The other thing, of course, is that most things "just work" - USB scanner, USB flash stick, etc.
Well Linus wanted things in the kernel to work more automatically. I guess the price we gotta pay for stuff working automatically, is people allowing stuff to happen automatically. It does make sense this way, only negative effect is old schoolers saying "back in my day we had to download the source and feed it into a PDP-7 with a punch tape reader, and we liked it that way." I'm gonna go reminisce about the days of leaving my machine on at college over break and rebooting the kernel from miles away when I wouldn't have physical access to the machine for weeks. Good thing i came up. btw, you never ran X11 until you ran netscape 4.x via X-win32 from your remote server over a 56k modem without any kind of compression.
Well I must be fucking new here cause I RTFA. Allow me to 'splain to you.
Groklaw is run by a paralegal. This is a legal history. All those diagrams of Unix, networking etc, are from a geek point of view. groklaw wants to make a history that concerns itself with patents and trademarks being declared, licensed, expired etc.
I guess it depends very much what people use Linux for, and how they use their actual machines.
My point is people who want a new kernel, at least linux users I knnow in real life, usually have no problem compiling it from a tarball. I find it odd that someone who wants to use a new kernel would wait for their OS to have a prepackaged binary available for it.
*Resumes waiting for Firebird 0.8 and a good distro with kernel 2.6.x*
Ok I can understand wanting a firebird binary thats been blessed, but really man, if you want 2.6.x download it, make menuconfig(or your favorite interface), bzimage, modules, modules-install, then copy your kernel and update lilo. Of course your probally running that new fangled grub. Back in my day we had boot loaders that knew their place and didn't read ext2 file systems. You had to reload your MBR every time you messed around with your kernel. And we liked it that way!!
Seriously though, do people not compile kernels anymore? I mean I haven't in a while, but thats because my only linux box currently is used for running DiabloII for my brother and for me to attempt to cross compile Open Watcom. I compile kernels on my BSD machine regurally as i track 5.x-RELEASE. I've compiled a 2.4 kernel on SuSE a few months ago on a box at work. Is their some issue with breaking stuff (besides the system not booting) that's been happening due to magic autoconfig scripts in distros that would cause someone who wants 2.6 to wait for their distro to bless it?
Good thing it would be instantly wiped out by the inhospitable Earth conditions.
A Nasa scientist once sneezed on a mirror on some LEO bound device. When it came back the same bacteria was found on the mirror. I'm hoping someone here can verify that. Bacteria is pretty adaptable.
Gotta love that blazing static instruction translation speed!
Auctually I gotta say I've noticed large speed improvements on i86 hosts between this and 2.02. Now if only they would release 2.1.1 already with the bug fix so you can compile in both x11 anf rfb(VNC) console support
Also the bochs people outright admit that it is slow. They refuse to add any kind of trickery like running instructions natively on intel becasue its meant for debugging OSes and the like. Sometimes you need to be able to run through your OS's boot up one instruction at a time to find a bug. This allos you to do that.
All I can say - competition is good. If Watcom is a decent compiler and will be able to compile kernel and Linux distro I am very glad. Most likely gcc team look critically what is good and what is bad and improve things were needed.
Its my understanding that thekernel is chock full of GCCisms, however userland is a different story. Main obscacle to compiling kernel on watcom will be convincing Linux to accept patches that remove the gccisms or provide watcomisms as appropiate. I do believe that this will give gcc a kick in the pants.
If you wanted to write an NLM for Netware, you used Watcom. It also targetted OS/2. Those were the days.
Yeah netware guys said netware was built using watcom. Also, the watcom dev team all seem to use OS/2 Warp.
Add to this that compiler gets better with each release and I think it will soon be what Linux is for UNIX - making the rest obsolete.
I was talking to some Novell engineers at Linux World. They all love watcom. The watcom toolchain is being ported to linux. It already self bootstraps. Novell owns SuSE. I expect SuSE will be making use of watcom for linux in the future.
All my projects are going to use Watcom from now on. I'm sick of the annoying voo-doo neccessary to make a cross compiler between unix and mingw/cygwin/djgpp using gcc. Watcom lets me cross compile out of the box. Granted the IDE needs some work, but wmake very powerful, though unique. All the basic unix userland you expect for a makefile (cp, rm, install) is a builtin command and calls to the tool chain (compiler, linker etc) are loaded as DLLs saving system calls, thus improving performance.
GCC is very mature, popular and supported, but its not going to be the only kid on the block for long now that Watcom is open source.
You can operate your disc system. Duh.
Auctually linux is the superior OS for operating on your discs IMHO. No OS has more Filesystem and Partition Table/Slice support than linux. Sure NTFS can be a little lacking, but in terms of all around File system for popular and obscure, Linux is the way to go.
Well you can do alot, probally not enough to justify a 2.1 GHZ PIV, but alot. Doom, Quake, Word Perfect 5.1, Lotous, and all sorts of stuff. If your interested in programming a single tasking OS, I'd go to www.openwatcom.com and learn the joy of a non gcc free compiler that comes with many 32 bit extenders.
How many 486's had PCI slots? I don't think I've ever run into a single one.
Well SCSI is designed to be backwards comnpatiable. So your ultra-mega scsi-3 super predictive write ahead bus 2 terabyte drive would work in a mac at scsi 1 speeds. As for the BIOS issue, set the settings for a 512 meg hard drive.
Try strapping a drive that big into a PC from that era, it looks at you silly when you try to teach it that there's more than 2GB in the world.
Well if your OS Doesn't use bios calls for accessing hard drives, eg linux or BSD, as long as the partition that boots is in the first 512 Megs, you can slap a hunndred gig hard drive in a 486. Now performance is another issue, but that can be remedied witrh an ata/133 PCI ide card. Of course your gonna want to go with a Pentium 75Mhz at the least so your CPU will handle the full Bus speed.
I'd opt for damn near anything over BIND, though. I've been around for a while, and it's caused me more than enough headaches to last me a lifetime, thank you all the same, zippy ska-bang dhcp updating or no.
Well if you don't need dhcp auto updating, then go with DJB. I probally would. However, if you want to provide active directory-ish services then you need an LDAP server, and a DHCP server, and you need samba 3.0 and Bind 9.Even if non of your workstations run windows this is a nice setup. samba is faster than NFS, and if you do your schemas right your ldap directory can be used fro logons to windows, unix, apple, a poop load of OSes I've never touched, your qmail virtual domains, and to boot you have a choice of address books. I'll be honest I'm painting broad brush stokes here. However, replacing BIND 9 with DJB in such a setup is going to add more problems than it solves.
Well I know it was the first to automatically figure out PTR records for reverse DNS, but what about DHCP updated DNS entries ala BIND9. Thats showstopper for replacing active directory.
a. print your code and mail it to yourself, do NOT ever open it. This sealed envelope containing your code with the US postal stamp on it is admisable as court evidence (again, provided it is not opened) - cost 37
Usually its better to send it certified mail to yourself. Most people I know go for certified mail when doing a "poor mans copyright."
If it requires a slightly bigger heat sink, whats the problem as long as its a desktop PC. As long as you cool it properly an AMD can take the heat. Either proccessor will not last an OS boot up running without cooling at room temperature. I just walked into my companies data center of about 30 racks worth of equpitment, mostly Intel DELL stuff and the the A/C says its 63 degrees in the data center and is currently cooling. I believe it turns of at 60 degrees. Did I mention that its 2 degrees outside? All temperatures are given in Farenheit cause I'm an insensitive clod.
Watcom includes clones of CL.exe, NMAKE and LINK that allow you to put the watcom bin/include/lib folders at the head of the VC++ search path and use the Visual C++ ide to compile with watcom. Unfortunatly their a bit dated, but work fine with visual studio 5.0. They have begun to support newer flags and a maintainer that cares about such thing would probally be welcomed by the maintainers and community as a whole.
Because Watcom has better support for Windows.libs and dlls?
As a large fan of Watcom, Regular user of it, and poster on the watcom newsgroups, I must say that GCC has superior support for windows DLLs. Now Watcom has its own eccentricities for using DLLs, such as the command line NOSTDCALL to strip the _ and @N from stdcall exported stdcall functions. However, gcc's dlltool lets you do all sorts of fun things, and GCC lets you you specify a DLL on on the command line instead of an import lib to resolve external dependencies.
Why do I use watcom?
Because its weird, wmake called the rest of the toolchain as DLLs, and I'm fustrated by the amount of voodoo neccessary to compile GCC as a cross compiler.
Well as long as it was commented assembly language, their is value in the source. I assume symbol names and other debugging info was removed. Also Their would probally be documentation for the code somewhere.
I, for one, don't want to go back to only using fonts that reside in the printer you have currently attached and have everything messed up when the document had to be printed elsewhere.
Their were third party font tools for WP available. There were alot of other flaws in WP, as well as alot of unique ideas. The reveal codes option was a nice view. The knee jerk reaction to that is of course to use XML and just have a "view source option" like most HTML editors. However, if you are editing a binary file, a psudo Markup tag view is useful. It was a good tool, with some unique features. I think the best comparison would bo to midnight commander. They booth have some really useful features, and while not exactly hip and sexy, some people find them damn useful.
Slashdot Mirror
How ironic, being that your comment currently is rated +3 funny, and I have excellent karma even though I never post in the first minute.
The other thing, of course, is that most things "just work" - USB scanner, USB flash stick, etc. Well Linus wanted things in the kernel to work more automatically. I guess the price we gotta pay for stuff working automatically, is people allowing stuff to happen automatically. It does make sense this way, only negative effect is old schoolers saying "back in my day we had to download the source and feed it into a PDP-7 with a punch tape reader, and we liked it that way." I'm gonna go reminisce about the days of leaving my machine on at college over break and rebooting the kernel from miles away when I wouldn't have physical access to the machine for weeks. Good thing i came up. btw, you never ran X11 until you ran netscape 4.x via X-win32 from your remote server over a 56k modem without any kind of compression.
Well I must be fucking new here cause I RTFA. Allow me to 'splain to you.
Groklaw is run by a paralegal. This is a legal history. All those diagrams of Unix, networking etc, are from a geek point of view. groklaw wants to make a history that concerns itself with patents and trademarks being declared, licensed, expired etc.
I guess it depends very much what people use Linux for, and how they use their actual machines.
My point is people who want a new kernel, at least linux users I knnow in real life, usually have no problem compiling it from a tarball. I find it odd that someone who wants to use a new kernel would wait for their OS to have a prepackaged binary available for it.
*Resumes waiting for Firebird 0.8 and a good distro with kernel 2.6.x*
Ok I can understand wanting a firebird binary thats been blessed, but really man, if you want 2.6.x download it, make menuconfig(or your favorite interface), bzimage, modules, modules-install, then copy your kernel and update lilo. Of course your probally running that new fangled grub. Back in my day we had boot loaders that knew their place and didn't read ext2 file systems. You had to reload your MBR every time you messed around with your kernel. And we liked it that way!!
Seriously though, do people not compile kernels anymore? I mean I haven't in a while, but thats because my only linux box currently is used for running DiabloII for my brother and for me to attempt to cross compile Open Watcom. I compile kernels on my BSD machine regurally as i track 5.x-RELEASE. I've compiled a 2.4 kernel on SuSE a few months ago on a box at work. Is their some issue with breaking stuff (besides the system not booting) that's been happening due to magic autoconfig scripts in distros that would cause someone who wants 2.6 to wait for their distro to bless it?
Good thing it would be instantly wiped out by the inhospitable Earth conditions. A Nasa scientist once sneezed on a mirror on some LEO bound device. When it came back the same bacteria was found on the mirror. I'm hoping someone here can verify that. Bacteria is pretty adaptable.
Gotta love that blazing static instruction translation speed! Auctually I gotta say I've noticed large speed improvements on i86 hosts between this and 2.02. Now if only they would release 2.1.1 already with the bug fix so you can compile in both x11 anf rfb(VNC) console support Also the bochs people outright admit that it is slow. They refuse to add any kind of trickery like running instructions natively on intel becasue its meant for debugging OSes and the like. Sometimes you need to be able to run through your OS's boot up one instruction at a time to find a bug. This allos you to do that.
All I can say - competition is good. If Watcom is a decent compiler and will be able to compile kernel and Linux distro I am very glad. Most likely gcc team look critically what is good and what is bad and improve things were needed.
Its my understanding that thekernel is chock full of GCCisms, however userland is a different story. Main obscacle to compiling kernel on watcom will be convincing Linux to accept patches that remove the gccisms or provide watcomisms as appropiate. I do believe that this will give gcc a kick in the pants.
If you wanted to write an NLM for Netware, you used Watcom. It also targetted OS/2. Those were the days.
Yeah netware guys said netware was built using watcom. Also, the watcom dev team all seem to use OS/2 Warp.
Add to this that compiler gets better with each release and I think it will soon be what Linux is for UNIX - making the rest obsolete.
I was talking to some Novell engineers at Linux World. They all love watcom. The watcom toolchain is being ported to linux. It already self bootstraps. Novell owns SuSE. I expect SuSE will be making use of watcom for linux in the future. All my projects are going to use Watcom from now on. I'm sick of the annoying voo-doo neccessary to make a cross compiler between unix and mingw/cygwin/djgpp using gcc. Watcom lets me cross compile out of the box. Granted the IDE needs some work, but wmake very powerful, though unique. All the basic unix userland you expect for a makefile (cp, rm, install) is a builtin command and calls to the tool chain (compiler, linker etc) are loaded as DLLs saving system calls, thus improving performance.
GCC is very mature, popular and supported, but its not going to be the only kid on the block for long now that Watcom is open source.
You can operate your disc system. Duh.
Auctually linux is the superior OS for operating on your discs IMHO. No OS has more Filesystem and Partition Table/Slice support than linux. Sure NTFS can be a little lacking, but in terms of all around File system for popular and obscure, Linux is the way to go.
Well you can do alot, probally not enough to justify a 2.1 GHZ PIV, but alot. Doom, Quake, Word Perfect 5.1, Lotous, and all sorts of stuff. If your interested in programming a single tasking OS, I'd go to www.openwatcom.com and learn the joy of a non gcc free compiler that comes with many 32 bit extenders.
How many 486's had PCI slots? I don't think I've ever run into a single one.
Well SCSI is designed to be backwards comnpatiable. So your ultra-mega scsi-3 super predictive write ahead bus 2 terabyte drive would work in a mac at scsi 1 speeds. As for the BIOS issue, set the settings for a 512 meg hard drive.
Try strapping a drive that big into a PC from that era, it looks at you silly when you try to teach it that there's more than 2GB in the world.
Well if your OS Doesn't use bios calls for accessing hard drives, eg linux or BSD, as long as the partition that boots is in the first 512 Megs, you can slap a hunndred gig hard drive in a 486. Now performance is another issue, but that can be remedied witrh an ata/133 PCI ide card. Of course your gonna want to go with a Pentium 75Mhz at the least so your CPU will handle the full Bus speed.
I'd opt for damn near anything over BIND, though. I've been around for a while, and it's caused me more than enough headaches to last me a lifetime, thank you all the same, zippy ska-bang dhcp updating or no.
Well if you don't need dhcp auto updating, then go with DJB. I probally would. However, if you want to provide active directory-ish services then you need an LDAP server, and a DHCP server, and you need samba 3.0 and Bind 9.Even if non of your workstations run windows this is a nice setup. samba is faster than NFS, and if you do your schemas right your ldap directory can be used fro logons to windows, unix, apple, a poop load of OSes I've never touched, your qmail virtual domains, and to boot you have a choice of address books. I'll be honest I'm painting broad brush stokes here. However, replacing BIND 9 with DJB in such a setup is going to add more problems than it solves.
Well I know it was the first to automatically figure out PTR records for reverse DNS, but what about DHCP updated DNS entries ala BIND9. Thats showstopper for replacing active directory.
a. print your code and mail it to yourself, do NOT ever open it. This sealed envelope containing your code with the US postal stamp on it is admisable as court evidence (again, provided it is not opened) - cost 37
Usually its better to send it certified mail to yourself. Most people I know go for certified mail when doing a "poor mans copyright."
Auctually, being that the heat is considered "waste," Using the wasted energy to reduce heating costs is the best way to go.
If it requires a slightly bigger heat sink, whats the problem as long as its a desktop PC. As long as you cool it properly an AMD can take the heat. Either proccessor will not last an OS boot up running without cooling at room temperature. I just walked into my companies data center of about 30 racks worth of equpitment, mostly Intel DELL stuff and the the A/C says its 63 degrees in the data center and is currently cooling. I believe it turns of at 60 degrees. Did I mention that its 2 degrees outside? All temperatures are given in Farenheit cause I'm an insensitive clod.
Watcom includes clones of CL.exe, NMAKE and LINK that allow you to put the watcom bin/include/lib folders at the head of the VC++ search path and use the Visual C++ ide to compile with watcom. Unfortunatly their a bit dated, but work fine with visual studio 5.0. They have begun to support newer flags and a maintainer that cares about such thing would probally be welcomed by the maintainers and community as a whole.
Because Watcom has better support for Windows .libs and dlls?
As a large fan of Watcom, Regular user of it, and poster on the watcom newsgroups, I must say that GCC has superior support for windows DLLs. Now Watcom has its own eccentricities for using DLLs, such as the command line NOSTDCALL to strip the _ and @N from stdcall exported stdcall functions. However, gcc's dlltool lets you do all sorts of fun things, and GCC lets you you specify a DLL on on the command line instead of an import lib to resolve external dependencies.
Why do I use watcom?
Because its weird, wmake called the rest of the toolchain as DLLs, and I'm fustrated by the amount of voodoo neccessary to compile GCC as a cross compiler.
They are working on an Linux version:
Which is coming along quite nicely. I believe it even can compile itself on linux.
Uh what about iTunes 4? You kow the version available on OSX and Windows.
Well as long as it was commented assembly language, their is value in the source. I assume symbol names and other debugging info was removed. Also Their would probally be documentation for the code somewhere.
I, for one, don't want to go back to only using fonts that reside in the printer you have currently attached and have everything messed up when the document had to be printed elsewhere.
Their were third party font tools for WP available. There were alot of other flaws in WP, as well as alot of unique ideas. The reveal codes option was a nice view. The knee jerk reaction to that is of course to use XML and just have a "view source option" like most HTML editors. However, if you are editing a binary file, a psudo Markup tag view is useful. It was a good tool, with some unique features. I think the best comparison would bo to midnight commander. They booth have some really useful features, and while not exactly hip and sexy, some people find them damn useful.
In the french wad all the monsters either cursed at you, surrendered, or took a nap and then fired nuclear warheads at you.