Wars are only fought when BOTH sides think they can win.
That is not always true. Sometimes nations blunder into wars that are clearly not in their best interest. When I was in high school, my history teacher made us read The Guns of August, a book about how Europe blundered into the First World War through a serious of diplomatic misunderstandings and misjudgements about the intentions of both their adversaries and allies.
Before I read that book I had the naive belief that, although politicians may make self-serving statements in public, in private they were actually smart competent people that knew what they were doing and worked for the best interest of their people. After reading now they sent millions of their citizens off to die in a pointless war over a dead archduke, I realized that wasn't true.
I thought about that book in 2003, as America was blundering into the Iraq War.
In America, consumption already far outpaces savings and investment, with the difference accumulated as debt.
Do you really believe the solution is to consume even more? That means even less investment and more borrowing from other countries that have surplus savings.
There is not a shred of evidence that automation causes unemployment.
In the long run, this is true. But in the short run, there can be dislocation of workers that lack skills for new jobs.
There is plenty of evidence that automation improves living standards and wealth for everybody.
This is also true in the long run. But in the short run, while average living standards improve, the people whose jobs are replaced can see a decline in their living standards. Backhoes reduce wages for ditch diggers, and looms reduce wages for weavers. In time, new opportunities open up and people adapt.
Perl 5 must be godawful if you need to compile it to Java.
It isn't compiled to Java. It is compiled to JVM bytecode. Perl compilers have been done before, so the only new thing here is the backend target... and that he claims to support "eval" without an embedded interpreter. I don't see how that is possible, and he should get a Turing award if he actually accomplished that.
National citizenship rules should be changed. Instead of getting automatic citizenship based on where you are born, you should instead get provisional citizenship until your 21st birthday, and then you pick permanent citizenship in the country that best fits your political and economic views.
UK already has hate speech laws, which must've been fine with you.
Representative democracy doesn't work that way. Just because the party in power implements a particular law, that does not mean the voters are "fine with it". The choices in an election have a very coarse granularity. You vote for a party, not particular policies. If you vote for Labour so that you get more enlightened censorship laws, then you also get a PM that thinks the British economy should be more like Venezuela's. People care about their paycheck more than they care about the free speech rights of Holocaust deniers, but that doesn't mean that every Tory voter supports censorship.
Better 5 months late and unannounced with no industry coordination or planning than never.
Anyone with a brain knew this was going to happen and already made the transition years ago. The procrastinating and/or ignorant people caught with their pants down would not have responded to any effort at coordination, and are not capable of planning.
Even if you try and run your own mail-server with no objections from your ISP
You are missing the point. In this alternative universe there would be no ISPs. You get your internet from the devices around you, in a wireless web. There would be no hierarchy, no center, no backbones. Just lots of peer devices communicating directly with each other.
Here is an analogy: The current Internet is like getting your information from the six o'clock news, with a central hub. This new Internet would be like getting your information by talking to your friends and neighbors, and then passing on the news and rumors to others.
Traffic is not like sewage that needs to be piped from one place to another. Sure, road improvements can lead to increased traffic, but traffic is PEOPLE and better roads give more of them the ability to live as they choose. Government should serve the people, and should not view citizens as an annoyance to be managed away.
Well that's a horribly biased piece and whoever wrote that should be shunned.
Indeed. TFA is portraying NIMBYism as heroic. The freeway may have been a bad idea, but the other projects would have been nice to have. Cities should be dynamic, with growth, change, and progress. Stagnation is bad for our economy and is a major source of inequality, as rents are driven up, and poorer people are driven out of the most prosperous areas, while the rich cash in on the rising property values driven by artificial scarcity.
The question is in how restrictive the authorities are.
Indeed. That is why I specifically mentioned that the risk of having your door kicked down in the middle of the night, and the police hauling you off to jail is four times higher in America.
"So long as you freely allow authoritarians to dictate what you can and can't do, without resisting or protesting" is a pretty big exception to freedom.
Authoritarians do not "dictate what you can and can't do". That is "totalitarianism" and China is nothing like that. Chinese people are free to travel abroad, change jobs, associate with whoever they want, live where they want. The main difference between them and Americans is that they have less reason to fear the police.
Phasing out cash is a great tool for every totalitarian system.
China is not totalitarian. They are authoritarian. There is a difference.
As long as they don't challenge authority, Chinese people actually have greater freedom to go about their lives than Americans do: Americans are four times more likely to be arrested and incarcerated by their government.
In which century? China's economy has risen eight-fold in the last few decades. You might want to visit again.
Most folks outside the big cities only have power during the day
Nonsense. There may be a few remote villages that still use generators, but that is not "most people". For 99% of Chinese, grid electricity is available and reliable.
Their payment system doesn't rely on wall-power anyway. It is based on phones and the cellular network, which, btw, is faster, more reliable, and more ubiquitous than it is in America.
I was in Shanghai earlier this year, and I hired a handyman to fix my toilet. When he was finished, he popped up a QR code on his phone, I scanned it with my phone, and the bill was paid.
Is it just because they have the best fabs or designers or the most experience?
This is a big part of it. Intel has a huge market and can spread high NRE over millions of units. So they can devote a lot of engineering resources to each design iteration, and their fabs are fabulous (sorry).
- x86 has a pretty expressive instruction set which improves code density enough that more code can fit in cache than RISC-y architectures
This is only partly true. Original x86 code was dense, but extensions were tacked on that add prefixes to allow extended precision and extra registers. These made the code less dense.
Code has much better locality of reference than data, since a lot of time is spent in tight loops. So it actually isn't super important to have a really big code cache. The cache can be Harvard Architecture, so code and data are cached separately, and the code cache is read-only. Current x86 CPUs use separate "Harvard" cache for L1 (the one closest to the metal) and use a unified cache for L2 and L3.
Intel couldn't figure out how to make a compiler good enough
One of the early RISC principles espoused by Dave Patterson was that the chip and the compiler should be developed simultaneously. If the compiler guys need a key instruction, then the silicon guys add it to the design. If an instruction is rarely used by the compiler, then it should be eliminated and replaced in software with a slower (but infrequent) sequence.
A big mistake with Itanium, was that this didn't happen. The hardware was done first, and then the design was thrown over the wall to the compiler team. Instead there should have only been ONE team with compiler and hardware guys working side-by-side.
Another big mistake was that Intel tried to monopolize the compiler market. Only their own rather expensive compiler produced acceptable code. But at the time it was released, the server market was rapidly moving to Linux/FreeBSD and gcc was the FREE pre-installed default compiler. Not many people wanted to pay extra for a compiler. Intel would have been much better off if they teamed up with the FSF and worked hand-in-hand to have a gcc port working on day one, and using feedback from the gcc designers to influence the hardware design as well.
AMD did exactly this with their x86-64 design. They hired gcc developers and they worked closely with the hardware designers. When the chip was released, gcc was ready, and both Linux and FreeBSD were able to boot up and run on some of the very first systems.
Find me a human who can compete with a bloodhound or beagle in tracking a person, based on smelling a old shirt.
Also a cow. TFS makes it sound like since cows have a poor sense of smell. That is not true at all. Pigs also have superb smelling ability. They can locate potatoes and other root vegetables even through frozen ground. Pigs are sometimes used for tracking instead of dogs. Dogs have the drawback that they will only work with one handler, who they consider their master. But a pig will work with any handler, and will consider any human to be their equal.
Never say "yes." They will record that, and alter the recording so that you said "yes" to agree to their offer.
Bullcrap. A nameless voice on a phone is not a court enforceable contract. Absolutely no way. And a call center in Mumbai does not have write access to anyone's credit report.
Slashdot Mirror
So this is a private group of experts that will help prevent Nuclear war. So how exactly do they do that?
The group formed in 1947, seven decades ago. Since then there have been ZERO nuclear wars. So they have been doing a damned good job so far.
Will they have doomsday clock like the other bunch?
They are the same bunch.
if you want success in the long term, you need to endure hardships in the short term.
Good luck winning an election with that slogan.
Wars are only fought when BOTH sides think they can win.
That is not always true. Sometimes nations blunder into wars that are clearly not in their best interest. When I was in high school, my history teacher made us read The Guns of August, a book about how Europe blundered into the First World War through a serious of diplomatic misunderstandings and misjudgements about the intentions of both their adversaries and allies.
Before I read that book I had the naive belief that, although politicians may make self-serving statements in public, in private they were actually smart competent people that knew what they were doing and worked for the best interest of their people. After reading now they sent millions of their citizens off to die in a pointless war over a dead archduke, I realized that wasn't true.
I thought about that book in 2003, as America was blundering into the Iraq War.
If he can compile and run the following perl program, I will be extremely impressed.
#!/usr/bin/env perl
eval(<>);
the working class actually spends their income.
In America, consumption already far outpaces savings and investment, with the difference accumulated as debt.
Do you really believe the solution is to consume even more? That means even less investment and more borrowing from other countries that have surplus savings.
Except that this time around there is nowhere to go.
Except that is what people said last time, and the time before that.
There is not a shred of evidence that automation causes unemployment.
In the long run, this is true. But in the short run, there can be dislocation of workers that lack skills for new jobs.
There is plenty of evidence that automation improves living standards and wealth for everybody.
This is also true in the long run. But in the short run, while average living standards improve, the people whose jobs are replaced can see a decline in their living standards. Backhoes reduce wages for ditch diggers, and looms reduce wages for weavers. In time, new opportunities open up and people adapt.
Perl 5 must be godawful if you need to compile it to Java.
It isn't compiled to Java. It is compiled to JVM bytecode. Perl compilers have been done before, so the only new thing here is the backend target ... and that he claims to support "eval" without an embedded interpreter. I don't see how that is possible, and he should get a Turing award if he actually accomplished that.
In his Gettysburg address, Abraham Lincoln said that the USA should have a government of, by, and for the people
... while waging war on people that felt his government didn't represent them.
National citizenship rules should be changed. Instead of getting automatic citizenship based on where you are born, you should instead get provisional citizenship until your 21st birthday, and then you pick permanent citizenship in the country that best fits your political and economic views.
UK already has hate speech laws, which must've been fine with you.
Representative democracy doesn't work that way. Just because the party in power implements a particular law, that does not mean the voters are "fine with it". The choices in an election have a very coarse granularity. You vote for a party, not particular policies. If you vote for Labour so that you get more enlightened censorship laws, then you also get a PM that thinks the British economy should be more like Venezuela's. People care about their paycheck more than they care about the free speech rights of Holocaust deniers, but that doesn't mean that every Tory voter supports censorship.
Better 5 months late and unannounced with no industry coordination or planning than never.
Anyone with a brain knew this was going to happen and already made the transition years ago. The procrastinating and/or ignorant people caught with their pants down would not have responded to any effort at coordination, and are not capable of planning.
Even if you try and run your own mail-server with no objections from your ISP
You are missing the point. In this alternative universe there would be no ISPs. You get your internet from the devices around you, in a wireless web. There would be no hierarchy, no center, no backbones. Just lots of peer devices communicating directly with each other.
Here is an analogy: The current Internet is like getting your information from the six o'clock news, with a central hub. This new Internet would be like getting your information by talking to your friends and neighbors, and then passing on the news and rumors to others.
Learn about induced traffic.
Traffic is not like sewage that needs to be piped from one place to another. Sure, road improvements can lead to increased traffic, but traffic is PEOPLE and better roads give more of them the ability to live as they choose. Government should serve the people, and should not view citizens as an annoyance to be managed away.
Well that's a horribly biased piece and whoever wrote that should be shunned.
Indeed. TFA is portraying NIMBYism as heroic. The freeway may have been a bad idea, but the other projects would have been nice to have. Cities should be dynamic, with growth, change, and progress. Stagnation is bad for our economy and is a major source of inequality, as rents are driven up, and poorer people are driven out of the most prosperous areas, while the rich cash in on the rising property values driven by artificial scarcity.
Oh? Then how are the phones charged? Magical pixie dust?
You don't need reliable 24/7 power to charge a phone. Cell towers have backup batteries, so they continue to work through outages.
If you live off the grid, you can still have a cellphone.
I would rather have a US $100 dollar bill than an electronic promise to pay me.
Wechat is not a credit based system. You tap, and there is an immediate transfer of money from your account to mine. No "promise" is involved.
The question is in how restrictive the authorities are.
Indeed. That is why I specifically mentioned that the risk of having your door kicked down in the middle of the night, and the police hauling you off to jail is four times higher in America.
"So long as you freely allow authoritarians to dictate what you can and can't do, without resisting or protesting" is a pretty big exception to freedom.
Authoritarians do not "dictate what you can and can't do". That is "totalitarianism" and China is nothing like that. Chinese people are free to travel abroad, change jobs, associate with whoever they want, live where they want. The main difference between them and Americans is that they have less reason to fear the police.
Phasing out cash is a great tool for every totalitarian system.
China is not totalitarian. They are authoritarian. There is a difference.
As long as they don't challenge authority, Chinese people actually have greater freedom to go about their lives than Americans do: Americans are four times more likely to be arrested and incarcerated by their government.
I've toured rural China with my Wife's family.
In which century? China's economy has risen eight-fold in the last few decades. You might want to visit again.
Most folks outside the big cities only have power during the day
Nonsense. There may be a few remote villages that still use generators, but that is not "most people". For 99% of Chinese, grid electricity is available and reliable.
Their payment system doesn't rely on wall-power anyway. It is based on phones and the cellular network, which, btw, is faster, more reliable, and more ubiquitous than it is in America.
I was in Shanghai earlier this year, and I hired a handyman to fix my toilet. When he was finished, he popped up a QR code on his phone, I scanned it with my phone, and the bill was paid.
Is it just because they have the best fabs or designers or the most experience?
This is a big part of it. Intel has a huge market and can spread high NRE over millions of units. So they can devote a lot of engineering resources to each design iteration, and their fabs are fabulous (sorry).
- x86 has a pretty expressive instruction set which improves code density enough that more code can fit in cache than RISC-y architectures
This is only partly true. Original x86 code was dense, but extensions were tacked on that add prefixes to allow extended precision and extra registers. These made the code less dense.
Code has much better locality of reference than data, since a lot of time is spent in tight loops. So it actually isn't super important to have a really big code cache. The cache can be Harvard Architecture, so code and data are cached separately, and the code cache is read-only. Current x86 CPUs use separate "Harvard" cache for L1 (the one closest to the metal) and use a unified cache for L2 and L3.
Intel couldn't figure out how to make a compiler good enough
One of the early RISC principles espoused by Dave Patterson was that the chip and the compiler should be developed simultaneously. If the compiler guys need a key instruction, then the silicon guys add it to the design. If an instruction is rarely used by the compiler, then it should be eliminated and replaced in software with a slower (but infrequent) sequence.
A big mistake with Itanium, was that this didn't happen. The hardware was done first, and then the design was thrown over the wall to the compiler team. Instead there should have only been ONE team with compiler and hardware guys working side-by-side.
Another big mistake was that Intel tried to monopolize the compiler market. Only their own rather expensive compiler produced acceptable code. But at the time it was released, the server market was rapidly moving to Linux/FreeBSD and gcc was the FREE pre-installed default compiler. Not many people wanted to pay extra for a compiler. Intel would have been much better off if they teamed up with the FSF and worked hand-in-hand to have a gcc port working on day one, and using feedback from the gcc designers to influence the hardware design as well.
AMD did exactly this with their x86-64 design. They hired gcc developers and they worked closely with the hardware designers. When the chip was released, gcc was ready, and both Linux and FreeBSD were able to boot up and run on some of the very first systems.
Find me a human who can compete with a bloodhound or beagle in tracking a person, based on smelling a old shirt.
Also a cow. TFS makes it sound like since cows have a poor sense of smell. That is not true at all. Pigs also have superb smelling ability. They can locate potatoes and other root vegetables even through frozen ground. Pigs are sometimes used for tracking instead of dogs. Dogs have the drawback that they will only work with one handler, who they consider their master. But a pig will work with any handler, and will consider any human to be their equal.
Never say "yes." They will record that, and alter the recording so that you said "yes" to agree to their offer.
Bullcrap. A nameless voice on a phone is not a court enforceable contract. Absolutely no way. And a call center in Mumbai does not have write access to anyone's credit report.