Now then, lemme trot out my standard response to this claim, usually made by embittered former OS/2 users.
Microsoft does not control their own platform anymore. Their installed base is spread across 5+ Win32 implementations, including 95/95OSR2/98/98SE/NT351/NT4/2000. Office *has to* run on every single one of those, because many home and business customers don't upgrade their OS much if ever. This plays right into Wine's hands, since Office cannot use any new whizbang features on new MS OSes. They are being slowly strangled to death by their very own market share - it's a beautiful thing, and it goes along with ESR's arguments about DOJ being fun but unnecessary.
Macrovision's making a killing with their "SafeDisc" CD protection scheme, which is pretty much a bad sector check on top of an encryption scheme. Never mind that there's an automated program out there that undoes the encryption without checking the bad sectors first, companies are forking over billions for this.
The reason? The PC game software industry is dying. Powerful easy-to-use consoles are murdering PC software sales in every category except first-person shooters and real-time strategy, and that's only a matter of time. Publishers believe due to timing that it's because of the rise of CD-R drives, when it's actually because of Windows and the PC architecture, neither of which was designed to play games and both of which act strangely when forced to do so.
Ironically, the only thing SafeDisc prevents in real life is playing the games on Wine (the bad sector check hacks it's way into kernel mode on Windows), and once cracked (either by automated or more traditional means) that's not a problem either.
Actually, DVD Audio discs won't play on existing DVD Video players. DVD-A was slated to use a varient of CSS ("CSS-2") for copy protection, but DeCSS put the kibosh on that. DVD-Audio as now shipping uses a new and supposedly improved encryption scheme (but still nonstandard and closed, so it's probably crackable). Think RIAA's having a fit now that we can make perfect rips of 44.1k/16-bit CDs? Hah! That's nothing:)
Anyway, most DVD-Audio players coming out now are also DVD-Video (thank god), but older DVD-V (and computer DVD-ROM drives) won't be able to read DVD-A discs.
NVIDIA's drivers for XFree 4.0 are built off the same codebase as their Windows Detonators. Linux with those babies is ready right now for anything Carmack can toss out.
And what's wrong with WINE, anyway? Half-Life/Counterstrike in it's full OpenGL glory via WINE is quite fun, and you'd be hard pressed to make a native port run faster in any significant way.
2.95.2 is armed and dangerous with optimizations on. I've seen it completely remove reverse-counting for loops with substantial bodies (ie, for (i=7; i>0; i++) { guts_of_application(); } disappeared entirely from the generated code). And this is on x86, the supposedly most stable target.
If you change the "cc" symlink to point to "kgcc" instead of "gcc", the kernel builds fine on RH 7.
Having spent hours trying to find bugs in my code that turned out to be gcc 2.95.2 bugs I'm glad *something*'s being done about it. The 2.96 snapshot thus far is much better quality than 2.95.2, if a lot pickier on ANSI C++ violations (which is fine too).
This worked for me. I was getting frequent phone-spams from AT&T and MCI, and I told them both to add me to their "do-not-call" list. The MCI rep was actually bright enough to tell me "it may be up to 60 days before this goes into effect", but neither one have called me since I asked to be on their list (almost a year now).
the thought of extending x86 junk to 64-bits is just... chilling.
I thought so too at first, but read the documentation. In 64-bit mode, many of the x86's wackiest features and instructions go away. No more segments/selectors, and you get 8 new general purpose registers to play with (in addition to EAX and friends). It actually "looks and feels" more like 64-bit MIPS than x86. I think GCC oughta be able to crank out some nice code with 8 more registers to play with:)
Yes, but Microsoft's marketing for NT/2000 over the years has constantly told PHBs that they don't need expensive smart admins, only Unix/Linux does. And there are in fact PHBs that believe it - I worked for a company where management tried to set up and admin a NT file/print server themselves. They made it nearly 3 months before the whole thing imploded and we had to hire actual admins. At least with Linux nobody's (yet?) making that claim.
Doesn't matter what they are - the point remains that IE gets an unfair free ride on memory usage because most of it shows up as "System". 3rd party browsers don't get that advantage. Heck, explorer.exe (the desktop) even preloads all your plugins (Flash/Director, Real, Quicktime, etc) so *they* appear as "system" memory usage too.
It's amazing what you can discover about Windows running wine:)
M3 T00! It's working fine on several of my computers, with the exception of a AGP problem on my i815 machine (not Redhat's fault - the kernel driver stupidly doesn't function on an 815 when you don't use the on-board video). Rebuilding the kernel fixed that just fine.
I suspect the real reason this story exists is because Rob and co are known Debian bigots, but Slashdot conspiracy theories are so tiresome:)
Sega's by far the coolest game company when it comes to emulation - they've only shut down ROM sites and left news and emulators alone. Contrast with Sony and Nintendo, who claim the emulators themselves are illegal and have lawyers to try and prove it. Remember that when Sega found out about KGen, their reaction was to pay Steve Snake a buttload of money to make an enhanced Win9x version for their Sega Smash Packs on the PC. Contrast with Sony's reaction to bleem!/VGS, or Nintendo's reaction to UltraHLE and I think you'll realize Sega is actually very cool about emulation.
Beta 3's been quite stable for me. I've been quite angry about KDE not releasing RH RPMs for beta 4 or 5 - is this some kind of continued fallout over the GNOME Foundation brouhaha?
Because specific chipsets have specific DVD acceleration support, and it's usually not exposed by X (not X's fault, the companies in question want to avoid legal trouble with DVD-CCA so they won't document anything they don't have to).
Even accounting for the fact that I run it on Win98, I've never come across a DVD title using it that functions properly. Not only does it blindly assume and require that your desktop be 640x480, it crashes/hangs/bluescreens frequently. I can never get more than 3 or 4 questions into the quiz from the Matrix, and a lot of people I know can't get the software to load at all or detect their DVD-ROM drive.
Someone should reverse-engineer that and come up with a working alternative - that would have a market.
I've written low-level drawing code that had to work on 3 dozen video cards, so I know entirely too much about this. There are actually 3 flavors of "high color":
* 15 bit, no alpha channel, aka "555" color with 5 bits each of R, G, and B.
* 15 bit with alpha, aka "1555" with 1 alpha bit and 5 bits each of R, G, and B.
* 16 bit which (on PC hardware at least) is always "565" color, with 5 bits each for red and blue and 6 for green (because the human eye is more sensitive to variations in green).
You can of course treat 555 and 1555 the same in most cases. Older boards tended to be 555 format, while most newer designs are 565.
That's an awfully serious accusation to be levelling against the likes of Alan. Please list reliable sources, 'cuz this is the story of the year if you can prove it.
Given that Redhat funded development of the TUX webserver, which requires 2.4 for it's fundamental operation, I'm not gonna put much stock in it though...
Wall Street analysts would argue with that assessment. And even if Sourceforge went away tomorrow, I greatly doubt (m)any of the projects on it would be cancelled. Most of them had some form of that infrastructure before, and they can have it again.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll post one when I get home from work. Had I known I was gonna be Slashdotted I would've included one :)
Oh my Jesus, I've been Slashdotted. :-)
Now then, lemme trot out my standard response to this claim, usually made by embittered former OS/2 users.
Microsoft does not control their own platform anymore. Their installed base is spread across 5+ Win32 implementations, including 95/95OSR2/98/98SE/NT351/NT4/2000. Office *has to* run on every single one of those, because many home and business customers don't upgrade their OS much if ever. This plays right into Wine's hands, since Office cannot use any new whizbang features on new MS OSes. They are being slowly strangled to death by their very own market share - it's a beautiful thing, and it goes along with ESR's arguments about DOJ being fun but unnecessary.
Macrovision's making a killing with their "SafeDisc" CD protection scheme, which is pretty much a bad sector check on top of an encryption scheme. Never mind that there's an automated program out there that undoes the encryption without checking the bad sectors first, companies are forking over billions for this.
The reason? The PC game software industry is dying. Powerful easy-to-use consoles are murdering PC software sales in every category except first-person shooters and real-time strategy, and that's only a matter of time. Publishers believe due to timing that it's because of the rise of CD-R drives, when it's actually because of Windows and the PC architecture, neither of which was designed to play games and both of which act strangely when forced to do so.
Ironically, the only thing SafeDisc prevents in real life is playing the games on Wine (the bad sector check hacks it's way into kernel mode on Windows), and once cracked (either by automated or more traditional means) that's not a problem either.
Actually, DVD Audio discs won't play on existing DVD Video players. DVD-A was slated to use a varient of CSS ("CSS-2") for copy protection, but DeCSS put the kibosh on that. DVD-Audio as now shipping uses a new and supposedly improved encryption scheme (but still nonstandard and closed, so it's probably crackable). Think RIAA's having a fit now that we can make perfect rips of 44.1k/16-bit CDs? Hah! That's nothing :)
Anyway, most DVD-Audio players coming out now are also DVD-Video (thank god), but older DVD-V (and computer DVD-ROM drives) won't be able to read DVD-A discs.
Ahh yes, Slackware. For people who think Debian is too friendly ;-)
NVIDIA's drivers for XFree 4.0 are built off the same codebase as their Windows Detonators. Linux with those babies is ready right now for anything Carmack can toss out.
And what's wrong with WINE, anyway? Half-Life/Counterstrike in it's full OpenGL glory via WINE is quite fun, and you'd be hard pressed to make a native port run faster in any significant way.
2.95.2 is armed and dangerous with optimizations on. I've seen it completely remove reverse-counting for loops with substantial bodies (ie, for (i=7; i>0; i++) { guts_of_application(); } disappeared entirely from the generated code). And this is on x86, the supposedly most stable target.
If you change the "cc" symlink to point to "kgcc" instead of "gcc", the kernel builds fine on RH 7.
Having spent hours trying to find bugs in my code that turned out to be gcc 2.95.2 bugs I'm glad *something*'s being done about it. The 2.96 snapshot thus far is much better quality than 2.95.2, if a lot pickier on ANSI C++ violations (which is fine too).
This worked for me. I was getting frequent phone-spams from AT&T and MCI, and I told them both to add me to their "do-not-call" list. The MCI rep was actually bright enough to tell me "it may be up to 60 days before this goes into effect", but neither one have called me since I asked to be on their list (almost a year now).
the thought of extending x86 junk to 64-bits is just... chilling.
:)
I thought so too at first, but read the documentation. In 64-bit mode, many of the x86's wackiest features and instructions go away. No more segments/selectors, and you get 8 new general purpose registers to play with (in addition to EAX and friends). It actually "looks and feels" more like 64-bit MIPS than x86. I think GCC oughta be able to crank out some nice code with 8 more registers to play with
NT/2000 users : Stupid.
Yes, but Microsoft's marketing for NT/2000 over the years has constantly told PHBs that they don't need expensive smart admins, only Unix/Linux does. And there are in fact PHBs that believe it - I worked for a company where management tried to set up and admin a NT file/print server themselves. They made it nearly 3 months before the whole thing imploded and we had to hire actual admins. At least with Linux nobody's (yet?) making that claim.
Doesn't matter what they are - the point remains that IE gets an unfair free ride on memory usage because most of it shows up as "System". 3rd party browsers don't get that advantage. Heck, explorer.exe (the desktop) even preloads all your plugins (Flash/Director, Real, Quicktime, etc) so *they* appear as "system" memory usage too.
:)
It's amazing what you can discover about Windows running wine
Heck, it's about time such an easy pick for FuckedCompany came up. Anyone who's a regular /. reader NOT got :D:C:::::: (or whatever) on their hit list?
M3 T00! It's working fine on several of my computers, with the exception of a AGP problem on my i815 machine (not Redhat's fault - the kernel driver stupidly doesn't function on an 815 when you don't use the on-board video). Rebuilding the kernel fixed that just fine.
:)
I suspect the real reason this story exists is because Rob and co are known Debian bigots, but Slashdot conspiracy theories are so tiresome
Sega's by far the coolest game company when it comes to emulation - they've only shut down ROM sites and left news and emulators alone. Contrast with Sony and Nintendo, who claim the emulators themselves are illegal and have lawyers to try and prove it. Remember that when Sega found out about KGen, their reaction was to pay Steve Snake a buttload of money to make an enhanced Win9x version for their Sega Smash Packs on the PC. Contrast with Sony's reaction to bleem!/VGS, or Nintendo's reaction to UltraHLE and I think you'll realize Sega is actually very cool about emulation.
Umm, duh? The alternative, after all, is that said adults actually become good attentive parents. God (or whatever) forbid!
You forgot KDE, GNOME, Microsoft, Legos, RMS, Debian, and Star Wars. Hope this helps.
You misspelled "Space Channel 5". HTH.
"Up! Down! Left! Right! Shoot! Shoot! Shoot!"
Beta 3's been quite stable for me. I've been quite angry about KDE not releasing RH RPMs for beta 4 or 5 - is this some kind of continued fallout over the GNOME Foundation brouhaha?
Because specific chipsets have specific DVD acceleration support, and it's usually not exposed by X (not X's fault, the companies in question want to avoid legal trouble with DVD-CCA so they won't document anything they don't have to).
This site doesn't render in Netscape on any platform (haven't tried Mozilla) but works fine in IE.
Even accounting for the fact that I run it on Win98, I've never come across a DVD title using it that functions properly. Not only does it blindly assume and require that your desktop be 640x480, it crashes/hangs/bluescreens frequently. I can never get more than 3 or 4 questions into the quiz from the Matrix, and a lot of people I know can't get the software to load at all or detect their DVD-ROM drive.
Someone should reverse-engineer that and come up with a working alternative - that would have a market.
I've written low-level drawing code that had to work on 3 dozen video cards, so I know entirely too much about this. There are actually 3 flavors of "high color":
* 15 bit, no alpha channel, aka "555" color with 5 bits each of R, G, and B.
* 15 bit with alpha, aka "1555" with 1 alpha bit and 5 bits each of R, G, and B.
* 16 bit which (on PC hardware at least) is always "565" color, with 5 bits each for red and blue and 6 for green (because the human eye is more sensitive to variations in green).
You can of course treat 555 and 1555 the same in most cases. Older boards tended to be 555 format, while most newer designs are 565.
That's an awfully serious accusation to be levelling against the likes of Alan. Please list reliable sources, 'cuz this is the story of the year if you can prove it.
Given that Redhat funded development of the TUX webserver, which requires 2.4 for it's fundamental operation, I'm not gonna put much stock in it though...
Wall Street analysts would argue with that assessment. And even if Sourceforge went away tomorrow, I greatly doubt (m)any of the projects on it would be cancelled. Most of them had some form of that infrastructure before, and they can have it again.