It's not really the same. 16 bit applications had all sorts of issues on Windows. E.g. huge pointers (i.e. to objects bigger than 64K) were available but they required the compiler generate code to reload the segment base register. That was very slow in protected mode. The 16 bit API was very much cruftier than the 32 bit one due to near vs far pointer differences and the need to handle discarding code segments in software. By contrast a 32 bit application could use 32 bit pointers that could address any part of the address space with no issue. Plus everything was demand paged. 32 bit pointers were the same size as 16 bit far pointers so there was no speed penalty.
By contrast a 32 bit application has a 4GB flat address space. Every single one of the applications I use runs fine in that. A move to 64 bits gives you more registers but larger pointers. So it's not necessarily a net win in terms of performance. And there's no "API overhead" for 32 bit code compared to 64 bit code since both are flat and demand paged.
But it all comes down to diminishing returns. At the point people switched from Win16 to Win32 almost all programs had data segments much bigger than 64K. So the old selector:offset scheme had really started to bite. Now there are a few programs that need more than 4GB of data. But the vast majority don't and won't ever. So a lot of applications don't really need to be 64 bit.
Don't get me wrong - I've written some freeware applications and the recent ones build and run fine in both 32 and 64 bit mode. But I'm still only distributing the 32 bit builds. Maybe at some point in the future Windows will ditch support for 32 bit applications and then I'd probably distribute both.
You see, compiling the Linux kernel was harder than I thought. Well, not harder than I thought... it just suddenly didn't want to cooperate after my hundred times compiling the kernel. For Linux in VMWare, I had to rummage around for ages until I finally figured out that I had to include Fusion MPT, whatever the hell that was. Funny how when I searched for Symbios 53c1030 it didn't show up, although when I went to Fusion MPT there it was, staring at me happily in the face, along with its brothers the 53c1020, 53c1010, and who knows what not (Hint: It's not funny at all). And get this... when I tried to mount the iso images using the loopback, and with EFS compiled as a module and loaded, the fucking VFAT driver comes up and tries to make sense of the filesystem on the iso images. That's right, the EFS module didn't even do its fucking job, which was the whole fucking point of recompiling the kernel in the first fucking place. Worse of all, why the hell was the VFAT driver coming up? What the fuck? Don't try to be a hero, you just got yourself nuked, shitface.
So I tried going into my secret hideout - the LUKS encrypted supersecret Linux partition on my hard drive (not so secret if you just fdisk it). One thing led to another, and soon I was struggling furiously with this shitty program called mkinitrd (no doubt written by a monkey who was too busy jacking off to pay any attention to coding), which insists on making a gzipped ext2 filesystem image with your modules in it, instead of making a gzipped cpio archive, which the kernel uses. WHAT THE FUCK IS THE POINT OF PACKING MY KERNEL MODULES IN A FORMAT THAT THE KERNEL DOES NOT, REPEAT, DOES NOT, RECOGNIZE? The whole debacle wasted another 3 hours of my life, and I was still nowhere closer to getting IRIX 6.5 on my Indy.
And suddenly, up comes my shitty ext3 filesystem telling it can no longer find a superblock on so and so partition.
Fuck you, Linux.
Hope it is helpful to people considering Linux in a non hobby environment. Particularly "Don't try to be a hero, you just got yourself nuked, shitface." You can probably make yourself a macro in Emacs's Xrwqpxzzkpltk blogging module (don't use the 1.0.4pre version it's got a bug that posts all the images in ~/porn/ to your blog, stay on 1.0.1) so you don't need to type it out each time you use it and just type Esc Esc Ctrl Shift Alt S DTBAHYJGYN,S Ctrl F Esc AcpiPowerButton K.
This is presuming that minor parties are somehow immune to voters, which I do not agree with. They can get voted out just as well as anyone else. In fact they tend to be seen as a softer target who can be attacked and blamed for compromises made to form government.
This is a classic slashdot post. It is also complete bollocks.
The patent system doesn't stop people thinking ideas. What it does mean is that if you profit from those ideas the patent holder can ask you to pay a license.
And there's a reason for that - it means that the people that have the ideas can make money without having to buy a factory. Or, conversely, that people that own factories have to pay the inventor of things they make. Otherwise the people that owned the factories would not need to. More to the point there'd be no incentive for inventors.
The SFLC is just spreading FUD quite frankly. In fact the very name SFLC - a reference to the Southern Poverty Law Centre is offensive. The idea that people making Linux distributions are in any way comparable to the people that risks life and limb defending civil rights is absurd.
I read a study on this. It went something like this
Day 1: Everything OK. Several subjects complained that they couldn't troll slashdot in the evening while ignoring the TV.
Day 2: Holy shit! The patients have turned into red eyed vicious zombie like creatures. They've started to eat each other and are trying to beat the door down with clubs made from gnawed off limbs. Executing plan GOTTERDAMERUNG!
After that there were no more transmissions from the facility. It seems like the staff improvised a fuel air explosive by flooding the building with natural gas and then detonated it, vaporizing the facility.
What makes Mandarin hard is learning thousands of characters. Also it doesn't have tenses in the way that pretty much every other language on Earth does. I.e. it's a lot easier to move from one Indo European language to another since the mapping is more or less 1:1. That definitely isn't true between Chinese and an Indo-European language. In fact it probably isn't true between Chinese and for example Japanese.
What would make English hard is spelling I suspect. Also it's got a very complicated ancestry - you can see bits of Scandinavian, French, Latin and Germanic in English. Modern vernacular Mandarin by contrast is very recent - the switch from Classical Mandarin is 20th Century. It's actually a younger language than Esperanto. But it's hard to really say because English was the first language I spoke. So I didn't really learn it the way people learn foreign languages.
I suspect even if I hadn't learned it growing up it wouldn't be that hard to learn because it is so ubiquitous and the odds are I would have learned another Indo European language.
It's also worth pointing out that in English if you can form the Present Continuous that covers a very large percentage of use cases.
I got mine for 11500 TWD which wasn't too bad. It looks analog but isn't really - it is radio controlled, solar powered quartz. I can see the time in both Europe and Asia pretty easily which is handy when I call people. You can swap the home and world time zones with a couple of button presses when you get on a plane.
There's definitely a case for learning Mandarin so you can talk to people in Taiwam. That's why I'm doing it. Mandarin is an interesting language too - in an odd sort of way its very user unfriendliness makes it fascinating.
intentionally crashing competitor's products at trade shows.
If some FSF activist was doing it to Windows you'd think it was wonderful. And it's hardly unexpected that a CEO would point out the weaknesses in a competitors products when asked.
Anyway he was right about "Developers! Developers! Developers!" being the key to Windows. It's a pity he didn't take his own advice with Windows Phone 7 - all the Windows Mobile ISPs have said they won't support it because they'd be forced to rewrite all the C/C++ code in C# and then jump hurdles to get in the app store. So the App store may have 11,000 applications but most of them are written by hobbyists of Microsoft employees in their spare time. Meanwhile Android has things like Opera and Firefox. Also Android has 150,000 and iOS has 300,000.
If Windows 8 is anything like as locked down as Windows Phone 7 - and they look pretty much the same even when Windows 8 is not running on a tablet which is a terrible blunder - Windows 8 will fail much worse than Vista did. Maybe was badly as Windows Phone 7. Mind you on mobiles there's a viable replacement for Microsoft's OS. I can't see people and ISVs jumping ship from Windows to Linux or Macs the way they are almost certain to from Windows Mobile to Android.
Also even Ballmer isn't stupid enough to sink the company by trying to turn desktop Windows into a locked down system like XBox or WP7 I suspect.
Hitler[AoE]: u guys are fockin gay Hitler[AoE]: ur never getting in my city *Hitler[AoE] has been eliminated.* benny~tow: OMG u noob you killed yourself Eisenhower: ROFLOLOLOL Stalin: OMG LMAO! Hitler[AoE]: WTF i didnt click there omg this game blows *Hitler[AoE] has left the game* paTTon: hahahhah T0J0: WTF my teammates are n00bs benny~tow: shut up noob Roosevelt: haha wut a moron paTTon: wtf am i gunna do now? Eisenhower: yah me too T0J0: why dont u attack me o thats right u dont got no ships lololol Eisenhower: fock u paTTon: lemme go thru ur base commie Stalin: go to hell lol paTTon: fock this sh1t im goin afk Eisenhower: yah this is gay *Roosevelt has left the game.* Hitler[AoE]: wtf? Eisenhower: sh1t now we need some1 to join *tru_m4n has joined the game.* tru_m4n: hi all T0J0: hey Stalin: sup Churchill: hi tru_m4n: OMG OMG OMG i got all his stuff! tru_m4n: NUKES! HOLY **** I GOT NUKES Stalin: d00d gimmie some plz tru_m4n: no way i only got like a couple Stalin: omg dont be gay gimmie nuculer secrets T0J0: wtf is nukes? T0J0: holy ****holy****hoyl****! *T0J0 has been eliminated.* *The Allied team has won the game!*
Slashdot Mirror
I like "grammar nazi'ism" almost as much as I like "pendants". "Could care less" used to irritate me but now I just see it as the same sort of thing.
Like the cheerleader would touch anyone who knew what a 'commit count' was.
Hmmm.
"GNU\Linux, Proprietary, FUD, SCO, patent, lawyers".
And that's Bingo for me!
It's not really the same. 16 bit applications had all sorts of issues on Windows. E.g. huge pointers (i.e. to objects bigger than 64K) were available but they required the compiler generate code to reload the segment base register. That was very slow in protected mode. The 16 bit API was very much cruftier than the 32 bit one due to near vs far pointer differences and the need to handle discarding code segments in software. By contrast a 32 bit application could use 32 bit pointers that could address any part of the address space with no issue. Plus everything was demand paged. 32 bit pointers were the same size as 16 bit far pointers so there was no speed penalty.
By contrast a 32 bit application has a 4GB flat address space. Every single one of the applications I use runs fine in that. A move to 64 bits gives you more registers but larger pointers. So it's not necessarily a net win in terms of performance. And there's no "API overhead" for 32 bit code compared to 64 bit code since both are flat and demand paged.
But it all comes down to diminishing returns. At the point people switched from Win16 to Win32 almost all programs had data segments much bigger than 64K. So the old selector:offset scheme had really started to bite. Now there are a few programs that need more than 4GB of data. But the vast majority don't and won't ever. So a lot of applications don't really need to be 64 bit.
Don't get me wrong - I've written some freeware applications and the recent ones build and run fine in both 32 and 64 bit mode. But I'm still only distributing the 32 bit builds. Maybe at some point in the future Windows will ditch support for 32 bit applications and then I'd probably distribute both.
Where do you live?
I googled for "Linux POS" and got this
http://ritchan.dasaku.net/computers/why-linux-is-a-piece-of-shit
You see, compiling the Linux kernel was harder than I thought. Well, not harder than I thought ... it just suddenly didn't want to cooperate after my hundred times compiling the kernel. For Linux in VMWare, I had to rummage around for ages until I finally figured out that I had to include Fusion MPT, whatever the hell that was. Funny how when I searched for Symbios 53c1030 it didn't show up, although when I went to Fusion MPT there it was, staring at me happily in the face, along with its brothers the 53c1020, 53c1010, and who knows what not (Hint: It's not funny at all). And get this ... when I tried to mount the iso images using the loopback, and with EFS compiled as a module and loaded, the fucking VFAT driver comes up and tries to make sense of the filesystem on the iso images. That's right, the EFS module didn't even do its fucking job, which was the whole fucking point of recompiling the kernel in the first fucking place. Worse of all, why the hell was the VFAT driver coming up? What the fuck? Don't try to be a hero, you just got yourself nuked, shitface.
So I tried going into my secret hideout - the LUKS encrypted supersecret Linux partition on my hard drive (not so secret if you just fdisk it). One thing led to another, and soon I was struggling furiously with this shitty program called mkinitrd (no doubt written by a monkey who was too busy jacking off to pay any attention to coding), which insists on making a gzipped ext2 filesystem image with your modules in it, instead of making a gzipped cpio archive, which the kernel uses. WHAT THE FUCK IS THE POINT OF PACKING MY KERNEL MODULES IN A FORMAT THAT THE KERNEL DOES NOT, REPEAT, DOES NOT, RECOGNIZE? The whole debacle wasted another 3 hours of my life, and I was still nowhere closer to getting IRIX 6.5 on my Indy.
And suddenly, up comes my shitty ext3 filesystem telling it can no longer find a superblock on so and so partition.
Fuck you, Linux.
Hope it is helpful to people considering Linux in a non hobby environment. Particularly "Don't try to be a hero, you just got yourself nuked, shitface." You can probably make yourself a macro in Emacs's Xrwqpxzzkpltk blogging module (don't use the 1.0.4pre version it's got a bug that posts all the images in ~/porn/ to your blog, stay on 1.0.1) so you don't need to type it out each time you use it and just type Esc Esc Ctrl Shift Alt S DTBAHYJGYN,S Ctrl F Esc AcpiPowerButton K.
Hell yeah! Now you're cooking with an open flame.
> Fist of God
I believe in Islam it is referred to as the Cloven Hoof of Allah.
This is presuming that minor parties are somehow immune to voters, which I do not agree with. They can get voted out just as well as anyone else. In fact they tend to be seen as a softer target who can be attacked and blamed for compromises made to form government.
This is a classic slashdot post. It is also complete bollocks.
The patent system doesn't stop people thinking ideas. What it does mean is that if you profit from those ideas the patent holder can ask you to pay a license.
And there's a reason for that - it means that the people that have the ideas can make money without having to buy a factory. Or, conversely, that people that own factories have to pay the inventor of things they make. Otherwise the people that owned the factories would not need to. More to the point there'd be no incentive for inventors.
The SFLC is just spreading FUD quite frankly. In fact the very name SFLC - a reference to the Southern Poverty Law Centre is offensive. The idea that people making Linux distributions are in any way comparable to the people that risks life and limb defending civil rights is absurd.
Pop quiz! Who's married to Romana out of Doctor Who? Richard Dawkins or you?
The defence rests.
You could send the .secure communications over VPN tunnels over the regular internet just like companies do with their intranet.
I read a study on this. It went something like this
Day 1: Everything OK. Several subjects complained that they couldn't troll slashdot in the evening while ignoring the TV.
Day 2: Holy shit! The patients have turned into red eyed vicious zombie like creatures. They've started to eat each other and are trying to beat the door down with clubs made from gnawed off limbs. Executing plan GOTTERDAMERUNG!
After that there were no more transmissions from the facility. It seems like the staff improvised a fuel air explosive by flooding the building with natural gas and then detonated it, vaporizing the facility.
You could arrange a "little accident" for them.
If you truly believed in the strength of your code you'd be glad to defend it by single combat in the code review arena.
Two coders enter! One coder leaves!
You're,uh, still putting the old covers on your TPS reports.
Don't be culturally insensitive
http://gradha.sdf-eu.org/textos/klingon_programmer.en.html
I think it's scripts all the way down.
What makes Mandarin hard is learning thousands of characters. Also it doesn't have tenses in the way that pretty much every other language on Earth does. I.e. it's a lot easier to move from one Indo European language to another since the mapping is more or less 1:1. That definitely isn't true between Chinese and an Indo-European language. In fact it probably isn't true between Chinese and for example Japanese.
What would make English hard is spelling I suspect. Also it's got a very complicated ancestry - you can see bits of Scandinavian, French, Latin and Germanic in English. Modern vernacular Mandarin by contrast is very recent - the switch from Classical Mandarin is 20th Century. It's actually a younger language than Esperanto. But it's hard to really say because English was the first language I spoke. So I didn't really learn it the way people learn foreign languages.
I suspect even if I hadn't learned it growing up it wouldn't be that hard to learn because it is so ubiquitous and the odds are I would have learned another Indo European language.
It's also worth pointing out that in English if you can form the Present Continuous that covers a very large percentage of use cases.
The funniest version was rip off Sony phones branded Phony. It's a shame they didn't call the rip off sunglasses "Okie".
I used to have a self winding Oris watch but it was a bit flakey.
Right now I've got one of these
http://www.amazon.com/Casio-Chronograph-Multiband6-Japanese-Eqw-m600db-1ajf/dp/B004P5NX4G
I got mine for 11500 TWD which wasn't too bad. It looks analog but isn't really - it is radio controlled, solar powered quartz. I can see the time in both Europe and Asia pretty easily which is handy when I call people. You can swap the home and world time zones with a couple of button presses when you get on a plane.
There's definitely a case for learning Mandarin so you can talk to people in Taiwam. That's why I'm doing it. Mandarin is an interesting language too - in an odd sort of way its very user unfriendliness makes it fascinating.
tl;dr
intentionally crashing competitor's products at trade shows.
If some FSF activist was doing it to Windows you'd think it was wonderful. And it's hardly unexpected that a CEO would point out the weaknesses in a competitors products when asked.
Anyway he was right about "Developers! Developers! Developers!" being the key to Windows. It's a pity he didn't take his own advice with Windows Phone 7 - all the Windows Mobile ISPs have said they won't support it because they'd be forced to rewrite all the C/C++ code in C# and then jump hurdles to get in the app store. So the App store may have 11,000 applications but most of them are written by hobbyists of Microsoft employees in their spare time. Meanwhile Android has things like Opera and Firefox. Also Android has 150,000 and iOS has 300,000.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/223861/windows_phone_7_app_store_still_lags_behind_apple_android.html
If Windows 8 is anything like as locked down as Windows Phone 7 - and they look pretty much the same even when Windows 8 is not running on a tablet which is a terrible blunder - Windows 8 will fail much worse than Vista did. Maybe was badly as Windows Phone 7. Mind you on mobiles there's a viable replacement for Microsoft's OS. I can't see people and ISVs jumping ship from Windows to Linux or Macs the way they are almost certain to from Windows Mobile to Android.
Also even Ballmer isn't stupid enough to sink the company by trying to turn desktop Windows into a locked down system like XBox or WP7 I suspect.
Those are their two main weapons! Three! Three main weapons!
slashdot is just turning into 4chan with 10 year old memes.
So you'd agree with Pedobear that 10 year olds are "TOO OLD!"
You sick bastard!
I liked this
http://www.strategypage.com/humor/articles/military_jokes_20057151.asp
Hitler[AoE]: u guys are fockin gay
Hitler[AoE]: ur never getting in my city
*Hitler[AoE] has been eliminated.*
benny~tow: OMG u noob you killed yourself
Eisenhower: ROFLOLOLOL
Stalin: OMG LMAO!
Hitler[AoE]: WTF i didnt click there omg this game blows
*Hitler[AoE] has left the game*
paTTon: hahahhah
T0J0: WTF my teammates are n00bs
benny~tow: shut up noob
Roosevelt: haha wut a moron
paTTon: wtf am i gunna do now?
Eisenhower: yah me too
T0J0: why dont u attack me o thats right u dont got no ships lololol
Eisenhower: fock u
paTTon: lemme go thru ur base commie
Stalin: go to hell lol
paTTon: fock this sh1t im goin afk
Eisenhower: yah this is gay
*Roosevelt has left the game.*
Hitler[AoE]: wtf?
Eisenhower: sh1t now we need some1 to join
*tru_m4n has joined the game.*
tru_m4n: hi all
T0J0: hey
Stalin: sup
Churchill: hi
tru_m4n: OMG OMG OMG i got all his stuff!
tru_m4n: NUKES! HOLY **** I GOT NUKES
Stalin: d00d gimmie some plz
tru_m4n: no way i only got like a couple
Stalin: omg dont be gay gimmie nuculer secrets
T0J0: wtf is nukes?
T0J0: holy ****holy****hoyl****!
*T0J0 has been eliminated.*
*The Allied team has won the game!*
Also this
http://users.livejournal.com/kim_jong_il__/
"And Iran, Iran's so far awaaay."