I haven't seen TPM yet. I will probably wait until most of the hype dies down (a few weeks?) because I am not so excited by it that I have to see it right away.
I was originally very excited until I saw the second trailer. I noticed that it looked like things were getting a little too cutesy, and most of the posts in this forum seem to confirm that.
The opposite would be THX1138, which I rented last weekend and saw for the first time. I would recommend it to anyone who liked the original Star Wars. While it doesn't have very many special effects, it does have alot of the Lucas science fiction feel, although not in the space adventure vein of Star Wars. And it has absolutely no cutesy crap like TPM seems to have.
I love the futuristic-yet-familiar feel of the original Star Wars; THX1138 is kind of like that. I think that Lucas should first write a great story replete with his interesting and believable futuristic visions, make the screen play really solid, then add the special effects afterwards. He should write a screenplay like it was 1977 and then use 1999 special effects to make it look amazing.
It seems like what he did instead was write a screenplay with the full knowledge that he can use (and abuse and overuse) modern special effects rather than concentrating on making a solid and compelling story.
That is once again kind of the opposite of THX1138, where the story was the solid part and the special effects were pretty run-of-the-mill.
Re:Pinnacle of Arrogance
on
GNU Inside?
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· Score: 2
I don't think RMS ever said that "It's a GNU system with a Linux kernel until HURD comes out." I think that was a facetious reference that they made up in the article to illustrate the way that they perceive Stallman's attitudes about Linux.
Even if source code is speech (which I kinda doubt but I haven't formed any definitive opinions yet), how does it relate to export laws?
A document describing top-secret military plans is speech too, but I'm not allowed to give it to a foreign party (and probably not allowed to pass it around within the U.S. too). So how is source code, given that it is free speech, any different from this?
BTW, this is not to say that I am for export restrictions on encryption software. Far from it. I am totally opposed to these laws and I am even registered as an "arms dealer" on that page that lets you ftp encryption software to a source outside the US and then be listed as a known arms dealer, in protest of the laws.
BUT, I think that ruling that source code is free speech and therefore restricting its export is a violation of the 1st amendment is not a good way to go about repealing these laws. The result is good, but the means are completely backwards.
I don't think Cyrix is going to survive in the x86 market. Everyone who is trying to compete with Intel is doing so by losing money. The only company making money in the x86 market is Intel. Companies like Cyrix cannot survive in this environment.
I remember hearing a year or two ago about Cyrix's "Jalepeno" core, but after a while I came to realize that it just isn't going to happen. Cyrix is too far behind now to catch up. I've been wondering what they have been doing for the past 18 months when they have introduced no new designs.
I put a Cyrix PR200 into a computer I built for my sister almost two years ago. It is still going strong and still meeting all of her family's modest needs. At the time, it was far and away the best value in the x86 market. Now I think AMD has surpassed Cyrix in bang:buck ratio. You can get a K6-2 350 for about the same price as a MII-333, and the AMD chip will beat the Cyrix chip in every way.
This didn't stop me from putting a Cyrix PR300 (overclocked to PR333, although I suspect that Cyrix is selling the exact same chip as 300 and 333 just to try to differentiate the "top end" of their product line a little bit) into a computer that I built for my next-door neighbor for use at his business. That level of performance will be more than enough for the simple real estate management package he needs to run, and combined with a super-cheap built-in audio & video socket 7 motherboard, I was able to keep the price of the computer very, very low (sub-$450).
I guess that if Cyrix goes away I will miss them, because their chips have always done very well for me. I just don't think that they're keeping up with the market at all. And they're at the lowest of the low end, where it's nearly impossible to make a decent profit.
I agree. If I were going to set up a new Linux site like this, I'd have done my own research and put up as much as I could find so that the site wasn't empty at first.
People are much more likely to send you information if they see that you've already done some work and that the site is going somewhere. Who wants to send info to a site that hasn't even bothered to do the first bit of research? It doesn't inspire confidence in the future of the site.
But I guess it's easy to set up a blank site and advertise for people to fill it with content, which is why so many sites start up this way...
My friend works at TivO, I got a demo of it at a New Year's Eve party last year (Dec 31 '98), it was super cool.
And it's a Linux box. No kidding. I hope I am not giving away trade secrets or anything but it is essentially a Linux box (PPC architecture, I believe) with a big honking SCSI drive for storing the feed and proprietary video encoding and decoding libraries. Plus UI, scheduling, etc etc.
My friend worked on the filesystem (it uses a custom filesystem that is compressed and formatted in such a way to make streaming digital video feeds very fast); they chose Linux partly because the available source made hacking your own filesystem possible. And no, there are no GPL violations because the filesystem is a self-contained kernel module.
Seems kind of stupid to rename it from egcs to gcc3.
They should go with either straight old gcc or leave it as egcs. What's the point of introducing yet another name for a GNU compiler? Either it's gcc or it isn't. If it isn't, then keep it egcs. If it's the new GNU compiler, then call it gcc. What could the possible advantage be to introducing yet another compiler name?
We ordered one last week. I doubt it will have 6.0 as it was probably already put together and shipped already, although we haven't gotten it yet.
I am not sure if I would want 6.0 though as I have heard rumors that the 2.2 kernel is not as stable as 2.0, and while I admit that those are just rumors and probably unfounded, this machine is going to be our corporate file server so it needs to be as rock solid as possible.
My feelings about Dell hardware are mixed; we've had problems upgrading the memory in them because they have used some really weird memory configurations, and they overcharge for some surprisingly low-quality hardware (the Montego sound cards in some of our Dell workstations come to mind) but then again they don't seem to break, ever...
That's what I use. And I *always* limit my lines to 80 columns, which may inflate my line count a little bit. Also I tend to comment fairly liberally and use whitespace abundantly when it helps to clarify code. Some of my coworkers write lines 160+ characters long (!!!) and they don't comment at all. So my 50+ Kloc is a somewhat inflated compared to them.
However, I feel that neat, readable, well organized, commented code is implicitly more valuable so while my whitespace:line ratio is higher, so is my value:line...
At work, approx 50,000 lines At home (personal projects) approx 15,000 lines
The 50,000 lines were Java, the 15,000 C and C++
I wish the totals were reversed, but unfortunately I have to code what other people want me to code so that I can feed myself and then code what I want to code on my time off...
I used to think Linus was humble and I respected that. It's a great thing to do something great and still be humble about it.
It's quite the opposite to do a great thing (albeit with the help of thousands of others) and in the end use it as a platform to insult others and minimize their accomplishments.
I have to say, RMS may have some radical ideas, and he may support them pretty strongly, but I can't remember the last time I heard of him calling someone else stupid or minimizing their accomplishments.
If there is one thing I learned from that article, it's that Linus is not nearly as humble as I thought he was.
He seems to want to make a point of pissing on everyone else ("microkernels suck and the people who made them are stupid, everything from GNU except GCC is lame, etc") for some reason. What an ego.
Unless you're writing your own toolkit, in which case you will need raw X knowledge.
X is a beautiful thing. The API is sometimes a little clumsy but they cover just about everything. I have on many, many occasions run into some difficulty that I realized X had already solved, in a way that I didn't expect but turned out to be quite clever.
They thought of everything when they designed X. Really.
If you're sophisticated, I'd recommend the O'Reilly books. They are so thorough it is unreal. Compare that to Windoze programming books which think that if they tell you how to program the most simple of applications, they have done their job. I don't know how many times I have wished for a book as good as the X series from O'Reilly for the Windoze platform.
But if you're new to graphics programming (and even if you're not) you may find the O'Reilly X books to be a little terse. It takes a few readings to really understand everything. But it's absolutely top-notch once you get it.
Kinda like Unix.
BTW, I agree about Motif. I think it was the worst thing to happen to Unix, ever. I think it did more to harm Unix as a platform than anything else that ever occurred during the 30+ years that Unix has been in existence.
It's not possible to buy a Pentium MMX dual socket 7 motherboard and then later upgrade it to P-II. P-II is slot 1 which will not plug into a socket 7 board.
Therefore I wouldn't worry if the dual Pentium MMX dual MB supported bus speeds greater than the Pentium MMX supports.
I had the misfortune of doing some development on an HP-UX workstation for a couple of months using HP's standard debugger (forget what it was called - adb? adx?). That thing sucked rocks. gdb rules and for those who develop under HP-UX, I am sure this is welcome news.
Just curious... I always thought that selling at a loss to drive a competitor out of the market was a monopolistic practice and, in the context of antitrust law, illegal. Isn't it?
I've always wondered how AMD or Intel (or any company that loses money quarter after quarter because they were selling at a loss in order to eliminate competition) could escape antitrust action... I know that Intel is the target of an antitrust suit but do these issues facter into it?
Baloney. X is awesome. It does have its problems, but a "complete rewrite" is not in order. I assume you mean a "complete rewrite" of the X protocol definition since a "complete rewrite" of any particular server or Xlib implementation really doesn't mean anything.
X is proven technology that has been around for 15 years. I believe that the only people who are clamoring for things like a "complete rewrite" (and those who constantly bitch about X for one reason or another) are those who don't really understand it well enough to appreciate it.
Samba at work. P-II 350, 64 Megs RAM, 18 gig 40-Mbps SCSI. It is faster to copy from a local hard drive to the Samba server than to another partition on the same drive on the local machine.
It's wicked fast, super reliable, and decently easy to administrate. Couldn't ask for anything more, really.
The NT users can't tell the difference between the Linux Samba box and the NT server it replaced, except it's alot faster now...
Your comments are quite valid but let me lend some advice to anyone considering buying a parallel-port version of any peripheral...
DON'T DO IT.
The parallel port SUCKS, especially for high-speed transfers like these drives provide.
The best you can get is like 2 megabit (NOT megaBYTE) and at that speed your machine becomes completely unusable as 100% of your CPU gets diverted to handling parallel port interrupts...
It's really not worth buying a parallel port versions of one of these drives, if you ask me...
Can anyone with experience comment on how much faster these $15,000 Compaq Alpha machines are than, say, a $1000 P-II 450 with a 3D accelerator?
I'm honestly curious, because the prices are really high but who knows, maybe the performance (video, CPU, IO, disk) makes up for it?
Also I love the idea of owning a non-Intel Linux box but I've become lazy and am too used to simply installing binary RPMs for 386, and I imagine there are alot fewer RPMs for Alpha. Also I imagine that alot of programs out there used on Linux don't work on the Alpha... but, having no experience with this, I could easily be wrong...
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I haven't seen TPM yet. I will probably wait until most of the hype dies down (a few weeks?) because I am not so excited by it that I have to see it right away.
I was originally very excited until I saw the second trailer. I noticed that it looked like things were getting a little too cutesy, and most of the posts in this forum seem to confirm that.
The opposite would be THX1138, which I rented last weekend and saw for the first time. I would recommend it to anyone who liked the original Star Wars. While it doesn't have very many special effects, it does have alot of the Lucas science fiction feel, although not in the space adventure vein of Star Wars. And it has absolutely no cutesy crap like TPM seems to have.
I love the futuristic-yet-familiar feel of the original Star Wars; THX1138 is kind of like that. I think that Lucas should first write a great story replete with his interesting and believable futuristic visions, make the screen play really solid, then add the special effects afterwards. He should write a screenplay like it was 1977 and then use 1999 special effects to make it look amazing.
It seems like what he did instead was write a screenplay with the full knowledge that he can use (and abuse and overuse) modern special effects rather than concentrating on making a solid and compelling story.
That is once again kind of the opposite of THX1138, where the story was the solid part and the special effects were pretty run-of-the-mill.
I don't think RMS ever said that "It's a GNU system with a Linux kernel until HURD comes out." I think that was a facetious reference that they made up in the article to illustrate the way that they perceive Stallman's attitudes about Linux.
Even if source code is speech (which I kinda doubt but I haven't formed any definitive opinions yet), how does it relate to export laws?
A document describing top-secret military plans is speech too, but I'm not allowed to give it to a foreign party (and probably not allowed to pass it around within the U.S. too). So how is source code, given that it is free speech, any different from this?
BTW, this is not to say that I am for export restrictions on encryption software. Far from it. I am totally opposed to these laws and I am even registered as an "arms dealer" on that page that lets you ftp encryption software to a source outside the US and then be listed as a known arms dealer, in protest of the laws.
BUT, I think that ruling that source code is free speech and therefore restricting its export is a violation of the 1st amendment is not a good way to go about repealing these laws. The result is good, but the means are completely backwards.
I don't think Cyrix is going to survive in the x86 market. Everyone who is trying to compete with Intel is doing so by losing money. The only company making money in the x86 market is Intel. Companies like Cyrix cannot survive in this environment.
I remember hearing a year or two ago about Cyrix's "Jalepeno" core, but after a while I came to realize that it just isn't going to happen. Cyrix is too far behind now to catch up. I've been wondering what they have been doing for the past 18 months when they have introduced no new designs.
I put a Cyrix PR200 into a computer I built for my sister almost two years ago. It is still going strong and still meeting all of her family's modest needs. At the time, it was far and away the best value in the x86 market. Now I think AMD has surpassed Cyrix in bang:buck ratio. You can get a K6-2 350 for about the same price as a MII-333, and the AMD chip will beat the Cyrix chip in every way.
This didn't stop me from putting a Cyrix PR300 (overclocked to PR333, although I suspect that Cyrix is selling the exact same chip as 300 and 333 just to try to differentiate the "top end" of their product line a little bit) into a computer that I built for my next-door neighbor for use at his business. That level of performance will be more than enough for the simple real estate management package he needs to run, and combined with a super-cheap built-in audio & video socket 7 motherboard, I was able to keep the price of the computer very, very low (sub-$450).
I guess that if Cyrix goes away I will miss them, because their chips have always done very well for me. I just don't think that they're keeping up with the market at all. And they're at the lowest of the low end, where it's nearly impossible to make a decent profit.
I agree. If I were going to set up a new Linux site like this, I'd have done my own research and put up as much as I could find so that the site wasn't empty at first.
...
People are much more likely to send you information if they see that you've already done some work and that the site is going somewhere. Who wants to send info to a site that hasn't even bothered to do the first bit of research? It doesn't inspire confidence in the future of the site.
But I guess it's easy to set up a blank site and advertise for people to fill it with content, which is why so many sites start up this way
My friend works at TivO, I got a demo of it at a New Year's Eve party last year (Dec 31 '98), it was super cool.
And it's a Linux box. No kidding. I hope I am not giving away trade secrets or anything but it is essentially a Linux box (PPC architecture, I believe) with a big honking SCSI drive for storing the feed and proprietary video encoding and decoding libraries. Plus UI, scheduling, etc etc.
My friend worked on the filesystem (it uses a custom filesystem that is compressed and formatted in such a way to make streaming digital video feeds very fast); they chose Linux partly because the available source made hacking your own filesystem possible. And no, there are no GPL violations because the filesystem is a self-contained kernel module.
Those are two different questions.
The answer to the first is, very good.
The answer to the second is, pretty good.
Seems kind of stupid to rename it from egcs to gcc3.
They should go with either straight old gcc or leave it as egcs. What's the point of introducing yet another name for a GNU compiler? Either it's gcc or it isn't. If it isn't, then keep it egcs. If it's the new GNU compiler, then call it gcc. What could the possible advantage be to introducing yet another compiler name?
We ordered one last week. I doubt it will have 6.0 as it was probably already put together and shipped already, although we haven't gotten it yet.
...
I am not sure if I would want 6.0 though as I have heard rumors that the 2.2 kernel is not as stable as 2.0, and while I admit that those are just rumors and probably unfounded, this machine is going to be our corporate file server so it needs to be as rock solid as possible.
My feelings about Dell hardware are mixed; we've had problems upgrading the memory in them because they have used some really weird memory configurations, and they overcharge for some surprisingly low-quality hardware (the Montego sound cards in some of our Dell workstations come to mind) but then again they don't seem to break, ever
Sorry, K&R is the One True Style, and it uses:
...
if (...) {
...
}
That's what I use. And I *always* limit my lines to 80 columns, which may inflate my line count a little bit. Also I tend to comment fairly liberally and use whitespace abundantly when it helps to clarify code. Some of my coworkers write lines 160+ characters long (!!!) and they don't comment at all. So my 50+ Kloc is a somewhat inflated compared to them.
However, I feel that neat, readable, well organized, commented code is implicitly more valuable so while my whitespace:line ratio is higher, so is my value:line
At work, approx 50,000 lines
...
At home (personal projects) approx 15,000 lines
The 50,000 lines were Java, the 15,000 C and C++
I wish the totals were reversed, but unfortunately I have to code what other people want me to code so that I can feed myself and then code what I want to code on my time off
Except that in the cases where they are equal, it would be horrendously inefficient ...
I agree wholeheartedly.
I used to think Linus was humble and I respected that. It's a great thing to do something great and still be humble about it.
It's quite the opposite to do a great thing (albeit with the help of thousands of others) and in the end use it as a platform to insult others and minimize their accomplishments.
I have to say, RMS may have some radical ideas, and he may support them pretty strongly, but I can't remember the last time I heard of him calling someone else stupid or minimizing their accomplishments.
Oh my god what bullshit.
If there is one thing I learned from that article, it's that Linus is not nearly as humble as I thought he was.
He seems to want to make a point of pissing on everyone else ("microkernels suck and the people who made them are stupid, everything from GNU except GCC is lame, etc") for some reason. What an ego.
OK, maybe not *everything*, but close to it.
...
And it's possible to do the things you mentioned with diligent programming. It may not be built into X, but it's *possible*.
If your WM gets swapped out you've got more to worry about than X
Sorry, but have you ever actually written Motif code or used Motif apps?
It's garbage. Plain and simple.
Not to nitpick, but O'Reilly's X books are older than 5 years ... I think first publishing was in like '87 or so ...
...
But, the books are certainly up-to-date, because X hasn't changed hardly at all since the last revision of the books, in '90-something
Unless you're writing your own toolkit, in which case you will need raw X knowledge.
X is a beautiful thing. The API is sometimes a little clumsy but they cover just about everything. I have on many, many occasions run into some difficulty that I realized X had already solved, in a way that I didn't expect but turned out to be quite clever.
They thought of everything when they designed X. Really.
If you're sophisticated, I'd recommend the O'Reilly books. They are so thorough it is unreal. Compare that to Windoze programming books which think that if they tell you how to program the most simple of applications, they have done their job. I don't know how many times I have wished for a book as good as the X series from O'Reilly for the Windoze platform.
But if you're new to graphics programming (and even if you're not) you may find the O'Reilly X books to be a little terse. It takes a few readings to really understand everything. But it's absolutely top-notch once you get it.
Kinda like Unix.
BTW, I agree about Motif. I think it was the worst thing to happen to Unix, ever. I think it did more to harm Unix as a platform than anything else that ever occurred during the 30+ years that Unix has been in existence.
It's not possible to buy a Pentium MMX dual socket 7 motherboard and then later upgrade it to P-II. P-II is slot 1 which will not plug into a socket 7 board.
Therefore I wouldn't worry if the dual Pentium MMX dual MB supported bus speeds greater than the Pentium MMX supports.
I had the misfortune of doing some development on an HP-UX workstation for a couple of months using HP's standard debugger (forget what it was called - adb? adx?). That thing sucked rocks. gdb rules and for those who develop under HP-UX, I am sure this is welcome news.
Just curious ... I always thought that selling at a loss to drive a competitor out of the market was a monopolistic practice and, in the context of antitrust law, illegal. Isn't it?
... I know that Intel is the target of an antitrust suit but do these issues facter into it?
I've always wondered how AMD or Intel (or any company that loses money quarter after quarter because they were selling at a loss in order to eliminate competition) could escape antitrust action
Baloney. X is awesome. It does have its problems, but a "complete rewrite" is not in order. I assume you mean a "complete rewrite" of the X protocol definition since a "complete rewrite" of any particular server or Xlib implementation really doesn't mean anything.
X is proven technology that has been around for 15 years. I believe that the only people who are clamoring for things like a "complete rewrite" (and those who constantly bitch about X for one reason or another) are those who don't really understand it well enough to appreciate it.
Samba at work. P-II 350, 64 Megs RAM, 18 gig 40-Mbps SCSI. It is faster to copy from a local hard drive to the Samba server than to another partition on the same drive on the local machine.
...
It's wicked fast, super reliable, and decently easy to administrate. Couldn't ask for anything more, really.
The NT users can't tell the difference between the Linux Samba box and the NT server it replaced, except it's alot faster now
Your comments are quite valid but let me lend some advice to anyone considering buying a parallel-port version of any peripheral ...
...
...
DON'T DO IT.
The parallel port SUCKS, especially for high-speed transfers like these drives provide.
The best you can get is like 2 megabit (NOT megaBYTE) and at that speed your machine becomes completely unusable as 100% of your CPU gets diverted to handling parallel port interrupts
It's really not worth buying a parallel port versions of one of these drives, if you ask me
Can anyone with experience comment on how much faster these $15,000 Compaq Alpha machines are than, say, a $1000 P-II 450 with a 3D accelerator?
... but, having no experience with this, I could easily be wrong ...
I'm honestly curious, because the prices are really high but who knows, maybe the performance (video, CPU, IO, disk) makes up for it?
Also I love the idea of owning a non-Intel Linux box but I've become lazy and am too used to simply installing binary RPMs for 386, and I imagine there are alot fewer RPMs for Alpha. Also I imagine that alot of programs out there used on Linux don't work on the Alpha