| Why are you not using a compiler that warns about that? Some compilers even have default warning, and you have to put a comment (or #pragma or command-line option to disable the warning) that a case statement really should fall through.
| A shoddy cratsman blames his tools. Compiler warnings are configurable, and lint tools are your friend.
Craftsmen (the real hardware working ones) get to choose their tools and choose them with a good design. A tool which intrinsically prevents the common human problem, instead of having lighted warning stickers, is better. Should they blame their tools if they're a bad ergonomic design? Yes.
The solution was obvious---a "fallthrough" statement to designate intentional fallthrough (the rare case).
The fact that there's a compiler warning for a semantically valid situation---not a known ambiguity or undefined behavior---shows how it's a common problem.
And stuff like this "A shoddy cratsman blames his tools" is powertalk meant to inhibit rational criticism and imply superior capability of the author.
Swift will be as platform specific as C#. Theoretically not, but practically yes.
It's just the new-shiny way to access the NeXT/Cocoa API's, like C# was the same for Windows.
Swift-the-language will probably go everywhere that LLVM goes, but there won't be a significant, and full featured, standard library defined independently of the Apple/Cocoa library. Because then there would be the "Standard" way to do things and then the "Cocoa" way to do things and they wouldn't be entirely compatible.
That is bizarre. So if you see a function signature which takes an array as a parameter, you either do know that elements will be changed, or will not be changed---but only depending on potentially hidden implementation of that function?
And which things have the 'potential to modify' the length of an array? Implementation defined?
Fortran 90+ had it right. You just say for each argument whether the intent is data to go 'in' (can't change it), 'out' (set by implementation), or 'inout', values go in, and may be modified.
In more populated locales of the USA, the density of people and of money is substantially higher than many places in Sweden or Japan, which nevertheless have much superior internet service to the USA.
Is internet really awesome and inexpensive in Manhattan or San Francisco or Philadelphia? No.
Internet is really awesome in the tiny number of places which have Google Fiber.
It's the no good deed goes unpunished file. Sun does a bunch more for open source than any other major public for profit company at the time. Geeks shit all over them for not doing everything up to a Communist-sympathizing FSF thinks is necessary.
Meanwhile, Microsoft and Oracle act like asses and thrive on aggressively proprietary and expensive software.
Richard Lindzen is somewhat respectable when he publishes in peer-reviewed journals---and there he hardly denies the influence of greenhouse forcing on climate, but he hypothesizes a string of various mechanisms to make the climate sensitivity somewhat lower than the consensus. These are usually refuted by observations.
He isn't respectable when he publishes completely misleading BS in right-wing newspaper editorial pages.
And the point is that he is the only name people seem to know, and there are thousands of climatologists who do real work too and their names are anonymous because they aren't prominent denialists.
| Of note, the other product of combustion is water vapor. Irrigation forces more water vapor into the air. Paving forces more water vapor into the air. Even the cooling towers of nuclear power plants force more water vapor into the air. These things happen on a continuous basis, so the world is on average more humid by perhaps 1% than it was 100 years ago. Which would be more than enough to account for ALL observed warming.
Silly person, water is in statistical equilibrium with the oceans, direct human injection of water is irrelevant, in contrast to greenhouse gases.
The amount of water in the atmosphere depends on the climate.
| The corruption and violence of the Iranian regime is what spurred the 1979 revolution that installed the current Islamist government
Indeed, but the continued radical hostility and virulent anti-Israeli ideology and corruption and terrorism and violence and lack of freedom of the current Islamist government is the fault of Ayatollah Khomeini and his fellow ideologues.
After all, Vietnam is hardly anywhere near as hostile as Iran, and the USA bombed half the country and killed a million, instead of merely being highly friendly to an authoritarian ally. Likewise all sorts of Central and South American ex-dictatorships, none exhibits the hostility of Iran despite worse actions by the USA.
Iranian leadership is managed by Persian non-Arabic Moslems. They have many disputes with Arabs, but anti-Jewish bigotry and ideology is a common bond.
| Enough time has past and lots of CO2 has been emitted, to know with certainty that CO2 is not doing what it is claimed to do - cause a greenhouse effect.
This is false. The increase in greenhouse effect has been directly measured by balloons, satellites aircraft and ground instruments.
Which is no surprise since it is based on indusputable atomic physics.
The NIF is a nuclear weapons project, not an energy project. It is financed by DOE NNSA, National Nuclear Security Agency.
The primary goal is to generate calibration data for nuclear weapons simulations. There some minor lip service to energy research, but the engineering approach is 70 years behind where the tokamak is for energy production.
Because the person is getting a significant extra benefit---a substantial sum of money---as a primary, and clearly negotiated result of a contract about that very issue. I get X for Y.
It's completely different, for instance, if you take a taxi to the airport, and then find a submarine clause that your "taxi-use license" required you to pay the driver's fuel cost for the next year, and forbade you from telling anybody that the taxi company did this.
The usual is "get ride for money" or "get meal for money", not "get meal and gag order for money".
| I very sincerely doubt Russia wants any part of a sincere challenge, so dicking with astronaut counts and the cost of a space toilet seems reasonable
The Russians are imposing sanctions on themselves, to pre-empt the embarrassment of US doing it to them first.
"Oh, so you are thinking of ordering Lockheed to stop buying our RD-180 engine for hard currency? Nyet! We'll ban it first!"
The shifting is all the sleazy tricks to make shell companies so that the 'territory' which makes the profit happens to be a small office in a low tax country which somehow is supplying this global market, and the large operations in the large markets operate at a loss.
The US charging taxes on worldwide income is an attempt to circumvent those shenanigans.
The 'territorial' system would make the farcical tax evasion entirely legal instead of tax-deferred. Now it's just legal until the money comes back to the U.S. (i.e. tax-deferral benefit provided for free).
Now the companies and their WSJ propagandists claim all this money is "trapped" when it is no such thing---they just don't want to pay the taxes they owe---and use it as extortion for tax "reform" which reforms only one half of the bargain. Is your money in your 401k "trapped"?
And in aggregate, corporate income tax i.e. actual money paid is at generational lows, not highs as you would have believed from the noise. But they're working to make it even lower.
A: Legacy code, and because Fortran 2003+ is a very good modern language for scientific computation and maps very naturally to problems. As it turns out, the language semantics (both legacy and modern constructs) make it very good to parallelize. And it runs fast, as in, equalling C++ level of performance is considered a weak showing.
If you haven't seen or used modern Fortran and think it's anything like Fortran 66/77 then you're mistaken. Except for I/O, which still tends to suck.
In addition there are still some seemingly trivial but actually important features which make it better than many alternatives (starting from Fortran 90).
There's some boneheaded clunkers in other languages which Fortran does right: obviously, built-in multi-dimensional arrays, AND, arrays whose indices can start at 0, 1 (or any other value) and of course know their size. Some algorithms are written (on paper) with 0-based indexing and others with 1-based and allowing either one to be expressed naturally lowers chance of bugs.
Another one is that Fortran distinguishes between dynamically allocatable, and pointers/references. The history of C has constrained/brain-damaged people to think that to get the first, you must necessarily take the second. That doesn't happen in Fortran, you have ALLOCATABLE arrays (or other things) for run-time allocation of storage, and if you need a pointer (rarer) you can get that too. And Fortran provides the "TARGET" attribute to indicate that something *may be pointed to/referenced*, and by default this is not allowed. No making pointers/references to things which aren't designed to be referred to multiple times. This also means that the aliasing potential is highly controlled & language semantics constructed to make Fortran able to make very aggressive, and safe, optimization assumptions.
The more parallel you want, the more of these assumptions you need to get fast code, and naturally written Fortran code comes this way out of the box than most other languages.
| Of course, once you get to the high end, AMD cannot compete with Intel; but that's only a segment of the market, and it is, in fact, a much smaller segment than the sub $200 segment.
From AMD's end, that's a critically important segment since it's where the most money is, and chip design and manufacturing are exceptionally expensive.
The reason for failure was that there were multiple indents for positions and the key could be torqued in a way which changed ignition mode. A key & lock which does not need to be a mode selector need not have these problems. For instance, a dash-mounted lock with a key whose positions are 180 degrees apart.
| If I lose power steering or braking I just have to steer or brake harder - ok, it sucks, but if you can't do that you shouldn't be driving
This problem is what's actually believed to cause the serious accidents which GM will be liable for. Asserting "if you can't do that you shouldn't be driving" doesn't work.
Accidental and unexpected loss of power steering and brakes while at speed appears to be a more common and dangerous situation to the average driver than the very rare (but spectacular) uncontrolled 'throttle stuck open' events, which can be ameliorated by transmission shift into neutral, and pressing the "start/stop button" in for a few seconds.
Repeated press of start/stop (e.g. in a panic) should display emergency information, and possibly also shut off ignition, but not any other systems. Problem with this is interference from a malevolent child or "brofriend".
Slashdot Mirror
| Why are you not using a compiler that warns about that? Some compilers even have default warning, and you
have to put a comment (or #pragma or command-line option to disable the warning) that a case statement really
should fall through.
| A shoddy cratsman blames his tools. Compiler warnings are configurable, and lint tools are your friend.
Craftsmen (the real hardware working ones) get to choose their tools and choose them with a good design. A tool which intrinsically prevents the common human problem, instead of having lighted warning stickers, is better. Should they blame their tools if they're a bad ergonomic design? Yes.
The solution was obvious---a "fallthrough" statement to designate intentional fallthrough (the rare case).
The fact that there's a compiler warning for a semantically valid situation---not a known ambiguity or undefined behavior---shows how it's a common problem.
And stuff like this "A shoddy cratsman blames his tools" is powertalk meant to inhibit rational criticism and imply superior capability of the author.
Swift will be as platform specific as C#. Theoretically not, but practically yes.
It's just the new-shiny way to access the NeXT/Cocoa API's, like C# was the same for Windows.
Swift-the-language will probably go everywhere that LLVM goes, but there won't be a significant, and full featured, standard library defined independently of the Apple/Cocoa library. Because then there would be the "Standard" way to do things and then the "Cocoa" way to do things and they wouldn't be entirely compatible.
That is bizarre. So if you see a function signature which takes an array as a parameter, you either do know that elements will be changed, or will not be changed---but only depending on potentially hidden implementation of that function?
And which things have the 'potential to modify' the length of an array? Implementation defined?
Fortran 90+ had it right. You just say for each argument whether the intent is data to go 'in' (can't change it), 'out' (set by implementation), or 'inout', values go in, and may be modified.
In more populated locales of the USA, the density of people and of money is substantially higher than many places in Sweden or Japan, which nevertheless have much superior internet service to the USA.
Is internet really awesome and inexpensive in Manhattan or San Francisco or Philadelphia? No.
Internet is really awesome in the tiny number of places which have Google Fiber.
powertalk, not fact talk
It's the no good deed goes unpunished file. Sun does a bunch more for open source than any other major public for profit company at the time. Geeks shit all over them for not doing everything up to a Communist-sympathizing FSF thinks is necessary.
Meanwhile, Microsoft and Oracle act like asses and thrive on aggressively proprietary and expensive software.
Richard Lindzen is somewhat respectable when he publishes in peer-reviewed journals---and there he hardly denies the influence of greenhouse forcing on climate, but he hypothesizes a string of various mechanisms to make the climate sensitivity somewhat lower than the consensus. These are usually refuted by observations.
He isn't respectable when he publishes completely misleading BS in right-wing newspaper editorial pages.
And the point is that he is the only name people seem to know, and there are thousands of climatologists who do real work too and their names are anonymous because they aren't prominent denialists.
| The general scientific consensus has been wrong on countless things throughout history.
And it's been much much less wrong on its subject matter expertise than any other group of humans throughout history.
| Of note, the other product of combustion is water vapor. Irrigation forces more water vapor into the air. Paving forces more water vapor into the air. Even the cooling towers of nuclear power plants force more water vapor into the air. These things happen on a continuous basis, so the world is on average more humid by perhaps 1% than it was 100 years ago. Which would be more than enough to account for ALL observed warming.
Silly person, water is in statistical equilibrium with the oceans, direct human injection of water is irrelevant, in contrast to greenhouse gases.
The amount of water in the atmosphere depends on the climate.
www.head-fi.org
Not as good as open in general, but not bad at all.
| The corruption and violence of the Iranian regime is what spurred the 1979 revolution that installed the current Islamist government
Indeed, but the continued radical hostility and virulent anti-Israeli ideology and corruption and terrorism and violence and lack of freedom of the current Islamist government is the fault of Ayatollah Khomeini and his fellow ideologues.
After all, Vietnam is hardly anywhere near as hostile as Iran, and the USA bombed half the country and killed a million, instead of merely being highly friendly to an authoritarian ally. Likewise all sorts of Central and South American ex-dictatorships, none exhibits the hostility of Iran despite worse actions by the USA.
This problem, reproducible data analysis, has been solved before.
Decent alternatives to spreadsheets (which are entirely opaque) are (a) Matlab, (b) Mathematica notebook, (c) iPython notebook+numpy+pandas, (d) SAS/SPSS/R
Iranian leadership is managed by Persian non-Arabic Moslems. They have many disputes with Arabs, but anti-Jewish bigotry and ideology is a common bond.
| Enough time has past and lots of CO2 has been emitted, to know with certainty that CO2 is not doing what it is claimed to do - cause a greenhouse effect.
This is false. The increase in greenhouse effect has been directly measured by balloons, satellites aircraft and ground instruments.
Which is no surprise since it is based on indusputable atomic physics.
The NIF is a nuclear weapons project, not an energy project. It is financed by DOE NNSA, National Nuclear Security Agency.
The primary goal is to generate calibration data for nuclear weapons simulations. There some minor lip service to energy research, but the engineering approach is 70 years behind where the tokamak is for energy production.
Because the person is getting a significant extra benefit---a substantial sum of money---as a primary, and clearly negotiated result of a contract about that very issue. I get X for Y.
It's completely different, for instance, if you take a taxi to the airport, and then find a submarine clause that your "taxi-use license" required you to pay the driver's fuel cost for the next year, and forbade you from telling anybody that the taxi company did this.
The usual is "get ride for money" or "get meal for money", not "get meal and gag order for money".
| I very sincerely doubt Russia wants any part of a sincere challenge, so dicking with astronaut counts and the cost of a space toilet seems reasonable
The Russians are imposing sanctions on themselves, to pre-empt the embarrassment of US doing it to them first.
"Oh, so you are thinking of ordering Lockheed to stop buying our RD-180 engine for hard currency? Nyet! We'll ban it first!"
The shifting is all the sleazy tricks to make shell companies so that the 'territory' which makes the profit happens to be a small office in a low tax country which somehow is supplying this global market, and the large operations in the large markets operate at a loss.
The US charging taxes on worldwide income is an attempt to circumvent those shenanigans.
The 'territorial' system would make the farcical tax evasion entirely legal instead of tax-deferred. Now it's just legal until the money comes back to the U.S. (i.e. tax-deferral benefit provided for free).
Now the companies and their WSJ propagandists claim all this money is "trapped" when it is no such thing---they just don't want to pay the taxes they owe---and use it as extortion for tax "reform" which reforms only one half of the bargain. Is your money in your 401k "trapped"?
And in aggregate, corporate income tax i.e. actual money paid is at generational lows, not highs as you would have believed from the noise. But they're working to make it even lower.
Since 1995 auto manufacturers have had to upgrade all sorts of technology, and so have web service providers. And yet....
No, Fortran won't be ruined.
Fortran, the language, has evolved very significantly with little annoying cruft hurting current design on account of legacy compatibility.
The comparison vs C and C++ is instructive.
A: Legacy code, and because Fortran 2003+ is a very good modern language for scientific computation and maps very naturally to problems. As it turns out, the language semantics (both legacy and modern constructs) make it very good to parallelize. And it runs fast, as in, equalling C++ level of performance is considered a weak showing.
If you haven't seen or used modern Fortran and think it's anything like Fortran 66/77 then you're mistaken. Except for I/O, which still tends to suck.
In addition there are still some seemingly trivial but actually important features which make it better than many alternatives (starting from Fortran 90).
There's some boneheaded clunkers in other languages which Fortran does right: obviously, built-in multi-dimensional arrays, AND, arrays whose indices can start at 0, 1 (or any other value) and of course know their size. Some algorithms are written (on paper) with 0-based indexing and others with 1-based and allowing either one to be expressed naturally lowers chance of bugs.
Another one is that Fortran distinguishes between dynamically allocatable, and pointers/references. The history of C has constrained/brain-damaged people to think that to get the first, you must necessarily take the second. That doesn't happen in Fortran, you have ALLOCATABLE arrays (or other things) for run-time allocation of storage, and if you need a pointer (rarer) you can get that too. And Fortran provides the "TARGET" attribute to indicate that something *may be pointed to/referenced*, and by default this is not allowed. No making pointers/references to things which aren't designed to be referred to multiple times. This also means that the aliasing potential is highly controlled & language semantics constructed to make Fortran able to make very aggressive, and safe, optimization assumptions.
The more parallel you want, the more of these assumptions you need to get fast code, and naturally written Fortran code comes this way out of the box than most other languages.
Somebody was pushing it back in the late 80's.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture_Neutral_Distribution_Format
I guess Android is close enough, as running on many hardware platforms is required for its business model.
| Of course, once you get to the high end, AMD cannot compete with Intel; but that's only a segment of the market, and it is, in fact, a much smaller segment than the sub $200 segment.
From AMD's end, that's a critically important segment since it's where the most money is, and chip design and manufacturing are exceptionally expensive.
The reason for failure was that there were multiple indents for positions and the key could be torqued in a way which changed ignition mode. A key & lock which does not need to be a mode selector need not have these problems. For instance, a dash-mounted lock with a key whose positions are 180 degrees apart.
| If I lose power steering or braking I just have to steer or brake harder - ok, it sucks, but if you can't do that you shouldn't be driving
This problem is what's actually believed to cause the serious accidents which GM will be liable for. Asserting "if you can't do that you shouldn't be driving" doesn't work.
Accidental and unexpected loss of power steering and brakes while at speed appears to be a more common and dangerous situation to the average driver than the very rare (but spectacular) uncontrolled 'throttle stuck open' events, which can be ameliorated by transmission shift into neutral, and pressing the "start/stop button" in for a few seconds.
Repeated press of start/stop (e.g. in a panic) should display emergency information, and possibly also shut off ignition, but not any other systems. Problem with this is interference from a malevolent child or "brofriend".