61–70 of 211 posts
They shouldn't have killed an excellent processor (the Alpha) which already had tons of software and history and was already being used in the fastest supercomputers in the world for a product that was never (and still isn't) proven. The Itanic was never best in its class at anything.
I have to admit that as a DEC alpha user starting in 1993 (using OSF/1), and also one of the main FreeBSD/alpha port authors, the itanium being phased out fills me with joy.
OpenVMS port to x86-64 still work in progress: http://www.openvms.org/node/111
OpenVMS port to x86-64 still work in progress: http://www.openvms.org/node/111
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My early career involved compiling a lot of software that would have been better run on Linux or some BSD variant for AIX. I can confirm that building stuff like a custom Apache stack on AIX (don’t ask) was like pulling teeth using XLC. I’m not really old enough to be an actual grey beard, but I got just enough hands-on experience with late-period Big Commercial Unix to feel like I at least swept floors and fetched c…
NeXT won the desktop Really? Mac OS has maybe 15% desktop market share.
I wonder what it’s like working on Itanium over the last decade (and perhaps earlier). I can see someone joining early on when the marketing buzz was exciting and reality had not set in. But now...you’re working on a product that is widely mocked and has no future, yet releases are still being made. How depressing...what causes someone to stay on?
A lot of people have good jobs supporting and incrementally enhancing legacy products and product lines of various kinds in software, computer hardware, and in many other areas. It’s mostly a Silicon Valley concept that if you’re not working on something ground-breaking you’re wasting your life. And how many people at some of those big SV companies are mostly just working on ad tech?
Making spare parts for the B-52, or maintaining security fixes for Solaris (which has its fanatic fans) can be rewarding, no question. But to work on the Itanium any time in the last decade must have been soul-sucking.
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x86-64 is anything but "boring" and "safe". :) Real mode, Mod R/M and SIB byte encoding weirdness, REX prefixes, 80-bit floats, parity flag, hard-wired registers for shifts/multiplies/divisions, builtin CRC32 over the wrong polynomial, Pascal calling convention support, binary-coded decimal, high halves of 16-bit registers, MMX overlap with x87 floating point, etc. etc.
Right, but most of these are just past crimes^W^Wlegacy that Intel has to deal with in the name of backwards compatibility.
This is completely off topic, but I've seen things like the "^W^W" a few times before, and I don't know what it means.
Is this a weird encoding mismatch thing? is it from some editor/system that people instinctively type? Is it from some other forum which has a strange markup syntax for something?
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Right, but most of these are just past crimes^W^Wlegacy that Intel has to deal with in the name of backwards compatibility.
>most of these are just past crimes^W^Wlegacy This is completely off topic, but I've seen things like the "^W^W" a few times before, and I don't know what it means. Is this a weird encoding mismatch thing? is it from some editor/system that people instinctively type? Is it from some other forum which has a strange markup syntax for something?
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Right, but most of these are just past crimes^W^Wlegacy that Intel has to deal with in the name of backwards compatibility.
>most of these are just past crimes^W^Wlegacy This is completely off topic, but I've seen things like the "^W^W" a few times before, and I don't know what it means. Is this a weird encoding mismatch thing? is it from some editor/system that people instinctively type? Is it from some other forum which has a strange markup syntax for something?
'^W' is what would appear instead if you weren't in a readline/emacs editor, but instead a dumb line terminal. Thus, leaving '^W' behind makes it look like you didn't realize what you just corrected is still visible.
It's a joke. I've now explained and ruined it.
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Right, but most of these are just past crimes^W^Wlegacy that Intel has to deal with in the name of backwards compatibility.
>most of these are just past crimes^W^Wlegacy This is completely off topic, but I've seen things like the "^W^W" a few times before, and I don't know what it means. Is this a weird encoding mismatch thing? is it from some editor/system that people instinctively type? Is it from some other forum which has a strange markup syntax for something?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right, but most of these are just past crimes^W^Wlegacy that Intel has to deal with in the name of backwards compatibility.
>most of these are just past crimes^W^Wlegacy This is completely off topic, but I've seen things like the "^W^W" a few times before, and I don't know what it means. Is this a weird encoding mismatch thing? is it from some editor/system that people instinctively type? Is it from some other forum which has a strange markup syntax for something?