Actually the OS X kernel is about half as fast in lmbench (UNIX benchmark) as Linux 2.4. The OS X kernel is really antiquated. Much of it is 4.4BSD and Mach code. The GUI is modern, but the guts are ancient.
Why would I want my AmigaFS modules in cache? Or anything that touches something slow like a hard-drive? The whole point of cache is so the code that gets used the most stays in cache. If certain kernel code gets used often enough, it'd stay in the cache.
There is a difference between going around to other guys and saying "Oh, he's hot and I love those shoes" and internally acknowledging that another man is good-looking. The original poster was doing the latter.
I don't get the metrosexual stuff either. A lot of the stuff that they are co-opting (being well groomed, well-dressed, etc) is what gentlemen are supposed to be anyway.
Oh bah. Its so weird how girls have no problem noticing that another girl is hot, but guys absolutely refuse to do the same. Look: it doesn't make you any less straight to acknowledge that Tom Cruise is really hot. I'm a straight guy, and I can almost say that with a straight face:)
Patents must be royalty free, not programs. Patents can be used to subvert the freedom of otherwise free code. That's why the patent clause is in there.
People use the GPL as a means to prevent the code from seeing proprietary use. This security is acquired by a decrease in freedom for other developers. --- The goal of the GPL is not to prevent code from seeing proprietory use. That's a means, not an end. The goal of the GPL is to ensure that users are always free to have access to the source code of their programs. The GPL restricts the freedoms of some (developers) to prepetuate freedom for everyone else.
When I use the term "GPL compatible" I do not mean it in the ideological sense. I mean it in the technical sense --- there is a list of licenses on the FSF website called "GPL compatible licenses." Code under these licenses can be incorporated into GPL'ed code and linked against GPL'ed code.
The Mars rover isn't doing fluid dynamics calculations to determine the aerodynamic characteristics of particular wing shapes. I'm not saying you can't do a lot with 16-20MHz, I'm saying that scientists and engineers can't do a lot with 16-20MHz.
The BSD license, and the MIT license are both GPL compatible. In fact, most licenses more liberal than the GPL are compatible with it. Being GPL compatible simply means that you can include that code in GPL'ed code. For developers, having the X license be GPL-compatible is a good thing.
Of course, this issue brings up some schisms between the GPL and BSD communities. However, I find the attitude of the BSD proponents on this subject somewhat strange. By choosing the BSD license, you are giving people the right to do whatever they want with their work. This means that company could take your code and include it in a proprietory app, without releasing improvements back to the community. By their decision to license under BSD, developers indicate that they are okay with this. Why, then, should any of them get mad that other developers would include BSD code in GPL'ed programs? Is GPL worse than propietory???
Hah. 3D OpenGL screensavers don't push graphics hardware at all. The open DRI drivers for the Radeon 9000 are far inferior to the ATI Linux binary drivers for the same card, which are inferior still to the ATI Windows binary drivers for the card.
And yes, I am arguing that its okay to push freedom aside for some jobs. First, I don't equate software freedom with personal freedom. I make compromises with personal freedom (the US Constitution is one giant compromise of personal freedom, as is the very concept of government) and I'm willing to make even more compromises with software freedom. But that's beside the point. Using NVIDIA's binary drivers doesn't diminish my software freedom. If they became a hinderance to me, I could switch to something else in the amount of time it took me to buy a new card. I'm not tied to them like I am to a proprietory platform.
I'm a big fan of free software. I use a free platform, and have on numerous occasions changed to code to suit my purposes. Hell, I'm working on something for KDE right now! However, I don't think that all software has to be free. I don't believe that Free Software is about forcing other developers to believe what you believe, but rather, building a free platform yourself. We should welcome donations of Free programs, but not demand them. Most of all, we shouldn't restrict ourselves and our use of our computers just because there is no Free Software that does what we need it to do.
space --- What kind of space? Have you seen the die size of an Alpha EV7???
energy --- The same processor that takes up 150W at 1.25GHz?
coding efficient --- RISC architectures generally take up more space. They take up 4 bytes per instruction, while x86 averages about 3.2 bytes per instruction. They also take more instructions overall, because the instructions do less.
RISC set? --- There is no such thing as "RISC vs CISC" anymore. The "CISC" chips are all actually cores even more minimal than the average RISC chip with an x86 instruction decoder in front.
So what did you do with all you had was a 286 @ 16 MHz to use? --- When all they had was a 286 @ 16MHz, they didn't do large-scale simulations of molecules on the computer, or design airplanes mostly on the computer. 64-bit machines already exist, and the software to take advantage of them already exists --- people want to be able to do the things they do on current 64-bit machines on commodity hardware.
That's not the point. Nobody wants to pay top dollar today to get what they paid top dollar for a couple of years ago.
And apparently, you do need NVIDIA's OpenGL implementation. Certainly, none of the cards for which there are register-level specs have drivers as good as the native ones!
Its not just that. Not all drivers are commodities. Its not like a network card driver where most things are the same with different register locations. An OpenGL driver is an *entire* OpenGL implementation. Its everything from the interrupt handler in the kernel to the shared library loaded by the application. From the minute you make a glFoo() call, you're in the OpenGL driver. There is a lot of code in there that is entirely hardware independent. There is code to optimize display lists, optimize drawing order, etc. ATI could use that code very easily, but its really not hardware-dependent.
I bet if the drivers were free (or at LEAST open source) --- Like all those other high-quality free OpenGL drivers? There is not a single decent free OpenGL driver out there. NVIDIAs at least support 100% of the features of the card, and are as fast as the Windows version. They are also very stable, though they have problems with certain configurations. I've used them on three different machines on numerous different Linux distros, and they've worked flawlessly on all of them. They are certainly stable enough that SGI ships them with their Linux workstations, and that ILM uses them for their graphics workstations!
So does ATI but ATI apparently works with the free software community. --- No they don't. With ATI, Linux users are second-class citizens. They don't offer open specs for their latest cards --- only binary drivers. And those are much lower in quality than their Windows ones. NVIDIA consistently has binary drivers that are as good as their Windows ones, and delivers them within weeks of their Windows releases. Couple that with the fact that an OSS release of their drivers would mean giving a competitive advantage to ATI (OpenGL drivers aren't just simple register-bangers like a network driver, they contain a great deal of high-level code implementing the OpenGL API), and I can support their decision to keep their drivers closed.
I won't miss them if they take their non-free software away. --- You wouldn't, but anyone who actually uses 3D on Linux would. There are no good free OpenGL drivers. Not a single one! They are all half the speed, and missing many of the features. NVIDIA's drivers are the *only* good OpenGL drivers available for Linux, and losing them would be disasterous.
History, you see, is on my side. The farm jobs went away, and down the road, we were better for it. The textiles jobs went away, and down the road, we were better for it. This is just more of the same thing that has been happening for *centuries*.
Qt isn't terribly language-specific. There are excellent bindings to other languages, especially Python. Its written in C++, but pretty much any language that can handle the C calling convention can call Qt.
Free trade relies on the idea of comparative advantage, that one place is inherently better at doing something than another. --- That's not what comparative advantage means. Its not a matter of doing something better, but doing more for less. Even if Indian programmers are less productive than American ones by significant amount, if they are cheap enough, they have a comparative advantage.
then it really is a race to the bottom to see who can pay the least for the samee service. --- Yes, generally, capitalism is about paying the least for an acceptable amount of service. But its not a race to the bottom. When people get things for cheaper, everyone benefits. You might lose your job, but that is offset by the fact that other people save money on software.
There's no advantage to hiring US programmers, so it goes to India! --- Most likely.
We can't get visas to work in India, and even if we could --- You can get visas to work in India. All you need is a letter from an Indian company. This is FUD some Slashdot troll cooked up.
it would be for 1/6th of what a programmer would make here! --- Duh!
So don't give me bull about capitalism. This isn't a debate about capitalism v. socialism. --- Protectionism = Socialism. Its like welfare, except the people who are the targets aren't the disabled/invalid/mentally unstable/etc, but the ones who can't compete.
American programmer is losing. --- Has it occured to you that the "American programmer" might be going the way of the "American textile worker" or the "American farmer?" When these jobs went away, we called it progress. And you want us to believe that programming jobs are somehow different?
This isn't about *pure* capitalism. Free trade is something well-supported by the majority of economists, even socialist ones in Europe. It has nothing to do with people giving something up. Its a simple cost/benefit analysis done by companies. If the loss in benefit is offset by the reduced cost, its a net win. Now, companies may not be judging the costs and benefits properly, but the free market will act to equillibriate that naturally.
If one pen is cheaper than another, but does the job well-enough, why buy the more expensive one? Face it, we are all just factors of production. We have been this way ever since we decided that we wanted the US to be a capitalist country. It is capitalism that has gotten us this far, and now people like you are getting squimish about it???
Plus, why do you think companies owe you jobs? Its not like the taxes you pay are going to them. And nationality has no importance here --- a dollar is a dollar whether it comes into your pocket from an Indian or an American. What makes you so special that we must protect your job, while loosing other American jobs in the process?
Protectionism simply doesn't work. One study showed that protectionist laws in the textiles industry manged to save about 70,000 jobs, but cost the economy $200,000 for each job saved. What makes *you* so special that the rest of us should pay $200,000 out of our pockets to protect your job? I've got a cheaper idea --- we can just mail you the money instead! I'm sure that if you reply with PayPal account information, all us Slashdotters will be willing to pony into your "I can't compete" fund...
Actually, since the Revolutionary War Americans have been quite well off. When DeTocqueville came to America, he was amazed at how well-off the average person was. America became a superpower after WW-II, but barring the Great Depression, they have always been relatively wealthy.
Economists actually have a theory about this. Protectionist policies will remain popular, despite the fact that they hurt the economy in the long run, because people will stupidly keep voting for them.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually the OS X kernel is about half as fast in lmbench (UNIX benchmark) as Linux 2.4. The OS X kernel is really antiquated. Much of it is 4.4BSD and Mach code. The GUI is modern, but the guts are ancient.
Why would I want my AmigaFS modules in cache? Or anything that touches something slow like a hard-drive? The whole point of cache is so the code that gets used the most stays in cache. If certain kernel code gets used often enough, it'd stay in the cache.
There is a difference between going around to other guys and saying "Oh, he's hot and I love those shoes" and internally acknowledging that another man is good-looking. The original poster was doing the latter.
I don't get the metrosexual stuff either. A lot of the stuff that they are co-opting (being well groomed, well-dressed, etc) is what gentlemen are supposed to be anyway.
Oh bah. Its so weird how girls have no problem noticing that another girl is hot, but guys absolutely refuse to do the same. Look: it doesn't make you any less straight to acknowledge that Tom Cruise is really hot. I'm a straight guy, and I can almost say that with a straight face :)
KDE 1.x was very fast. It was KDE 2.x that was really slow. Today's KDE 3.2 is very fast in all respects except startup speed.
Patents must be royalty free, not programs. Patents can be used to subvert the freedom of otherwise free code. That's why the patent clause is in there.
People use the GPL as a means to prevent the code from seeing proprietary use. This security is acquired by a decrease in freedom for other developers.
---
The goal of the GPL is not to prevent code from seeing proprietory use. That's a means, not an end. The goal of the GPL is to ensure that users are always free to have access to the source code of their programs. The GPL restricts the freedoms of some (developers) to prepetuate freedom for everyone else.
The TJ quote is really completely inapplicable.
When I use the term "GPL compatible" I do not mean it in the ideological sense. I mean it in the technical sense --- there is a list of licenses on the FSF website called "GPL compatible licenses." Code under these licenses can be incorporated into GPL'ed code and linked against GPL'ed code.
The Mars rover isn't doing fluid dynamics calculations to determine the aerodynamic characteristics of particular wing shapes. I'm not saying you can't do a lot with 16-20MHz, I'm saying that scientists and engineers can't do a lot with 16-20MHz.
The BSD license, and the MIT license are both GPL compatible. In fact, most licenses more liberal than the GPL are compatible with it. Being GPL compatible simply means that you can include that code in GPL'ed code. For developers, having the X license be GPL-compatible is a good thing.
Of course, this issue brings up some schisms between the GPL and BSD communities. However, I find the attitude of the BSD proponents on this subject somewhat strange. By choosing the BSD license, you are giving people the right to do whatever they want with their work. This means that company could take your code and include it in a proprietory app, without releasing improvements back to the community. By their decision to license under BSD, developers indicate that they are okay with this. Why, then, should any of them get mad that other developers would include BSD code in GPL'ed programs? Is GPL worse than propietory???
Will-do. It didn't occur to me to use HTML to do that. Thanks for the tip :)
Hah. 3D OpenGL screensavers don't push graphics hardware at all. The open DRI drivers for the Radeon 9000 are far inferior to the ATI Linux binary drivers for the same card, which are inferior still to the ATI Windows binary drivers for the card.
And yes, I am arguing that its okay to push freedom aside for some jobs. First, I don't equate software freedom with personal freedom. I make compromises with personal freedom (the US Constitution is one giant compromise of personal freedom, as is the very concept of government) and I'm willing to make even more compromises with software freedom. But that's beside the point. Using NVIDIA's binary drivers doesn't diminish my software freedom. If they became a hinderance to me, I could switch to something else in the amount of time it took me to buy a new card. I'm not tied to them like I am to a proprietory platform.
I'm a big fan of free software. I use a free platform, and have on numerous occasions changed to code to suit my purposes. Hell, I'm working on something for KDE right now! However, I don't think that all software has to be free. I don't believe that Free Software is about forcing other developers to believe what you believe, but rather, building a free platform yourself. We should welcome donations of Free programs, but not demand them. Most of all, we shouldn't restrict ourselves and our use of our computers just because there is no Free Software that does what we need it to do.
space
---
What kind of space? Have you seen the die size of an Alpha EV7???
energy
---
The same processor that takes up 150W at 1.25GHz?
coding efficient
---
RISC architectures generally take up more space. They take up 4 bytes per instruction, while x86 averages about 3.2 bytes per instruction. They also take more instructions overall, because the instructions do less.
RISC set?
---
There is no such thing as "RISC vs CISC" anymore. The "CISC" chips are all actually cores even more minimal than the average RISC chip with an x86 instruction decoder in front.
So what did you do with all you had was a 286 @ 16 MHz to use?
---
When all they had was a 286 @ 16MHz, they didn't do large-scale simulations of molecules on the computer, or design airplanes mostly on the computer. 64-bit machines already exist, and the software to take advantage of them already exists --- people want to be able to do the things they do on current 64-bit machines on commodity hardware.
That's not the point. Nobody wants to pay top dollar today to get what they paid top dollar for a couple of years ago.
And apparently, you do need NVIDIA's OpenGL implementation. Certainly, none of the cards for which there are register-level specs have drivers as good as the native ones!
Its not just that. Not all drivers are commodities. Its not like a network card driver where most things are the same with different register locations. An OpenGL driver is an *entire* OpenGL implementation. Its everything from the interrupt handler in the kernel to the shared library loaded by the application. From the minute you make a glFoo() call, you're in the OpenGL driver. There is a lot of code in there that is entirely hardware independent. There is code to optimize display lists, optimize drawing order, etc. ATI could use that code very easily, but its really not hardware-dependent.
I bet if the drivers were free (or at LEAST open source)
---
Like all those other high-quality free OpenGL drivers? There is not a single decent free OpenGL driver out there. NVIDIAs at least support 100% of the features of the card, and are as fast as the Windows version. They are also very stable, though they have problems with certain configurations. I've used them on three different machines on numerous different Linux distros, and they've worked flawlessly on all of them. They are certainly stable enough that SGI ships them with their Linux workstations, and that ILM uses them for their graphics workstations!
So does ATI but ATI apparently works with the free software community.
---
No they don't. With ATI, Linux users are second-class citizens. They don't offer open specs for their latest cards --- only binary drivers. And those are much lower in quality than their Windows ones. NVIDIA consistently has binary drivers that are as good as their Windows ones, and delivers them within weeks of their Windows releases. Couple that with the fact that an OSS release of their drivers would mean giving a competitive advantage to ATI (OpenGL drivers aren't just simple register-bangers like a network driver, they contain a great deal of high-level code implementing the OpenGL API), and I can support their decision to keep their drivers closed.
I won't miss them if they take their non-free software away.
---
You wouldn't, but anyone who actually uses 3D on Linux would. There are no good free OpenGL drivers. Not a single one! They are all half the speed, and missing many of the features. NVIDIA's drivers are the *only* good OpenGL drivers available for Linux, and losing them would be disasterous.
You've obviously never used SCONS.
History, you see, is on my side. The farm jobs went away, and down the road, we were better for it. The textiles jobs went away, and down the road, we were better for it. This is just more of the same thing that has been happening for *centuries*.
Qt isn't terribly language-specific. There are excellent bindings to other languages, especially Python. Its written in C++, but pretty much any language that can handle the C calling convention can call Qt.
Free trade relies on the idea of comparative advantage, that one place is inherently better at doing something than another.
---
That's not what comparative advantage means. Its not a matter of doing something better, but doing more for less. Even if Indian programmers are less productive than American ones by significant amount, if they are cheap enough, they have a comparative advantage.
then it really is a race to the bottom to see who can pay the least for the samee service.
---
Yes, generally, capitalism is about paying the least for an acceptable amount of service. But its not a race to the bottom. When people get things for cheaper, everyone benefits. You might lose your job, but that is offset by the fact that other people save money on software.
There's no advantage to hiring US programmers, so it goes to India!
---
Most likely.
We can't get visas to work in India, and even if we could
---
You can get visas to work in India. All you need is a letter from an Indian company. This is FUD some Slashdot troll cooked up.
it would be for 1/6th of what a programmer would make here!
---
Duh!
So don't give me bull about capitalism. This isn't a debate about capitalism v. socialism.
---
Protectionism = Socialism. Its like welfare, except the people who are the targets aren't the disabled/invalid/mentally unstable/etc, but the ones who can't compete.
American programmer is losing.
---
Has it occured to you that the "American programmer" might be going the way of the "American textile worker" or the "American farmer?" When these jobs went away, we called it progress. And you want us to believe that programming jobs are somehow different?
This isn't about *pure* capitalism. Free trade is something well-supported by the majority of economists, even socialist ones in Europe. It has nothing to do with people giving something up. Its a simple cost/benefit analysis done by companies. If the loss in benefit is offset by the reduced cost, its a net win. Now, companies may not be judging the costs and benefits properly, but the free market will act to equillibriate that naturally.
If one pen is cheaper than another, but does the job well-enough, why buy the more expensive one? Face it, we are all just factors of production. We have been this way ever since we decided that we wanted the US to be a capitalist country. It is capitalism that has gotten us this far, and now people like you are getting squimish about it???
Plus, why do you think companies owe you jobs? Its not like the taxes you pay are going to them. And nationality has no importance here --- a dollar is a dollar whether it comes into your pocket from an Indian or an American. What makes you so special that we must protect your job, while loosing other American jobs in the process?
Protectionism simply doesn't work. One study showed that protectionist laws in the textiles industry manged to save about 70,000 jobs, but cost the economy $200,000 for each job saved. What makes *you* so special that the rest of us should pay $200,000 out of our pockets to protect your job? I've got a cheaper idea --- we can just mail you the money instead! I'm sure that if you reply with PayPal account information, all us Slashdotters will be willing to pony into your "I can't compete" fund...
Actually, since the Revolutionary War Americans have been quite well off. When DeTocqueville came to America, he was amazed at how well-off the average person was. America became a superpower after WW-II, but barring the Great Depression, they have always been relatively wealthy.
Economists actually have a theory about this. Protectionist policies will remain popular, despite the fact that they hurt the economy in the long run, because people will stupidly keep voting for them.