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Domain: ptf.com

Stories and comments across the archive that link to ptf.com.

Comments · 6

  1. Re:Why MySQL Grew So Fast by fm6 · · Score: 1 · on Why MySQL Grew So Fast
    Firebird is free now. When the Web started exploding ten years ago, Firebird was still Interbase, and Interbase was still closed-source and reasonably expensive. (No nitpicks about the specific status of Interbase please -- it's complicated and uninteresting.)

    PostgreSQL has always been OS, but it didn't appear until 1996. The original Postgres engine goes back much further, but didn't support SQL. Also Stonebraker and other Postgres people saw it as the basis of commercial products not free software.

    You're probably right, anyway -- even if Interbase and PosgreSQL had been available for free in 1995, their greater complexity would have kept most web developers from using them. But they weren't so we're dealing in theory.

  2. Re:Is this the end for the CD bookshelves? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0 · on Welcome to the Safari Jungle

    > I wonder if there is a partially technical solution that could be married to an inexpensive organizational solution to facilitate the planning, writing, editing, publishing and distribution of good free electronic books.

    Check out the DOSSIER Project, which seems to be an implementation of the ideas you are talking about. Not only is this editted collection of reference material offered in print, you can subscribe to download PDF versions instead. I like the idea.

    It is also reviewed on Slashdot.

  3. Re:Why would you bother running linux on an ibook? by marmoset · · Score: 1 · on Installing Linux On The New Apple iBook

    One of the two "let's port everything in the world to Darwin and OSX" projects uses Debian's packaging tools extensively.

  4. Re:What about the rest of us Linux PPC Users??? by ygbsm · · Score: 1 · on Linux And The PowerPC Architecture

    I tried the MKLinux on a 1400 trick and was sadly disappointed. First you're right, lack of connectivity makes it useless, secondly it wasn't stable on my powerbook, that might have been the newer G3 upgrade card, it might have been the ethernet card (built in), who knows . . . If anybody wants to try MKLinux, I recommend MkLinux: Microkernel Linux for the Power Macintosh by Prime Time Freeware I gave up on MKLinux and switched to LinuxPPC because I didn't have enough time to make it work . . .

  5. Re:BeOS on slashdot by alangmead · · Score: 1 · on BeOS For Linux!
    I really doubt that its the microkernel that causes BeOS to be so fast. Microkernels are notorious for being slow. (Well, Mach is notorious for being slow, and Mach is the microkernel that has had the most research done with it. Every time someone talks about the lack of speed of Mach, they tend to imply "its just a microkernel thing", but they may just be giving other microkernels a bad name.) Some of the Mach papers that came with the MkLiux book seem to imply that Mach's slowness came from the its message passing architecture (from microkernel to server. A server being a kernel or a piece of a kernel.), and hinted at some ways in which it could optimize them into something only as expensive as a function call. No matter what, they were only hoping to make the microkernel into something that had the same speed as a traditional kernel. They weren't looking for a microkernel design to give them boosted performance.

    I thought BeOS's speed was mainly due to very low latency thread dispatching.

  6. Re:let's not be hypocrites... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0 · on Microsoft Embraces and Extends Perl

    Limiting perl to that which is completely portable hacks large chunks of usefulness out of it. Without the VMS::* modules, there'd be considerably less use for perl there, and similarly for MacPerl. Especially for MacPerl. I urge anyone that thinks that perl is identical in all its ports to sit themselves down in front of a Mac, or to tell me how to build a droplet in unix perl :-) For that matter, if you want to maintain pure portability, then you end up with a lowest-common-denominator language -- and you wouldn't even have fork().

    *If* Microsoft changes core Perl, then there'll be some compatibility problems. But there's nothing stopping you from going to CPAN and getting the "real" module, or from coming up with a whole new port. I'm not that familiar with Java politics and implementations, but I suspect that it'd be considerably more difficult to branch that than perl, for instance.

    Besides, this was the big issue with ActivePerl, when they became the 'main' win32 perl port. "No, they're going to branch perl! It'll be all windowslike and incompatible with the rest!" But the sky didn't fall, and I'm not sure what more Perl FUD is accomplishing for *anyone* involved.

    I realize that most slashdotters think that "everything should be the same" means that "everything should work like unix", but that's just not the case in all situations. Using the unix paradigms in MacPerl, for instance, would just frustrate both unix people using it (whose paradigms have been wrapped around an OS that really doesn't want to think that way) and Mac people (whose programming concepts aren't unixlike).

    Perl isn't Java, controlled tightly by Sun; it's not IE, a particular program. It's considerably more difficult to derail. (Microsoft offers C in Windows, but that hasn't derailed the language there, either.)

    -Rich rich@vax2.concordia.ca