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Comment Re:Vector Graphics (Score 1) 71

The irony is that it's only taken 40+ years to get to display resolutions for raster graphics to approximate vector graphics.

I'm not sure why that's ironic. When you're only displaying the outlines of objects, you don't need nearly as much memory (or memory bandwidth) as you do with a raster display. On top of that, vector displays only get that resolution in monochrome; you lose it when you try to do color. (A color display can't exceed the resolution of its shadow mask.) I can tell you from experience: Quake looks better on a 640x480x8 raster display than it could ever look on a vector display.

Comment Re:More like Chrome? (Score 1) 248

Please, not another useless Chrome clone.

I agree. Other than greed, I can't understand why they don't just make an agreement with Google or Mozilla - preferably both - to have one of their browsers automatically installed with Windows. Writing a browser from scratch is a huge project, and while I'm sure it's a tiny fraction of Microsoft's output, that's a fair amount of resources that could be directed elsewhere, while generating a fair amount of good will in the software community.

Comment Re: Established science CANNOT BE QUESTIONED! (Score 1) 719

if you're not willing to build a bunch of nuclear power plants and shut down a bunch of coal plants, then yes you ARE arguing global warming to advance a political agenda

Some of the most prominent AGW scientists are strongly in favor of nuclear power: http://www.scientificamerican....

Others are a little more cautious, but still think nuclear is an important part of an overall strategy to reduce global warming: http://www.ucsusa.org/our-work...

Comment Re:EEE (Score 0) 217

To extend and extinguish, of course.

Yeah... My guess is that, after this announcement, developers are going to say to themselves, "Great, now we don't have to learn how to use new tools to create software for Linux", and do all their work on Windows. Fewer people will work on development tools for Linux, too, because they can use tools that already exist on Windows to create software for Linux.

Then, in five or ten years, when everyone's using Microsoft's tools, they'll claim no one's using them to port to Linux, anyway, and drop support. Developers will have no choice but to use Linux's (poor or non-existant) development tools, or drop support for Linux, altogether.

Brilliant!

Comment Anything that's OS independent? (Score 3) 259

As long as we're on the subject, I'd like to know about such software, too, but I'd like something that's OS independent, and stores images locally. My mom has an enormous collection of family photos, dating back to the early 20th century, that I'd like to catalog while she's still around. It would be nice if she could do the annotations on her Windows machine, while I organize everything on my Linux machine. Ideally, we could copy the images and associated data back and forth using a CDROM or USB key.

Comment Re:YES !! (Score 1) 241

"Why do you need that $700 enterprise-grade AP? Just use the $69 linksys one like I do at home!"

I just got a very similar question, yesterday.

We're adding 350 workstations (and PoE phones) to our network - something for which we should be seriously looking at a Catalyst 6500 or a Nexus 7000, right? No, I cheaped out and got some Catalyst 2960s and a pile of SF500s. Total cost? $20000.

What's the first question they asked me? "Nowadays, I can get two terabytes of hard disk for $100. Why do we have to pay so much for our network ports?"

Comment Re:They can go bite a donkey (Score 1) 699

They use my bandwidth (without permission)

You know, I don't even have a problem with that. I kind of feel like looking at their ads is the price I pay for viewing their content, and (assuming the ads were less intrusive) it's better than having to explicitly pay for every site we access. I held off installing Adblock for a long time, but when their ads are so CPU intensive they hang my browser for minutes at a time, that's where I draw the line.

Comment Re:Shyeah, right. (Score 1) 284

That's because computers at the time couldn't keep up with the drives (unless you really knew what you were doing). I read a bunch of old QIC tapes I have, a few years ago, on a relatively modern machine, and the drive only stopped at the ends of the tapes.

Comment Re:The original 68000 interrupts were inadequate (Score 1) 147

Interrupts worked fine. It was bus errors (i.e. for off-chip memory protection and/or mapping units) that were a problem. The 68010 fixed that particular issue if I recall.

You're correct, except for the fact that it wasn't a bug. The original 68000 simply wasn't designed for use with demand-paged virtual memory. To make that happen, you need to either save the processor state somewhere (which the 68010, 68020, etc. did) or have restartable instructions (the approach used by National Semiconductor, for their 32000 series). I vaguely remember reading that Motorola switched to restartable instructions in the 68040 or 68060, but I'm not sure.

Comment Re:68010/@2MB ran a unix variant (Score 1) 147

My first exposure toboth UNIX and 68K was with a Motorola VME/10 system

I've actually used one of those. Pretty decent machines, for their day. I especially liked how they had two ways to access the graphics memory: one by bit-planes, and the other by pixels.

You're lucky; my first 68K experience was on a Vicom image processor. It was a 68000-based machine, running VersaDOS. Talk about a terrible OS - even MS/DOS would have been better.

Comment Re:Nice... (Score 1) 147

The '020 supported external memory management (MC68451)

No, the 68451 was for the 68010 - though since it was a segmented MMU (rather than demand-paged), I imagine it could have worked with the 68000, too. The 68020 used the 68851, which was a demand-paged MMU.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...

Comment Re:Hey, congratulations (Score 1) 147

The 68030 could hold short loops in its chip logic with some tricks, despite not really having a cache. Unfortunately, the 68040's on-chip cache implementation was horrible and created all sorts of problems for implementers, and by then Intel chips were running much much faster

No, you're thinking of the 68010's "loop mode", where tight loops didn't require memory accesses for instruction fetches (after the initial instruction fetch). Both the 68020 and 68030 had caches.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...

Comment Re:"Now the userbase needs to expand" (Score 1) 77

Why would anyone want to watch someone else play video games?

Have you never heard of YouTube? Try searching for "let's play", sometime. Some of those videos have over a million views. Even the less popular stuff, like Minecraft, pulls in enough advertising money for these people to make a living from it.

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