OSNews

From time to time, some OSNews visitors claim that x86 was a bad chip (instruction set?) architecture and something better should come along. As a current example, see http://www.osnews.com/thread?342462 (story: "Freescale To Take on Intel's Atom in Netbook Market", comment: "x86 is brain dead")
What do you all think is technically wrong with x86, why can't it be fixed, and which CPU and/or ISA (instruction set architecture) should follow? Why?
Also, one question that I couldn't answer myself by searching the web: For years, x86 suffered from too few general purpose registers (8), that were only recently raised to 16 with x86-64 (in long mode). What was the reason the number of registers in x86 was not increased earlier and higher? Why limit it to just 16 when other CPU's often offer something around 128 registers or so? Too expensive?

http://marketing.openoffice.org/marketing_bouncer.html

Its often neglected on here that the Microsoft Monopoly is based on more than an OS or a Browser. These figures are the most fun thing to watch.

Microsoft is suddenly taking a hit from all sides.

Here's an idea related to the OSnews sidebar boxes and their content:

On the default OSnews front page, there are also random comments and random news stories shown in the side bar. Those two categories don't seem very useful in my opinion, often covering only very out of date subjects.

Why not replace those two categories with:
- The most recommended news from this month (or two months, or half a year)
- The comments that have gotten most votes from the last week (often the first comments in a new thread seem to get most votes, so it couldn't be too serious, of course, but still better in my opinion than just showing some random comments from the past years).

Hello there,

what's exactly the reason for those newly-introduced folded news items?

Is it just me or is there a growing anti-apple sentiment here at OSNews. Apple hasn't been so froendly with some things lately but nowadays, if anyone says nearly anything supporting apple, they are down are modded down and are ganged up on by multiple hostile flamers. I know this sounds whiny but its starting to piss me off. If you disagree, hate me, dont care about me or other SANE apple supporters (who are being generalized as "fanboys"), the go ahead, mod us down. But is it just me or is there a growing trend of disappointment and discontent about OSNews popularity contests?

Are you on Facebook? If so, please take a moment to stop by the OSNews Facebook page and become a fan. Facebook is a growing social networking site and is a great place to share your favorite bands, books, products, and even websites. If you're on Facebook, we'd appreciate if you'd take a second to let the world know you're an OSNews reader.

Lately I have been looking for an OS that could provide me with a Unix-like environment that has good WiFi, graphics and power management hardware support. Linux distros are nice but the hardware support for something basic like dual monitor support (for something like plugging in a projector) is far from ideal.

Are there any reliable Unix environments that could run under Windows well? I've tried Cygwin and SFU under Windows XP. I recall that these environments are not suitable for running network command-line utilities that require working sys/inet.h headers. Does Vista x64 include SFU? Is it far better than SFU 3.5?

MacBooks are out of the question as they are more expensive outside of the US and limited to slot-loading drives that are not usable with small promo CDs or MiniDVDs that I receive while traveling. It's also equipped with drives that enforce very strict RPC-2 DVD region encoding. These drives are super-slim and can't be replaced easily.

Thanks,
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I think once you are actually on page 2, the OSNews Page 2 link in the orange bar should switch to OSNews Page 1 with the page 1 stories listed underneath, if possible. There is no reason to list the page 2 stories twice on that page, and it adds the convenience of returning to page 1 by "flipping" the page.

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Also, you are not able to comment on old stories on the front page (or page 2), and if you click on "reply" or "post a comment" it tells you so. However, in the conversations section you can type a reply/comment on old stories, only to be denied due to "story age" after you submit it.

(I lost my above comment about page 2 trying to reply to the original "page 2" conversation because of that.)

What's the deal with "Page 2"?

between different employees of sun and the public, there is a packaging war going on and at stake is the VERY FUTURE OF OPENSOLARIS

apt dpkg, ips, spkg, conary, IT IS INCREDIBLE THE LIBERTY OPEN SOURCE HAS CREATED

battle between conary and ips: http://tinyurl.com/6yyyoc

battle between spkg and ips: http://tinyurl.com/5wwdah

And there is more out there.

What is intriguing is that the spkg guy works for sun and helped create opensolaris but also maintains his own distro, the nexenta guys created the first opensolaris distro with a modern packaging system and other innovations like booting off zfs, and and conary guy has worked for free on opensolaris since the beginning, one of the only people like that left.

So all of these packaging battles are just a microcosm of a greater war, a war of ideologies and development methods and entire distributions. Truly a magnificent web of free creation caused by opensolaris being made open source.