Whatever, dude. It's a hash collision, and adding more letters won't help when you already have popular letters. You could also capitalize the B, under UNIX, (or is it Unix?:) or use longer names, but don't you think a better long-term solution would be to try not to use names that are already taken?
After all, we have cc, bcc, gcc, lcc, and probably a few others, why have another bcc when you could have icc, or vcc, or cb or something. I'm sure the marketing people just spend all day thinking up better names, anyhow, put them to use for once.:)
In Unix, bcc is a GPL'ed compiler for producing 386 binaries. I realize that bcc has been the 'Borland C Compiler', but we really don't need more than one C Compiler on the same platform, with the same name. That's just trouble waiting to happen.
I almost completely agree with what you said about movie ratings, but no matter how many cities allow women to go topless, you won't see it very often just from outright societal pressure. (and heck, they'd probably charge them with disrupting traffic or something...)
The RHPS stuff is really lame, though. We had some of that here, and we have one of the best productions at the Rialto in Raleigh, NC. (Disclaimer: I don't work on the show, I'm just a fan...) They were cracking down on underage drinking too, but they started censoring the on-stage activities, and that was pretty silly. (Oh no, simulated sex with a flashlight...)
And man, I'm glad I didn't go to college early. I thought about it when I first took my SAT's, but I'm glad I waited, because instead of being as mature as your average college student, and as screwed up, and half the size, now I'm definitely more mature, screwed up in my own special way, and about the right size.;)
Jon Katz, I've read your articles, and I'm not always particularly impressed, but in this case... Well, you have to pick which battles to fight, and this one sounds entertaining.
I saw the South Park movie, and although I'm certainly old enough (21), I am of course in favor of letting whoever (a) wants to see the movie and (b) thinks they can handle satire, to see the movie. Of course this cuts out the religious right, but by and large, most teenagers and some adults fit this criteria.
Why blame other people for not censoring you when you should be perfectly capable of censoring yourself? Why should movie theaters enforce that the parents be there the whole time, when you can confirm that they have the parent's permission? Isn't that what it's supposed to be all about?
Bah. I hate politics, and arbitrary laws based on age. Don't ask me for my opinions on uniforms in public schools, because I'll tell you.
Put the shades back on, you look like RMS in that picture.:)
No, seriously, I'm proud of my beard too, I just have to hack Unix more to get it to look like that.
However, what's up with the K-DE Windowing System? Eh? That strike anyone else as odd? KDE is common, and 'K DE' is bearable, because it is the 'K Desktop Environment', but where did that dash come from? Journalists, man... Somewhere in the public's respect with lawyers and used-car salesmen. (to paraphrase Barry Saunders)
If you want to blame Microsoft, buy NT, but how much tech support does that really get anyone?
If you want it to work, set up Linux. If you want to blame someone, buy it from a vendor. Who loses here?
Oh yeah, and... standard disclaimer: if you *really* want to put *four* ethernet cards in one machine to serve *static* web pages to more users than will *ever* visit your web site, then get Microsoft to setup NT for you. At least for now.:)
Unfortunately doing this literally would probably lose a lot in translation, and doing it any other way would be difficult. Maybe one day, 40 years later, when the Cyc project is considered an 'applet' or something, we'll have smart text-filters...
Um, that's not precisely true. First, I've installed linux *without* partitioning before, UMSDOS support still works, and you can mount ext2 partitions (or any other filesystem type, pretty much) on loopback, which means they're just files on top of another filesystem. It isn't necessarily as efficient, but it's still pretty fast, actually.
Also, you could run X off of a CD, if necessary, with a little magic for file locations and temporary files. However, you're right in that I wouldn't want to run X in the initial install, unless I was assured that I could *always* either pick the right X-server, or use one that would work the first time. That seems unlikely.
Time for an ncurses version... (there might be one, I haven't looked into this at all...)
There's a similar emulator from SCO called Merge, I haven't tried it, but see if you can run the SCO x86 binaries under iBCS, I'd be curious as to the results.
Compare buying new PC's to buying new consoles. New PC's are getting cheaper, old hardware will always get cheaper. Consoles... well, the systems might drop in price a little, but they'll go back up for the next generation, and the games will always be pricey. PC games tend to drop in price quickly enough for me, but I still haven't bought them in a while though.:(
This wasn't accurate, it was just as uninformed as most articles. At least it's publicity, though.
I know that at least FreeBSD should be able to run linux binaries without too much trouble, just like Linux should be able to run, say, SCO binaries without too much work, etc. So it shouldn't really have fewer applications. Also, a lot of the same UNIX apps should be source-compatible anyhow, and some are released under the BSD license.
Since the owner of the source code can release it under multiple licenses anyhow, there's nothing wrong with making a kernel submission GPL'ed, and also releasing it to the *BSD's under their license, so I don't really see the argument there. The other arguments have been dealt with. Remember, the BSD license lets your competitors freely use your code too, and also lets people take that code and incorporate it into closed projects, which I don't think is necessarily a feature.
Past that, at least it's press. I don't believe that 70% of all ISP's figure, either. A lot of ISP's use Linux. Maybe if he meant the number, it would only take a few major ISP's to skew that figure. Still... that doesn't jive.
Computers are getting cheaper, game consoles... aren't. At least now some of the best games are coming out for the PC, but consoles generally last longer than gaming PC's and are cheaper. Hey, gaming PC's can be expensive if you want the latest and greatest of everything. I don't mind being 18 months behind the cutting edge, but I miss all the new games...
However, to play a lot of old console system games and arcade games, nothing beats a real computer.:)
Oh, and yo new comment-posting dude, fill out the dept. field, will ya? That's one of my favorite parts. (like "from the Mmm... Playstation II dept." or the "crunchy with milk dept." or whatever. "From the dept." sounds a little too staid and dry around here...) Okay, end of nit-picking.
I'd *love* to get a few shares of RHAT early. I like their company, and believe in the product. (well, maybe not 6.0, but... never use the first release of anything on a production machine until you're sure it's stable:)
However, for you doubters crying "Foul!" and "SPAM!", remember that Mark Twain had an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of a little venture run by his friend Alexander Graham Bell, and... he turned it down because he'd gotten burned one too many times by bad investments.
So when I get my shares of RHAT too late, or don't hold onto them, I might be feeling pretty stupid...
Um.... They did raise money, at $6 a share. That's what an IPO is. If the stock goes up, BEOS doesn't get the money, the people who sell the shares do. If the company holds onto some stock, however, selling that later might make them some money.
That's why Bill Gates is rich: he kept all his stock.
1) This has *no bearing whatsoever* on her work. And if she were a man, and that man was attractive, then maybe someone would have brought this up. Also, what bearing does this man's opinions have on the field of Computer Science? I don't agree with, say, all of RMS's views, or ESR's, but they're still great coders...
2) Didn't look at her home page, but professional photos do tend to look better. Actually, that was one of the *intelligent* replies to this troll.
3) I'm sure 'the woman' is used to it by now. It's not nice to call people ugly, but consider the source. If she hasn't learned by now not to listen to anonymous posters talking trash, perhaps it's time.
This brings up another point: would we be viciously defending her if she wasn't a woman? Of course not. Grow up, gender matters in society, no matter how much you try to wish it away. Hopefully in the future people will view this in a more positive light, instead of being so hung up about it. Maybe this is America's Puritan roots at work for us, but I could do without it.
No, if they have code for it, I'm sure they can translate it into decent code for us. If they can't do that, it's probably because of licensing issues, not technical incompetence. (I doubt they built decoders for them directly into hardware, they must have drivers for other people's DVD drives...)
I used Debian at first, and it was okay. I did find it easier to download and install a few packages, and get it all working, although the installer took some time to figure out...
However, what's with the nine diskettes? That sounds like a reason to buy a ZIP-drive, at least. (I got mine to work on a 286, I just had to make a 5-1/4" disk with the DOS driver on it at first, and ever since then, I've been sold on them--it's so handy for copying files off of old computers, provided they have a paralell port... Besides, with 100MB of space for an install, put in an X-server configuration too, while you're at it...)
Also, I haven't spent much time with FreeBSD, although the kernel configuration looked nifty, and the minimal disk looked weird, and I use Red Hat as my primary distro, although I'm currently un-thrilled with Red Hat 6. It is more bloated and unstable than a Linux distribution should be, so I'm waiting for the revisions to fix this. Of course, you could say the same thing about Kernel 2.2.x, but... we'll see how well it improves, I have some faith in both of these...
Have you ever run a demo written in straight assembler? (or do you know why the Linux kernel isn't written in Java?) *I* can tell the difference, Java is very slow compared to assembler. (especially on a P-90, or anything less...:)
The point is moot. If Amiga contributes their changes back to the kernel, (they could use binary-only modules) Linux will have good DVD support and kickass multimedia hardware support. If they don't, we'll hate them. Either way, I'll probably still be using Linux.
That's the only company out there where Linux would give the Amiga a real edge for their CPU as regards Java applications, and whatnot. If we could run that at near-native speeds, life would be good.
Assuming Transmeta really is making a CPU, of course.;)
(Of course, we're basically re-inventing LISP machines, but as long as it's cheap and fast, we're doing better, right?:)
Okay, here's what you do today: take a RedHat distribution, *only* install one 'desktop', and the associated applications. Okay, so say I install GNOME with fvwm95-2 or qvwm, or E with only one theme or something, and get rid of some of the nice options and stuff. Then I only install GNOME apps, and I try to get rid of all the options to get to the 'Terminal' icon. I hide the boot messages, maybe with a splash screen or something, automatically make the system start up in X, perhaps with an option to start in some kind of 'maintenance mode' running the SVGA16 server or whatever counts as minimal on a platform. Make the user automatically be logged in as root, because who needs that login hassle? It's confusing... Eventually we'll get rid of all of those bothersome "UNIX features", or we can all go out and buy Macintoshes...
Anyone see my point here? Red Hat is trying to make applications and desktops easier to use for the average user, but they shouldn't try to prevent people from using an xterm to load netscape instead of a button, or switching their desktop from GNOME to KDE, or friggin' twm for that matter. If the user knows how to use it, they should be able to, because no matter what you say, one size does not fit all. For that matter, I would kill for a command prompt on a Macintosh. I found a third-party one, but I didn't like it that much. Also, I'd love to see real network logins with decent profiles and access controls on Windows or the Macintosh. Right now NT only really falls short on the huge profiles and no disk quotas.
Also, what if your system does halt on something while booting up? Isn't it better to have a real error message than a negative number or a page fault? Even if it starts up in text, since starting a graphics mode might be a problem?
Also, I don't think you should ever reject feedback from users, whether or not they are programmers. Secretaries might have specific needs, but we do too. In lynx, there's an option for a beginner mode, an intermediate mode, and an advanced mode. It starts out in beginner mode, and if you read through the help, you can change it to intermediate or advanced mode. So what's wrong with a little choice?
I agree, I love it when I see benchmarking like this. tomshardware does a good job for this sort of thing with processors, but that's most of what they benchmark.
I benchmarked emulator overhead for a while, but gave up when I realized that the actual processor overhead by running DOSEmu is a percent or two, and just completely installed Linux instead.
(recompiling benchmarks is also a good way to test compilers...:)
? I've tested this, and gcc is pretty good, and egcs is great on x86. I remember that when comparing it to the old Watcom C compiler (which was the best back then) integer performance was always equal or up to 30% better, and only floating point performance was lacking by a percent or two. I wouldn't mind having a faster compiler, but what we have is pretty good, and is supported on many platforms. For really speed-critical optimizations, assembler still works.
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Whatever, dude. It's a hash collision, and adding more letters won't help when you already have popular letters. You could also capitalize the B, under UNIX, (or is it Unix? :) or use longer names, but don't you think a better long-term solution would be to try not to use names that are already taken?
:)
After all, we have cc, bcc, gcc, lcc, and probably a few others, why have another bcc when you could have icc, or vcc, or cb or something. I'm sure the marketing people just spend all day thinking up better names, anyhow, put them to use for once.
In Unix, bcc is a GPL'ed compiler for producing 386 binaries. I realize that bcc has been the 'Borland C Compiler', but we really don't need more than one C Compiler on the same platform, with the same name. That's just trouble waiting to happen.
Yeah, I know, it's part of the whole CYA mentality these businesses have, and some of it is understandable, but it shouldn't be this bad.
:)
However... Hey, Mr. Homeless Man, do you want your $10 to buy vodka or not?
I almost completely agree with what you said about movie ratings, but no matter how many cities allow women to go topless, you won't see it very often just from outright societal pressure. (and heck, they'd probably charge them with disrupting traffic or something...)
;)
The RHPS stuff is really lame, though. We had some of that here, and we have one of the best productions at the Rialto in Raleigh, NC. (Disclaimer: I don't work on the show, I'm just a fan...) They were cracking down on underage drinking too, but they started censoring the on-stage activities, and that was pretty silly. (Oh no, simulated sex with a flashlight...)
And man, I'm glad I didn't go to college early. I thought about it when I first took my SAT's, but I'm glad I waited, because instead of being as mature as your average college student, and as screwed up, and half the size, now I'm definitely more mature, screwed up in my own special way, and about the right size.
Jon Katz, I've read your articles, and I'm not always particularly impressed, but in this case... Well, you have to pick which battles to fight, and this one sounds entertaining.
I saw the South Park movie, and although I'm certainly old enough (21), I am of course in favor of letting whoever (a) wants to see the movie and (b) thinks they can handle satire, to see the movie. Of course this cuts out the religious right, but by and large, most teenagers and some adults fit this criteria.
Why blame other people for not censoring you when you should be perfectly capable of censoring yourself? Why should movie theaters enforce that the parents be there the whole time, when you can confirm that they have the parent's permission? Isn't that what it's supposed to be all about?
Bah. I hate politics, and arbitrary laws based on age. Don't ask me for my opinions on uniforms in public schools, because I'll tell you.
Put the shades back on, you look like RMS in that picture. :)
No, seriously, I'm proud of my beard too, I just have to hack Unix more to get it to look like that.
However, what's up with the K-DE Windowing System? Eh? That strike anyone else as odd? KDE is common, and 'K DE' is bearable, because it is the 'K Desktop Environment', but where did that dash come from? Journalists, man... Somewhere in the public's respect with lawyers and used-car salesmen. (to paraphrase Barry Saunders)
If you want to blame Microsoft, buy NT, but how much tech support does that really get anyone?
:)
If you want it to work, set up Linux. If you want to blame someone, buy it from a vendor. Who loses here?
Oh yeah, and... standard disclaimer: if you *really* want to put *four* ethernet cards in one machine to serve *static* web pages to more users than will *ever* visit your web site, then get Microsoft to setup NT for you. At least for now.
Heh. Sounds like a job for lex or sed...
Unfortunately doing this literally would probably lose a lot in translation, and doing it any other way would be difficult. Maybe one day, 40 years later, when the Cyc project is considered an 'applet' or something, we'll have smart text-filters...
Um, that's not precisely true. First, I've installed linux *without* partitioning before, UMSDOS support still works, and you can mount ext2 partitions (or any other filesystem type, pretty much) on loopback, which means they're just files on top of another filesystem. It isn't necessarily as efficient, but it's still pretty fast, actually.
Also, you could run X off of a CD, if necessary, with a little magic for file locations and temporary files. However, you're right in that I wouldn't want to run X in the initial install, unless I was assured that I could *always* either pick the right X-server, or use one that would work the first time. That seems unlikely.
Time for an ncurses version... (there might be one, I haven't looked into this at all...)
There's a similar emulator from SCO called Merge, I haven't tried it, but see if you can run the SCO x86 binaries under iBCS, I'd be curious as to the results.
Compare buying new PC's to buying new consoles. :(
New PC's are getting cheaper, old hardware will always get cheaper. Consoles... well, the systems might drop in price a little, but they'll go back up for the next generation, and the games will always be pricey. PC games tend to drop in price quickly enough for me, but I still haven't bought them in a while though.
This wasn't accurate, it was just as uninformed as most articles. At least it's publicity, though.
I know that at least FreeBSD should be able to run linux binaries without too much trouble, just like Linux should be able to run, say, SCO binaries without too much work, etc. So it shouldn't really have fewer applications. Also, a lot of the same UNIX apps should be source-compatible anyhow, and some are released under the BSD license.
Since the owner of the source code can release it under multiple licenses anyhow, there's nothing wrong with making a kernel submission GPL'ed, and also releasing it to the *BSD's under their license, so I don't really see the argument there. The other arguments have been dealt with. Remember, the BSD license lets your competitors freely use your code too, and also lets people take that code and incorporate it into closed projects, which I don't think is necessarily a feature.
Past that, at least it's press. I don't believe that 70% of all ISP's figure, either. A lot of ISP's use Linux. Maybe if he meant the number, it would only take a few major ISP's to skew that figure. Still... that doesn't jive.
Computers are getting cheaper, game consoles... aren't. At least now some of the best games are coming out for the PC, but consoles generally last longer than gaming PC's and are cheaper. Hey, gaming PC's can be expensive if you want the latest and greatest of everything. I don't mind being 18 months behind the cutting edge, but I miss all the new games...
:)
However, to play a lot of old console system games and arcade games, nothing beats a real computer.
Oh, and yo new comment-posting dude, fill out the dept. field, will ya? That's one of my favorite parts. (like "from the Mmm... Playstation II dept." or the "crunchy with milk dept." or whatever. "From the dept." sounds a little too staid and dry around here...) Okay, end of nit-picking.
Ah, but they did have this in Revenge of the Nerds, and that made it that much funnier...
:)
...now I need to get one of these for my own *ahem* recreational use...
I'd *love* to get a few shares of RHAT early. I like their company, and believe in the product. (well, maybe not 6.0, but... never use the first release of anything on a production machine until you're sure it's stable :)
However, for you doubters crying "Foul!" and "SPAM!", remember that Mark Twain had an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of a little venture run by his friend Alexander Graham Bell, and... he turned it down because he'd gotten burned one too many times by bad investments.
So when I get my shares of RHAT too late, or don't hold onto them, I might be feeling pretty stupid...
Um.... They did raise money, at $6 a share. That's what an IPO is. If the stock goes up, BEOS doesn't get the money, the people who sell the shares do. If the company holds onto some stock, however, selling that later might make them some money.
That's why Bill Gates is rich: he kept all his stock.
You should know better than this:
1) This has *no bearing whatsoever* on her work. And if she were a man, and that man was attractive, then maybe someone would have brought this up. Also, what bearing does this man's opinions have on the field of Computer Science? I don't agree with, say, all of RMS's views, or ESR's, but they're still great coders...
2) Didn't look at her home page, but professional photos do tend to look better. Actually, that was one of the *intelligent* replies to this troll.
3) I'm sure 'the woman' is used to it by now. It's not nice to call people ugly, but consider the source. If she hasn't learned by now not to listen to anonymous posters talking trash, perhaps it's time.
This brings up another point: would we be viciously defending her if she wasn't a woman? Of course not. Grow up, gender matters in society, no matter how much you try to wish it away. Hopefully in the future people will view this in a more positive light, instead of being so hung up about it. Maybe this is America's Puritan roots at work for us, but I could do without it.
No, if they have code for it, I'm sure they can translate it into decent code for us. If they can't do that, it's probably because of licensing issues, not technical incompetence. (I doubt they built decoders for them directly into hardware, they must have drivers for other people's DVD drives...)
I used Debian at first, and it was okay. I did find it easier to download and install a few packages, and get it all working, although the installer took some time to figure out...
However, what's with the nine diskettes? That sounds like a reason to buy a ZIP-drive, at least.
(I got mine to work on a 286, I just had to make a 5-1/4" disk with the DOS driver on it at first, and ever since then, I've been sold on them--it's so handy for copying files off of old computers, provided they have a paralell port... Besides, with 100MB of space for an install, put in an X-server configuration too, while you're at it...)
Also, I haven't spent much time with FreeBSD, although the kernel configuration looked nifty, and the minimal disk looked weird, and I use Red Hat as my primary distro, although I'm currently un-thrilled with Red Hat 6. It is more bloated and unstable than a Linux distribution should be, so I'm waiting for the revisions to fix this. Of course, you could say the same thing about Kernel 2.2.x, but... we'll see how well it improves, I have some faith in both of these...
Have you ever run a demo written in straight assembler? :)
(or do you know why the Linux kernel isn't written in Java?)
*I* can tell the difference, Java is very slow compared to assembler.
(especially on a P-90, or anything less...
The point is moot. If Amiga contributes their changes back to the kernel, (they could use binary-only modules) Linux will have good DVD support and kickass multimedia hardware support. If they don't, we'll hate them. Either way, I'll probably still be using Linux.
That's the only company out there where Linux would give the Amiga a real edge for their CPU as regards Java applications, and whatnot. If we could run that at near-native speeds, life would be good.
;)
:)
Assuming Transmeta really is making a CPU, of course.
(Of course, we're basically re-inventing LISP machines, but as long as it's cheap and fast, we're doing better, right?
Okay, here's what you do today: take a RedHat distribution, *only* install one 'desktop', and the associated applications. Okay, so say I install GNOME with fvwm95-2 or qvwm, or E with only one theme or something, and get rid of some of the nice options and stuff. Then I only install GNOME apps, and I try to get rid of all the options to get to the 'Terminal' icon. I hide the boot messages, maybe with a splash screen or something, automatically make the system start up in X, perhaps with an option to start in some kind of 'maintenance mode' running the SVGA16 server or whatever counts as minimal on a platform. Make the user automatically be logged in as root, because who needs that login hassle? It's confusing... Eventually we'll get rid of all of those bothersome "UNIX features", or we can all go out and buy Macintoshes...
Anyone see my point here? Red Hat is trying to make applications and desktops easier to use for the average user, but they shouldn't try to prevent people from using an xterm to load netscape instead of a button, or switching their desktop from GNOME to KDE, or friggin' twm for that matter. If the user knows how to use it, they should be able to, because no matter what you say, one size does not fit all. For that matter, I would kill for a command prompt on a Macintosh. I found a third-party one, but I didn't like it that much. Also, I'd love to see real network logins with decent profiles and access controls on Windows or the Macintosh. Right now NT only really falls short on the huge profiles and no disk quotas.
Also, what if your system does halt on something while booting up? Isn't it better to have a real error message than a negative number or a page fault? Even if it starts up in text, since starting a graphics mode might be a problem?
Also, I don't think you should ever reject feedback from users, whether or not they are programmers. Secretaries might have specific needs, but we do too. In lynx, there's an option for a beginner mode, an intermediate mode, and an advanced mode. It starts out in beginner mode, and if you read through the help, you can change it to intermediate or advanced mode. So what's wrong with a little choice?
I agree, I love it when I see benchmarking like this. tomshardware does a good job for this sort of thing with processors, but that's most of what they benchmark.
:)
I benchmarked emulator overhead for a while, but gave up when I realized that the actual processor overhead by running DOSEmu is a percent or two, and just completely installed Linux instead.
(recompiling benchmarks is also a good way to test compilers...
? I've tested this, and gcc is pretty good, and egcs is great on x86. I remember that when comparing it to the old Watcom C compiler (which was the best back then) integer performance was always equal or up to 30% better, and only floating point performance was lacking by a percent or two. I wouldn't mind having a faster compiler, but what we have is pretty good, and is supported on many platforms. For really speed-critical optimizations, assembler still works.