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Comment Re:Someone explain this to me (Score 1) 710

I remember back in the 1990s (I think) reading news stories about corporations pursuing 'increased productivity' per worker as a strategy for success, particularly in relation to international competition. Is there any other way to translate that language into plain English other than to say that what was desired was less wages for the same amount of work?

Yes. It could be translated as "more output for the same amount of work", if the increased productivity is per-work-hour productivity. Whether that translates into "less pay for the same amount of work" or not depends on whether wages grow with productivity. In the US, they grew with productivity from the late 1940's until the early 1970's, but haven't done so after that.

Comment Re:The problem is not switch speed (Score 1) 183

Not the production process so much as the design process. It'd mean starting over from scratch with a whole new architecture, redoing decades of work in hardware and software.

Presumably the hardware and software to which you're referring is the hardware to manufacture the chips and the software used to design them, considering that the asynchronous processor that was "faster (~3x) and consume less energy (~2x)" was an "asynchronous, Pentium-compatible test chip that ran three times as fast, on half the power, as its synchronous equivalent.", so the asynchronous processors themselves don't have to have a shiny new instruction set architecture. (The original PDP-10 KA10 processor was asynchronous - "[the arithmetic processor] operates asynchronously using hardware subroutines, whereby the start of each operation is triggered by the completion of the previous operation rather than by a trigger from a synchronous timing chain" - but the KS10 was a synchronous microcoded machine using AMD 2900 bit-slices.)

Comment Re:Half a century (Score 3, Informative) 113

Uh, I thought this was the descendant of Burroughs B5000? You know, the computer that Alan Kay tells everyone to take a look at to understand how silly today's architectures look in comparison.

It's both the descendants of the 36-bit Univac 1108 and the 48-bit-plus-tags Burroughs 6500 (very much like, but not compatible with, the B5000).

Comment Re:Isn't Samsung the largest UNIX vendor? *grin* (Score 1) 396

But is Mach UNIX? I don't mean 'POSIX compliant' because Windows NT 4.0 is POSIX compliant.

If Mach is "the Mach kernel", I don't think it offers UNIX APIs, but at least two OSes based on Mach have passed the Single UNIX Specification test suite (which NT 4.0 hasn't, and which even Interix^Wthe Subsystem for Unix-based Applications hasn't).

Comment Re: Legacy file systems should be illegal (Score 1) 396

Forget about moving Windows off NTFS.

Microsoft haven't. I guess they realized that software actually used alternate data streams, so they had to add them back to ReFS, although only "up to 128K for both Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2", so they're more like "big extended attributes" than full alternate data streams.

Comment Re:Legacy file systems should be illegal (Score 2) 396

10.5 added hardlinking.

Are you certain? The ln command, when run without -s, would return an error if you used it under Tiger or earlier?

Or are you referring to hardlinking to directories, which was something UNIX traditionally supported, but which required root permissions (as it was used by the mkdir command to create the . and .. directories), and which was removed at one point (4.2BSD, as that added the mkdir() system call, making the ability of link() to link to a directory unnecessary?), and added back in 10.5 with the introduction of Time Machine, so that it could be used in backup trees as a very hacky form of de-duplication (each backup tree is a complete copy of the file system being backed up, but if there's an older copy of an unchanged file or a directory everything under which is unchanged, the "copy" is done by making a hard link rather than by copying the file to the backup disk).

Instead of tackling "bitrot" head-on, Apple seems to have taken the "make backups easy" approach. This works to some degree, but since the backups use hardlinking, you really only have two copies of the data -- the one on your main drive, and the one on your backup drive. This makes cycling your backup drives even more important than it already was.

That's what happens with any backup scheme that does incremental backups - if a file hasn't changed, a copy isn't made.

Comment Re:Since when does Qt "work" with OS X? (Score 4, Informative) 636

No this is NOT a troll, please read.

A claim of cross-platform is one thing. But in practice I know of no significant apps using Qt that exist in the wild that work on OS X.

Please provide a link to any mainstream working application for Mac OS X that uses Qt.

$ otool -L /Applications/Google\ Earth.app//Contents//MacOS//Google\ Earth
/Applications/Google Earth.app//Contents//MacOS//Google Earth:
@rpath/libgoogleearth_free.dylib (compatibility version 0.0.0, current version 0.0.0)
/System/Library/Frameworks/Cocoa.framework/Versions/A/Cocoa (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 19.0.0)
/System/Library/Frameworks/Carbon.framework/Versions/A/Carbon (compatibility version 2.0.0, current version 155.0.0)
@rpath/QtCore.framework/Versions/4/QtCore (compatibility version 4.7.0, current version 4.7.4)
@rpath/QtGui.framework/Versions/4/QtGui (compatibility version 4.7.0, current version 4.7.4)
@rpath/QtWebKit.framework/Versions/4/QtWebKit (compatibility version 4.7.0, current version 4.7.4)
@rpath/QtNetwork.framework/Versions/4/QtNetwork (compatibility version 4.7.0, current version 4.7.4)

...

I don't know of a single one because Qt's support for XCode is incredibly poor.

Do you have to use Xcode, the IDE, to develop OS X apps? Or by "Xcode" do you mean "Xcode the IDE, plus the command-line tools"?

Comment Did we check for confounding variables? (Score 1) 187

Or is there really nothing other than CO2 levels which correlates strongly with the use of portable classrooms and with absenteeism? Perhaps low socioeconomic status has nothing to do with which school districts have more trouble affording permanent buildings? Perhaps higher numbers of children per family are unrelated to which schools are overcrowded?

It's hard to tell, when the bibliography consists of "studies show".

What's sad is that this is still better-than-average science and science reporting. We got an actual transcript, and the correlation seems to be at least a step above the "people who wear parachutes are more likely to die in skydiving accidents!" level which is so good at grabbing headlines.

Comment Re:Just like Bulldozer? (Score 1) 345

IBM introduced the 64-bit version of the PowerPC architecture in 2002,

Well before that, and, yes, the PPC 620 was used in some systems shipped by Groupe Bull. IBM's first systems using 64-bit PPC processors came out in 1997.

and I think that some of their mainframe processors were 64-bit about 2 years before that.

2 years before 2002, yes.

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