Overrated is not Disagree. Read the FAQ

Concentrate more on promoting than on demoting. Try to be impartial about this; simply disagreeing with a comment is not a valid reason to mark it down. The goal here is to share ideas, to sift through the haystack and find needles, and to keep spammers and griefers in check.

Sometimes comments are disproportionately up-moderatedâ"this probably means several moderators saw it at nearly the same time, and their cumulative scores exaggerated its merit. (Example: A knock-knock joke at +5, Funny.) Such a comment is Overrated.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/

If only they would allow directed donations. I'd gladly donate a hundred bucks towards the Electrolysis project but more likely my money would go towards FirefoxOS (ugh).

The one reply to this so far is nothing more than an expression of disgust; but that's better than modding down. Remember, dear moderators, there is no -1 Disagree mod. The other negative mods are not there as substitutes. It was left out on purpose. If you want to refute the parent, put forth an argument.

That might actually be useful if 1. The person being searched believes it works. 2. The person doing the searching knows how to read the expressions and gestures of the person being searched.

I'm given to understand that the highly effective Israeli airport security uses that kind of technique, although AFAIK props aren't involved. They ask you a question and it's not so much the answer they're looking for as it is the way you answer.

Actually if the failure rate was exactly 100%, it would be a valuable tool:
it would very reliabily show where NOT to look for water, and by deduction you'll know that you need to look for water at the remaining NOT dowsed places.

The real failure rate would be something very high, but not close to 100%.
By random chance, you're bound to find water, eventually.

The whole point of a scientific statistical test would be to see if the few successes occur as frequently as random chance, or if dowsing has a slightly higher success rate that could NOT be explained purely by random chance.

Came to instigate a reinstallation. Saw that I was beaten to it. Left satisfied.

Everytime someone mentions Deus Ex, someone reinstalls Deus Ex

How many other nouns form plurals by adding a d?

UPS aren't charging you for the weight of the trolley they used to load your package onto the delivery van though are they.

If I download a web page, I expect to pay for the bytes leaving my router and arriving back at it.
If I download an encrypted web page, I expect those bytes to include that encryption overhead.

On neither occasion do I know or care about the encapsulation. That's the ISP's issue, not mine.

Just like the fuel in the van is UPS's issue, not mine.

Maybe because it's a public holiday in some countries. Enterprisey stuff likes to know things like that.

As to there being two, I understand that the benighted heathens of the Byzantine persuasion calculate it differently to the bead-jigglers in Rome.

Then again, it's PHP so all bets are off.

Two members of the EU each have enough nukes to target every US town and city of more than 100,000 people.

It is evident from your posts here that you have some personal issues to deal with.

It is NOT normal to lash out with a vitriolic tirade of graphic sexual threats under ANY circumstances, much less being "provoked" by inflammatory speech. It is sick, and it should not be tolerated or even expected in a peaceful civilized society.

You don't let a thief go or belittle the victim because the door wasn't locked at the time or there were no bars on the windows so a break in should have been expected. You don't defend a rapist and blame a rape victim because she wore a bikini to the beach on a hot day. And yoy certainly don't threaten someone with grave injury or death because what they say offends you. Actions of this sort are those of sick, twisted people...not always evil people as they could be victims of their upbringings, but sick people who need help nonetheless.

At the end of the day, whether or not you play video games is a choice. You have the right to decide not to buy a game. You have the right not to agree with the context or subject of the game. What Anita does is assume that since she's offended, that the games have no right to exist.

The quotes around the "software" mean that i refer about the firmware/microcode as a piece of software designed to run on top of the actual execution units of a CPU.

Slow: yes, indeed. But not impossible to do.

Yeah, I pretty well know that RISCs don't (all) have flags.
Now, again, how is that preventing the micro-code swap that dinkypoo refers to (and that was actually done on transmeta's crusoe)?
You'll just end with a bigger clunkier firmware that for a given front-end instruction from the same ISA, will translate into a big bunch of back-end micro-ops.
Yup. A RISC's ALU won't update flags. But what's preventing the firmware to dispatch *SEVERAL* micro-ops ? first to do the base operation and then aditionnal instructions to update some register emulating flags?
Yes, it's slower. But, no that don't make micro-code based change of supported ISA impossible, only not as efficient.

Yes, and please explain how that makes *definitely impossible* to run x86 instruction? and not merely *somewhat slower*?

Slow, but still doable and done.

Now, keep in mind that:
- Itanium is a VLIW processor. That's an entirely different beast, with an entirely different approach to optimisation, and back during Itanium development the logic was "The compiled will handle the optimising". But back then such magical compiler didn't exist and anyway didn't have the necessary information at compile time (some type of optimisation requires information only available at run time. Hence doable in microcode, not in compiler).
Given the compilers available back then, VLIW sucks for almost anything except highly repeated task. Thus it was a bit popular for cluster nodes running massively parallel algorithms (and at some point in time VLIW were also popular in Radeon GFX cards). But VLIW sucks for pretty much anything else.
(Remember that, for example, GCC has auto-vectorisaion and well performing Profile-Guided-Optimisation only since recently).
So "supporting an alternate x86 instruction on Itanium was slow" has as much to do with "supporting an instruction set on a back-end that's not tailored for the front-end is slow" as it has to do with "Itanic sucks for pretty much everything which isn't a highly optimized kernel-function in HPC".

But still it proves that runing a different ISA on a completely alien back-end is doable.
The weirdness of the back-end won't prevent it, only slow it down.

Luckily, by the time Transmeta Crusoe arrived:
- knowledge had a bit advance in how to handle VLIW ; crusoe had a back-end better tuned to run CISC ISA

Then by the time Radeon arrived:
- compilers had gotten even better ; GPU are used for the same (only) class of task at which VLIW excels.

Yeah, sure, of course they are going to optimise the back-end for what the CPU is the most-likely to run.
- Itanium was designed to run mainly IA-64 code with a bit support for older IA-32 just in case in order to offer a little bit of backward compatibility to help the transition. It was never though of as a IA-32 workhorse. Thus the back-end was designed to run mostly IA-64 (although even that wasn't stellar, due to weirdness of VLIW architecture). But that didn't prevent the front-end from accepting IA-32 instructions.
- Crusoe was designed to run mainly IA-32 code. Thus the back-end was designed a bit to run better IA-32 code.

BUT

To go back at what dinkypoo says: the back-end doesn't directly eat IA-32 instruction in none of the mentionned processor (neither recent Intel, nor AMDs, nor Itaniums, nor Crusoe, etc.) they all have back-ends that only consume the special micro-ops that the front-end feeds them after expanding the ISA (or the software front-end in case of Crusoe or the compiler in the CPU in case of Radeon). That's true, and you haven't disproved it (of course).

Also, according to dinkypoo, you should be able to replace the front-end, without touching the back-end, and you will be able to get a chip that supports a different instruction set (because the actual execution units never see it directly).
The Crusoe is a chip that did exactly that (thank to the fact that their front-end was pure software), and in fact HAD its microcode swapped, either as an in-lab experiment to run PowerPC instruction, or as a tool to help test x86_64 instruction.

So no, your wrong that "you can't simply change the decoder" is false. YOU CAN simply change the decoder, it has been done.
Just don't expect stellar performance depending on how much your back-end in the way it works from the target instruction set. (x86_64 on a Crusoe vs. IA-32 on an Itanium).
It might be slow, but it works. you're wrong, dinkypoo is right, accept it.

Whose word do we have on this other than hers? Answer: Nobodys.

This is a woman who has been caught lying about this kind of thing in the past. She's getting criticism, she doesn't like it, or know how to deal with it; so she makes up stories like this. She's done it before. She's been caught. Don't buy into this woman's attention whoring.