We should be willing to take risks. But spending hundreds of billions on a manned space program with poorly defined goals only to watch the astronauts burn up in reentry is not the kind of risk we should be taking. You found a very good way of pointing out how little truth there is in claims that dead astronauts' sacrifices pave the way for others.
Until we're willing to make large and meaningful goals and commitments (like a lunar base/observatory) we have little reason to spend money and lives taking unnecessary risks.
I'd have to look into it more since I'm not certain, but AFAIK portable players with strong enough processors to run Rockbox haven't bothered with codec-specific hardware for quite a while (since the early Archos models). Maybe there are situations where there's a DSP which the original firmware does a better job of utilizing, but a DSP is still fairly general-purpose.
Using any kind of lossless codec will of course hurt your battery life a good bit because of the higher bitrate/ increased number of flash reads. In any of the situations where I'd actually use my portable player (in the car, while running, etc) I very highly doubt I could distinguish between originals and 128kbps LAME-encoded MP3s in blind testing. So while I certainly have used Rockbox (as I mentioned in my previous post) I must admit I've never used lossless files on my portable player.
Rockbox to the rescue! Unfortunately, many of the newest ipod models aren't supported (lack of developer time/interest/hardware ownership) but if you have a supported model you get support not only for FLAC but also for a whole host of other useful codecs Apple refuses to support.
Many slashdotters heard of Rockbox back in the Archos days and have forgotten about it since then. Rockbox continues to get better, and it's worth another look. I just flashed a Sansa Clip+ the other day and was surprised at what Rockbox had to offer.
Post actually predeceased Turing; if he "continued to be productive for years" while "Turing's participation in the field was cut very short" that's because Turing turned his attention to other things.
I guess another explanation for Turing's early fame is that his article in Mind introducing the Turing Test captured the popular imagination in a way that everyone's more substantive work --including his own-- didn't. Though it's not CS but rather philosophy of mind, and though I think as philosophy of mind it's kind of naive and its primary merit is that it is effective as a starting point for discussion, I'd bet that from the time of its publication until the AI winter it was better known and more discussed than any real theoretical results.
But Turing's idolization - plays, parades, statues, and being the only one to really get credit for creating the computer revolution in the eyes of millions whose interest came after the PC exploded in popularity- really started after the AI winter had been going on for a decade and people had become disillusioned about hard AI and about the post-ELIZA Turing test. I still retain my former conviction about the most plausible explanation for his idolization over the course of the past 25 years.
I'm certainly not saying Turing was a hack job whose contributions should be overlooked; far from it. And no matter what you think of other sodomy laws, Lawrence v. Texas, etc, it's obviously atrocious what was done to Turing. But I think there are a dozen other "fathers of computing" who are at least as deserving of all the brouhaha and of a Commemorative Year as Turing is.
But nothing he did at Bletchley Park has anything to do with "produc[ing] the foundations for our society." His machines there were totally special-purpose rotor machines, no more related to modern computers than were the German Enigma machines they existed to decrypt or the Polish decryption "Bomba" they were based on.
He didn't have anything to do with Colossus, which was the one project from there that did have any relevance to modern computing; the idea that he was responsible for Colossus is a common misconception.
The fact that things got named after Turing when terminology was first being settled in the late 30s-early 50s is, as you say, not attributable to his homosexuality. But that's not what I'm talking about- though naming things is a very visible way of assigning credit etc it doesn't explain the continuing total imbalance of credit or the popular idolization.
You make an interesting point about oracles- I don't know about independent inventors there- but here's a relevant quote from a paper "Turing Oracle Machines, Online Computing, and Three Displacements in Computability Theory" by R. I. Soare:
Turing spent 1936-1938 at Princeton writing a Ph.D. thesis under Church on ordinal logics. A tiny and obscure part of his paper [1939, section 4] included a description of an oracle machine (o-machine)-- roughly a Turing a-machine which could interrogate an "oracle" (external database) during the computation. The one page description was very sketchy and Turing never developed it further.
Emil Post [1944, section 11] considerably expanded and developed relative computability and Turing functionals. These concepts were not well understood when Post began, but in Post [1943], [1944], [1948] and Kleene-Post [1954] they emerged into their modern state. These are summarized in the Post-Turing Thesis of section 6.2. This remarkable role by Post has been underemphasized in the literature but is discussed here in sections 5 and 6.
Again, it's conceivable this could have contributed to Turing's fame, but as far as deserved credit goes, taking oracles into account would actually weigh in Post's favor.
I don't think saying Newton gets all the credit for calculus is accurate. Even high school students learn about the independent discovery and Leibniz's contributions.
The Wright Brothers are a somewhat more parallel case, as everybody learns about them and nobody remembers any of the other innovators in early flight.
I didn't just collect a bunch of random names of his contemporaries to post here in response to this article. I've studied mathematical logic a good bit, and recently have been working towards writing a brief article about the history of logic and development of theoretical CS from 1870-1950.
Though I like everybody else started off with the idea that he was some kind of exceptional genius who earned the title of the father of computing, I had to abandon this idea in the face of evidence that others deserved more of the credit than he did.
If you can provide a better explanation for his idolization, let's hear it. But otherwise your summary dismissal of my reasons looks rather like you're the one whose bias is showing.
Post's 1936 paper described the same kind of machine, and Post came up with better versions of it (nobody uses Turing's original formulation, and the formulations actually used in textbooks etc usually build on Post's work).
I can't find a reference right this second but I'm fairly certain that nobody thought of the DFA or PDA abstractions for >10 years after all three papers were published (I think Post's later work on string rewriting and the PCP helped lead to those ideas along with the corresponding ideas of regular/context free), so there wasn't yet any other framework for the Post/Turing formalism to fit more naturally into.
Thanks for actually trying to provide an alternate reason rather than jumping at my throat for mentioning the only reason I'm able to come up with like most of these folks. I'm interested to hear whatever alternate explanations people can come up with.
Why do people remember Turing rather than Church and Post, both of whom developed their ideas independently of Turing and beat him to publication by quite a while (though Post's was submitted after Turing's) and both of whom made many further important contributions to mathematical logic and computational theory while Turing did not?
Why do people continue to erroneously associate Turing with the Colossus computer while Tommy Flowers is totally unremembered? Why has Turing's work at Bletchley Park etc overshadowed the efforts of Zuse, Shannon, Stibitz, Atanasoff, Eckert, Mauchly, and others whose efforts did so much more to make general-purpose computing a reality?
I can only see one answer: Turing was gay, and lots of people feel it's important to idolize homosexuals' contributions.
Undoing my mods to say this- the very first thing Wikipedia says about Brandenburg vs. Ohio is that "government cannot punish inflammatory speech unless it is directed to inciting and likely to incite imminent lawless action." Advocating violence in the abstract is a long long way from being involved in the day-to-day planning of suicide attacks as Awlaki was. Why are you ignoring this? If you were trying to make some kind of objective argument about justice, rather than being a partisan who's simply seizing the opportunity to push your view, you'd certainly have given this thought.
The government has the right to take action against those who are personally involved in perpetrating ongoing violence.
Nobody likes trials in absentia, but efforts to apprehend Awlaki had gone on for years without success, and finally a trial was scheduled in a Yemeni court. Awlaki could not have failed to have received information about the time and place of his trial, which was nationally and internationally in the news. His defense counsel was not just a sham but put up a vigorous defense. He was convicted and the judge called for his capture dead or alive. I think that in this case people went to extreme lengths to provide as much due process as could be given under the circumstances.
I didn't say you don't take the direction of the project seriously. As I said, I love Cygwin; I think the project is one of the main jewels of open source and a vital part of the open source ecosystem's success over the past 15 years. But I do think that you deserve a lot more help than you get and that limited manpower inevitably leads to limited goals and limited vision; it takes enough energy to deal with present difficulties that future huge changes and blue-sky projects have to take a back seat.
As concerns 1.7, you're certainly right that I don't know the internals very well. But I thought I remembered things saying that quite a number of the areas in which 1.7's performance was better than 1.5's were made possible because you no longer had to support 9x.
I don't think you seriously believe that cygwin's performance wouldn't really improve if you had more hands on deck. If what you mean to say is "hey, we're not writing sloppy code here; things done in cygwin take time because there's lots of work that has to be done" then I'm in total agreement. If what you mean to say is "the code we write is so marvelously perfect that even putting a dozen brilliant full-time developers on cygwin for a few years couldn't change performance much" then that's totally laughable.
Your link to the cygwin-cvs logs of course shows that there are people working hard on cygwin. But the fact that the stream of updates turned into a trickle when Corinna went on vacation at the beginning of this month shows that those people are quite few.
Of course you do have a number of committed and active maintainers. But that number is small given the task; I'd wager that a project like Debian has easily a hundred times as many maintainers, and maintaining a Cygwin port and build is often a lot harder than maintaining a package for a linux distro. The loss of a single maintainer is often a keenly felt blow (witness Dave Korn's disappearance from the face of the planet for some months earlier this year).
I am very grateful for your efforts and wish you all the best; it just so happens that my idea of "the best" includes a couple hundred dedicated package maintainers and a dozen core developers to speed your way forward.:)
Look, I love Cygwin and have been using it since forever. But it's pretty slow at a lot of crucial operations, making it unsuitable for a large class of things folks use SUA for.
More importantly, it suffers from a serious lack of manpower and direction. For a project which is so vast and so important to open source, it has alarmingly few active maintainers. The lack of maintainers is made worse by the fact that a considerable amount of maintainer effort is duplicated between cygports and the official cygwin distribution.
Everybody uses cygwin but as far as I can tell very few people pay RH for cygwin support, and thus there are AFAIK only three people who are paid for their work on cygwin.
The lack of manpower really shows. Crucial packages go for long periods without important bugfixes, and new releases take a long time to get ported&integrated from upstream. Development on the cygwin core is fairly slow. NT-based versions of Windows offered quite considerable benefits over Win9x (lots of additional capabilities and much less of a mismatch with POSIX -> better security and performance), but the first version to really take advantage of these benefits was 1.7, released for Christmas 2009- 7 years after the majority of users (much less the majority of technical users likely to use cygwin) had made the switch. The developers had their first serious discussion about the possibility of a 64-bit version of Cygwin in June of this year; it will likely be quite a while before a 64-bit version is released. A lot of cygwin's performance problems could be fixed if the core developers weren't already overburdened as it is.
Unless cygwin can attract a lot of new developers I don't think the project can stay up-to-date enough to continue to support the uses we all already rely on it for, much less be in a position to give SUA emigres a soft landing.
Is every security update now front page-worthy news? Maybe it's been a slow news day or something, but Flash security patches aren't exactly a rare occurrence. Might as well have an article "SUN COMES UP AGAIN TODAY!"
(should have said this in my post: as you say, just tweaking the processor design doesn't lead to big enough gains to make this worthwhile, but the different transistor type is enough to make it worthwhile)
It's because the companion core uses different transistors. The four main processors use TSMC's 40nm general purpose (G) process while the companion core uses their 40nm low power (LP) process. (Though it's two different "processes" it's made on the same die, just with different transistor design).
To reach >1GHz for the main cores you have to use the faster but leakier and power-hungrier transistor design, so even if you underclock one of those cores to match the frequency of the companion core it'll still use a lot more power than the companion does.
Of course just looking at an average of either quantity isn't going to be sufficient- you need to look at the distribution of values, not just the mean. (Looking at the 99th percentile, as they did in the article, is a start.) But at least this way we're looking at the distribution of the right numbers.
I'm glad somebody started looking at ms per frame instead of frames per second. Since what we really care about for game performance is whether frames are rendered quickly enough to give satisfactory reaction times etc, using frames per second is misleading.
Another example where the same thing happens is fuel consumption: we keep talking about miles per gallon, but what we primarily care about is the fuel consumed in our driving, not the driving we can do on a given amount of fuel, so this is misleading. To use wikipedia's example, people would be surprised to realize that the move from 15mpg to 19mpg (saving 1.4 gallons per 100 miles) has a much bigger environmental and economic impact than the move from 34mpg to 44mpg (saving 2/3 of a gallon per 100 miles).
Similarly, moving from 24 fps to 32 fps has a bigger impact on the illusion of motion, fluidity, and response times than moving from 40 fps to 60 fps (10.4 ms difference vs 8.3 ms difference in time between frames). I think everyone should have been using ms per frame all along.
(note: yes, I already said this on their forum, I just think it should be repeated here)
Oh, and use snes9x or some other reasonably speedy emulator rather than bsnes unless you're playing a game that snes9x etc can't handle well. bsnes is more accurate than other emulators but that comes at a tremendous performance cost. Your mac mini likely wouldn't ramp up fan speeds doing snes9x.
All reasonably modern machines, including silent low-end machines (like the passive AMD A-350 setup one person suggested), are well above the requirements of emulating 5th-generation or slower consoles (i.e. up to and including the n64 and original Playstation).
But for newer consoles you have to have a fair amount of speed, and any system with the capacity to run Dolphin at playable framerates is going to need a fan. You can make a fairly quiet system that will do it (look for mid-range low-wattage CPUs and GPUs, and check out silentpcreview), but the combination of CPU and video card requirements for Dolphin mean a totally passive setup is out of the question - even with ridiculously large heatsinks etc.
Of course you can work around this, and people have been doing so for a long time. But it's one extra unnecessary annoyance, and it gets more and more complicated and annoying as programs grow more complex. As shutdown said, the preprocessor/macro system is brittle; we deal with all kinds of kludges (all the way from the simple #ifndef macro which has to wrap anything which might somehow get included twice to the many complexities of Autotools) to try to keep it working in complex situations. And there's really nothing to recommend it- you say having header files for everything encourages good design, but I don't see any reason this would be true; it's wasted effort, but people feel it must be a helpful ritual since they've been doing it so long.
It's true that with C89 and up, compilers try to provide implicit declarations for functions which you call before any prototype/declaration. But there are good reasons why this is still a warning; I don't know all the details, but there can be issues with the types the compiler infers for the implicit declaration and matching that to the actual function, and IIRC this gets a lot worse under C++. It's best to stick with the ritual of providing the prototypes first, and AFAIK getting rid of them would require a major language redesign and not just extra compiler smarts.
This is a good example of the general pattern- there are lots of suboptimal design decisions in C that require only a trivial amount of effort to work around for simple programs (the programs K&R were thinking about back in the day of the PDP-7), but the effort is still there; as programs grow in complexity, making sure these things are always dealt with correctly becomes far from trivial, and when you add new language constructs to the mix (esp. C++) you compound the problem.
This isn't unique to C; as any programming language ages, some of the design decisions and tradeoffs it originally made will turn out to have been suboptimal. If you add new features they often interact poorly with such suboptimal design decisions, creating complicated "gotchas"; the more powerful the new feature the more likely it is to have FQA-inspiring oddities and gotchas. (Example elsewhere: talk to a Java developer about how generics are done via type erasure and they'll likely have a story to tell about times they've banged their head against that and wished the thing had been done right from the beginning.) But the problems are more pervasive in C and C++ since so much has changed and so much has been learned since C was first designed.
As shutdown suggested, "functional unit" was a mistake and "translation unit" is the correct name. Sorry my mistake caused confusion, and glad to see it was largely cleared up. I hope you also saw a clarifying comment I made a couple days ago.
The disagreement about the definition of smut is exaggerated: just about everybody "knows it when they see it," to quote Judge Stewart, for the vast majority of cases. To pretend there's vast disagreement about it is just disingenuous.
Sure, there's a bit of disagreement at the margins, and of course saying that a whole domain has to move to.xxx because of a pornographic image or two would be ludicrous. But I'm not talking about implementing a zero-false-negatives filter, especially not at a government level: I'm talking about making it simple for individuals or families to decide they don't want that to be such a prominent and easily-accessible part of their Internet experience. Without externally imposed mandatory filters, sites which are focused around pornography would lose very little business by moving to the.xxx tld, but it would become very simple for families and individuals to elect to have a much cleaner internet environment.
Slashdot Mirror
We should be willing to take risks. But spending hundreds of billions on a manned space program with poorly defined goals only to watch the astronauts burn up in reentry is not the kind of risk we should be taking. You found a very good way of pointing out how little truth there is in claims that dead astronauts' sacrifices pave the way for others.
Until we're willing to make large and meaningful goals and commitments (like a lunar base/observatory) we have little reason to spend money and lives taking unnecessary risks.
So now we're defending arbitrary, silly, and unenforceable TOS and EULAs! Glad to get that cleared up!
Troops! ABOUT-FACE! March!
Yes Sir!
have anything on Bruce Lee playing table tennis with nunchaku.
Seeing that movie changed my life ambitions. Fo' rizzle.
I'd have to look into it more since I'm not certain, but AFAIK portable players with strong enough processors to run Rockbox haven't bothered with codec-specific hardware for quite a while (since the early Archos models). Maybe there are situations where there's a DSP which the original firmware does a better job of utilizing, but a DSP is still fairly general-purpose.
Using any kind of lossless codec will of course hurt your battery life a good bit because of the higher bitrate/ increased number of flash reads. In any of the situations where I'd actually use my portable player (in the car, while running, etc) I very highly doubt I could distinguish between originals and 128kbps LAME-encoded MP3s in blind testing. So while I certainly have used Rockbox (as I mentioned in my previous post) I must admit I've never used lossless files on my portable player.
Rockbox to the rescue! Unfortunately, many of the newest ipod models aren't supported (lack of developer time/interest/hardware ownership) but if you have a supported model you get support not only for FLAC but also for a whole host of other useful codecs Apple refuses to support.
Many slashdotters heard of Rockbox back in the Archos days and have forgotten about it since then. Rockbox continues to get better, and it's worth another look. I just flashed a Sansa Clip+ the other day and was surprised at what Rockbox had to offer.
Post actually predeceased Turing; if he "continued to be productive for years" while "Turing's participation in the field was cut very short" that's because Turing turned his attention to other things.
I guess another explanation for Turing's early fame is that his article in Mind introducing the Turing Test captured the popular imagination in a way that everyone's more substantive work --including his own-- didn't. Though it's not CS but rather philosophy of mind, and though I think as philosophy of mind it's kind of naive and its primary merit is that it is effective as a starting point for discussion, I'd bet that from the time of its publication until the AI winter it was better known and more discussed than any real theoretical results.
But Turing's idolization - plays, parades, statues, and being the only one to really get credit for creating the computer revolution in the eyes of millions whose interest came after the PC exploded in popularity- really started after the AI winter had been going on for a decade and people had become disillusioned about hard AI and about the post-ELIZA Turing test. I still retain my former conviction about the most plausible explanation for his idolization over the course of the past 25 years.
I'm certainly not saying Turing was a hack job whose contributions should be overlooked; far from it. And no matter what you think of other sodomy laws, Lawrence v. Texas, etc, it's obviously atrocious what was done to Turing. But I think there are a dozen other "fathers of computing" who are at least as deserving of all the brouhaha and of a Commemorative Year as Turing is.
But nothing he did at Bletchley Park has anything to do with "produc[ing] the foundations for our society." His machines there were totally special-purpose rotor machines, no more related to modern computers than were the German Enigma machines they existed to decrypt or the Polish decryption "Bomba" they were based on.
He didn't have anything to do with Colossus, which was the one project from there that did have any relevance to modern computing; the idea that he was responsible for Colossus is a common misconception.
The fact that things got named after Turing when terminology was first being settled in the late 30s-early 50s is, as you say, not attributable to his homosexuality. But that's not what I'm talking about- though naming things is a very visible way of assigning credit etc it doesn't explain the continuing total imbalance of credit or the popular idolization.
You make an interesting point about oracles- I don't know about independent inventors there- but here's a relevant quote from a paper "Turing Oracle Machines, Online Computing, and
Three Displacements in Computability Theory" by R. I. Soare:
Again, it's conceivable this could have contributed to Turing's fame, but as far as deserved credit goes, taking oracles into account would actually weigh in Post's favor.
I don't think saying Newton gets all the credit for calculus is accurate. Even high school students learn about the independent discovery and Leibniz's contributions.
The Wright Brothers are a somewhat more parallel case, as everybody learns about them and nobody remembers any of the other innovators in early flight.
I didn't just collect a bunch of random names of his contemporaries to post here in response to this article. I've studied mathematical logic a good bit, and recently have been working towards writing a brief article about the history of logic and development of theoretical CS from 1870-1950.
Though I like everybody else started off with the idea that he was some kind of exceptional genius who earned the title of the father of computing, I had to abandon this idea in the face of evidence that others deserved more of the credit than he did.
If you can provide a better explanation for his idolization, let's hear it. But otherwise your summary dismissal of my reasons looks rather like you're the one whose bias is showing.
Post's 1936 paper described the same kind of machine, and Post came up with better versions of it (nobody uses Turing's original formulation, and the formulations actually used in textbooks etc usually build on Post's work).
I can't find a reference right this second but I'm fairly certain that nobody thought of the DFA or PDA abstractions for >10 years after all three papers were published (I think Post's later work on string rewriting and the PCP helped lead to those ideas along with the corresponding ideas of regular/context free), so there wasn't yet any other framework for the Post/Turing formalism to fit more naturally into.
Thanks for actually trying to provide an alternate reason rather than jumping at my throat for mentioning the only reason I'm able to come up with like most of these folks. I'm interested to hear whatever alternate explanations people can come up with.
Why do people remember Turing rather than Church and Post, both of whom developed their ideas independently of Turing and beat him to publication by quite a while (though Post's was submitted after Turing's) and both of whom made many further important contributions to mathematical logic and computational theory while Turing did not?
Why do people continue to erroneously associate Turing with the Colossus computer while Tommy Flowers is totally unremembered? Why has Turing's work at Bletchley Park etc overshadowed the efforts of Zuse, Shannon, Stibitz, Atanasoff, Eckert, Mauchly, and others whose efforts did so much more to make general-purpose computing a reality?
I can only see one answer: Turing was gay, and lots of people feel it's important to idolize homosexuals' contributions.
Undoing my mods to say this- the very first thing Wikipedia says about Brandenburg vs. Ohio is that "government cannot punish inflammatory speech unless it is directed to inciting and likely to incite imminent lawless action." Advocating violence in the abstract is a long long way from being involved in the day-to-day planning of suicide attacks as Awlaki was. Why are you ignoring this? If you were trying to make some kind of objective argument about justice, rather than being a partisan who's simply seizing the opportunity to push your view, you'd certainly have given this thought.
The government has the right to take action against those who are personally involved in perpetrating ongoing violence.
Nobody likes trials in absentia, but efforts to apprehend Awlaki had gone on for years without success, and finally a trial was scheduled in a Yemeni court. Awlaki could not have failed to have received information about the time and place of his trial, which was nationally and internationally in the news. His defense counsel was not just a sham but put up a vigorous defense. He was convicted and the judge called for his capture dead or alive. I think that in this case people went to extreme lengths to provide as much due process as could be given under the circumstances.
Hello cgf or Corinna or whoever you are!
I didn't say you don't take the direction of the project seriously. As I said, I love Cygwin; I think the project is one of the main jewels of open source and a vital part of the open source ecosystem's success over the past 15 years. But I do think that you deserve a lot more help than you get and that limited manpower inevitably leads to limited goals and limited vision; it takes enough energy to deal with present difficulties that future huge changes and blue-sky projects have to take a back seat.
As concerns 1.7, you're certainly right that I don't know the internals very well. But I thought I remembered things saying that quite a number of the areas in which 1.7's performance was better than 1.5's were made possible because you no longer had to support 9x.
I don't think you seriously believe that cygwin's performance wouldn't really improve if you had more hands on deck. If what you mean to say is "hey, we're not writing sloppy code here; things done in cygwin take time because there's lots of work that has to be done" then I'm in total agreement. If what you mean to say is "the code we write is so marvelously perfect that even putting a dozen brilliant full-time developers on cygwin for a few years couldn't change performance much" then that's totally laughable.
Your link to the cygwin-cvs logs of course shows that there are people working hard on cygwin. But the fact that the stream of updates turned into a trickle when Corinna went on vacation at the beginning of this month shows that those people are quite few.
Of course you do have a number of committed and active maintainers. But that number is small given the task; I'd wager that a project like Debian has easily a hundred times as many maintainers, and maintaining a Cygwin port and build is often a lot harder than maintaining a package for a linux distro. The loss of a single maintainer is often a keenly felt blow (witness Dave Korn's disappearance from the face of the planet for some months earlier this year).
I am very grateful for your efforts and wish you all the best; it just so happens that my idea of "the best" includes a couple hundred dedicated package maintainers and a dozen core developers to speed your way forward. :)
Look, I love Cygwin and have been using it since forever. But it's pretty slow at a lot of crucial operations, making it unsuitable for a large class of things folks use SUA for.
More importantly, it suffers from a serious lack of manpower and direction. For a project which is so vast and so important to open source, it has alarmingly few active maintainers. The lack of maintainers is made worse by the fact that a considerable amount of maintainer effort is duplicated between cygports and the official cygwin distribution.
Everybody uses cygwin but as far as I can tell very few people pay RH for cygwin support, and thus there are AFAIK only three people who are paid for their work on cygwin.
The lack of manpower really shows. Crucial packages go for long periods without important bugfixes, and new releases take a long time to get ported&integrated from upstream. Development on the cygwin core is fairly slow. NT-based versions of Windows offered quite considerable benefits over Win9x (lots of additional capabilities and much less of a mismatch with POSIX -> better security and performance), but the first version to really take advantage of these benefits was 1.7, released for Christmas 2009- 7 years after the majority of users (much less the majority of technical users likely to use cygwin) had made the switch. The developers had their first serious discussion about the possibility of a 64-bit version of Cygwin in June of this year; it will likely be quite a while before a 64-bit version is released. A lot of cygwin's performance problems could be fixed if the core developers weren't already overburdened as it is.
Unless cygwin can attract a lot of new developers I don't think the project can stay up-to-date enough to continue to support the uses we all already rely on it for, much less be in a position to give SUA emigres a soft landing.
"Collusion and price-fixing are so much friendlier with two. :)" - Lowell McAdam
Is every security update now front page-worthy news? Maybe it's been a slow news day or something, but Flash security patches aren't exactly a rare occurrence. Might as well have an article "SUN COMES UP AGAIN TODAY!"
(should have said this in my post: as you say, just tweaking the processor design doesn't lead to big enough gains to make this worthwhile, but the different transistor type is enough to make it worthwhile)
It's because the companion core uses different transistors. The four main processors use TSMC's 40nm general purpose (G) process while the companion core uses their 40nm low power (LP) process. (Though it's two different "processes" it's made on the same die, just with different transistor design).
To reach >1GHz for the main cores you have to use the faster but leakier and power-hungrier transistor design, so even if you underclock one of those cores to match the frequency of the companion core it'll still use a lot more power than the companion does.
Of course just looking at an average of either quantity isn't going to be sufficient- you need to look at the distribution of values, not just the mean. (Looking at the 99th percentile, as they did in the article, is a start.) But at least this way we're looking at the distribution of the right numbers.
I'm glad somebody started looking at ms per frame instead of frames per second. Since what we really care about for game performance is whether frames are rendered quickly enough to give satisfactory reaction times etc, using frames per second is misleading.
Another example where the same thing happens is fuel consumption: we keep talking about miles per gallon, but what we primarily care about is the fuel consumed in our driving, not the driving we can do on a given amount of fuel, so this is misleading. To use wikipedia's example, people would be surprised to realize that the move from 15mpg to 19mpg (saving 1.4 gallons per 100 miles) has a much bigger environmental and economic impact than the move from 34mpg to 44mpg (saving 2/3 of a gallon per 100 miles).
Similarly, moving from 24 fps to 32 fps has a bigger impact on the illusion of motion, fluidity, and response times than moving from 40 fps to 60 fps (10.4 ms difference vs 8.3 ms difference in time between frames). I think everyone should have been using ms per frame all along.
(note: yes, I already said this on their forum, I just think it should be repeated here)
Oh, and use snes9x or some other reasonably speedy emulator rather than bsnes unless you're playing a game that snes9x etc can't handle well. bsnes is more accurate than other emulators but that comes at a tremendous performance cost. Your mac mini likely wouldn't ramp up fan speeds doing snes9x.
All reasonably modern machines, including silent low-end machines (like the passive AMD A-350 setup one person suggested), are well above the requirements of emulating 5th-generation or slower consoles (i.e. up to and including the n64 and original Playstation).
But for newer consoles you have to have a fair amount of speed, and any system with the capacity to run Dolphin at playable framerates is going to need a fan. You can make a fairly quiet system that will do it (look for mid-range low-wattage CPUs and GPUs, and check out silentpcreview), but the combination of CPU and video card requirements for Dolphin mean a totally passive setup is out of the question - even with ridiculously large heatsinks etc.
Of course you can work around this, and people have been doing so for a long time. But it's one extra unnecessary annoyance, and it gets more and more complicated and annoying as programs grow more complex. As shutdown said, the preprocessor/macro system is brittle; we deal with all kinds of kludges (all the way from the simple #ifndef macro which has to wrap anything which might somehow get included twice to the many complexities of Autotools) to try to keep it working in complex situations. And there's really nothing to recommend it- you say having header files for everything encourages good design, but I don't see any reason this would be true; it's wasted effort, but people feel it must be a helpful ritual since they've been doing it so long.
It's true that with C89 and up, compilers try to provide implicit declarations for functions which you call before any prototype/declaration. But there are good reasons why this is still a warning; I don't know all the details, but there can be issues with the types the compiler infers for the implicit declaration and matching that to the actual function, and IIRC this gets a lot worse under C++. It's best to stick with the ritual of providing the prototypes first, and AFAIK getting rid of them would require a major language redesign and not just extra compiler smarts.
This is a good example of the general pattern- there are lots of suboptimal design decisions in C that require only a trivial amount of effort to work around for simple programs (the programs K&R were thinking about back in the day of the PDP-7), but the effort is still there; as programs grow in complexity, making sure these things are always dealt with correctly becomes far from trivial, and when you add new language constructs to the mix (esp. C++) you compound the problem.
This isn't unique to C; as any programming language ages, some of the design decisions and tradeoffs it originally made will turn out to have been suboptimal. If you add new features they often interact poorly with such suboptimal design decisions, creating complicated "gotchas"; the more powerful the new feature the more likely it is to have FQA-inspiring oddities and gotchas. (Example elsewhere: talk to a Java developer about how generics are done via type erasure and they'll likely have a story to tell about times they've banged their head against that and wished the thing had been done right from the beginning.) But the problems are more pervasive in C and C++ since so much has changed and so much has been learned since C was first designed.
As shutdown suggested, "functional unit" was a mistake and "translation unit" is the correct name. Sorry my mistake caused confusion, and glad to see it was largely cleared up. I hope you also saw a clarifying comment I made a couple days ago.
The disagreement about the definition of smut is exaggerated: just about everybody "knows it when they see it," to quote Judge Stewart, for the vast majority of cases. To pretend there's vast disagreement about it is just disingenuous.
Sure, there's a bit of disagreement at the margins, and of course saying that a whole domain has to move to .xxx because of a pornographic image or two would be ludicrous. But I'm not talking about implementing a zero-false-negatives filter, especially not at a government level: I'm talking about making it simple for individuals or families to decide they don't want that to be such a prominent and easily-accessible part of their Internet experience. Without externally imposed mandatory filters, sites which are focused around pornography would lose very little business by moving to the .xxx tld, but it would become very simple for families and individuals to elect to have a much cleaner internet environment.