[NCLUG] PC for Linux (Ubuntu)

Brian Wood bwood at beww.org
Wed Sep 17 09:04:26 MDT 2008


Bob Proulx wrote:
> DJ Eshelman wrote:

> 
> I would say that if you have to ask if which you should be running
> then I think the person asking should stick with 32-bit.  It is
> simpler and if someone is asking then they probably need the simpler
> course of action.  I personally run 64-bit because I want to exercise
> that path and to fix any programs which do not work properly on
> 64-bits.  I think developers should run 64-bits to continue to improve
> the system.

Amen to that last statement. I was an "early adopter" of the DEC Alpha
CPU long ago, and it was totally amazing to me how much code out there
was not 64-bit clean. The biggest problem was integer to pointer
conversions, on an Intel 32-bit machine you can get away with that, as
they are the same size, but not on the alpha. Programmers should have
known better, but people are lazy I guess.

Nobody seemed to care at the time, as few people ran Alpha systems, at
least in the OSS world, but things are changing, fast.

beww



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