I think we should still use the name "AMD64", if only to emphasize that this was something AMD invented, not Intel, and AMD should get the credit for it. Intel now make AMD64-compatible CPUs in much the same way as AMD made/make "x86"-compatible CPUs.
Doesn't anybody else have problems with Opera for Mac OS X not saving their preferences? I have this problem with Opera 7.x and 8.5. I've a sneaking suspicion that my UFS filesystem has something to do with it....
Re:What were the BSDs using?
on
GCC 4.1 Released
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· Score: 2, Informative
If by *BSDs, you mean 386BSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD etc, then, yes, they've always used GCC (starting with GCC 1.39 in 386BSD, I think). Before that (ie. 4.3BSD and earlier), there was the closed-source pre-ANSI pcc (Portable C Compiler). Not sure whether 4.4BSD used pcc or GCC...
My Alpha running Debian at home and my Alpha running FreeBSD at work were left cold, lonely, and wanting Java; running a subset of Java applications with free software partial implementations
Speaking of Alphas, has GCC's Alpha code generation improved any since, say, 3.0? ISTR, GCC-compiled Alpha code used to sometimes run about 2x - 3x slower than code from the DEC/Compaq C compiler.
It started off as Linus's weekend hack to build a 386-specific replacement kernel
There was already a 386-specific 32-bit version of the MINIX kernel around at the time; it was called MINIX-386, unsurprisingly enough, and was widely used in the MINIX hacker community.
Linus went off in a huff and turned Linux into a complete OS by ripping out all the MINIX and adding all the GNU stuff instead.
There wasn't ever any MINIX code in Linux - there couldn't have been, as MINIX was a commercial product at the time. What there was, was plenty of minor MINIX influences on the design (lack of raw disk devices, "kernel", "fs" and "mm" subdirectories in the kernel source, Minix-compatible on-disk filesystem format, major/minor device numbers etc.) but no major ones (ie. the microkernel paradigm).
And in the mean time, MINIX had been killed by toxic licensing policies of the copyright owner (not Andy Tanenbaum). That, and the x86 architecture had expanded to 90% of the market.
Well, yes, you had to pay for MINIX, but there were no free OSs to speak of in those days. The reason MINIX seemed to disappear was that most of the MINIX hacker types were using MINIX because it was the closest thing to real UNIX they could afford. Once Linux appeared, as open source, with its simple goal of being a UNIX clone (rather than a model OS for teaching purposes, as MINIX was meant to be), it was inevitable that most of the MINIX hacker community would migrate en masse.
Does anyone else find it, err, surprising that in his resume, his first job after graduating with a BS was Program Manager for Excel? That's what I call fast-track:-)
Sun's product nomenclature just gets more bizarre. They've dusted off the old "Ultra" name (previously only used on UltraSPARC workstations, as the name suggests) and given it to an Opteron-based workstation! WTF?! And at the same time they announce an "Ultra 3" laptop, which is UltraSPARC-based (strangely, given that their workstation line seems to be inexorably drawn towards Opteron), but appears to be nothing more than an existing Tadpole or Naturetech laptop....
In theory, FreeBSD 5 should have the best (highest-performance) SMP support (SMPng) but I haven't seen any benchmarks comparing it with {Net,Open}BSD's on SMP systems.
Dans machine wasn't quite (apparently) 'the first off the production line - Edinburgh uni (where this T3D came from) wanted one that could be upgraded without a lot of hassle. Cray could only offer them this one, which was their testbed unit, wired for a full complement of processors, but not fully populated.
I used to be a sysadmin for this T3D; originally it was SN6007 (the seventh T3D built), delivered as a T3D MC256 (256 PEs). When it was upgraded (initially to MCN320 configuration, later MCN384 then MCN512), it was easier to swap the chassis for one with a bigger, non-power-of-2 (hence the N in MCN) wiremat already installed, than it was to replace the wiremat in situ. The "new" chassis brought its serial number with it, and hence SN6007 became SN6001.
The first T3D delivered was actually SN6002, to Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center in 1993.
I've had a.org domain for about 2.5 years. I used a unique address specifically for the admin e-mail in the WHOIS data, and never got any spam addressed to it... until a few months ago when a slow but steady trickle started. I changed the address to one of the form abuse@... and haven't had any more spam (so far) 8-).
Not just in France...there used to be a definition of horsepower in Britain (originated by the RAC I believe) where 1 hp was considered to be equivalent to 100cc of engine capacity. By this definition, the 2CV had about 6.5hp (652cc engine IIRC)...
Who the heck is Spyder Inc? The TCP/IP stack in NT 3.1 was the STREAMS-based SpiderTCP 6 (IIRC) from Spider Systems Ltd. (I used to work for them). This in turn used some BSD code. This stack was replaced in NT 3.5, with a stack alledgedly written from scratch at Microsoft according to this .
UnixWare was an early (first?) commercial implementation of UNIX on i386 hardware...
I think you're confusing UnixWare with the "other" SCO Unix there. UnixWare (aka SVR4.2) was originally released in 1992, fairly late in the game as (commercial) 386 Unix ports go.
My theory is that it originally stood for "frugal" - fvwm 1.x at least had a pretty low memory footprint and had configuration options to reduce it further...
No, but then I could have burned Etherboot into a Flash chip on the (3C905) Ethernet cards in each compute node, which would have been neater (if I could have got a hold of the chips at the time...)
Yep, it's been done before. In fact, I did it two years ago when I built a 17-node (16 diskless compute nodes plus a front-end server) Beowulf cluster using Etherboot loaded from floppy (icky, I know but it worked). Pretty straightforward if you've ever set up diskless UNIX workstations in a previous life...
Yep, it's been done before. In fact, I did it two years ago when I built a 17-node (16 diskless compute nodes plus a front-end server) Beowulf cluster using Etherboot loaded from floppy (icky, I know but it worked). Pretty straightforward if you've ever set up diskless UNIX workstations in a previous life...
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I think we should still use the name "AMD64", if only to emphasize that this was something AMD invented, not Intel, and AMD should get the credit for it. Intel now make AMD64-compatible CPUs in much the same way as AMD made/make "x86"-compatible CPUs.
In theory, with PowerPC Macintoshes being called "Power Macintoshes", the PowerPC PowerBooks should have been called "Power PowerBooks" 8-)
Why? Intel haven't used the number "86" since, well, the 486...
Doesn't anybody else have problems with Opera for Mac OS X not saving their preferences? I have this problem with Opera 7.x and 8.5. I've a sneaking suspicion that my UFS filesystem has something to do with it....
If by *BSDs, you mean 386BSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD etc, then, yes, they've always used GCC (starting with GCC 1.39 in 386BSD, I think). Before that (ie. 4.3BSD and earlier), there was the closed-source pre-ANSI pcc (Portable C Compiler). Not sure whether 4.4BSD used pcc or GCC...
My Alpha running Debian at home and my Alpha running FreeBSD at work were left cold, lonely, and wanting Java; running a subset of Java applications with free software partial implementations
Speaking of Alphas, has GCC's Alpha code generation improved any since, say, 3.0? ISTR, GCC-compiled Alpha code used to sometimes run about 2x - 3x slower than code from the DEC/Compaq C compiler.
From the front page of www.minix3.org:
There was already a 386-specific 32-bit version of the MINIX kernel around at the time; it was called MINIX-386, unsurprisingly enough, and was widely used in the MINIX hacker community.
There wasn't ever any MINIX code in Linux - there couldn't have been, as MINIX was a commercial product at the time. What there was, was plenty of minor MINIX influences on the design (lack of raw disk devices, "kernel", "fs" and "mm" subdirectories in the kernel source, Minix-compatible on-disk filesystem format, major/minor device numbers etc.) but no major ones (ie. the microkernel paradigm).
Well, yes, you had to pay for MINIX, but there were no free OSs to speak of in those days. The reason MINIX seemed to disappear was that most of the MINIX hacker types were using MINIX because it was the closest thing to real UNIX they could afford. Once Linux appeared, as open source, with its simple goal of being a UNIX clone (rather than a model OS for teaching purposes, as MINIX was meant to be), it was inevitable that most of the MINIX hacker community would migrate en masse.
Does anyone else find it, err, surprising that in his resume, his first job after graduating with a BS was Program Manager for Excel? That's what I call fast-track :-)
Sun's product nomenclature just gets more bizarre. They've dusted off the old "Ultra" name (previously only used on UltraSPARC workstations, as the name suggests) and given it to an Opteron-based workstation! WTF?! And at the same time they announce an "Ultra 3" laptop, which is UltraSPARC-based (strangely, given that their workstation line seems to be inexorably drawn towards Opteron), but appears to be nothing more than an existing Tadpole or Naturetech laptop....
Hmmm...Clive Sinclair once tried to make a laptop with a rear-projection CRT....you can read about it here :-).
In theory, FreeBSD 5 should have the best (highest-performance) SMP support (SMPng) but I haven't seen any benchmarks comparing it with {Net,Open}BSD's on SMP systems.
> What if they ported AIX to the PowerMac?
They did.
I used to be a sysadmin for this T3D; originally it was SN6007 (the seventh T3D built), delivered as a T3D MC256 (256 PEs). When it was upgraded (initially to MCN320 configuration, later MCN384 then MCN512), it was easier to swap the chassis for one with a bigger, non-power-of-2 (hence the N in MCN) wiremat already installed, than it was to replace the wiremat in situ. The "new" chassis brought its serial number with it, and hence SN6007 became SN6001.
The first T3D delivered was actually SN6002, to Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center in 1993.
I've had a .org domain for about 2.5 years. I used a unique address specifically for the admin e-mail in the WHOIS data, and never got any spam addressed to it... until a few months ago when a slow but steady trickle started. I changed the address to one of the form abuse@... and haven't had any more spam (so far) 8-).
Not just in France...there used to be a definition of horsepower in Britain (originated by the RAC I believe) where 1 hp was considered to be equivalent to 100cc of engine capacity. By this definition, the 2CV had about 6.5hp (652cc engine IIRC)...
Sorry, wasn't really involved on the hardware side back then...ask me a question about the SpiderPort firmware instead 8-)
Who the heck is Spyder Inc? The TCP/IP stack in NT 3.1 was the STREAMS-based SpiderTCP 6 (IIRC) from Spider Systems Ltd. (I used to work for them). This in turn used some BSD code. This stack was replaced in NT 3.5, with a stack alledgedly written from scratch at Microsoft according to this .
UnixWare was an early (first?) commercial implementation of UNIX on i386 hardware...
I think you're confusing UnixWare with the "other" SCO Unix there. UnixWare (aka SVR4.2) was originally released in 1992, fairly late in the game as (commercial) 386 Unix ports go.
My theory is that it originally stood for "frugal" - fvwm 1.x at least had a pretty low memory footprint and had configuration options to reduce it further...
lukemftp (the standard FTP client on NetBSD) will do HTTP too.
No, but then I could have burned Etherboot into a Flash chip on the (3C905) Ethernet cards in each compute node, which would have been neater (if I could have got a hold of the chips at the time...)
Yep, it's been done before. In fact, I did it two years ago when I built a 17-node (16 diskless compute nodes plus a front-end server) Beowulf cluster using Etherboot loaded from floppy (icky, I know but it worked). Pretty straightforward if you've ever set up diskless UNIX workstations in a previous life...
Yep, it's been done before. In fact, I did it two years ago when I built a 17-node (16 diskless compute nodes plus a front-end server) Beowulf cluster using Etherboot loaded from floppy (icky, I know but it worked). Pretty straightforward if you've ever set up diskless UNIX workstations in a previous life...