This was written in March! dtdodge: is the marketing budget now dedicated to resubmitting old articles to Slashdot? Quick: someone post a link to the Byte story from 1994!
There has rarely been a more annoying startup than the folks at There. Has-been talent with an enormous number of hangers-on, infected with group-think and with a cult-like worship for their little world. They have such a sense of self-importance, they acted as if they were working on the A-bomb. And for a brief while, I thought they might actually be doing something interesting. (After all, Transmeta, Exponential and others were supersecret in the same way -- and for their other failings, they at least had interesting technology.) I realized that I had put too much faith in There when Snowcrash happened to come up in a conversation. "Who told you that?!" one of the Thereians snapped. "Told me what?" "About Snowcrash!" "Um, doesn't everyone know about Snowcrash? And who cares? Isn't Stephenson a bit hackneyed anyway?" "Well, don't tell anyone else!" And then I knew that they weren't serious -- or interesting.
Just because Linux finally figured this out doesn't mean that it stumbled on anything patentable. In this particular case, Linux is one of the last to the party: you have at least Solaris, IRIX and Dynix as prior art, and presumably AIX, DG-UX, HP-UX, and Tru64 as well.
You've obviously never done any instruction decoding
Oh, yes I have. My favorite tool at the moment happens to be the watcom dis-assembler and gdb.
Let me rephrase: you haven't written any code that attempts x86 instruction decoding. I have; it's about 1200 lines of C --
and that's just to get the damn instruction width...
You've obviously never done any instruction decoding -- it's a colossal mess on x86. In particular, the lack of a uniform instruction length makes for a nightmare whenever one wishes to write software that involves binary rewriting. (Binary rewriting is much easier on any of the RISC architectures.)
And x86 is just _so_ fugly. What else could one call "real" mode? Or "virtual wire" mode? Or segmented paging? Or the TSS? Or conforming code segments? Or ASCII Adjust AX After Multiply? And we haven't even gotten to the real fugliness: the PC architecture. Give me a shotgun and a time machine, and set the dial for Boca Raton, 1980!
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This was written in March! dtdodge: is the marketing budget now dedicated to resubmitting old articles to Slashdot? Quick: someone post a link to the Byte story from 1994!
There has rarely been a more annoying startup than the folks at There. Has-been talent with an enormous number of hangers-on, infected with group-think and with a cult-like worship for their little world. They have such a sense of self-importance, they acted as if they were working on the A-bomb. And for a brief while, I thought they might actually be doing something interesting. (After all, Transmeta, Exponential and others were supersecret in the same way -- and for their other failings, they at least had interesting technology.) I realized that I had put too much faith in There when Snowcrash happened to come up in a conversation. "Who told you that?!" one of the Thereians snapped. "Told me what?" "About Snowcrash!" "Um, doesn't everyone know about Snowcrash? And who cares? Isn't Stephenson a bit hackneyed anyway?" "Well, don't tell anyone else!" And then I knew that they weren't serious -- or interesting.
Just because Linux finally figured this out doesn't mean that it stumbled on anything patentable. In this particular case, Linux is one of the last to the party: you have at least Solaris, IRIX and Dynix as prior art, and presumably AIX, DG-UX, HP-UX, and Tru64 as well.
You've obviously never done any instruction decoding -- it's a colossal mess on x86. In particular, the lack of a uniform instruction length makes for a nightmare whenever one wishes to write software that involves binary rewriting. (Binary rewriting is much easier on any of the RISC architectures.)
And x86 is just _so_ fugly. What else could one call "real" mode? Or "virtual wire" mode? Or segmented paging? Or the TSS? Or conforming code segments? Or ASCII Adjust AX After Multiply? And we haven't even gotten to the real fugliness: the PC architecture. Give me a shotgun and a time machine, and set the dial for Boca Raton, 1980!