During an experiment, I needed to install Fedora 12. I made a few mistakes:
- I went with the netinstall. Unlike Debian's netinstall, Fedora's is
very slow.
- The installer was a bit sliggish under KVM, and so I accidentally
clicked though the window that let me unselect Gnome. So it's installing
the whole shebang.
- For whatever reason, it is installing CJK fonts. I do not speak either
of those languages, and therefore they are useless to me. Furthermore, I've
been told that something in the neighborhood of 20% of Fedora users make use
of CJK. That just sounds wrong. Why install a package by default
that only 20% of your userbase will benefit from? Aren't there more useful
packages?
Dear Flash,
You Suck.
Sincerely,
Josef 'Jeff' Sipek.
P.S. do I really have to justify this?
Earlier this year, I heard of a company that tried to make a product out of
dynamic binary translation of x86 code to
z/Architecture.
Recently, I decided to look at what they do.
The company is called Mantissa
Corporation, and their binary translation product is called z/VOS.
Much like VMWARE, they cache the translated code, in z/VOS's case it's
really a must otherwise I'd guess the cost of traslation would make the
result unusable. I like how they used VNC (see the demo mentioned below) to
give the virtual x86 box a display.
There is an official blog that
has some interesting bits of information. For example, they hint at how
they use multiple address spaces to give a the x86 code the illusion of
virtual memory. I am not quite sure why they list
Decimal
Floating Point facility as a requirement. Unfortunately, it has been a
few months since the last update.
Their website also happens to have a
demo
of a small x86 assembly operating system starting up and running under
z/VOS. I find this fascinating.
Dear Firefox,
You Suck.
Sincerely,
Josef 'Jeff' Sipek.
P.S. xulrunner-stub using 4% CPU when the window is not visible and 36% when
re-rendering parts of the page is a bit too excessive.