"you wank. 'gcc compatible', yes great. you extend a language and then force all sort of people to deal with the resultant garbage. there is a standard, use it. the gcc extentions can be conveient, but they don't really change the scope of the language."
Whether or not you or I think the resultant garbage is bad, sometimes people have taken advantage of it and that's enough to say they're not compatible.
"and the intel compiler can really scream over gcc in some applica0tions, and its almost never worse. its a good compiler for a crappy instruction set."
True, true, and true.
"why would you not want to use it? because you're a religous fanatic?"
Off the top of my head?
Because maintaining an application for two different architechtures is easier than maintaining an application for two different compilers and architechtures. Even if they were both strict C compilers, they'd still be slightly different.
Because ICC isn't free for commercial applications.
Because ICC produces broken binaries for other processors. Irrelevant on Intel Mac, but if we're talking about Linux or Windows this is an issue.
Because as bad as the GCC customizations are, sometimes people have used them and sometimes it's a pain to port them to another compiler.
I'm not a GNU zealot or a GCC zealot, I'm just saying that there's valid reasons to not want a different compiler. If they'd been using a commercial compiler and were considering adding GCC I'd be saying the same thing.
"Intel plans to provide industry leading development tools support for Apple later this year, including the Intel C/C++ Compiler for Apple, Intel Fortran Compiler for Apple, Intel Math Kernel Libraries for Apple and Intel Integrated Performance Primitives for Apple."
Nothing in there says that ICC will be the default compiler in XCode.
I never denied that it would be available, only that it would be the default.
"The intel compilers are free for non-commercial use. At least on linux and I'm pretty sure for windows."
Using ICC by default would make XCode non-free for commercial use.
"Also, it is always a good idea to test your code on as many different compilers as possible. This makes sure that it will be easier to port later on."
I won't deny that, but for people doing Mac-only development it would introduce a lot of extra effort and platform-specific bugs. It would be foolish to do it by default. Apple needs to minimize the differences between platforms, it's already going to take a non-trivial amount of extra effort to maintain a universal binary.
Before anyone says it, this won't replace GCC on XCode. Intel's compiler is expensive and is not 100% compatible with GCC. It also doesn't support PowerPC so as long as they're supporting both architechtures they can't use ICC exclusively.
It'll be an option for people that need better performance on x86. Any collaboration is so that ICC can be hooked into XCode in an easy to use way.
PowerPC was probably the best choice for sonar analysis when they designed the system, and now that it's not the fastest they've still got to support the systems they have in place because it's fast enough.
The difference being that Intel is already selling chips good enough to justify the switch. Whether or not this new thing is a big change, and whether or not it works out, Intel has proved they can make chips good enough by selling them in the millions.
My entire building is covered by a giant "SMC" network. I wouldn't be surprised if half the people were accidently leaching from each other's connections.
Hydro is one of the alternatives that works now, but conditions have to be good for it to work. Most of the places where conditions are good are already in use.
It helps, but it won't scale much higher than it is and it's not even a majority now.
The isotope of Uranium currently used in commercial reactors is U-235, which constitutes about 0.7% of all naturally occuring Uranium. Othertypes of reactors can use the remaining 99.3% of Uranium or the much more common Thorium as fuel.
Integral fast reactors produce much less waste because they burn the fuel more completely. They're not even close to waste-free, but their waste isotopes are shorter lived, and the long-term radioactive waste produced (reactor structure etc) is much smaller in quantity. Pebble bed reactors produce their waste contained in nigh-indestructible (usually silicon carbide?) pebbles that are easier to dispose of safely.
There's thousands of years of fuel, even at substantially increased demand.
"Quote some numbers please. "Doesn't really look that good" is meaningless."
Coal generation is about 35% efficient, transmission losses can be up to about 20% or so, battery storage is around 60% efficient, electric motors are around 66% efficient, so 0.35 * 0.80 * 0.60 * 0.66 = 0.11.
Cars are what, about 25% efficient at converting the energy into work?
"Then look up coal gasification on Google."
Coal gassification doesn't make up a majority of the electricity generated in the US. When we're talking about electricity generation, traditional coal can be taken to be the majority.
"Renewable energy looks more expensive at first, and by traditional measures it is -- but that doesn't mean it's not the best value in the long run."
It doesn't help at all if it's too expensive for the economy to sustain. Solar power as it stands is ruinously expensive -- our economy cannot afford it.
I have no problem with renewable energy, I don't even have a problem with subsidies for it if there is a reasonable expectation that it can become cheaper or that electricity will get more expensive. But renewable energy will not sustain us for some time. The demand for energy is too great and too immediate, and good conditions are too rare.
"Nuclear might not be exaclty cheap but it is cheap enough for the French to build it and even export. Germany, where environmental freaks lobbied against nuclear power plants years ago, now import a lot of their power from France. I think storing nuclear waste in a mountain in Nevada is worth cutting down on the emissions and also on dependency on foreign oil, if according to many it slows down the melting of the ice caps - even better."
I'm not saying it's impractical (clearly that's not the case), just that it's more expensive than coal, and for the purposes of the US we can pretty much assume it's coal. Ultimately nuclear power will be the way to go. It's the only thing that can scale as high as we care to take it and last indeffinitely. I think the future of portable power will be dominated by hydrogen or hydrocarbons produced in nuclear power plants.
This is just getting started. For example, Exxon recently announced that natural gas production in North America has peaked. The tar sands in Alberta rely on natural gas to provide additional hydrogen (the existing hydrocarbons are too heavy), so various companies are looking at producing hydrogen in nuclear reactors so they can continue production as natural gas gets more expensive.
"And don't even talk about those "fool cells". Like nuclear fusion, fuel cell cars will always be 10 years away."
Commercial fusion power is generations away. However far away fuel cells cars are, they're a lot closer than fusion power. And if they never arrive, it'll be because some other technology gets similar efficiency for less money, in which case I won't care.
He's adding more battery storage so more of the trip can be handled by batteries on mains power. It's as simple as that.
People think that's good, but they forget about the problem of getting mains power. "We'll use solar!" they say, as if that isn't many times more expensive than nuclear, and as if nuclear isn't more expensive than coal. These cars are running on coal, spewing particulates (some of them radioactive) the whole way. The exaust just isn't coming out of the car.
Power plants are a bit more efficient than car engines, but transmission losses are non-trivial and the transmission infrastructure for the electricity can't take a significant number of people doing this.
"Even if it does, power plants still produce energy more efficiently than an automobile engine."
Everything except natural gas (which is running out and expensive) is stuck below about 35% efficient. Coal power plants a bit more efficient than an engine, but once you factor in transmission losses and storage losses it doesn't really look that good. That, and coal is a very dirty source of power (eg it releases lots of particulates some of them radioactive). The only viable large scale alternative is nuclear, and it's not exactly cheap.
Also, the transmission infrastructure can't take a significant number of people doing this.
"The difference that sets Apple apart is that when they get into something, they're not just another "me too" company with some crappy product that is barely distinguishable from all the others that are already on the market.
Other music players are crap compared to the iPod"
Are they? Depends on your criteria. Other music players variously cost less, have support for more formats, have a better battery life, and so on.
"other music stores are crap compared to the iTMS"
Again, depends on your criteria. Allofmp3 gives you a choice of format, gives you better quality (including lossless), doesn't have DRM etc. That puts it ahead in my books.
"OS X is Unix, yes, but the UI is so far ahead of what Linux desktop have been trying to do for years."
But it is behind in many other ways. It has poor performance compared to Linux, in particular Linux has better responsiveness on single-CPU systems and that significantly impacts usability. Linux also, dare I say it, runs on generic hardware. That is an issue that impacts usability because some options are not affordable with MacOS X (eg you must buy a second CPU to get a second display).
Apple is only special if we define the terms of the comparison to favor Apple. Otherwise, they are exactly like everyone else: good at some things, bad at others.
Darwin is a very different kernel. The interface the kernel exposes is mostly BSD, but the implementation is entirely different.
That said, they can barely port BSD drivers to other BSDs. Between BSDs that aren't as closely related (FreeBSD, OpenBSD for example) it's more a matter of using the other driver as documentation when you rewrite the driver.
"Actually the important thing is that modern x86 implementations are RISC. They just have a CISC instruction set that's translated to RISC "micro-ops" very early in the pipeline."
But they're different enough from RISC chips for the distinction to be important. They need extra hardware to do the decoding, and they have higher code density.
"Better tell that to the ARM folks who created the Thumb2 instruction set."
"Or one could innovate and create or revolutionize a market which is pretty much what Apple did. There are innovators and there are wanna-bes."
Apple has its share of wannabe moments.
PowerPC, which they helped create, isn't good enough so they have decided to use soemthing else. They didn't create the MP3 player, or the online music store, but they jumped in anyway. Their OS wasn't good enough, their efforts to create another one failed, so they bought a UNIX even though UNIX has been around longer than Apple itself. The list goes on.
And, I would remind you, Real revolutionized highly compressed audio back in the day.
Apple isn't special. They have to follow the leader sometimes, just like every other company out there.
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A customer the size of Apple would have no trouble obtaining a source license to ICC.
Whether or not you or I think the resultant garbage is bad, sometimes people have taken advantage of it and that's enough to say they're not compatible.
"and the intel compiler can really scream over gcc in some applica0tions, and its almost never worse. its a good compiler for a crappy instruction set."
True, true, and true.
"why would you not want to use it? because you're a religous fanatic?"
Off the top of my head?
- Because maintaining an application for two different architechtures is easier than maintaining an application for two different compilers and architechtures. Even if they were both strict C compilers, they'd still be slightly different.
- Because ICC isn't free for commercial applications.
- Because ICC produces broken binaries for other processors. Irrelevant on Intel Mac, but if we're talking about Linux or Windows this is an issue.
- Because as bad as the GCC customizations are, sometimes people have used them and sometimes it's a pain to port them to another compiler.
I'm not a GNU zealot or a GCC zealot, I'm just saying that there's valid reasons to not want a different compiler. If they'd been using a commercial compiler and were considering adding GCC I'd be saying the same thing."Intel plans to provide industry leading development tools support for Apple later this year, including the Intel C/C++ Compiler for Apple, Intel Fortran Compiler for Apple, Intel Math Kernel Libraries for Apple and Intel Integrated Performance Primitives for Apple."
Nothing in there says that ICC will be the default compiler in XCode.
I never denied that it would be available, only that it would be the default.
"The intel compilers are free for non-commercial use. At least on linux and I'm pretty sure for windows."
Using ICC by default would make XCode non-free for commercial use.
"Also, it is always a good idea to test your code on as many different compilers as possible. This makes sure that it will be easier to port later on."
I won't deny that, but for people doing Mac-only development it would introduce a lot of extra effort and platform-specific bugs. It would be foolish to do it by default. Apple needs to minimize the differences between platforms, it's already going to take a non-trivial amount of extra effort to maintain a universal binary.
Before anyone says it, this won't replace GCC on XCode. Intel's compiler is expensive and is not 100% compatible with GCC. It also doesn't support PowerPC so as long as they're supporting both architechtures they can't use ICC exclusively.
It'll be an option for people that need better performance on x86. Any collaboration is so that ICC can be hooked into XCode in an easy to use way.
PowerPC was probably the best choice for sonar analysis when they designed the system, and now that it's not the fastest they've still got to support the systems they have in place because it's fast enough.
It has caused my memory to run at more conservating timings in the past. That was really annoying.
The difference being that Intel is already selling chips good enough to justify the switch. Whether or not this new thing is a big change, and whether or not it works out, Intel has proved they can make chips good enough by selling them in the millions.
My entire building is covered by a giant "SMC" network. I wouldn't be surprised if half the people were accidently leaching from each other's connections.
They want a list of EVERY access point?
I can't even imagine the immensity of that task. There must be millions of APs in the US, and the list would change on a day-to-day basis.
Without SSID broadcast, it wouldn't even necessarily be possible to discover them all.
Hydro is one of the alternatives that works now, but conditions have to be good for it to work. Most of the places where conditions are good are already in use.
It helps, but it won't scale much higher than it is and it's not even a majority now.
I was wrong about the isotopes of Uranium used. Forget about that part...
The isotope of Uranium currently used in commercial reactors is U-235, which constitutes about 0.7% of all naturally occuring Uranium. Other types of reactors can use the remaining 99.3% of Uranium or the much more common Thorium as fuel.
Integral fast reactors produce much less waste because they burn the fuel more completely. They're not even close to waste-free, but their waste isotopes are shorter lived, and the long-term radioactive waste produced (reactor structure etc) is much smaller in quantity. Pebble bed reactors produce their waste contained in nigh-indestructible (usually silicon carbide?) pebbles that are easier to dispose of safely.
There's thousands of years of fuel, even at substantially increased demand.
"Quote some numbers please. "Doesn't really look that good" is meaningless."
Coal generation is about 35% efficient, transmission losses can be up to about 20% or so, battery storage is around 60% efficient, electric motors are around 66% efficient, so 0.35 * 0.80 * 0.60 * 0.66 = 0.11.
Cars are what, about 25% efficient at converting the energy into work?
"Then look up coal gasification on Google."
Coal gassification doesn't make up a majority of the electricity generated in the US. When we're talking about electricity generation, traditional coal can be taken to be the majority.
"Renewable energy looks more expensive at first, and by traditional measures it is -- but that doesn't mean it's not the best value in the long run."
It doesn't help at all if it's too expensive for the economy to sustain. Solar power as it stands is ruinously expensive -- our economy cannot afford it.
I have no problem with renewable energy, I don't even have a problem with subsidies for it if there is a reasonable expectation that it can become cheaper or that electricity will get more expensive. But renewable energy will not sustain us for some time. The demand for energy is too great and too immediate, and good conditions are too rare.
"Nuclear might not be exaclty cheap but it is cheap enough for the French to build it and even export. Germany, where environmental freaks lobbied against nuclear power plants years ago, now import a lot of their power from France. I think storing nuclear waste in a mountain in Nevada is worth cutting down on the emissions and also on dependency on foreign oil, if according to many it slows down the melting of the ice caps - even better."
I'm not saying it's impractical (clearly that's not the case), just that it's more expensive than coal, and for the purposes of the US we can pretty much assume it's coal. Ultimately nuclear power will be the way to go. It's the only thing that can scale as high as we care to take it and last indeffinitely. I think the future of portable power will be dominated by hydrogen or hydrocarbons produced in nuclear power plants.
This is just getting started. For example, Exxon recently announced that natural gas production in North America has peaked. The tar sands in Alberta rely on natural gas to provide additional hydrogen (the existing hydrocarbons are too heavy), so various companies are looking at producing hydrogen in nuclear reactors so they can continue production as natural gas gets more expensive.
"Electricity will be next to free within the next 10-30 years"
That's the funniest thing I've ever heard.
I'd like to say it's also the stupidest, but unfortunately you have some rather stiff competition on that front. Keep trying though.
"And don't even talk about those "fool cells". Like nuclear fusion, fuel cell cars will always be 10 years away."
Commercial fusion power is generations away. However far away fuel cells cars are, they're a lot closer than fusion power. And if they never arrive, it'll be because some other technology gets similar efficiency for less money, in which case I won't care.
He's adding more battery storage so more of the trip can be handled by batteries on mains power. It's as simple as that.
People think that's good, but they forget about the problem of getting mains power. "We'll use solar!" they say, as if that isn't many times more expensive than nuclear, and as if nuclear isn't more expensive than coal. These cars are running on coal, spewing particulates (some of them radioactive) the whole way. The exaust just isn't coming out of the car.
Power plants are a bit more efficient than car engines, but transmission losses are non-trivial and the transmission infrastructure for the electricity can't take a significant number of people doing this.
"Even if it does, power plants still produce energy more efficiently than an automobile engine."
Everything except natural gas (which is running out and expensive) is stuck below about 35% efficient. Coal power plants a bit more efficient than an engine, but once you factor in transmission losses and storage losses it doesn't really look that good. That, and coal is a very dirty source of power (eg it releases lots of particulates some of them radioactive). The only viable large scale alternative is nuclear, and it's not exactly cheap.
Also, the transmission infrastructure can't take a significant number of people doing this.
They have lots of processors, but I'm not sure any individual element has a clock speed that high.
"The difference that sets Apple apart is that when they get into something, they're not just another "me too" company with some crappy product that is barely distinguishable from all the others that are already on the market.
Other music players are crap compared to the iPod"
Are they? Depends on your criteria. Other music players variously cost less, have support for more formats, have a better battery life, and so on.
"other music stores are crap compared to the iTMS"
Again, depends on your criteria. Allofmp3 gives you a choice of format, gives you better quality (including lossless), doesn't have DRM etc. That puts it ahead in my books.
"OS X is Unix, yes, but the UI is so far ahead of what Linux desktop have been trying to do for years."
But it is behind in many other ways. It has poor performance compared to Linux, in particular Linux has better responsiveness on single-CPU systems and that significantly impacts usability. Linux also, dare I say it, runs on generic hardware. That is an issue that impacts usability because some options are not affordable with MacOS X (eg you must buy a second CPU to get a second display).
Apple is only special if we define the terms of the comparison to favor Apple. Otherwise, they are exactly like everyone else: good at some things, bad at others.
Darwin is a very different kernel. The interface the kernel exposes is mostly BSD, but the implementation is entirely different.
That said, they can barely port BSD drivers to other BSDs. Between BSDs that aren't as closely related (FreeBSD, OpenBSD for example) it's more a matter of using the other driver as documentation when you rewrite the driver.
"Actually the important thing is that modern x86 implementations are RISC. They just have a CISC instruction set that's translated to RISC "micro-ops" very early in the pipeline."
But they're different enough from RISC chips for the distinction to be important. They need extra hardware to do the decoding, and they have higher code density.
"Better tell that to the ARM folks who created the Thumb2 instruction set."
It's a trend. Exceptions happen.
"Or one could innovate and create or revolutionize a market which is pretty much what Apple did. There are innovators and there are wanna-bes."
Apple has its share of wannabe moments.
PowerPC, which they helped create, isn't good enough so they have decided to use soemthing else. They didn't create the MP3 player, or the online music store, but they jumped in anyway. Their OS wasn't good enough, their efforts to create another one failed, so they bought a UNIX even though UNIX has been around longer than Apple itself. The list goes on.
And, I would remind you, Real revolutionized highly compressed audio back in the day.
Apple isn't special. They have to follow the leader sometimes, just like every other company out there.