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Comment Re:what's the point anymore (Score 5, Informative) 113

Speaking as someone who programs and administers computers on the Dorado line, that is total bollox. dreamchaser's post is also inaccurate.

Part of the Exec (= OS) is written in Assembler, the rest is in a proprietary language called Plus (a bit like Pascal) or C.
The same applies to processors and libraries provided by Unisys or third parties.
User programs can be in Fortran, Cobol, C or Assembler. Pascal and PL/1 were dropped a few years back, use of Plus in non-Unisys-written code is unsupported.

The key part of the article was Both the OSes will execute tasks on Intel's Xeon server chips through a firmware layer that translates the OS code for execution on x86 chips. Existing programs will work without recompilation, it is the Exec which needs to make the accomodations.

I don't know much (ok, anything at all) about the Libre lines but the Dorado machines have some very unusual characteristics such as 9-bit bytes which would render anything other than hardware compatibility a total disaster necessitating a forced conversion to another platform immediately.

Comment Re:Kudos (Score 1) 157

There was a recent article (here, I think) pointing out how utterly clueless a lot of legislaters are on what they are legislating on - especially technical subjects. Most of them have some kind of legal background and for this they need a bit of that along with a bit of the technical. Was this bill fundamentally misguided or was it withdrawn because of opposition (up to and including bribery) from special interests? My guess would be "yes" to both ;-)

Comment Re:well (Score 5, Informative) 557

Quite honestly, I don't think they are true.
I was there around 18 months ago and the place had a very Russian (rather than Ukranian) feel to it. It is an accident of recent history that the Crimea ended up in the Ukraine at all, it was also taken for granted before the vote that there was a large majority for secession. That majority had not been evident in the Eastern regions as of a week or so ago, what effect the Ukranian Army marching in is going to have on public opinion - I would not want to hazard a guess. The secessionists there were using all means up to and including murder of public figures to intimidate the locals, but an army fighting their way in could also cause antagonism.

Western perception is of the Ukraine is that part of the country orientates itself westwards and part towards the north (Russia). It is a simplification but wtf. The problem is that whoever was in power, they lined their own pockets. When the last west-leaning government was voted out but still in power, they proclaimed Stepan Bandera a Hero of the Ukraine. Bandera was a figure who (to a certain extent) cooperated with the Nazis against the Soviets and Russians, and whose followers "ethnic cleansed" around 70 000 Poles - mostly women and children - around 1943. He himself was interned at the time because the Nazis considered Ukrainians to be only slightly less sub-human than they saw the Russians. Bandera's people had nothing agaist Ukrainian Jews.
Still, those who distrust "western leaning" politicians have been provided with good reasons.

Comment Re:more downgrades (Score 2) 688

Someone asked the Seamonkey developers months ago if they were going to implement Australis: No, not enough resources, not enough interest.
Firefox are essentially making the same step Microsoft did with Windows 8 - unifying their look-and-feel across platforms (PC/Laptop, Tablet, Phone) and we all know how that went. Seamonkey makes absolutely no sense on a Tablet or Phone so the developers feel no need to move that way. What could cause problems in the medium term - and I simply don't know if this is a danger - is that the Seamonkey code is largely based on the Firefox and Thunderbird code bases. Bugs in F+T propagate across to Seamonkey, as do the fixes. I *think* that Australis is independent of the underlying code but the chances of me being wrong are probably 50%.

Comment Re:Big deal (Score 4, Insightful) 132

Snowden supplies some of the answers.
The GCHQ and NSA's surveillance of Italy specifically included looking for commercial advantages. It looks very much as though the same applies to Germany so it seems obvious what this is a general pattern. My first thought when I saw this article was that the FBI is trying to claim "everybody does it" - hell, they may even be right.
What annoyed the Germans so much was that it was their supposed friends acting this way.

Comment Re:More reason to keep using Firefox! (Score 1) 1482

Firefox users! Boycott OKCupid!
So this guy was against Prop 8 six years ago. Big deal. I wonder what Steve Balmer's position (ouch!) was on Prop 8 back then, are visitors allowed to use Internet Planet Exploder? The guy in charge of Apple now? Is Safari access welcome?

This has to be an April 1 thing, right?

Comment Re:Is it really that costly? (Score 1) 423

My "old laptop" - it was released as "Vista ready" which gives an indication as to its age - has 1GB and a Core Duo processor.
It is totally unuseable under XP for several minutes after booting, XP is doing all the things it really *has* to do with the very highest priority.

I'll admit it runs decently after that.

It is not going to be upgraded for several reasons, what I have done is to uninstall security holes like Flash or Java. I never browsed as Administrator anyway, people who did are a big reason XP is considered so insecure.

Comment Re:Globalization (Score 4, Interesting) 198

Russia is upset about the NSA and the US + EU's reaction to them taking over the Crimea.
China is upset about the NSA and is backing Russia over Crimea.
Android is open source.
Both countries have the resources to go through Android with a fine toothed comb. This looks pretty much like the best short-term option they had - lets see if someone now buys up Symbian, it comes from a Finnish company and could be a good starting point.

Comment Re:Good for Linux (Score 1) 367

I have an older laptop which is set up to dual-boot between XP and Linux. It only has 1GB of memory and the dvd drive crapped out years ago so upgrading is not an option. The Linux version I have on there is long-life, but updates ceased at the end of last year and it was a *lot* younger than XP. Suggesting that a Linux release will be around longer than XP was is being optimistic, and if there is such a beast, was that choice obvious 10 years ago?

In my previous job 10 years ago I had responsibility for maintaining a small Linux server for three years. I was running NFS and FTP on it. In those three years the distribution's FTP-server-of-choice changed twice, I kept with ProFTPD because that way my scripts still worked.
XP was supported for far longer than any version of Linux was.

What upgrade path should they have taken? XP's end-of-life was actually deferred a couple of times - basically because Vista was such a turkey. Once Windows 7 came out that option was no longer necessary. Apple also have shorter cycles than Microsoft.

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