I don't know under what health system you live and what your profession / experience is. I have worked as a doctor in Germany, Norway, and Australia and have been performing pap smears and vaginal vault smears for almost two decades. I discuss the indication with all patients, especially with women after hysterectomy. As I stated - some will not need smears any more after a total hysterectomy, but this cannot be generalized. Some will certainly benefit from continued smears.
Oh this explains it all. This article is about the US, and I have experience with being a patient in the US gynecology system.
I figured that the lab used different tools/dyes/processes to evaluate the results. I appreciate your professional experience telling me I'm apparently mistaken. No matter how intelligent a woman is as a patient, she still doesn't understand the "business end" of the process.
At least here, people get all crazy if you don't list the lab work correctly, etc. DIFFERENT BITS! That's what's different............ ok, I deserved that smack.
CONNOTATION! You cannot tell someone that a word does not "connote" a certain meaning, because connotations are personal. You can say "that connotation does not apply broadly" or "your connotation is unusual, you should perhaps reconsider it." You cannot tell us "you are wrong."
Anecdotes can be verified, witnesses can be tracked, corroborations can be obtained.
Ah yes, sorry. Who do I find for a witness for the anecdotal removal of subjective pain in the knees due to drinking distilled beaver piss?
Corroborations, once established allow someone to actually PUBLISH an account, rather than just have it unsubstantiated. At this point, it's not an anecdote anymore.
Scientific data can be embellished and even completely falsified, you paradoxical twit.
The difference is that anecdotal evidence isn't presented neither rigorously, nor commonly to sufficiently skeptical audiences?
So this is probably a stupid question, but as I understand things, a PAP smear is actually a test for HPV which a woman can (I assume) contract with or without her cervex. While it is true that HPV is very much the leading cause of cervical cancer, they are not one and the same. If all the above is true, then doesn't a PAP smear still make sense no matter the state of a woman's cervex? And for that matter, I do believe that men can catch HPV also, why is it that we test woman twice a year and men never?
No, a pap smear looks for pre-cancerous cervix cells. A proper HPV test is far better done by looking for antibodies in a blood test.
First, pap smears don't actually detect HPV, this is a misassumption.
In taking a Pap smear, a tool is used to gather cells from the outer opening of the cervix (Latin for "neck") of the uterus and the endocervix. The cells are examined under a microscope to look for abnormalities. The test aims to detect potentially pre-cancerous changes (called cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN) or cervical dysplasia), which are usually caused by sexually transmitted human papillomaviruses (HPVs). The test remains an effective, widely used method for early detection of pre-cancer and cervical cancer. The test may also detect infections and abnormalities in the endocervix and endometrium.
I'm a girl, and I've had HPV tests. It's far easier and cost-effective to test for HPV with a blood test for antibodies. Most HPV situations clear up on their own and require no treatment. However, in America, once you hear you have something, your first question is "what do I do to treat it?"
A few facts first: 1) Pap smears still make sense in women after a hysterectomy. It is then called a vaginal vault smear. It is meaningful at the very least in women who had abnormal smears prior to hysterectomy, because abnormal cells can have spread to the surrounding vaginal wall
This is not a pap smear. It's a vaginal vault smear. The two are listed as different procedure codes and consume different resources. True, while you're there the doctor most often may as well take a vaginal vault smear, but there is still no point in giving a pap smear to women who do not have a cervix. And according to the National Cancer Institute vaginal cancer occurs about 1/5th as often as cervical cancer. Do you really need a yearly test for it? Oh wait, no you don't.
2) Some surgeons leave a stump of the cervix behind when they perform a subtotal hysterectomy. Not common practice any more, but used to be very common in many countries and can have some advantages for the stability of the pelvic floor. Not all women who had a hysterectomy know whether they still have a cervix stump or not.
A good reason to ask your gynecologist while he's in there. If you don't know if you don't have a cervix left or not, then you're just being absolutely careless. Likewise, if your medical record doesn't reflect if you still have a cervix or not, then that's clinical negligence.
3) When the hysterectomy was performed for malignancy, eg cancer of the uterus, the vaginal vault smear can be useful to detect early recurrence
Pap smear != vaginal vault smear. If you had a hysterectomy that was done for malignancy, then regular vaginal vault smears are indicated. However again, a pap smear is not a vaginal vault smear.
Hence. some women may not need pap smears after a total hysterectomy - but in many women this is still a meaningful and cost effective procedure - which is why even public health systems are still happy to pay for them.
It definitely is easier to mail out pink reminder letters to every medical record marked as "F", but this is the point of this whole process. You and your doctor should be discussing this stuff, and you should know if there is no good reason for pap smears. Simply dumping every woman on an assembly line to get the procedure does not save money, and gives unnecessary medical procedures to perhaps millions of women who don't need them.
The article does not seem to take this properly into account - because most scientists have only a very limited insight into medical problems. I should know - I did a science degree first before becoming a MD.
There certainly is a big disconnection between the ephemeral "science" and "medicine". However, few women know why regular pap smears are recommended, and when it doesn't make sense to get them, and even fewer of them are confident enough to look their doctor in the eye and say, "hey, I don't need a pap smear."
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that your doctor prescribed Nexium or some other namebrand Proton Pump Inhibitor. The generic, Omeprazole, is available Over-The-Counter, costs a fraction of the price, and works virtually identically.
My mother was on Nexium, and then it went off her insurance in-coverage prescriptions. Funny enough, the generic actually uses corn-based products, which my mom is allergic to. Eventually, the doctor convinced the insurance company that she really did need the name-brand version, and they eventually covered it.
Of course, no one had the negotiable power to have the generic prescription provided without corn-products. If you think peanut allergies suck, corn is in like everything!
> system is being rigged by a culture of "Get Rich" thinking.
Rigged? Isn't that what capitalism is all about?
You cannot motivate people to work through financial incentives, yet bash those who act upon such motivations.
The solution will never be in changing how people think. Instead, walls need to be raised, certain doors need to be locked, and opportunity should only shine from the right direction. Financial motivation will always be a part of any capitalist situation.
YES! Of course! The Free Market is the only way to go. Let's privatize the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force!
I mean, the only reason they volunteer for the military is because they're getting paid so well for it... oh wait, they don't. Usually, even Generals and Colonels leave the military on a Friday, return on a Monday to the same place as a contractor, and earn tons more money.
Seriously... what is wrong with the capitalists here on slashdot? I mean, the whole idea of Linux and F/OSS and geek culture is doing complex, and difficult things regardless of the personal income potential.
I was hired by a big software company for $75k/year to do less difficult work than what I was doing for the F/OSS community for free.
I agree. That's why I chose to use the adverb+verb form, rather than the simplistic (and more popular) adjective+noun form. The latter implies a single, time-constrained event of dubious provenance, whereas the former implies a continued, non-time-bound state of failure. I note that you apparently favour the adjective+noun form, which is epically weak.
Forgive people... the adverb has been dying a slow death in English for quite awhile.
Universities that train doctors, lawyers, and MBAs survive because of us. We spent equally long or longer training, but we're perfectly happy to take lower salaries because we love what we do.
OMG! I would totally take the 1 in 10 doctors who enjoy their job rather than those doing it just for the money.
I'm willing to put my neck on the line somewhat to avoid a CT in a toddler who just has overprotective parents, but your fat, diabetic, smoking, sedentary, litigious ass is just not cute enough to get the my sympathy.
Funny you should mention toddlers and CT scans. We just ran into this the other night with my daughter. She had a 3-4 foot fall onto concrete. Ended up with a head bump and a nose bleed. The EMTs at the arena suggested we take her into the ER because of the bleeding nose (even though it was likely she hit it). We brought her into the ER and had the doctor check her out just in case. The doctor examined her and explained when and why they might want to do a CT scan, but suggested that she should be fine without one. It sounded like many parents didn't want to hear no from him. Anyhow, we didn't get a CT scan because the benefits didn't outweigh the risks and the next day she was fine.
I had a wreck on a motorcycle, and went to the ER. Not because I felt bad, or injured... I felt mostly fine. But I figured "meh, I have good insurance".
I then spent a few hours strapped to a backboard and a head strap, that was pressing my head against my ponytail. They took an X-Ray fairly quickly, then I had to wait, then they come back, and "your x-ray was a little fuzzy, we want to take a CT scan". So, I said "well, ok, you're the doctor, but I feel fine... I mean, would I be able to hold up my head on my own and still be fine? Because I did that for like 30 mins before I got the back board."
But no, I ended up waiting around, with my ponytail pressing into my skull, for a couple hours. It started hurting horribly.
I learned my lesson... if I have every reason to believe that I'm fine, then I'm not going to the ER.
Worst thing is, a month later, I got Post-Concussion Syndrome, and with all the wonderful defensive medicine they did, they didn't see any indication of a concussion. Awesome... Doctors practicing defensive medicine to CYA, not to actually FIND anything...
It implies that it is second-hand, cannot be verified, and is therefore unreliable. As this is an implication, and thus a connotation, it is not in the dictionary. Its denotation, however is in the dictionary.
That anecdotes are able to be embellished, or even completely fabricated while not being falsifiable is just such an indication that it does not qualify as scientific data.
Totally, I got the same thing from playing Joust back in the day. You know, when you had to push the buttons uphill BOTH WAYS!
I'm just amazed that someone who is not a doctor didn't put this together faster, and laugh rather than make a big deal out of it. But no! Over protective parents suck. Seriously, if my parents had brought me in to the doctor for every simple-to-diagnose problem in my life, I would have been a medical mystery, too.
I say bring back lawn darts and let the stupid people weed themselves out some more again.
If that was an astronaut up there this would be resolved in a minute, not a month.
...Astronaut samples the water, "Hmm, tastes pretty good...gack...gack..." Cue any number of "Martian Zombie" movies... Now do you see why we just send robots? Sure their programming sometimes goes bad and they start killing us, but don't EAT OUR BRAINS!
You obviously haven't seen any Martian Zombie Robot films...
As frigid as Mars is, it would have sublimated onto the rover, not condensed.
God, I'm an idiot... it would have accumulated by DEPOSITION, not sublimation.
Still, the point is still there. It would have changed from vapor to solid without a liquid phase. The perchlorates that would keep it liquid wouldn't be in the vapor, and thus it would depose, not condense.
I'm no web developer but how can google.com be on that list as well? It is one of the simplest websites around. A text field, few links and a bit of javascript.
The problem here is that Microsoft released a list of domains that are not properly supported, and the list contains one entry: "*.*"
The Itanium might have had a chance if optimizing compilers had been available that would actually exploit its hardware... but see the following sound bite:
the "Itanium" approach that was supposed to be so terrific - until it turned out that the wished-for compilers were basically impossible to write.
They forgot, and then AMD expanded x86 exactly the way Intel had previously done twice: by making something that could work as a fast 80386.
No. They didn't. The Itanium was able to run as fast as an 80386. However, the x86 architecture had long since adopted to RISC ideas such as pipelining and OOE.
The original Itanium even though it "only" ran at 800MHz it was able to by exactly the precise design of the architecture run two instructions at once. That puts it at about 1.6GHz, and since its pipeline was much shorter than the P4, branch misprediction costs were much lower, and since it had predicates, it could avoid branches entirely for short instruction groups.
This whole idea that it was "only" 800MHz or that it wasn't fast, is absolutely bogus, and I expect people on Slashdot to understand that MHz to MHz comparison is only useful on the same core.
Well, I guess having better compilers for IA64 would helped greatly, considering that the architecture's performance is critically depending upon the compiler detecting instructions that are not interdependant.
That's pretty much right on the head there. Intel made the IA64 under the assumption "make a better chip, and the compiler will follow", unfortunately, they didn't realize how much inertia was behind x86. AMD exploited it and POOF, Itanium goes down in flames.:(
The PowerPC architecture was dumped by Apple and failed to challenge Intel in the PC market in a big way.
You missed the proper order. The PowerPC architecture didn't have the money behind it that the x86 architecture did. Take a crappier design but spend a ton more money on it, and you can easily make it faster than a better design.
The PowerPC failed to compete effectively against the Intel/AMD competition, and thus, Apple was pretty much forced to switch because of simple economics.
I don't think so. x86-64 is fully backwards-compatible with x86. Itanium is not.
Wanna guess why they're not that popular?
You don't know the architecture? The first Itaniums had hardware x86 processors. The only reason they don't now, is that it was found to be faster to emulate the x86 than run it with a diminished hardware.
Pathetic. "God knows" is a colloquialism. I promise that Jebus won't bite you if you use it. Take a lesson from all the others whose blind hate made them alter their language. Not to 'Universe'win this thread but Untermensch much?
Seraphim
I am aware that it is simply colloquial usage. However, I am also allowed to make a decision that I do not wish to perpetuate Christian culture. My choice.:P
This means that if you buy an Apple CD you can draw on it, shred it, burn it, recycle it, or put it on a pedestal and worship it. However, you have no authority to distribute the content on that disk, the same as you have no authority to distribute the content of the book that you own.
Which was not being debated, what was being debated is if Apple has the right to say you can't mess with the software on the CD for your on personal use. The physical CD is to the software as the cover is to the story of the book. If I want to take my copy of The Da Vinci Code and replace every incidence of "Da Vinci" with "Ninja Turtles", no matter how they kick and scream, the publisher has no legal right of stopping me. That is what Apple is trying to do, stopping me from changing the contents.
Actually, the CD is more like the physical parts of the book up to and including the ink, but not the content represented BY the ink.
You're allowed to do whatever you want to the physical parts of the book/CD, but you are not allowed to copy/distribute the content represented on the book/CD.
Completely and utterly irrelevant and inaccurate analogy. You cannot use a celebrity as you see fit because s/he cannot become you property (and the law doesn't allow that even if they wished to do so). When purchasing things that can be purchased though (and yes, a copy of a work is an item, not a "license to use an item"), the ultimate authority on what can be done with or to that item is the owner. If I buy a book, I can draw on it, shred it, burn it, recycle it, or put it on pedestal and worship it. The publisher nor author have any capability or legal authority to prevent me from doing any of this.
I recall reading in an Apple EULA that one purchases the CD and physically owns the CD, but the content of the software itself is still owned by Apple.
This means that if you buy an Apple CD you can draw on it, shred it, burn it, recycle it, or put it on a pedestal and worship it. However, you have no authority to distribute the content on that disk, the same as you have no authority to distribute the content of the book that you own.
Now, things remain so that you can always alter the content of a book or CD for your own personal use. That's part of fair-use. I think it should be well known here on Slashdot that the DMCA unreasonable encroaches upon fair-use rights.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know under what health system you live and what your profession / experience is. I have worked as a doctor in Germany, Norway, and Australia and have been performing pap smears and vaginal vault smears for almost two decades. I discuss the indication with all patients, especially with women after hysterectomy. As I stated - some will not need smears any more after a total hysterectomy, but this cannot be generalized. Some will certainly benefit from continued smears.
Oh this explains it all. This article is about the US, and I have experience with being a patient in the US gynecology system.
I figured that the lab used different tools/dyes/processes to evaluate the results. I appreciate your professional experience telling me I'm apparently mistaken. No matter how intelligent a woman is as a patient, she still doesn't understand the "business end" of the process.
At least here, people get all crazy if you don't list the lab work correctly, etc. DIFFERENT BITS! That's what's different... ... ... ... ok, I deserved that smack.
It implies that it is second-hand
No, it does not.
It really, really doesn't.
CONNOTATION! You cannot tell someone that a word does not "connote" a certain meaning, because connotations are personal. You can say "that connotation does not apply broadly" or "your connotation is unusual, you should perhaps reconsider it." You cannot tell us "you are wrong."
Anecdotes can be verified, witnesses can be tracked, corroborations can be obtained.
Ah yes, sorry. Who do I find for a witness for the anecdotal removal of subjective pain in the knees due to drinking distilled beaver piss?
Corroborations, once established allow someone to actually PUBLISH an account, rather than just have it unsubstantiated. At this point, it's not an anecdote anymore.
Scientific data can be embellished and even completely falsified, you paradoxical twit.
The difference is that anecdotal evidence isn't presented neither rigorously, nor commonly to sufficiently skeptical audiences?
So this is probably a stupid question, but as I understand things, a PAP smear is actually a test for HPV which a woman can (I assume) contract with or without her cervex. While it is true that HPV is very much the leading cause of cervical cancer, they are not one and the same. If all the above is true, then doesn't a PAP smear still make sense no matter the state of a woman's cervex? And for that matter, I do believe that men can catch HPV also, why is it that we test woman twice a year and men never?
No, a pap smear looks for pre-cancerous cervix cells. A proper HPV test is far better done by looking for antibodies in a blood test.
First, pap smears don't actually detect HPV, this is a misassumption.
In taking a Pap smear, a tool is used to gather cells from the outer opening of the cervix (Latin for "neck") of the uterus and the endocervix. The cells are examined under a microscope to look for abnormalities. The test aims to detect potentially pre-cancerous changes (called cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN) or cervical dysplasia), which are usually caused by sexually transmitted human papillomaviruses (HPVs). The test remains an effective, widely used method for early detection of pre-cancer and cervical cancer. The test may also detect infections and abnormalities in the endocervix and endometrium.
I'm a girl, and I've had HPV tests. It's far easier and cost-effective to test for HPV with a blood test for antibodies. Most HPV situations clear up on their own and require no treatment. However, in America, once you hear you have something, your first question is "what do I do to treat it?"
The (non-)obvious answer is often "uh... rest?"
A few facts first:
1) Pap smears still make sense in women after a hysterectomy. It is then called a vaginal vault smear. It is meaningful at the very least in women who had abnormal smears prior to hysterectomy, because abnormal cells can have spread to the surrounding vaginal wall
This is not a pap smear. It's a vaginal vault smear. The two are listed as different procedure codes and consume different resources. True, while you're there the doctor most often may as well take a vaginal vault smear, but there is still no point in giving a pap smear to women who do not have a cervix. And according to the National Cancer Institute vaginal cancer occurs about 1/5th as often as cervical cancer. Do you really need a yearly test for it? Oh wait, no you don't.
2) Some surgeons leave a stump of the cervix behind when they perform a subtotal hysterectomy. Not common practice any more, but used to be very common in many countries and can have some advantages for the stability of the pelvic floor. Not all women who had a hysterectomy know whether they still have a cervix stump or not.
A good reason to ask your gynecologist while he's in there. If you don't know if you don't have a cervix left or not, then you're just being absolutely careless. Likewise, if your medical record doesn't reflect if you still have a cervix or not, then that's clinical negligence.
3) When the hysterectomy was performed for malignancy, eg cancer of the uterus, the vaginal vault smear can be useful to detect early recurrence
Pap smear != vaginal vault smear. If you had a hysterectomy that was done for malignancy, then regular vaginal vault smears are indicated. However again, a pap smear is not a vaginal vault smear.
Hence. some women may not need pap smears after a total hysterectomy - but in many women this is still a meaningful and cost effective procedure - which is why even public health systems are still happy to pay for them.
It definitely is easier to mail out pink reminder letters to every medical record marked as "F", but this is the point of this whole process. You and your doctor should be discussing this stuff, and you should know if there is no good reason for pap smears. Simply dumping every woman on an assembly line to get the procedure does not save money, and gives unnecessary medical procedures to perhaps millions of women who don't need them.
The article does not seem to take this properly into account - because most scientists have only a very limited insight into medical problems. I should know - I did a science degree first before becoming a MD.
There certainly is a big disconnection between the ephemeral "science" and "medicine". However, few women know why regular pap smears are recommended, and when it doesn't make sense to get them, and even fewer of them are confident enough to look their doctor in the eye and say, "hey, I don't need a pap smear."
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that your doctor prescribed Nexium or some other namebrand Proton Pump Inhibitor. The generic, Omeprazole, is available Over-The-Counter, costs a fraction of the price, and works virtually identically.
My mother was on Nexium, and then it went off her insurance in-coverage prescriptions. Funny enough, the generic actually uses corn-based products, which my mom is allergic to. Eventually, the doctor convinced the insurance company that she really did need the name-brand version, and they eventually covered it.
Of course, no one had the negotiable power to have the generic prescription provided without corn-products. If you think peanut allergies suck, corn is in like everything!
On a slight tangent...
> system is being rigged by a culture of "Get Rich" thinking.
Rigged? Isn't that what capitalism is all about?
You cannot motivate people to work through financial incentives, yet bash those who act upon such motivations.
The solution will never be in changing how people think. Instead, walls need to be raised, certain doors need to be locked, and opportunity should only shine from the right direction. Financial motivation will always be a part of any capitalist situation.
YES! Of course! The Free Market is the only way to go. Let's privatize the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force!
I mean, the only reason they volunteer for the military is because they're getting paid so well for it... oh wait, they don't. Usually, even Generals and Colonels leave the military on a Friday, return on a Monday to the same place as a contractor, and earn tons more money.
Seriously... what is wrong with the capitalists here on slashdot? I mean, the whole idea of Linux and F/OSS and geek culture is doing complex, and difficult things regardless of the personal income potential.
I was hired by a big software company for $75k/year to do less difficult work than what I was doing for the F/OSS community for free.
I agree. That's why I chose to use the adverb+verb form, rather than the simplistic (and more popular) adjective+noun form. The latter implies a single, time-constrained event of dubious provenance, whereas the former implies a continued, non-time-bound state of failure. I note that you apparently favour the adjective+noun form, which is epically weak.
Forgive people... the adverb has been dying a slow death in English for quite awhile.
Universities that train doctors, lawyers, and MBAs survive because of us. We spent equally long or longer training, but we're perfectly happy to take lower salaries because we love what we do.
OMG! I would totally take the 1 in 10 doctors who enjoy their job rather than those doing it just for the money.
I'm willing to put my neck on the line somewhat to avoid a CT in a toddler who just has overprotective parents, but your fat, diabetic, smoking, sedentary, litigious ass is just not cute enough to get the my sympathy.
Funny you should mention toddlers and CT scans. We just ran into this the other night with my daughter. She had a 3-4 foot fall onto concrete. Ended up with a head bump and a nose bleed. The EMTs at the arena suggested we take her into the ER because of the bleeding nose (even though it was likely she hit it). We brought her into the ER and had the doctor check her out just in case. The doctor examined her and explained when and why they might want to do a CT scan, but suggested that she should be fine without one. It sounded like many parents didn't want to hear no from him. Anyhow, we didn't get a CT scan because the benefits didn't outweigh the risks and the next day she was fine.
I had a wreck on a motorcycle, and went to the ER. Not because I felt bad, or injured... I felt mostly fine. But I figured "meh, I have good insurance".
I then spent a few hours strapped to a backboard and a head strap, that was pressing my head against my ponytail. They took an X-Ray fairly quickly, then I had to wait, then they come back, and "your x-ray was a little fuzzy, we want to take a CT scan". So, I said "well, ok, you're the doctor, but I feel fine... I mean, would I be able to hold up my head on my own and still be fine? Because I did that for like 30 mins before I got the back board."
But no, I ended up waiting around, with my ponytail pressing into my skull, for a couple hours. It started hurting horribly.
I learned my lesson... if I have every reason to believe that I'm fine, then I'm not going to the ER.
Worst thing is, a month later, I got Post-Concussion Syndrome, and with all the wonderful defensive medicine they did, they didn't see any indication of a concussion. Awesome... Doctors practicing defensive medicine to CYA, not to actually FIND anything...
It implies that it is second-hand, cannot be verified, and is therefore unreliable. As this is an implication, and thus a connotation, it is not in the dictionary. Its denotation, however is in the dictionary.
That anecdotes are able to be embellished, or even completely fabricated while not being falsifiable is just such an indication that it does not qualify as scientific data.
We called it a Joystick Ow-wee
Totally, I got the same thing from playing Joust back in the day. You know, when you had to push the buttons uphill BOTH WAYS!
I'm just amazed that someone who is not a doctor didn't put this together faster, and laugh rather than make a big deal out of it. But no! Over protective parents suck. Seriously, if my parents had brought me in to the doctor for every simple-to-diagnose problem in my life, I would have been a medical mystery, too.
I say bring back lawn darts and let the stupid people weed themselves out some more again.
You obviously haven't seen any Martian Zombie Robot films...
As frigid as Mars is, it would have sublimated onto the rover, not condensed.
God, I'm an idiot... it would have accumulated by DEPOSITION, not sublimation.
Still, the point is still there. It would have changed from vapor to solid without a liquid phase. The perchlorates that would keep it liquid wouldn't be in the vapor, and thus it would depose, not condense.
That condensed on the metal parts of the rover. Assuming of course that those globs are water and not Martian spit or something else.
As frigid as Mars is, it would have sublimated onto the rover, not condensed.
I'm no web developer but how can google.com be on that list as well? It is one of the simplest websites around. A text field, few links and a bit of javascript.
The problem here is that Microsoft released a list of domains that are not properly supported, and the list contains one entry: "*.*"
Hahaha, all of this is so awesome. :)
<3
The Itanium might have had a chance if optimizing compilers had been available that would actually exploit its hardware... but see the following sound bite:
the "Itanium" approach that was supposed to be so terrific - until it turned out that the wished-for compilers were basically impossible to write.
(http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1193856)
When Don Knuth says your chip is impossible to program for, you're in deep, deep trouble.
There's a statement from the GMP project that writing efficient assembly for the Itanium is a challenging exercise for human and compiler alike.
They forgot, and then AMD expanded x86 exactly the way Intel had previously done twice: by making something that could work as a fast 80386.
No. They didn't. The Itanium was able to run as fast as an 80386. However, the x86 architecture had long since adopted to RISC ideas such as pipelining and OOE.
The original Itanium even though it "only" ran at 800MHz it was able to by exactly the precise design of the architecture run two instructions at once. That puts it at about 1.6GHz, and since its pipeline was much shorter than the P4, branch misprediction costs were much lower, and since it had predicates, it could avoid branches entirely for short instruction groups.
This whole idea that it was "only" 800MHz or that it wasn't fast, is absolutely bogus, and I expect people on Slashdot to understand that MHz to MHz comparison is only useful on the same core.
Well, I guess having better compilers for IA64 would helped greatly, considering that the architecture's performance is critically depending upon the compiler detecting instructions that are not interdependant.
That's pretty much right on the head there. Intel made the IA64 under the assumption "make a better chip, and the compiler will follow", unfortunately, they didn't realize how much inertia was behind x86. AMD exploited it and POOF, Itanium goes down in flames. :(
The PowerPC architecture was dumped by Apple and failed to challenge Intel in the PC market in a big way.
You missed the proper order. The PowerPC architecture didn't have the money behind it that the x86 architecture did. Take a crappier design but spend a ton more money on it, and you can easily make it faster than a better design.
The PowerPC failed to compete effectively against the Intel/AMD competition, and thus, Apple was pretty much forced to switch because of simple economics.
I don't think so. x86-64 is fully backwards-compatible with x86. Itanium is not.
Wanna guess why they're not that popular?
You don't know the architecture? The first Itaniums had hardware x86 processors. The only reason they don't now, is that it was found to be faster to emulate the x86 than run it with a diminished hardware.
Now imagine being from a country that hasn't eradicated Polio and trying to get into the USA or Japan...
Yep, just as hard as getting a dog from where Rabies hasn't been exterminated into Japan is.
Pathetic. "God knows" is a colloquialism. I promise that Jebus won't bite you if you use it. Take a lesson from all the others whose blind hate made them alter their language. Not to 'Universe'win this thread but Untermensch much?
Seraphim
I am aware that it is simply colloquial usage. However, I am also allowed to make a decision that I do not wish to perpetuate Christian culture. My choice. :P
This means that if you buy an Apple CD you can draw on it, shred it, burn it, recycle it, or put it on a pedestal and worship it. However, you have no authority to distribute the content on that disk, the same as you have no authority to distribute the content of the book that you own.
Which was not being debated, what was being debated is if Apple has the right to say you can't mess with the software on the CD for your on personal use. The physical CD is to the software as the cover is to the story of the book. If I want to take my copy of The Da Vinci Code and replace every incidence of "Da Vinci" with "Ninja Turtles", no matter how they kick and scream, the publisher has no legal right of stopping me. That is what Apple is trying to do, stopping me from changing the contents.
Actually, the CD is more like the physical parts of the book up to and including the ink, but not the content represented BY the ink.
You're allowed to do whatever you want to the physical parts of the book/CD, but you are not allowed to copy/distribute the content represented on the book/CD.
Completely and utterly irrelevant and inaccurate analogy. You cannot use a celebrity as you see fit because s/he cannot become you property (and the law doesn't allow that even if they wished to do so). When purchasing things that can be purchased though (and yes, a copy of a work is an item, not a "license to use an item"), the ultimate authority on what can be done with or to that item is the owner. If I buy a book, I can draw on it, shred it, burn it, recycle it, or put it on pedestal and worship it. The publisher nor author have any capability or legal authority to prevent me from doing any of this.
I recall reading in an Apple EULA that one purchases the CD and physically owns the CD, but the content of the software itself is still owned by Apple.
This means that if you buy an Apple CD you can draw on it, shred it, burn it, recycle it, or put it on a pedestal and worship it. However, you have no authority to distribute the content on that disk, the same as you have no authority to distribute the content of the book that you own.
Now, things remain so that you can always alter the content of a book or CD for your own personal use. That's part of fair-use. I think it should be well known here on Slashdot that the DMCA unreasonable encroaches upon fair-use rights.