I'm in process of moving my company's main web app to python 3, and standardized on 3.5 to match Debian 9.
But python 3.6 has so many cpu & memory improvements (not to mention things like f'' strings), seriously considering installing custom copy of 3.6... though not sure if I want the burden of maintaining my own copy of everything that will affect.
Then again... "Debian stable" being rock solid stable is why I stick with it for production; if their caution in this is the price I pay, it's worth it.
The post posits that, to handle the burden of legacy instructions, an "obvious technically-appealing approach (is) starting over with a clean-sheet architecture".
The approach that immediately occurred to me would be have a layer that translates the legacy instructions into modern equivalents; without as much concern if they are slower to execute in their new form (they're legacy, after all, right?).
Of course, doing something like that is probably nowhere near trivial, the devil's always in the details.
But I bet this is already being done at the microcode level. Stepping things up to having a published agreement about which instructions were globally considered "legacy", and guidelines for what their equivalents were, would go a long was towards allowing a general feeling that an ISA was evolving, rather than just accumulating weight upon weight.
> The approach that immediately occurred to me would be have a layer that translates the legacy instructions into modern equivalents; without as much concern if they are slower to execute in their new form (they're legacy, after all, right?).
This is what x86 CPUs already do and have been doing for years.
It's also why Intel & AMD don't care about "x86 complexity" and it's also why even though people love to claim that a switch to RISC would improve efficiency/performance, so far there's really no evidence to support that.
Intel just plops their teeny-tiny (in terms of die space) x86-to-internal-microcode transactor on top of their new cores and calls it a day. As long as that translation layer isn't a bottleneck, which it rarely is, then Intel doesn't care.
It's not just about legacy instructions which can be decoded down to some microcode. It's about architectural features like SGX, CET, MPX, TSX, VT --- plus the legacy stuff like segment registers and 286 call gates and virtual 8086 mode and so on and so on --- and how they all interact with each other, and how they increase the complexity of context switching, OS support, and so on.
OS complexity is because they choose to keep and value that backwards compatibility, just like x86 values backwards compatibility.
Linux could eliminate all that complexity tomorrow by just bulk removing x86 support and only running x86-64. All OS complexity eliminated. All context switching complexity eliminated.
Wow! Thanks for mentioning OODA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop), never heard of that before. That's a really intriguing concept... so many cogsci, ML, netsec, and game theory connections. While the wikipedia page is rather sparse, it's already added a few things to my reading pile.
Does anyone know if [Shorewall](http://shorewall.org/) has plans to support nftables, or is it staying on iptables for now?
While I'm excited to hear about a simplified abstraction at the kernel level, for most setups I've had to configure, I really like the highlevel abstraction it provides.
I've used shorewall for some time. As a matter of fact, installed it on my recent laptop as well (archlinux). But till now I didn't like quite often config file format changes, because of which I needed to figure out how to change current config to match the latest one. PF in this regard was more consistent and more readable and didn't requre to use anything on top of it. Then again - I never needed very complex FW rules.
At my company we tend to use "NOTE:" just to be aware of something, "XXX:" when something's functional, but has room for improvement, "TODO:" when functionality's missing, and "FIXME:" when it's plain broken.
In that context the XXX's are kinda nice to have... we can mark there's something to work on; but only search for TODO/FIXME when looking for things that will actually impact currently needed operations.
There was an article a while back -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1144548 -- purporting that the efficient market hypothesis is true if and only if P = NP. ... which I'd argue implies social science is overly optimistic about that hypothesis.
That also implies that if the market is very close to efficient, you need absolutely massive amounts of computational power to bring it even closer (i.e. to make money). So even if it is inefficient, that doesn't mean anyone can reasonably expect to find exploitable patterns.
One bit of trivia I really love is why "DEL" is at 127 -- weirdly way away from all the control codes.
It's because 0x7F is all ASCII bits set to "1". Back in the early punch card (and telegraph?) days, if there was a typo, you couldn't "unpunch" a hole to make it a 0 again, but you could punch out all the rest of them, indicating "ignore this char, I've deleted it" -- 0b1111111.
Actually, per a snopes article (http://www.snopes.com/donald-drumpf), the Drumpf to Trump transition may have occurred because the former was more German sounding, and there was a good bit of anti-german hatred at the time.
This is what all the anti-immigration people don't get. Chances are, when their ancestors came to this country they likely weren't wanted by the current residents. Basically every American racial/cultural slur you can think of arose during the time when that group was the majority immigrant group. Every group was discriminated against (Irish, Germans, Italians, Chinese/Japanese).
So what? America's history is overwhelmingly white and Christian. The vast majority of immigration to the US has been from white, Christian nations, even more so at the time when the Statue of Liberty was erected. Is the US a nation of Yemeni immigrants? It's silly to simply treat all potential immigrants as if they are the same. Also, it's disingenuous to reference the Statue of Liberty as some kind of justification for unlimited immigration from all nations of the world. The USA is not a dumping ground for the world's poor.
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
You can make your immigration policy tighter for residency/naturalization, it's within country's right, but tying that to where people are born is pretty sad.
Are you kidding me? Benefits like regressing on clean energy, blocking PhD students and scientists, and in general violating laws? He's been awful just a week into his presidency. The next 4 years are not going to magically get better.
It's an import tax he's talking about. Presumably the idea is that US producers will gain from decreased Mexican imports. How that will help pay for the wall I don't know.
Honestly, I'm not sure it's worth it trying to analyze Trump's policy at this point. He seems to have taken a page from the Russian playbook, in that he seems intentionally chaotic and unpredictable, in order to keep the opposition reactive.
Ok, having done a bit of morning reading, I'm inclined to think the tax is a red herring. This is about the wall. Trump wants to get started with building it, maybe to be seen keeping his promises, maybe because it'll employ US workers. But it's expensive, so he needs some story for how it's going to be paid for, specifically how Mexico will pay for it. Even if that doesn't pan out, by the time it's clear the cost was paid by the US taxpayer, he'll have moved onto bigger things that will distract from the issue.
Alternatively, I'm wrong, and the wall really is just a huge put-on, used as leverage against e.g. the mexicans, or part of a more obscure campaign.
No, taxing imports favors US-made stuff, which benefits US manufacturers. That's the point.
Edit: ... That's the point of protectionism. I'm not arguing that it's the better policy. It's just what he seems to be doing. As with the flap over Carrier. As much as I disagree with much of Trump's plans, it is bizarre how US policy for decades aided manufacturers in exporting production overseas.
It doesn't benefit their employees, though, since consumer prices will rise as a result. As that happens, either the standard of living goes down, or wages go up, which raises consumer prices again.
So far, the wealth of the majority of western population has been based on cheap consumer goods. Those goods are cheap because the people making them have a lower standard of living than the people buying them. So if Trump reduces imports, that implies that to keep cheap goods, the standard of living for the portion of US population producing those goods must go down relative to the rest of the population.
Automation can alter that to a great extent, but the profits from that may just go to the owner class, not the workers.
Maybe so. But there's also the issue of underemployment. It's a pretty good bet that the Americans who used to make steel and cars and stuff didn't earn more doing whatever they did after those jobs went south/overseas. And that's probably one of the reasons why they voted for Trump.
Yeah, they were talking about this on Freakonomics yesterday - a lot of those people working steel or textiles wound up in low paying retail or service sector jobs.
Some of those jobs might come back. Maybe not as numerous due to automation and stuff, but it might be something at least.
Hmm, maybe I should switch to microcontroller programming...
I'm in process of moving my company's main web app to python 3, and standardized on 3.5 to match Debian 9.
But python 3.6 has so many cpu & memory improvements (not to mention things like f'' strings), seriously considering installing custom copy of 3.6... though not sure if I want the burden of maintaining my own copy of everything that will affect.
Then again... "Debian stable" being rock solid stable is why I stick with it for production; if their caution in this is the price I pay, it's worth it.