have reported case-cracking due to the lack of fan, eh?
This is much more Steve jobs than a fan. Steve has his various obsessions. I was reading that when the NeXT Cube came out, he wanted an absolute perfect cube. Sounds normal, until you realize that this is actually a bitch to manufacture. Normally you have an imperceptably wider mouth of the mold to make removal easier. Maybe a couple thousandths here or there. But no, Steve wanted perfect sides, baking extraction difficult. Cost a bunch more, he lots some cases because of scratches, but Steve got what he wanted. I remember hearing something similar with the G4 cube, but not exactly, cause i think he learned his lesson on the Black Cube NeXTs.
I haven't seen this page, looks like it's slashdotted for the next few hours, but i wanted a cheap small firewall box. I like the form factor of the old Qubes, but they're not cheap. Whats a good box to go for? I saw the cappuccino and it was pricey even without the second network card. I don't care about video at all, if I can get a serial console and even delete the video if it would save me a few bucks. As a firewall it doesn't have to be a burner CPU, and get a decent hard drive and I'm set. Is there a standard small form factor that i can get? Something like a cheap celeron, a hard drive, and two network cards, and I think that would be what I needed.
Darwin is already x86 compatible, not that hard since it essentially a Mixed BSD and Mach core. OS X is based a lot on NeXT which in later years ran on x86 hardware. The Classic environment would be the biggest problem, thogh there were some aborted ports to x86, and remember that it's already been "ported" (and rewritten probably) going from 68K to PowerPC. Some important tools (eg QuickTime) already are on x86, so they have experience across chips. I doubt if many parts of the tree are "x86 only", they cut their teeth already on porting issues, I doubt if much is dirty, and they don't have a totally separate tree, maybe a branch or two. Look at Linux, they don't have an Alpha source tree. Isn't even the mainframe stuff part of the main tree now?
As to why, you need to keep your options open. Look what happened to Be, they swapped chips. Didn't help them much, went from competing with Mac hardware to competing on Microsoft's home turf, and they were hurt by that (though there were many times they shot themselves in the foot). If Iwas a shareholder, I'd expect this, haivng soemthing ready for a switch if it ever became necessary.
I think your analogy to a game developer is flawed. I personally thnk Apple's situation is more complex than can be summed up in a simple analogy.
Apple sells hardware. Though as most said, Apple probably wouldn't make this available on general PC hardware, just on Apple branded x86es, they still have to start making the boxes. x86 margins are razor thin. By being essentially the only PowerPC hardware maker (they killed the clone market, pissing off Motorola) they have more to say about their hardware margins than say, HP.
They'd need an infrastructure of apps and developers. PowerPC was so much faster than the long in the tooth 68k series that emulation was acceptible. Not fast, but acceptable. Things got better as more of the core got ported to PowerPC. The Pentium series isn't an order of magnitude faster (some would debate if it's faster at all, but thats not my flamewar). Old apps running a PowerPC emulator on the x86 would be slow.
They can't piss off their chip supplier, not yet anyway. Luckily they have IBM in the wings. Motorola and Apple have been fighting for years. it's definitely a marriage of convenience now, but there's still that dependency.
They'd be seen as tougher competition for microsoft, which still controls the most important apps to most MacOS users, Office. I'd never expect an MacOS X x86 native office suite. Maybe using the WINE will be good enough then for using Win32 Office on a mac, but without Office, this is a pipe dream. I don't follow the legalities of Microsoft and WINE, but I'd be interesting what MSs lawyers have to say at that point. They may allow a non-corporation, the Linux community to run WINE, but if it's a default install by a corporation? Even if Apple won, it would sap them of capital and time. If it did have WINE, it may bring up the irony of having x86 MS apps running much faster on x86 OS X than MacOS apps (emulated PowerPC).
It would require 2 versions of apps. Even without source changes, it doubles your test matrix (maybe more, more variation in PC hardware) and doubles your shelf space requirements in the stores. See WinNT on Alpha, or PowerPC, or Solaris on PowerPC for examples of why this isn't a very workable idea.
I personally would dot the i's and cross the t's a bit different, but a pragmatist view of the fight in California by Bruce Perens. A good, well thought out read.
When I started college in 91 (not all that ancient times really) our computer facility used an IBM mainframe, VM/CMS. It was quite a shock for some folks who had never seen a computer before to be stuck on IBM 3270 style terminals, some were real orange screen 3278s, others were ugly greenscreen Esprits with bad 3278 emulation. Many that never worked anyway. "Where do I put my floppy?" HA! you get your A disk on the mainframe, all 1Meg of it, LESS than a floppy. There were PCs, PS/2 386s. (Can you tell our comp guys was an IBM guy? rumor is we got kickbacks from them) At first the PCs only had software that wasn't available on the Mainframe, math apps and such.
But the main word processor was WordPerfect 4.2 for the mainframe. And this is on the block oriented 3270 terminal. You had to get used to the clunky interface and how the cursor moved funky because of the 3270isms. It could do fonts and bold, italic yes, but on printout only. Remember these are character based terminals, "print preview" essentially just showed you margins, maybe some bold, and underline. Font size chagnes? Right. Change your font? Well, print it and hope for the best. Turnaround was attrocious; big jobs (anyting over 20 pages) jobs were automatically routed to one of the "big" printers, where they printed and the operators collected them and put them in bins. So you had to wait for the bin guy to vome around every hour or so to get your work. Saving your files, also fun!!! At that time VM/CMS didn't allow hierarchical filesystems, so all your files were in the same namespace, limited to 8.3 filenames. Good luck remembering what file is what 3 years from now. If you need more than 1.2Mb storage (yeah, nobody does) you can store it offline to tapes... then if you need it, you have to request it to be restored. That might take a day.
Slowly we changed from that. The PS/2s became more plentiful. You could actually print from them once in a while; at first you had to print to a postscript file, then ftp it to the mainframe, then print, but then we got real print servers. Pretty soon we became a real comp lab, with real apps where you could save somethng to a floppy. Now the mainframe is mothballed. Never updated it for y2k. Odd, cause Niketown uses VM/CMS, I should work there.;)
To be annoying and follow up my own post, I forgot to include:
4) Monterrey, the stillborn joint project with IBM to get UNIX on Itanium. IBM isn't releasing theirs yet (a lot of Monterrey went into AIX 5L), they're waiting to see what Itanium does in the marketplace. Under what situations would SCO release it (assuming they survive long enough to) into the marketplace is unknown.
Just a reminder, Caldera has three UNIX(like) OSes.
1) OpenServer, the "old" SCO unix. This is a dog, and is not getting any real updates. Basically just fixes, SCO is milking this cash cow as long as it can, but it's already pretty dry. Anyone who's used it will remember the symbolic link hell it was.
2) OpenUNIX 8, nee UnixWare 7. This is where the real development is going to. This is SVR5 UNIX. Why? because thats what SCO says SVR5 UNIX is. It's it's party, and it can call it what it wants. SCO owns the UNIX trademark. OpenUNIX has a lot of GNU userland tools and pretty strong Linux compatibility in the kernel. Said to run Linux binaries a bit fqaster than Linux, mostly because of a better VM.
3) Caldera Linux. Don't know much about this except to say it exists. Well I had a login once, it was Linux, really.
A lot of folks seem to be comfusing 1 and 2 above. They're different beasts.
/me chuckles as half the slashdot readership runs away at someone admitting that he likes pico:)
I like pico too, i just couldn't use it as a programmers editor. You may want to try nano, a pico clone (Debian licensing issues) with some major improvements like regex search/replace, i think syntax highlighting also.
Strange how fashion at times has come down to un-practicality, proving chic-ness and how rich you are by how impractical your actions are.
Blue bloods were called that because they were so pale that their veins showed through their skin. They weren't like the field workers, out in the sun all day, and they wanted to prove it. Now that normal jobs are inside and not outside, I find it a bit ironic now that having a tan now is chic, showing that you're not stuck inside all day.
A couple Halloweens back I had one of those long frilly shirts (don't ask) with the lace on the cuffs. I was thinking as I wore it, I'd end up ripping them to shreds or accidentally killing myself if I wore it regularly. Totally impractival. But it proves I don't have to do anything, I have servants to do it. How cool I am!!
Which was the compiler company that wrote into it's compiler the ability to recognize a common benchmark that didn't require output, and just converted it to NOOPs? Wow, did that computer ever chomp on those NOOPs fast...
Benchmarks measure speed on benchmark code. It's like horsepower in a car - a car with 300 horsepower isn't necessarily faster than one with 280, or even 200. It just depends, man.
Canon SLRs (Elan 7e, EOS 3, Elan IIe,...) and video cameras have had eye selection of autofocus points for years. It tracks your eye, I think by finding the center of the easy to spot black pupil, and makes the autofocus system sensitive to that spot. Its easy, because it knows exactly where your eye is going to be, right up by the viewfinder. I bet a headset version of this wouldnt be that exspensive - it only adds about $30-$40 to the camera retail price (Elan 7 vs. Elan 7e)
To any trolls underneath this post that are actually interested in whats really under the hood of OS-X...
Yes, OS X is heavily based on Mach, but it's not a "pure" microkernel. A pure microkernel only abstracts the hardware, everything else is in userland "servers". In a microkernel UNIX, you'd have the UNIX API as a server, and your app would have to pass messages through the kernel to make syscalls. Check GNU/Debian, this may be an example of it, UNIX server running under the HURD mk. Maybe also mkLinux, the old linux for macs. Check these, I'm not sure, too late/tired to do real research.
The problem with this, is UNIX doesn't run well this way. UNIX is designed monolithic, and microkernel implementations just add an extra layer. The message passing slows you down, thats why Microsoft dropped the GUI subsystem into the kernel in going from 3.51 to 4.0, speedup. Anyways, since the base of OS X is UNIX they put this in the kernel to speed things up. The microkernel handles the hardware, and running old MacOS at kernel level handles prettty much everything else.
As an aside, the UNIX part of the core is a hybrid. Apple started with NetBSD (better cross platform?) but added a lot of 3.x FreeBSD cause they liked it so much. An apple employee (forgot which, see above comment on being late) has commit access to the FreeBSD cvs tree. The next major rev of the kernel is rumored to be freebsd 4 series.
Slightly off topic, but when I read this, my weird mind remembered the samurai accountant skit from old SNL. He's explaining performace, which has a peaked graph, up then down. Someone questions that, why does it go down? Belushi takes out his sword and cuts the graph out at the peak. it all goes up. Everybody is satisfied.
The other fun thing was RedHat kernel by default had ip masquerading on. The software had a listen port, 61000 IIRC. IP masqueradig kept all ports 50000 to 65000 I think. So we had two choices... Make folks recompile their kernel to support this software. Change the port and have folks be incompatible with others. Change the port and have UI to change which port to coneect to.
We felt nobody would (or should) recompile to get user level softwrae wotking, so we picked "use different port, but show a hidden UI pref if you wanted to talk to other machines", figuring most folks would want to check their own box only, and if they wanted to check other machines, they'd have to work.
Mind you this was only in RedHat. If there was a standard it would be easier. But no, now we had to have a UI for this, have soem confusing things about "ports" and "IP masquerading". It made it difficult to support Linux. There were major differences between Slack and RedHat because of this. This all led to them dropping Slack, then (after they dropped us) dropping UNIX support altogether. The Windows world is much easier to support. There's fewer variations. This is one of the reasons why you can get whatever software you want for windows.
The BSD ports setup pretty much requires source distribution and the target audience for LSB isn't interested in that.
BSD also has binary packages, which mesh with the ports system. They're.tgz packages with the normal pre and postinstall scripts available in the package. I always thought of the BSD system as pretty slick, a source model and a binary package model that mesh well. Anything I installed from ports I remove with the package tools. I can check for new versions of all externally installed software (packages and ports) with the same command. They blend well enough for me that I kind of see them as one system.
Certification has little to do with being bloated. It has to do with compatibility. Compatibility sometimes aids to bloatedness because you have to support both new and old. Look how big XP is vs NT 2000, a good deal of bloat is to get the Win95 kernel stuff working. Even with all that bloat, there is stuff that doesn't work. Microsoft isn't certified, and it can break things as it pleases, sometimes intentionally.
Linux certification has less to do with forward and reverse compatibility than across distros. Testing's a bitch. Last professional project I did on Linux, we had to support 3 different startup models: Slack 3 and inittab, SVR4, and RedHat SVR4 where they moved the rc?.d directories. (granted this was a long time ago and all may have changed since). Because it's a pain to test for 3 different distros, most folks only do 1, and they might as well do the biggest, and that's RedHat. Slack was dropped, and Mandrake was a one time deal. The group that contracted us said screw these other distros, we'll just support RedHat.
The reason for certification is to get more software. If I can target one installation file, one file system layout, then I'm more likely to make software for that. The easier it is for me to support you, the more likely I am to do so.
Yes the user is free to do whatever they want. You could make it where your startup directory isn't/etc/rc{1,2,3,4,5,6}.d but called/MyReallyCoolStartupDir/runlevel/{un,deux, trois...}. I doubt if most software would work though. If you want to make your mark on your install, go ahead. There's plenty of stuff you can do. There's just some stuff you should leave where others can find it.
Re:Finally, ABI stabilization. Now about optimizat
on
GCC 3.2 Released
·
· Score: 2
Obviously there's a bug, just a question of where. Linux 2.2 series had problems with later more aggressively optimizing versions of gcc (2.95 i believe). These were because of kernel bugs, not compiler bugs. Specifically, they were some assembler statements that were'nt optimization safe This has been fixed in the 2.4 series. The 2.2 based distros kept the older not-as-aggressive gcc 2.8 or egcs 1.1 around as kgcc just for the compiler, while all the userland code (which didn't have this bug) used gcc 2.9 series.
And occams razor doesn't seem to apply here. You're seeing a problem, and there one of two equally possible sources.
The shift from GIF to JPEG was accelerated when CI$ wanted royalties for GIFs
Just being pedantic, but maybe. If I recall correctly, JPEGs came in big when:
Video cards with more than 8 bit color became affordable. Without true color, JPEGs don't give you any advantages and are actually a disadvantage because you have to pick your 256 colors every time.
Scanners started becoming cheap. JPEGs actually degrade the quality of anything with large amounts of flat color e.g. most banners and drawn images. Once you had files that benefitted from tru-color and JPEGs they gained in popularity.
And don't forget progressive JPEG, you can't have Netscape 2.0 just interlacing GIFs can you?;)
Slashdot Mirror
Strange game, the only way to win is not to play... how about a nice game of chess?
Lame I know, but with the WarDriving reference just 2 stories away on the main page I just had to.
"I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and democracy - but that could change."
-- Vice President Dan Quayle
have reported case-cracking due to the lack of fan, eh?
This is much more Steve jobs than a fan. Steve has his various obsessions. I was reading that when the NeXT Cube came out, he wanted an absolute perfect cube. Sounds normal, until you realize that this is actually a bitch to manufacture. Normally you have an imperceptably wider mouth of the mold to make removal easier. Maybe a couple thousandths here or there. But no, Steve wanted perfect sides, baking extraction difficult. Cost a bunch more, he lots some cases because of scratches, but Steve got what he wanted. I remember hearing something similar with the G4 cube, but not exactly, cause i think he learned his lesson on the Black Cube NeXTs.
I haven't seen this page, looks like it's slashdotted for the next few hours, but i wanted a cheap small firewall box. I like the form factor of the old Qubes, but they're not cheap. Whats a good box to go for? I saw the cappuccino and it was pricey even without the second network card. I don't care about video at all, if I can get a serial console and even delete the video if it would save me a few bucks. As a firewall it doesn't have to be a burner CPU, and get a decent hard drive and I'm set. Is there a standard small form factor that i can get? Something like a cheap celeron, a hard drive, and two network cards, and I think that would be what I needed.
As to why, you need to keep your options open. Look what happened to Be, they swapped chips. Didn't help them much, went from competing with Mac hardware to competing on Microsoft's home turf, and they were hurt by that (though there were many times they shot themselves in the foot). If Iwas a shareholder, I'd expect this, haivng soemthing ready for a switch if it ever became necessary.
I think your analogy to a game developer is flawed. I personally thnk Apple's situation is more complex than can be summed up in a simple analogy.
If it did have WINE, it may bring up the irony of having x86 MS apps running much faster on x86 OS X than MacOS apps (emulated PowerPC).
Redmond, where it will be safe from EVIL-DOERS.
Hey all you evil doers, knock off all that evil doing!
-- The Tick
I personally would dot the i's and cross the t's a bit different, but a pragmatist view of the fight in California by Bruce Perens. A good, well thought out read.
When I started college in 91 (not all that ancient times really) our computer facility used an IBM mainframe, VM/CMS. It was quite a shock for some folks who had never seen a computer before to be stuck on IBM 3270 style terminals, some were real orange screen 3278s, others were ugly greenscreen Esprits with bad 3278 emulation. Many that never worked anyway. "Where do I put my floppy?" HA! you get your A disk on the mainframe, all 1Meg of it, LESS than a floppy. There were PCs, PS/2 386s. (Can you tell our comp guys was an IBM guy? rumor is we got kickbacks from them) At first the PCs only had software that wasn't available on the Mainframe, math apps and such.
;)
But the main word processor was WordPerfect 4.2 for the mainframe. And this is on the block oriented 3270 terminal. You had to get used to the clunky interface and how the cursor moved funky because of the 3270isms. It could do fonts and bold, italic yes, but on printout only. Remember these are character based terminals, "print preview" essentially just showed you margins, maybe some bold, and underline. Font size chagnes? Right. Change your font? Well, print it and hope for the best. Turnaround was attrocious; big jobs (anyting over 20 pages) jobs were automatically routed to one of the "big" printers, where they printed and the operators collected them and put them in bins. So you had to wait for the bin guy to vome around every hour or so to get your work. Saving your files, also fun!!! At that time VM/CMS didn't allow hierarchical filesystems, so all your files were in the same namespace, limited to 8.3 filenames. Good luck remembering what file is what 3 years from now. If you need more than 1.2Mb storage (yeah, nobody does) you can store it offline to tapes... then if you need it, you have to request it to be restored. That might take a day.
Slowly we changed from that. The PS/2s became more plentiful. You could actually print from them once in a while; at first you had to print to a postscript file, then ftp it to the mainframe, then print, but then we got real print servers. Pretty soon we became a real comp lab, with real apps where you could save somethng to a floppy. Now the mainframe is mothballed. Never updated it for y2k. Odd, cause Niketown uses VM/CMS, I should work there.
I like Orbit . Fairly legible, bright. Radio buttons and check boxes look too similar tho, losing their ability to tell you what they are.
To be annoying and follow up my own post, I forgot to include:
4) Monterrey, the stillborn joint project with IBM to get UNIX on Itanium. IBM isn't releasing theirs yet (a lot of Monterrey went into AIX 5L), they're waiting to see what Itanium does in the marketplace. Under what situations would SCO release it (assuming they survive long enough to) into the marketplace is unknown.
Just a reminder, Caldera has three UNIX(like) OSes.
1) OpenServer, the "old" SCO unix. This is a dog, and is not getting any real updates. Basically just fixes, SCO is milking this cash cow as long as it can, but it's already pretty dry. Anyone who's used it will remember the symbolic link hell it was.
2) OpenUNIX 8, nee UnixWare 7. This is where the real development is going to. This is SVR5 UNIX. Why? because thats what SCO says SVR5 UNIX is. It's it's party, and it can call it what it wants. SCO owns the UNIX trademark. OpenUNIX has a lot of GNU userland tools and pretty strong Linux compatibility in the kernel. Said to run Linux binaries a bit fqaster than Linux, mostly because of a better VM.
3) Caldera Linux. Don't know much about this except to say it exists. Well I had a login once, it was Linux, really.
A lot of folks seem to be comfusing 1 and 2 above. They're different beasts.
3) Pay a fortune for the name "UNIX"
They already did; The UNIX trademark passed from Novell -> SCO -> Caldera, aka SCOx. None of them seemed to made any money from it.
Read here.
/me chuckles as half the slashdot readership runs away at someone admitting that he likes pico :)
I like pico too, i just couldn't use it as a programmers editor. You may want to try nano, a pico clone (Debian licensing issues) with some major improvements like regex search/replace, i think syntax highlighting also.
Strange how fashion at times has come down to un-practicality, proving chic-ness and how rich you are by how impractical your actions are.
Blue bloods were called that because they were so pale that their veins showed through their skin. They weren't like the field workers, out in the sun all day, and they wanted to prove it. Now that normal jobs are inside and not outside, I find it a bit ironic now that having a tan now is chic, showing that you're not stuck inside all day.
A couple Halloweens back I had one of those long frilly shirts (don't ask) with the lace on the cuffs. I was thinking as I wore it, I'd end up ripping them to shreds or accidentally killing myself if I wore it regularly. Totally impractival. But it proves I don't have to do anything, I have servants to do it. How cool I am!!
Which was the compiler company that wrote into it's compiler the ability to recognize a common benchmark that didn't require output, and just converted it to NOOPs? Wow, did that computer ever chomp on those NOOPs fast...
Benchmarks measure speed on benchmark code. It's like horsepower in a car - a car with 300 horsepower isn't necessarily faster than one with 280, or even 200. It just depends, man.
Canon SLRs (Elan 7e, EOS 3, Elan IIe, ...) and video cameras have had eye selection of autofocus points for years. It tracks your eye, I think by finding the center of the easy to spot black pupil, and makes the autofocus system sensitive to that spot. Its easy, because it knows exactly where your eye is going to be, right up by the viewfinder. I bet a headset version of this wouldnt be that exspensive - it only adds about $30-$40 to the camera retail price (Elan 7 vs. Elan 7e)
To any trolls underneath this post that are actually interested in whats really under the hood of OS-X...
Yes, OS X is heavily based on Mach, but it's not a "pure" microkernel. A pure microkernel only abstracts the hardware, everything else is in userland "servers". In a microkernel UNIX, you'd have the UNIX API as a server, and your app would have to pass messages through the kernel to make syscalls. Check GNU/Debian, this may be an example of it, UNIX server running under the HURD mk. Maybe also mkLinux, the old linux for macs. Check these, I'm not sure, too late/tired to do real research.
The problem with this, is UNIX doesn't run well this way. UNIX is designed monolithic, and microkernel implementations just add an extra layer. The message passing slows you down, thats why Microsoft dropped the GUI subsystem into the kernel in going from 3.51 to 4.0, speedup. Anyways, since the base of OS X is UNIX they put this in the kernel to speed things up. The microkernel handles the hardware, and running old MacOS at kernel level handles prettty much everything else.
As an aside, the UNIX part of the core is a hybrid. Apple started with NetBSD (better cross platform?) but added a lot of 3.x FreeBSD cause they liked it so much. An apple employee (forgot which, see above comment on being late) has commit access to the FreeBSD cvs tree. The next major rev of the kernel is rumored to be freebsd 4 series.
Slightly off topic, but when I read this, my weird mind remembered the samurai accountant skit from old SNL. He's explaining performace, which has a peaked graph, up then down. Someone questions that, why does it go down? Belushi takes out his sword and cuts the graph out at the peak. it all goes up. Everybody is satisfied.
67.7234597% of statistics are made up.
National Chalk Association. Chalk doesn't kill people, guns kill people.
To be tacky and reply to my own post...
The other fun thing was RedHat kernel by default had ip masquerading on. The software had a listen port, 61000 IIRC. IP masqueradig kept all ports 50000 to 65000 I think. So we had two choices...
Make folks recompile their kernel to support this software.
Change the port and have folks be incompatible with others.
Change the port and have UI to change which port to coneect to.
We felt nobody would (or should) recompile to get user level softwrae wotking, so we picked "use different port, but show a hidden UI pref if you wanted to talk to other machines", figuring most folks would want to check their own box only, and if they wanted to check other machines, they'd have to work.
Mind you this was only in RedHat. If there was a standard it would be easier. But no, now we had to have a UI for this, have soem confusing things about "ports" and "IP masquerading". It made it difficult to support Linux. There were major differences between Slack and RedHat because of this. This all led to them dropping Slack, then (after they dropped us) dropping UNIX support altogether. The Windows world is much easier to support. There's fewer variations. This is one of the reasons why you can get whatever software you want for windows.
The BSD ports setup pretty much requires source distribution and the target audience for LSB isn't interested in that.
.tgz packages with the normal pre and postinstall scripts available in the package. I always thought of the BSD system as pretty slick, a source model and a binary package model that mesh well. Anything I installed from ports I remove with the package tools. I can check for new versions of all externally installed software (packages and ports) with the same command. They blend well enough for me that I kind of see them as one system.
BSD also has binary packages, which mesh with the ports system. They're
Certification has little to do with being bloated. It has to do with compatibility. Compatibility sometimes aids to bloatedness because you have to support both new and old. Look how big XP is vs NT 2000, a good deal of bloat is to get the Win95 kernel stuff working. Even with all that bloat, there is stuff that doesn't work. Microsoft isn't certified, and it can break things as it pleases, sometimes intentionally.
/etc/rc{1,2,3,4,5,6}.d but called /MyReallyCoolStartupDir/runlevel/{un,deux, trois...}. I doubt if most software would work though. If you want to make your mark on your install, go ahead. There's plenty of stuff you can do. There's just some stuff you should leave where others can find it.
Linux certification has less to do with forward and reverse compatibility than across distros. Testing's a bitch. Last professional project I did on Linux, we had to support 3 different startup models: Slack 3 and inittab, SVR4, and RedHat SVR4 where they moved the rc?.d directories. (granted this was a long time ago and all may have changed since). Because it's a pain to test for 3 different distros, most folks only do 1, and they might as well do the biggest, and that's RedHat. Slack was dropped, and Mandrake was a one time deal. The group that contracted us said screw these other distros, we'll just support RedHat.
The reason for certification is to get more software. If I can target one installation file, one file system layout, then I'm more likely to make software for that. The easier it is for me to support you, the more likely I am to do so.
Yes the user is free to do whatever they want. You could make it where your startup directory isn't
Obviously there's a bug, just a question of where. Linux 2.2 series had problems with later more aggressively optimizing versions of gcc (2.95 i believe). These were because of kernel bugs, not compiler bugs. Specifically, they were some assembler statements that were'nt optimization safe This has been fixed in the 2.4 series. The 2.2 based distros kept the older not-as-aggressive gcc 2.8 or egcs 1.1 around as kgcc just for the compiler, while all the userland code (which didn't have this bug) used gcc 2.9 series.
And occams razor doesn't seem to apply here. You're seeing a problem, and there one of two equally possible sources.
Just being pedantic, but maybe. If I recall correctly, JPEGs came in big when:
And don't forget progressive JPEG, you can't have Netscape 2.0 just interlacing GIFs can you?