Sun is working on making computers do floating point math correctly.
“The problem that Gustafson and Papadopoulos referred to stems from the fact that the binary mathematics employed by computers has a hard time accurately representing certain numbers. Fractions, for example, are particularly tough, because they often involve non-terminating numbers that are impossible to accurately express in binary format.”
It’s 11 PM on the night before our first big code delivery, and I have zero open bugs. Damnit, that feels good!
rml@ximian?
I was betting on RedHat. When I read “We have some very interesting
things planned, and I am totally psyched. Desktop
integration…”, I started getting afraid. In-kernel GUI, anyone?
There’s an excellent article on groklaw (http://www.groklaw.com) on “The GPL is a License, Not a Contract, Which is Why the Sky Isn’t Falling”. Specifically, why this means that companies don’t have quite as much to fear when using GPL’d code as certain fudsters would like us all to believe[1].
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20031214210634851
[1] This is because it’s a license, not a contract. If you breach a contract, I can come after you and sue you. If you breach a license, all that happens is that the license is revoked. What this means is that if you e.g. distribute GPL’d code without giving the source, you are violating the license, and you have to stop distributing your offending code, because you no longer have permissions (==license) to do so. It doesn’t mean you have to open up the rest of your non-infringing code, for example, as the fudsters would like you to believe, and as *might* have been the case if the GPL had been a contract. IANAL, nor do I play one on TV.
Put up the work-in-progress version of the aib-B1 patch. The patch is by Con Kolivas and me. I supplied the percpu variables and list handling, and Con hooked it into the relevant points in the scheduler.
The purpose is to make the scheduler smarter when choosing which idle CPU to put a new task on, by keeping track of which CPU has been idle longest. This is a work in progress, Con is benchmarking it now, and we are thinking about a bit-field version that should be faster (although I’m concerned about possible contention).
The CADR machine, a revised form for the CONS Lisp machine. Stuff to read while I wait for the aib (Aggressive Idle Balancing, details to follow) aib-b1 patch to finish compiling.
“Worse is Better”? Jim Waldo claims that not really, Worse is simply Worse.
I had an interesting idea today, combining two of my favorite computational pasttimes, lisp and operating systems. Need to ruminate on it some more and write it up.
Being the trident sound card driver kernel maintainer, my second worst
nightmare is some unrelated change in a different part of the kernel
breaking my module just before 2.6.0-final ships. My worst nightmare,
in case you were wondering, if finding such a change, and before I
have time to come out with a fix, having 2.6.0-final ship…
At least it’s working fine with 2.6.0-test11. ladypine and
me are currently listening to “moving on up” (Full Monte soundtrack)
on it. There shouldn’t be too many opportunities for screw ups before
2.6.0-final ships with Linus’s code freeze. Is that Murphy laughing in
the distance?
One brute force forward patch later, and 2.6.0-t11-shpte boots but does not run userspace. Time to debug, me’thinks…
The last few days have been lousy for reasons too numerous and mundane to count. There is one good thing about it, though – the reasonable assumption that today will be better.
Muli Ben-Yehuda's journal 