my discussions are sometimes being transferred to other forums?

[bert]

Thanks - I'll look it up.

[bert]

No, the clue is in the "fr"

[bert]

but it isn't supported anymore and can only be run on W7 64 bit with much fiddling with XP emulation or by regressing back to V5

[bert]

In message , [e-mail] writes

The perceived problem with these forums which hijack threads is that ultimately their aim is to kill the feeder news group.

[polygonum]

There is also the perceived problem that they are able to benefit by getting clicks on advertisement-carrying pages due to our voluntary, co-operative efforts.

Whether any do so is another matter - because I never visit them, I do not know.

[Nick Odell]

Oh, I dunno. It depends what the other choices are, I suppose. I was given a piece of complicated gubbins that I presume had been sourced as a 'grey' import. The instructions were in three languages and the French was, for me, much easier to understand than either Danish or Polish.

Nick

[polygonum]

And I did post it knowingly, with a smiley - it was the only ng with thunderbird in its name carried by news.individual.net.

[bert]

Neither do I.

[Mike Tomlinson]

En el artículo , bert escribió:

The clue's in the smiley.

[Jeremy Nicoll - news posts]

How about in Windows, the Registry?

How about the SQL-like interface to WMI?

[bert]

Windows wasn't the first interface of its type.

That's an application of an idea not an idea in itself.

[Jeremy Nicoll - news posts]

The registry's not "an interface" at all. It's a configuration database.

FFS.

[Huge]

SQL wasn't MS's idea and WMI sounds like an extension to SNMP to me.

In MS's defence (shock, horror), there's very little that's absolutely new in computing - most things are built on the back of other people's ideas.

[Andy Burns]

WMI is MS's implementation of the CIM and WBEM parts of DMTF, I've never used any other implementations, but it looks like the SQLish query language is part of the spec, don't know whether MS brought that to the table or one of the other DMTF members. Yes, you can view it as doing similar things to SNMP.

Doesn't stop every man and his dog trying to patent their combination of building blocks.

[Huge]

Troo. That and standing up in press conferences and product launches and pontificating about "innovation" when it's no such thing. TBH, I've not seen anything paradigm-shifting since I worked with Xerox PARC in the early 80's.

[Nick Odell]

As a mere consumer and bystander my impression is that the last two real innovations were parallel processing and the 32-bit microprocessor and that everything we have now still stems from those. Am I right? Are today's multi-core processors not just banks of 32-bit technology, harnessed together? (Genuine question from the easily dumbfounded)

Nick

[Huge]

First implemented by Burroughs in ~1970.

That's not really an innovation. We were just waiting for the engineering to catch up with the desire. The earliest 32 bit microprocessor that I can find is the AMD 32000 in 1988, but I'm certain there are earlier ones...

In effect, yes.

[Martin Brown]

I think the advent of cheap laser printers was a major paradigm shift. The same is also true of inkjets - I still have a single small print done on a prototype using a chinagraph clay coated paper somewhere.

These days they are mostly 64bit native processors and the OS has just about caught up but not all the applications/drivers. 64bit isn't a massive leap forward like the step up from 16bit was. 2^32 is already a big enough number that most consumers won't notice the difference.

One place where it makes a big difference is magic bitboards for chess engines which play on an 8x8 = 64 squares board. Few other applications benefit to the same extent but you can address insane amounts of memory and shuffle it about faster thanks to advances there.

A rough guide is that there are true multi-cores and hyperthreading (which is virtual/pretend multicore). The former can have real benefits for problems amenable to parallel processing the latter can sometimes (IME often) choke on data path bandwidth - again improved in 64bit kit.

They are sort of stuck with 3-4GHz clock speeds now. The days when every generation was 1.5x faster clock speeds are long gone. And the benefits of multi-CPU don't scale all that well after about 4 even for algorithms that are optimised for parallelism.

A special case are dedicated 3D graphics cards where the job of rendering in realtime can be divided up across many cores.

Solid state disks are the latest big system improvement at least if you have to handle large amounts of data quickly. Prices are falling too as they become mainstream.

[Nick Odell]

Thanks, Huge & Martin. Nick

[John Rumm]

68020 was '84 ish, and the 68K itself even earlier, although that was only really 32 bit on the inside,

or banks of 64 bit cores with 32 bit emulation.