...that their stock options aren't going to be worth as much.
good, thats what stock options are supposed to do: motivate the employees to work better and make their products better.
the fact that its taken this long for M$ employees to get the realization they've gotta make better products is probably a reflection of the incredi-bloat of the stock. i'm all for a devaluation of M$, personally.. their products blow. its a travesty that such a bug-ridden, bloaty, insecure piece of crap has been propelled into the future so long by the mechanics of the money industry..
abandon microsoft. its the only way to get a better OS from redmond. hit the employees where it hurts: their decadence.
AC: First off, the PowerPC does not have a PC register.
right.. but the m68k did, so i guess what i meant was, whether they've changed all that in subsequent releases.. well, i did some google, and came up with this interesting Unsanity article on the subject of the Mach-O ABI, which may be where i got my dim memory of this ABI issue in the first place.
wherein the following interesting statement is made:
This brings us the question, "how much faster would the applications be if the ABI was done right?". The answer is, according to some tests done by my friends on a Macintosh Development IRC channel, the speed gain would be 10-30%, depending on each particular application (how often does it calls functions). Realistically, the speed gain would be around 10 to 12 per cent...
so there is still a chance for a major speedup of OSX on PPC.. but i guess with the switch to x86, this is being abandoned?
AC: Mac OS X never did anything with its ABI for 68k compatbility.
hmm:
Mach-O ABI we see now used in Mac OS X is more or less a direct port of NeXT's Mach-O designed for m68k - it relies on PC (program counter) register to perform various manipulations with data (for the geeks: PC-relative addressing). There's nothing wrong with that, as its an effective and common practice, except for one little thing: there is no PC register in RISC processors (programmatically accessible).
are we talking about the same thing? i guess its not m68k compatability here, but NextStep/Mach-O legacy which is the issue, at least for PPC (i'm assuming this is all different for OSX/x86).
AC: Mac OS X's ABI differed from OS 9's ABI in that OS X did not dedicate the R2 register to TOC register. Without doing anything special this resulted in a slight slow down in relocatable code, and a slight increase in leaf function code that was register limited (less frame spills). That would have hurt on Mac OS 9 (where everything is relocatable, and in one big address space), but was not a big deal on OS 9 where all applications are located at address 0 and are non-relocatable.
Additionally, if you really care you can ignore ABI pretty blatantly so long as none of the functions are exposed, or you provide thunk entry points. You could setup R2 based entry points, maintain your R2 pointer, and then have wrapper entry points that setup R2. That results in using exactly the same code sequence as OS 9, except the code that sets up the TVector in OS 9 is now in the wrapper entry point (and I mean basically instruction identical).
i'm really not sure where OS9 comes into this question. my understanding is that the Mach-O ABI, being derived from NextStep for m68k, is the reason we're having this conversation, and that OS9 has nothing to do with it.. but then, i'm only a lowly C programmer who lets the compiler fuss about the plumbing, and for whom OSX is only one port target in many.. i never had anything to do with OS9, ack spit..
but i guess i've got the answer to my question, anyway:
There are signs of change though -- the recent update to GCC, the compiler shipped with OSX, allows it to perform so-called -mdynamic-no-pic optimization, which hard-codes the data addresses in the code, so the result is roughly equivalent to the CFM ABI used in Mac OS Classic -- so the GCC itself, compiled with that optimization, is 10% faster. Applications, to take advantage of that, need to be recompiled, so it doesn't affect 80% of the titles already shipped for Mac OS X. Then again, the optimization above only works for executables and not shared libraries.
Either way, there is no way to change the ABI now, as it would break all of the existing applications - which is obviously not what Apple (or us) would want.
And after all, who cares about a 10% speed loss? You can always get a faster Mac, right?
yeah. always. by putting linux on the one i've got, i suppose...;)
It used to be that OSX had a brain-dead ABI that resulted in not all of the PPC registers being used 'properly', in order to maintain a 68k 'compatability' mode..
Has this been changed? Are all the registers of the PPC being used properly now? Is the PC register actually being used as a program counter, rather than one of the generic 32-bit registers?
yeah, i know the power consumption is 'less' in the newer MacBooks.. but its still not a match for my portable, ARM-based, easily-recharged-by-the-sun systems.. which admittedly, aren't running up in the multi-Ghz range, but then.. why does anyone 'need' multi-Ghz computing for anything more than, well, power consumption...
the point is, i'm no longer chasing manufacturers' speed fix. (where: "speed will fix our slow software" is the norm) i'm far more interested in optimizing the software i do have, and run, for the absolutely lowest-power computing platform i can find.. and right now, ARM is doing pretty well.
for $800 i can buy one 'big' computer, and set it up with its own special spot in my life, or for half that price i can get 3 or 4 'very small' ARM-based systems, and put them all over the place.. even inside furniture and objects non-computer'ish, and still get the same things done. no more cable-mess for me, no more beige-box zone in the living room, no more 'computer nerd' section of the house, no more 'gotta sit here, and only here, to do the web'..
me, i switched to Apple because their hardware/Darwin[linux-ppc] was interesting.. for a while.. and i felt that the fact of their survival as a 'different computing platform' company in the face of the intel x86 tyranny was a worthwhile hedge towards new hardware of interest. x86 doesn't really 'interest me', though it certainly has an equally infinite # of uses as, say, ARM or MIPS still do..
but of course, i used to think it was cool to have gone from a stack of Indy's to a single powerbook, and still be able to take all the 'good' software (unix) with me.. now i'm far more interested in just getting as many cheap, little, ecologically sound computers, than i am in having my own halon setup, and consequently: Apple is dead to me now.
why put XP on Apple?
because it proves the point: software is mobile, a liquid substance of little bounds.
and thus: hardware always comes first. all thought starts first with lines in the sand.
point 1 is maybe poignant, and geeks like poignancy perhaps, in this case, because it is proven by crossing the hijinx of one exploiter-of-the-mob computer manufacture, guilty of all its own culting, with another equally cult'ed mass-control monster, and produces a seething snake pit of sexiness. XP on bochs, and thus PPC.. and now XP on x86, where it already was living just fine, anyway.. on Apple hardware.
point 2, hardware, is what you need to tame all beasts of nefariously infinite nature.
with XP on Apple, the reason to switch is dead. XP is the wrong end of the computerized commodity curve for my liking, so.. neither of these points i'm trying to make may, indeed, have weight..
It *is* a thoughtcrime.. if your activities look like you're doing it, and if there is evidence you've educated yourself on the laws involved, you'll be charged and will have to prove yourself not guilty.
All Fascism begins with the Bank. It is doubleplusgood to let the money-lenders own you. And boy, do they own you, America..
i'm saying, moron or not, that humans have a right to communicate with each other, it is inalienable. we cannot communicate with any other species or lifeform in the same way that a Chinese person can keep an American Family well-fed..
If Bush hadn't set the example of uni-laterally dominating the ICANN blowup, China wouldn't so easily be in the position to be going of its own, as well, and there would still be, at least, a forum within which this could be resolved.. Internationally...
Bigots don't like to think in terms of One World Government, but there is for sure a reason we might wanna recognize ourselves as a single species, instead of arbitrary nation-states and other cliques granting themselves infinite power to do what they want..
this attitude is so utterly arrogant. i'd happily tune in to the life of at least 6.5billion people, minus the 'few thousand' so arrogant as to imagine themselves of Vinge's ilk, disinterested in ones fellow man, regardless of status or girth..
I'm thinking you need to put on your tinfoil hat, get in your faraday cage, and pop your meds.
oooh.. good use of old clichés as a rejoinder.. 'pop my meds' would be good, wouldn't it citizen, since it'd just shut me up and put me back in my little box, not caring about whats being done in the world.
listen: the CIA will *never* be brought under control by elected politicians. name one, single, case where this has occurred, and the CIA haven't been able to bring about some other circumstance to navigate around the ruling.
the fact is, the establishment of a secret intelligence agency without public oversight (and there is *zero* with the CIA) is a grand trojan horse designed to introduce a hidden control mechanism into a society. every single scenario where a 'secret intelligence agency' was considered a solution to some problem, has instead proven to be an introduced mallady within the given society, by its enemies.
if you don't think this is the case, ask yourself these two simple questions: what have the CIA successfully done to protect the american people? what harm has the agency done the United States of America?
hint: the answers to those questions are protected and classified in the interests of national security.. 'national security' in this case, being, the desire of the American public to revolt against its politicians and create conditions ripe for civil war.. you do know that 99% of the time, when a politicians says 'national security' he means "we can't tell the public about this because we believe it might cause another civil war..."
... aren't Americans allowed to see, and what are the links to it? I'd, personally, like to see as much war footage as possible, without censorship.
Anyone know of an online archive of Iraq War footage? Lets see the reality of it all, not what the media-lapdogs are 'privileged' to be allowed to show us..
you bet your ass everyone could have a cell phone who wanted one..
this whole concept of connected photocopiers was pioneered by the japanese, as a computing concept, in the 70's.. and has been in steady iteration since the 80's..
(i'm a bit more interested in running torrent on the toaster, but thats just me..)
you're wearing it if you say you got it 'on'. you're fighting against it if you say you're 'against' it.
it is well known that the gov't slogan is 'war on drugs' instead of 'war against drugs', because the general American populace is very polarized.. and any radical call to arms must be tempered in order to prevent that populace from uprising against the call itself, in revolt.. making the slogo "War on.." makes it instantly "assumed" by the reader..
subtle psychological propaganda tricks. America is/was good at that sort of thing.
Smaller camera's. Camera's in things you don't know are camera's. Camera's with the ability to send their pictures to anywhere on the planet, instantly.
If someone is using your software, let them keep using it. Keep the codebase going. Keep the machines around to build them new bins. Its not hard, it just requires you to change your mind about 'old' versus 'new' as a dominating ideology for how to organize ones life.
This notion of consumer-itis, wherein things get 'old' just because nobody else is using them, applies to all things, and particularly software. I detest it. It might be a 'reality' of the industrialization of human consumption that things change and shift, but just because of this is no reason not to continue to use technology which works.
If something is useful to a customer, let them keep using it. DOS isn't bad, its just passé.. but its still driving a lot of industry.
I know machines booting DOS that can carve a surfboard better than anyone! Under some circumstances, a CP/M based machine is a good idea!
Technology doesn't actually 'get old': humans get old. Technology is as useless as a rock, unless someone is actively using it, and in that case, if they're making dinner with it, let 'em use it..
how do you know it didn't just, in a billion-trillion billionth of a second, fall to the center of the earth, where it is now getting all the raw mass it needs to grow and grow.. ?
i mean, after all, you can't really measure what you're doing..
Slashdot Mirror
...that their stock options aren't going to be worth as much.
.. their products blow. its a travesty that such a bug-ridden, bloaty, insecure piece of crap has been propelled into the future so long by the mechanics of the money industry..
good, thats what stock options are supposed to do: motivate the employees to work better and make their products better.
the fact that its taken this long for M$ employees to get the realization they've gotta make better products is probably a reflection of the incredi-bloat of the stock. i'm all for a devaluation of M$, personally
abandon microsoft. its the only way to get a better OS from redmond. hit the employees where it hurts: their decadence.
AC: First off, the PowerPC does not have a PC register.
.. but the m68k did, so i guess what i meant was, whether they've changed all that in subsequent releases.. well, i did some google, and came up with this interesting Unsanity article on the subject of the Mach-O ABI, which may be where i got my dim memory of this ABI issue in the first place.
.. but i guess with the switch to x86, this is being abandoned?
.. but then, i'm only a lowly C programmer who lets the compiler fuss about the plumbing, and for whom OSX is only one port target in many .. i never had anything to do with OS9, ack spit ..
... ;)
right
wherein the following interesting statement is made:
This brings us the question, "how much faster would the applications be if the ABI was done right?". The answer is, according to some tests done by my friends on a Macintosh Development IRC channel, the speed gain would be 10-30%, depending on each particular application (how often does it calls functions). Realistically, the speed gain would be around 10 to 12 per cent...
so there is still a chance for a major speedup of OSX on PPC
AC: Mac OS X never did anything with its ABI for 68k compatbility.
hmm:
Mach-O ABI we see now used in Mac OS X is more or less a direct port of NeXT's Mach-O designed for m68k - it relies on PC (program counter) register to perform various manipulations with data (for the geeks: PC-relative addressing). There's nothing wrong with that, as its an effective and common practice, except for one little thing: there is no PC register in RISC processors (programmatically accessible).
are we talking about the same thing? i guess its not m68k compatability here, but NextStep/Mach-O legacy which is the issue, at least for PPC (i'm assuming this is all different for OSX/x86).
AC: Mac OS X's ABI differed from OS 9's ABI in that OS X did not dedicate the R2 register to TOC register. Without doing anything special this resulted in a slight slow down in relocatable code, and a slight increase in leaf function code that was register limited (less frame spills). That would have hurt on Mac OS 9 (where everything is relocatable, and in one big address space), but was not a big deal on OS 9 where all applications are located at address 0 and are non-relocatable.
Additionally, if you really care you can ignore ABI pretty blatantly so long as none of the functions are exposed, or you provide thunk entry points. You could setup R2 based entry points, maintain your R2 pointer, and then have wrapper entry points that setup R2. That results in using exactly the same code sequence as OS 9, except the code that sets up the TVector in OS 9 is now in the wrapper entry point (and I mean basically instruction identical).
i'm really not sure where OS9 comes into this question. my understanding is that the Mach-O ABI, being derived from NextStep for m68k, is the reason we're having this conversation, and that OS9 has nothing to do with it
but i guess i've got the answer to my question, anyway:
There are signs of change though -- the recent update to GCC, the compiler shipped with OSX, allows it to perform so-called -mdynamic-no-pic optimization, which hard-codes the data addresses in the code, so the result is roughly equivalent to the CFM ABI used in Mac OS Classic -- so the GCC itself, compiled with that optimization, is 10% faster. Applications, to take advantage of that, need to be recompiled, so it doesn't affect 80% of the titles already shipped for Mac OS X. Then again, the optimization above only works for executables and not shared libraries.
Either way, there is no way to change the ABI now, as it would break all of the existing applications - which is obviously not what Apple (or us) would want.
And after all, who cares about a 10% speed loss? You can always get a faster Mac, right?
yeah. always. by putting linux on the one i've got, i suppose
It used to be that OSX had a brain-dead ABI that resulted in not all of the PPC registers being used 'properly', in order to maintain a 68k 'compatability' mode ..
Has this been changed? Are all the registers of the PPC being used properly now? Is the PC register actually being used as a program counter, rather than one of the generic 32-bit registers?
yeah, i know the power consumption is 'less' in the newer MacBooks
the point is, i'm no longer chasing manufacturers' speed fix. (where: "speed will fix our slow software" is the norm) i'm far more interested in optimizing the software i do have, and run, for the absolutely lowest-power computing platform i can find
for $800 i can buy one 'big' computer, and set it up with its own special spot in my life, or for half that price i can get 3 or 4 'very small' ARM-based systems, and put them all over the place
me, i switched to Apple because their hardware/Darwin[linux-ppc] was interesting .. for a while .. and i felt that the fact of their survival as a 'different computing platform' company in the face of the intel x86 tyranny was a worthwhile hedge towards new hardware of interest. x86 doesn't really 'interest me', though it certainly has an equally infinite # of uses as, say, ARM or MIPS still do..
.. now i'm far more interested in just getting as many cheap, little, ecologically sound computers, than i am in having my own halon setup, and consequently: Apple is dead to me now.
.. and now XP on x86, where it already was living just fine, anyway.. on Apple hardware.
..
but of course, i used to think it was cool to have gone from a stack of Indy's to a single powerbook, and still be able to take all the 'good' software (unix) with me
why put XP on Apple?
because it proves the point: software is mobile, a liquid substance of little bounds.
and thus: hardware always comes first. all thought starts first with lines in the sand.
point 1 is maybe poignant, and geeks like poignancy perhaps, in this case, because it is proven by crossing the hijinx of one exploiter-of-the-mob computer manufacture, guilty of all its own culting, with another equally cult'ed mass-control monster, and produces a seething snake pit of sexiness. XP on bochs, and thus PPC
point 2, hardware, is what you need to tame all beasts of nefariously infinite nature.
with XP on Apple, the reason to switch is dead. XP is the wrong end of the computerized commodity curve for my liking, so.. neither of these points i'm trying to make may, indeed, have weight
It *is* a thoughtcrime .. if your activities look like you're doing it, and if there is evidence you've educated yourself on the laws involved, you'll be charged and will have to prove yourself not guilty.
..
All Fascism begins with the Bank. It is doubleplusgood to let the money-lenders own you. And boy, do they own you, America
i'm saying, moron or not, that humans have a right to communicate with each other, it is inalienable. we cannot communicate with any other species or lifeform in the same way that a Chinese person can keep an American Family well-fed
You are not free. Your nation is enslaved by its secrets.
If Bush hadn't set the example of uni-laterally dominating the ICANN blowup, China wouldn't so easily be in the position to be going of its own, as well, and there would still be, at least, a forum within which this could be resolved .. Internationally...
..
Bigots don't like to think in terms of One World Government, but there is for sure a reason we might wanna recognize ourselves as a single species, instead of arbitrary nation-states and other cliques granting themselves infinite power to do what they want
We could all learn Chinese. End of problem.
put DRM on them!!!
this attitude is so utterly arrogant. i'd happily tune in to the life of at least 6.5billion people, minus the 'few thousand' so arrogant as to imagine themselves of Vinge's ilk, disinterested in ones fellow man, regardless of status or girth
I'm thinking you need to put on your tinfoil hat, get in your faraday cage, and pop your meds.
.. good use of old clichés as a rejoinder .. 'pop my meds' would be good, wouldn't it citizen, since it'd just shut me up and put me back in my little box, not caring about whats being done in the world.
.. 'national security' in this case, being, the desire of the American public to revolt against its politicians and create conditions ripe for civil war.. you do know that 99% of the time, when a politicians says 'national security' he means "we can't tell the public about this because we believe it might cause another civil war..."
oooh
listen: the CIA will *never* be brought under control by elected politicians. name one, single, case where this has occurred, and the CIA haven't been able to bring about some other circumstance to navigate around the ruling.
the fact is, the establishment of a secret intelligence agency without public oversight (and there is *zero* with the CIA) is a grand trojan horse designed to introduce a hidden control mechanism into a society. every single scenario where a 'secret intelligence agency' was considered a solution to some problem, has instead proven to be an introduced mallady within the given society, by its enemies.
if you don't think this is the case, ask yourself these two simple questions: what have the CIA successfully done to protect the american people? what harm has the agency done the United States of America?
hint: the answers to those questions are protected and classified in the interests of national security
... aren't Americans allowed to see, and what are the links to it? I'd, personally, like to see as much war footage as possible, without censorship.
..
Anyone know of an online archive of Iraq War footage? Lets see the reality of it all, not what the media-lapdogs are 'privileged' to be allowed to show us
.. are given cart-blanche to declare their own secrets, they will forever be out of control.
America: your country has been usurped by your CIA and its masters. The American Public no longer control that agency.
.. cell phones? japan? 1995?
..
.. and has been in steady iteration since the 80's ..
you bet your ass everyone could have a cell phone who wanted one
this whole concept of connected photocopiers was pioneered by the japanese, as a computing concept, in the 70's
(i'm a bit more interested in running torrent on the toaster, but thats just me..)
its easy: got your shirt ON?
is your shirt AGAINST your skin?
you're wearing it if you say you got it 'on'. you're fighting against it if you say you're 'against' it.
it is well known that the gov't slogan is 'war on drugs' instead of 'war against drugs', because the general American populace is very polarized
subtle psychological propaganda tricks. America is/was good at that sort of thing.
boit me, i happen to like it spelled that way... /angry flowers notwithstanding..
How?
..
Smaller camera's. Camera's in things you don't know are camera's. Camera's with the ability to send their pictures to anywhere on the planet, instantly.
Can't have a police state then, can we
No question about it, get yourself a GP2X ..
... ;)
Wonderful platform. I have 5
.. its gonna be a rough ride.
seriously though, i'll never write software for Microsoft, ever. i have all the hardware i need, and it all runs linux.
no thanks, Microsoft!
(GP2X rocks, yo!)
if you've got a boss like this, then this document is exactly what you don't need to be reading..
coz' undoubtedlyl he'll be readin' it too. d'oh!
If someone is using your software, let them keep using it. Keep the codebase going. Keep the machines around to build them new bins. Its not hard, it just requires you to change your mind about 'old' versus 'new' as a dominating ideology for how to organize ones life.
This notion of consumer-itis, wherein things get 'old' just because nobody else is using them, applies to all things, and particularly software. I detest it. It might be a 'reality' of the industrialization of human consumption that things change and shift, but just because of this is no reason not to continue to use technology which works.
If something is useful to a customer, let them keep using it. DOS isn't bad, its just passé
I know machines booting DOS that can carve a surfboard better than anyone! Under some circumstances, a CP/M based machine is a good idea!
Technology doesn't actually 'get old': humans get old. Technology is as useless as a rock, unless someone is actively using it, and in that case, if they're making dinner with it, let 'em use it
.. watch out fer l. bob rife, and keep your katana sharp, monkies!
how do you know it didn't just, in a billion-trillion billionth of a second, fall to the center of the earth, where it is now getting all the raw mass it needs to grow and grow .. ?
i mean, after all, you can't really measure what you're doing..