Nearly every geek I know loves Strangelove. In fact, I can't think of an exception off hand, except among people who haven't seen the film. But then again, most people I know who have seen the film like it, so maybe that's just a common theme among the people I know.:) And Strangelove is a little science fiction, too, IMHO.
While undercommenting is bad, so is overcommenting. At least I find that too much comments obfuscates the code. There is no reason to comment every single line in most code. If you don't understand what it does, and you have a description of what the block of code does (or is supposed to do), it's probably either because you need to think more about what it does, or it is just plain badly written (in which case you should rewrite it), not because there aren't enough comments. Especially since comments can be misleading, while code can't be.
They don't primarily need the patents to protect themselves from others patenting their technologies, but as a bargaining point when trying to get access to patents held by others. The software industry in the US (and probably other industries too) is rife with patent cross-licensing agreements, which are often necessary to operate. Without a patent portfolio of your own, you will be forced to pay license fees for these patents, which gets expensive, compared to the cost of applying for a patent. At least that's my understanding of the situation.
No, they can't use an NDA, either. When they give GPL'd software to the NDA'd party, they do so under the GPL, which explicitly states that the NDA'd party can freely redistribute the software. If they don't permit this redistribution, they are violating the GPL (by restricting the rights granted by the GPL, they violate section 6 of the GPL), and thus they lose their rights with regard to the software. So no, an NDA doesn't help, either.
2-5 years? Umm... The K6 hasn't been out for 5 years. It was originally released in April of 1997, not even 2.5 years ago. Also keep in mind that they went from.35 micron to.25 micron, which reduces temperature (and thus probably increases life expectancy) at similar clock rates, with the 233MHz+ K6, at the end of 1997. So to claim they last 2-5 years is kind of premature, especially when they changed the manufacturing process less than 2 years ago. You could say that they usually last 2 years, maybe, but not 2-5. Personally I'm happy with my K6-2/300, but it's only 8 months old, so I can't say much about the longevity of it.
Mosaic was not open source. Sure, the source was available, but the license is not compatible with the Open Source Definition, because you can't distribute it for a fee. This means it wouldn't be possible to distribute it on CD, for instance. The license also states you can only use it for "internal business use", which means there are a lot of uses for which you need to negotiate a special license.
INWO was not a horrid M:tG clone. It was a great game (which I think M:tG is, too), that you didn't need to invest your life savings in in order to have a shot at winning (unlike M:tG;-)). Though I really look forward to being able to get the original game, it should be great fun. And it isn't a CCG, which means I can get my friends to chip in, too.
Since the GPL doesn't mention "public distribution", but merely distribution, it doesn't matter what you call it. If you distribute, you do it under the GPL or not at all.
Actually the MC68000 is more of a 32 bit chip. The data bus is only 16 bits wide, and it uses 24 bit addressing (IIRC), but all the registers are 32 bits wide.
Actually, the GPL makes no distinction between internal and external distribution. You distribute it to them under the GPL, or you don't distribute at all. Or you violate the license. The recipient being under contractual obligation has no effect on this, because the GPL forbids you from distributing under terms other than the GPL. Either you release them from the contractual obligation, or you can't distribute it to them. If you install it on company computers, that's one thing, because that's not distributing to someone. But that's not what they're doing here. For employees, there might be laws that prevent them from using the rights that the GPL grants them, but no conditions imposed by the employer can apply, or distributing the software to them would have been illegal. This is my understanding of the GPL. IANAL.
Have you looked at GNUstep? It's not finished yet, but it's moving along quite well and should be ready for real use sometime in the first half of next year. Hopefully. With that, you have a GUI that measures up to Next, and a development environment that should be close, though some tools might be missing, I don't know what NeXT has/had in the way of tools that isn't being cloned.
Free software? Try to get MS to send you the code for ping. Just because it was free when they took it, doesn't mean their version is free. To the kind of management that will outright forbid free software, this is probably proof that MS has made sure it's "commercial quality", like all other MS products.
Berlin uses OmniORB, which is well out of beta, so that is not a concern. Berlin uses OpenGL as a 2D imaging layer (yes, OpenGL is useful for 2D, too), so you won't need hardware acceleration, though that would certainly be a good thing to have. And yes, I have seen these working well on a Linux box, as well as Berlin itself (well, as well as you can expect from version 0.1.0). To say Berlin relies on vaporware (or semi-vaporware) is simply nowhere near the truth.
Doubling the clock almost always improves performance more than doubling the number of processors. You can get more from two processors than one that is twice the speed, but that would be for some fairly unlikely case, like if the context switches you save are more expensive than the overhead of SMP or something.
Umm... OK, so there is no support for 3D sound, or weird input devices. But we have 2D covered (X or ggi), 3D (OpenGL), sound (OSS or ALSA)... What more is needed? Sure, a lot of hardware isn't supported, but that isn't due to lack of APIs, but lack of support from hardware vendors.
What's so bad about this? And it's a four step affair. make clean; make zlilo; make modules; make modules_install If you can't understand this procedure, you are either too stupid to compile kernels, or just not interested enough, in which case you shouldn't be compiling kernels, you should be getting them from your distributor. That's what distributions are for.
I can't imagine RMS having made such a statement. He cares about freedom, which includes the freedom for anyone to use computer programs. This does of course not translate into him caring whether people who don't view computing the way he does find software to hard to use or not, but I don't think he is actually opposed to software that "normal" people find easy to use, he just doesn't care much about it. Or maybe he does care about it, I don't know. But I've never seen him state they don't have any business using computers, and it doesn't seem like something he'd say. IMHO, of course, I can't speak for him, because I'm me and not him.
You don't have to run lots of stuff in the background if you don't want to, you know. If you want maximum game performance, shut down everything else and things will be quick and nice.
I read it the first time. I just wanted to point out that the comparison of Sun and Apple ads makes about as much sense as comparing Ford and Boeing ads, i.e. none at all. That's all. I could have been clearer about that in my original post, I suppose.
Sun and Apple are not competing in the same market at all. Sun sells workstations and servers for "serious computing", Apple sells computers for end-users. Anyone who considers a Mac and a Sun Ultra alternatives for the same kind of computing use are crazy. Unless they're planning to replace MacOS on the Mac, but that is not the market Apple are after.
SUN sells workstations that will beat the G4 handily except for Altivec stuff, which probably is faster. But they also have the Enterprise 10000 can be equipped with up to 64 processors, which means it will leave a G4 in the dust.
SGI sells Onyx2 InfiniteReality2, which will beat probably anything else on heavy-duty visualisation stuff, and can be equipped with up to 128 processors.
HP makes the J-5000 workstation, which will also beat a G4 on most tasks, as well as big-ass servers with up to 128 processors.
IBM makes RS/6000 workstations and servers, which can scale up to 128 processors.
Compaq sells XP1000 workstations with a 667MHz Alpha 21264 processor, which will beat the G4 on anything that can't make very good use of Altivec, and there are places that sell dual 667MHz 21264 workstations. Compaq also has the AlphaServer GS line, which can take up to 14 21264's, probably beating the G4 on anything.
Furthermore, the Athlon probably beats the G4 on stuff that doesn't parallellise well, and an 8-way Xeon should be faster for most, if not all, things.
Unfortunately all the systems here, except the Athlon, are far, far more expensive than a G4. But you can get faster systems if you're willing to pay the price. Oh, and all of those run some Unix variant, as well as Windows NT for Alpha and Athlon/PIII.
Also, when it comes to the speed of the G4, it all depends on how useful Altivec is for your app. If it isn't useful, the G4 isn't that impressive. If it is, the G4 should be very good value for money, if Altivec is anywhere near as good as the hype claims it is.
Nor is it under any other free license, but rather under a relatively liberal, but still non-free license. Noone was saying that only GPL software is free or come with source. You should calm down.
Sure doesn't look like Solaris has/bin and/sbin mostly statically linked to me (well, sbin does, by a small margin). Of course this isn't a stock install of Solaris, but somehow I doubt that/bin and/sbin are all that different from the stock ones....
OK, admittedly my Debian GNU/Linux only has a total of 4 statically linked binaries in/bin and/sbin, so real Unix wins, but/bin and/sbin obviously aren't mostly dynamically linked in either of the two Unices I had available. OTOH, many people don't agree that static binaries are a good idea even for essential stuff.
As for rc?.d dirs: isildur@o191 ~ $ uname -a Linux o191 2.2.10 #5 Sat Jun 19 14:06:48 CEST 1999 i586 unknown isildur@o191 ~ $ ls -d/etc/rc* /etc/rc.boot//etc/rc1.d//etc/rc3.d//etc/rc5.d//etc/rcS.d/ /etc/rc0.d//etc/rc2.d//etc/rc4.d//etc/rc6.d/
At least Debian GNU/Linux keeps the rc.d dirs in/etc, though Red Hat Linux (and probably others, as well) doesn't.
I don't really understand why I bothered with this, I just felt like it.:)
If you had actually read the article, you would see that it was about linux workstations, not servers. The server has some HP box, and presumably not one of their x86 boxes, but a real computer.
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Nearly every geek I know loves Strangelove. In fact, I can't think of an exception off hand, except among people who haven't seen the film. But then again, most people I know who have seen the film like it, so maybe that's just a common theme among the people I know. :)
And Strangelove is a little science fiction, too, IMHO.
While undercommenting is bad, so is overcommenting. At least I find that too much comments obfuscates the code. There is no reason to comment every single line in most code. If you don't understand what it does, and you have a description of what the block of code does (or is supposed to do), it's probably either because you need to think more about what it does, or it is just plain badly written (in which case you should rewrite it), not because there aren't enough comments. Especially since comments can be misleading, while code can't be.
They don't primarily need the patents to protect themselves from others patenting their technologies, but as a bargaining point when trying to get access to patents held by others. The software industry in the US (and probably other industries too) is rife with patent cross-licensing agreements, which are often necessary to operate. Without a patent portfolio of your own, you will be forced to pay license fees for these patents, which gets expensive, compared to the cost of applying for a patent.
At least that's my understanding of the situation.
No, they can't use an NDA, either. When they give GPL'd software to the NDA'd party, they do so under the GPL, which explicitly states that the NDA'd party can freely redistribute the software. If they don't permit this redistribution, they are violating the GPL (by restricting the rights granted by the GPL, they violate section 6 of the GPL), and thus they lose their rights with regard to the software. So no, an NDA doesn't help, either.
2-5 years? Umm... The K6 hasn't been out for 5 years. It was originally released in April of 1997, not even 2.5 years ago. Also keep in mind that they went from .35 micron to .25 micron, which reduces temperature (and thus probably increases life expectancy) at similar clock rates, with the 233MHz+ K6, at the end of 1997. So to claim they last 2-5 years is kind of premature, especially when they changed the manufacturing process less than 2 years ago. You could say that they usually last 2 years, maybe, but not 2-5.
Personally I'm happy with my K6-2/300, but it's only 8 months old, so I can't say much about the longevity of it.
Mosaic was not open source. Sure, the source was available, but the license is not compatible with the Open Source Definition, because you can't distribute it for a fee. This means it wouldn't be possible to distribute it on CD, for instance. The license also states you can only use it for "internal business use", which means there are a lot of uses for which you need to negotiate a special license.
INWO was not a horrid M:tG clone. It was a great game (which I think M:tG is, too), that you didn't need to invest your life savings in in order to have a shot at winning (unlike M:tG ;-)). Though I really look forward to being able to get the original game, it should be great fun. And it isn't a CCG, which means I can get my friends to chip in, too.
Since the GPL doesn't mention "public distribution", but merely distribution, it doesn't matter what you call it. If you distribute, you do it under the GPL or not at all.
Actually the MC68000 is more of a 32 bit chip. The data bus is only 16 bits wide, and it uses 24 bit addressing (IIRC), but all the registers are 32 bits wide.
Actually, the GPL makes no distinction between internal and external distribution. You distribute it to them under the GPL, or you don't distribute at all. Or you violate the license. The recipient being under contractual obligation has no effect on this, because the GPL forbids you from distributing under terms other than the GPL. Either you release them from the contractual obligation, or you can't distribute it to them. If you install it on company computers, that's one thing, because that's not distributing to someone. But that's not what they're doing here.
For employees, there might be laws that prevent them from using the rights that the GPL grants them, but no conditions imposed by the employer can apply, or distributing the software to them would have been illegal.
This is my understanding of the GPL. IANAL.
Have you looked at GNUstep? It's not finished yet, but it's moving along quite well and should be ready for real use sometime in the first half of next year. Hopefully.
With that, you have a GUI that measures up to Next, and a development environment that should be close, though some tools might be missing, I don't know what NeXT has/had in the way of tools that isn't being cloned.
Free software? Try to get MS to send you the code for ping. Just because it was free when they took it, doesn't mean their version is free. To the kind of management that will outright forbid free software, this is probably proof that MS has made sure it's "commercial quality", like all other MS products.
Berlin uses OmniORB, which is well out of beta, so that is not a concern.
Berlin uses OpenGL as a 2D imaging layer (yes, OpenGL is useful for 2D, too), so you won't need hardware acceleration, though that would certainly be a good thing to have.
And yes, I have seen these working well on a Linux box, as well as Berlin itself (well, as well as you can expect from version 0.1.0).
To say Berlin relies on vaporware (or semi-vaporware) is simply nowhere near the truth.
Doubling the clock almost always improves performance more than doubling the number of processors. You can get more from two processors than one that is twice the speed, but that would be for some fairly unlikely case, like if the context switches you save are more expensive than the overhead of SMP or something.
Umm... OK, so there is no support for 3D sound, or weird input devices. But we have 2D covered (X or ggi), 3D (OpenGL), sound (OSS or ALSA)... What more is needed? Sure, a lot of hardware isn't supported, but that isn't due to lack of APIs, but lack of support from hardware vendors.
What's so bad about this? And it's a four step affair.
make clean; make zlilo; make modules; make modules_install
If you can't understand this procedure, you are either too stupid to compile kernels, or just not interested enough, in which case you shouldn't be compiling kernels, you should be getting them from your distributor. That's what distributions are for.
I can't imagine RMS having made such a statement. He cares about freedom, which includes the freedom for anyone to use computer programs. This does of course not translate into him caring whether people who don't view computing the way he does find software to hard to use or not, but I don't think he is actually opposed to software that "normal" people find easy to use, he just doesn't care much about it. Or maybe he does care about it, I don't know. But I've never seen him state they don't have any business using computers, and it doesn't seem like something he'd say. IMHO, of course, I can't speak for him, because I'm me and not him.
You don't have to run lots of stuff in the background if you don't want to, you know. If you want maximum game performance, shut down everything else and things will be quick and nice.
I read it the first time. I just wanted to point out that the comparison of Sun and Apple ads makes about as much sense as comparing Ford and Boeing ads, i.e. none at all. That's all. I could have been clearer about that in my original post, I suppose.
Sun and Apple are not competing in the same market at all. Sun sells workstations and servers for "serious computing", Apple sells computers for end-users. Anyone who considers a Mac and a Sun Ultra alternatives for the same kind of computing use are crazy. Unless they're planning to replace MacOS on the Mac, but that is not the market Apple are after.
SUN sells workstations that will beat the G4 handily except for Altivec stuff, which probably is faster. But they also have the Enterprise 10000 can be equipped with up to 64 processors, which means it will leave a G4 in the dust.
SGI sells Onyx2 InfiniteReality2, which will beat probably anything else on heavy-duty visualisation stuff, and can be equipped with up to 128 processors.
HP makes the J-5000 workstation, which will also beat a G4 on most tasks, as well as big-ass servers with up to 128 processors.
IBM makes RS/6000 workstations and servers, which can scale up to 128 processors.
Compaq sells XP1000 workstations with a 667MHz Alpha 21264 processor, which will beat the G4 on anything that can't make very good use of Altivec, and there are places that sell dual 667MHz 21264 workstations. Compaq also has the AlphaServer GS line, which can take up to 14 21264's, probably beating the G4 on anything.
Furthermore, the Athlon probably beats the G4 on stuff that doesn't parallellise well, and an 8-way Xeon should be faster for most, if not all, things.
Unfortunately all the systems here, except the Athlon, are far, far more expensive than a G4. But you can get faster systems if you're willing to pay the price. Oh, and all of those run some Unix variant, as well as Windows NT for Alpha and Athlon/PIII.
Also, when it comes to the speed of the G4, it all depends on how useful Altivec is for your app. If it isn't useful, the G4 isn't that impressive. If it is, the G4 should be very good value for money, if Altivec is anywhere near as good as the hype claims it is.
Nor is it under any other free license, but rather under a relatively liberal, but still non-free license. Noone was saying that only GPL software is free or come with source. You should calm down.
astmatix uname -a /bin/* | grep dynamic | wc /bin/* | grep static | wc /sbin/* | grep dynamic | wc /sbin/* | grep static | wc
/bin and /sbin mostly statically linked to me (well, sbin does, by a small margin). Of course this isn't a stock install of Solaris, but somehow I doubt that /bin and /sbin are all that different from the stock ones....
/sbin/* | grep executable | grep -v dynamic | wc /sbin/* | grep executable | grep dynamic | wc /bin/* | grep executable | grep -v dynamic | wc /bin/* | grep executable | grep dynamic | wc
/bin and /sbin, so real Unix wins, but /bin and /sbin obviously aren't mostly dynamically linked in either of the two Unices I had available. OTOH, many people don't agree that static binaries are a good idea even for essential stuff.
/etc/rc* /etc/rc1.d/ /etc/rc3.d/ /etc/rc5.d/ /etc/rcS.d/ /etc/rc2.d/ /etc/rc4.d/ /etc/rc6.d/
/etc, though Red Hat Linux (and probably others, as well) doesn't.
:)
SunOS astmatix.ida.liu.se 5.7 Generic_106541-03 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-4
astmatix file
355 3907 30022
astmatix file
1 11 82
astmatix file
8 88 703
astmatix file
10 110 846
Sure doesn't look like Solaris has
Let's try Digital UNIX 4.0, shall we?
lien2[~]> uname -a
OSF1 lien2.mai.liu.se V4.0 878 alpha
lien2[~]> file
15 210 1498
lien2[~]> file
71 1137 8552
lien2[~]> file
16 224 1578
lien2[~]> file
284 4565 33880
Dynamically linked binaries dominate here, too.
OK, admittedly my Debian GNU/Linux only has a total of 4 statically linked binaries in
As for rc?.d dirs:
isildur@o191 ~
$ uname -a
Linux o191 2.2.10 #5 Sat Jun 19 14:06:48 CEST 1999 i586 unknown
isildur@o191 ~
$ ls -d
/etc/rc.boot/
/etc/rc0.d/
At least Debian GNU/Linux keeps the rc.d dirs in
I don't really understand why I bothered with this, I just felt like it.
Because now they're threatening web sites, and not software authors and users of LZW-using software.
If you had actually read the article, you would see that it was about linux workstations, not servers. The server has some HP box, and presumably not one of their x86 boxes, but a real computer.