Posts by DarkStranger

Chrome and Firefox are planet-wreckers, IE cuddles dolphins

Keep Mom Happy, Use Chrome!

My mom is 73 and has been bashing my because her computer has slowed to a crawl. She's still running XP on a dual core 3.4GHz P4 with 4 GB ram and less that 15% of her 480GB hard disk has been used. I've been racking my brains trying to figure out what's been going on.

I noticed that she was spending most of her time using IE and I suggested that she stop using IE and start using FF or Chrome and I set Chrome as her default browser. Now she is happy and content. Her computer no longer hangs and zips through her favorite web tasks. She says it faster than ever and she thinks that I am a computer Jedi again.

The moral of the story is keep your mom happy and use Chrome!

Hey, cloudy tech vendors on Amazon: AWS can fluff you up

Still seems like a good value for some applications?

My company is just staring to test our applications on EC2 and so far we are satisfied. While all of our development and business processes are in-house we have 'NO' in-house servers that expose our business services.

Our websites are hosted with a dedicated hosting provider and our applications are launched on EC2. We need periods of high computational and I/O bandwidth. While we can build or buy our own high computation servers, we can not match the I/O bandwidth of AWS at a cost effective price, at least not yet.

It is this ability to scale that makes AWS such a good fit for us...

MIPS chip slips through Android compliance

Performance!

Some of us that specialize in embedded work actually wondered just the opposite. For instance if you had two identically configured systems but one is MIPS32r2 based and one is an ARMv7 and both are clocked at say 500MHz, the ARM system nominally would consume ~15% less power than the MIPS system but it would also suffer from a ~25% performance hit when compared to the MIPS system.

Similarly I worked at a company that specialized in low power x86 SOC designs back in 1996 and I was responsible for doing an exhaustive comparison of the available low power architectures at the time. In my report to my supervisor I told him that Motorola's M-Core architecture would perform better than ARM on a power usage basis but not on a performance basis.

ARM had also implemented a programmer accessible shadow register set, special interrupt processing and the THUMB instruction set and the writing was on the wall.

Hack attacks on US could spark military action

If you don't like it...

Some of us Americans dislike or even hate the way the United States government has prosecuted it's foreign policy, myself included, but almost all of us hate being lumped into this 'Ugly American' cancer cluster category that so many Europeans, Asians and middle easterners so willingly place us.

As there are consequences for everyone's actions I invite and encourage you to stand up for what you believe in. So if you are being invaded by someone stand-up or shut-up!

Intel keeps heat on AMD with Tri-Gate transistors

Interesting article, but?

Interesting article, but I am a bit confused at why you choose the phrases "peddle its processors" or "will start bragging" to describe some of AMD actions. Doesn't Intel also "peddle its processors" and engage in bragging?

The Node Ahead: JavaScript leaps from browser into future

Still it's cool...

@Wile E. Veteran

Being an embedded systems guy that loved to build hard real-time, deterministic systems before I joined the web app development world I have to agree with you that the event driven / interrupt driven model has been in use for a long time. Nearly every rtos based or bare metal FSM embedded system uses an interrupt driven (callback) architecture to respond to asynchronous events. Internet routers and wireless base stations are a great example.

But it's cool to see the young guy's rediscover old methods and apply them to newer technologies.

The Reg guide to Linux, part 2: Preparing to dual-boot

"Option 3 is for weenies"

You must be kidding right? I really like Ubuntu. I have three Ubuntu flavors; Netbook Remix, Desktop and Server installed. With the both of the 32-bit and 64-bit variations of the Desktop and Server versions installed. For a total of 5 Ubuntu installations.

I also have Debian, Fedora, OpenSolaris, Windows XP Pro, Windows 7 and NetBSD installed on my Vista x64 workstation and having a VM manager has been a marvelous solution. I’ll admit that most setups like mine are for a specific purpose but the comfort afforded by isolating a Windows host machine from unintended OS corruption is invaluable.

It is not a “Weenies” way out….

Can Sun's GlassFish turn on master Oracle?

Budding Ecosystem for Glassfish...

I have used Glassfish internally now for over a year now I view it as a very good application server. I like it so much that I am using it along with the Netbeans Platform to build a commercial product.

I hope that Oracle doesn't kill or dilute it.