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Discovered by mathematicians at the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), the bug occurs when using the GIMPS Prime95 application to find Mersenne primes. So that's what happened to the Pentium floating point engineers
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I knew there was a reason I chose to build my PC around an AMD processor!
The difficult we do right away...
...the impossible takes slightly longer.
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Geeze, I just built a new Sky Lake box too. Anyway, I love it and I'm not likely to ever do calculating like that.
Core i7-6700 with 32 gigs of ram and 1TB SSD...lol...
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I recently wrote a pair of at least slightly controversial articles about 64-bit vs. 32-bit applications and the performance costs associated with going to 64 bit. Another 4600 bytes on bits (more or less)
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Beating a dead horse. Doesn't a 64bit process run faster than a 32 bit processor and hence it's all bs anyway?
Decrease the belief in God, and you increase the numbers of those who wish to play at being God by being “society’s supervisors,” who deny the existence of divine standards, but are very serious about imposing their own standards on society.-Neal A. Maxwell
You must accept 1 of 2 basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe or we are not alone. Either way, the implications are staggering!-Wernher von Braun
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I think the usual answer to that is, "it depends". 
TTFN - Kent
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Well, sure. But a 64bit processor is presumably newer, faster, better tech than the older 32 bit processor. So one would think it'd be at least a wash. But I do I agree with rincon (WTFWHN?) that data structures containing pointers will be bigger and thus take more memory. Moving more memory takes more time, etc, etc. Code that deals with 64bit pointers will necessarily be bigger thus taking more time to move the code into the processor, etc. --- all other things being equal --- But that's just it, they're not equal, the newer 64bit processor is faster and better, so it should at least be a wash if not faster anyway.
But I want Moooooore, Mooooooore, Mooooooooooooore!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Decrease the belief in God, and you increase the numbers of those who wish to play at being God by being “society’s supervisors,” who deny the existence of divine standards, but are very serious about imposing their own standards on society.-Neal A. Maxwell
You must accept 1 of 2 basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe or we are not alone. Either way, the implications are staggering!-Wernher von Braun
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You're forgetting that the newer processor will also run 32bit code faster than the old one; and without the cache miss penalties from bigger pointers.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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While I didn't mention it, I didn't miss it. Why? Because most code when moving from 32bit to 64bit is also moving processors.
Decrease the belief in God, and you increase the numbers of those who wish to play at being God by being “society’s supervisors,” who deny the existence of divine standards, but are very serious about imposing their own standards on society.-Neal A. Maxwell
You must accept 1 of 2 basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe or we are not alone. Either way, the implications are staggering!-Wernher von Braun
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Moving to the new processor is a speedup; and unless your old hardware is really ancient or really low power is already 64bit. Porting to 64 is normally at best a wash; in most cases it's marginal slowdown. If you want something to be faster you buy faster hardware; you don't port the code to 64bit.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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Dan Neely wrote: Moving to the new processor is a speedup
Exactly.
Dan Neely wrote: you don't port the code to 64bit.
Maybe, maybe not. It depends. Much code doesn't need to be "ported", just recompiled. As such it may or may not be faster. But speed's not usually the reason to "port" the code, the reason is access to more memory than 32bit code will allow. So fighting, arguing and debating the speed implications is ridiculous and pointless.
Decrease the belief in God, and you increase the numbers of those who wish to play at being God by being “society’s supervisors,” who deny the existence of divine standards, but are very serious about imposing their own standards on society.-Neal A. Maxwell
You must accept 1 of 2 basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe or we are not alone. Either way, the implications are staggering!-Wernher von Braun
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Excited rumors began circulating on Twitter this morning that a major experiment designed to hunt for gravitational waves—ripples in the fabric of spacetime first predicted by Albert Einstein—has observed them directly for the very first time. Fire up the macroscope!
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That'd be nice.
"But what...is it good for?"
- Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968, commenting on the microchip
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Like I commented the last time around, the design sensitivity of the Advanced LIGO hardware is enough better than the previous generation that detection odds have gone from "maybe if we get lucky" (a neutron star closer than any known objects, or beating the odds and having a merger transient happen in a much shorter than statistically expected window) to "if we don't get a detection something is wrong" (hardware, data analysis, or the physics itself).
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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Open source has won -- as a cauldron for innovation as well as a frictionless means of software distribution. So why are we still messing with obscure licensing minutiae? I blame the lawyers
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Princeton University - Computer scientists launch campaign to guarantee bug-free software[^]
I realize this is old news (Kent posted it last week [^]), but I don't feel that it has been sufficiently ridiculed yet.
Then again, perhaps I am just unduly skeptical about a group of 8 students and 2 professors that "aims to eliminate out [sic] bugs in complex software" with $10M over 5yrs. It certainly is a venerable goal; and who am I to suggest that they might possibly be a tad over-ambitious? After all, they have already recognized that their "initial challenge will be to dissect the overwhelming complexity of modern hardware and software to uncover the factors that determine how various computer components work together," which sounds like a prudent starting point, even if it does end up taking a good couple of weeks out of their schedule. And, of course, I shouldn't overlook the fact that they wisely have planned to develop their so-called "deep specifications" using such proven strategies as "deductive reasoning, syllogisms and mathematics". It's only a shame that we have had to wait so long for these eminent tools to be applied to the plebeian field of Computer Science!
So... never mind my suggestion. I humbly retract my call for ridicule. Clearly what we need to do is herald this project as the "coming of age for the industry". And not just for this industry! Indeed -- as the team has presciently observed -- this breakthrough could impact "not only computer science disciplines, but many other disciplines as well." Think of it! With just a few extra years and some more far-sighted grants from the NSF, we might be on the cusp of seeing the eradication of errors from all modern scientific endeavors!
Wow! I don't know about you, but I think we could use a few less mistakes in science as we know it. And all that for only $10M? What a bargain!
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Of course, they will then need $20 and another 10 years for a project to eliminate all the errors in their "eliminate all the bugs" project. This will then need $40 for another project... [repeating ad infinitum].
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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Unless they are planning to code using lego and super glue or get Chuck N to do all the coding this is just foolish nonsense. 
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When Louis Bleriot first flew across the channel, the idea that one day members of the working class would be able to do the same for the cost of a decent lunch and some unplanned intimacy with a stranger under the guise of "security" seemed very unlikely - but now the airline industry is one of the most reliable most of us will ever interact with.
The path of the software industry over similar time span has not gone nearly as well. I think in some respects this is because planes are but by engineers whereas software is built by mathematicians.
Engineers are noise and fault tolerant, mathematicians are noise and fault intolerant. So whilst the hardware we work on is fault tolerant (think parity bits etc.) the software that runs on it is not.
Sadly what is likely to arise from the "DeepSpec" is a shifting of the fault-intolerance up from the software into the design phase. I personally have walked this path before with formal specification languages (Z in particular) but have come to the opinion that they just cannot work because the real world is messy and unknowable so at some point a "tolerance zone" will need to exist. I personally feel that the closer this zone is to the hardware the better our software will be ... bug survivable systems rather than bug free ones.
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It is said that: Only two people make no mistakes - the unborn child, and the dead man. All others in between do make mistakes.
Analogously, only two code snippets don't have bugs - the unwritten code snippet, and the one which is irrecoverably scrapped
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For $10 million, I'll come up with whatever bullshit project you want. The trick is writing good grant requests, not actually making sense with them.
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The syndrome is said to be caused by 'learned bodily habits' and anxiety caused by daily technologies This is why... hang on, I think I have a call coming in
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Kent Sharkey wrote: The syndrome is said to be caused by 'learned bodily habits'
We just won't go there, ok?
Marc
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ewww!!
Decrease the belief in God, and you increase the numbers of those who wish to play at being God by being “society’s supervisors,” who deny the existence of divine standards, but are very serious about imposing their own standards on society.-Neal A. Maxwell
You must accept 1 of 2 basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe or we are not alone. Either way, the implications are staggering!-Wernher von Braun
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Gives a whole meaning to the Blondie song "Call Me"... 
"Computer games don't affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in darkened rooms, munching magic pills and listening to repetitive electronic music."
-- Marcus Brigstocke, British Comedian
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