Have you considered archiving virtual machines with old versions of Word along with the documents? I think that you can get old versions of Word for about $50 each on ebay.

Mtpaint has a "Gamma Correction" check box. If you check it you get the faint picture. If you leave it unchecked you get the grey box. Not bad for an editing program that fits entirely in one uncompressed 616KB executable.

I found Crome to be about ten times as responsive as Firefox in the BrowserResponsivenessBenchmark: http://www.ucc.asn.au/~mccabedj/BrowserResponsivenessBenchmark.html

Their efforts in removing "Jank" from the UI thread seem to have paid off.

You can also gain some performance by tweaking code for different processor types, even if they have the same instruction set. One example would avoiding XOR swaps on CPUs that have instruction pipelining, which is independent of the instruction set.

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

This maybe wasn't the best example since XOR swaps are rarely useful anyway. I suspect that other things like word (mis)alignment and varying cache miss costs may be a factor for different processors.

Gentoo claims that picking e.g. core2 over nocona can boost performance by 15% (which seems a bit much to me), so picking the right x86_64 variant is still something that is considered. Not something I worry about though, unless I am compiling from source anyway.

They story suggests that scientists should present all their raw data to improve "openness". I agree that it is unlikely to inform people who are unwilling to read more than a few key phrases from one textbook. However I think this should be the norm in *all* fields of science, controversial or not (where privacy is not a concern etc.).

For example, I once contacted a author of a paper basically saying "I read the paper you wrote on a utility to improve security. It seems to me that your utility could also be used to improve performance as well. Could I play with the utility?". Their response was "I wrote that a few years back. I think I lost the code." Other researchers have similar difficulties when trying to perform meta-studies based on other researchers data. This could have been avoided if submitting raw data and code was the norm. These days there would be almost zero-cost in submitting raw-data in electronic form along with almost every manuscript submitted for peer-review and publication.

I had some trouble with this, so I wrote a script called lyxpp.py to allow me to specify a precise preamble. See: http://www.lyx.org/trac/ticket/5031

LyX could loosely be called a LaTeX editor and can be sanely called simple and/or easy to use.

Everyone is so paranoid about the AP. I am sure they have ensured that they have rights to distribute the content.

Anyone one tried pasting in the leaked Windows source code? According to their pricing scheme its $100 for a "For profit" license to post the code on a webpage. Maybe a little overpriced, but at least it's less than the cost for a single use binary at my local store.

The point of the original story was that SSD is cheaper than ran. Clearly moving everything from SSD into ram is going to make things faster, but so would moving everything from HDD to ram. Its just a matter of cost vs benefit.

I am not too sure how the cost/benefit of ReadyBoost stacks up, but I'd guess that plugging in a decent flash-drive would be cheaper than trying to find obsolete Laptop ram.

The wikipedia entry for Superfetch doesn't mention anything about only being 32bit, and it sound like it would work better the more RAM it has to play with: In any case, hack or not, ReadyBoost is an example of a hybrid system.

Isn't ReadyBoost essentially a hybrid system?

Also I rememeber that one of the main disadvantages of Btrfs over ZFS was that I doesn't support using SSD to speed up overall access, while ZFS does.

Also has an Ethernet port. Estimated run time of 2.5 hours. Apparently will also come in 2GB SSD, 128MiB ram options.

You mean like the everyday common POSIX fork() command? Yes, apparently Windows does have that capability, they just hide it in their API.

The turbo feature works by routing all your non https content via compression servers, which can ofcourse cause slowdowns: http://www.downloadsquad.com/2009/03/13/opera-10-alpha-now-includes-opera-turbo-compression/

This appears to be lossy compression that reduces image quality... Hopefully pretty much all html is compressed at the source these days: http://www.webreference.com/internet/software/servers/http/compression/

Another reason is that running a program under wine does not normally need a Windows license to be legal. Can be handy if you've avoided the MS tax, but you find that there is one piece of windows software that you want to run.

I just note that VirtualBox has a "seamless" mode which makes (2) invalid. It still behaves differently than a native, e.g. when a windows app has focus I have a second panel. However I "can cut/paste between them, and put them in a beside each other and so on."

Only wimps backup their password to a sticky notes: _real_ men just upload their important passwords on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it ;)