Yes, but 90% of us developers won't spend hours grokking 30 pages of search results. We'll tune our searches until we can find exactly what we're looking for in pages 1-3. Yes, some well-trained end-users do this as well. Most newbies will not and end-users will not.
Then get Konqueror. After a lengthy battle with NVIDIA_GLX and XFree86 4.3.0 and SuSE 7.2, I am bathing in the glory that is a browser that doesn't crash on me every 20 minutes (yippee!).
Yes, I had to configure Konqueror to pretend to be IE 5.5 when I went to bank online.
Oh glorious days.
On a side note, and slightly off-topic, I had a short conversation with my roommate yesterday (a windows nut). His comment that Linux must surely suck if it takes me 2 hours to get my graphics driver installed...
And when I asked him how that was any different from Windows when upgrading to a new graphics card, he quickly shut up. Nevermind the fact that *I* had to completely rebuild my windowing subsystem (from XF3 to XF4). Hehehe.
NT 3.1 supported Alpha on release day (or shortly thereafter). In May 1994 when I started working professionally, NT was supported on Intel, MIPS and Alpha.
I think this time around, Intel isn't going to let Microsoft make that same mistake. And Microsoft CANNOT make that mistake if it wants to have a place in the Enterprise. In the late '80's and early 90's, Microsoft was happy owning the home computer, and small business. They had ZERO chance of competing in the Datacenter.
That's not true today. Today Windows 2000 server offers just as reliable a platform as Solaris or Tru64 does. 64bit support is necessary for Microsoft to continue to make money and keep their marketshare in the backoffice. 5 years from now, if they don't have a 64bit offering, SQL Server is going to look pretty pathetic next to postgres or SAP or Oracle on Solaris or Linux.
Right, because probably 90% of the computations you are going to be doing are with 32bit integers (in my database work, that's all I've ever really used, although I *HAVE* needed 64bit pointers).
The only reason to go to a 64bit CPU right now is the extra address space. Continue to count your money and stock valuation in 32bit integers. (Hell, some of us could get by with 16bit integers for that). But to count everyone in the world needs >32bit integer.
So you are right. Moving to 64bit addition and subtraction is pointless (right now). Letting me store a 6GB AVI movie in RAM for effects processing, however, is not.
Speak for yourself, brother. I and many of my contemporaries prefer grey on black... but yes, the usage of neon colors on a black screen must be reserved only for those of us on LSD.
Anyhow, anyone else regretting the day bgcolor=white became the default instead of grey?
could instead look like this:
|---16b ---|--- 32b ---|-------- 64b ---------|
AX EAX EAX2
And hence treat the extra 32 bits as a separate named register.
Now, I'm no CPU designer, and there's probably lots of REALLY good reasons this isn't done (complicating the instruction set is one of them, I imagine. Contention for cache and memory another perhaps? Kills branch prediction?) But I could see it as being a useful tool to improving a generally 32bit world (Try iterating a 64bit integer to overflow, you'll probably be doing it for weeks). While 64bit addressing has it's place, much of the worlds data still fits into 32 bit values.
Damn it, I can't think straight here... I think the major reason why Windows 3.1 and WfW was "good enough" had more to do with the cost of memory at the time than it did with the software being "good enough". Fact is, Microsoft couldn't take the fragile assembly that was Windows in 1993 and make a 32bit OS out of it. The 5 year project that was NT proved just how hard it was for them to go ahead and do this.
To lend a bit of credence to my argument that 16bit wasn't good enough, was their effort to make OS/2 1.0 a 32bit OS. If not for IBM wanting support for the 80286, we'd have had a consumer level 32bit OS sooner than we did (although it might have sucked worse than Windows can sometimes).
I'm only going to address this one point:
BS again. The market decided that the Win 3.11 and Win9.x operating systems were good enough. Windows NT was quite viable and fully 32 bit for a long time. The problem is people did not want to change their hardware and applications which is what a big change to a more demanding OS like NT would have required. You do remember Win32S calls in Windows 3.11 right? They were free additions to the stock Windows 3.11 system.
80386 processor released in: 1985
First 32bit Microsoft Windows release: April 1993
Result: 8 years to a relatively consumer level OS that took advantage of said processor. The 80486 was already out, and the Pentium was due very shortly (Summer 1993).
I'd have to say that Intel won't be letting Microsoft do THAT again. Granted, today memory is cheap. The days of $50/MB are long gone...
Yah, but there's a corollary there, in that WindowsNT for the alpha was crippled by being 64bit. Life might have been MUCH different for the Alpha had Exchange, SQL Server and Oracle been ported to Win64 back in 1996.
Why pay 2-3X the cost of your Wintel workstation to get an Alpha (oooo) that's only 20-30% faster than your current workstation, if you lose the major benefit of 64bit-ness? There was no point. The fact that OSF/Digital Unix was around and 64bit did nothing to get all the Windows developers out there motivated to port to Alpha, simply because a 32-64bit port is about 10times easier than a 32-64bit and OS port together.
Had Microsoft released Windows 3.51 in November 1996 with 64bit ports for MIPS and Alpha, we might have a MUCH different computing landscape right now. (Might being the key word.)
I think your patent claim is going to fail on prior art. I mean, fuckedcompany.com has a HUGE list of all the current B2B bombers that have come and gone over the past two and a half years.
Actually, what pisses me off most about Army of Darkness, is that I cannot seem to get a version with *ALL* of the publicly released footage. For example, the TV version has some extra scenes in the windmall that are present on the Japanese subtitled import, but that video is missing a bunch of other scenes in the castle. And the 3, count em three different DVD versions are still missing the same scenes. It's fucking annoying. One of my favorite movies, and I can't seem to get one whole cohesive piece. ARRGGH!!!!
Too bad I'll never be able to watch Bruce Campbell in any movie or TV show and not think: "Well maybe I didn't pronounce every exact syllable, but yeah, I said your damn words...":-)
PLEASE don't let the Matrix franchise turn into another Lucasfilm whoring effort. Since the ?remaining? two movies will be released this year, save the Mega Special Edition Gold Boxed Set for the completed trilogy. Please don't give me 20 different remastered and rereleased versions, so that I can't tell what was the original anymore.:(
You can't. Because even if I strain every living bacteria and undead virus out of every liquid and solid I poured into my "goop", some religious nutcase would just claim that my experiment was flawed, and it MUST have been earthly contamination, even if I *PERFECTLY* cleansed said materials.
It's like those moon bacteria. You can scrub and scrub and scrub... all it takes is missing just one bit, and you kink up the whole works.
Except you forget these small things called vaporous and conflicting "business requirements". Just because sendmail works in my company doesn't mean it's not a moving target. Acquisitions of companies and divisionalizations be damned...;-)
As much as I hate the fool for his racist comments, I'll buttress his argument with an observation that it's partially true: with respect to the entitlement establishment that this country has built, where in some cases, your ability to get into schools and jobs depends more on the color of your skin than on the things you know.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but 90% of us developers won't spend hours grokking 30 pages of search results. We'll tune our searches until we can find exactly what we're looking for in pages 1-3. Yes, some well-trained end-users do this as well. Most newbies will not and end-users will not.
-Chris
Then get Konqueror. After a lengthy battle with NVIDIA_GLX and XFree86 4.3.0 and SuSE 7.2, I am bathing in the glory that is a browser that doesn't crash on me every 20 minutes (yippee!).
Yes, I had to configure Konqueror to pretend to be IE 5.5 when I went to bank online.
Oh glorious days.
On a side note, and slightly off-topic, I had a short conversation with my roommate yesterday (a windows nut). His comment that Linux must surely suck if it takes me 2 hours to get my graphics driver installed...
And when I asked him how that was any different from Windows when upgrading to a new graphics card, he quickly shut up. Nevermind the fact that *I* had to completely rebuild my windowing subsystem (from XF3 to XF4). Hehehe.
NT 3.1 supported Alpha on release day (or shortly thereafter). In May 1994 when I started working professionally, NT was supported on Intel, MIPS and Alpha.
I think this time around, Intel isn't going to let Microsoft make that same mistake. And Microsoft CANNOT make that mistake if it wants to have a place in the Enterprise. In the late '80's and early 90's, Microsoft was happy owning the home computer, and small business. They had ZERO chance of competing in the Datacenter.
That's not true today. Today Windows 2000 server offers just as reliable a platform as Solaris or Tru64 does. 64bit support is necessary for Microsoft to continue to make money and keep their marketshare in the backoffice. 5 years from now, if they don't have a 64bit offering, SQL Server is going to look pretty pathetic next to postgres or SAP or Oracle on Solaris or Linux.
This time around, they have no choice.
-Chris
Right, because probably 90% of the computations you are going to be doing are with 32bit integers (in my database work, that's all I've ever really used, although I *HAVE* needed 64bit pointers).
The only reason to go to a 64bit CPU right now is the extra address space. Continue to count your money and stock valuation in 32bit integers. (Hell, some of us could get by with 16bit integers for that). But to count everyone in the world needs >32bit integer.
So you are right. Moving to 64bit addition and subtraction is pointless (right now). Letting me store a 6GB AVI movie in RAM for effects processing, however, is not.
-Chris
Speak for yourself, brother. I and many of my contemporaries prefer grey on black... but yes, the usage of neon colors on a black screen must be reserved only for those of us on LSD.
Anyhow, anyone else regretting the day bgcolor=white became the default instead of grey?
-Chris
Right, but the flipside of that argument is that the 64bit register, instead of looking like this,
|---16b ---|--- 32b ---|-------- 64b ---------|
AX EAX LEAX
could instead look like this:
|---16b ---|--- 32b ---|-------- 64b ---------|
AX EAX EAX2
And hence treat the extra 32 bits as a separate named register.
Now, I'm no CPU designer, and there's probably lots of REALLY good reasons this isn't done (complicating the instruction set is one of them, I imagine. Contention for cache and memory another perhaps? Kills branch prediction?) But I could see it as being a useful tool to improving a generally 32bit world (Try iterating a 64bit integer to overflow, you'll probably be doing it for weeks). While 64bit addressing has it's place, much of the worlds data still fits into 32 bit values.
-Chris
Damn it, I can't think straight here... I think the major reason why Windows 3.1 and WfW was "good enough" had more to do with the cost of memory at the time than it did with the software being "good enough". Fact is, Microsoft couldn't take the fragile assembly that was Windows in 1993 and make a 32bit OS out of it. The 5 year project that was NT proved just how hard it was for them to go ahead and do this.
To lend a bit of credence to my argument that 16bit wasn't good enough, was their effort to make OS/2 1.0 a 32bit OS. If not for IBM wanting support for the 80286, we'd have had a consumer level 32bit OS sooner than we did (although it might have sucked worse than Windows can sometimes).
- 80386 processor released in: 1985
- First 32bit Microsoft Windows release: April 1993
Result: 8 years to a relatively consumer level OS that took advantage of said processor. The 80486 was already out, and the Pentium was due very shortly (Summer 1993).I'd have to say that Intel won't be letting Microsoft do THAT again. Granted, today memory is cheap. The days of $50/MB are long gone...
-Chris
Sorry, that was supposed to be 32bit
-Chris
Yah, but there's a corollary there, in that WindowsNT for the alpha was crippled by being 64bit. Life might have been MUCH different for the Alpha had Exchange, SQL Server and Oracle been ported to Win64 back in 1996.
Why pay 2-3X the cost of your Wintel workstation to get an Alpha (oooo) that's only 20-30% faster than your current workstation, if you lose the major benefit of 64bit-ness? There was no point.
The fact that OSF/Digital Unix was around and 64bit did nothing to get all the Windows developers out there motivated to port to Alpha, simply because a 32-64bit port is about 10times easier than a 32-64bit and OS port together.
Had Microsoft released Windows 3.51 in November 1996 with 64bit ports for MIPS and Alpha, we might have a MUCH different computing landscape right now. (Might being the key word.)
I think your patent claim is going to fail on prior art. I mean, fuckedcompany.com has a HUGE list of all the current B2B bombers that have come and gone over the past two and a half years.
:-)
dotCOM to dotBOMB in 12 easy steps...
Good god, imagine a BSOD when you try and browse to www.goatse.cx with THAT thing...
They don't run away. They just give up.
:-)
Hence the white flag in every home, right next to the umbrella.
I have at LEAST 3. The original version on VHS. The remastered boxed set (1994? 1996?) on VHS. The DVD from the movie rerelease in 98?
Actually, what pisses me off most about Army of Darkness, is that I cannot seem to get a version with *ALL* of the publicly released footage. For example, the TV version has some extra scenes in the windmall that are present on the Japanese subtitled import, but that video is missing a bunch of other scenes in the castle. And the 3, count em three different DVD versions are still missing the same scenes. It's fucking annoying. One of my favorite movies, and I can't seem to get one whole cohesive piece. ARRGGH!!!!
:-)
Too bad I'll never be able to watch Bruce Campbell in any movie or TV show and not think: "Well maybe I didn't pronounce every exact syllable, but yeah, I said your damn words..."
PLEASE don't let the Matrix franchise turn into another Lucasfilm whoring effort. Since the ?remaining? two movies will be released this year, save the Mega Special Edition Gold Boxed Set for the completed trilogy. Please don't give me 20 different remastered and rereleased versions, so that I can't tell what was the original anymore. :(
troll, flamebait or funny +1... so hard to decide... so no mod point for you... you funny troll. :-)
You can't. Because even if I strain every living bacteria and undead virus out of every liquid and solid I poured into my "goop", some religious nutcase would just claim that my experiment was flawed, and it MUST have been earthly contamination, even if I *PERFECTLY* cleansed said materials.
It's like those moon bacteria. You can scrub and scrub and scrub... all it takes is missing just one bit, and you kink up the whole works.
But you know those eye-Talians (fuhgive me, I'm from BAHston...) They'll breed like rabbits when they have too...
Except you forget these small things called vaporous and conflicting "business requirements". Just because sendmail works in my company doesn't mean it's not a moving target. Acquisitions of companies and divisionalizations be damned... ;-)
Oh didn't you know? Stupidity is now a disease, and you're a racist for repressing the stupid.
</rant off>
Okidata OL-600e purchased in 1996 for $450 dollars. 75,000 pages later, still on toner #3. :-)
Now *THAT* was funny...
And that's presuming that water is a valuable commodity to any planet except our own...
As much as I hate the fool for his racist comments, I'll buttress his argument with an observation that it's partially true: with respect to the entitlement establishment that this country has built, where in some cases, your ability to get into schools and jobs depends more on the color of your skin than on the things you know.