Bad ideas

• I'm sitting in Chennai Airport. There are two wifi networks here: BSNL and Tata Indicom. BSNL is free (I know from past experience), but the signal is practically non-existent. Tata used to require toddling off to their booth downstairs to buy a card, but it turns out they have an online purchase now. So I try that.
  
  They ask for name, address, phone, email. Thankfully not for father's/husband's name or ration card number. I supply everything. Their credit card payment gateway is disabled, but they have an ICICI Bank gateway. I click on it. And it tells me my network isn't up.
  
  Well of course it isn't up. That's why I'm trying to pay, right?
  
  So now I'm using GPRS via my mobile phone. Slow, but it's actually good enough.
• Today, and yesterday, I was benchmarking my program with the Sun Studio compiler, and with gcc, on two AMD Opteron machines: one running Solaris, one running Linux. On both machines, the gcc-compiled version beat the Sun Studio version handsomely. Free software is good...
  
  Also, it turns out, a 64-bit binary runs about 60% faster than a 32-bit binary. But the vast majority of new computers out there are 64-bit (AMD Opteron/Turion/Athlon or Intel Core Duo/Core 2 Duo/Xeon), yet are running a 32-bit edition of Windows. Which means they're running roughly 40% slower than they should be.
  
  Moreover, most of the recent benchmarks claiming Intel's new Woodcrest Xeons beat the Opteron were done in 32-bit mode. I'd really like to see 64-bit benchmarks.
  
• If you find it entertaining to hear others bitch about ill-thought-out software, check out this site.