damien

It does close the gap.

Before:

  cc -shared -fPIC -Os -s -o empty.so empty.c
  cc -std=c99 -Wall -Wextra -O3 -g3 -fpie -pie -o benchmark benchmark.c ./empty.so -ldl

  jit: 1.541608 ns/call
  plt: 2.309939 ns/call
  ind: 1.540583 ns/call
  

  cc -shared -fPIC -Os -s -o empty.so empty.c
  cc -std=c99 -Wall -Wextra -O3 -g3 -fpie -fno-plt -pie -o benchmark benchmark.c ./empty.so -ldl

  jit: 1.541836 ns/call
  plt: 1.539239 ns/call
  ind: 1.542874 ns/call

I've heard OEMs make more money from pre-installing adware/spyware/trialware than what they pay for the Windows license.

You can always decline the EULA and try to get a refund for the bundled Windows license. In Europe it is supposedly easy to get a refund due to a European Union directive on unfair commercial practices: http://no.more.racketware.info/en/europe

Yea, the slow scrolling on Android is annoying. I believe it's caused by not using the native functionality, which I hope gets fixed soon: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=776030

It's likely talking about all future dividends (discounted for time value). Startups will naturally reinvest their earnings to grow, but at some point, pursuing growth will be too costly and the best use of their earnings will be to return it to the owners as dividends.

If a company were guaranteed to never return anything to owners, then it would be more like speculating in the future value of a baseball card than an actual investment.

It may not be a practical way to calculate value, but it's not crazy either.

Probably the largest application written in Rust is the Rust compiler itself.

Yes, I'd say a language runtime definately falls in that critical 3% Knuth referred to in the original quote.

Makes sense if you are the only person running your programs (and you are allowed to ignore things like hardware and power costs).

Also, 2 minutes per change to compile the object files affected and link the executable seems a bit excessive considering the entire Linux kernel can generally be built from scratch in less time than that (assuming a modern system).

They're headings, not sentences...

I like both Dota 2 and HoN, but HoN definitely has the upper hand with regards to fast-pace twitch-based gameplay. The first thing a HoN player notices when trying out Dota 2 for the first time is that input delay.

Supposedly part of the problem is that Dota 2 uses the Source engine with netcode designed for FPS games; hence it does prediction and interpolation which works well for those games but not as well for RTS games. For more info: http://pastebin.com/ekk07PKn

What? That doesn't sound right... how does the distribution method affect copyright? Think of all the free software (with licenses dependent on copyright) that's made available over BitTorrent. Or World of Warcraft game updates, or humble bundle games, or ...

You need the driver before the chip is out so that your favorite distro already supports it when you buy that new GPU card.

It is really noticeable when dragging something with your finger and the object you are dragging doesn't stay under your finger. I'm actually surprised the delay on all those devices are so high, I mean I can ping a Google server that's in another city 140 miles away from me in under 10ms...

Are you sure? The article doesn't seem to say whether it's a hardware or software issue, and the iphone's hardware parts aren't exactly secret proprietary stuff... I mean the Galaxy S4 is supposed to have the better PowerVR GPU for example. I'm thinking the difference is in the software stack, I think you'd be surprised at how much code gets run between the time there's an input event and an app reacts to it on the screen.

Anyways, it'd be interesting to know if running Android on an iphone showed the same delays.

Well AMD is technically fabless since they spinned off GlobalFoundries in 2009, but yea it's probably a good move for them.

The letter l on it's own at small font sizes resembles the number 1 in other fonts too closely. In fact, my default sans font (DejaVu Sans) has the 1 shaped just like the Inconsolata l. I'm sure it's something you get used to but I personally prefer the style used in DejaVu Sans Mono or Ubuntu Mono, where the l shape can't be mistaken for anything else.

I don't think I mentioned any technical reason? Allocating developer time is generally a management decision.

If anything, Intel has already put their resources into Wayland and the lack of any good technical reasons for Mir's existence probably played a large role in their decision.

I don't see why this is so shocking really, many other projects in the Linux graphics stack have already said that they won't be supporting Mir upstream any time soon. At this point, I'd be more surprised of hearing a project supporting Mir than the other way around.

Yep, all of their technical reasons have pretty much been debunked. The reason for Mir's existence is mainly about project control. As Matthew Garrett mentions[1], they likely need that control for Ubuntu Phone to be able to relicense the code to keep their hardware partners happy.

[1] http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/25376.html

I don't see how it's political to let Canonical keep the burden of maintaining code that only they care about...

Why would you be pretty sure he is more familiar with C when most of his past projects were written in C++? Not to mention that he's written two blog posts explaining his reasoning...

I'm not sure the trademark is a big deal, it's probably to prevent misuse like what happened with the Linux trademark (which took a few years to resolve). I doubt he's doing it to make it more annoying to use.

That's how the Kore web server works ( https://kore.io/ ); it makes you generate a static.h file at compile time that contains all of you your static content.

But like you say, I have to wonder if it actually makes a difference performance-wise. The kernel will cache the static file data anyways. The only improvement I can see is maybe to avoid having to look up file metadata (length and mtime)? Or to avoid a syscall?

Or -Ofast

So what does that middle dot actually do before the function names? It doesn't seem to be mentioned in the linked documentation of the Plan 9 assembler, and if I have to use a character that I can't easily type with my keyboard, I'd like to at least know what it actually does. :)

Also, doesn't doing this limit your code to using gc toolchain (since the generic Go function has to get called from the arch-specific asm code which uses that Plan 9 dialect)? Does this mean that the Go standard library can't be compiled with gccgo for example?

Linus actually uses a MacBook Air: http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/19/an-interview-with-millenium...

Have you tried Heroes of Newerth? It works great under Linux. ;)

From the language FAQ: https://github.com/mozilla/rust/wiki/Doc-language-FAQ

Go adopted semantics (safety and memory model) that are quite unsatisfactory.

    Shared mutable state.
    Global GC.
    Null pointers.
    No RAII or destructors.
    No type-parametric user code.

That's one kickass walled garden... just what I'd expect from Apple. ;)

It seems they've already started that kind of spin. For example, in the wsj article:

"Chinese internet analysts said they were shocked by the Google announcement, but at the same time they understood the reasons behind its threat to back out of China. They said the cyber attacks have exposed Google's inability to protect its users' privacy..."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126335402591827235.html

⌘tab to cycle apps

⌘` to cycle windows within an app

I think that's what he's referring to.

Which one is that? pgpool?

Technology-wise, PostgreSQL is superior to MySQL. The main reservation most people seem to have about it is due to its lack of a good, easy to use replication solution. But I hear that they are actively working to resolve that now.