[how many computer users would have the slightest idea what any of this means?]
<http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3655511>
Linux Desktop Gets a New (X) Face
By Sean Michael Kerner
The term Linux desktop is a bit of misnomer since there are actually many Linux desktop environments, including KDE and GNOME.
[...]
....................
Bad form old bean - that's a rigged question.
The target audience is clearly technical.
Windows is the dominant operating system and considered by millions to be easy to use. But consider this excerpt from a Microsoft Dev Network technical paper on the Windows XP kernel:
Reduced Lock Contention
A number of critical internal locks used to synchronize access to various internal memory management data structures have been either removed completely or optimized, resulting in much less contention. The following operations no longer involve acquiring locks: charging nonpaged and paged pool quotas, allocating and mapping system page table entries, charging commitment of pages, and allocating and mapping physical memory allocated through the address windowing extensions (AWE) functions.
Access to the lock that synchronizes access to the structures that describe physical memory (the PFN database) has been improved. These changes translate into greater parallelism and scalability on multiprocessor systems, since the number of times the memory manager may have to block while another CPU is making a change to a global structure has been reduced or eliminated.
[...]
<http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/01/12/XPKernel/>
.d.