistic things like subsidies and government monopolies as long as it benefits them. The populace has been absorbed by some sort of neo-populism (exemplified by talking heads like Lou Dobbs). University economics departments are some of the few places where you'll find people who stick to capitalistic principles, instead of some conveniently-defined mutation thereof.
A person in China wanting to purchase a CD (from for example, Amazon.com) would not be able to afford it - because that CD would still cost the same US$$ to purchase from China/India/Fiji/Indonesia that it would to purchase it from the UK or from the USA.
A person in China working in a sweatshop is not in the market for CDs.
What you are actually advocating is that people in the "Third World" should not expect the same standard of living as people in the "First World"
Of course they shouldn't. What the hell planet do you live on where everyone can expect the same standard of living?
Those corporations should be required to pay the same wages in US$$ as they should be paying in Europe or the USA.
Then you'd have a few factory workers living like kings*, and a whole lot of unemployed people who would otherwise have work now being unable to sustain their families. Yeah, that's a great idea!
*) A median American salary of $45,000 is enough to buy a house in the most exclusive gated community in Bangladesh, send your children to private English schools, and maintain a cook, a maid, a nanny, and someone to handle odd-jobs.
Why shouldn't I find it acceptable? Out of a sense of guilt for being born into a different class of society? Where is the rationality in feeling guilt for the workings of random chance? Is it fair that I make more in an hour than a Bengali textile worker does in a month? No, but that's just the nature of the world. There is no point in pretending that the world can be some sort of utopian place where the efforts of all are rewarded on the same level. By sheer bad luck, many people in the world will get a very bad lot in life. The only things that can be done is to maximize the quality of life of these people within the scope of what is realistic. And in that context there is no reason to feel guilty for buying shoes made by someone making $25 a month, because the brutal reality is that the alternative for her would've been working just as hard on a small village farm, just to feed herself.
And the real issue is way beyond the short-term comparison between a low-paying job and even lower-paying farm work. Industrialization, as painful as it is, is the only way to move a country like Bangladesh forward. Urbanization, commerce, industry, serve not only immediate monetary needs, but change the fundamental nature of society, modernizing it, disabusing people of backwards notions, integrating people within the larger world in which we live. Fifty years ago, most Bengalis were working hard for low pay in village farms. Now, many are working hard for low pay in industry, but belong to unions and can get to a hospital in an emergency and maybe send their children to school. Fifty years hence, who knows?*
*) Fifty-years hence Bangladesh will probably still be exceedingly poor, but for reasons completely unrelated to economics. The government is fantastically corrupt, and eating into a large portion of whatever progress industry and commerce have been bringing to the country.
While sweatshop labor is not something that spoiled westerners find particularly comfortable, there is a flip-side to the issue. That flip-side is that at least these people are working, and usually at least making enough to feed their families. The alternatives are worse, to say the least.
Bleeding-heart westerners often this ridiculous notion that workers should be treated well everywhere in the world. This is an idealism that does more harm than good. It is far preferable to have 100 workers working for a barely livable wage than to have 20 workers working for a fair wage. The simple fact is that the cost of progress is high, but the cost of allowing progress to pass you by is even higher. Consider the textile industry in a place like Bangladesh (where my parents are from). Most westerners would look at the working conditions in these places and be appalled. Yet, most Bengalis will tell you that the textile industry has been on the whole good for the country. It has employed women who would otherwise be toiling away in rural areas for no pay at all. It brings them into urbanized areas, which as filthy as they are, are still preferable to the rural backwaters which they left behind. It brings them closer to clinics and schools, however poor they are, wheras before they would've had no access to these services at all.
Westerners remember with horror the days when their own cities were like this, and feel that allowing such conditions to exist in the modern world is not acceptable. But the world is not modern for everybody. While it's 2007 for people in the US and Europe, it's 1920 for people in places like Bangladesh. There is no alternative for these societies but to deal with the price of progress, in the hopes that one day they can enter the modern world. If they are successful in this endeavor, then decades from now they too can have the luxury of being able to turn down work just because the conditions are below standard.
Intel's and NVIDIA's software guys are generally recognized as being pretty competent. ATI's guys have a decidedly worse reputation, which really is deserved given their historical performance (or lack thereof).
Beats me. It's just that almost every serious programmer I know prefers the sharp 1-pixel thick rendering of non-antialiased fonts. I personally think anti-aliasing is easier on the eyes too, but I'm young enough that I never did much coding on a system without AA.
I'm not using Emacs under X. I'm using the Carbon port ;)
Emacs is a programmers editor. Most programmers don't like to stare at anti-aliased code. That said, I'm firmly in the anti-aliased camp, which is fine for me because the various Mac builds support anti-aliasing (I believe the Windows ports do as well).
Emacs is a really powerful tool once you get the hang of it. It has absolutely unparalleled support for chopping/dicing/splicing and otherwise throwing text around really fast without ever taking your hands of the keyboard. And Emacs has language-aware modes for a whole bunch of different languages.
I used to use vi when I was on linux, and it was an excellent tool. When I first got my Macs, I used TextMate, which was all the rage among Mac users. Somebody turned me on to Emacs not too long ago, and I haven't looked back. It's just very well-designed for working on large amounts of code, and scales way better than TextMate ever did (tabs become useless when you're working on dozens of files!).
That said, the learning curve for Emacs is *steep*. It's definitely a "hands off the mouse" kind of system. It took me a month and 2000 lines of code before I was really comfortable with it, and I still haven't tapped a fraction of its full power!
Slime is really worth learning Emacs for. I used to program Lisp with vim, and my productivity improve substantially when I started using slime.
Ah. I probably wouldn't have bothered to correct further, but the for/or thing really drives me insane.
Entertainingly enough, even native English speakers can never get prepositions correct. A more correct translation follows.
/not a native English speaker
ISRO, [the] Indian Space Research Organization, is planning to send a robot [on a] mission to the moon. It is probably going to be made by students and profs. of IIT-Kanpur (for those who don't know, it's the Indian equivalent [of] MIT). The two-legged robot, fitted with sophisticated sensors and high-resolution cameras, is capable of recording information and images using laser beams. It can also detect the distance [to] a hindrance, enter a small crater, [and] bring surface samples and return high resolution images to the lunar vehicle. [] It seems to be pretty good. Although it needs some more sophistication, the cost of it is less than $50,000. Now [that's] a penny relative to the obscene amounts of money NASA spends every day. That [money] can be saved to make this world a whole lot better. Way to go ISRO.
Some of the sentences are incredibly tortured, but not incorrect per se.
"The market has spoken" argument carries a very big implicit assumption: that the market in question is free under the rules of capitalistic theory. Very few markets are free in the real world. The market for intellectual property is inherently not a free market --- the whole idea of copyright is that a copyright is a temporary monopoly over a particular work; a subversion of the free market in order to provide an incentive for creation of new works.
Thus, you're applying a theory to a market which is inherently incompatible with the assumptions of that theory. Any conclusion you reach is meaningless.
Yeah, the midseason breaks are full of stupid. Sci-Fi Friday was awesome (two hours of StarGate, then BSG), but they kept dicking with the formula (long haituses) before breaking it up entirely.
FireFly was great, but BSG is good too. The shows were very different. The sci-fi aspects and dialogue in FireFly were better, while the drama and plots are better in BSG.
I actually quite like the "science" in BSG. It's very minimal, and it avoids driving the plot. ST: VOY drove me insane with all the shit science they just made up. Obviously, science fiction is supposed to be fictional science, but good in good Sci-Fi like BSG, it seems like the science has internally-consistent rules, while in a lot of bad Sci-Fi (unfortunately most modern Star Trek shows, save for DS9), the writers pay no attention to consistency, and just make up new pseudo-scientific things to work themselves out of complicated plots.
I agree with this one to an extent. This season of BSG has been a little slow, but I just watched the second half of season 3 on iTunes, and it was quite good. They explore a lot of themes that I haven't really seen explored in a mainstream sci-fi show (eg: the union thing), and most of it is genuinely interesting.
I just watched the first 10 episodes of Voyager, season 2, and it floors me that it made it another five seasons beyond that. I also just caught up on the current season of BSG, and I'm equally floored that they only have one more left. How can such utter dreck be allowed to continue, while a great show can't?
You're basically saying that you never have to prioritize your principles, which must be nice for you. What is this magical set of COMPLETELY ORTHOGONAL principles that you've devised? Of course, if you're principles aren't indeed pairwise consistent, then what the heck do you do when they conflict? Because that's precisely when you have to accept a small fascism to fight a bigger one.
But that's the whole point. You can't talk about the importance of freedom and then not allow people to dismiss it.
I don't personally care if an immigrant doesn't believe in our principles of freedom. What I care about is what happens when they impose those beliefs on the rest of us. It happens through various vectors, through complaints in newspapers (the Muhammad cartoons in the Netherlands), parents complaining about certain things in schools, and ultimately through voting. We're not seeing much of it now in the United States, particularly from Muslims, who are highly apolitical, but we will eventually.
Everything about societies based on the ideals of the French revolution is designed to maintain the sovereignty of the people.
The American democracy predates the substantially more liberal Continental democratic revolutions. The American democracy is built on the British model, and in intention, is much closer to a republic than a democracy (though Andrew Jackson did a pretty good job of fucking that up). The Constitution is designed expressly to prevent the people from exercising power in stupid ways. This is a Good Thing.
The same thing goes for freedom of thought. There may be people that don't believe in it, and they should be free to believe that.
Sure, but what I don't want is people who think that way to change the culture, ruining it for the rest of us. You've gotta stop people from peeing in the pool, freedom or not...
Freedom is ultimately about discovering new things about the world and about ourselves. Freedom means not closing off any avenues.
No it's not. It's about protecting Life, Liberty, and Property. Those three words are the most succinct summery of the philosophical basis of the US Constitution that I've ever found.
I'm sorry, but you're not going to convince me that the only way to protect freedom of speech is to let it die at the hands of foreign cultures that don't care about it.
As for homegrown conservatives, that's probably a bigger issue in the US than immigrants, but the opposite is true for France. And it's really frightening to me that you don't conside immigrants to be as big a threat as homegrown conservatives. Muslims are every bit as conservative as Baptists, and believe a lot of the same ridiculous positions (ie: don't believe in evolution, don't believe in secular government, etc). They're much less of a threat to freedom in the US, because they're not nearly as politically active as conservative Christians, but that's not going to be the case forever. And of course Hispanics might be even worse, because not only are they Catholic and conservative, but they tend to be poorer than the other two groups, which amplifies the conservatism, and on top of all of that, they're politically active. If you're a self-respecting liberal who believes in birth control rights and whatnot, you're going to be wary of the influence of Hispanics on our culture...
Yes, it is a choice between liberalism and fascism, but in this situation, the small fascism of more careful immigration policy protects liberalism from the greater fascism of cultures who honestly couldn't care less about liberal European ideals.
I'm a big fan of liberalism, and an open culture. I like immigrants, (I am one!), and I know they can contribute great things to a society. However, I also know that many people in many cultures have a distinctly illiberal view of the world, and some wish to impose their illiberal views on their new country. Like all sources of illiberalism, this one must be fought.