Pst, "solar system", ASTROnauts... This irritates me a bit... The only "spacemen" IMHO were those few who did the moon missions. As for all the others... Do you realise that a typical orbit for a shuttle/space-station is a bit above 300km? That's 1/40th of the Earth diameter. 2.5%. Sorry, but that's just not too impressive to me.
I wouldn't say that "Linux" ABI (actually, that should be at least "every free Unix I guess", dunno about MacOSX) is similar to x86. It uses registers for passing arguments, SSE is default for math, and for once there is no EBP, or rather RBP, stack frames setup (usually), so "-fomit-frame-pointer" is kinda obsolete.
Why require 16-byte alignment? Oh, so that xmm data can be stored aligned on stack. But how often do you need it? 0.01% of all stack frames or less? Wouldn't it make more sense to do this alignment when entering functions that needs it (3 assembler commands, right?). Why so many registers allocated for args? Why not drop 387 stack support at all - wouldn't that improve context switching times? (Hmm, I may be wrong here)... Finally why MS felt obligated to come with their fucking own version of ABI?! (Ok, that last one is rhetoric)...
But that's peanuts compared to the whole memory-model / "int" size thing. I mean - do people never learn? At least 16-bit Unicode problems should've tought us something about bean-picking. So now we have cache-spoiling-if-nothing-else 32-bits selecting prefix on every other fucking CPU instruction and you cannot have more than 4 Gigs of executable code, what's that? "640k should be enough for everyone" once again? What if I want some code generator for turning my data into self-processing code? (Old-schoolers may remember "compiled sprites" to get my idea).
x64 is a great step forward for x86 and it could be better if wiser (IMHO) decisions were made in its infancy. Maybe it's too late now but I guess it will bite our asses in the years to come.
What really changed everything was advanced superscalar architecture. The Pentium Pro, which could execute significantly more than one instruction per clock, changed everything.
I'm sure that Nexgen came first, didn't it? (Nexgen were bought by AMD and K6 and beyond are from that line).
Note that when Pyramids were being built the climate in northern Africa was much different to what it is today. There was no such a huge desert. There was an awful lot of people living in Egypt. And in fact, I read somewhere, that agriculture in northern africa basically fed the whole Roman Empire. Some, BTW, claim that deforestation from this agriculture was the main cause of desertification. Same thing in Iraq, BTW - Babylonians were not leaving in the sand.
My mom's computer is K6@500MHz with whopping 160 megs of PC100 RAM. It does not break a sweat with XP themes at all. I cannot see any difference at all with or without themes. Of course I put Royale there 'cos built-in ones are sucky (aesthetics-wise). And as funny as it is - Office 2k3 also works pretty nice.
MSVS is a cute name for a Linux distro, ain't it?;)
But seriously - that sucks - "developers" basically raped GPL - as is no source available and NO license is included with it at all. It's like 60s-70s again (when USSR stole from IBM the whole platform).
THE problem in Russia with moving to Linux (or FreeBSD) is that Internet connectivity is scarce and very expensive. The only place where it's more or less ok is in Moscow but Moscow is like another country here in Russia.
I like to see KDE (and to a lesser degree, GNOME) not as a "desktop environment", but more as a "development platform". XFCE, fluxbox, etc may look like a nice idea when fresh, but once you have a motley set of apps (all loading their own GUI and other libraries) the bloat factor shoots past KDE very fast indeed.
1. They fucked up their setup. They assigned 2Gigs to VM and all host has is 2Gigs too? Brilliant. 2. Since when are you allowed to post benchmarks of MS software?
What was the point for them of choosing.NET development over Java from FOSS's point of view? What does it give them they think that Java couldn't? MZ format wrapped binaries?
Actually - climate is a factor, IMHO. When you have 10 months of cold weather outside (and 6-8 of them are outright freezing), when you have long winter evenings when there's nothing to do anyway, hacking prospers. In California it may be inverse (going out to heat from conditioned office?), but in good climate it's pretty hard to force yourself staying inside when the weather is so nice.
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Pst, "solar system", ASTROnauts... This irritates me a bit... The only "spacemen" IMHO were those few who did the moon missions. As for all the others... Do you realise that a typical orbit for a shuttle/space-station is a bit above 300km? That's 1/40th of the Earth diameter. 2.5%. Sorry, but that's just not too impressive to me.
I said it before and I'll say it again: the one safe way to do multi-threaded programming is forking and IPC.
I wouldn't say that "Linux" ABI (actually, that should be at least "every free Unix I guess", dunno about MacOSX) is similar to x86. It uses registers for passing arguments, SSE is default for math, and for once there is no EBP, or rather RBP, stack frames setup (usually), so "-fomit-frame-pointer" is kinda obsolete.
Is it only me or anyone else feels a bit unease about lost opportunity with a good cleanup when we moved to x64 ABI (yes, I don't like "x86_64")?
o ns
I mean:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_calling_conventi
Why require 16-byte alignment? Oh, so that xmm data can be stored aligned on stack. But how often do you need it? 0.01% of all stack frames or less? Wouldn't it make more sense to do this alignment when entering functions that needs it (3 assembler commands, right?). Why so many registers allocated for args? Why not drop 387 stack support at all - wouldn't that improve context switching times? (Hmm, I may be wrong here)... Finally why MS felt obligated to come with their fucking own version of ABI?! (Ok, that last one is rhetoric)...
But that's peanuts compared to the whole memory-model / "int" size thing. I mean - do people never learn? At least 16-bit Unicode problems should've tought us something about bean-picking. So now we have cache-spoiling-if-nothing-else 32-bits selecting prefix on every other fucking CPU instruction and you cannot have more than 4 Gigs of executable code, what's that? "640k should be enough for everyone" once again? What if I want some code generator for turning my data into self-processing code? (Old-schoolers may remember "compiled sprites" to get my idea).
x64 is a great step forward for x86 and it could be better if wiser (IMHO) decisions were made in its infancy. Maybe it's too late now but I guess it will bite our asses in the years to come.
When people say "runs Windows" they presume "runs Windows Apps".
I'm sure that Nexgen came first, didn't it? (Nexgen were bought by AMD and K6 and beyond are from that line).
Please explain why CentOS maintains its own package repositories.
The largest one with free-market endorsing government noted for manufacturing your notebook. And shoes. And...
Dude?!
Note that when Pyramids were being built the climate in northern Africa was much different to what it is today. There was no such a huge desert. There was an awful lot of people living in Egypt. And in fact, I read somewhere, that agriculture in northern africa basically fed the whole Roman Empire. Some, BTW, claim that deforestation from this agriculture was the main cause of desertification. Same thing in Iraq, BTW - Babylonians were not leaving in the sand.
May we have 32 days in March and then April, 2nd, please?
Cool. What's the longest reply chain in /. history, BTW?
Stolen. :-|
OK, now - can I get a reply for no particular reason?
... Happy lawsuit!
My mom's computer is K6@500MHz with whopping 160 megs of PC100 RAM. It does not break a sweat with XP themes at all. I cannot see any difference at all with or without themes. Of course I put Royale there 'cos built-in ones are sucky (aesthetics-wise). And as funny as it is - Office 2k3 also works pretty nice.
MSVS is a cute name for a Linux distro, ain't it? ;)
But seriously - that sucks - "developers" basically raped GPL - as is no source available and NO license is included with it at all. It's like 60s-70s again (when USSR stole from IBM the whole platform).
THE problem in Russia with moving to Linux (or FreeBSD) is that Internet connectivity is scarce and very expensive. The only place where it's more or less ok is in Moscow but Moscow is like another country here in Russia.
I like to see KDE (and to a lesser degree, GNOME) not as a "desktop environment", but more as a "development platform". XFCE, fluxbox, etc may look like a nice idea when fresh, but once you have a motley set of apps (all loading their own GUI and other libraries) the bloat factor shoots past KDE very fast indeed.
They've come up with open-sourcing their GPU drivers, for example.
1. They fucked up their setup. They assigned 2Gigs to VM and all host has is 2Gigs too? Brilliant.
2. Since when are you allowed to post benchmarks of MS software?
(Disclaimer: I somewhat dislike Java and .NET)
.NET development over Java from FOSS's point of view?
What was the point for them of choosing
What does it give them they think that Java couldn't? MZ format wrapped binaries?
Much more probably is that there are only a handful of BR releases now and people want to buy something to play on their new expensive players.
Actually - climate is a factor, IMHO. When you have 10 months of cold weather outside (and 6-8 of them are outright freezing), when you have long winter evenings when there's nothing to do anyway, hacking prospers. In California it may be inverse (going out to heat from conditioned office?), but in good climate it's pretty hard to force yourself staying inside when the weather is so nice.
I believe Mac sales much more than doubled, and as for Linux... sales?!
Then go and fucking buy one. They ARE out there. Or is your dream that _all_ phones should be like that? No, thanks.