And Apple's OS X will continue to get faster and faster on all CPUs because they're stilll getting it more and more optimized. They use GCC, which has a LOT of room to grow on the PPC arch (not to say that it's bad now). I think Panther uses GCC-3.3, which has a new processor pipeline description model (DFA) that makes scheduling for a particular CPU easier to describe and produces code that takes better advantage of the CPU.
Also, (AFAIK) Mac OS X has the ability to put multiple compiled versions of code into any binary, meaning that the application you run (or the OS itself) could have seperate binaries for the 970, 74xx, and 7xx CPUs all rolled into one file, your machine picks the best one to use at runtime. The same feature works for seperate archs too, so you could have one app file and INSIDE it you have the PPC binaries and x86 binaries. Resource forks are kewl!
I'd like Apple to ratchet-up the bus speed on the next iBooks to 166 or 200 MHz, they'd have to use faster-than-standard memory though. I don't think it would be a problem, as I'd bet a lot of 144-pin laptop ram can clock up to 166MHz. Apple could also swap out the memory controller for one that handles DDR, or they could sell their own memory 'dertified' for the iBook, they'd make a killing on it.
PowerLogix produces an 800MHz PPC750FX upgrade now, I expect them to move up to the GX when they can. I run my G3 as a server,the G4 would be a wasted upgrade for me as I don't use ANY of the altivec enhancements. I've been waiting for this for a long time. The only reason I haven't bought the PowerLogix FX upgrade is the smaller cache, this new chip satisfies that requirement.
I don't think it really works that way, but running two instances of any PPC OS should be easy with Mac-On-Linux. MOL is like VMWare for the PPC, you can open a full-speed non-emulated Classic session INSIDE Linux, you can also boot it to OSX. I'm pretty sure you could boot multiple sessions as well. With XFree you could even use a mac running linux as a multi-client Mac OS terminal server.
So what you're asking is already possible with 32-bit PPC systems.
Well, since the original poster seems to take his Mozilla issues to Slashdot instead of bugzilla, we're using the 'slashdot WORKSFORME' flag, which is to mod down as flamebait. It has nothing to do with open source defensiveness, it has to do with the poster using the wrong outlet for his problems. Look at how many folks DON'T have that issue, most likely the original poster has installed several versions of Mozilla on top of each other or has totaly borked plugins.
If I were to post that IE crashes every time I open a PDF you wouldn't give me credit, you'd say that I probably screwed up my plugins or something.
I was building Mozilla with GTK2 on my box for a while, but moved back to GTK because 2 was 'crashy'. I didn't notice any difference besides very minor widget appearance changes. What's the draw to GTK2? Are there any 'real' advantages?
Excuse me, as far as I know almost EVERY piece of software has a warning attached that says that it may or may not work at all, every OSS piece of software I've seen has a warning about 'fitness or merchantability' in it, meaning 'sure, use it for your missile targetting systems, but you can't sue us if you get fried.'
Mozilla is one of the 'pillars' of OSS software, along with GCC, the Linux kernel, KDE, GNOME, and Apache (I'm probably forgetting some too). It's important to hype it up and keep us informed so we can test and push the technology. If we were all still using Mozilla 1.0 there wouldn't _BE_ a 1.4 release for a LONG time.
Slashdot is the appropriate place to make such release announcements. If you don't like them taking up space here, turn off mozilla stories in your prefs, if you want to track Mozilla closer turn on the Mozilla slashbox.
I agree with your gentoo/debian point of view, but Debian's install (from what I recall) was a LOT more intensive and didn't net many benefits over Gentoo.
Also, I found apt-get very confusing, but emerge makes a LOT of sense to me. Just a personal opinion.
I think that even if there were liquid nitrogen tanks where the wing was split the result would be the same, as the liquid would expand to gas so quickly under the heat that there would most assuredly be an explosion.
I'll bet you laugh when you scan the radio and hear NPR begging for money.:-)
Seriously though, he's not expecting someone to send him a check for contributing, he's expecting a product that will enable him to sell services. That's the long-term path.
I can't sell a Linux machine to a company and keep the loot I would normally give to Microsoft if the product isn't good, can I?
I would suggest buying a used Mac G3 Blue+White, get one with the Adaptec Ultra2Wide SCSI card. The 450MHz model was the last in it's line, so it has all the revisions, etc.
If this is a school, there's probably one of these under a pile of Apple posters in the Photo Lab. Take it.
The G3 will get great performance for its cost and power requirements, it has no need for a cpu fan so there's less to clean or fail. Linux on PowerPC is amazingly fast, and the fact that you're running on an obscure arch should even protect you from some exploits. Also, there 800MHz upgrades for these things, but you'll never need them.
Put 1GB ram into it. Put a 36GB SCSI drive in. Buy a SCSI drive enclosure for another 36GB drive, and hook that one up externally. Have your internal drive backup to the external every night at 3:00am.
Invest decent money in a good UPS and make sure the room you put this stuff in is environmentally sound (no leaks, flaking walls, rats, bugs, heat). The G3 will stand a few cm off the floor anyway on it's feet, but consider a cheapo-moisture sensor that warns you if pipes burst. Keep that external drive at least 3 feet from the CPU.
Install Gentoo. Seriously, you'll get to be 'at one' with the machine and you'll only get what you ask for, I don't know many people who switch FROM gentoo to anything else.
Seriously, I have a G3 running Linux that I use as a file/print/NAT server at home. Well I decided it was time to rebuild the whole thing, since I had some new ideas on how to implement the filesystem layout... anyway, in between the old Gentoo OS and the new install, I popped the Jaguar CD in to see how it felt on my G3.
LO AN BEHOLD!
Jaguar recognized my Compaq NC3131 64-bit PCI dual-port server NIC without ANY configuration! I saw eth0, eth1, and eth2 in the system profiler. I had forgotten that I put the card in there last year to see if I could get it to work under linux. OSX was even reporting all the detailed info on the Compaq NIC that I wasn't expecting!
Apple's OSX has drivers for hardware Apple never even produced, a byproduct of it's Mach/BSD heritage, and it has the auto-configuring niceness of a well-designed Apple OS.
The best way to reduce congestion, IMHO, would be VERY strict enforcement of a "Let people merge" law. Cars traveling on a highway should NEVER be less than 80ft behind others, and there should be signs 'suggesting' that people 'get to the left' when a major merge is coming on, and telling them to get into the right WELL BEFORE their exit.
We also need to start paying the cops partly on commission, I see too many cops sitting on their asses while I'm being tailgated by homicidal soccer-moms. Strict driver-courtesey laws, video-survelliance of roads, and stricter enforcement would solve congestion better than selling HOV tickets to the aforementioned soccer-moms.
Everyone keeps ranting about this. I have a simple solution:
the computer 'brain' attached to this radar probably discards anything approaching faster than the car's forward motion (assumes it is in another lane, how else could it be moving 'backwards'?). And also discounts anything approaching at the SAME speed as the car (the 'world'). The only thing left are things moving SLOWER than the car's forward motion, the 'brain' figures out their range and general location, (checking the steering to make sure you aren't on a curve) and makes an adjustment to your speed to reduce the possibility of a disasterous crash.
This thing probably DOESN'T [even attempt to] work if you're cruising at 90MPH towards a parked car (nor should it, because that's fair grounds for removal from the gene-pool). It helps you not rear-end folks when you're moving significantly faster than the rest of the folks on the road. I'll bet the auto-braking will discourage all the assholes in Hondas who tailgate me and weave lanes for two hours every day.
Then take a G3/500 and a PIII/500 and build a kernel on each one. The G3 finishes 45 minutes ahead on my machines here at home, the PIII takes almost 1.5 hours.
A 1.25Ghz G4 is probably just as fast as a P4/2.4 in real-world things like kernel compiles.
I just did some rough math and guesswork. It seems the wing took about as much force as if I had driven my Ford Escort into it at 15MPH. That's quite a bit of force!
But the difference is that YOU did it. I was so sick of having mandrake/redhat totalyy screw up a hand-crafted config file because I opened up the 'latest/greatest GUI config tool'.
There really is NO better way (short of fully-automated artificially intelligent solutions) to handle config files. Maybe the only improvement would be a special text-editor for config files, one that had a library of available options and examples and security warnings.
Not to mention that the Mac camp is virtually free of pimply-faced overclocking gamerz who really make computing les enjoyable. Instead you have artists, professors, and rich folks who can speak proper english.
If you think admins will still be going for $30/hour in a few years there's something wrong. Joe Sixpac's son just dropped out of high school and he's getting his A+ certs right now, and he'll work for $10/hour. Wait and see.
Slashdot Mirror
And Apple's OS X will continue to get faster and faster on all CPUs because they're stilll getting it more and more optimized. They use GCC, which has a LOT of room to grow on the PPC arch (not to say that it's bad now). I think Panther uses GCC-3.3, which has a new processor pipeline description model (DFA) that makes scheduling for a particular CPU easier to describe and produces code that takes better advantage of the CPU.
Also, (AFAIK) Mac OS X has the ability to put multiple compiled versions of code into any binary, meaning that the application you run (or the OS itself) could have seperate binaries for the 970, 74xx, and 7xx CPUs all rolled into one file, your machine picks the best one to use at runtime. The same feature works for seperate archs too, so you could have one app file and INSIDE it you have the PPC binaries and x86 binaries. Resource forks are kewl!
I'd like Apple to ratchet-up the bus speed on the next iBooks to 166 or 200 MHz, they'd have to use faster-than-standard memory though. I don't think it would be a problem, as I'd bet a lot of 144-pin laptop ram can clock up to 166MHz. Apple could also swap out the memory controller for one that handles DDR, or they could sell their own memory 'dertified' for the iBook, they'd make a killing on it.
PowerLogix produces an 800MHz PPC750FX upgrade now, I expect them to move up to the GX when they can. I run my G3 as a server,the G4 would be a wasted upgrade for me as I don't use ANY of the altivec enhancements. I've been waiting for this for a long time. The only reason I haven't bought the PowerLogix FX upgrade is the smaller cache, this new chip satisfies that requirement.
I don't think it really works that way, but running two instances of any PPC OS should be easy with Mac-On-Linux. MOL is like VMWare for the PPC, you can open a full-speed non-emulated Classic session INSIDE Linux, you can also boot it to OSX. I'm pretty sure you could boot multiple sessions as well. With XFree you could even use a mac running linux as a multi-client Mac OS terminal server.
So what you're asking is already possible with 32-bit PPC systems.
Right on, I was thinking "I hava AA fonts, but compile against gtk1"
Well, since the original poster seems to take his Mozilla issues to Slashdot instead of bugzilla, we're using the 'slashdot WORKSFORME' flag, which is to mod down as flamebait. It has nothing to do with open source defensiveness, it has to do with the poster using the wrong outlet for his problems. Look at how many folks DON'T have that issue, most likely the original poster has installed several versions of Mozilla on top of each other or has totaly borked plugins.
If I were to post that IE crashes every time I open a PDF you wouldn't give me credit, you'd say that I probably screwed up my plugins or something.
Some stuff moved around or was simplified. Check:
options -> privacy+security -> popup windows
options -> advanced -> scripts and plugins
That's what the slashboxes are for! Your post makes me want to rip my eyeballs out! ARRRRRGHHHH!
Honestly curious, what's the difference?
I was building Mozilla with GTK2 on my box for a while, but moved back to GTK because 2 was 'crashy'. I didn't notice any difference besides very minor widget appearance changes. What's the draw to GTK2? Are there any 'real' advantages?
Excuse me, as far as I know almost EVERY piece of software has a warning attached that says that it may or may not work at all, every OSS piece of software I've seen has a warning about 'fitness or merchantability' in it, meaning 'sure, use it for your missile targetting systems, but you can't sue us if you get fried.'
Mozilla is one of the 'pillars' of OSS software, along with GCC, the Linux kernel, KDE, GNOME, and Apache (I'm probably forgetting some too). It's important to hype it up and keep us informed so we can test and push the technology. If we were all still using Mozilla 1.0 there wouldn't _BE_ a 1.4 release for a LONG time.
Slashdot is the appropriate place to make such release announcements. If you don't like them taking up space here, turn off mozilla stories in your prefs, if you want to track Mozilla closer turn on the Mozilla slashbox.
I agree with your gentoo/debian point of view, but Debian's install (from what I recall) was a LOT more intensive and didn't net many benefits over Gentoo.
Also, I found apt-get very confusing, but emerge makes a LOT of sense to me. Just a personal opinion.
I think that even if there were liquid nitrogen tanks where the wing was split the result would be the same, as the liquid would expand to gas so quickly under the heat that there would most assuredly be an explosion.
Sounds like smoking is only allowed in the reactor room :-)
I'll bet you laugh when you scan the radio and hear NPR begging for money. :-)
Seriously though, he's not expecting someone to send him a check for contributing, he's expecting a product that will enable him to sell services. That's the long-term path.
I can't sell a Linux machine to a company and keep the loot I would normally give to Microsoft if the product isn't good, can I?
I would suggest buying a used Mac G3 Blue+White, get one with the Adaptec Ultra2Wide SCSI card. The 450MHz model was the last in it's line, so it has all the revisions, etc.
If this is a school, there's probably one of these under a pile of Apple posters in the Photo Lab. Take it.
The G3 will get great performance for its cost and power requirements, it has no need for a cpu fan so there's less to clean or fail. Linux on PowerPC is amazingly fast, and the fact that you're running on an obscure arch should even protect you from some exploits. Also, there 800MHz upgrades for these things, but you'll never need them.
Put 1GB ram into it. Put a 36GB SCSI drive in. Buy a SCSI drive enclosure for another 36GB drive, and hook that one up externally. Have your internal drive backup to the external every night at 3:00am.
Invest decent money in a good UPS and make sure the room you put this stuff in is environmentally sound (no leaks, flaking walls, rats, bugs, heat). The G3 will stand a few cm off the floor anyway on it's feet, but consider a cheapo-moisture sensor that warns you if pipes burst. Keep that external drive at least 3 feet from the CPU.
Install Gentoo. Seriously, you'll get to be 'at one' with the machine and you'll only get what you ask for, I don't know many people who switch FROM gentoo to anything else.
Seriously, I have a G3 running Linux that I use as a file/print/NAT server at home. Well I decided it was time to rebuild the whole thing, since I had some new ideas on how to implement the filesystem layout... anyway, in between the old Gentoo OS and the new install, I popped the Jaguar CD in to see how it felt on my G3.
LO AN BEHOLD!
Jaguar recognized my Compaq NC3131 64-bit PCI dual-port server NIC without ANY configuration! I saw eth0, eth1, and eth2 in the system profiler. I had forgotten that I put the card in there last year to see if I could get it to work under linux. OSX was even reporting all the detailed info on the Compaq NIC that I wasn't expecting!
Apple's OSX has drivers for hardware Apple never even produced, a byproduct of it's Mach/BSD heritage, and it has the auto-configuring niceness of a well-designed Apple OS.
I'm not understanding what you mean. I said:
1. Cars should be more than 80Ft apart (front-wise) on the freeway.
and
2. Cops don't seem to ever nab the assholes who are 2ft from my rear bumper when we're going 80MPH.
I think you thought I said that cars shouldn't be MORE than 80 ft apart... but I didn't.
The best way to reduce congestion, IMHO, would be VERY strict enforcement of a "Let people merge" law. Cars traveling on a highway should NEVER be less than 80ft behind others, and there should be signs 'suggesting' that people 'get to the left' when a major merge is coming on, and telling them to get into the right WELL BEFORE their exit.
We also need to start paying the cops partly on commission, I see too many cops sitting on their asses while I'm being tailgated by homicidal soccer-moms. Strict driver-courtesey laws, video-survelliance of roads, and stricter enforcement would solve congestion better than selling HOV tickets to the aforementioned soccer-moms.
Everyone keeps ranting about this. I have a simple solution:
the computer 'brain' attached to this radar probably discards anything approaching faster than the car's forward motion (assumes it is in another lane, how else could it be moving 'backwards'?). And also discounts anything approaching at the SAME speed as the car (the 'world'). The only thing left are things moving SLOWER than the car's forward motion, the 'brain' figures out their range and general location, (checking the steering to make sure you aren't on a curve) and makes an adjustment to your speed to reduce the possibility of a disasterous crash.
This thing probably DOESN'T [even attempt to] work if you're cruising at 90MPH towards a parked car (nor should it, because that's fair grounds for removal from the gene-pool). It helps you not rear-end folks when you're moving significantly faster than the rest of the folks on the road. I'll bet the auto-braking will discourage all the assholes in Hondas who tailgate me and weave lanes for two hours every day.
Then take a G3/500 and a PIII/500 and build a kernel on each one. The G3 finishes 45 minutes ahead on my machines here at home, the PIII takes almost 1.5 hours.
A 1.25Ghz G4 is probably just as fast as a P4/2.4 in real-world things like kernel compiles.
I just did some rough math and guesswork. It seems the wing took about as much force as if I had driven my Ford Escort into it at 15MPH. That's quite a bit of force!
I wonder how many Volkswagen Beetles that is?
But the difference is that YOU did it. I was so sick of having mandrake/redhat totalyy screw up a hand-crafted config file because I opened up the 'latest/greatest GUI config tool'.
There really is NO better way (short of fully-automated artificially intelligent solutions) to handle config files. Maybe the only improvement would be a special text-editor for config files, one that had a library of available options and examples and security warnings.
Not to mention that the Mac camp is virtually free of pimply-faced overclocking gamerz who really make computing les enjoyable. Instead you have artists, professors, and rich folks who can speak proper english.
If you think admins will still be going for $30/hour in a few years there's something wrong. Joe Sixpac's son just dropped out of high school and he's getting his A+ certs right now, and he'll work for $10/hour. Wait and see.