Fast loaders replaced Commodore's ROM routines, which were incredibly inefficient, with custom code that was uploaded the disk drive and dramatically reduced loading times.
The extra 32MiB of memory are used for UMD cache, although custom firmware makes that area visible to homebrew code, so you can use it in your own apps.
Not really. In the BSD world once you raise the secure level you cannot load kernel modules, root or not. And of course once you've raised the secure level you cannot lower it until next reboot.
I don't use iPhoto and, coming from a BSD background, don't care that much about Finder, but I was surprised about your comment regarding Mail.app. Mail comes from the NextSTEP days, and IMHO is a very nice mail program. I wasn't aware that Microsoft bundled a decent mail app with Windows.
So, what do you dislike about Mail? I've used Sylpheed on BSD for years and briefly used GNUMail (a Mail.app clone). I never liked Thunderbird and I have to use Outlook at work and it sucks ass. Mail is very nice once you get used to it, has a decent spam filter and threading options and solid IMAP support (I store my mail on a NetBSD box running Dovecot). What more do you need?
I agree with you, except the being selfish part. Take for example people who try to solve the problems within their marriage by having a baby. Now that I would consider selfish. Your decision I consider mature and thought out.
Now I have a R5000 Indy (are is for RISC and, yes, MIPS used to be the processor for embedded stuff) in my
house, but the Irix 6.4 I am trying to install never really boots up
Heh, no surprise, IRIX 6.4 is Octane/Origin/Onyx only. In the same way IRIX 6.3 was a patched 6.2 made to run on O2. You either want 6.2 or 6.5. Check Ebay, IRIX is pretty cheap these days and you can update it to 6.5.22m for free. That's what I run on my O2.
I won't be buying or recommending any more NVIDIA products unless they release the goddamned specs so I can actually use their proprietary hardware. There's a very interesting paragraph in the article (emphasis mine):
For Nvidia, intellectual property is a secondary issue. "It's so hard to write a graphics driver that open-sourcing it would not help," said Andrew Fear, Nvidia's software product manager. In addition, customers aren't asking for open-source drivers, he said.
That's one of the biggest piles of bullshit I've read this year. And how does that explain their closed source nforce drivers then? Is it so hard to write a driver for a $10 NIC? In the meantime my Radeon 9250 card works in FreeBSD/amd64, which NVIDIA doesn't support yet and nobody knows if/when they will. You don't value free software drivers until you're stuck (by choice or otherwise) on an unsupported platform. NVIDIA? Never again.
Actually StarForce is a pretty interesting copy protection. As someone who spent quite a lot of time studying Fravia's reverse engineering essays I've always thought a good programmer must know his reverse engineering, and StarForce is obviously made by talented people. I stopped using Windows in 1994 so I couldn't care less about proprietary software, but don't ditch StarForce's technical merits just because the company behind it has questionable ethics.
Funny, people who use free software don't have any problem with copy protection systems:)
Where I live the shop must ask you for a legal document that proves you're the owner of the card. In my case it's my identity card, and the name must match what's written on the debit card. If it doesn't you can't pay, plain and simple. I assume that if the picture on your ID card doesn't match they won't let you pay either. So why aren't shops over there asking for proof? In case my card was stolen the thief would have a hard time putting it to use because every time I pay with it I get an SMS on my phone, so I'd know even if they succeded and cancel the card with one simple phone call.
Theo, like RMS, is one of the few visible heads in the FOSS world that stands on his ideals. And I wish more people were like those two. I use Ati hardware because it's supported by the DRI project and it does the job fine since I don't play complex games anyway. I refuse to use NVIDIA's proprietary kernel drivers. I recently upgraded my box to an Athlon64 and found out there's not proprietary nvidia driver for FreeBSD/amd64. Thank $DEITY I bought a Radeon. It might not matter to you, but then again you might as well run Windows if software freedom is irrelevant.
Note how Theo's work has resulted in wi-fi drivers that are as free as possible (firmware binary blobs are still needed).
I don't usually reply to trolls, but I'm building world right now, so here we go...
Moderators, the parent post is not informative at all. The BSDs have never been about hype or world domination. The OpenBSD developers make OpenBSD for their own use. If you like it you're free to use it. And the same goes for the other BSDs. So NetBSD got new machines thanks to donations. Guess what, the same thing has happened to Drupal recently, and I'd hardly call that project a failure.
HP, IBM, SGI use Linux because they can actually save money by doing so. They sell hardware and services and, by embracing Linux, they save loads of cash on R&D and get geeks to like them. Look, IBM uses Linux, they're the good guys!
You are so wrong about the status of the BSDs. Have you even taken a look at FreeBSD's SMP architecture? And, for your info, Scott Long is working on a journaling layer for FFS. The thing is, most people on BSD land care little about journaling because production BSD systems don't crash, they just chug along. One of the FreeBSD project's mail servers has a constant load of near 100 with very heavy disk i/o as well, and it just works .
I don't know what world you live in, but I deploy OpenBSD firewalls and FreeBSD servers all the time, and people are very happy with them. Oh, and Juniper routers use the FreeBSD kernel. Must be pretty good if it drives some of biggest iron routers in the world.
I have nothing against Linux and use it when it's the best tool for the job, but there's more in the freenix world than Linux distros. Give the BSDs a try, you might like them. For a quick test read the excellent OpenBSD man pages and then compare them to the ones included in your average Linux distro. That alone should show you the effort its developers put on technical excellence.
I've always thought that the forking argument was simply bullshit, and I'll tell you why.
If java was free software you could get your binary package certified by Sun (i.e. run the official tests and pay the fee to be able to stick the Java brand). That means Sun could actually save development money because people could port the jdk/jre to certain niche platforms that are currently unsupported, without Sun having to spend a single dollar on that.
And another reason why this argument doesn't hold any water, how many forks of python, ruby or perl are there? That's what I thought. They have a point because Microsoft tried to fuck them with their modified java runtime, but if somebody does that they can't call it Java anymore, so the point is now moot.
ISTR Apple mentioning that their computer will run Windows and they won't do anything to prevent people from doing so, just they won't support it. And it seems that the Mactel systems won't have OpenFirmware, which is one of the features I love from their hardware (and Sun's OBP implementation too). More likely some special key will be embedded in the BIOS that the OS X install will check for.
All those languages are very nice until you check the requirements. Let's see an example: darcs. Darcs is an SCM written in Haskell, which is pretty cool. So, in order to build darcs, you need a haskell compiler, which is written in haskell! GHC needs a bootstrapped compiler in order to be able to compile itself.
This same problem exists with java (see how the FreeBSD port pulls a linux-jdk to build the native version), modula3 and IIRC mono. As long as this problem exists those languages will never be that popular. It's true that you need a C compiler to build gcc, but cross compiling C is a mastered art, it's been done for years. Take a look at how you can build the whole NetBSD operating system even from Windows/cygwin and for a different target CPU.
No, it's not a 1:1 copy. Try copying a StarForce3 protected CD with dd and you'll see that the software knows it's a copy. Modern copy protections rely on physical characteristics of the media to tell a copy from the original. ISTR that some Windows software can duplicate that, but they work at a much lower level, very near the drivers.
That entry is pretty old, and the situation is hardly the same. As of today, FreeBSD 5.4 (soon to be out) performs much better than the previous releases, but for UP machines NetBSD 2.0 or DragonFlyBSD are IMHO better choices.
I run FreeBSD 5.4 on a SMP box and it's much better than it used to be. If/When I can allot some time I'll do some benchmarking of FreeBSD 5.4 vs DragonFlyBSD 1.2 on my dual PIII.
Exactly. I read the online version of NYTimes daily, and I don't even live in the US. I like to get my news from various sources, and they usually have interesting articles.
I do actually use it. Why? I don't need no stinking GUI, and don't want to run a bloated java app, like Azureus. I run btdownloadcurses.py inside screen on my home server. I log in, launch the program, log out and forget about it until it's done. I don't need to keep a desktop box up 24/7 because the app needs a working X environment.
Perdona, no he sido yo el del otro post. Me he dejado abierto el firefox mientra me iba a tomar un cafe y compañero de trabajo, que es un poco gilipollas, se ha puesto a hacer la gracia. Lo siento.
Au contraire, NetBSD-style init scripts are much more logical than sys V. With sys V you have a mess of symlinks. On NetBSD (and FreeBSD 5.x) you tell the rcorder program what dependencies your script has and what does it provide, the system figures our the execution order on it's own. To turn a service on you just put in your/etc/rc.conf file. Want to run bind? Just put named_enable="YES" in your/etc/rc.conf and there you go. Check Luke Mewburn's rc.d paper for more info.
I don't think it works that way. Where I live (Spain) we pay a tax every time we buy a CD-R(W). This tax was put there to compensate the artists for private copies you could make with that CD. A private copy is a right you have, and it means you can copy a CD you've already
purchased. In other words, if I buy the latest Prodigy album I'm allowed by law to make backup copies to e.g. use in my car. This doesn't allow me to borrow your copy and make a duplicate. This tax gives them money because, in their opinion, they're losing money since I didn't buy 2 copies of said album. Of course all these laws are bullshit because 99% of the CD-Rs I buy are used to store my own data, not music, but that's another issue.
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Fast loaders replaced Commodore's ROM routines, which were incredibly inefficient, with custom code that was uploaded the disk drive and dramatically reduced loading times.
Actually, a pixel shader 3.0 capable GPU can do realtime ambient occlusion and raytracing. See here and here for two examples, in 4KiB no less.
IIRC from my old DOS days 64KiB was the limit for DMA transfers as they had to be segment aligned.
The extra 32MiB of memory are used for UMD cache, although custom firmware makes that area visible to homebrew code, so you can use it in your own apps.
Not really. In the BSD world once you raise the secure level you cannot load kernel modules, root or not. And of course once you've raised the secure level you cannot lower it until next reboot.
I don't use iPhoto and, coming from a BSD background, don't care that much about Finder, but I was surprised about your comment regarding Mail.app. Mail comes from the NextSTEP days, and IMHO is a very nice mail program. I wasn't aware that Microsoft bundled a decent mail app with Windows.
So, what do you dislike about Mail? I've used Sylpheed on BSD for years and briefly used GNUMail (a Mail.app clone). I never liked Thunderbird and I have to use Outlook at work and it sucks ass. Mail is very nice once you get used to it, has a decent spam filter and threading options and solid IMAP support (I store my mail on a NetBSD box running Dovecot). What more do you need?
I agree with you, except the being selfish part. Take for example people who try to solve the problems within their marriage by having a baby. Now that I would consider selfish. Your decision I consider mature and thought out.
The C64 is very well documented.
Heh, no surprise, IRIX 6.4 is Octane/Origin/Onyx only. In the same way IRIX 6.3 was a patched 6.2 made to run on O2. You either want 6.2 or 6.5. Check Ebay, IRIX is pretty cheap these days and you can update it to 6.5.22m for free. That's what I run on my O2.
I won't be buying or recommending any more NVIDIA products unless they release the goddamned specs so I can actually use their proprietary hardware. There's a very interesting paragraph in the article (emphasis mine):
That's one of the biggest piles of bullshit I've read this year. And how does that explain their closed source nforce drivers then? Is it so hard to write a driver for a $10 NIC? In the meantime my Radeon 9250 card works in FreeBSD/amd64, which NVIDIA doesn't support yet and nobody knows if/when they will. You don't value free software drivers until you're stuck (by choice or otherwise) on an unsupported platform. NVIDIA? Never again.
Actually StarForce is a pretty interesting copy protection. As someone who spent quite a lot of time studying Fravia's reverse engineering essays I've always thought a good programmer must know his reverse engineering, and StarForce is obviously made by talented people. I stopped using Windows in 1994 so I couldn't care less about proprietary software, but don't ditch StarForce's technical merits just because the company behind it has questionable ethics.
Funny, people who use free software don't have any problem with copy protection systems :)
Where I live the shop must ask you for a legal document that proves you're the owner of the card. In my case it's my identity card, and the name must match what's written on the debit card. If it doesn't you can't pay, plain and simple. I assume that if the picture on your ID card doesn't match they won't let you pay either. So why aren't shops over there asking for proof? In case my card was stolen the thief would have a hard time putting it to use because every time I pay with it I get an SMS on my phone, so I'd know even if they succeded and cancel the card with one simple phone call.
Theo, like RMS, is one of the few visible heads in the FOSS world that stands on his ideals. And I wish more people were like those two. I use Ati hardware because it's supported by the DRI project and it does the job fine since I don't play complex games anyway. I refuse to use NVIDIA's proprietary kernel drivers. I recently upgraded my box to an Athlon64 and found out there's not proprietary nvidia driver for FreeBSD/amd64. Thank $DEITY I bought a Radeon. It might not matter to you, but then again you might as well run Windows if software freedom is irrelevant.
Note how Theo's work has resulted in wi-fi drivers that are as free as possible (firmware binary blobs are still needed).
I don't usually reply to trolls, but I'm building world right now, so here we go...
Moderators, the parent post is not informative at all. The BSDs have never been about hype or world domination. The OpenBSD developers make OpenBSD for their own use. If you like it you're free to use it. And the same goes for the other BSDs. So NetBSD got new machines thanks to donations. Guess what, the same thing has happened to Drupal recently, and I'd hardly call that project a failure.
HP, IBM, SGI use Linux because they can actually save money by doing so. They sell hardware and services and, by embracing Linux, they save loads of cash on R&D and get geeks to like them. Look, IBM uses Linux, they're the good guys!
You are so wrong about the status of the BSDs. Have you even taken a look at FreeBSD's SMP architecture? And, for your info, Scott Long is working on a journaling layer for FFS. The thing is, most people on BSD land care little about journaling because production BSD systems don't crash, they just chug along. One of the FreeBSD project's mail servers has a constant load of near 100 with very heavy disk i/o as well, and it just works .
I don't know what world you live in, but I deploy OpenBSD firewalls and FreeBSD servers all the time, and people are very happy with them. Oh, and Juniper routers use the FreeBSD kernel. Must be pretty good if it drives some of biggest iron routers in the world.
I have nothing against Linux and use it when it's the best tool for the job, but there's more in the freenix world than Linux distros. Give the BSDs a try, you might like them. For a quick test read the excellent OpenBSD man pages and then compare them to the ones included in your average Linux distro. That alone should show you the effort its developers put on technical excellence.
I've always thought that the forking argument was simply bullshit, and I'll tell you why.
If java was free software you could get your binary package certified by Sun (i.e. run the official tests and pay the fee to be able to stick the Java brand). That means Sun could actually save development money because people could port the jdk/jre to certain niche platforms that are currently unsupported, without Sun having to spend a single dollar on that.
And another reason why this argument doesn't hold any water, how many forks of python, ruby or perl are there? That's what I thought. They have a point because Microsoft tried to fuck them with their modified java runtime, but if somebody does that they can't call it Java anymore, so the point is now moot.
ISTR Apple mentioning that their computer will run Windows and they won't do anything to prevent people from doing so, just they won't support it. And it seems that the Mactel systems won't have OpenFirmware, which is one of the features I love from their hardware (and Sun's OBP implementation too). More likely some special key will be embedded in the BIOS that the OS X install will check for.
All those languages are very nice until you check the requirements. Let's see an example: darcs. Darcs is an SCM written in Haskell, which is pretty cool. So, in order to build darcs, you need a haskell compiler, which is written in haskell! GHC needs a bootstrapped compiler in order to be able to compile itself.
This same problem exists with java (see how the FreeBSD port pulls a linux-jdk to build the native version), modula3 and IIRC mono. As long as this problem exists those languages will never be that popular. It's true that you need a C compiler to build gcc, but cross compiling C is a mastered art, it's been done for years. Take a look at how you can build the whole NetBSD operating system even from Windows/cygwin and for a different target CPU.
No, it's not a 1:1 copy. Try copying a StarForce3 protected CD with dd and you'll see that the software knows it's a copy. Modern copy protections rely on physical characteristics of the media to tell a copy from the original. ISTR that some Windows software can duplicate that, but they work at a much lower level, very near the drivers.
Wow, that's my weblog :)
That entry is pretty old, and the situation is hardly the same. As of today, FreeBSD 5.4 (soon to be out) performs much better than the previous releases, but for UP machines NetBSD 2.0 or DragonFlyBSD are IMHO better choices.
I run FreeBSD 5.4 on a SMP box and it's much better than it used to be. If/When I can allot some time I'll do some benchmarking of FreeBSD 5.4 vs DragonFlyBSD 1.2 on my dual PIII.
Exactly. I read the online version of NYTimes daily, and I don't even live in the US. I like to get my news from various sources, and they usually have interesting articles.
I do actually use it. Why? I don't need no stinking GUI, and don't want to run a bloated java app, like Azureus. I run btdownloadcurses.py inside screen on my home server. I log in, launch the program, log out and forget about it until it's done. I don't need to keep a desktop box up 24/7 because the app needs a working X environment.
Perdona, no he sido yo el del otro post. Me he dejado abierto el firefox mientra me iba a tomar un cafe y compañero de trabajo, que es un poco gilipollas, se ha puesto a hacer la gracia. Lo siento.
Te han moderado como offtopic, sudaca cabrón.
Au contraire, NetBSD-style init scripts are much more logical than sys V. With sys V you have a mess of symlinks. On NetBSD (and FreeBSD 5.x) you tell the rcorder program what dependencies your script has and what does it provide, the system figures our the execution order on it's own. To turn a service on you just put in your /etc/rc.conf file. Want to run bind? Just put named_enable="YES" in your /etc/rc.conf and there you go. Check Luke Mewburn's rc.d paper for more info.
I don't think it works that way. Where I live (Spain) we pay a tax every time we buy a CD-R(W). This tax was put there to compensate the artists for private copies you could make with that CD. A private copy is a right you have, and it means you can copy a CD you've already purchased. In other words, if I buy the latest Prodigy album I'm allowed by law to make backup copies to e.g. use in my car. This doesn't allow me to borrow your copy and make a duplicate. This tax gives them money because, in their opinion, they're losing money since I didn't buy 2 copies of said album. Of course all these laws are bullshit because 99% of the CD-Rs I buy are used to store my own data, not music, but that's another issue.