Is it dusty in here? It must be dusty in here.

I was shocked to find how poor the performance of expf() was compared to exp() in glibc. Turns out that in a handful of functions, they are changing the rounding mode of the FPU, which flushes the entire FPU state, obliterating performance. After switching to a different version -- from another library -- that didn't change rounding modes, performance was back on par.

It's perfectly understandable why rounding mode changes are necessary, since the FPU can be in any rounding mode coming in, and some guarantees are required, but they should really provide variations that do not do this. I truly hope the new implementation avoids it altogether, otherwise we're back on square one.

Although coming from the same root, the Nobel peace prize is a completely different group of people. A different country, even.

You're confused. It's called levelling the playing field. What the USAF did was sign a no-bid contract with the Boeing/Lockheed to purchase Russian rocket engines. A huge no-no in the public sphere, if not illegal. The only way to get them to reverse on that was to go to court.

Did your sense of humor go down with the boat?

Er. That's the point. The accused has to prove they aren't what the accuser says they are. Proving a negative, if you must.

If AT&T had left printouts of highly personal data in a dumpster and someone had found it right there, then I don't think you would've had a problem fingering the culprit. AT&T, right? Dumpster diving would certainly not get someone 41 months in the slammer (e.g California v Greenwood).

In other words, it was right there in the open. Hence, the blame lies squarely with AT&T for not properly securing their customers' private information.

Your obvious lack of parenting skills is not his responsibility.

I don't think it was the outcome he wanted either. But he chose to believe in medical quackery first, and now his children don't have a dad.

Um. He sold it to Sun. It wasn't until Sun got sold to Oracle -- a move which he fought against -- that the fork happened.

Maybe not at border crossings but at airports they sure as hell do; even if you're Canadian, like me. They even photograph your eyeballs.

The entire point of the HAL is to abstract hardware, any hardware, away from the OS. There's nothing that says it can't encompass more of the hardware than just the IO bus, CPU and MMU, like WinNT does. On an embedded device there's very little in terms of a standard IO bus that the OS can communicate through cleanly with peripherals, so might as well abstract the whole lot.

Perhaps by keeping the machine that hosts the seed secured? Like using a protocol between the publicly facing machine and the seed machine that doesn't allow for remote shell access? Really basic stuff, actually.

The unethical part, as far as I understand, is that smaller ISPs rent the "last mile" piece from Bell, which they're allowed to since the infrastructure is wholly, or partially, tax-payer funded. However, they don't buy big-pipe bandwidth from Bell, but instead peer with someone like Cogent. The cost of the bandwidth over the last mile is zero, since additional bytes don't degrade the infrastructure and therefore don't add to maintenance costs. However Bell wants to charge the ISP, for this zero-cost bandwidth, at the same scale as they charge their end-users, who, unlike the ISPs, *are* using their peering connection to talk to the rest of the internet.

I keep seeing this population density argument being thrown out as if it has some sort of a bearing on the issue.

You're not going to be rolling 100Mbs fiber to each farm house in Montana, now are you?

The fact that ISPs in North-America (Canada included) are unable to do this even in areas with high population density, simply indicates that they want to keep the status quo as long as customers keep paying. There is no technical or logistical issue preventing them from doing it. It's all about abject lack of competition and the precious dollar. Trotting out the density argument is specious at best.