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Comment Re:This is great! (Score 2) 353

. . . you forgot the part about how she is going to lay off Americans . . . revoke their citizenship, and force them to leave the country, and try their luck elsewhere in the world.

She also ditched the old concept of "The HP Way". I'm guessing that she will change the "Pledge of Allegiance, to the Flag" to "With Freedom and Justice . . . for the Rich".

Comment Re:SpaceShipTwo (Score 1) 447

"Hi, welcome to your flight to Hell! Our flight attendants will now show you our emergency procedures!"

"There is no life vest underneath your seat. If you would like one, they are available for rent for this flight for an extra $50."

"If the cabin loses pressure, oxygen masks will fall down. However, oxygen will only flow through the mask, if you have purchased our oxygen plan, also for $50. First, pay the flight attendant. Then put the mask on yourself. Then share the oxygen with any infants or incapacitated passengers next to you . . . "

Comment Re:Won't everything need to be recompiled? (Score 1) 85

AIX is full of "hacks" or "modifications" in the TCP/IP stack to greatly improve the performance on POWER architecture on MP systems. Have any of these made it into mainstream Linux? Are they even valid on Intel architecture?

For instance, when running a benchmark on an AIX POWER system, try increasing the load, and see if your results go up. It can happen, that you increase the load, the CPU utilization climbs, but you benchmark remains the same. Well, you might be hanging in spin locks. AIX supports instrumented locks, so you can check this with the lockstat command.

Another potential problem is that two many global variables are located in the same CPU cache line. So you can pad single variables, so that they are in separate cache lines. Or, even worse, you have one global variable that is being constantly updated by all processors, and is constantly causing cache invalidation on the memory bus. Then you need to do a hardware memory bus trace, with an HP logic analyzer that looks like something out of Hentai Porn. Then you need to write up a patent or something:

https://patents.justia.com/patent/6430659

So I'm just wondering if all this poop will be done for Linux on OpenPOWER . . .

Comment Re:Won't everything need to be recompiled? (Score 2) 85

AIX was pretty cool way back when, when they introduced 64-bit support. The processor was 64-bit. However, you could run a 32-bit kernel or a 64-bit kernel. And you could run a 32-bit process or a 64-bit process on either of the kernels.

So what does some poor chump (i.e. me) who is tasked with writing a device driver for AIX need to do? Well, first #ifdef the code, so you compile different stuff, depending on if you are building a 32-bit or 64-bit version of the device driver. Then you needed to add simple "if" statements in the device driver, to check if you were running a process in 32-bit or 64-bit mode. Then according to the mix, you would have to thunk the addresses, when copying the data from user space into kernel space.

Fun stuff. I can't believe that I actually did this in a former life . . .

Comment Re:Won't everything need to be recompiled? (Score 1) 85

A simple recompile won't do it . . . some programs, like your TCP/IP stack have dependencies on Endianess. IBM's POWER has been traditionally Big Endian. Linux is mostly Little Endian. There are C macros, ntoh() and hton() that do the required byte swapping for you . . . if you remember to use them! I have seen code that would run fine on a Big Endian machine . . . but would fall over and die on a Little Endian machine.

Sorting out all these problems is painful grunt work. Although, at one point, IBM tried to port AIX to Intel64. It was called Monterrey, or something like that. So IBM does have experience in doing this. It's just a question if they will fork out the dollars required to do this. And if the people know how to do this have been laid off.

Comment Re:N4N? (Score 1) 365

No, but he should be forced to dress like a woman, on odd or even days, depending on whether his birthday is odd or even.

That is my simple and effective cure for sexual diversity in IT. Half the time men will be forced to dress as women, and women be forced to dress like men. Hey, presto, when someone from the government comes to do a headcount, he or she will find an equal number of men and women. Problem solved.

Jesse Jackson can be placated by having a whites wear black face and blacks wear white face policy, as well.

The most fun would be the Native American Indian role: You get to turn your cubicle into a steamy, smoky sweat box, while consuming hallucinogenic Peyote.

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