If it's a hobby project, why not open source it? You can chose which patches you accept, so you retain creative control, but you might find that some people like to work on the bits that you find boring.

It's called 'memory deduplication' in other operating systems that implemented the feature (earlier) and in the research literature, but I can understand why Microsoft would not want to use a term that indicates that they're one of the last OS vendors to implement a feature.

It's not always a clear win. Memory deduplication increases the number of CoW pages, which increases the number of TLB faults. It also requires periodically scanning memory that hasn't been recently referenced, which introduces a lot of cache churn (you need to build a hash table of all pages, look for collisions, and then update pages, which introduces hash collisions.) The calculation also requires a lot of locking in the VM subsystem, which can harm performance on SMP machines. Unless you're so memory-constrained that you're about to start swapping, you'll generally get better performance by turning it off. The only place where you get a really big win is where you have a load of VMs which each have a few hundred MBs of identical OS code that can be deduplicated and is read-only so will never cause a fault.

You also don't reduce TLB pressure (one of the top causes of performance degradation on modern systems), because even systems with tagged TLBs don't usually have a way of specifying a bitmask of ASIDs that a page belongs to, so even if it's mapped at the same address you can't share TLB entries.

Macrobenchmarks that I've run show about a 10% slowdown for PIC on i386 when tested on Sandybridge and Haswell. Feel free to run your own. It used to be more significant, but 10% is still quite noticeable on jobs that take an hour or two...

The big cost is the lost of a GPR to the register allocator. You have to store %eip (or whatever %eip was when you did your one-instruction-forward branch followed by pop) in a GPR. The call-pop sequence is usually subject to micro-op fusion on modern x86 CPUs and so is transformed into a single get-eip operation that doesn't screw up store forwarding for the top few stack slots like a normal pop, so it's almost free.

On x86-64, you do not have this issue for two reasons. The first is that you have a lot more registers, so losing one doesn't hurt the register allocator so much. The second is that %rip can be used as an operand directly, so you can compute the target address without needing to copy it to another register.

Saving a few hundred KB of i-cache is often a very large performance win on modern CPUs.

Logic (at least up to first-order logic), set theory (some is covered, but not its connection to logic), game theory (essential to so many things, not covered at school at all), and graph theory (the basis for pretty much anything involving computers) would be at the top of my list. Anything where proofs dominate, rather than rote application of rules (we have machines for that now!) would be nice to see. Probability is already well covered in the UK, not sure about the USA. Statistics would be helpful to pretty much anyone.

Don't drop the calculus, but you can teach people to understand calculus in a couple of months. Having them spend a couple of years going from being a thousand times slower than a computer at solving differential equations to being 500 times slower isn't worth it. It's not like simple arithmetic, where getting a calculator out and typing the problem in can be a bottleneck.

They just released the first sub-$100 Windows Phone, so it seems that someone agrees with you. Surface is aimed more at the corporate market, so the price doesn't matter as much. Spending $1000 on a computer that lasts a couple of years and makes an employee more productive is usually a good investment.

Huh? DLLs are shared libraries. They've been shared between all applications that use them since 16-bit versions of Windows. The only time that wasn't the case was when you couldn't locate them at the same virtual address (win32 dlls are not position-independent code, because PIC is slower, so are statically relocated for a particular address), but in 64-bit apps DLLs are PIC and so that's not an issue.

The first does not necessarily follow from the first. They've encountered lots of species with cloning technology. It's never stated on-screen that they don't make use of this. The Borg nursery scene could easily be interpreted as showing newly cloned Borg with their first cybernetic implants (disregarding the Voyager stuff, where they changed the premise of the Borg beyond all recognition). In particular, they claim that 'We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own' - given that most species become extinct after encountering the Borg, this would be a very short-term strategy if they were not preserving genetic samples for cloning - you get a few decades of life out of the new intake and then you no longer have their biological distinctiveness.

Even if they didn't normally reproduce in this way, they seem good at adapting. I doubt that it would take long before they adapted in response to the threat of a lack of new species to assimilate.

So, what you're saying is, the SNES controller is good for games where a gamepad controller is the best UI, but an analogue pad is better for games where a keyboard and mouse is the best UI?

Should be? Sure. Is? Absolutely not, in any shipping design.

It's sad how few votes they've got. Advanced technology, realistic motivations (although not explained early on), plausible explanation for the Fermi paradox. What's not to like.

Anyone who didn't vote for them because they've not read the Revelation Space series should go away and read it now.

Why? In the first episode showing the Borg, they found a creche with Borg children, so they were still able to reproduce their biological components. Given how quickly they adapted without assimilating their enemies (and repaired damage), they also seemed more than capable of improving their technological abilities. You could argue that they couldn't survive without external stimulus, but that's pretty common for most lifeforms.

That's not entirely clear from the canon. Some of the dialog indicates that, within the collective, there are individual viewpoints, but that the whole acts based on the consensus view. With direct neural interfaces, there's a lot of time to debate possible courses of action before any decision has to be made.

Macrovision worked by setting the brightness to maximum during the flyback period when the beam is turned off. What kind of device were your friends using where this interfered with the signal? It was a problem for (some) VHS recorders, because they averaged the brightness over the entire frame and didn't ignore the flyback interval, so you ended up with a very dark copy.

Just to clarify, your question is:

A device can run arbitrary malicious code and is connected to a physical link to your car, to a system that has physical links to your engine management system, and was not written with security in mind, what's the worst that can happen?

Because calculus is a massively overrated part of mathematics. It is emphasised in the British education system because, when it was introduced, having accurate artillery tables was seen as important. It is emphasised in the US education system because, when it was introduced, being able to put a satellite into orbit with incredibly primitive computers (that might fail) was considered important.

Anything that involves pouring loads of money into blue-sky R&D tends to have big pay-offs. The question is whether one is a better investment than the other.