Which computer architecture is best? We got the Linux kernel source, version 2.4.0, and counted the instances of George Carlin's "Seven words you can never say on television", plus "crap," "damn," and "sucks" in each subdirectory of /usr/src/linux/arch.

The results:

alpha 1
arm 0
i386 7
ia64 0
m68k 3
mips 22
mips64 5
parisc 4
ppc 3
s390 0
sh 1
sparc 19
sparc64 13

So it's clear that ARM, IA-64, and System/390 are, from the kernel developer's point of view, the best computer architectures, and as for those piece-of-[explitive deleted] MIPS and Sparc boxes, well, the less we [explitive deleted] say about them the better.

- Don Marti