It's a crapfest of proprietary extensions, NIH syndrome and a million ways to change monitor brightness. And of course it's only tested on the latest Windows version, well, because...
Of course, Intel is to blame with the whole ACPI mess and looseness. Typical engineer mentality a standard that standardizes nothing.
Really, Intel and AMD should join forces in this: Make 'to change monitor brightness write a value from 0 (darker) to 0xff (brighter) to register 0xABC PERIOD'. "but but but", "I SAID PERIOD".
Relatively starved for registers, although since it's not a load/store arch (another issue, imho) that matters less than it does in, say, ARM.
x86-64 improves on this
There are also implementation issues (lack of a directory cache makes scalability suck), but architecturally, it's a pretty standard and slightly boring CISC. I don't quite understand all the hate it gets - it does tend to be slower than Power or z, and doesn't scale well, but the problems are implementation problems, not architectural ones.
Problem is Intel has a lot of money. So even if Power or Alpha is 'better', Intel has the money to make it better (in general) than the competition (see Apple dropping the PPC because IBM couldn't make a mobile G5, amongst other things)
Funny you mention WinModems. They are so simple the exactly opposite is true. They usually don't require a firmware (since it's the tiniest amount of hw to plug your computer to a phone line). On the other hand, a 'upload when using' fw for a 'Hard modem' would make lots of sense (this is used on some DSL USB Modems)
But yeah, it doesn't have to be closed source, still, I'm doubting Intel is releasing their processor's VHDL/Verilog files any time soon...
There's always this pendulum swing - shitty mfgs push more functionality into SW/FW, things get too slow, so along comes a bright-eyed new guy with real hardware again, that runs nice and fast. Then the new guy falls in love with money, starts peddling garbage again, and the cycle repeats.
Correct, but Moore's law is very helpful for money lovers. I'm sure something like desktop effects waste more CPU than a Winmodem today.
There is no "problem". Any investment bank that is not actually retarded has realtime systems that monitor overall risk of the entire bank it's, any given branch and any given desk.
Yes, they would probably have that, if IT wasn't so retarded and took ages to 'test' the solution. Of course, the crap they install in the computers is approved right away.
Boeing makes planes*, it takes hundreds of people to build a plane. How do you split that up?
I suspect in much the same way that they make them right now. In pieces. Some companies make landing gear, some companies make navigation systems, some companies design the planes, some companies do final assembly, etc.
Yeah, that'll work beautifully... see Boeing 787
Making everything work together is the biggest PITA in every project.
OCs, all the new chips, chipsets, MBs, from the early P5/P6s to the P4
But the market had its way, and it's cheaper to buy a new system (NB) nowadays. Not to mention speeds really haven't gone up as it used to be (not to mention clock speeds, but yeah the MHz is a myth)
We now do everything we need, except for the ultra needs of a few percent of the people. And you can always fire EC2 instances for sheer computing power.
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Geez, really, no
I was recommended against this (using a PCI card), around 6 years ago (but maybe even before that).
You can get an AGP board off ebay, or even a more modern system there, which is going to be faster and probably cheaper than the video card.
Or, you guess it, not upgrade to Windows 7. If you're concerned about money, stay with WinXP
As far as I know, all EFI implementations are like that
It's not really 'EFI on top of Bios' but they kept the menus the same, etc
Yes, having the HW buttons is nice, but it needs to be done in SW as well for power saving purposes (and be configurable in the OS)
Still, for the most part, the buttons usually trigger the OS to change the brightness
Well, they could have gone with Openfirmware
Of course, there would be some time adapting it to x86, etc
Still, EFI is a way better option than BIOS
Exactly
This is a mixture of corporate greed and engineering mentality of NIH syndrome
And of course, vendors took ages to implement UEFI, MS took ages to boot from UEFI, etc, etc
No, the problem is:
BIOS vendors are complete idiots
"EFI" vendors are the same guys
It's a crapfest of proprietary extensions, NIH syndrome and a million ways to change monitor brightness. And of course it's only tested on the latest Windows version, well, because...
Of course, Intel is to blame with the whole ACPI mess and looseness. Typical engineer mentality a standard that standardizes nothing.
Really, Intel and AMD should join forces in this: Make 'to change monitor brightness write a value from 0 (darker) to 0xff (brighter) to register 0xABC PERIOD'. "but but but", "I SAID PERIOD".
Yes, I read it, I was just pointing out it's going to be there (hopefully)
The SSE extensions are ugly, if you're including that in the category of x86.
Why? x87 is definitely ugly, but sse?
Lack of FMA support..
Like this? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FMA_instruction_set
Relatively starved for registers, although since it's not a load/store arch (another issue, imho) that matters less than it does in, say, ARM.
x86-64 improves on this
There are also implementation issues (lack of a directory cache makes scalability suck), but architecturally, it's a pretty standard and slightly boring CISC. I don't quite understand all the hate it gets - it does tend to be slower than Power or z, and doesn't scale well, but the problems are implementation problems, not architectural ones.
Problem is Intel has a lot of money. So even if Power or Alpha is 'better', Intel has the money to make it better (in general) than the competition (see Apple dropping the PPC because IBM couldn't make a mobile G5, amongst other things)
What about TheCompanyPrevioslyKnownasNetflixButIsntAnymoreBecauseMPAASucksDonkeyBalls?
They probably hired their good friends, Sony Computer, to do the auditing for them...
Yeah, sure. For 10x to 100x the cost.
Of course, they can use a VPN. Of course, they are too smart to do that.
What, in turn, makes someone have an external connection to the Internet so that they can do their work. Oops.
They are 'stuck' with an MS stack of course.
AMEN Brother!
Except there's this as well to worry... http://www.coreboot.org/Embedded_controller
Funny you mention WinModems. They are so simple the exactly opposite is true. They usually don't require a firmware (since it's the tiniest amount of hw to plug your computer to a phone line). On the other hand, a 'upload when using' fw for a 'Hard modem' would make lots of sense (this is used on some DSL USB Modems)
But yeah, it doesn't have to be closed source, still, I'm doubting Intel is releasing their processor's VHDL/Verilog files any time soon...
There's always this pendulum swing - shitty mfgs push more functionality into SW/FW, things get too slow, so along comes a bright-eyed new guy with real hardware again, that runs nice and fast. Then the new guy falls in love with money, starts peddling garbage again, and the cycle repeats.
Correct, but Moore's law is very helpful for money lovers. I'm sure something like desktop effects waste more CPU than a Winmodem today.
Exactly
Stallmantitis is ridiculous.
YOUR COMPUTER requires a non-trivial amount of closed-source information. It doesn't matter if it's in hardware or software.
And of course the 1st post is a troll, it's anonymous.
There is no "problem". Any investment bank that is not actually retarded has realtime systems that monitor overall risk of the entire bank it's, any given branch and any given desk.
Yes, they would probably have that, if IT wasn't so retarded and took ages to 'test' the solution. Of course, the crap they install in the computers is approved right away.
Boeing makes planes*, it takes hundreds of people to build a plane. How do you split that up?
I suspect in much the same way that they make them right now. In pieces. Some companies make landing gear, some companies make navigation systems, some companies design the planes, some companies do final assembly, etc.
Yeah, that'll work beautifully... see Boeing 787
Making everything work together is the biggest PITA in every project.
So do you think Cogent should move to New Jersey??
In the same way the "authorities" decided communism was better for the countries they coincidentally ruled.
So they can have a gold-plated bathroom while the people starve. Ref: Nicolae Ceausesco
But that's ok, North Korea is obviously the best country in the world and you are free to go there...
It's a soundstage on Mars
. That would be relatively easy if the 'source code' of the movie was released, but is incredibly difficult without it.
No way. Absolutely no way...
And by the way, one frame of a modern 3D scene in a movie takes an hour to render.
This is more complicated than it seems
Granted, this is needed: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/chfa2zb8(v=vs.71).aspx
Now:
You can write all the code as unsafe, so you're writing almost C
And in certain places of the kernel you can't have a 'malloc' that sleeps. Hence, you can't have a default allocator for objects. Hence, no gc
Also what warranties there are w.r.t. atomicity of operations in C#?
As long as your code can read and write blocks on the device, a file system can be implemented in any language
Yes. Except you have lots of restraints on fs operations, otherwise you're entering a deadlock or looping infinitely (like triggering swap).
FUSE of course needs kernel support, it's not a problem solver (from the point of view of the kernel)
So, you may be able to write an OS on "C#" but it's more of a gimmick than anything else.
Exactly
good luck trying to write a memory manager in a manage language
or a fs
"oh but you can only use a subset of C# there" well, duh
Geez, this brings back memories...
OCs, all the new chips, chipsets, MBs, from the early P5/P6s to the P4
But the market had its way, and it's cheaper to buy a new system (NB) nowadays. Not to mention speeds really haven't gone up as it used to be (not to mention clock speeds, but yeah the MHz is a myth)
We now do everything we need, except for the ultra needs of a few percent of the people. And you can always fire EC2 instances for sheer computing power.
Yes
If you wanna compete with the masses of 'barely knowledgeable' coders that work for 1/3 of what you need to live, go ahead and learn .NET and Java
Of course, if you can specialize in it and be very good or specialized, problem is finding someone that recognizes it and pays accordingly.
No, it's swamp gas, or a weather balloon.
Or maybe a common brushtail opossum