Daily Archives: Saturday, December 15, 2012

  • A Shropshire republican writes

    Steve WoodsMedia, Politics

    As an exiled Salopian, the Shropshire Star forms part of my regular online reading.

    Imagine my surprise earlier when I discovered that there is a spark of republicanism in my home town of Market Drayton, as shown by the following letter from Draytonian Andrew Lovatt.

    While thousands of the Queen’s subjects are born into poverty, her third great-grandchild will be born into a position of high status and comfort.

    The royal inequality gap is in direct contradiction to everything that 21st century Britain claims to stand for.

    Keep up the good work, Andrew! You probably feel quite lonely. 🙂

  • Linux drops support for i386 chips

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

    image of Tux, the Linux kernel mascot
    Tux, the Linux kernel mascot
    One of the great things about Linux is that it will run on really old hardware.

    However, there are some limits to this and The H Online reports that Linus Torvalds, the keeper of the Linux kernel, has integrated various changes developed by Intel employee H. Peter Anvin into the main development branch of Linux to remove support for the 386 series of processors from the Linux kernel. As a consequence, the Nx586 from Nexgen, a company that was later taken over by AMD, will also no longer be supported; design ideas for this processor were later incorporated into AMD’s K6, which continues to be supported.

    These changes will stop Linux from running on the system for which Torvalds first began to develop Linux. Linus’ response to this was: “I’m not sentimental. Good riddance.”

    Intel i836 processors, otherwise known as 80386 processors, were first introduced back in 1985 and worked at a then dazzling top speed of 33 mHZ.