Cygwin 1.7 Released

jensend writes "The 1.7 branch of Cygwin, the Unix-like environment for Windows, has reached stable status after about 3 1/2 years of effort. Among many other changes, this release drops support for Windows 9x. Since the NT API and NT-based versions of Windows are more capable and somewhat less of a mismatch with POSIX (for instance, they include a security model), this has allowed for code path simplifications, better performance (particularly noticeable with pipe I/O), better security, and better POSIX compatibility."

Comments

Merry Fucking Christmas!

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you nerds doing still working??

Isn't there some kind of /. Santa tracker or something??

Oh wait a minute. Slashdot is run by Jews. That explains everything.

Re:Merry Fucking Christmas!

[Anonymous Coward]

As a result of an overwhelming lack of requests, and with research
  help from that renowned scientific journal SPY magazine (January, 1990)
  --here is the annual scientific inquiry into Santa Claus.

  1) No known species of reindeer can fly. BUT there are 300,000 species
  of living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are
  insects and germs, this does not COMPLETELY rule out flying reindeer
  which only Santa has ever seen.

  2) There are 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world. BUT
  since Santa doesn't (appear) to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and
  Buddhist children, that reduces the workload to 15% of the total - 378
  million according to the Population Reference Reference Bureau. At an
  average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that's 91.8 million
  homes. One presumes there's at least one good child in each.

  3) Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different
  time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west
  (which seems logical). This works out to 822.6 visits per second. This is
  to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has
  1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney,
  fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat
  whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the
  sleigh and move on to the next house. Assuming that each of these 91.8
  millions stops are evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course,
  we know to be false but for the purposes of our calculations we will
  accept), we are now talking about .78 miles per household, a total trip of
  75-1/2 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at
  least once every 31 hours, plus feeding and etc.

  This means that Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3,000
  times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made
  vehicle on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per
  second - a conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour.

  4) The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming
  that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized lego set (2 pounds),
  the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably
  described as overweight. On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more
  than 300 pounds. Even granting that "flying reindeer" (see point #1) could
  pull TEN TIMES the normal amount, we cannot do the job with eight, or even
  nine. We need 214,200 reindeer. This increases the payload - not even
  counting the weight of the sleigh - to 353,430 tons. Again, for
  comparison - this is four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth.

  5) 353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air
  resistance - this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as
  spacecraft re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer
  will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy. Per second. Each. In
  short, they will burst into flame almost instantaneously, exposing the
  reindeer behind them, and create deafening sonic booms in their wake. The
  entire reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second.
  Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times
  greater than gravity. A 250-pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim)
  would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force.

  In conclusion - If Santa ever DID deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he's
  dead now. Merry X-mas.

Cygwin and Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

Yay! With Cygwin, you can take good, reliable, high-quality software and run it on a shitty OS! Woohoo! I bet they had to work so hard to be able to do that, too.

Compared to MingW,

[BhaKi]

cygwin SUCKS. Cygwin tools' functionality is a small subset of GNU utilities. MingW, OTOH, is a complete port of GNU to Windows.

Re:simpler explanation is

[Virak]

That sounds exactly like what a Jewdot editor would say. I knew it, you're one of them too!

Too expensive!

[Anonymous Coward]

Breakout licenses for cygwin are just too friggin' expensive.