Try this one: http://www.citeworld.com/article/2458446/cloud-computing/amazon-google-microsoft-cloud-price-wars-hurt-everyone.html

Who cares what that idiot thinks? She is completely unimportant.

I have been maintaining infrastructure for over a decade. I know what's involved.

When you mention flexibility, you're getting somewhere. If I needed a temporary capacity bump, the cloud would make a great deal of sense. It's not a bad DR plan either. But for the everyday capacity (the base load if you will), ownership is cheaper and offers better control.

Bank the money saved by owning the server vs cloud. By the time the server fails you'll have enough to buy 2 or 3.

OTOH, definitely consider the cloud as a DR measure.

He'll probably end up in an ally shooting up and explaining why unlike all the other junkies, it really and truly isn't his fault.

In some cases, they HAD to start taking drugs to control agonizing pain.

Later, they get cut off when they heal (or the doctor, threatened by the DEA dares not continue prescribing) and find they are addicted. Then stupid laws made by the small minded turn these ordinary citizens with a medical problem into criminals.

No metric is adequate for all purposes. This one is adequate for the task it was designed for, and is adequate for some other purposes as well. That's the best that can be expected of any tool. Always use the appropriate tools for the task at hand, of course.

Yes, I do assembly programming when necessary. Of course, this is a compiler, not an assembler.

But since I am speaking of a specific case of a compiler's behavior, I wouldn't actually have to be skilled in assembly code to evaluate if it did or did not run correctly with the offending function overridden in the object code.

The optimization flags have nothing to do with CPU errata. You should know that.

Compile with -On where n>3 and it may not behave correctly on GenuineIntel or on AMD with the crippler defanged. Oddly, it might work on AMD with the crippler in that case (or it might not). Most of that is due to the compiler taking a few liberties with floating point correctness that may or may not work out OK.

P.S. please if you get a chanse put some flown on Algernons grave in the bak yard.

And the other huge problem here with selection bias: he targeted people who'd used both virtual and physical keyboards. In other words, the people who had at one point gone out of their way to buy a physical keyboard when there were other options. Not many people (percentage wise) ever bothered, so the set is very much limited to those who were motivated to like the non-virtual option.

We'll try not to hold that against you :-)

For any case I have ever heard of..

Note that some programs won't run correctly with some optimizations even on GenuineIntel.

So, until last year, icc had not been available for the majority of Linux's lifetime. And keep in mind, it would be foolish to jump to a compiler with little track record no matter how good it looks. It could vanish tomorrow or quality could fall fast once it gets a foothold if it is a for profit venture. Given that, it wasn't a viable choice on principles for the first few years (and after because it proved to be problematic).

It says something about longevity and continued availability that a simple google for gcc history gets a detailed page indicating 1st release, a description of the development and a roadmap for the future while history for the intel compiler disappears beyond 10 years back.

It has only been recently that there were GOOD options that weren't gcc. The Linux kernel has several tricky bits in it where the tiny details of the compiler matter including how ambiguous bits of spec are interpreted and how bits the spec leaves to the compiler's option. So given a choice between 2 credible free compilers (clang and gcc) and a very much not free compiler with a history of cheating (the AMD debacle is not the only instance), it's not a very hard decision to make.

Meanwhile these days in the embedded space, optimized compilation of the kernel in the embedded space isn't nearly as important as it once was. CPU performance in that space is growing by leaps and bounds such that if a general purpose kernel is appropriate at all, there is probably an embarrassment of CPU cycles available at least to the point that the differences between gcc and icc won't be a deal breaker. The target app might or might not be another story, usually not.

That isn't to say that optimization is at all unwelcome, just that it takes 2nd priority to the compiler being stable and readily available.

Icc (and more often, ifort) are more popular in the HPC area for the application. Usually nobody worries too much about the kernel in that space either since the big gains there are made in efficient coding at the source level rather than in compiler optimization AND most of the calls into the kernel will be for hardware bound I/O. Optimization matters more in the application where the CPU will spend the vast majority of it's time crunching data with (hopefully) good cache utilization.

Yes, but after becoming an Oracle shop, you don't have any pennies left to spend. And $23K per processor isn't really pennies to anyone. If you're spending the big bucks already, you have tons of processors. If you aren't, then it's massive.

But the real problem here is that it's done by default, regardless of if it's needed at all. So a client ends up spending that money, very likely on something they don't need and don't see any benefit from. Let's assume they have only two machines running Oracle, in high availability mode each running dual processors. At $23K per processor, that's just shy of $100,000 (and if tax is included, it will be over that). What can a company do with $100,000? Quite a lot. Especially if they're small enough that all they need is one database instance. On the other hand...if you take that $100,000 out of their budget, that would result in them having to cut costs elsewhere...perhaps by firing the guy who didn't catch that line item on the bill of materials from Oracle in the first place?