Not here in Canada at least. It's actually easier to find [not particularly good] horror movies in the $1-3 range than the more family friendly dramas and such. (They usually go for about $5.) Of course, this could just be a reflection of the fact that I'll spend more time glancing through a pile of movies if I think I might find a Christopher Lee or Peter Cushing flick at the bottom of it, rather than some sappy '70s made-for-TV special.
And, now that I think of it, I picked up a DVD with the Lon Chaney Phantom of the Opera and Hunchback of Notre Dame silent films for about two bucks...
Yes and no. The default compiler is GCC4, however, the kernel and much of the OS (pretty much all of Darwin, in fact) are still compiled with GCC3 because they haven't completely cleared the codebase of GCC3-isms.
That said, remember that the submitter is talking about GCC4 on x86 platforms, and remember that Apple is putting a lot of work into making sure the PowerPC optimizations are as good as possible. Not to mention things like GCC4's auto-vectorization of code to take advantage of the Altivec unit (which has a more noticeable effect than MMXing x86 code).
It would be nice to see some test results for Apple's GCC versions 3 and 4.
The Italians were running n operation in American controlled territory without telling the Americans. That's rude, but overlookable.
The Italians then failed to yield to an American roadblock. That's not rude, that's stupid. American soldiers in Iraq have to contend with suicide car bombings (and the Italians know this).
While the Italian's motives were good. There implementation was, well, incompetent. And that's why there were dead Italians in this case.
Sun is in the middle of making it's chief operating system open source. They've just started an initiative to get as much of the company blogging as possible to make the company more transparent. They keep the Java name (that's right, just the name) so that they can guarantee anything called Java will actually be compatible. So there's very little chance of them taking Java away. And even if they did, the JVM, class libraries and whatnot all have publicly available specifications, so it's not like compatible replacements couldn't be produced.
And, let's not forget that the 'big cash' from MS was basically Microsoft paying Sun to stop running around calling it an anti-competitive monopolist.
Reality check: Sun's in the Open Source game for the long haul. Just because they don't worship at the altar of the GPL doesn't make them evil.
1. Microsoft was one of (if not the first) to buy a license from SCO, prompting the 'MS is bank-rolling the SCO suit' comments way back when.
2. MS had a SysV-derived OS called Xenix that has since been folded back into OpenServer & UnixWare. So even without the previously mentioned licensing there is probably a sheild clause somwhere protecting MS.
Basically MS is legally and morally in the clear when it comes to SysV-derived code.
I suppose I wasn't emphatic enough, Radar access ain't gonna happen. Consider that even ADC Premier members under NDA don't get access to the logs for bugs they filed. All they get is the current status, no commentary.
Radar is held very close to Apple's chest. (I just got a mental image of Steve Jobs hugging Gary Burghoff from M*A*S*H.) No one Apple doesn't employ is going to see it any time soon.
Which is unfortunate, but it is the reality of the situation.
However, guess what Apple's internal SCS says... probably "fixed radar://xxxxxx" because that's all anyone inside Apple needs.
So access to Apple's SCS records wouldn't do any good because pretty much to only way to get access to Radar is to cash an Apple paycheck for a position that requires Radar access.
So Apple would have to employ someone to translate the internal SCS entries to something the KHTML team could use. Considering all they legally have to do is make the WebCore source available, that's pretty unlikely.
If you've got a DVD-Burner, you could always live on the edge of copyright compliance: make a copy of the install DVD and then send the original away in exchange for CDs.
Aside from that, there's really not much of an option, unfortunately. Theoretically you might be able to boot off a DVD-ROM in an external USB enclosure, but I don't want to think how long the install would take over USB 1.1...
Apple applied for a trademark on Tiger in the Computer Operating System context in 2003 ( http://tarr.uspto.gov/servlet/tarr?regser=serial&e ntry=78269988 ). So it's not like they just slapped the name on the box without due diligence. It's just that both Apple and the USPTO decided that an on-line retailer (of x86 machines and parts) was unlikely to be confused with a new version of Mac OS.
The bulk of TigerDirect's suit seems to be more about their ranking on Google dropping than losing their trademark, however.
He's not commenting on the objective quality of the OS; he's commenting on the quality of it relative to the last Longhorn release:
This is a painful build to have to deal with after a year of waiting, a step back in some ways. I hope Microsoft has surprises up their sleeves.
In other words, the OS is trending from promising towards disappointing. The whole point of the big screen dog and pony show is to build excitement about the coming OS (yes, even at the developer shows). By bringing out a version that seems worse than the last one MS is killing enthusiasm for Longhorn.
The Alpha port of NT didn't actually run in true 64-bit mode. Compaq (not MS) was porting NT to run in native 64-bit mode on the Alpha, but they killed that project in 1999. MS had publicly stated at the time that they wouldn't be delivering a 64-bit version of NT until Intel's Merced (Itanium) processor came to market. MS's Alpha port of NT had a sort of pseudo-64-bit mode that was really just 32-bit with a couple of hack-type extensions.
Point 2: Even if they had a 64-bit Alpha port of NT, it wouldn't matter. Firstly because a lot of work has gone into NT since version 4. Secondly because the Alpha was a nice, clean, RISC-based CPU design. IA-64 is nowhere near as nice. It has far fewer registers and a very CISI-oriented instruction set. To put it in terms of a (somewhat unfair) metaphore: an AMC Pacer was a nice upgrade over a Ford Pinto, but it still didn't hold a candle to a Dodge Charger.
Basically, IA-64 is a completely different (read: more complex) take on 64-bit computing than the Alpha (or the PowerPC, or Itanium, for that matter). Not to mention the huge amount of testing that has to be done before MS can release an OS. Deer Hunter 5 has to run properly, you know.
If they called it a Public Beta, they wouldn't be able to claim they shipped XP/64 before Apple ships Tiger on Friday. The fact that they are throttling the availability by limiting it to OEMs and people with a pre-installed copy of XP Pro indicates (to me at least) that they really don't have a full production ramp-up yet.
Of course, nobody's going to remember this attempt at 3-day one-upsmanship in the long run, because Tiger's retail availability and the lifting of the NDA surrounding it is going to drown out the select few people waiting for their copies of XP/64 to be delivered. Not to mention the new eye-candy and search features Tiger has, while XP/64 is very much an under-the-hood upgrade.
Controller for an MRI scanner? Proprietary is OK. Microcode for an anti-lock braking system? Proprietary is OK.
Could you point to a source for RMS actually saying (or even implying this)? Taking the following quotations into into consideration, I find it hard to believe he would support any non-Free Software (as he and the FSF define the term) product.
"But we have to consider another, equally important question: will X solve the problem? Will X achieve the goal of giving users freedom? If X won't enable us to keep our freedom, then whether possible or not, it isn't useful."
"In my values, freedom is more important than "serving users" in a mere practical sense. Of course, in many cases we can achieve both, so we do not need to choose between them. But once in a while that isn't so."
And, of course, the Four Freedoms preclude any kind of closed system:
The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.[Emphasis mine.]
The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
I would be very interested to see RMS saying that there are acceptable uses for non-Free Software. Mainly in the hopes that the context would clear up what (at face value) would appear to be a contradiction in his position. Because, as I understand it, he is against any use of non-Free Software anywhere.
True. GUI apps are still limited to 32-bit. But, if you need more than 4GB of address space for your GUI app, you should probably be thinking of splitting it into a client/server setup anyway. And, of course, 64-bit operating mode means slower integer performance (which would be very noticeable in a GUI app). And yes, the Opteron and friends have slower integer performance clock-for-clock in 64-bit mode too. 64-bit mode is (at this point) only really useful when you have to deal with a huge amount of data. Most of the world doesn't actually need it yet, but we will eventually.
Also, Windows was 64-bit before Apple ever was -- remember Itanium?
You forgot about the Alpha port of NT... I think we can agree that Apple beat MS to the punch with a 64-bit consumer desktop OS.
Sun should have made Java an open specification like, err, EVERY OTHER FRIGGING LANGUAGE EVER MADE, instead of fighting idiotic lawsuits with MS (who were in the right for a change)
Java is an open specification. It's documented right here: http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jls/. The JVM and the Class Library are also openly specified. There is absolutely nothing stopping anyone from implementing their own Java system.
However, Sun owns the name Java. And if you want to use it for your system, you have to pass Sun's tests. Fair Enough, Linux is a trademarked name and I'm pretty sure there'd be at least a couple lawsuits if Microsoft started selling Windows under the name Linux XP.
Microsoft created their own JVM & Class Library (fair enough), and then added a bunch of non-standard additions while calling it a standard JVM & Class Library. That was against the rules governing the name Java.
Sun sued Microsoft because they broke the rules, and in doing so, broke the promise that everything with the name Java will be fully compatible. That promise is why Sun holds on to the name Java, and is pretty much the same reason Torvalds owns the Linux trademark.
Hiding the mouse pointer completely is usually a pretty stupid idea. It's quicker for the user to move the pointer out of the way than it is to find a hidden pointer when they need to use the mouse again...
Reacquiring the pointer after it's been hidden is actually quite easy: either you have some idea of where you left it, or you just move it around quickly to spot it.
Having to move it is is incredibly annoying. Because you leave the mouse, move to the keyboard, begin typing, realize you have to move the pointer, move back to the mouse, move the pointer, then go back to the keyboard and finish typing. Which is very disruptive.
Either way, the user has to do something about the pointer: either reacquire it or move it out of the way. It's better to make the user do this in-between tasks (i.e. between typing and mousing) than to interrupt a task with another one.
Given the they will no longer be promoting VB6 as a viable language, how would you feel if $SOMEONE were to declare your favorite language (perl, python, java, bash, C, C++) was no longer a viable language and that you would have to learn a completely new one.
Given that MS started promoting.NET back in 2000, and telling people that the 'new version of VB' would be based on it, that gives us a 5 year period between announcing the end of VB6 support and actually removing it. So, if someone where to tell me that 5 years from now there will be no more updates to Ruby? Well, I'd be unhappy, but I'd probably start re-reading Programming Python.
And, lets not forget that all the VB6 apps continue to work, and will do so for some time, and the VB6 IDE continues to work and will do so for some time. It's just a matter of needing to use a new system if you want to use new features. Which is unpleasant, but hardly surprising.
You could say the same about any Turing-complete language: C is just Pascal with a different syntax, or Prolog is just FORTRAN with a different syntax. A programming language is its syntax. The fact that VB.NET and C# have similar under-lying principles doesn't make them the same language. Much like moving from VB6 to VB.NET, moving from C/C++ to C# is not just a matter of a re-compilation. It generally requires a fair amount of rewriting.
And, let's not forget that all of your VB6 code can still be called by VB.NET code. So your existing base is not lost (VB6 apps aren't going to magically stop running).
Slashdot Mirror
Not here in Canada at least. It's actually easier to find [not particularly good] horror movies in the $1-3 range than the more family friendly dramas and such. (They usually go for about $5.) Of course, this could just be a reflection of the fact that I'll spend more time glancing through a pile of movies if I think I might find a Christopher Lee or Peter Cushing flick at the bottom of it, rather than some sappy '70s made-for-TV special.
And, now that I think of it, I picked up a DVD with the Lon Chaney Phantom of the Opera and Hunchback of Notre Dame silent films for about two bucks...
It's very easy, for suitably large ranges of near.
Yes and no. The default compiler is GCC4, however, the kernel and much of the OS (pretty much all of Darwin, in fact) are still compiled with GCC3 because they haven't completely cleared the codebase of GCC3-isms.
That said, remember that the submitter is talking about GCC4 on x86 platforms, and remember that Apple is putting a lot of work into making sure the PowerPC optimizations are as good as possible. Not to mention things like GCC4's auto-vectorization of code to take advantage of the Altivec unit (which has a more noticeable effect than MMXing x86 code).
It would be nice to see some test results for Apple's GCC versions 3 and 4.
The Italians were running n operation in American controlled territory without telling the Americans. That's rude, but overlookable.
The Italians then failed to yield to an American roadblock. That's not rude, that's stupid. American soldiers in Iraq have to contend with suicide car bombings (and the Italians know this).
While the Italian's motives were good. There implementation was, well, incompetent. And that's why there were dead Italians in this case.
(I'm Canadian, btw.)
Sun is in the middle of making it's chief operating system open source. They've just started an initiative to get as much of the company blogging as possible to make the company more transparent. They keep the Java name (that's right, just the name) so that they can guarantee anything called Java will actually be compatible. So there's very little chance of them taking Java away. And even if they did, the JVM, class libraries and whatnot all have publicly available specifications, so it's not like compatible replacements couldn't be produced.
And, let's not forget that the 'big cash' from MS was basically Microsoft paying Sun to stop running around calling it an anti-competitive monopolist.
Reality check: Sun's in the Open Source game for the long haul. Just because they don't worship at the altar of the GPL doesn't make them evil.
Change #4 to "Beg Sun to continue StarOffice & OpenOffice" and you've practically got Red Hat's basic business plan!
An interesting point with just two flaws:
1. Microsoft was one of (if not the first) to buy a license from SCO, prompting the 'MS is bank-rolling the SCO suit' comments way back when.
2. MS had a SysV-derived OS called Xenix that has since been folded back into OpenServer & UnixWare. So even without the previously mentioned licensing there is probably a sheild clause somwhere protecting MS.
Basically MS is legally and morally in the clear when it comes to SysV-derived code.
I suppose I wasn't emphatic enough, Radar access ain't gonna happen. Consider that even ADC Premier members under NDA don't get access to the logs for bugs they filed. All they get is the current status, no commentary.
Radar is held very close to Apple's chest. (I just got a mental image of Steve Jobs hugging Gary Burghoff from M*A*S*H.) No one Apple doesn't employ is going to see it any time soon.
Which is unfortunate, but it is the reality of the situation.
However, guess what Apple's internal SCS says... probably "fixed radar://xxxxxx" because that's all anyone inside Apple needs.
So access to Apple's SCS records wouldn't do any good because pretty much to only way to get access to Radar is to cash an Apple paycheck for a position that requires Radar access.
So Apple would have to employ someone to translate the internal SCS entries to something the KHTML team could use. Considering all they legally have to do is make the WebCore source available, that's pretty unlikely.
If you've got a DVD-Burner, you could always live on the edge of copyright compliance: make a copy of the install DVD and then send the original away in exchange for CDs.
Aside from that, there's really not much of an option, unfortunately. Theoretically you might be able to boot off a DVD-ROM in an external USB enclosure, but I don't want to think how long the install would take over USB 1.1...
Apple applied for a trademark on Tiger in the Computer Operating System context in 2003 ( http://tarr.uspto.gov/servlet/tarr?regser=serial&e ntry=78269988 ). So it's not like they just slapped the name on the box without due diligence. It's just that both Apple and the USPTO decided that an on-line retailer (of x86 machines and parts) was unlikely to be confused with a new version of Mac OS.
The bulk of TigerDirect's suit seems to be more about their ranking on Google dropping than losing their trademark, however.
In other words, the OS is trending from promising towards disappointing. The whole point of the big screen dog and pony show is to build excitement about the coming OS (yes, even at the developer shows). By bringing out a version that seems worse than the last one MS is killing enthusiasm for Longhorn.
The Alpha port of NT didn't actually run in true 64-bit mode. Compaq (not MS) was porting NT to run in native 64-bit mode on the Alpha, but they killed that project in 1999. MS had publicly stated at the time that they wouldn't be delivering a 64-bit version of NT until Intel's Merced (Itanium) processor came to market. MS's Alpha port of NT had a sort of pseudo-64-bit mode that was really just 32-bit with a couple of hack-type extensions.
Point 2: Even if they had a 64-bit Alpha port of NT, it wouldn't matter. Firstly because a lot of work has gone into NT since version 4. Secondly because the Alpha was a nice, clean, RISC-based CPU design. IA-64 is nowhere near as nice. It has far fewer registers and a very CISI-oriented instruction set. To put it in terms of a (somewhat unfair) metaphore: an AMC Pacer was a nice upgrade over a Ford Pinto, but it still didn't hold a candle to a Dodge Charger.
Basically, IA-64 is a completely different (read: more complex) take on 64-bit computing than the Alpha (or the PowerPC, or Itanium, for that matter). Not to mention the huge amount of testing that has to be done before MS can release an OS. Deer Hunter 5 has to run properly, you know.
If they called it a Public Beta, they wouldn't be able to claim they shipped XP/64 before Apple ships Tiger on Friday. The fact that they are throttling the availability by limiting it to OEMs and people with a pre-installed copy of XP Pro indicates (to me at least) that they really don't have a full production ramp-up yet.
Of course, nobody's going to remember this attempt at 3-day one-upsmanship in the long run, because Tiger's retail availability and the lifting of the NDA surrounding it is going to drown out the select few people waiting for their copies of XP/64 to be delivered. Not to mention the new eye-candy and search features Tiger has, while XP/64 is very much an under-the-hood upgrade.
I might be overly cynical, however...
Could you point to a source for RMS actually saying (or even implying this)? Taking the following quotations into into consideration, I find it hard to believe he would support any non-Free Software (as he and the FSF define the term) product.
(http://www.crystalspace3d.org/csdocs/rms.html)And, of course, the Four Freedoms preclude any kind of closed system:
I would be very interested to see RMS saying that there are acceptable uses for non-Free Software. Mainly in the hopes that the context would clear up what (at face value) would appear to be a contradiction in his position. Because, as I understand it, he is against any use of non-Free Software anywhere.
Tiger is not completely 64-bit.
True. GUI apps are still limited to 32-bit. But, if you need more than 4GB of address space for your GUI app, you should probably be thinking of splitting it into a client/server setup anyway. And, of course, 64-bit operating mode means slower integer performance (which would be very noticeable in a GUI app). And yes, the Opteron and friends have slower integer performance clock-for-clock in 64-bit mode too. 64-bit mode is (at this point) only really useful when you have to deal with a huge amount of data. Most of the world doesn't actually need it yet, but we will eventually.
Also, Windows was 64-bit before Apple ever was -- remember Itanium?
You forgot about the Alpha port of NT...
I think we can agree that Apple beat MS to the punch with a 64-bit consumer desktop OS.
Sun should have made Java an open specification like, err, EVERY OTHER FRIGGING LANGUAGE EVER MADE, instead of fighting idiotic lawsuits with MS (who were in the right for a change)
Java is an open specification. It's documented right here: http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jls/. The JVM and the Class Library are also openly specified. There is absolutely nothing stopping anyone from implementing their own Java system.
However, Sun owns the name Java. And if you want to use it for your system, you have to pass Sun's tests. Fair Enough, Linux is a trademarked name and I'm pretty sure there'd be at least a couple lawsuits if Microsoft started selling Windows under the name Linux XP.
Microsoft created their own JVM & Class Library (fair enough), and then added a bunch of non-standard additions while calling it a standard JVM & Class Library. That was against the rules governing the name Java.
Sun sued Microsoft because they broke the rules, and in doing so, broke the promise that everything with the name Java will be fully compatible. That promise is why Sun holds on to the name Java, and is pretty much the same reason Torvalds owns the Linux trademark.
Hiding the mouse pointer completely is usually a pretty stupid idea. It's quicker for the user to move the pointer out of the way than it is to find a hidden pointer when they need to use the mouse again...
Reacquiring the pointer after it's been hidden is actually quite easy: either you have some idea of where you left it, or you just move it around quickly to spot it.
Having to move it is is incredibly annoying. Because you leave the mouse, move to the keyboard, begin typing, realize you have to move the pointer, move back to the mouse, move the pointer, then go back to the keyboard and finish typing. Which is very disruptive.
Either way, the user has to do something about the pointer: either reacquire it or move it out of the way. It's better to make the user do this in-between tasks (i.e. between typing and mousing) than to interrupt a task with another one.
Consider this: How long has VB6 been around?
.NET back in 2000, and telling people that the 'new version of VB' would be based on it, that gives us a 5 year period between announcing the end of VB6 support and actually removing it. So, if someone where to tell me that 5 years from now there will be no more updates to Ruby? Well, I'd be unhappy, but I'd probably start re-reading Programming Python.
About 10 years.
Given the they will no longer be promoting VB6 as a viable language, how would you feel if $SOMEONE were to declare your favorite language (perl, python, java, bash, C, C++) was no longer a viable language and that you would have to learn a completely new one.
Given that MS started promoting
And, lets not forget that all the VB6 apps continue to work, and will do so for some time, and the VB6 IDE continues to work and will do so for some time. It's just a matter of needing to use a new system if you want to use new features. Which is unpleasant, but hardly surprising.
VB.Net is simply C# with a different syntax.
You could say the same about any Turing-complete language: C is just Pascal with a different syntax, or Prolog is just FORTRAN with a different syntax. A programming language is its syntax. The fact that VB.NET and C# have similar under-lying principles doesn't make them the same language. Much like moving from VB6 to VB.NET, moving from C/C++ to C# is not just a matter of a re-compilation. It generally requires a fair amount of rewriting.
And, let's not forget that all of your VB6 code can still be called by VB.NET code. So your existing base is not lost (VB6 apps aren't going to magically stop running).
New MS initiatives like .NET? Since when is .NET new? Last I heard, dotGNU had been created as a Free Software alternative to .NET.