I find the interesting thing is that last time I used fglrx drivers - which was quite a few years ago, maybe before AMD bought them - they exhibited this very behaviour on Xvideo. I'm rather curious what makes them decide that a simple buffer swap for the entire screen should be done by drawing it in little triangles (presumably a variant of tiled rendering, but it's a full buffer swap!) in an unsynchronised random order (well, roughly from the right to left - but why not display order, top to bottom?). Even when they did get vsync activated, it synced not to the vertical blank but about 1/9th into the screen - so you got a *guaranteed* horisontal tear in the same place instead of random jagged ones. That was all with just one monitor - when I ran two, some versions would synchronize to the wrong monitor. Meanwhile, the very new open source radeon driver support used a rock steady video overlay.

ATI proudly proclaimed their two-step release cycle back then. What we saw in reality was drivers getting released with alternating sets of bugs. Of course, support for something as plain as video playback wasn't a priority, so maybe there were improvements I didn't notice as much.

What fascinates me is not so much that they get issues when running on multiple monitors, but that the same weird artifacts keep popping up. It's not like modern graphics cards don't have the memory to use readout driven frame buffer base address swaps.

In all, I'd say the artifacts are not news worthy, but their longevity and recurrence are cause for shame.

Dotless names are used for local hosts (and frequently other shortcuts, like ssh aliases). Many systems use the dot to decide whether to do a global DNS lookup; if there aren't enough dots in there, the local domain gets appended. It's a lot like pathnames with the slash separator, where slash in front makes it an absolute path. What most people don't realise is that there are absolute DNS names too, which end with a period. If someone were to register the "search" top level domain, the URL would look like "http://search." Including the period. On /. of all places, this ought to be known.

DOS did have limited multi-tasking. The cursor blinking is performed by hardware (so doesn't even indicate DOS is running), and DOS has had background print spooling from disk since version 2, not that anybody I know ever used it. We did use a bunch of other TSRs (a TLA for programs that keep working after returning to the prompt, they were that common), such as DOSKEY or QDISK. True multitasking was achieved with other addons, such as DESQview or VMIX, and even DOS itself provided task switching via DOS Shell (after version 4).
The indication of being back at the prompt did work in combination with the fact that it wouldn't do any work unless and until instructed (in other words, it's in a stable state). You would know not to interrupt a print job simply because you just started it.

You must be playing a different Project Butter than I've seen. It would be a bit better if they got rid of the frequent hangups, often followed by an in-your-face message that the *app* is hung - which only appears after it starts responding again, proving that the UI was as hung as the app. It's not only slow, it's wrong and counterproductive.

My favourite part of that changelog is "Firefox 21 hasn't reached its feature freeze yet."

Actually, the shininess of gold is a direct consequence of its electrical and chemical properties. It's metallic, which causes the shine via electromagnetic reflection, and it stays shiny because it doesn't corrode easily. Similarly diamonds (and rubies, and sapphires) have particular value for their mechanical and optical properties; the very same that made them pretty and resilient. In conclusion, any other material with those properties will also be pretty, so your assertion is incorrect. Other properties did contribute to the use in trade and decoration, such as weight and malleability.

Sorry. I naïvely expected Slashdot to do something right, and not mangle my text input beyond all recognition. Slashdot filters out Braille letters even if entered in HTML entity form, so what I tried to enter does not seem possible.

Nope, it looks like this: â
ââzâ"â' âââââ'ââ'ââz âââzâzâ'â--âZâ

Looks like a decent start to me. I'm going to want better controls, obviously, as the SDL build seemed to think the world is a crappy touchscreen. I tried Disgaea (backup of my own disc), but it got stuck at the loading screen; not really sure what it was waiting for. I did rather expect the unimplemented functions it warned of, Atrac+ doesn't seem that popular - but it's used extensively by this game, which was what I bought the PSP for in the first place.
When building, the inline assembly for CPUID didn't want to work (replaced it with cpuid device support), and I had to add a -march=core2 flag to enable SSE2.

Sorry, your description is just historically wrong. What you call DOS isn't at all based on removing the features of Unix; it grew from QDOS, which was a Quick and Dirty imitation of CP/M. It eventually acquired a few Unix type features like directories, I/O redirection and device names. Also, at the time, Unix (far from the first multiuser OS, but quite popular due to its portability) was not particularly concerned with networking; things like UUCP (Unix to Unix CoPy) and Fidonet handled such tasks before the Internet (begun as ARPAnet) spread. The growing security model in Windows comes from an entirely different model of threats; MS indeed feel that the user is the threat, since a large number of them do not know what the computer does. Their solution is MS taking more control over systems that aren't theirs, since they feel even more threatened by users who do know (or want to learn) what they're doing.

They used to. It started to get a bit less reliable somewhere around the 3000 series. At this point they're yet another PC manufacturer short on ideas with a legal department that considers customer hostility a good thing. It seems a common problem when a company grows enough to hire administrative people who aren't involved with the products.

They've confirmed that board design files, FPGA logic, and documentation will be public. We just need to get the project started!