Dogs do unconditional love. With cats, in my experience, it is usually very conditional (on Dreamies/Temptations)
Posts by joeldillon
326 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Feb 2013
People find amazing ways to break computers. Cats are even more creative
What the **** did you put in that code? The client thinks it's a cyberattack
Brit universities told to keep up the world-class research with less cash
Malware in Lisp? Now you're just being cruel
Nvidia GPU roadmap confirms it: Moore’s Law is dead and buried
Dell sheds ten percent of staff for the second year in a row
Museum digs up Digital Equipment Corporation's dusty digital equipment
Re: All is not what it seems?
To be fair, Microsoft/Intel in the mid 1990s were targetting at best low-end servers. They didn't need 64 bit addressing yet for things like fileservers, whereas high-end scientific/database computing etc on Unix workstations did.
Intel trying to push everyone to Itanium shows they knew back then that they needed a 64 bit solution. They just chose the wrong way to do it and fucked up the execution, letting AMD in.
Linux royalty backs adoption of Rust for kernel code, says its rise is inevitable
The Doom-in-a-PDF dev is back – this time with Linux
Intel pitches modular PC designs to make repairs less painful
How Windows got to version 3 – an illustrated history
WSL1 was an NT kernel personality. It worked, but only sortakinda, which is why we now have WSL2.
This is /not/ an NT kernel personality because it turns out that wasn't actually fit for purpose, it is a tightly integrated virtual machine and does not rely on the NT native API; it runs a full, actual Linux kernel.
They've only gone and made Doom run in a PDF file
Re: An industry insider comments...
The PostScript function generator (which is Forth-like, not LISP-like) is very specifically limited to a small number of operators such that it is not Turing complete. In particular you get no control transfer instructions other than, iirc, if/else.
Not sure that PDFs as a whole are Turing complete for similar reasons. It's just a really complex spec.
Short-lived bling, dumb smart things, and more: The worst in show from CES 2025
Thousands of AI agents later, who even remembers what they do?
BASIC co-creator Thomas Kurtz hits END at 96
Buckle up, admins – Windows Server 2025 officially hits GA
Re: Windows Server... Now that's a name I haven't heard for a long time...
Waaaay back in the NT4 days Windows Server had a different default scheduler in the kernel, more suited to batch-oriented/background service type stuff than maintaining a snappy UI. Would be surprised if that's still true or significant today though.
It's about time Intel, AMD dropped x86 games and turned to the real threat
Microsoft veteran ditches Team Tabs, blaming storage trauma of yesteryear
'Any decent compiler should strip out any extraneous characters, assuming the code is indeed being compiled beforehand and not interpreted at run-time.'
- not quite sure what this means. You literally can't put a bunch of tabs (or spaces) in machine code or even bytecode, that's what a compiler is producing after all.
The empire of C++ strikes back with Safe C++ blueprint
So....just like your C++ example then? There are essentially two C++ ABIs, MSVC and the various Unixes (these days mostly meaning gcc+clang), all of which these days follow architecture-specific variations of what used to be called the Itanium ABI.
Meanwhile Windows and the various Unixes can and do have different C function calling conventions on the same architecture (x86-64 for example) in exactly the same way.
Gelsinger opens up about Intel troubles amid talk of possible split
Sweet 16 and making mistakes: More of the computing industry's biggest fails
Gentoo Linux to drop Itanium support as Funtoo fork enters 'Hobby Mode'
Re: Now end Windows
I wasn't asserting it was a development of the POSIX personality as such, which as we know was a fairly useless tickbox exercise, just that it used the same mechanisms just as e.g. the OS/2 personality did.
But you've done way more research on this than I have, so in your case I am happy to bow to authority. :)
Re: Now end Windows
WSL1 literally was an NT kernel personality, as was intended for NT to support from the start - and it wasn't that great, for compatibility and speed reasons, which is why WSL2 came along with the whole hypervisor thing.
Personally especially now there's X11 integration I find Windows 11 with WSL2 to be a pretty usable Linux, it's my usual development setup.
Raspberry Pi 5 slims down for cut-price 2 GB RAM version
X.org lone ranger rides to rescue multi-monitor refresh rates
How did a CrowdStrike file crash millions of Windows computers? We take a closer look at the code
' IMO means nothing goes in the kernel unless it absolutely must go there. The kernel is no place for a fancy anti-virus tool.'
Andrew Tanenbaum and the other microkernel advocates lost that argument in the 1990s (to Linus Torvalds among others). Some (many) things do go in the kernel which in theory need not do but for efficiency reasons do.
Dangerous sandwiches delayed hardware installation
Windows NT on a whole new platform: PowerMac
Re: Slow
Rage128 register-level programming docs are/were fairly easily available (I wrote a Qt/Embedded driver for it back in the day). The fact that it has a framebuffer, even if unaccelerated, is most of the work. Once you get that far, implement bitblt() (and its hardware, it should look the same on a Mac as on a PC) and you're most of the way to not-horribly-slow mode.
The graying open source community needs fresh blood
Re: Complexity Raises Learning- and Enthusiasm-Barriers
Modern (64 bit) ARM is a fairly clean RISC in my experience (by which I mean I've written a compiler backend for it for my hobby project). Only really weird thing I've come across is how it encodes immediates for logical operations, I still need to get my head round that, otherwise it is if anything cleaner than ARM classic and definitely more fun to target than Thumb - 16 bit opcodes come with compromises.
How much compiler optimisation do you think the standard Python interpreter is doing (not one of the weird implementations nobody actually uses)? That's just not Python's focus, for example. Something like Rust or Swift will be competitive but most people writing in not-C are writing in something that isn't trying to be a compiled native code language with C-like performance.
Unity closes offices, cancels town hall after threat in wake of runtime fee restructure
Microsoft's 10,000 job cuts didn't quite do the trick
'2023 now has the "second-highest total for the sector ever" with only 2001, the year of the "tech bubble" recession, having more. That year, 168,395 cuts were announced in technology.'
Well, we're only halfway through July so seems quite likely we'll have more than that by the end of this year.
Two new Linux desktops – one with deep roots – come to Debian
Version 100 of the MIT Lisp Machine software recovered
'Today, though, thanks to Apple Silicon Macs on the high end and RISC-V on the low end, RISC is enjoying a renaissance.' - errrr. I think you'll find there's a bloody ton more ARM chips out there, and they've never gone away in an embedded context. Not everything is a PC, and PCs are not being built with RISC-V.