Month: March 2008
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Standard Living
According to the U.S. census, median household income in the U.S. has not changed much since 1998. The economy does continue to expand. What is happening is that the richer households are absorbing all the gains, leading to increased inequality. I’ve commented before on whether or not this matters. I’ve now seen a couple of…
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Societal Maximization
What should a society seek to provide for its members? The most basic goals have to be the survival of members of the society and inducting new members into the society. Any society which can not achieve these goals will fail. (The most obvious way to induct new members is to have children, but there…
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Twinkle Twinkle
I was talking to my daughter about how anybody could put anything on the Internet. She was surprised by that, and indeed it is kind of incredible. There was nothing like that when I was young: a way for any random person to speak to any other random person. Of course, as I’ve said before,…
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How Does the Gcc Organization Work?
How does the gcc compiler get written? Who works on it and why? It seems to puzzle some people. There are vast numbers of free software projects these days, far more than I try to keep track of. Among these, gcc is unusual in several respects. gcc is more than 20 years old as an…
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volatile
The volatile qualifier in C/C++ is widely misunderstood. Because it is described so vaguely in language standards, many people interpret it as a do-what-I-mean qualifier. What the standard says is that accesses to volatile objects must be evaluated strictly according to the abstract machine defined by the language standard; this means that if the C/C++…