Sounds dreadful.

There will always be at least one 'bare metal' language around because we have to be able to write for the hardware, whether it be C/C++ or something else, and every programmer should be familiar with its basics at least.

Man, I never thought I'd see "bare metal language" and C++ in the same sentence.

        BITS 16

start:
        mov ax, 07C0h ; Set up 4K stack space after this bootloader
        add ax, 288 ; (4096 + 512) / 16 bytes per paragraph
        mov ss, ax
        mov sp, 4096

        mov ax, 07C0h ; Set data segment to where we're loaded
        mov ds, ax

        mov si, text_string ; Put string position into SI
        call print_string ; Call our string-printing routine

        jmp $ ; Jump here - infinite loop!

        text_string db 'This is my cool new OS!', 0

print_string: ; Routine: output string in SI to screen
        mov ah, 0Eh ; int 10h 'print char' function

.repeat:
        lodsb ; Get character from string
        cmp al, 0
        je .done ; If char is zero, end of string
        int 10h ; Otherwise, print it
        jmp .repeat

.done:
        ret

        times 510-($-$$) db 0 ; Pad remainder of boot sector with 0s
        dw 0xAA55 ; The standard PC boot signature

Even 1024x768 is 786432 pixels. 8bpp, 30FPS is 22.5MB/s, 16bpp obiously twice that. I suppose, on consideration, that 50MB/s (purely of framebuffer transferring) would probably be an acceptable load for a nominally 133MB/s basic-desktop PCI bus. A shared, graphics only, one would be better; but at that level of fiddling, you might as well just dump the 2d features on the 3d board (why, hello there, exactly what in fact happened, we were just talking about you...)

Interesting. I'm surprised that they managed to pull that off over a PCI bus. Especially before people got serious about security-through-randomization of the address space layout, it's always been conceptually fairly simple for anything with memory access to dump stuff into the framebuffer (they seem to have bitrotted; but there used to be some amusing examples designed for use against classic macs over firewire, since that was both external and had DMA, dumping flying toasters directly on top of your victim's desktop, silently grabbing frames out of their framebuffer, that sort of thing); but PCI is shared, and just not all that fast (compared to the demands of uncompressed video output of any nontrivial resolution and bit depth.

Out of curiosity, did the PowerVR cards manage to behave well in that regard, or could you induce situations where firing up the 3d cratered throughput on any IDE/ethernet/whatever peripherals on the same PCI bus, or where frames dropped all over the place because your IDE controller decided that something needed to Get Written NOW, and grabbed mastery of the bus at the wrong moment?

If all you say is so true, then why all Republican candidates in the 2012 primaries were pandering to extreme social conservative wing so much?

The only reason why corporations don't have army of their own to buy with all that money is because we don't let them through our government.

(In fact, even that's not quite true, as there are numerous examples of corporate mercenary armies in Third World countries.)

Why would anyone want to read very poorly written and extremely verbose fiction glorifying sociopaths?

(I'm not even anti-Amazon, but "Atlas Shrugged" is comically bad literature and philosophy.)

They do - "Amazon Local Delivery" is their own thing. And that program is going - it started with just Seattle, and it was already 10 cities last year.

Also, I think that popularity of Amazon was in large part the reason why UPS and FedEx got their shit together, at last.

If, in the end, consumers end up paying lower prices, why exactly is it bad?

Knowledge in physics does not give credence to a political philosophy

However demonstrated success does over-ride stupid insults like your outdated cold war one above. Take it at face value instead of moving the goal posts again.

I doubt that two thirds of these people them have any real idea of what libertarianism is

I'll answer that - it's a cool sounding label self applied to people whose political views cover the entire range from outright anarchists to the sort of people George Washington if he was alive today would want to shoot for being counter-revolutionary royalists. In other words - an utterly meaningless label. Your "so called libertarians" is just "no true Scottsman" bullshit and you have no more "idea of what libertarianism is" than them. Astroturfing has added more by bussing in extra teabaggers for more noise but they as just a much "libertarian" as anyone that sticks that label on themselves.

It's a case of using that North Sea oil for something useful instead of redundancy payouts which is how Thatcher squandered oil money in the UK. The only thing that grew was silly financial games that periodically collapse.

Or did you think that li'l ol' war was just going to end itself?

Actually yes, but that would have meant Russian occupation of all of Korea and more of Japan than that island north of Hokkaido.
Things would have gone very differently if the US had not had a change of leadership and the new leader reached for the nukes. Better? Who knows? Different anyway. Most of the cold war grew out of a stupid line on a map and and idiot waking up to find that lovable "Uncle Joe" really was the monster that Churchill had been warning about.

The sad thing is that place is making an effort. How bad are the places that are not?

Your statements would imply that these countries are inept and/or grossly negligent

In Australia's case with the offshore cables that was Telstra run by Sol Trujillo, so both inept and grossly negligent with a possibility of some sort of kickback as well.