Ultimately I think what the demand is will depend on how they price it. Yes power and rackspace do cost money but still the prices i've seen so-far for arm server gear have been unattractive to say the least.
Also note that bisecting won't nessacerally find the root cause of the bug, it will hopefully* find the commit where the bug became apparent but the developer will still have to analyse what part of that commit made the bug apparent and whether the commit really introduced the bug or merely made an existing bug elsewhere more apparrent.
* It is possible that the commit that introduced the bug will be a "broken" commit or immediately preceeded by broken commits so that bisection can't accurately identify it, only give a range of commits that may have introduced the bug.
What they actually split in half is a sequence of changesets (also known as commits).
The idea is you have a seqence of changesets that take you from the last known good revision to the first known bad revision. By splitting that sequence in half and determining if the revsion in the middle is good or bad you can in principle halve the number of revisions between last known good and first known bad until you find the revision that introduced the bug. Reality is messier because of nonlinear history, because some revisions may be "broken" such that it is not possible to determine if they are "good" or "bad" and because some bugs may be difficult to test for but still bisection is a useful tool for finding problem revisions among a long history relatively easill.
In general as CPU cores and their associated cache structure get bigger and more powerful the proportion of transitors devoted to instruction decoding goes down. So the complexity of decoding becomes less important and the density of the code becomes more important (because if means you can fit more code in cache). Afaict x86 does pretty well at instruction density. 32-bit x86 is register starved but 64-bit x86 doubles the register count (making it the same as 32-bit arm).
1: What really matters is not the absoloute strength of the quake it's how the strength compares to what those writing the building regs at the time of construction thought was likely to happen. 2: In europe we generally build are buildings to last and have been building them for a long time. Many people live in buildings that were built long before the rise of modern building regulations.
* Yes I know there were natives arround before that but afaict they didn't build much in the way of lasting structures.
If all hammers were the same price, I'd pick the sledge hammer.
Would you really? The sledgehammer is great when you want to apply a lot of force but it's going to be a disaster for many jobs because of lack of precision, it's also likely to be very tiring to use.
So it is for the Pi, In terms of raw CPU grunt it easily beats microcontroller based boards and having a linux environment, an ethernet interface and plenty of memory means you can do things like web interfaces easily and well for moderate user loads. However that comes at a price. Latencies will be much higher and less predictable (especially if you run an OS on it). There is GPIO but it runs at 3.3V, is NOT 5V tolerant and we don't have any proper specifications for it's electrical characteristics. Power consumption is also much higher than traditional 8-bit microcontrollers and significantly higher than the high end 32-bit micro-controllers.
crimes that potentially would not have been committed if the car had been clearly visible.
That is true, however preventing traffic violations in a small area doesn't nessacerally mean reducing the overall rate of traffic violations or improving safety.
Whereas if someone gets caught they are hit with a fine and here in the UK (and from a quick check on wikipedia a number of other places too) they are are also hit with "points". If they do not know where they are being watched then the risk of being caught will hopefully serve to discourage them from repeating the offense whereever they are. IMO the points are a bigger deterrent than the fines because building up too many of them will end the driver up in court with likely loss of license.
The problem with that soloution is I can see people feeding those numbers to buisnesses they don't like even though they have no reason to believe they are scammers.
They did not license the Cortex A-x designs and glue them together (like every other ARM SoC vendor, including Samsung.)
Afaict marvell also have their own implementations of the arm instruction set. I dunno if they are putting it in phone-targetted products or not though.
Small company starts selling old mass-market Mac games which you couldn't otherwise buy any more.
Sadly no.
Old mac games that haven't been ported aren't going to be of any use to owners of modern macs without an emulation soloution. Afaict there are no free clones of classic macos (while there is a free clone of dos) so selling old mac games with an emulation soloution would require apple's coperation.
Afaict what has actually happened here in most cases* is that GoG has started bundling old dos games with a mac version of dosbox and a mac installer as well as bundling them with a windows version of dosbox and a windows installer.
GoG don't write their own games, they're a DRM-free retailer selling other companies' games, mostly old ones that have been out of print for years but a few newer ones too.
GoG is actually a subsidary of a game developer but the vast majority of the games they sell are indeed third party.
*I think a few games do have native mac ports but they are by far the exception.
I seem to recall that DARPA was looking for a way to do just this. The idea is to put a small nuclear reactor at a forward operating base (such as in Afghanistan), and use the excess electricity to provide for the fuel needs. One of the most expensive and dangerous parts of operations is trucking in the fuel, so making it on-site, even if the efficiency is bad, can still be a huge win.
However renewable energy plants tend to have a very low power density or very specific requiements. So this is only useful for land operationss once they have portable nuclear reactors in thier inventory.
For sea operations they already have ship mounted nuclear reactors so electricity to liquids is more interesting there.
The thing is we already have the Fischer-Tropsch process to convert coal and natural gas to liquid fuel. The efficiency isn't great but I still think it will most likely be better than burning coal and natural gas to produce electricity and then using that electricity to make liquid fuels.
That is true, however until/unless our electricity generation is DOMINATED by nuclear and/or renewables I see very little merit in this.
Afaict most of our electricity comes from four sources, coil, natural gas, hydro and nuclear.
Nuclear plants have high capital costs and low fuel costs so they will be run at full power as much of the time as possible. Hydro plants have a fixed supply of water so while their instantanous output varies a lot their average output will be determined by river flow. That leaves coal and natural gas as the sources that will have to vary to meet demand.
Therefore the real question IMO is how does coal->electricity->liquid fuel and natural gas->electricity->liquid fuel compare to more direct ways of converting the fuels and my guess is the answer is "very badly".
For storage i'm guessing this will be a whole lot less efficient than pumped storage, batteries or flywheels.
What makes you think an electric powered aircraft would be silent? Afaict most of the noise of a jet aircraft comes from the movement of air which would be just as significant or possiblly more so (because you would need more power to compensate for the battery weight) with an electric ducted fan aircraft.
ok "european money" isn't the ideal way to reference the euro but the key fact is correct. There is no longer "french money" in the sense of money issued under control of the french government. Euros are issued under the authority of the ECB which in turn gets it's authority from the EU. As such it would take most of the EU cooperating to change it's behaviour. If france were to unilatterally start issuing euros outside the framework controlled by the ECB the result would not be pretty. At the very least I would expect such an action to cause total breakup of the EU and possiblly outright war.
Goverment debt in a government's own currency and owed to an central bank that exists at the pleasure of said government is basically just an accounting fiction**. Government debt in a governments own currency but owed to third parties is more real but can still be quickly eliminated if desired by issuing new currency*** to pay it off. Government debt denominated in a foreign-controlled currency is far more real than either as the greeks are finding out at the moment.
* Which afaict is "keep inflation low whatever the cost" ** That is "borrow from your own central bank and spend" is equivilent to "print and spend". *** This currency may be either physical or virtual though in the modern world it's likely to be mostly virtual.
Taxi's in the UK have the special privilage of being able to use bus lanes. So if you want to get arround quickly in a major city center it's hard to beat them (helicopters move quicker but finding a place to land them may be complicated).
I wouldn't call debian "supported for a long time". They only provide 1 year of overlap.
IIRC recently ubuntu extended their LTS policy to 5 years for the desktop (which with their standard release cycle gives three years of overlap) as well as the server. Though you do have to watch out if you plan to keep a ubuntu system for a long time without upgrading. In particular if you use anything from universe/multiverse then you will have to manage security updates for it yourself or live without security updates for it.
Afaict you can make stuff in the west for not that much more than in china but to do so requires a radically different approach. In china labour is cheap so you use labour to do anything that would be even moderately difficult to automate. In the west labour is expensive so you have to automate as much as you possiblly can.
Even if manufacturing does come back to the west don't expect it to create many jobs unless labour costs go way down.
80 plus* is a spot test done on a single sample supplied by the manufacturer**. It only tests efficicency, not quality reliability or safety and finally it is conducted with the PSUs air input at a relatively low temperature so it ends up not even testing the PSUs ability to produce it's nameplate power under realistic PC conditions (PC PSUs normally draw air from inside the case which is likely to be above normal room tempreature).
If a normal PC PSU doesn't have 80 plus then most likely it's an old and crappy design but having 80 plus is no gaurantee of not being a peice of shit.
* Which now comes in five levels, original, bronze, silver, gold and platinum. ** Which afaict is supposed to be representitive of production units, whether it actually is or not is another matter.
Since the erase blocks are larger than the write blocks and larger than the logial blocks used by the OS SSDs act by remapping logicial blocks every time they are written. Hopefully in a matter that levels wear as much as possible. They have some spare space to allow for failed blocks and garbage* blocks
The problem is these remapping systems are damn complex and therefore prone to bugs. Especially in corner cases like power failure (what happens if the power dies while the drive is moving blocks arround so it can "garbage collect" an erase block). Afaict this is the main cause of failures and data corruption on SSDs.
* That is a physical block that is no longer being used to back any logical block but has not yet been erased.
Why the fuck do I need a 1kw PSU to run a fucking computer in this day and age?
You don't unless it's some overclocked monster or a multi-GPU rig with multiple power guzzling GPUs. Frankly 300W is more than enough for most PCs but I haven't found any sources of decent and affordable PSUs that small so I usually end up putting in something a bit bigger.
Of course if you buy shit PSUs you will have to add in a shit PSU correction factor because they things can't get anywhere near their nameplate power but i'd rather give my buisness to more honest manufacturers..
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Ultimately I think what the demand is will depend on how they price it. Yes power and rackspace do cost money but still the prices i've seen so-far for arm server gear have been unattractive to say the least.
Also note that bisecting won't nessacerally find the root cause of the bug, it will hopefully* find the commit where the bug became apparent but the developer will still have to analyse what part of that commit made the bug apparent and whether the commit really introduced the bug or merely made an existing bug elsewhere more apparrent.
* It is possible that the commit that introduced the bug will be a "broken" commit or immediately preceeded by broken commits so that bisection can't accurately identify it, only give a range of commits that may have introduced the bug.
Meanwhile I wonder which ARMs even have instructions like divide or reciprocal square root.
The VFP floating point unit has divide and square root operations. It doesn't seem to have a decidated instruction for reciprocal square root though.
There doesn't seem to be an integer divide though, so you either have to do that in software or convert to floating point and back.
What they actually split in half is a sequence of changesets (also known as commits).
The idea is you have a seqence of changesets that take you from the last known good revision to the first known bad revision. By splitting that sequence in half and determining if the revsion in the middle is good or bad you can in principle halve the number of revisions between last known good and first known bad until you find the revision that introduced the bug. Reality is messier because of nonlinear history, because some revisions may be "broken" such that it is not possible to determine if they are "good" or "bad" and because some bugs may be difficult to test for but still bisection is a useful tool for finding problem revisions among a long history relatively easill.
I disagree.
In general as CPU cores and their associated cache structure get bigger and more powerful the proportion of transitors devoted to instruction decoding goes down. So the complexity of decoding becomes less important and the density of the code becomes more important (because if means you can fit more code in cache). Afaict x86 does pretty well at instruction density. 32-bit x86 is register starved but 64-bit x86 doubles the register count (making it the same as 32-bit arm).
is the pi better
Depends on what you are trying to do.
Two things to consider
1: What really matters is not the absoloute strength of the quake it's how the strength compares to what those writing the building regs at the time of construction thought was likely to happen.
2: In europe we generally build are buildings to last and have been building them for a long time. Many people live in buildings that were built long before the rise of modern building regulations.
* Yes I know there were natives arround before that but afaict they didn't build much in the way of lasting structures.
If all hammers were the same price, I'd pick the sledge hammer.
Would you really? The sledgehammer is great when you want to apply a lot of force but it's going to be a disaster for many jobs because of lack of precision, it's also likely to be very tiring to use.
So it is for the Pi, In terms of raw CPU grunt it easily beats microcontroller based boards and having a linux environment, an ethernet interface and plenty of memory means you can do things like web interfaces easily and well for moderate user loads. However that comes at a price. Latencies will be much higher and less predictable (especially if you run an OS on it). There is GPIO but it runs at 3.3V, is NOT 5V tolerant and we don't have any proper specifications for it's electrical characteristics. Power consumption is also much higher than traditional 8-bit microcontrollers and significantly higher than the high end 32-bit micro-controllers.
crimes that potentially would not have been committed if the car had been clearly visible.
That is true, however preventing traffic violations in a small area doesn't nessacerally mean reducing the overall rate of traffic violations or improving safety.
Whereas if someone gets caught they are hit with a fine and here in the UK (and from a quick check on wikipedia a number of other places too) they are are also hit with "points". If they do not know where they are being watched then the risk of being caught will hopefully serve to discourage them from repeating the offense whereever they are. IMO the points are a bigger deterrent than the fines because building up too many of them will end the driver up in court with likely loss of license.
The problem with that soloution is I can see people feeding those numbers to buisnesses they don't like even though they have no reason to believe they are scammers.
They did not license the Cortex A-x designs and glue them together (like every other ARM SoC vendor, including Samsung.)
Afaict marvell also have their own implementations of the arm instruction set. I dunno if they are putting it in phone-targetted products or not though.
Because they think (rightly or wrongly) that they can do better than the designs arm supplies and hence get an edge on their competitors.
Small company starts selling old mass-market Mac games which you couldn't otherwise buy any more.
Sadly no.
Old mac games that haven't been ported aren't going to be of any use to owners of modern macs without an emulation soloution. Afaict there are no free clones of classic macos (while there is a free clone of dos) so selling old mac games with an emulation soloution would require apple's coperation.
Afaict what has actually happened here in most cases* is that GoG has started bundling old dos games with a mac version of dosbox and a mac installer as well as bundling them with a windows version of dosbox and a windows installer.
GoG don't write their own games, they're a DRM-free retailer selling other companies' games, mostly old ones that have been out of print for years but a few newer ones too.
GoG is actually a subsidary of a game developer but the vast majority of the games they sell are indeed third party.
*I think a few games do have native mac ports but they are by far the exception.
No pay what you want is only 8 games.
More than the average (currently 13.72) is 20 games
and $34.99 is the full bundle.
I seem to recall that DARPA was looking for a way to do just this. The idea is to put a small nuclear reactor at a forward operating base (such as in Afghanistan), and use the excess electricity to provide for the fuel needs. One of the most expensive and dangerous parts of operations is trucking in the fuel, so making it on-site, even if the efficiency is bad, can still be a huge win.
However renewable energy plants tend to have a very low power density or very specific requiements. So this is only useful for land operationss once they have portable nuclear reactors in thier inventory.
For sea operations they already have ship mounted nuclear reactors so electricity to liquids is more interesting there.
The thing is we already have the Fischer-Tropsch process to convert coal and natural gas to liquid fuel. The efficiency isn't great but I still think it will most likely be better than burning coal and natural gas to produce electricity and then using that electricity to make liquid fuels.
That is true, however until/unless our electricity generation is DOMINATED by nuclear and/or renewables I see very little merit in this.
Afaict most of our electricity comes from four sources, coil, natural gas, hydro and nuclear.
Nuclear plants have high capital costs and low fuel costs so they will be run at full power as much of the time as possible. Hydro plants have a fixed supply of water so while their instantanous output varies a lot their average output will be determined by river flow. That leaves coal and natural gas as the sources that will have to vary to meet demand.
Therefore the real question IMO is how does coal->electricity->liquid fuel and natural gas->electricity->liquid fuel compare to more direct ways of converting the fuels and my guess is the answer is "very badly".
For storage i'm guessing this will be a whole lot less efficient than pumped storage, batteries or flywheels.
What makes you think an electric powered aircraft would be silent? Afaict most of the noise of a jet aircraft comes from the movement of air which would be just as significant or possiblly more so (because you would need more power to compensate for the battery weight) with an electric ducted fan aircraft.
ok "european money" isn't the ideal way to reference the euro but the key fact is correct. There is no longer "french money" in the sense of money issued under control of the french government. Euros are issued under the authority of the ECB which in turn gets it's authority from the EU. As such it would take most of the EU cooperating to change it's behaviour. If france were to unilatterally start issuing euros outside the framework controlled by the ECB the result would not be pretty. At the very least I would expect such an action to cause total breakup of the EU and possiblly outright war.
Goverment debt in a government's own currency and owed to an central bank that exists at the pleasure of said government is basically just an accounting fiction**. Government debt in a governments own currency but owed to third parties is more real but can still be quickly eliminated if desired by issuing new currency*** to pay it off. Government debt denominated in a foreign-controlled currency is far more real than either as the greeks are finding out at the moment.
* Which afaict is "keep inflation low whatever the cost"
** That is "borrow from your own central bank and spend" is equivilent to "print and spend".
*** This currency may be either physical or virtual though in the modern world it's likely to be mostly virtual.
Taxi's in the UK have the special privilage of being able to use bus lanes. So if you want to get arround quickly in a major city center it's hard to beat them (helicopters move quicker but finding a place to land them may be complicated).
I wouldn't call debian "supported for a long time". They only provide 1 year of overlap.
IIRC recently ubuntu extended their LTS policy to 5 years for the desktop (which with their standard release cycle gives three years of overlap) as well as the server. Though you do have to watch out if you plan to keep a ubuntu system for a long time without upgrading. In particular if you use anything from universe/multiverse then you will have to manage security updates for it yourself or live without security updates for it.
Afaict you can make stuff in the west for not that much more than in china but to do so requires a radically different approach. In china labour is cheap so you use labour to do anything that would be even moderately difficult to automate. In the west labour is expensive so you have to automate as much as you possiblly can.
Even if manufacturing does come back to the west don't expect it to create many jobs unless labour costs go way down.
80 plus* is a spot test done on a single sample supplied by the manufacturer**. It only tests efficicency, not quality reliability or safety and finally it is conducted with the PSUs air input at a relatively low temperature so it ends up not even testing the PSUs ability to produce it's nameplate power under realistic PC conditions (PC PSUs normally draw air from inside the case which is likely to be above normal room tempreature).
If a normal PC PSU doesn't have 80 plus then most likely it's an old and crappy design but having 80 plus is no gaurantee of not being a peice of shit.
* Which now comes in five levels, original, bronze, silver, gold and platinum.
** Which afaict is supposed to be representitive of production units, whether it actually is or not is another matter.
Since the erase blocks are larger than the write blocks and larger than the logial blocks used by the OS SSDs act by remapping logicial blocks every time they are written. Hopefully in a matter that levels wear as much as possible. They have some spare space to allow for failed blocks and garbage* blocks
The problem is these remapping systems are damn complex and therefore prone to bugs. Especially in corner cases like power failure (what happens if the power dies while the drive is moving blocks arround so it can "garbage collect" an erase block). Afaict this is the main cause of failures and data corruption on SSDs.
* That is a physical block that is no longer being used to back any logical block but has not yet been erased.
Why the fuck do I need a 1kw PSU to run a fucking computer in this day and age?
You don't unless it's some overclocked monster or a multi-GPU rig with multiple power guzzling GPUs. Frankly 300W is more than enough for most PCs but I haven't found any sources of decent and affordable PSUs that small so I usually end up putting in something a bit bigger.
Of course if you buy shit PSUs you will have to add in a shit PSU correction factor because they things can't get anywhere near their nameplate power but i'd rather give my buisness to more honest manufacturers..