oss will hurt IBM. Oracle and many other companies who port to linux. I have a very awkward feeling that microsoft appluaded oralce and IBM developing software for linux because they can just cut and paste the database code into sql server
Have either Oracle or IBM announced that they will be making source to their database software freely available? (That is not implied by the existence of a Linux port.)
Assuming that citing a domain name that gets you to Softway's pages about Interix is an attempt to defend the assertion that NT is a microkernel, I don't consider the ability to have multiple environments for different types of programs to be sufficient reason to dub something a microkernel - were the Wine folk to add extra system calls to the Linux kernel to assist it, would that render the Linux kernel a microkernel?
In addition, how much of Interix is implemented in the Interix subsystem process and how much is implemented in libraries called by programs running under Interix (with those libraries perhaps making NT system calls)?
I think the little paper-flying things are in the kernel alredy.
I've not seen anything to indicate that they are. Stuff at, I have the impression, the level of the drawing routines in Xlib may be in the kernel, but stuff at the toolkit level lives in userland, as well as stuff implemented atop it.
In theory, a microkernel design is more portable than a monolithic kernel.
Perhaps Microsoft should have considered using such a design, then. I've seen nothing to indicate that NT is anything like what I generally hear referred to as a "microkernel" - file systems, device drivers, networking stacks, and even low-level graphics in 4.0 run in kernel mode (I suppose a desperate Microsoft marketoon could try distinguishing between the NT "kernel" and the NT "executive", but somebody could partition the routines in a modern UNIX-flavored kernel in the same fashion), invoked via procedure calls, rather than in server processes.
Yes, some parts of the Win32 API are implemented in the Win32 subsystem process, but if that qualifies it as a microkernel, one could argue that an automounter makes UNIX a microkernel....
On Solaris I can set my files' rwx permissions for everybody, but since I can't create or modify groups I can't have any finer grained control.
Yes, you can, if you're running Solaris 2.5 or later - if the file system is local or on an Solaris 2.5 or later NFS server, set an ACL on the file (as another poster noted, man setfacl, although I've not found a man page that explains well the semantics of Solaris ACLs (they seem to closely resemble the ACLs in the POSIX 1003.1e D15 draft).
If I had Linux on my laptop I'd have to NFS export the directory.
That depends on the machines to which you're explorting it. If the clients support SMB (Microsoft-flavored OSes do, as does Linux), and if you have Samba on your machine, you could SMB-export it (as you can with NT) with Samba.
UK and ARPA in one nslookup address. Is this scary or what?
Under the assumption that this isn't just a troll, note that the "arpa" domain used to be, as I remember, a domain in which the old pre-DNS names of machines were put - "ARPA" as in "ARPANET" - and also was then and still is now used to store information needed for reverse lookups, i.e. finding a host name given its IP address, so that if the host "gatekeeper.legal-aid.gov.uk" has the IP address 193.128.12.45, there would be a DNS entry for "45.12.128.193.in-addr.arpa". In fact, there is such an entry - it's a CNAME record, saying the name is "really" "45.32.12.128.193.in-addr.arpa", and that name has a DNS entry that says its host name is "gatekeeper.legal-aid.gov.uk"
Increase your search size..You will see the rest of it
If by "search size" you mean "Hits per page", that didn't help - I tried it with Netscape-on-NT, Netscape-on-Solaris, IE-on-NT, and IE-on-Solaris, and all of them gave me a screen that said "12 of 2421813 matched" (I assume that means it searched through 2,421,813 patents, not that Dell has that many) and faint "First", "Prev", "Next", and "Last" arrows around the "1-12" on the bottom, none of which were active.
This was an "Advanced Text Search", of "U.S. Front Pages and Claims", from "earliest" to "present", with "Dell Computer" in the "Assignee" field, and all other fields left unchanged. Perhaps only 12 patents have that particular value in that particular field, and other Dell patents have something else.
...but seem to imply they will integrate features from IRIX and their other software into open source products, and also say they will begin migrating customers away from IRIX...
What I saw in their announcement was
Silicon Graphics will migrate to the Open Source community key technology from its IRIX operating system...
which says nothing about migrating users from IRIX; it says they're migrating technology from IRIX to "the Open Source community".
Also, both Motif and qt are commercial and as such require commercial licensing (for qt only if you're planning a commercial product).
...and many Linux users might not have Motif on their systems, as they may not have wanted to pay for it (or may only want free software on their systems, but those folks aren't worth worrying about if you're making commercial software, obviously).
There is, of course, LessTif, which is a free-software Motif clone, and which at least some Linux users might have installed. I've not used it, so I can't say whether it's "close enough" to Motif for most purposes; I have the impression it might be - check out the LessTif site for more information.
Basically, I am not entirely sure that they will have to contribute MMX, KNI optimizations back to GNU.
Even if they don't, then any optimizations that are part of GPLed code must be made available to their customers in source form, and their customers can give the source (or binaries) away for free, as I read clauses 3 (must make source available) and 6 (can't stop people you provided it to from giving it away) of the GPL.
To fully support the Celeron and Pentium II processors, Cygnus will optimize Cygnus GNUPro in the following ways.
Celeron and Pentium II processor performance optimizations,
GNUPro Compiler (C and C++) Innovation - including conditional move instructions, instruction scheduling based on processor architecture, improved register allocation, integer optimizations, floating point optimizations, and MMX instruction set support,
GNUPro Libraries optimized for Intel Architecture for embedded applications,
Assembler, linker, loader and binary utilities updated to support the Pentium II processor family,
Stabs+ and DWARF2 debugging information incorporated into COFF and ELF object formats,
Backward compatibility with the Pentium processor,
Host support - Linux, Windows NT/95, Solaris/SPARC, HP-UX.
Recognizing the power of advanced processor platforms, Cygnus will also support the Pentium III processor with the following optimizations:
Additional libraries tuned for Pentium III,
Support in the assembler for Streaming SIMD Extensions,
Availability and further enhancements will be announced in the second quarter of 1999.
The libraries may be Cygnus-proprietary (if they're not GLIBC-based, say), but the changes to the compiler and assembler won't be, unless they throw out GCC/EGCS, GAS, GLD, etc.
They don't say anything about KNI support in the compiler, however.
Actually I'm pretty sure the GPL says you only need to release sources to the people you give binaries to. It doesn't say anything about releasing things publically.
It does, however, say - at least as I read clause 6 of the GPL - that if you provide a GPLed program to anybody, the recipient can redistribute it:
6. Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the -Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to these terms and conditions. You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein. You are not responsible for enforcing compliance by third parties to this License.
"These terms and conditions" don't include "they have to give you money when they redistribute it", and that, combined with "You may not impose further restrictions...", makes it look as if, when you sell GPLed software to somebody, they can put it up for FTP for free and announce it to the world, and you have to live with that.
I.e., it doesn't say you have to release it publicly, but it lets anybody else do so, even if they paid you a large amount of money for it.
Didn't work very well on an NT machine here. The "Network" item in the Control Panel showed it when I selected "Adapters" (although that may have been from stuff installed along with the Intel driver for the card).
There's a "getmac" command that apparently comes with the Windows NT Resource Kit, which, when run without an argument, listed the MAC address of the card on the machine in question.
You can also run "nbtstat -a " to get, among other things, the MAC address of a single-hosted machine if it supports NetBIOS (if it's multi-hosted, you may only get one of the MAC addresses).
"To qualify as a world-class success and not just a fad, each new product or method must pass the acid test of 'crossing the chasm' that separates early adoption from mainstream acceptance. Linux, and open source in general, fails this acid test."
Or, more accurately, perhaps hasn't yet passed this acid test. It can only be said to have failed that test if, after some "reasonable" period of time, it hasn't passed it; otherwise, simply by discussing a product early enough in its life cycle, one could dismiss almost any new product as "failing this acid test".
Perhaps it will fail the test, and perhaps it won't. His article should be treated as a prediction to be tested against future reality, not as a firm description of what will happen. (A phrase that's more and more in my mind these days is "Just because somebody says something, that doesn't necessarily mean it's true.")
REMOVE spec-exec and branch prediction.
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And deep deep down the IA-64 IS RISC!
As opposed to on the surface, where it's something else?
REMOVE spec-exec and branch prediction.
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ut apparently they're still wasting silicon on such silly crap as speculative execution and branch prediction.
...just like many other vendors of CPU for general-purpose computers. It's not as if Intel are the only folks on the planet doing speculative execution and branch prediction, which I guess means that, by your lights, the other vendors doing that don't know how to design microprocessors, either. Sic transit gloriaDigital^H^H^H^H^H^H^HCompaq, Sun, MIPS/SGI, HP, etc.
Perhaps they're all going in the wrong direction, but thumping only Intel for doing, say, branch prediction is an error, given that the folks I cited did it as well....
seems to me window managers for any unices have a long way to go before being comparable to the macos user interface
Window managers are probably never going to be "comparable to the MacOS user interface", as they provide only one part of the GUI.
A more interesting question is how far desktop environments such as KDE and GNOME have to go before being comparable to the MacOS user interface, as they are intended to provide a lot more of the GUI.
I suspect not. They may have made a one-time payment so that they don't have to pay royalties on redistribution, but I'm skeptical of claims that this lets them put up on "ftp.sun.com" the source code, unless they've made it "AT&T-free" by now. (Does anybody have direct knowledge of what's involved in getting a Solaris source license? Does AT&T^H^H^H^HNovell^H^H^H^H^H^HSCO get involved?)
A UNIX-like OS written in Java or Perl?
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I haven't seen one of THOSE around.
Neither have I (I don't know what JavaOS, or whatever it's called these days, looks like, but I suspect it's not "UNIX-like" in the sense of having its core API look A Lot Like That Of UNIX).
I wasn't saying that either Java or Perl were used to make such an OS; I was saying that Java and Perl (definitely Java, and I think Perl as well) compile into a byte-coded language,but neither of them are UNIX-specific, so neither of them count as the sort of language whose byte codes could reasonably be called "UNIX instructions".
It is also being targeted as a standard X extension.
The X Typographical Extension returns from the grave?
I have the impression that there are other complaints about X's font/text handling, such as no support for kerning, and the inability for programs to get enough information about fonts to do printing (or even on-screen formatting?) the way they'd like (I have the impression that's at least one reason why WordPerfect for Linux has its own fonts). Is this extension intended to do more than just allow an X server to draw anti-aliased text?
Slashdot Mirror
It's amongst the mini-HOWTOs; did you check that section?
Here's the Large Disk (mini-)HOWTO.
Have either Oracle or IBM announced that they will be making source to their database software freely available? (That is not implied by the existence of a Linux port.)
Assuming that citing a domain name that gets you to Softway's pages about Interix is an attempt to defend the assertion that NT is a microkernel, I don't consider the ability to have multiple environments for different types of programs to be sufficient reason to dub something a microkernel - were the Wine folk to add extra system calls to the Linux kernel to assist it, would that render the Linux kernel a microkernel?
In addition, how much of Interix is implemented in the Interix subsystem process and how much is implemented in libraries called by programs running under Interix (with those libraries perhaps making NT system calls)?
I've not seen anything to indicate that they are. Stuff at, I have the impression, the level of the drawing routines in Xlib may be in the kernel, but stuff at the toolkit level lives in userland, as well as stuff implemented atop it.
Perhaps Microsoft should have considered using such a design, then. I've seen nothing to indicate that NT is anything like what I generally hear referred to as a "microkernel" - file systems, device drivers, networking stacks, and even low-level graphics in 4.0 run in kernel mode (I suppose a desperate Microsoft marketoon could try distinguishing between the NT "kernel" and the NT "executive", but somebody could partition the routines in a modern UNIX-flavored kernel in the same fashion), invoked via procedure calls, rather than in server processes.
Yes, some parts of the Win32 API are implemented in the Win32 subsystem process, but if that qualifies it as a microkernel, one could argue that an automounter makes UNIX a microkernel....
Yes, you can, if you're running Solaris 2.5 or later - if the file system is local or on an Solaris 2.5 or later NFS server, set an ACL on the file (as another poster noted, man setfacl, although I've not found a man page that explains well the semantics of Solaris ACLs (they seem to closely resemble the ACLs in the POSIX 1003.1e D15 draft).
That depends on the machines to which you're explorting it. If the clients support SMB (Microsoft-flavored OSes do, as does Linux), and if you have Samba on your machine, you could SMB-export it (as you can with NT) with Samba.
Under the assumption that this isn't just a troll, note that the "arpa" domain used to be, as I remember, a domain in which the old pre-DNS names of machines were put - "ARPA" as in "ARPANET" - and also was then and still is now used to store information needed for reverse lookups, i.e. finding a host name given its IP address, so that if the host "gatekeeper.legal-aid.gov.uk" has the IP address 193.128.12.45, there would be a DNS entry for "45.12.128.193.in-addr.arpa". In fact, there is such an entry - it's a CNAME record, saying the name is "really" "45.32.12.128.193.in-addr.arpa", and that name has a DNS entry that says its host name is "gatekeeper.legal-aid.gov.uk"
If by "search size" you mean "Hits per page", that didn't help - I tried it with Netscape-on-NT, Netscape-on-Solaris, IE-on-NT, and IE-on-Solaris, and all of them gave me a screen that said "12 of 2421813 matched" (I assume that means it searched through 2,421,813 patents, not that Dell has that many) and faint "First", "Prev", "Next", and "Last" arrows around the "1-12" on the bottom, none of which were active.
This was an "Advanced Text Search", of "U.S. Front Pages and Claims", from "earliest" to "present", with "Dell Computer" in the "Assignee" field, and all other fields left unchanged. Perhaps only 12 patents have that particular value in that particular field, and other Dell patents have something else.
A search on the IBM patent server found about 12 patents assigned to "Dell Computer", most of which, from the title, look mechanical or electrical.
Dunno. One thing they've already released is the GLX code; they may plan to release other things in the future.
What I saw in their announcement was
which says nothing about migrating users from IRIX; it says they're migrating technology from IRIX to "the Open Source community".
...and many Linux users might not have Motif on their systems, as they may not have wanted to pay for it (or may only want free software on their systems, but those folks aren't worth worrying about if you're making commercial software, obviously).
There is, of course, LessTif, which is a free-software Motif clone, and which at least some Linux users might have installed. I've not used it, so I can't say whether it's "close enough" to Motif for most purposes; I have the impression it might be - check out the LessTif site for more information.
Even if they don't, then any optimizations that are part of GPLed code must be made available to their customers in source form, and their customers can give the source (or binaries) away for free, as I read clauses 3 (must make source available) and 6 (can't stop people you provided it to from giving it away) of the GPL.
The press release says:
The libraries may be Cygnus-proprietary (if they're not GLIBC-based, say), but the changes to the compiler and assembler won't be, unless they throw out GCC/EGCS, GAS, GLD, etc.
They don't say anything about KNI support in the compiler, however.
It does, however, say - at least as I read clause 6 of the GPL - that if you provide a GPLed program to anybody, the recipient can redistribute it:
"These terms and conditions" don't include "they have to give you money when they redistribute it", and that, combined with "You may not impose further restrictions...", makes it look as if, when you sell GPLed software to somebody, they can put it up for FTP for free and announce it to the world, and you have to live with that.
I.e., it doesn't say you have to release it publicly, but it lets anybody else do so, even if they paid you a large amount of money for it.
Didn't work very well on an NT machine here. The "Network" item in the Control Panel showed it when I selected "Adapters" (although that may have been from stuff installed along with the Intel driver for the card).
There's a "getmac" command that apparently comes with the Windows NT Resource Kit, which, when run without an argument, listed the MAC address of the card on the machine in question.
You can also run "nbtstat -a " to get, among other things, the MAC address of a single-hosted machine if it supports NetBIOS (if it's multi-hosted, you may only get one of the MAC addresses).
See this page on the BESM-6 computer.
How are the SGI NT boxes at 3D rendering?
Or, more accurately, perhaps hasn't yet passed this acid test. It can only be said to have failed that test if, after some "reasonable" period of time, it hasn't passed it; otherwise, simply by discussing a product early enough in its life cycle, one could dismiss almost any new product as "failing this acid test".
Perhaps it will fail the test, and perhaps it won't. His article should be treated as a prediction to be tested against future reality, not as a firm description of what will happen. (A phrase that's more and more in my mind these days is "Just because somebody says something, that doesn't necessarily mean it's true.")
As opposed to on the surface, where it's something else?
...just like many other vendors of CPU for general-purpose computers. It's not as if Intel are the only folks on the planet doing speculative execution and branch prediction, which I guess means that, by your lights, the other vendors doing that don't know how to design microprocessors, either. Sic transit gloriaDigital^H^H^H^H^H^H^HCompaq, Sun, MIPS/SGI, HP, etc.
Perhaps they're all going in the wrong direction, but thumping only Intel for doing, say, branch prediction is an error, given that the folks I cited did it as well....
Yes, at http://www.cnetusa.com.
Window managers are probably never going to be "comparable to the MacOS user interface", as they provide only one part of the GUI.
A more interesting question is how far desktop environments such as KDE and GNOME have to go before being comparable to the MacOS user interface, as they are intended to provide a lot more of the GUI.
Including give it away?
I suspect not. They may have made a one-time payment so that they don't have to pay royalties on redistribution, but I'm skeptical of claims that this lets them put up on "ftp.sun.com" the source code, unless they've made it "AT&T-free" by now. (Does anybody have direct knowledge of what's involved in getting a Solaris source license? Does AT&T^H^H^H^HNovell^H^H^H^H^H^HSCO get involved?)
Neither have I (I don't know what JavaOS, or whatever it's called these days, looks like, but I suspect it's not "UNIX-like" in the sense of having its core API look A Lot Like That Of UNIX).
I wasn't saying that either Java or Perl were used to make such an OS; I was saying that Java and Perl (definitely Java, and I think Perl as well) compile into a byte-coded language,but neither of them are UNIX-specific, so neither of them count as the sort of language whose byte codes could reasonably be called "UNIX instructions".
The X Typographical Extension returns from the grave?
I have the impression that there are other complaints about X's font/text handling, such as no support for kerning, and the inability for programs to get enough information about fonts to do printing (or even on-screen formatting?) the way they'd like (I have the impression that's at least one reason why WordPerfect for Linux has its own fonts). Is this extension intended to do more than just allow an X server to draw anti-aliased text?