No idea. I don't know if the instructions for computing PC-relative addresses in an ISA without an architectural PC are patentable. They also exist in RISC V (not sure which came first), so if they do then it's going to be a problem for Kriste et al. Nothing else in there is especially novel: like ARMv8, it's a nicely designed compilation target, but it doesn't do anything that's especially exciting.

I didn't look at the floating point stuff in much detail, so there may be something there, although the biggest changes in recent versions of the MIPS specs have been that they're more closely aligned with the IEEE floating point standards, so it's hard to imagine anything there.

The biggest difference between MIPS64r6 and ARMv8 is that the MIPS spec explicitly reserves some of the opcode space for vendor-specific extensions (we use this space, although our core predates the current spec - it's largely codifying existing opcode use). This allows, for example, Cavium to add custom instructions that are useful for network switches but not very useful for other things. ARMv8, in contrast, expects that any non-standard extensions are in the form of accelerator cores with a completely different ISA. This means that any code compiled for one ARMv8 core should run on any ARMv8 implementation, which is a big advantage. With MIPS, anything compiled for the core ISA should run everywhere, but people using custom variants (e.g. Cisco and Juniper, who use the Cavium parts in some of their products) will ship code that won't run on another vendors' chips.

Historically, this has been a problem for the MIPS ecosystem because each MIPS vendor has forked GCC and GNU binutils, hacked it up to support their extensions, but done so in a way that makes it impossible to merge the code upstream (because they've broken every other MIPS chip in the process) and left their customers with an ageing toolchain to deal with. I've been working with the Imagination guys to try to make sure that the code in LLVM is arranged in such a way that it's relatively easy to add vendor-specific extensions without breaking everything else.

Imagination doesn't currently have any 64-bit cores to license, but I expect that they will quite soon...

Assuming that your code doesn't do anything that is vaguely MIPS specific. If it is, then there is little benefit in using MIPS32r2 now - ARMv7 is likely to be closer than MIPS32r2 to MIPS32r6 in terms of compatibility with C (or higher-level language) source code compatibility.

Basically, because the MIPS ISA sucks as a compiler target. Delay slots are annoying and provide little benefit with modern microarchitectures. The only way to do PC-relative addressing is an ugly hack in the ABI, requiring that every call uses jalr with $t9 in the call, which means that you can't use bal for short calls. The lwl / lwr instructions for unaligned loads are just horrible and introduce nasty pipeline dependencies. The branch likely instructions are almost always misused, but as they're the only way of doing a branch without a delay slot there's often no alternative.

There's no price yet because they're giving away the first production run to people who are going to do interesting things with them. Unfortunately, this is a really bad time to do anything MIPS related (and I say this as someone who hacks on a MIPS IV compatible softcore and the LLVM MIPS back end). Imagination has just released the MIPS64r6 and MIPS32r6 specs. These are the biggest revisions to the MIPS ISA since MIPS III, which introduced 64-bit support. They've removed a load of legacy crap like the lwr and lwl instructions and the branch-likely instruction family and added things like compact (no delay slot) branch instructions, the requirement that hardware supports unaligned loads and stores (or, at least, that the OS traps and emulates them), and added much better support for PC-relative addressing. The result is a nice ISA, which is not backwards compatible with MIPS32r2 or MIPS64r2, the ISA that these boards use. Any investment in software for MIPS now is going to be wasted when products with the new ISA come out.

For building big C++ projects, as long as the disk (yay SSDs!) can keep up, you can throw as many cores as you can get at the compile step and get a speedup, then sit dependent on single-thread performance for the linking. I got a huge speedup going from a Core 2 Duo to a Sandy Bridge quad i7, then another noticeable speedup going to a Haswell i7 in my laptop. The laptop is now sufficiently fast that I do a lot more locally - previously I'd mostly work on a remote server with 32 cores, 256GB of RAM (and a 3TB mirrored ZFS array with a 512GB SSD for ZIL and L2ARC), but now the laptop is only about a factor of 2 slower in terms of build times, so for developing individual components (e.g. LLVM+Clang) I'll use the laptop and only build the complete system on the server.

There are several nice features of a landline, but they can't (in the UK, at least) compete on price. The line rental alone for a landline costs more than I spend on calls on my mobile (pre-pay, no contract, no monthly fees). Calls from my mobile are 3p/minute, a landline is £16/month. I'd need to spend almost 9 hours on the phone each month before I spent as much on my mobile as a landline would cost me before I even made any calls. And then, for the kicker, the calls from the landline cost 9p/min (+15p setup) for calls to other landlines or 12p/min (+15p setup) for calls to mobiles. There's no possible justification for calls from the landline costing 3-4 times as much as calls from the mobile on top of the extortionate line rental. If I wanted to pay BT even more, for another £3 I could get free evening and weekend calls to landlines, but calls to mobiles would still be the same price. For £7.50 on top of the line rental, I'd get free calls to landlines, and calls to mobiles would only be twice the cost of my mobile. Almost everyone I call has a mobile though, so in exchange for paying BT an amount equivalent to about 12 hours of calls on my mobile per month, I could then pay double per minute what I pay for calls on my mobile with no line rental.

I enjoyed that article, but it's worth noting that vi actually is standard.

Lighting (the Mozilla calendar app) is also pretty nice. Rust is gaining a lot of interest as a systems programming language, although not so much in the application space.

Again, hand waving without specifics. The most noticeable change for me was that they button to customise the UI is now on the toolbar by default, rather than hidden away somewhere. What can you no longer customise that you could previously?

I really don't understand this complaint. The UI changes were relatively small, and one of the biggest ones was making the 'customize UI' button more prominent in the new versions.

I switched to Firefox on Android recently because Chrome for Android has the same handicapped cookie management policy as the older Android Browser, but Firefox lets me run the self-destructing cookies plugin, which does exactly what I've wished for the last 15 years all browsers would do by default.

No, it's developed in the open, but it's really hard to get changes pushed upstream. We have a bunch of patches for the FreeBSD support and to improve sandboxing, and it looks like it will end up taking 2-3 years to get them all upstreamed. Meanwhile, the code follows the traditional Google development model of gratuitously refactoring things (are Google people paid by number of lines of code changed?), so it's a lot of effort just to keep the patches up to date.

Building schools after you've been seen to come in and overthrow their government doesn't buy you nearly as much goodwill as building schools after you've just helped them overthrow a foreign invader and then removed your military presence from the country.

That's a rather one-sided view of what happened. Yes, the Soviet Union did invade Afghanistan as part of pushing its global ideology, much like the USA invaded Vietnam. But the stone age state of Afghanistan at the time of the US invasion in 2001 was a direct result of America supporting religious fanatics in a proxy war, the mujahideen, who after the war ended and the Soviet's were defeated went on to become the Taliban. That's why bin Laden is so famously a former ally of the US.

The USA is not only building an empire but doing so in plain sight of everyone. To quote Putin directly:

Our partners, especially in the United Sates, always clearly formulate their own geopolitical and state interests and follow them with persistence. Then, using the principle “You’re either with us or against us” they draw the whole world in. And those who do not join in get ‘beaten’ until they do.

This principle is most clearly visible in two acts. One is that the sanctions on Iran are built as a "you're with us or against us" model. Any country that is seen by America to be "undermining" the sanctions i.e. not joining in is itself sanctioned. And the second act is again sanctions based: every financial institution in the world is being taken over by Washington via a system of recursive ("viral" if you like) sanctions that require banks to obey the USA even if that would contradict local laws. The goal is to collect tax from American's abroad. It's called FATCA and it's resulted in many, many nations having to repeal their own privacy laws, in order to allow banks to become agents of the US Government. They were given no choice in the matter.

So the USA has found ways of forcing people in countries all over the world to: (a) engage in economic warfare against America's enemies and (b) pay taxes directly to America, all regardless of what the local government wants or how the local people vote.

Being able to conscript people to their fights and force payment of taxes is the very foundation of empire itself.

Check back in 6 months, compare what they reported on this conflict to what really happened. Because they were reporting the Ukrainian protests as being a bunch of Fascists who, if they had their way, would be building concentration camps for Russian speakers. Of course, the protesters won, got new elections, and turned out to be what they appeared to be; moderate youths who want increased relations with the EU.

Let's set aside the idea that RT is somehow horrendously biased and we can learn what really happened by, er, reading our totally neutral and trustworthy western newspapers.

Let's instead focus on an indisputable fact. This wonderful new parliament put in place by moderate youths who wanted only increased EU relations, on the very next day after the ex-President fled (the one who did actually win an election), voted overwhelmingly to repeal a law that made Russian an official language. Their first act wasn't to improve relations with the EU, or heal the giant rift between east and west Ukraine, their first order of business was to drive an even bigger wedge right between their own citizens.

Is it any wonder that this glorious democratic government our leaders love so much reacted to an independence movement in their country with massive military force, and has been shelling their own citizens ever since?

By the way, here's how RT reported it at the time. Seems pretty accurate to me.

That's sort of like saying the Soviet's didn't invade anywhere during the cold war. They just supported puppet governments and militias in their place, as did America (hence Osama bin Laden being a former employee of the CIA).

They all still have both political sovereignty, and also control of their legal borders.

You can't claim that America deciding unilaterally to engage in "regime change" to use the delightful term is respecting political sovereignty. What happens is the USA evaluates a government and if it's not one they like, sometimes they remove it by force and replace it with a new one they like better. Said country has "control of their borders" only if you ignore that the US military operates within those borders at will.

While people may have been all pissy about Bush, unilateral wars, and Team America World Police, the fact of the matter is that it was better than the alternative.

What alternative is that, exactly? That Iraq invades America? That the Afghans conquer Europe?

I'm trying to figure out how the world would look if Team America had not said "Fuck Yeah" so many times in the past decades. I think it'd probably look much the same as it does now, except quite possibly ISIS would not exist.