Supported Features
Supported Features
[Cueball and a friend holding a laptop standing together.] Cueball: It took a lot of work, but this latest linux patch enables support for machines with 4,096 CPUs, up from the old limit of 1,024. Friend: Do you have support for smooth full-screen Flash video yet? Cueball: No, but who uses that?

This comic is a reference to Linux builds adding support and features that will not appeal to the majority of desktop computer and Linux users. Cueball has created a patch that allows support for processors with 4,096 cores, even though most computers have only 8 cores or fewer. He considers this to be more worthwhile an endeavor than full-featured Flash support, which was the most common way to present videos or animations on websites at the time when this comic was published, five years before the first official release of HTML5 . Flash movies are known for their bad performance and high consumption on CPU power compared with other movie formats. Cueball's friend is uninterested in the 4,096-core-processor fix, and only wants to know if it will help him with Flash video.
However, as of 2013, there are commercial computer systems that can be actually configured up to 2,048 cores (4,096 threads), e.g. SGI UV 2000 . 95% of the world's supercomputers run Linux, so while Flash video on desktop Linux would directly affect more people, the high performance computing industry relies on and actually funds Linux development. It should be noted that GNU/Linux now supports flash via Gnash . The first stable release was February 15, 2012; over two and a half years after this comic was written. In a turn, Flash was officially deprecated at the end of 2020, making supporting it mostly pointless.
The title text mentions the "American political satirist, writer, director, television host, actor, media critic, and stand-up comedian" Jon Stewart which further refers to his famous American late night satirical television program The Daily Show . The show is also available on the internet ( www.thedailyshow.com ), presented in Flash video.
[Cueball and a friend holding a laptop standing together.] Cueball: It took a lot of work, but this latest linux patch enables support for machines with 4,096 CPUs, up from the old limit of 1,024. Friend: Do you have support for smooth full-screen Flash video yet? Cueball: No, but who uses that?
