deater

well it depends on your error bars. On many modern system you can have +/- 5% variation or more run to run just due to the non-determinism present in modern CPU architectures and operating systems (even things like room temperature, time of day, the number of environment variables, etc, can affect this). While you could maybe run a set of careful experiments to characterize and remove this, in my experience most researchers don't bother. So something as small as 3% would need a lot of convincing to me to make the argument that it is significant.

even some of Banks' stuff starts to get a bit dated. I was re-reading Consider Phlebas the other day, and in one sequence he snuck into a high-security concert type event and he's making narrow escapes because concert security is humans checking for paper tickets. And while I am sure you could come up with an in-universe reason for why a super-technological somewhat morally ambiguous future event with pervasive technology would be relying on 1980s levels of surveillance, I think it's just funny how people not that long in the past couldn't easily imagine how willing we'd be to overcomplicate things like that.

you wouldn't believe how many people cite that paper as "Wulf et al." when that's practically more characters than saying "Wulf and McKee"

I notice these things a bit more as she was my PhD thesis advisor

I don't know how many of you have seen a 1541 floppy drive in person either but it is massive, it's heavier and possibly bigger that an actual Commodore 64 and pretty expensive at the time too.

it's fun seeing c64 people on the defensive about it, a nice change from getting lectures from them about how their graphics were the pinnacle of 8-bit computing

as the previous commenter hinted, it's because the founders were Vera and Augustin

way back in the day our college LUG (linux user group) had a rep from VA Linux come to speak, but the person running things was unfamiliar with the company and kept calling them "Virginia Linux"

at the time, just out of undergrad, I ended up working for the remnants of the #9 Video Card company that had been bought by S3 and was masking a last effort at making a Linux-based Transmeta-powered "web-pad" (tablet): the "Frontpath ProGear" (new management wouldn't let them give it a Beatles related name that #9 equipment used to get)

in any case due to the unfortunate timing of the dot-com implosion it never really went anywhere (I wish I had managed to keep one, they used to appear on ebay occasionally)

the one thing I remember is that it was memory limited, it had 64MB but I think the code-morphing software really wanted 16MB of it which really cut into the available system memory

saying "windows 98 was bad too" is just an example that Microsoft has always had poor code quality. Back in the day Linux, for all its flaws, was generaly a lot more stable on the same hardware.

microsoft has a lot to answer for after 50 years of normalizing poor quality software