Until it can be proven that overeating is caused by the food itself, and not just pure western pigginess, it's only safe to say that the WHO's dietary guidelines were right, *not* their legal recommendations.
The food itself certainly can cause overeating. The food that does that is carbohydrate foods which over-stimulate insulin production. Most sugars for sure, and for many people, fruit, potatoes and grain products. Insulin causes fat storage and also tends to create more appetite. This is an evolutionary development that allows the rapid storage of fat during times when a lot of food is available, such as during the short season of fruit, honey, etc. Excess insulin causes blood sugar yo-yo effect, and cravings for more sugar.
Some of us are quite sensitive to this, thus the popularity of the Atkins Diet. It may be extreme, but the low-carb approach in general (hopefully one a little more moderate) does in fact work for many people.
But it does not work for everyone! We have genetic differences. Eskimos do not eat the same as Iranians, and each probably would not do well on each other's diets. But on their own traditional diets they do very well indeed. That is a major problem with most diet recommendations: They want to recommend One Diet to Rule Them ALL. No can do. Does not fit the real world of different genetics.
However, guzzling Big Gulps is not good for anyone, regardless of genetic makeup. Natural, healthy, fat is just fine, and some of us need a large amount of it in our diets to stay healthy. To insist that everyone must eat little fat is crazy, as I have found for myself. There is only fat or carbs as a reasonable fuel source, and I can't handle many carbs, thus fat is where I get most of my fuel calories.
The Low-Fat mantra has been accepted by nearly everyone as THE TRUTH, when in fact it is mostly used to promote Low-Fat commercial trash foods. Some fats, such as vegetable oils that have been bleached, over-refined, and over-heated until they resemble plastic more than any actual food are dangerous in any amount. But fat as it exists in nature is necessary for good health. That's why they call them Essential Fatty Acids.
If humans are not designed to use fat for fuel, why we do store our excess fuel as fat?
I want it to run something that has been *proven* to be bug-free and stable. Given that most Embedded Linux distributions are constantly changing, based on the latest kernel changes, it's out too. I'd probably go with a stable version of VxWorks that has a history in medical devices.
I did the same thing, in about the same time frame, with similar results. Seemed to me that there was not enough money being made by Lineo (or the competitors we researched) to deliver the quality of support someone might want. I had to pretty much figure everything out myself, from the source code. They were not much help. Their utiltity to build a custom kernel was somewhat useful, and that is all.
From a business standpoint, it's not clear that having the source is worth more than having the support, and paying more up front or per unit. Depends on the project. It would have to be a low cost and high volume product to be worth using Linux I think. Or I would have to have more time than money...
Maybe over time things will get better, but for embedded systems, the key thing is stability, not more and more features. And if it got really stable, then the core OS would be free to everyone to use, and then how much support would you need? The embedded Linux tools biz does seem like a tough business to be in.
The history is well documented. See the first version of the book Inside Windows NT. Dave Cutler was well known for having things his way, and he came from DEC specifically to design NT from the ground up. While there might have been some re-use here and there from OS/2 code, the design was definitely based on VMS.
I took NT architecture and driver classes from guys that used to work with Dave Cutler at DEC. It was an easy jump for them, because the system was so close. And they also had special access to the actual NT source code, so they knew what was being done. These guys were not guessing, based on some error message text being re-used, or some similarity to HPFS structures (which no doubt also borrowed ideas from mainframes, given it was IBM...). NTFS itself may have borrowed some ideas from HPFS, but many things about it are directly from VMS. And the NT kernel itself is definitely a design derivative of VMS.
Yeah, it's an overused phrase, but in this case it seems appropriate. The reference to the Mercola site is an excellent idea, and the first place I would go too.
What we call "traditional medicine," with the priesthood of doctors and the magic wand of drugs, is not at all traditional. It is merely a few decades long experiment that is not working out, but we don't yet have the wisdom to boot it out of our society. At this point it is held in place by the astounding amount of money involved, just like the energy industry and some others.
The amazing thing to me is that so much of the otherwise intelligent/. crowd also buys into the silly idea that the only way to be "healthy" is to take lots of drugs and have body pieces cut out if they become unhealthy. Maybe because they don't want to give up the sugary snacks and soda? I'd rather feel good all the time and be healthy, but that's just me.
While technology can help many fields, it has to be used intelligently. We laugh at controlling the toilet seat via a cel phone, but take seriously that technology should be the answer to the health of our entirely organic bodies. Drugs may be useful in a few cases, but the root CAUSE of most health problems are certainly not a "drug deficiency." Most of them are poor choices in lifestyle and/or a severe lack of education in the actual causes of disease and good health (for cause of poor education, see above reference to LOTS of MONEY).
Putting improper substances (food) for our particular body CAUSES some chemical imbalances, and in our arrogance we think the solution is to try to outsmart nature and just tweak the chemicals. That is like going blind into a million line program and thinking we can just change a few lines and not cause side-effects, even though we don't know hardly anything about the rest of the codebase. As you might expect, it does not work so well. Have you ever really listened to the list of side-effects of the drugs advertised on TV?! Most are much worse than the disease!
The right answer is to find the conditions under which the (individual) human body needs to thrive, and supply them. We are self-healing beings, given half a chance. It's really not so complicated, though the people making billions off the status quo will not admit that it could be that easy.
Humans evolved over millions of years in a certain way, and in the last 100 years we have completely changed the nature of the foods we eat, when we sleep relative to the sun, how much natural light we get, and the chemicals we are exposed to. And as it stands, most of us will get heart disease, diabetes, or cancer; and at a younger and younger age each generation. These diseases were relatively rare not so very long ago. And plenty of less well known diseases often clear up with the same basic regime.
Years ago, I found that if I took just a little bit of Speed (methamphetamine) I would feel what I knew was "normal." I could relax and have focus and energy. But I was just fooling with the Speed and did not want to be a junkie. So I started learning about nutrition to see what else it might be that my body was missing.
Many of the changes seemed to help, but it never really brought me to "normal." For 25 years I ate what was the best I could find for my particular body. But even then I was limited by my beliefs and the lure of "common knowledge." One thing everyone "knew" was that red meat and other animal foods was bad for you and lots of fruit and whole grains were good. Then, from a story and link on Dr. Mercola's site, I found a reference to a book called The Metabolic Typing Diet, by Wolcott and Fahey. The background of Dr. Wolcott is fascinating, but the short version is that we all have specific genetic needs, and we don't eat the kind of foods we need, bad things happen.
The doctor's mentor healed himself on a vegetarian diet, and nearly killed his own wife on the same diet. Since he thought there was no hope anyway, he let her have the meat she wanted. She got
Perhaps you might TRY some of what is on the Mercola site, rather than taking the word of someone with an axe to grind with anyone that threatens HIS TRUTH.
Many of the articles on the Mercola site have extensive references to real studies, not to mention he runs his own office with multiple doctors and REAL EXPERIENCE with thousands of real patients to back up what he says. Many of the other doctors who contribute articles to his site are world class experts in their fields.
This nation has health problems and costs spiraling out of control because of the same trap that all science falls into: protecting the status quo.
Actually, there is a standard for an A/V network. It's called HAVi, and it based on Firewire. (In theory is should be able to use other media and protocols too, but the theory is very far from the reality, given the protocol design.) Main web site for the org is here.
This was created by many of the same Japanese companies. I worked for one of their research labs on the project. When the economy hit the skids a couple years back, they basically abondoned it. They were not the only ones though. Lots of talk, some specs, but no company was actually wiling to be the first to spend the money to put the capabilities into real products. Last I heard it was dying a slow death, in spite of spiffy news updates on the HAVi site.
Same old story of the difficulty of getting competitors to truly work together past the level of the standards committee. When it comes to putting dollars (or yen) on the line, it's a different story.
Given that I was right in the middle of the HAVi thing, and watched it die in realtime, I don't have much faith in this latest great idea either. Especially since HAVi was actually useful.
"the Force is really generated by bacterial midichlorians infections"
The midichlorians do not generate The Force. They are just a bridge. "They make us aware of the Living Force" I believe is the line from the movie (which I just saw again a couple days ago). The Force is entirely separate from any individual life form. It is everywhere. The trick is to be able to sense what is essentially another dimension of life that is not physical in the way we normally think of it.
Some people have it, some don't. Some people realize there is more to life than/. and some don't....
Won't it be a capital expense and still be counted as taxable profit? Gotta love the taxman.
Not necessarily. Up to $100K of capital equipment per year can often just be expensed for a small business. Used to be $25k, but it was just increased to $100k for 2003. This is called the Section 179 Expense Election. Some of the details of the recent changes are here
But of course, it's a tax law, and so there are lots of details to investigate. This overview can even seem misleading about the 100% deduction because it is taken out of context of the entire Section 179 rule. So the actual documents need to be consulted (or even better a tax professional). But the deduction is real, and almost every small business takes advantage of it (it starts to phase out over $400k of capital expenses).
No, if you're dumb you'll short it. For that to work effectively, you not only have to know that it will go down, but when. And you don't.
Not quite. Knowing when is important for a stock option (a PUT in this case). The only way you are going to lose money on shorting a stock is if it continues to go up. You can basically hold a short as long as you want. Do you really thing SCO is going to keep going up NOW? The initial craziness is over. People are now looking for real meat in their claims.
And as someone else mentioned, you can hedge your bet with options. The example mentioned was flawed, as you would actually want to buy a call (not a put) so that if the stock goes up you make money to offset what you lose on the short. The option is time limited, but if done right it would not be too expensive to do the hedging.
Seems like one of the better gambles around actually. And using a combination of selling short and options you can construct a risk/reward curve that makes sense to you based on your perceived odds of SCO going down the toilet.
Or you can just buy put options well below the current price, where they are cheap, and if it falls below that price you make a buck for every buck below that it drops (minus the initial cost of the option). It does take a while to set up an account for options though, as you have to convince the brokerage you know what you are doing, since options can wipe out your money VERY quickly if you don't understand them.
Granted, with options there a time factor, which is figured into the cost of the option. So it is more difficult than shorting, but takes less money too (often a LOT less money). When you know the company and the market situation very well, options can be very useful in circumstances like these.
The aid money we give to Uzbekistan goes to the people, doesn't it?
You'd hope so wouldn't you? Often it does not, or has bad consequences. I strongly recommend the recent book "Adventure Capitalist" by Jim Rogers. The website about his recent trip is here.
He took a 3 year trip, driving around the world to see how it REALLY is. One of the things he noted was that the international aid almost NEVER actually got to the people that were supposed to get it. Someone always gets in the middle and ends up SELLING the goods. Where food actually gets through, it often just creates a whole generation that does not know how to farm their own land, even though it is now perfectly capable of supporting them. Not sure if it specifically applies to Uzbekistan, but aid alone very often does more harm than good, if done as a policy rather than just a temporary measure.
But that is just a couple of points. The book is highly recommended for insight on the reality of what is going on in many parts of the world. (The reality of former USSR is really eye-opening too. Like most military equipment is getting sold off like crazy, and the country basically run by organized crime.)
While I honestly have to admit that some of your points are relevant, some are way off base compared to what I was trying to say.
I'm not blaming the language for anything. I program almost exclusively in C and C++; apps, drivers and embedded code. And I like the languages a lot. For the work I do they are about the only reasonable solution. And I don't have much trouble with any size issues. I was attempting to make a point about the HUGE base of legacy code out there, and much of it is not good code. (are you really suprised?). So it will be a real problem, and someone will have to deal with it.
Granted, I may not have effectively communicated what I was trying to say, and you had some valid points and corrections. Sad thing is that your ranting and raving and sarcasm makes it difficult to have a rational discussion with you, so I'm not going to try.
Try doing a count of the number of times you used the word "YOU" in your reply and think about how that makes it a personal attack on someone rather than passing on information. (I see the same thing in some of your reponses to others) When passing on information, "YOU" does not get used very much. Read K&R and see how many times "you" is used to communicate information. Therefore, it seems your intent was not to communicate information. Worth considering what it really was...
This is the sort of attitude that gives techies a bad name. Your programming skills may be great, but if you are so abusive that people don't want to work with you, what is the point?
In the parent comment, you said "because buttheads like you can't get through your thick skulls not to use raw types" And that got modded up for being "insightful." The comment guidelines specifically say that "...Inflammatory... comments might be moderated" Sad thing is, it seems they actually get modded UP! Have to be careful what behaviour gets rewarded...
I've looked at some of your recent postings and you're obviously a very bright person that is able to reason effectively and make real contributions here. If you could just drop the personal insults....
Well, many of us do not use raw types. Bu here is the issue: if an int = 64 bits, then according to the rules of C, a long must also be 64 bits. If that happens, then there is NO WAY TO DEFINE A 32 BIT VALUE. And that is important for some types of programming (drivers, embedded, etc.) It would require some kind of compiler specific hack.
The problem here is like that of the Win2K issue, we are now crossing into the realm where the designers of the language (and the people that wrote programs in that language) did not think we would go.
The whole thing breaks down after 32 bits because an int can't be larger than a long. The model only has worked so far because there have been basically two sizes of int in wide use as we moved from 8 to 16 to 32 bits (8-bit compilers use int=16 bits). As long as the int was no smaller than a 'short' and no longer than a 'long' everything worked fine, and met the rules for an int. That requires that int be either 16 or 32 bits, and nothing else. Otherwise the value of long has be redefined to 64 bits instead of the 32 bits it always was, which starts to break some code.
This is true even for those of us that rarely use the int type at all, and carefully use short or long or longlong so we know the limits (usually through typedefs). Perhaps it is not a real disaster for everyone if longs become 64 bits and there is no 32 bit type, but it depends on what kind of code you're writing. The closer you are to the hardware the more potentional for trouble.
This has of course already been handled before with other machines, but it really will be hitting the mainstream now, and affecting a large amount of legacy code in coming years. I can see why the most direct route to not royally screwing up a lot of code is to just keep an int at 32 bits. Like today, the 64-bit value is there if you need it. But 32-bits is enough for most things, and it makes porting all the legacy software from PCs a whole lot easier.
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Until it can be proven that overeating is caused by the food itself, and not just pure western pigginess, it's only safe to say that the WHO's dietary guidelines were right, *not* their legal recommendations.
The food itself certainly can cause overeating. The food that does that is carbohydrate foods which over-stimulate insulin production. Most sugars for sure, and for many people, fruit, potatoes and grain products. Insulin causes fat storage and also tends to create more appetite. This is an evolutionary development that allows the rapid storage of fat during times when a lot of food is available, such as during the short season of fruit, honey, etc. Excess insulin causes blood sugar yo-yo effect, and cravings for more sugar.
Some of us are quite sensitive to this, thus the popularity of the Atkins Diet. It may be extreme, but the low-carb approach in general (hopefully one a little more moderate) does in fact work for many people.
But it does not work for everyone! We have genetic differences. Eskimos do not eat the same as Iranians, and each probably would not do well on each other's diets. But on their own traditional diets they do very well indeed. That is a major problem with most diet recommendations: They want to recommend One Diet to Rule Them ALL. No can do. Does not fit the real world of different genetics.
However, guzzling Big Gulps is not good for anyone, regardless of genetic makeup. Natural, healthy, fat is just fine, and some of us need a large amount of it in our diets to stay healthy. To insist that everyone must eat little fat is crazy, as I have found for myself. There is only fat or carbs as a reasonable fuel source, and I can't handle many carbs, thus fat is where I get most of my fuel calories.
The Low-Fat mantra has been accepted by nearly everyone as THE TRUTH, when in fact it is mostly used to promote Low-Fat commercial trash foods. Some fats, such as vegetable oils that have been bleached, over-refined, and over-heated until they resemble plastic more than any actual food are dangerous in any amount. But fat as it exists in nature is necessary for good health. That's why they call them Essential Fatty Acids.
If humans are not designed to use fat for fuel, why we do store our excess fuel as fat?
I want it to run something that has been *proven* to be bug-free and stable. Given that most Embedded Linux distributions are constantly changing, based on the latest kernel changes, it's out too. I'd probably go with a stable version of VxWorks that has a history in medical devices.
I did the same thing, in about the same time frame, with similar results. Seemed to me that there was not enough money being made by Lineo (or the competitors we researched) to deliver the quality of support someone might want. I had to pretty much figure everything out myself, from the source code. They were not much help. Their utiltity to build a custom kernel was somewhat useful, and that is all.
From a business standpoint, it's not clear that having the source is worth more than having the support, and paying more up front or per unit. Depends on the project. It would have to be a low cost and high volume product to be worth using Linux I think. Or I would have to have more time than money...
Maybe over time things will get better, but for embedded systems, the key thing is stability, not more and more features. And if it got really stable, then the core OS would be free to everyone to use, and then how much support would you need? The embedded Linux tools biz does seem like a tough business to be in.
The history is well documented. See the first version of the book Inside Windows NT. Dave Cutler was well known for having things his way, and he came from DEC specifically to design NT from the ground up. While there might have been some re-use here and there from OS/2 code, the design was definitely based on VMS.
I took NT architecture and driver classes from guys that used to work with Dave Cutler at DEC. It was an easy jump for them, because the system was so close. And they also had special access to the actual NT source code, so they knew what was being done. These guys were not guessing, based on some error message text being re-used, or some similarity to HPFS structures (which no doubt also borrowed ideas from mainframes, given it was IBM...). NTFS itself may have borrowed some ideas from HPFS, but many things about it are directly from VMS. And the NT kernel itself is definitely a design derivative of VMS.
Yeah, it's an overused phrase, but in this case it seems appropriate. The reference to the Mercola site is an excellent idea, and the first place I would go too.
/. crowd also buys into the silly idea that the only way to be "healthy" is to take lots of drugs and have body pieces cut out if they become unhealthy. Maybe because they don't want to give up the sugary snacks and soda? I'd rather feel good all the time and be healthy, but that's just me.
What we call "traditional medicine," with the priesthood of doctors and the magic wand of drugs, is not at all traditional. It is merely a few decades long experiment that is not working out, but we don't yet have the wisdom to boot it out of our society. At this point it is held in place by the astounding amount of money involved, just like the energy industry and some others.
The amazing thing to me is that so much of the otherwise intelligent
While technology can help many fields, it has to be used intelligently. We laugh at controlling the toilet seat via a cel phone, but take seriously that technology should be the answer to the health of our entirely organic bodies. Drugs may be useful in a few cases, but the root CAUSE of most health problems are certainly not a "drug deficiency." Most of them are poor choices in lifestyle and/or a severe lack of education in the actual causes of disease and good health (for cause of poor education, see above reference to LOTS of MONEY).
Putting improper substances (food) for our particular body CAUSES some chemical imbalances, and in our arrogance we think the solution is to try to outsmart nature and just tweak the chemicals. That is like going blind into a million line program and thinking we can just change a few lines and not cause side-effects, even though we don't know hardly anything about the rest of the codebase. As you might expect, it does not work so well. Have you ever really listened to the list of side-effects of the drugs advertised on TV?! Most are much worse than the disease!
The right answer is to find the conditions under which the (individual) human body needs to thrive, and supply them. We are self-healing beings, given half a chance. It's really not so complicated, though the people making billions off the status quo will not admit that it could be that easy.
Humans evolved over millions of years in a certain way, and in the last 100 years we have completely changed the nature of the foods we eat, when we sleep relative to the sun, how much natural light we get, and the chemicals we are exposed to. And as it stands, most of us will get heart disease, diabetes, or cancer; and at a younger and younger age each generation. These diseases were relatively rare not so very long ago. And plenty of less well known diseases often clear up with the same basic regime.
Years ago, I found that if I took just a little bit of Speed (methamphetamine) I would feel what I knew was "normal." I could relax and have focus and energy. But I was just fooling with the Speed and did not want to be a junkie. So I started learning about nutrition to see what else it might be that my body was missing.
Many of the changes seemed to help, but it never really brought me to "normal." For 25 years I ate what was the best I could find for my particular body. But even then I was limited by my beliefs and the lure of "common knowledge." One thing everyone "knew" was that red meat and other animal foods was bad for you and lots of fruit and whole grains were good. Then, from a story and link on Dr. Mercola's site, I found a reference to a book called The Metabolic Typing Diet, by Wolcott and Fahey. The background of Dr. Wolcott is fascinating, but the short version is that we all have specific genetic needs, and we don't eat the kind of foods we need, bad things happen.
The doctor's mentor healed himself on a vegetarian diet, and nearly killed his own wife on the same diet. Since he thought there was no hope anyway, he let her have the meat she wanted. She got
Perhaps you might TRY some of what is on the Mercola site, rather than taking the word of someone with an axe to grind with anyone that threatens HIS TRUTH.
Many of the articles on the Mercola site have extensive references to real studies, not to mention he runs his own office with multiple doctors and REAL EXPERIENCE with thousands of real patients to back up what he says. Many of the other doctors who contribute articles to his site are world class experts in their fields.
This nation has health problems and costs spiraling out of control because of the same trap that all science falls into: protecting the status quo.
Actually, there is a standard for an A/V network. It's called HAVi, and it based on Firewire. (In theory is should be able to use other media and protocols too, but the theory is very far from the reality, given the protocol design.) Main web site for the org is here .
This was created by many of the same Japanese companies. I worked for one of their research labs on the project. When the economy hit the skids a couple years back, they basically abondoned it. They were not the only ones though. Lots of talk, some specs, but no company was actually wiling to be the first to spend the money to put the capabilities into real products. Last I heard it was dying a slow death, in spite of spiffy news updates on the HAVi site.
Same old story of the difficulty of getting competitors to truly work together past the level of the standards committee. When it comes to putting dollars (or yen) on the line, it's a different story.
Given that I was right in the middle of the HAVi thing, and watched it die in realtime, I don't have much faith in this latest great idea either. Especially since HAVi was actually useful.
The midichlorians do not generate The Force. They are just a bridge. "They make us aware of the Living Force" I believe is the line from the movie (which I just saw again a couple days ago). The Force is entirely separate from any individual life form. It is everywhere. The trick is to be able to sense what is essentially another dimension of life that is not physical in the way we normally think of it.
Some people have it, some don't. Some people realize there is more to life than
Won't it be a capital expense and still be counted as taxable profit? Gotta love the taxman.
Not necessarily. Up to $100K of capital equipment per year can often just be expensed for a small business. Used to be $25k, but it was just increased to $100k for 2003. This is called the Section 179 Expense Election. Some of the details of the recent changes are here
But of course, it's a tax law, and so there are lots of details to investigate. This overview can even seem misleading about the 100% deduction because it is taken out of context of the entire Section 179 rule. So the actual documents need to be consulted (or even better a tax professional). But the deduction is real, and almost every small business takes advantage of it (it starts to phase out over $400k of capital expenses).
Not quite. Knowing when is important for a stock option (a PUT in this case). The only way you are going to lose money on shorting a stock is if it continues to go up. You can basically hold a short as long as you want. Do you really thing SCO is going to keep going up NOW? The initial craziness is over. People are now looking for real meat in their claims.
And as someone else mentioned, you can hedge your bet with options. The example mentioned was flawed, as you would actually want to buy a call (not a put) so that if the stock goes up you make money to offset what you lose on the short. The option is time limited, but if done right it would not be too expensive to do the hedging.
Seems like one of the better gambles around actually. And using a combination of selling short and options you can construct a risk/reward curve that makes sense to you based on your perceived odds of SCO going down the toilet.
Or you can just buy put options well below the current price, where they are cheap, and if it falls below that price you make a buck for every buck below that it drops (minus the initial cost of the option). It does take a while to set up an account for options though, as you have to convince the brokerage you know what you are doing, since options can wipe out your money VERY quickly if you don't understand them.
Granted, with options there a time factor, which is figured into the cost of the option. So it is more difficult than shorting, but takes less money too (often a LOT less money). When you know the company and the market situation very well, options can be very useful in circumstances like these.
You'd hope so wouldn't you? Often it does not, or has bad consequences. I strongly recommend the recent book "Adventure Capitalist" by Jim Rogers. The website about his recent trip is here.
He took a 3 year trip, driving around the world to see how it REALLY is. One of the things he noted was that the international aid almost NEVER actually got to the people that were supposed to get it. Someone always gets in the middle and ends up SELLING the goods. Where food actually gets through, it often just creates a whole generation that does not know how to farm their own land, even though it is now perfectly capable of supporting them. Not sure if it specifically applies to Uzbekistan, but aid alone very often does more harm than good, if done as a policy rather than just a temporary measure.
But that is just a couple of points. The book is highly recommended for insight on the reality of what is going on in many parts of the world. (The reality of former USSR is really eye-opening too. Like most military equipment is getting sold off like crazy, and the country basically run by organized crime.)
BTW, insightful post.
I'm not blaming the language for anything. I program almost exclusively in C and C++; apps, drivers and embedded code. And I like the languages a lot. For the work I do they are about the only reasonable solution. And I don't have much trouble with any size issues. I was attempting to make a point about the HUGE base of legacy code out there, and much of it is not good code. (are you really suprised?). So it will be a real problem, and someone will have to deal with it.
Granted, I may not have effectively communicated what I was trying to say, and you had some valid points and corrections. Sad thing is that your ranting and raving and sarcasm makes it difficult to have a rational discussion with you, so I'm not going to try.
Try doing a count of the number of times you used the word "YOU" in your reply and think about how that makes it a personal attack on someone rather than passing on information. (I see the same thing in some of your reponses to others) When passing on information, "YOU" does not get used very much. Read K&R and see how many times "you" is used to communicate information. Therefore, it seems your intent was not to communicate information. Worth considering what it really was...
This is the sort of attitude that gives techies a bad name. Your programming skills may be great, but if you are so abusive that people don't want to work with you, what is the point?
In the parent comment, you said "because buttheads like you can't get through your thick skulls not to use raw types" And that got modded up for being "insightful." The comment guidelines specifically say that "...Inflammatory... comments might be moderated" Sad thing is, it seems they actually get modded UP! Have to be careful what behaviour gets rewarded...
I've looked at some of your recent postings and you're obviously a very bright person that is able to reason effectively and make real contributions here. If you could just drop the personal insults....
Why not have the smallest addressable unit be a 16-bit value, instead of the now-standard 8 bits?
Because sometimes you really need 8 bit values. While there are ways around it, it can certainly be problematic in some cases.
Well, many of us do not use raw types. Bu here is the issue: if an int = 64 bits, then according to the rules of C, a long must also be 64 bits. If that happens, then there is NO WAY TO DEFINE A 32 BIT VALUE. And that is important for some types of programming (drivers, embedded, etc.) It would require some kind of compiler specific hack.
The problem here is like that of the Win2K issue, we are now crossing into the realm where the designers of the language (and the people that wrote programs in that language) did not think we would go.
The whole thing breaks down after 32 bits because an int can't be larger than a long. The model only has worked so far because there have been basically two sizes of int in wide use as we moved from 8 to 16 to 32 bits (8-bit compilers use int=16 bits). As long as the int was no smaller than a 'short' and no longer than a 'long' everything worked fine, and met the rules for an int. That requires that int be either 16 or 32 bits, and nothing else. Otherwise the value of long has be redefined to 64 bits instead of the 32 bits it always was, which starts to break some code.
This is true even for those of us that rarely use the int type at all, and carefully use short or long or longlong so we know the limits (usually through typedefs). Perhaps it is not a real disaster for everyone if longs become 64 bits and there is no 32 bit type, but it depends on what kind of code you're writing. The closer you are to the hardware the more potentional for trouble.
This has of course already been handled before with other machines, but it really will be hitting the mainstream now, and affecting a large amount of legacy code in coming years. I can see why the most direct route to not royally screwing up a lot of code is to just keep an int at 32 bits. Like today, the 64-bit value is there if you need it. But 32-bits is enough for most things, and it makes porting all the legacy software from PCs a whole lot easier.