You're comparing with i386, which is an ancient ill-designed ABI. All that "speed improvement" you're talking about comes from extra registers (i386 is extremely register-starved), integer word width (available in 32-bit long mode, too -- only pointer size is reduced), math and vector extensions. You can get the best of both worlds without 64-bit pointers, as long as you don't need multi-gig memory per process. There are tasks that do need such memory, but most are split into pieces that run concurrently.
And while RAM isn't exactly cheap, it's cheap enough to where that penalty doesn't matter to most users.
It's mostly about cache, not RAM.
Unless you care about performance.
Please run some benchmarks. I see you're confusing x32 with i386.
I realize that there are arch improvements in amd64 but that's no reason to break compatibility.
64-bit on x86 royally sucks. Beside unavoidable issues related to 64-bit in general (twice as big pointers, thus any pointer-heavy structure taking twice as much memory, thus cache lines), on x86 in particular it's a dirty hack.
To get slower than amd64, you'd need an ancient register-starved ABI that passes way too much on stack, can't use floating point efficiently, may not pass 64-bit arguments when you actually need them, etc -- ie, i386.
Compare this with a modern 32-bit ABI on x86 (ie, x32). An average program takes ~2/3 memory to run, speed depending on how much pointers you use, but +7% is typical, over 40% in certain cases.
On architecture families that were designed with 64-bit in mind, most of this benefit disappears, but on x86 sane 32-bit wins handily.
Works perfectly on Pine64, for Pinebook I use anarsoul's tree; mainlining of that is waiting for dp work that was sluggish but recently gained pace. You also need patched u-boot, but patched ATF is in Debian (and lookie who's packaging that part:) ).
but not my Phenom II 840 (quad-core) from 2010. Both are still going strong after all these years.
This is the last non-backdoored x86 CPU available, so that's especially painful. I'm using a 6-way Phenom II myself, and it's adequate for pretty much all tasks I do: none of pieces of software I maintain is big enough, and despite me doing tons of mentoring, stuff that gets sponsored is no LibreOffice or llvm-toolchain.
But then, for secure tasks I can use Allwinner A64 in a Pinebook -- turns out a murderous repressive communist country produces trustworthy hardware while the "land of the free" that sports that 4th Amendment does not.
That's not emulation of beeps: you can do that unprivileged as long as you can play regular sound: here's a function named sin, output its results as 16-bit integers and there you go. That beep tool uses real PC honker, needing root to access it without being at console.
Or block https not secured by DANE. Oh wait, implementing DANE in the browser was WONTFIXed by Mozilla. Yay for every single state-sponsored attacker controlling at least one CA.
the 'No new messages' blurp in the corner of the client only stays for two seconds after checking, so you're left wondering if it checked or not if you miss that short moment.
But how do you even "check" your mail? Either the new mail is there (visible as bold directory, and a number in the tray icon), or not. Delivery between your server and client is done via IMAP push, so "checking" does nothing (unless possibly your network was down and you want to haste a reconnect attempt).
I haven't seen a mail server that requires polling anywhere this millenium, so I'd be surprised there's one still alive. In a government agency, perhaps.
Even text clients like mutt show notifications on the status bar, so at most "checking" involves looking at that terminal. And that's why I have Thunderbird playing role of a glorified biff.
I'd want to follow your advice but can't. I don't remember the usernames or passwords for any of facebook accounts I created, thus there's no way I can delete them. Can't ask facebook to find them by IP as all accesses not over Tor are blocked, redundantly, in browser extensions (by domain, with default policy: deny) and router (by IP block).
The only not evil thing about facebook is them sponsoring some nice pieces of technology, but that's akin to research that made spaceflight possible or that-period advances in chemistry. And facebook needs to be treated the same way as Werner von Braun's previous employer was.
You'd have to want battery life and the ability to run Windows apps
But I do have the ability to run Windows programs (not just apps) already, at adequate speed rather than 1/100 (arm is easy to emulate on x86, the other way is really slow)!
It's called VNC. I can ssh home and run a Windows VM this way, on a real x86 processor.
Yes, it does require network, but that's pretty ubiquitous these days. On the other hand, apps make a tiny tiny fraction of the Windows ecosystem -- why would I want to run one when anything of value is a program rather than app? I guess even most of Microsoft's own marketing team doesn't use Windows Store exclusively,
On the other hand, I haven't even booted Windows yet this year.
indeed, that restart feature is a bandage for shoddy software
It's worse than that: it's a security hole with no excuse whatsoever.
A daemon never has a reason to crash. I don't recall the last case a daemon crashed for me (not counting failing to start), and I run unstable on a number of non-production machines. Code that goes into a proper distribution these decades is not hopelessly buggy.
If your company has some local daemon that requires a band-aid, you need to debug crashes ASAP as there's above 50% chance the crash is exploitable. Obviously, usually your management is criminally negligent and wants you to add features instead, but in such case it takes a single line to use runit or some other daemon supervisor.
Thus, auto-restarting crashed daemons is such a bad idea it must never be a part of an init system. Doing this anyway should be considered exceptional, and in such cases you need to take some extra precautions anyway.
Fixing Facebook is too hard as long as the GOP is in power.
And why, pray tell, the Dems would go against a company that's ridiculously biased towards their party line?
Neither of US parties: not the racist authoritarian party[1], nor the oil "defense" environmental destruction party, are going to issue pro-privacy laws.
[1]. Which is deliciously ironic considering their rhetoric.
Likewise, I have Jabber on because an ex-boss whom I still do some work for uses it to communicate. All it costs me is a bit of memory. Doesn't mean I use it, or want to use, to talk to anyone else. Or, I'm halfway straddling Soylent and Slashdot: the former has far better average quality of comments while the latter has far more comments that people can up-mod. Or, after reducing the number of IRC channels I'm down to only 22.
There's nothing wrong with using different means of communication for different uses or different people. You suffer a minor inconvenience, yeah, but it's more than worth it by being immune to a channel starting to suck: you just drop it and advise people to move. You're no longer a hostage to any provider.
Some stats: years ago, I counted kernel developers on "git shortlog -sn" who have a gender-obvious first name (I'm familiar with Western and Slavic names). People whose names I did not recognize were skipped completely; the first 1000 recognizable names had 8 women. There are multiple outreach programs for women, none exclusively for men.
A more rigorous count, of who maintains Debian packages. I extracted the most recent changelog entry of all "key" packages in Stretch (as defined by autoremoval criteria -- ie, high popcon, d-i, or a build-dep completion of those). Whenever a name is not gender-obvious, I did a quick DuckDuckGo search. Stats:
3 packages had (wrongly) a team as person
42 were maintained by someone whose gender did not pop up in ~60 seconds of DDGing
34 by women
2 by a man who identifies as female
4720 by regular men
This means, only 0.9% of gender-recognizable uploads were done by a woman. Those 10 women in the analyzed set also did only 60% uploads a man would do. Likewise, outreach programs target women but none targets exclusively men.
Yeah, jstar (JOE with standard rather than Joseph Allen's keybindings) is the best editor I know. And for someone who coded graphical games in TP3 before learning to tie his shoes, moving to a lesser editor would be hard.
One downside is that the author sticks to some archaic coding workflow, making sending patches too cumbersome to bother.
Or just keep running Win 7 -- just don't be stupid and click on links from spy32545434warecle4ner.ru.
Even when Win 7 goes out of support, it's only support for client programs that really matters. As long as the TCP/IP stack has no holes that can't be firewalled against, there's no reason for Windows updates.
Some computers are perfectly fine running XP in 2018
Alas, Firefox stops support for XP and Vista in June 2018, leaving you with no usable browser. That makes the computer no good for a typical user, although it'd still be useful for that Windows-only $1M medical device.
And, it looks like Windows is rapidly stopping to be the problem. IOT crap, on the other hand...
If those were just POWs, there would be less reason to complain. But instead, they gathered partisans who fought against Germans but were not affiliated with Soviets, jews, gays, Silesians, people with a shred of German ancestry, those sent for forced labour into Germany, and so on.
Random machinegunning of prisoners, standing cells, and games like "we lock you in a shed, set the shed on fire, and you get shot if you try to break out of the shed" also means these were concentration camps rather than mere prisons.
But that's not why I'm arguing why this new law is bad. It forbids mention that Polish concentration camps ever existed -- and, as listed above, they did exist. And that Auschwitz and tens of other ex-Nazi camps were run by Poles, which is what our current government denies. The very same camp, just after so-called "liberation".
BTW, could you document how Auschwitz was operated by Poland ? Which with SS units ? Which laws ?
I'm not aware of any detachment of the Red Army nor of Polish government named "SS". The camps were operated first by NKVD, then by MBP (Ministry of Public Security). And polish Auschwitz was closed after only around two years to be converted into a museum -- while other camps, such as KL Warchau (right inside the capital) operated until 1956.
Which Poland ?
Poland born in 1945, purged of all leaders of Poland up to now that were incompatible with USSR policies ? Ah yes, that was outstanding moment of humanity, when USA, UK and USSR decided to deprive Poland of autonomy...
The above was the new, soviet-imposed regime, yes. Which has not been denounced as illegal by any of subsequent governments.
But, if you believe those were no "real Poles", what about the concentration camp in Bereza Kartuska?
Or, during the war itself, camps lent to us by the UK, on Isle of Bute and nearby. Those were nothing like Nazi or Soviet camps, merely of Abu Ghraib level of viciousness (some of more equal prisoners were even allowed to move around and received half pay, with only the rest being held behind barbed wire and subjected to abuse, no intentional killing) -- but in a discussion about naming, if our Dear Leader in Exile referred to them as "concentration camps", who I am to argue?
From when it was operated by Germans, Russians or Poles? Yeah, the first did this for thrice as long, with about three orders of magnitude more deaths as the others (and this includes subcamps as reopened Auschwitz I was relatively tame), but it's worth mentioning considering our great new polish law.
There were individuals freed from Nazi-run camp, just to be shortly later readmitted to the same camp under new management. This is such an outstanding shining moment for the humanity.
Slashdot Mirror
You're comparing with i386, which is an ancient ill-designed ABI. All that "speed improvement" you're talking about comes from extra registers (i386 is extremely register-starved), integer word width (available in 32-bit long mode, too -- only pointer size is reduced), math and vector extensions. You can get the best of both worlds without 64-bit pointers, as long as you don't need multi-gig memory per process. There are tasks that do need such memory, but most are split into pieces that run concurrently.
And while RAM isn't exactly cheap, it's cheap enough to where that penalty doesn't matter to most users.
It's mostly about cache, not RAM.
Unless you care about performance.
Please run some benchmarks. I see you're confusing x32 with i386.
I realize that there are arch improvements in amd64 but that's no reason to break compatibility.
64-bit on x86 royally sucks. Beside unavoidable issues related to 64-bit in general (twice as big pointers, thus any pointer-heavy structure taking twice as much memory, thus cache lines), on x86 in particular it's a dirty hack.
To get slower than amd64, you'd need an ancient register-starved ABI that passes way too much on stack, can't use floating point efficiently, may not pass 64-bit arguments when you actually need them, etc -- ie, i386.
Compare this with a modern 32-bit ABI on x86 (ie, x32). An average program takes ~2/3 memory to run, speed depending on how much pointers you use, but +7% is typical, over 40% in certain cases.
On architecture families that were designed with 64-bit in mind, most of this benefit disappears, but on x86 sane 32-bit wins handily.
Works perfectly on Pine64, for Pinebook I use anarsoul's tree; mainlining of that is waiting for dp work that was sluggish but recently gained pace. You also need patched u-boot, but patched ATF is in Debian (and lookie who's packaging that part :) ).
but not my Phenom II 840 (quad-core) from 2010. Both are still going strong after all these years.
This is the last non-backdoored x86 CPU available, so that's especially painful. I'm using a 6-way Phenom II myself, and it's adequate for pretty much all tasks I do: none of pieces of software I maintain is big enough, and despite me doing tons of mentoring, stuff that gets sponsored is no LibreOffice or llvm-toolchain.
But then, for secure tasks I can use Allwinner A64 in a Pinebook -- turns out a murderous repressive communist country produces trustworthy hardware while the "land of the free" that sports that 4th Amendment does not.
That's not emulation of beeps: you can do that unprivileged as long as you can play regular sound: here's a function named sin, output its results as 16-bit integers and there you go. That beep tool uses real PC honker, needing root to access it without being at console.
Or block https not secured by DANE. Oh wait, implementing DANE in the browser was WONTFIXed by Mozilla. Yay for every single state-sponsored attacker controlling at least one CA.
real men echo to /dev/dsp
Except for those who noticed that /dev/dsp was deprecated five ages and two aeons ago, and today its emulation is not even functional anymore.
the 'No new messages' blurp in the corner of the client only stays for two seconds after checking, so you're left wondering if it checked or not if you miss that short moment.
But how do you even "check" your mail? Either the new mail is there (visible as bold directory, and a number in the tray icon), or not. Delivery between your server and client is done via IMAP push, so "checking" does nothing (unless possibly your network was down and you want to haste a reconnect attempt).
I haven't seen a mail server that requires polling anywhere this millenium, so I'd be surprised there's one still alive. In a government agency, perhaps.
Even text clients like mutt show notifications on the status bar, so at most "checking" involves looking at that terminal. And that's why I have Thunderbird playing role of a glorified biff.
You do all your browsing via tor?
No, only when visiting a dodgy site, like Facebook.
Probably means you take other extreme measures to protect your privacy.
It's sad to hear that basic common sense is labelled "extreme" these days.
I'd want to follow your advice but can't. I don't remember the usernames or passwords for any of facebook accounts I created, thus there's no way I can delete them. Can't ask facebook to find them by IP as all accesses not over Tor are blocked, redundantly, in browser extensions (by domain, with default policy: deny) and router (by IP block).
The only not evil thing about facebook is them sponsoring some nice pieces of technology, but that's akin to research that made spaceflight possible or that-period advances in chemistry. And facebook needs to be treated the same way as Werner von Braun's previous employer was.
You'd have to want battery life and the ability to run Windows apps
But I do have the ability to run Windows programs (not just apps) already, at adequate speed rather than 1/100 (arm is easy to emulate on x86, the other way is really slow)!
It's called VNC. I can ssh home and run a Windows VM this way, on a real x86 processor.
Yes, it does require network, but that's pretty ubiquitous these days. On the other hand, apps make a tiny tiny fraction of the Windows ecosystem -- why would I want to run one when anything of value is a program rather than app? I guess even most of Microsoft's own marketing team doesn't use Windows Store exclusively,
On the other hand, I haven't even booted Windows yet this year.
indeed, that restart feature is a bandage for shoddy software
It's worse than that: it's a security hole with no excuse whatsoever.
A daemon never has a reason to crash. I don't recall the last case a daemon crashed for me (not counting failing to start), and I run unstable on a number of non-production machines. Code that goes into a proper distribution these decades is not hopelessly buggy.
If your company has some local daemon that requires a band-aid, you need to debug crashes ASAP as there's above 50% chance the crash is exploitable. Obviously, usually your management is criminally negligent and wants you to add features instead, but in such case it takes a single line to use runit or some other daemon supervisor.
Thus, auto-restarting crashed daemons is such a bad idea it must never be a part of an init system. Doing this anyway should be considered exceptional, and in such cases you need to take some extra precautions anyway.
It's radical leftist feminists who are pushing for porn censorship these days
Yes, they're currently the bigger enemy of free speech, but the religious kind has never stopped. We're being hit from both sides.
Fixing Facebook is too hard as long as the GOP is in power.
And why, pray tell, the Dems would go against a company that's ridiculously biased towards their party line?
Neither of US parties: not the racist authoritarian party[1], nor the oil "defense" environmental destruction party, are going to issue pro-privacy laws.
[1]. Which is deliciously ironic considering their rhetoric.
Likewise, I have Jabber on because an ex-boss whom I still do some work for uses it to communicate. All it costs me is a bit of memory. Doesn't mean I use it, or want to use, to talk to anyone else. Or, I'm halfway straddling Soylent and Slashdot: the former has far better average quality of comments while the latter has far more comments that people can up-mod. Or, after reducing the number of IRC channels I'm down to only 22.
There's nothing wrong with using different means of communication for different uses or different people. You suffer a minor inconvenience, yeah, but it's more than worth it by being immune to a channel starting to suck: you just drop it and advise people to move. You're no longer a hostage to any provider.
Some stats: years ago, I counted kernel developers on "git shortlog -sn" who have a gender-obvious first name (I'm familiar with Western and Slavic names). People whose names I did not recognize were skipped completely; the first 1000 recognizable names had 8 women. There are multiple outreach programs for women, none exclusively for men.
A more rigorous count, of who maintains Debian packages. I extracted the most recent changelog entry of all "key" packages in Stretch (as defined by autoremoval criteria -- ie, high popcon, d-i, or a build-dep completion of those). Whenever a name is not gender-obvious, I did a quick DuckDuckGo search. Stats:
This means, only 0.9% of gender-recognizable uploads were done by a woman. Those 10 women in the analyzed set also did only 60% uploads a man would do. Likewise, outreach programs target women but none targets exclusively men.
The Aral sea hasn't dried and withered away completely yet.
Yeah, jstar (JOE with standard rather than Joseph Allen's keybindings) is the best editor I know. And for someone who coded graphical games in TP3 before learning to tie his shoes, moving to a lesser editor would be hard.
One downside is that the author sticks to some archaic coding workflow, making sending patches too cumbersome to bother.
Or just keep running Win 7 -- just don't be stupid and click on links from spy32545434warecle4ner.ru.
Even when Win 7 goes out of support, it's only support for client programs that really matters. As long as the TCP/IP stack has no holes that can't be firewalled against, there's no reason for Windows updates.
Some computers are perfectly fine running XP in 2018
Alas, Firefox stops support for XP and Vista in June 2018, leaving you with no usable browser. That makes the computer no good for a typical user, although it'd still be useful for that Windows-only $1M medical device.
And, it looks like Windows is rapidly stopping to be the problem. IOT crap, on the other hand...
Or any dekstop mail app?
Why would I install a pointless bloated program (or worse, an "app") on every computer I use? Just ssh and do mail from the server. :p
So a website devoted to copy+paste programming gets Javascript at #1? Oh so surprising...
If those were just POWs, there would be less reason to complain. But instead, they gathered partisans who fought against Germans but were not affiliated with Soviets, jews, gays, Silesians, people with a shred of German ancestry, those sent for forced labour into Germany, and so on.
Random machinegunning of prisoners, standing cells, and games like "we lock you in a shed, set the shed on fire, and you get shot if you try to break out of the shed" also means these were concentration camps rather than mere prisons.
But that's not why I'm arguing why this new law is bad. It forbids mention that Polish concentration camps ever existed -- and, as listed above, they did exist. And that Auschwitz and tens of other ex-Nazi camps were run by Poles, which is what our current government denies. The very same camp, just after so-called "liberation".
Am I missing something here?
An opportunity to shame those whom the article's author disagrees with.
BTW, could you document how Auschwitz was operated by Poland ? Which with SS units ? Which laws ?
I'm not aware of any detachment of the Red Army nor of Polish government named "SS". The camps were operated first by NKVD, then by MBP (Ministry of Public Security). And polish Auschwitz was closed after only around two years to be converted into a museum -- while other camps, such as KL Warchau (right inside the capital) operated until 1956.
Which Poland ?
Poland born in 1945, purged of all leaders of Poland up to now that were incompatible with USSR policies ? Ah yes, that was outstanding moment of humanity, when USA, UK and USSR decided to deprive Poland of autonomy...
The above was the new, soviet-imposed regime, yes. Which has not been denounced as illegal by any of subsequent governments.
But, if you believe those were no "real Poles", what about the concentration camp in Bereza Kartuska?
Or, during the war itself, camps lent to us by the UK, on Isle of Bute and nearby. Those were nothing like Nazi or Soviet camps, merely of Abu Ghraib level of viciousness (some of more equal prisoners were even allowed to move around and received half pay, with only the rest being held behind barbed wire and subjected to abuse, no intentional killing) -- but in a discussion about naming, if our Dear Leader in Exile referred to them as "concentration camps", who I am to argue?
From when it was operated by Germans, Russians or Poles? Yeah, the first did this for thrice as long, with about three orders of magnitude more deaths as the others (and this includes subcamps as reopened Auschwitz I was relatively tame), but it's worth mentioning considering our great new polish law.
There were individuals freed from Nazi-run camp, just to be shortly later readmitted to the same camp under new management. This is such an outstanding shining moment for the humanity.