Is a fresh Fedora install really easier than "sudo apt-get install gnome-panel" ? That would add Gnome Classic as an option on the Ubuntu login screen.

In this situation the value of the profiling tools is not for instruction tuning, but to help you notice the existence of the bad search function so you can replace it with something else.

In a large program there can be lurking n-squaredness which may not be obvious from looking at any one section of the code. For example there could be an innocent function which loops over n objects, and you may not realize that it is being called from a function twelve levels up the stack which is also looping over the same n objects.

Sometimes it's enough to just stop in the debugger a few times to realize what is slower than it should be and why. In other cases, browsing the output of a good call graph profiler can help inspire the fix faster.

How does your theory account for the current market share of Microsoft Windows?

That they are Canadian?

There's no network access down in the tunnels so the paper provides a good snapshot to read...

Back in the day, we had something better for that use case... it was called AvantGo. I guess some people today might use Plucker, but it's just not the same.

Because of the daemon feature being added in this release, I was more surprised than I otherwise would have been: when I finally managed to compile emacs 23 for Solaris 10, it started much faster than 22.1. It really is almost instantaneous now even though I do have plenty of customization going on.

Hard to beat the price as you've laid it out, but the web browsing experience on the T|C is not very satisfying by today's standards. The combination of 320x320, 802.11b (not g) and PalmOS makes me normally prefer to cross the house to use a desktop PC. Though it is convenient for ssh access to try to restart gdm or cleanly reboot a machine whose screen and keyboard has locked up for some reason.