Well I for one am coming back here...

Is there any place where the supposed speedups and other improvements are demonstrated?

Win7 is a pretty good OS. 8/8.1 are horrid. I'd like to see the benefits clearly shown somewhere before upgrading.

No, it was fully preemptive right from the start. It was a major selling point.

It was the Mac that did cooperative.

Mind you, preemptive on a 68000 wasn't flawless. Saw a lot of GURU in the day.

-MB- is that you?

The 1541, on the other hand, would misalign if you looked at it funny.

Amen brother.

My 3 Amigas were NOT "PC"s. 2 of them were "PC compatible", thanks to Bridgeboards.

Son, I was there. Owned 3 Amigas.

Amigas were NOT PCs - and saying so in the wrong circles would get you shot.

"PC" meant it ran MS-DOS.

That's no longer true.

The Catalyst drivers have made *huge* gains over the past year to year and a half, both in terms of performance and stability.

Civ V and the recent Civ-BE preview run just fine on my HD 7870.

I'm in a military.

Starfleet - especially the Starfleet of ST2 - is *unquestionably* a military.

Gene said a lot of things, but trek grew well beyond his initial creation and took on a life of its own. You can't argue using dogma.

Commodore BASIC, Turbo Pascal, M6800 Assembly (wonderful!), 8088 Assembly (horrible!), C, SQL, M68k Assembly, AREXX, perl, sh, Javascript, Java, php. I've dabbled in others (I can crank out a VB macro if need be), but those are my core fluencies.

The assembly was very useful in learning how the CPU actually works, and proved very useful for understanding industrial/microcontroller stuff later on, but with CPUs these days being vastly more complex than an 8088 or an M6800, I don't know if it could be dumbed down enough. Perhaps on a virtual machine or something?

Turbo Pascal was an absolutely brilliant language to learn on, and it is a shame Pascal seems to have fallen out of favour. It was powerful enough to write workable programs on, but simple enough to keep a new student from wandering off the cliff edge.

If I was teaching, I'd use perl:

- perl supports multiple syntaxes so you can teach the simple stuff in a straightforward manner
- The fact that it identifies variables and in which context they are being used is a brilliant way to help students separate out what bits are variables/arguments and what bits are code
- The C and sh bits are gateways into C and sh - "C lite"
- You can do some really powerful and *useful* programs in perl, which teaches that programming isn't just the creation of monolithic apps, but a *process* that can be used to solve a single specific problem.
- perl has native regular expressions, and teaching pattern matching opens up a whole new world of problem solving techniques

I can see homework like "Take the provided text file, and write a program that takes it as input and prints out the sentence that has the most vowels in it" or "Write a program that prints a list of the songs in your music library, ordered by date of album release". These programs are easy to write in perl, fun, challenging, and *useful*.

Phenom II x6 1090t, Radeon HD 7880, 12 GB DDR2 (it's an AM2+ board), Ubuntu 14.04 32 bit. Runs flawlessly for me.

Amen, amen, amen.

I have an HD 7880 in my Linux box, and it works very well with Catalyst.

The drivers have made some real strides lately, and I bet all the issues in the Phoronix article are addressed in the next release.

I'm planning to move to systemd as soon as possible. Off Ubuntu and back to Fedora for me.

Why? Because it is clearly the right way ahead, and I'd rather learn its nuances sooner than later.

And it *has* to be better than the steaming pile of shit that Ubuntu has become.