Right, but just try putting together a Linux system with AltiVec aware code tools. You have two choices: you can either get Yellow Dog Linux, a horrible, nasty Red Hat knock-off that barely installs on most hardware, or you can install some other PPC distribution and patch GCC yourself. Oh, but you'll need GCC 2.95.2. If you want patches for 2.95.3, you'll need to get them off some obscure Japanese web site I can't recall right now. Forget about 2.95.4. Also you can join the AltiVec mailing list at AltiVec.org, but thier archive is useless and infuriating, so you'll also need to just ask the same questions on the list over and over again.
My point is that Motorola and Apple have really dropped the ball with respect to AltiVec and developer relations.
Yeah so far this year I have found a working Apple PowerBook and two working laser printers in trash heaps near my home. Sick! I clean them up and either keep them if I don't have one already (like the first laser printer) or give them to public schools.
I didn't see any mention of the compilers in their press release and web pages. Does anyone know if YDL 2.0 includes AltiVec-aware compilers and tools?
Please understand that Konqueror wouldn't get me so steamed up if they would take a rest from trumpeting their standards (non-)compliance. On their own web site they boldly claim CSS1 compliance "except for 3 properties", a claim which is strictly false. In only fifteen minutes of testing, I was able to find numerous CSS1 bugs in Konqueror 2.1.1. Their claim to support "about 60%" of CSS2 is even more bizarre: released versions of Konqueror barely scratch the surface of CSS2 compliance, especially with regard to table layouts, backgrounds, horizontal and vertical formatting, and floats. Konqueror developers should give the rhetoric a rest and honestly assess the quality of their product.
If 2.2 will cover more standards correctly than 2.1, I'm all for it. Every browser that implements a standard correctly is another group of users that I can rely on reaching by writing code to standards. Anyway I am not worried about Konqueror users. They are the kind of people who can and do change the browser they do in a heartbeat. I really start to worry when a buggy browser (NN 4.x, or IE) become entrenched in markets that never upgrade.
I think you are wrong about your IE comment. There is a large and growing group of web authors who see IE and other non-compliant browsers as obstacles. The members of this group are the people driving the next generation of web content and applications. When the others see what this group is doing with standards, they will start wondering "How can I make my site look like that and do those things?" The momentum is on the side of the standards. Soon enough we will see IE 6.0, with hopefully improved standard behavior. Millions of people will get it via Windows Update. AOL users will all get a next-generation browser as part of some future push upgrade. This will provide a sufficiently large group of users for standardize web authoring to be taken seriously.
You missed my point. I am not interested in developing Konqueror. I already have Galeon, a wonderful browser that I use everyday and help to develop. Further, I am not talking about poorly-coded websites. I'm talking about full-blown w3c code that exercises all the exciting technologies like CSS and DOM.
Konqueror will soon come to a roadblock. Their HTML layout code it uses takes shortcuts that prevent them from implementing interesting things like DOM access to CSS, DOM animation, and even HTML 4.0. Let's take a short tour, of test cases that have been developed by the W3C, and some for testing Mozilla:
Mozilla has a large set of tests that it fails, too, but it is much smaller than Konqueror's. As a web monkey today, supporting Konqueror is in the same league as supporting Netscape 4.7. If Konqueror ever becomes standards-compliant, then it will be useful, but until then it will be just another on a large pile of browsers that are getting left behind by new, innovative content.
Here's the thing: Konqueror and Opera both stink. The reason they have been developed quickly is that neither of them correctly implement HTTP, HTML, DOM, or CSS. Mozilla implements these things more correctly than Opera and Konqueror and consequently takes a development speed and runtime performance hit.
If anyone is really interested, I'll post a list of sites that Opera and Konqueror foul up that Mozilla get right. There are a lot of such sites. Browsers like Konqueror and Opera, that pay lip service to standards but don't implement them, are holding back the development of new techniques and technologies on the web.
I think there is a common misconception that the GPL restricts the use of software. The GPL doesn't actually restrict the end user fom doing anything. As an end user, I can download GPLed programs and link them with damn well whatever libraries I want, cut and paste them into other programs, or print them out and draw pictures on them.
The GPL only comes in to play when I wish to distribute software.
Thanks shel. Next time, you should include an ASCII Venn diagram.
My argument addresses a specific section of Mundie's argument, which I have quoted. It says that innovators are rewarded when their intellectual property is protected. My examples are of people who innovated but were open with their intellectual property.
What's the next generation of audio format going to be? DAD, DVD Audio, SACD? The uncertainty is giving me fits. I just built a DAC with 192KHz/24-bit capability, and a multitude of physical interfaces, but my source material is ALL still 44.1KHz/16-bit CD Audio. I'd love to by a new transport but I have no clue what the winner is going to be.
Re:Astroturfers now define slashdot content
on
Mundie Responds
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· Score: 4
I think the quality of the commentary is declining because all of the best commentators have moved along to other forums. It's been so long since I've seen a good Natalie Portman naked and petrified post. Equally infrequent today is the wonderful hot grits post. I haven't seen a penis bird or an ASCII-art rectum guy in ages. All your base are increasingly less likely to belong to us.
Where has all the great intellectual rhetoric of the past gone?
THe main problem with Mundie's argument is that there numerous counterexamples. Mundie:
Without intellectual property protection, neither innovation nor a healthy commercial software industry is sustainable. The last 50 years of public- and private-sector collaboration has demonstrated that when intellectual property rights are protected, innovators are rewarded for their efforts.
But actually, that isn't what the last 50 years have shown us. In exact opposition, the last 50 years have shown us that open systems are the one s that exhibit massive, uncontrolled growth and contribute the most surprising things to society. The "PC era" that Mundie invokes in this article was possible not because of IBM's lightning wit, but because Compaq and the rest pried IBMs intellectual property away to make PC clones. The Internet was the result of public sector research. HTTP, SMTP, DNS, POP, IMAP, SSL, ICP, HTML/SGML/XML, and every other enabling technology of the Internet was given away freely by its creator. The web was created, and given away. BIND, Sendmail, NCSA httpd, Apache, and free operating systems are examples of key technologies that enjoy wide, free distribution unconstrained by their licenses.
There is only one example of an underlying enabling technology that fell under strong intellectual property protection. RSA encryption was patented and required licensing until last year. This "protection" literally crippled encryption innovation for some time. People were forced to either invent their own encryption schemes that weren't covered by RSA's patents, license RSA's patents for large sums of money, or ignore their patents. If you have set up an Apache HTTPS server before this year, you know what a pain in the ass it was to do so legally in the United States. The intellectual property protection afforded to RSA was a huge blow that slowed the growth of encryption for years.
There are so many more examples of technology that was freely distributed to the benefit of society. The C and C++ languages upon which Windows is built are an example. Think of where Microsoft would be if they had to pay a recurring licensing fee for every C++ object they compiled. Consider also how damn hard it would be to debug a C++ program if the format of the object file were protected under intellectual property laws. Think of what Windows would be if the inventors of TCP/IP had refused to license the protocols to Microsoft. Windows would of course be worthless with TCP/IP networking. What would Windows 2000 be if LDAP and Kerberos had not been available to the developers? Microsoft is standing on the shoulders of a giant so big, that they don't even realize it.
Mundie is flat wrong in his argument: almost all of the software technology that we take for granted today was the direct result of research and development performed in the open and given away.
Captain Tacky forgot to mention that Nokia is doing this in partnership with CollabNet, a very cool company based on community development, which also used to operate sourcexchange.
Re:Good riddance to yet another bad business model
on
Eazel Come, Eazel Go?
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· Score: 2
Compiling GNOME takes about 90 minutes on hardware I bought six months ago, including Nautilus and Gnumeric. I'm not sure where this two days business came from. I think my Multia could compile GNOME in 2 days. You are also ignoring that you don't always have to compile from scratch. A major part of the compile time is gtk+ and gnome-libs, but these come out with relative infrequency.
Anyway it isn't as if you have to just look at your xterm while it compiles. Just run a compile script and get on with your life.
Yeah too bad the rest of the country doesn't realize that 99% of the electricity goes to air conditioning and stirring the water around in Beverley Hills swimming pools. These colo centers can't be using that much power, if they can run the whole place off one or, rarely, two deisel generators as backup.
One of the main reasons why these photos are of such high quality is simply the size of the exposed film. The photographer was using a 3"x3" sheet of film (glass actually) for each color. Compare with a modern color camera using 35mm, or the even smaller APS format film. Large format cameras have a huge quality advantage over 35mm cameras. You wouldn't want to use one for shooting an ice hockey game, but for lanscapes, portraits, surveys, and the like they are wonderful.
Programs written in Unicode?
on
Apocalypse 2
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· Score: 4
Larry says that the programs can be written in Unicode. Wow. If I am reading that properly, then this would be a valid Perl 6 program:
Hey, I'm trying to do my part. My computer averages 10W power consumption, which I believe to be on the left tail of the power consumption histogram. You're right about the energy: the US uses way too much energy, and it generates it in too-dirty ways. I'm all for nuclear fission, thermal solar, and wind. I abhor coal, oil, and natural gas generation. But, I don't currently have the billions of dollars, nor the political pull required to get that stuff changed. What I can do is advocate paperless reports.
I'd like to see the numbers on it, since you are interested. How much fuel is required to haul a tree to the paper mill? Produce the paper? Ship the paper to retail and the to the customer? Then what, is the above poster going to pay fedex to burn massive amounts of jet fuel to overnight the precious report somewhere?
Welcome to MY planet, jackass. The trees on my planet sink CO2, produce O2, provide habitat directly or indirectly for most known land animal species, hold the soil in place, and generally keep the ecosystem humming along. Chopping them up for reports about some business, which will have no lasting value for humanity, is not an appropriate use of trees.
Slashdot Mirror
My point is that Motorola and Apple have really dropped the ball with respect to AltiVec and developer relations.
Yeah so far this year I have found a working Apple PowerBook and two working laser printers in trash heaps near my home. Sick! I clean them up and either keep them if I don't have one already (like the first laser printer) or give them to public schools.
boot cd:\\yaboot
At the yaboot prompt I type:
debian video=ofonly
Has worked for me so far.
I didn't see any mention of the compilers in their press release and web pages. Does anyone know if YDL 2.0 includes AltiVec-aware compilers and tools?
Debian PPC is nice. Testing and unstable both work fine.
Whee. There are people doing 1080i HDTV on embedded PPC 7410s, without hardware colorspace conversion.
Please understand that Konqueror wouldn't get me so steamed up if they would take a rest from trumpeting their standards (non-)compliance. On their own web site they boldly claim CSS1 compliance "except for 3 properties", a claim which is strictly false. In only fifteen minutes of testing, I was able to find numerous CSS1 bugs in Konqueror 2.1.1. Their claim to support "about 60%" of CSS2 is even more bizarre: released versions of Konqueror barely scratch the surface of CSS2 compliance, especially with regard to table layouts, backgrounds, horizontal and vertical formatting, and floats. Konqueror developers should give the rhetoric a rest and honestly assess the quality of their product.
I think you are wrong about your IE comment. There is a large and growing group of web authors who see IE and other non-compliant browsers as obstacles. The members of this group are the people driving the next generation of web content and applications. When the others see what this group is doing with standards, they will start wondering "How can I make my site look like that and do those things?" The momentum is on the side of the standards. Soon enough we will see IE 6.0, with hopefully improved standard behavior. Millions of people will get it via Windows Update. AOL users will all get a next-generation browser as part of some future push upgrade. This will provide a sufficiently large group of users for standardize web authoring to be taken seriously.
Konqueror will soon come to a roadblock. Their HTML layout code it uses takes shortcuts that prevent them from implementing interesting things like DOM access to CSS, DOM animation, and even HTML 4.0. Let's take a short tour, of test cases that have been developed by the W3C, and some for testing Mozilla:
Prefer some real-world sites? How about a site for HTML writers who are sick and tired of broken browsers like Konqueror? Here's something totally stupid, but cool. How about another goofy test that Konqueror butchers?
Mozilla has a large set of tests that it fails, too, but it is much smaller than Konqueror's. As a web monkey today, supporting Konqueror is in the same league as supporting Netscape 4.7. If Konqueror ever becomes standards-compliant, then it will be useful, but until then it will be just another on a large pile of browsers that are getting left behind by new, innovative content.
If anyone is really interested, I'll post a list of sites that Opera and Konqueror foul up that Mozilla get right. There are a lot of such sites. Browsers like Konqueror and Opera, that pay lip service to standards but don't implement them, are holding back the development of new techniques and technologies on the web.
The GPL only comes in to play when I wish to distribute software.
My argument addresses a specific section of Mundie's argument, which I have quoted. It says that innovators are rewarded when their intellectual property is protected. My examples are of people who innovated but were open with their intellectual property.
What's the next generation of audio format going to be? DAD, DVD Audio, SACD? The uncertainty is giving me fits. I just built a DAC with 192KHz/24-bit capability, and a multitude of physical interfaces, but my source material is ALL still 44.1KHz/16-bit CD Audio. I'd love to by a new transport but I have no clue what the winner is going to be.
Where has all the great intellectual rhetoric of the past gone?
But actually, that isn't what the last 50 years have shown us. In exact opposition, the last 50 years have shown us that open systems are the one s that exhibit massive, uncontrolled growth and contribute the most surprising things to society. The "PC era" that Mundie invokes in this article was possible not because of IBM's lightning wit, but because Compaq and the rest pried IBMs intellectual property away to make PC clones. The Internet was the result of public sector research. HTTP, SMTP, DNS, POP, IMAP, SSL, ICP, HTML/SGML/XML, and every other enabling technology of the Internet was given away freely by its creator. The web was created, and given away. BIND, Sendmail, NCSA httpd, Apache, and free operating systems are examples of key technologies that enjoy wide, free distribution unconstrained by their licenses.
There is only one example of an underlying enabling technology that fell under strong intellectual property protection. RSA encryption was patented and required licensing until last year. This "protection" literally crippled encryption innovation for some time. People were forced to either invent their own encryption schemes that weren't covered by RSA's patents, license RSA's patents for large sums of money, or ignore their patents. If you have set up an Apache HTTPS server before this year, you know what a pain in the ass it was to do so legally in the United States. The intellectual property protection afforded to RSA was a huge blow that slowed the growth of encryption for years.
There are so many more examples of technology that was freely distributed to the benefit of society. The C and C++ languages upon which Windows is built are an example. Think of where Microsoft would be if they had to pay a recurring licensing fee for every C++ object they compiled. Consider also how damn hard it would be to debug a C++ program if the format of the object file were protected under intellectual property laws. Think of what Windows would be if the inventors of TCP/IP had refused to license the protocols to Microsoft. Windows would of course be worthless with TCP/IP networking. What would Windows 2000 be if LDAP and Kerberos had not been available to the developers? Microsoft is standing on the shoulders of a giant so big, that they don't even realize it.
Mundie is flat wrong in his argument: almost all of the software technology that we take for granted today was the direct result of research and development performed in the open and given away.
Captain Tacky forgot to mention that Nokia is doing this in partnership with CollabNet, a very cool company based on community development, which also used to operate sourcexchange.
Anyway it isn't as if you have to just look at your xterm while it compiles. Just run a compile script and get on with your life.
Slackware has a port to SPARC in their -current tree, which will freeze to 7.2 sometime this summer. They also have an working Alpha port.
BeOS advocates.
Yeah too bad the rest of the country doesn't realize that 99% of the electricity goes to air conditioning and stirring the water around in Beverley Hills swimming pools. These colo centers can't be using that much power, if they can run the whole place off one or, rarely, two deisel generators as backup.
Starmedia?
One of the main reasons why these photos are of such high quality is simply the size of the exposed film. The photographer was using a 3"x3" sheet of film (glass actually) for each color. Compare with a modern color camera using 35mm, or the even smaller APS format film. Large format cameras have a huge quality advantage over 35mm cameras. You wouldn't want to use one for shooting an ice hockey game, but for lanscapes, portraits, surveys, and the like they are wonderful.
my $¾ = 0.75;
I'd like to see the numbers on it, since you are interested. How much fuel is required to haul a tree to the paper mill? Produce the paper? Ship the paper to retail and the to the customer? Then what, is the above poster going to pay fedex to burn massive amounts of jet fuel to overnight the precious report somewhere?
This useless waste of energy has to stop. Check out today's SF Chronicle: Californians use 15 megawatts of power just to stir the water in their fucking swimming pools. WHAT THE FUCK ARE WE DOING WASTING SO MUCH ENERGY?!?!
Welcome to MY planet, jackass. The trees on my planet sink CO2, produce O2, provide habitat directly or indirectly for most known land animal species, hold the soil in place, and generally keep the ecosystem humming along. Chopping them up for reports about some business, which will have no lasting value for humanity, is not an appropriate use of trees.