ch_123

I remember switching my Windows computers from XP to the alpha releases of Windows 7 (back around late 2008/early 2009), and noticing improved stability. I remember needing to reinstall Windows at least once a year with XP, which was something I never needed to do with Windows 7 and onwards. This may have been true for Vista once it stabilized, but I had a very poor experience with Vista around the time it first came out (particularly with BSODs relating to Nvidia drivers), and ended up skipping over it.

Your mileage may have varied, and all that.

The GoF book predates Java, and many of the examples in the book are in Smalltalk - so I think it's quite likely that composition over inheritance came from the Smalltalk community.

Problems with inheritance, such as the fragile base case problem, are intrinsic to inheritance, and not any specific language's implementation of it.

> TIMI is just a bytecode virtual machine and was designed as such from the beginning.

It's a bit more complicated than that. For one, it's an ahead-of-time translation model. The object references are implemented as tagged pointers to a single large address space. The tagged pointers rely on dedicated support in the Power architecture. The Unix compatibility layer (PASE) simulates per-process address spaces by allocating dedicated address space objects for each Unix process (these are called Terraspace objects).

When I read Frank Soltis' book a few years ago, the description of how the single level store was implemented involved segmentation, although I got the impression that the segments are implemented using pages in the Power architecture. The original CISC architecture (IMPI) may have implemented segmentation directly, although there is very little documentation on that architecture.

This document describes the S/38 architecture, and many of the high level details (if not the specific implementation) also apply to the AS/400 and IBM i: https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~levy/capabook/Chapter8.pdf

Yeah, my assumption is that all the PA-RISC operating systems did, but I only know about HP-UX for certain.

HP-UX on PA-RISC had an upward-growing stack. In practice, various exploits were developed which adapted to the changed direction of the stack.

One source from a few mins of searching: https://phrack.org/issues/58/11

The Rational R1000 is an interesting (and obscure) example to use - IBM's S/38 and AS/400 (now IBM i) also took a similar approach, and saw far more widespread usage.

The decision to kill off Alpha was made by Compaq, not HP.

Source: http://www.decus.de/events/alphamigration/vortraege/porting_...

HP is also ending support for its Itanium-based hardware, which seems like the main motivation here.

Might be worth more than Qualcomm is willing to spend and/or introduce antitrust concerns. This feels like a hedging of bets, no need for Qualcomm to buy the biggest name in the RISC-V space.

I lived in Edinburgh for a while, and there were a number of establishments (typically fish and chip shops) which made them.

Are there some onerous requirements for REAL IDs which require it to be more expensive, or is this a short-sighted money making scheme for the states?

Question from a European: I assume that most people flying within the US would use their driver's license as ID. Given how long this "REAL ID" standard has been in effect, why have the non compliant IDs not expired yet? Do some states not issue REAL ID compliant licenses?

(Apologies if this is a stupid question, I'm not familiar with how these things work in the US)

In this case, I'm talking specifically about the switches. There are various options from Gateron, Kailh and Outemu (including switches made by these companies but sold under different brands) which are widely regarded as superior to Cherry's options.

In terms of keyboards, a good all-rounder suggestion is to take a look at some options from Keychron.

A little over a decade ago, the patents expired on the MX switch design. The first clones (mostly from China) were cheap and terrible. Then came the ones which were cheap and almost as good. Then came the ones which were better than the originals, and eventually the ones which were more innovative too.

Meanwhile, Cherry kept making the same product line which they had since the 1980s, with relatively minor improvements.

> Discord doesn't work properly with Wayland

Is this specifically to do with screen sharing or streaming? I use it purely as a chat client under Wayland and it has generally worked fine.

(Now that I think of it, I've had a few weird crashes, but nothing which made it unusable)

Perforce also did exclusive file locking (and I believe Microsoft ended up using a customized Perforce internally at some point).

> The average American now holds onto their smartphone for 29 months, according to a recent survey by Reviews.org, and that cycle is getting longer. The average was around 22 months in 2016.

As someone who makes enough money to buy a new phone every year if I wanted, I typically upgrade my phone (iPhone for what it's worth) every 4 years. My experience is that this is about as long as it takes for enough new features to accumulate to make me excited about an upgrade. By the end of this 4 year period, my phones are in a sufficiently good state to be sold, or passed on to a family member.

The idea that a typical person is expected to upgrade their phone every 2 years or so is almost incomprehensible to me.

I'm also curious given the rhetoric that the North Korean media has about the "puppet" state in the south. I can understand that the North Koreans want to claim sovereignty over the whole peninsula, but the article makes it sound like North Korea pretends that the ROK does not exist.

I believe they made improvements to their keyboards in recent years. My DM42n has a decent keyboard. Main criticism compared to my HP48G is that the keys are on the small side.

An extra row of keys to match the HP48 would be useful too.

The DB48X project created a HP48G/HP50G style firmware for SwissMicros calculators.

https://github.com/c3d/db48x

There is a community of folks who are really into this firmware, and a lot of those people buy SwissMicros other models of calculators, (e.g. DM42 or DM32) and put keyboard stickers on it. This allows them to buy the model with the correct key legends up front.

The low volume and the relatively high build quality involved pushes the prices up.

CDE was based heavily on VUE. If you read the CDE source code, you'll find many references to VUE.

> Printing menus isn’t hard, or even costly.

I'm not a fan of QR code menus either, but printed menus are not necessarily cheap. The owner of one of my favourite restaurants told me that he couldn't raise prices on his menu to match inflation because the cost of re-printing all the menus with increased prices would eat up the difference. IIRC, the restaurant later shifted to a cheaper and simpler menu design.

> Have you ever wondered why we celebrate Richard Stallman as a visionary prophet of digital freedom while simultaneously abandoning every principle he fought for?

Since when has Stallman changed his principles?

The plan was for all operating systems on top of IBM's POWER/PPC hardware to be rehosted as "personalities" on top of the Workplace OS microkernel, but in the end, OS/2 was the only personality that saw any real work.

The Workplace OS would also have been used on Apple hardware as part of the abortive Taligent project.

(It also would have been used on x86 and other platforms, but they started with PPC)

Any one of: the risk of a migration going wrong is too high, application or infrastructure compatibility issues, or the cost of retraining staff who work with the database to work with something else.

It is possible that there are simple solutions to these problems, but the perception that they are serious will turn companies away from a migration.

Many of these claims about COBOL originate from reports which are decades old. I sometimes hear a stat that 5 billion new lines of COBOL are written per year. When I looked into this claim, it turned out that it originated from a Gartner report written in the 90s.

Reminds me of OpenVMS Galaxy on DEC Alpha systems, which allowed multiple instances of the OS to run side by side on the same hardware without virtualization.

https://www.digiater.nl/openvms/doc/alpha-v8.3/83final/aa_re...

> its a variable length opcode encoding with a complex decoder path

In practice, the performance impact of variable length encoding is largely kept in check using predictors. The extra complexity in terms of transistors is comparatively small in a large, high-performance design.

Related reading:

https://patents.google.com/patent/US6041405A/en

https://web.archive.org/web/20210709071934/https://www.anand...