What makes me wonder about all this good PR is that the Hurd existed as a project before Linux, and it's still alpha code. Why? And why is the Hurd only available for 32-bit x86? Is the hype surrounding microkernel false, or was there some other factor that has slowed down the Hurd despite its microkernel superiority? (And if so, what is that other factor -- human factors among the the Hurd development leads perhaps?)
Personally, having been messing around with gnumach for quite a while, I think that its a tremendously overcomplicated microkernel. Adding device drivers is a nightmare, and programming for it seems to be really convoluted and alien. It was and probaby is really advanced in some respects, but the complexity caused by this has really hindered the Hurd developer's efforts.
PC hardware advanced right beyond gnumach's ability to keep up almost overnight and anybody who is smart or knowledgable enough to make it current is probably 1. either working 70 hour weeks and getting rich or else 2. too busy living the good life from doing 1. above and too burned out to stand the sight of a monitor anymore.
I wish I could magically patch in linux kernel 2.6 drivers into L4 or gnumach but I'm just a hobbyist and I'm just happy to be able to compile and get the stuff to run. We non-CS major's are at somewhat of a disadvantage I think when it comes to kernel hacking.
Please remember that at the time, neither Minix nor BSD was free. If there was a free and open *x out there, Linus would not have needed to write Linux.
If fact, back in 1991 I was toying around with both Minix and Linux. Minix was pretty cool but it did cost money and it was pretty basic in what it could do. It was pretty much text only. Linux, on the otherhand was something of a baby huey, born on the gigantic side. I remember ftp'ing disk images for days on my 2400 baud modem and then creating a humongous pile of disks.
Minix, on the other hand, was like 2 disks AFAIK, but it wasn't nearly as groovy as Linux was with all that GNU software that was immediately ported over to run on it. I even struggled to get X running on my Debian 0.9 system but never pulled it off with my EGA card that weighed about ten pounds and was covered with hundreds of chips. A VGA card and monitor cost a king's ransom back in those days was way out of my price range.
But compared to MS-DOS and DesqView, which I used to run my old BBS system on back then, Linux was pretty darned cool! You could put a getty on your comport and it kind of was a bbs already, and you could actually do meaningfull things with your computer while it ran the bbs since it had virtual consoles and awesome multitasking even back then, whereas with DesqView you sort of had a poorly performing kind of multitasking system that barely ran anything usefull without taking up so many cycles that nothing really worked well at all. I don't think that Minix was able to do anything like this back then, but then I only really messed around with it for a couple of days.
Minix is a diffrent operating system with a diffrent focus. I can easly see Minix being used more effectively in the imbeded market where Linux is today.
Another interesting idea might be to port the Hurd to run on the Minix microkernel. Admittedly it might not be as sexy as L4Ka or as crufty as gnumach, but it would probably be really easy to do compared to resuscitating gnumach yet again or starting with essentially nothing like with L4.
Minix already has a microkernel with some hardware drivers and the gcc compiler, porting the Hurd to the minix microkernel ought to be a snap. Ok/. geek boys, get on it, as big as you all talk I'm sure you all could do it in your sleep if you felt like it.
Actually, I just got it booting on my Asus A7N8X with Western Digital WD1200JB and NVidia GeForce FX 5900. Turns out there is a newly discovered bug in gnumach which barfs when you have lots of RAM installed. Add the command uppermem 523648 to Grub's boot entry and magically it all works.
For the more adventurous, you can check out Hurd on L4. The link is to a wiki page that I have been working on recently. But while you can actually run the Hurd and do things in the X-Window system with Gnumach, the L4 variant is just getting off the ground. Some recent crucial code porting has recently occured and we may soon see a libc0 for Hurd on L4 with any luck. If you want to spend about an hour making a bootable debugger then check out the link:-P
That job security through code obscurity thing really doesn't work because the ones who do the hiring and firing probably have no idea what it is you do other than "some computer stuff" and they probably don't have any clue that the whole system is going to crash a couple months after you're gone.
I had a HP9000 PARISC C-200 64 bit machine which I toyed around with for a year or so. I ended up selling it off due to the incredible amount of heat which blasted out of the back of the case. It was kind of nifty, but I never did manage to use any 64 bit software with it. If you were trying to do something like iterative numerical solution of systems of differential equations to a ridiculous degree of precision then 64 bit would be pretty cool, but you can do that kind of extended precision math on a 32 bit machine as well, albeit a lot slower.
I think that 64 bit systems are pretty cool personally, but for what its worth, I'm totally happy with my XP2400+. Cheap, powerfull, and stable. Three good things right there.
Yeah its a toy, no its not going to replace your desktop, yeah its pretty cool.
I gotta get the aux input hooked up in my car so I can use it as an Ogg / mp3 player. I've tested it a couple times and thats spiff.
As far as geeky toys go, Zarus's are hard to beat. If you're all into practicality and that kind of crap then go get a 10 cent notebook from wally mart.
It would save the current cursor position, write the date and time on the top line of the screen, jump back to where it had been, write the current directory, and do it all in nice colors!
Well you can do that like this in a color xterm or linux console. Heres my above prompt with the 1337 time and date deal patched in note: for some reason the/. text processor sticks an extra space in there :-)
Amazingly enough, you can do all those cool old ANSI.SYS tricks in a linux console or most xterms. This may not work on all linux systems, notably some older Redhat variants
It's really not too difficult fixing your own hard drive, if the problem is a head crash, or the infamous Seagate "stiction" problem, if you know what to do. You will require #4/0 steel wool, paint thinners, WD-40, a few hand tools, and about 45 minutes.
- First, you need a clean room, so make sure the garage door is closed before you begin. Move those old lawnmower parts off the bench. Disassemble the sealed unit and carefully wash all parts with paint thinners. Bend the read/write heads out of the way, and then disassemble the platter stack.
- VERY CAREFULLY buff the platter surfaces with the #4/0 steel wool. This will remove any existing data, level out any surface defects, and help to redistribute the magnetic media and fill in those pesky "bad sectors" that most drives have.
- Reassemble the platter stack, and using a.015" feeler gauge, bend the read/write heads back to the platter surface, using the feeler gauge to set the gap. This is slightly higher gap than the factory uses, but it reduces the chance of head collisions with any flotsam you neglected to remove.
- Give the heads and platters a good shot of WD-40 and reassemble the unit. If your drive has a filter, replace it with a clean section of gauze pad.
All that's left is to low level and DOS format the drive, and you're back in business. I haven't tried this myself, but my friend's wife's sister-in-law's husband knows a technician that does it all the time....
I don't know... I've installed Debian on about half a dozen different laptops now, each with horribly undocumented chipsets and lcd systems. Managed to get X working in each case. If you think getting XFree86 v 4.x is rough, man you have no idea how hard it used to be with XFree86 v 3.x! xf86config used to consistently produce completely useless modelines for 99% of all monitors, it used to take days sometimes to find a mode that barely worked just enough so you could run xvidtune and fix it.
It took me about a good evenings worth of messing around to convert my Debian system to a 2.6 kernel, and I use ALSA sound, nForce2 motherboard, GeForceFX graphics, lots of bleeding-edge hardware so I always have to roll my own kernels from source. My tip: install GRUB as your bootloader, it will save your butt.
Debian's not a simple system but it really rewards those who take the time to learn it. It just feels like an old-time big iron system. I really can't quantify it but when I use other distros they seem really lightweight to me. Don't expect to slap Debian on your box and be an expert with it in 45 minutes. Its a heavyweight OS for people who demand a bit more.
From my experience with different video cards and 3D FPS in linux, nvidia is head and shoulders above the rest, and they have been very responsive to the community.
I agree. Ever since I yanked out my Voodoo Banshee and plopped in my first Geforce2MX I've been very pleased not only with the performance but also with the stability. Sometimes it takes a bit of tinkering to find the magic kernel and XF86Config recipes, but once you do you are pretty much golden.
NVidia's hardware support for linux is a lot better than 99% of the other hardware manufacturers out there (compare with say Lucent). NVidia has made a Linux box into one heck of a powerfull OpenGL development platform, a poor-man's SGI workstation if you will.
Of course I spend all my time playing Neverwinter Nights online now because of it:-)
I've been using an nForce2 board for about a year now with first a Geforce4MX and now a FX 5900, and I have have totally excellent results. I agree that getting it set up would be somewhat of a daunting challenge for the linux gnubie, and even for a lot of intermediate level users. Familiarity with compiling your own kernel is essential for success.
As for your black screen when switching to VC's, compile your kernel with vesafb support and boot it with a vga=... parameter. That should resolve that pesky problem (I figured that one out about 2 years ago after some carefull searching through forums on the web).
Your hardware can be made to work great, but you are going to have to get your hands dirty and do some researching for answers. My Asus A7N8X Deluxe nForce2 board is easily the fastest and most stable Linux system that I have ever had the pleasure to use. I think everything except possibly the IEEE1394 firewire is functional, and that because I don't own any firewire devices so haven't bothered with it.
I use the VESA framebuffer with mine. Just read the vesafb.txt file from the kernel docs to get a mode parameter to activater it, if you use GRUB as your bootloader, you'll have something like this:
kernel/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda3 vga=0x0318
I've been running it with kernel 2.6.0-mm1 and the previous unofficial 2.6.0 nvidia driver package from minions.de and haven't noticed any problems with my Debian unstable system. You'll know if it kicks into framebuffer mode when you see the little penguin in the corner at boot-up. I'll probably ugrade my stuff this weekend.
This is definitley intriguing, but I can't gather frmo the article if there are any uses
I suspect that this may be a prescursor discovery which is related to the quest for producing a stable form of metallic hydrogen. Metallic hydrogen, which if found to be stable at temperatures higher than near absolute-zero, would have some excellent properties as a compact delivery form for hydrogen. Hydrogen, which I am sure you all know, is a promising clean chemical energy source but is hampered by its low energy density per volume compared with other conventional fuels.
I believe that it is properly classified as an amorphous solid; i.e. there is no ordered crystalline structure present. Contrast this with quartz which is composed of the same molecules but does in fact have a crystal structure. Technically, a supercooled liquid is probably also an appropriate description because when heated to redness to where it will flow, glass does not undergo a phase transition. Also, given a seed crystal and enough time, molten glass will eventually crystallize into quartz, forming a proper crystalline solid. So amorphous solid or supercooled liquid are both good terms to describe the molecular state of common glass.
In the summer of 2000, our server was running SCO Unix, and I decided to try and get the PS/2 mouse working so I could use the Windows 3.0 looking thing that was their implementation of the X-Window System. I ran the script, which seemed to compile a kernel module, and rebooted the machine.
Big Mistake! The machine wasn't Y2K complient and failed to reboot because it had some problem with some init script or other (some stupid thing like syslogd or somesuch). And it just hung there.... took the whole company's main production system down. Whatever expensive system recovery solution it was that SCO had sold us proved to be useless, and the company implored me to fix it rather than making us resort to calling in SCO the whiteshirts.
It took me about 6 hours to find a workaround, which ultimately involved booting a Debian Linux rescue cd, loading the UFS kenel module, mounting the root partition, executing a shell, and commenting the offending line out of the init script. Apparently the machine hadn't been rebooted since the turn of the millenium, which was fairly impressive, but needless to say I was not expecting a Y2K bug on a SCO Unix system. The whole thing caught me completely off-guard and made me look like a fool. That fact that I was able to resolve the problem without calling in technical support was probably the only thing that saved my job.
The following webiste has served as a central index for engineering and scientific related applications which run on Linux, and it has been around for quite a while.
The site lists both free and commerical applications.
For a drafting program, I would recommend QCad which is a nice GPL 2D drafting package. Unfortunatly I am not aware of any GPL 3D drafting programs which are either robust or mature enough for industrial use. Periodically I attempt to get TurboCad running under Wine, but while it seems to be getting closer to working, still no success yet.
Don't overlook the Python Programming Language which has a variety of extensions which make it very suitable for number crunching applications. Its is fairly easy to learn how to make GUI-based applications for specialized purposes, and its speed of development combined with robust error-checking and interpreted execution mode makes it ideal for implementing small engineering solutions.
You are missing the great beginnings of the GNU movement and why RMS did this all to begin with. Back before Linux hit the scene, the GCC compiler was basically designed to run on hostile systems. A university, for instance, might get fed up with outrageous licensing fees every year and not licencse c++, pascal, fortran, (insert expensive developer license here). Using your proprietary UNIX cc compiler you could bootstrap GCC and make a heck of a fine development platform for cheap! Then you could let your license expire and keep using the system for years to come! Back in those days it was an attempt to for cash starved university research labs to get out from under AT&T's heavy-handed licensing schemes. Man I used to dream of running UNIX at home but it was totally out of the reach of a typical home computer enthusiast, it might as well have cost a million-dollars because nobody that I knew could afford anything like that. Apple's A/UX or maybe Xenix on a TRS-80 were the closest you could come and that was still beyond the reach of most home computer hobbyists. Later on, I think OS/9 on a Tandy CoCo was doable but that was some pretty obscure stuff. Anyways, removing GCC support from SCO would be hurting the people that it is designed to help the most. Yeah SCO is abusing it, probably illegally, but its a situation where you have to tolerate the abuse in order get the help where its needed the most. That being said, anybody that is still running SCO should be taken out behind the barn and you know what, screw 'em I say. There comes a time when you can only take so much crap before you have to pack up your toys and go home.
And since everybody knows that Windows also contains stolen code from Linux, therefore Windows users should be required to license it also. I foresee that SCO would have sued Microsoft next but thats probably what the cash infusion was - a bribe to keep mum about it. Yeah thats the ticket!
I've been using an A7N8X Deluxe since April with only minor issues. It was a bit cutting-edge having to run a test kernel for a while, but it runs well enough that I'm still running a test kernel. Once in a blue moon it seems like the AMD Viper chipset code gets freaked out and I start geting some IDE timeouts which requires a reboot, but thats not bad for the bleeding edge system it is. Probably if I rolled up a new kernel it would work just dandy, but inertia and the rarity of this problem ( maybe 4 times in 7 months ) hasn't really made it a big deal for me. But my system isn't really being stressed that much, I just use it to to play Neverwinter Nights online most of the time nowadays:-)
This sucks. I wanted to play some Fallout3. Now if it does come out you can be sure it will suck. Maybe BioWare will hire some of these talented guys. I have money right here, gimme Fallout3 and the money is yours... no? Oh too bad.
I have read this debate which has raged as to whether he said it or not. The funny thing is that I seem to recall a quote from around the Windows 3.0 era regarding video resolution limitations which went something like:
... and to think Bill Gates said, "Nobody will ever need more than 640x480 resolution for Windows"...
Really I think this is what his remark was and its being confused with 640k RAM.
Anyone have any idea why NWN stories always hit the front page? Isn't that what the games section is for?
I mean the odd one or two I could understand, but every bit of news about the game turns up here... pretty much the only game with this honour
Because Slashdot is News for Nerds - Stuff that Matters. If you don't think that this is front page news then you are obviously a geek rather than a nerd, and us nerds don't like you geeks making stupid posts dis'ing our holy grail: Dungeons and Dragons. Maybe you should go to some other "News for Geeks" site like The Register instead.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, having been messing around with gnumach for quite a while, I think that its a tremendously overcomplicated microkernel. Adding device drivers is a nightmare, and programming for it seems to be really convoluted and alien. It was and probaby is really advanced in some respects, but the complexity caused by this has really hindered the Hurd developer's efforts.
PC hardware advanced right beyond gnumach's ability to keep up almost overnight and anybody who is smart or knowledgable enough to make it current is probably 1. either working 70 hour weeks and getting rich or else 2. too busy living the good life from doing 1. above and too burned out to stand the sight of a monitor anymore.
I wish I could magically patch in linux kernel 2.6 drivers into L4 or gnumach but I'm just a hobbyist and I'm just happy to be able to compile and get the stuff to run. We non-CS major's are at somewhat of a disadvantage I think when it comes to kernel hacking.
If fact, back in 1991 I was toying around with both Minix and Linux. Minix was pretty cool but it did cost money and it was pretty basic in what it could do. It was pretty much text only. Linux, on the otherhand was something of a baby huey, born on the gigantic side. I remember ftp'ing disk images for days on my 2400 baud modem and then creating a humongous pile of disks.
Minix, on the other hand, was like 2 disks AFAIK, but it wasn't nearly as groovy as Linux was with all that GNU software that was immediately ported over to run on it. I even struggled to get X running on my Debian 0.9 system but never pulled it off with my EGA card that weighed about ten pounds and was covered with hundreds of chips. A VGA card and monitor cost a king's ransom back in those days was way out of my price range.
But compared to MS-DOS and DesqView, which I used to run my old BBS system on back then, Linux was pretty darned cool! You could put a getty on your comport and it kind of was a bbs already, and you could actually do meaningfull things with your computer while it ran the bbs since it had virtual consoles and awesome multitasking even back then, whereas with DesqView you sort of had a poorly performing kind of multitasking system that barely ran anything usefull without taking up so many cycles that nothing really worked well at all. I don't think that Minix was able to do anything like this back then, but then I only really messed around with it for a couple of days.
Minix already has a microkernel with some hardware drivers and the gcc compiler, porting the Hurd to the minix microkernel ought to be a snap. Ok /. geek boys, get on it, as big as you all talk I'm sure you all could do it in your sleep if you felt like it.
Actually, I just got it booting on my Asus A7N8X with Western Digital WD1200JB and NVidia GeForce FX 5900. Turns out there is a newly discovered bug in gnumach which barfs when you have lots of RAM installed. Add the command uppermem 523648 to Grub's boot entry and magically it all works.
For the more adventurous, you can check out Hurd on L4. The link is to a wiki page that I have been working on recently. But while you can actually run the Hurd and do things in the X-Window system with Gnumach, the L4 variant is just getting off the ground. Some recent crucial code porting has recently occured and we may soon see a libc0 for Hurd on L4 with any luck. If you want to spend about an hour making a bootable debugger then check out the link :-P
That job security through code obscurity thing really doesn't work because the ones who do the hiring and firing probably have no idea what it is you do other than "some computer stuff" and they probably don't have any clue that the whole system is going to crash a couple months after you're gone.
I think that 64 bit systems are pretty cool personally, but for what its worth, I'm totally happy with my XP2400+. Cheap, powerfull, and stable. Three good things right there.
I gotta get the aux input hooked up in my car so I can use it as an Ogg / mp3 player. I've tested it a couple times and thats spiff.
As far as geeky toys go, Zarus's are hard to beat. If you're all into practicality and that kind of crap then go get a 10 cent notebook from wally mart.
It's really not too difficult fixing your own hard drive, if the problem is a head crash, or the infamous Seagate "stiction" problem, if you know what to do. You will require #4/0 steel wool, paint thinners, WD-40, a few hand tools, and about 45 minutes.
.015" feeler gauge, bend the read/write heads back to the platter surface, using the feeler gauge to set the gap. This is slightly higher gap than the factory uses, but it reduces the chance of head collisions with any flotsam you neglected to remove.
- First, you need a clean room, so make sure the garage door is closed before you begin. Move those old lawnmower parts off the bench. Disassemble the sealed unit and carefully wash all parts with paint thinners. Bend the read/write heads out of the way, and then disassemble the platter stack.
- VERY CAREFULLY buff the platter surfaces with the #4/0 steel wool. This will remove any existing data, level out any surface defects, and help to redistribute the magnetic media and fill in those pesky "bad sectors" that most drives have.
- Reassemble the platter stack, and using a
- Give the heads and platters a good shot of WD-40 and reassemble the unit. If your drive has a filter, replace it with a clean section of gauze pad.
All that's left is to low level and DOS format the drive, and you're back in business. I haven't tried this myself, but my friend's wife's sister-in-law's husband knows a technician that does it all the time....
I don't know... I've installed Debian on about half a dozen different laptops now, each with horribly undocumented chipsets and lcd systems. Managed to get X working in each case. If you think getting XFree86 v 4.x is rough, man you have no idea how hard it used to be with XFree86 v 3.x! xf86config used to consistently produce completely useless modelines for 99% of all monitors, it used to take days sometimes to find a mode that barely worked just enough so you could run xvidtune and fix it. It took me about a good evenings worth of messing around to convert my Debian system to a 2.6 kernel, and I use ALSA sound, nForce2 motherboard, GeForceFX graphics, lots of bleeding-edge hardware so I always have to roll my own kernels from source. My tip: install GRUB as your bootloader, it will save your butt. Debian's not a simple system but it really rewards those who take the time to learn it. It just feels like an old-time big iron system. I really can't quantify it but when I use other distros they seem really lightweight to me. Don't expect to slap Debian on your box and be an expert with it in 45 minutes. Its a heavyweight OS for people who demand a bit more.
I agree. Ever since I yanked out my Voodoo Banshee and plopped in my first Geforce2MX I've been very pleased not only with the performance but also with the stability. Sometimes it takes a bit of tinkering to find the magic kernel and XF86Config recipes, but once you do you are pretty much golden.
NVidia's hardware support for linux is a lot better than 99% of the other hardware manufacturers out there (compare with say Lucent). NVidia has made a Linux box into one heck of a powerfull OpenGL development platform, a poor-man's SGI workstation if you will.
Of course I spend all my time playing Neverwinter Nights online now because of it :-)
I've been using an nForce2 board for about a year now with first a Geforce4MX and now a FX 5900, and I have have totally excellent results. I agree that getting it set up would be somewhat of a daunting challenge for the linux gnubie, and even for a lot of intermediate level users. Familiarity with compiling your own kernel is essential for success.
As for your black screen when switching to VC's, compile your kernel with vesafb support and boot it with a vga=... parameter. That should resolve that pesky problem (I figured that one out about 2 years ago after some carefull searching through forums on the web).
Your hardware can be made to work great, but you are going to have to get your hands dirty and do some researching for answers. My Asus A7N8X Deluxe nForce2 board is easily the fastest and most stable Linux system that I have ever had the pleasure to use. I think everything except possibly the IEEE1394 firewire is functional, and that because I don't own any firewire devices so haven't bothered with it.
I use the VESA framebuffer with mine. Just read the vesafb.txt file from the kernel docs to get a mode parameter to activater it, if you use GRUB as your bootloader, you'll have something like this:I've been running it with kernel 2.6.0-mm1 and the previous unofficial 2.6.0 nvidia driver package from minions.de and haven't noticed any problems with my Debian unstable system. You'll know if it kicks into framebuffer mode when you see the little penguin in the corner at boot-up. I'll probably ugrade my stuff this weekend.
I believe that it is properly classified as an amorphous solid; i.e. there is no ordered crystalline structure present. Contrast this with quartz which is composed of the same molecules but does in fact have a crystal structure. Technically, a supercooled liquid is probably also an appropriate description because when heated to redness to where it will flow, glass does not undergo a phase transition. Also, given a seed crystal and enough time, molten glass will eventually crystallize into quartz, forming a proper crystalline solid. So amorphous solid or supercooled liquid are both good terms to describe the molecular state of common glass.
In the summer of 2000, our server was running SCO Unix, and I decided to try and get the PS/2 mouse working so I could use the Windows 3.0 looking thing that was their implementation of the X-Window System. I ran the script, which seemed to compile a kernel module, and rebooted the machine.
Big Mistake! The machine wasn't Y2K complient and failed to reboot because it had some problem with some init script or other (some stupid thing like syslogd or somesuch). And it just hung there.... took the whole company's main production system down. Whatever expensive system recovery solution it was that SCO had sold us proved to be useless, and the company implored me to fix it rather than making us resort to calling in SCO the whiteshirts.
It took me about 6 hours to find a workaround, which ultimately involved booting a Debian Linux rescue cd, loading the UFS kenel module, mounting the root partition, executing a shell, and commenting the offending line out of the init script. Apparently the machine hadn't been rebooted since the turn of the millenium, which was fairly impressive, but needless to say I was not expecting a Y2K bug on a SCO Unix system. The whole thing caught me completely off-guard and made me look like a fool. That fact that I was able to resolve the problem without calling in technical support was probably the only thing that saved my job.
Scientific Applications on Linux
The site lists both free and commerical applications.
For a drafting program, I would recommend QCad which is a nice GPL 2D drafting package. Unfortunatly I am not aware of any GPL 3D drafting programs which are either robust or mature enough for industrial use. Periodically I attempt to get TurboCad running under Wine, but while it seems to be getting closer to working, still no success yet.
Don't overlook the Python Programming Language which has a variety of extensions which make it very suitable for number crunching applications. Its is fairly easy to learn how to make GUI-based applications for specialized purposes, and its speed of development combined with robust error-checking and interpreted execution mode makes it ideal for implementing small engineering solutions.
Oh, yeah thats a nice way to write short programs.
You are missing the great beginnings of the GNU movement and why RMS did this all to begin with. Back before Linux hit the scene, the GCC compiler was basically designed to run on hostile systems. A university, for instance, might get fed up with outrageous licensing fees every year and not licencse c++, pascal, fortran, (insert expensive developer license here). Using your proprietary UNIX cc compiler you could bootstrap GCC and make a heck of a fine development platform for cheap! Then you could let your license expire and keep using the system for years to come! Back in those days it was an attempt to for cash starved university research labs to get out from under AT&T's heavy-handed licensing schemes. Man I used to dream of running UNIX at home but it was totally out of the reach of a typical home computer enthusiast, it might as well have cost a million-dollars because nobody that I knew could afford anything like that. Apple's A/UX or maybe Xenix on a TRS-80 were the closest you could come and that was still beyond the reach of most home computer hobbyists. Later on, I think OS/9 on a Tandy CoCo was doable but that was some pretty obscure stuff. Anyways, removing GCC support from SCO would be hurting the people that it is designed to help the most. Yeah SCO is abusing it, probably illegally, but its a situation where you have to tolerate the abuse in order get the help where its needed the most. That being said, anybody that is still running SCO should be taken out behind the barn and you know what, screw 'em I say. There comes a time when you can only take so much crap before you have to pack up your toys and go home.
And since everybody knows that Windows also contains stolen code from Linux, therefore Windows users should be required to license it also. I foresee that SCO would have sued Microsoft next but thats probably what the cash infusion was - a bribe to keep mum about it. Yeah thats the ticket!
I've been using an A7N8X Deluxe since April with only minor issues. It was a bit cutting-edge having to run a test kernel for a while, but it runs well enough that I'm still running a test kernel. Once in a blue moon it seems like the AMD Viper chipset code gets freaked out and I start geting some IDE timeouts which requires a reboot, but thats not bad for the bleeding edge system it is. Probably if I rolled up a new kernel it would work just dandy, but inertia and the rarity of this problem ( maybe 4 times in 7 months ) hasn't really made it a big deal for me. But my system isn't really being stressed that much, I just use it to to play Neverwinter Nights online most of the time nowadays :-)
This sucks. I wanted to play some Fallout3. Now if it does come out you can be sure it will suck. Maybe BioWare will hire some of these talented guys. I have money right here, gimme Fallout3 and the money is yours... no? Oh too bad.
I have read this debate which has raged as to whether he said it or not. The funny thing is that I seem to recall a quote from around the Windows 3.0 era regarding video resolution limitations which went something like:
Really I think this is what his remark was and its being confused with 640k RAM.