Architectural improvements for general purpose CPUs yield less and less benefits: Even more registers? Even better branch prediction? Even larger caches? It'll all yield but a few percent, at least for current Intel designs. So, the way to go is currently more and more cores, but what good is it to have many cores that can't all fire simultaneously?

Of course general purpose CPUs exist, simply because we call them that way. But it is also true that each design has it's own strengths, and "dark silicon" is another driver for special purpose hardware. Efficiency is another. Andrew Chien has published some interesting research on this subject. In his 10x10 approach he suggests to use 10 different types of domain-specific compute units (e.g. for n-body, graphics, tree-walking...), each of which is 10x more efficient than "general purpose CPUs" in its domain (YMMV). Those compute units bundled together, make up one core of the 10x10 design. Multiple cores can be connected via a NoC.

Let's see how software will cope with this development...

ps: can special purpose hardware exist if general purpose hardware doesn't?

FTFY

It's amazing how the joke got old so quick. I guess you should have stopped around the third iteration.

And before you come criticize this comment, wait for Bennett's.

IIRC, the license explicitly forbids running it under a VM... though in my opinion if you paid for the crap you should be able to run it whatever way you want.
But, as I said, Windows is just a waste of hard disk space to me, be it a partition or VDI.

Because nobody offers that option. I would gladly request a refund for the Windows 7 that came with my notebook if I could. The only reason I keep its partition is because I paid for that crap, and just "in case I need it"... but it's been 3 years so far without booting it. I guess I'll just wipe it and give more space to my Linux partition whenever I get some time to do it.

Does that apply even if you're scratching your head while saying the false things (or the "least untruthful things") intentionally?

...that 35k come to Point Lay to get laid?

One reason might be that railways are more efficient in densely populated areas. There express trains can even compete with airplanes. Yesterday we went from Tokyo to Osaka. Flight time would have been ~1h, plus 1h checkin and transfer to/from the airport (~45min. each). The Nozomi Shinkansen took us there in 2:30, and both stations were directly at the center of the cities.

Most of Japan's population is situated in coastal regions, so just a hand full of routes can service all major cities. Imagine how many connections you'd need in the US...

And it was fa-bu-lous!!!

Thank you, that's exactly what I wanted to know.

I guess I've missed the news, any links for my lazy ass?

Bitcoin sounds like a nice investment for dictators willing to further screw their populaces.

What happens to the block chain if the network is split, as in this case?

If you're really interested in readability you would probably define those bits, like:

#define HIGHSTUFF (0b001011 << 17)
#define NOTSOHIGHSTUFF (0b010011011 << 8)

and then or them together.

Alternatively you could define a macro for your bit field, like:

#include
#define bitfield(a,b,c,d) 0x##a##b##c##d
int main() {
        printf("%x", bitfield(f,f,f,f));
}

On my machine, I have clang 3.4.2-r100, gcc 4.9.0, 4.8.3, 4.7.4, 4.6.4 and icc 14.0.3.174 installed. All simultaneously, no hassle.