I'll bet you that for every ten you pick at random from the list (not counting the kernel and tools required for an absolute bare-bones distribution), all ten will compile out of the box on an Intel-based system, but at least one of those ten will compile out of the box only on an intel-based system, and it's more likely to be two or three.
You are confusing operating systems and the programs that run on them. Seperate the two and your uneducated arguments may gain some weight. Linux (the kernel and all the tools required to develop and run applications on top of it) is amazingly cross-platform--look at how little platform-specific kernel code there is. Application XYZ may or may not be portable, but just because someone writes Intel-specific code doesn't somehow ruin the services it utilizes.
And I'll take you up on that bet. I have an Alpha sitting right here that I've never had a problem with; it runs all the software I've tried to compile. How many non-Intel machines do you own, and can you name an operating system component that isn't usable on it? I'm expecting a reply.
What is high-end? How much CPU power, I/O bandwidth, or storage constitutes "high-end?" Convince me you're not just repeating lines from a salesman pitching Company ABCXYZ's newest high-priced, buzzword-stuffed hardware supported only by their new proprietary operating system ZYXBCA version 54.23.1002.11, which lacks any objective "high-end" qualities other than full buzzword compliance with the hardware on which it runs.
Wow, seems like you have a lot to learn about companies who wish to protect their investments in research and development.
I guess so. Next thing you know, Compaq will endorse some rogue hackers' operating system with some funny name not nearly as marketable as their own ("Tru64 -- We left out the 'e' so you don't have to... we think?"). They might even tell their customers it's alright to use it!
It's a good thing we'll never see any such mutant operating system become popular, especially in the network, server, technical, and research fields where we work, because we might all get fired if we do something incompetent and don't have anyone else to blame! At least with an industry interested in protecting its valuable "intellectual property investment" above all else (very high indeed above the wishes of its annoying little customers), we're safely tucked away under our own warm fuzzy security blankets, and we'll sleep well knowing we'll never have to worry about the nuisances in life, like personal choice or freewill.
And, here is an example of why I think Compaq's proprietary libs and compiler is probably a good idea: When you get an rpm or tgz binary for your system, you will probably get the source code and maybe a binary - right? Then you will compile the source with gcc - right? Or maybe install the binary version.
Here's a clue for you: I don't do binaries. When I install an operating system, I first compile a fresh compiler for the architecture. I've recently been using EGCS 1.1.2 on the machines I use now; ask anyone with an account on the Intels, Alphas, or SPARCs. I download a source code package for a program I want to use, and I compile it. I install it. I don't do binaries except for the original installations of distributions, and OFTEN I retrieve the source package of a specific utility to bring it around to what I want it to do.
Now, what is so different about taking the same source code and compiling with a proprietary library and compiler?
I can't compile the compiler. I don't have immediate access to the latest releases. I can't fix bugs in them. I can't freely redistribute them so that I have a similar build environment on all my machines. I have yet another Makefile battle with cross-architecture development projects and native compiler flags. I get to battle vendor tools, often broken (make, yacc, bin utils, etc.). I waste more time learning another system to do something not as well as the tools I already use, and they actually want to CHARGE me for the experience!
Would you care to explain how one can win a contest by not even showing up? How is nothing twice as fast as GCC? Talk about battling for vapor.
Grow up.
It's nice to see you're capable of forming pointed, logical arguments.
Source is nice. We'd all (well, most of us) prefer it if the source for Digital's cc was made free, but that fact that it isn't is entirely unrelated to the fact that it produces much better code than GNU cc (and variants thereof).
You are correct in that its proprietary nature is unrelated to its performance. However, I don't see how this gives your argument any credence. I don't want proprietary software; it's a pain in the ass, and there's no way to fix it. Is this where you tell me I don't need source because the compiler is perfect; it has no flaws, no bugs, and not a single error? Microsoft sells that kind of software too.
This is actually a *good* thing. As long as the source code is free it doesn't really matter
Huh? How can this be a good thing at all? The source is not free; I can't redistribute it. I can't fix it if I find even the tiniest little annoying bug. I'm still considering buying an Alpha, but it won't be through Compaq, unless I can buy the hardware unattached to this software I'll never use. I won't support a proprietary compiler and set of libraries when I can use fundmentally better ones without isolating myself from the world.
They changed the numbers to be much larger and clearer (sans-serif, bold font), to be more easily readable to those with poor eyesight. They also used some more special, glittery ink, and new watermarking designs and interwoven metallic strips to stop counterfeit operations.
Actually, if I'm not mistaken, RMS founded the FSF for the sole purpose of making money. People wanted Emacs, but didn't have FTP access, so he sold them tapes for $150.
The FSF is a non-profit organization; it can't "make money." He founded it to distribute software, good free software, and the money he took paid for the media and the labor to copy, test, and mail the tapes.
they're just jealous becasue they didn't think of it first.
The more I think about this, the more I think you're right. Had Tim O'Reilly invented a license much like the GPL, just as useful, infectious, and widely-accepted, and it sold books, we'd hear monthly how great it is for the entire world.
Tim O'Reilly and company don't care about your freedom to use software. Tim O'Reilly and company don't care about software at all, any more than it sells books. They deal largely in proprietary information--books you can't share with friends, and have little interest in writing about anything that doesn't rake in cash.
When you bought a machine, you paid for MS DOS, PERIOD. I can't recall a single major US vendor who bundled DR DOS with their boxes.
GoldStar sold PC 386 clones with DR-DOS; I had one.
I've seen parts of the source for MS DOS and DR DOS, and a LOT of the machine code for both. TRUST ME... MS DOS is a total kludge, whereas DR DOS was written by assembly aces who knew what they were doing.
I'm not sure I trust a man who shouts so much when he types. DR-DOS was a far superior product compared to Microsoft's operating systems, that's clear. And you could even buy clear, concise documentation for it.
besides DR DOS, MS decided to deliberately try to compete with FREE memory management add on's to DOS 5.0 with products like 386^MAX and QEMM. It was a market space MS never competed in and essentially just killed these utilities.
And DR-DOS, as of version 5, included both extended memory management utilities and a cooperative, protected-mode task switcher (ala DesqView) for applications. One could run Windows 3.1, protected mode, as a task, and then switch back out to DOS and run other things (as many as you could fit in RAM--it would even page these out if you needed it). Novell DOS 7, the result of Novell's extensions of the DR-DOS code base after company acquisition, added pre-emptive multi-tasking if I remember correctly.
Linux was written by a single man? That man was "Linus Torvald?" The FSF preaches that all software should be "Open Source?" What a waste of electrons.
It's a perfectly logical reply to someone who wants to make illogical decisions for other peoples' children. You have no right to tell another person, adult or child, what he or she has the "right" to view. Since when do you issue peoples' rights? If you have that power, so do I, and by my power, I revoke your right to life, and order you dead by tomorrow by your own hand. Do you still feel so empowered?
Also, it's my understanding that the only functionality that will be disabled is renderfarming and texture libraries.
Render farming sounds like something only someone with 20 machines would need, but that's not quite true. I have an SMP machine with 2 Pentium II processors. Blender, however, isn't threaded, nor is the renderer seperate from the front-end. For this reason, if I want to render either a frame inside Blender, I'm held to a single CPU. Render jobs take about twice as long as they could.
There are two alternatives I see here, but since I don't have any Blender code I can only speculate on the difficulty of implementing each. The first is the hard way, and that involves tweaking the renderer to use either threads or fork off new renderers to handle chunks of the same frame (even/odd scanlines, maybe something BSPed). This is hard, and Ton has stated that a big overhaul of the engine would be required to do this.
The second, and easiest (almost trivial) solution is to let the front end fork off another renderer to handle every Nth frame. This is almost the way I do it now (I use a shell script to run Blender in render-only mode on sequential frames, keeping two resident at any time), but I have no integration with the modeling environment.
Blender has a "Render Daemon" button which seems to do nothing in the latest release, but I sure wish it did.
I've used blender; it's nice software. It's got a very powerful set of features, and an interface you've gotta learn to like, but it's good software.
I bought the manual for a single reason: I hoped it would supply Ton the cash it would take to let him free Blender, and convince him there's money to be made in the business he appeared to be endorsing (selling manuals or support, freeing the software). Maybe I was just optimistic, but this was seriously the route NaN _appeared_ to be heading.
It appears he'd rather remain proprietary and punish his users. An Alpha version of Blender was promised so long ago, and I have read that it does now exist, but I've lost the actual interest to download. It took too long to release, it was done by a single guy (as is most of this work), and it's now just another piece of proprietary software I don't care to try to coax to run somewhere not "standard". More binaries I can't fix bugs in, and believe me, there were painful bugs in previous releases (for example, the popup menus would lose their fonts, and I'd have to kill Blender to read anything again).
Mail me when I can share the software with friends, not my wallet with strangers.
What's your problem? I use a G100, 8 MB, AGP, in 1280x1024 @ 16bpp all day long at work, and it's really fast and I haven't had a single problem with it. Make sure you're running the very latest XFree86 X servers (I think I'm using 3.3.3.1), and it will even set the/proc/mtrr values for write-combining at the linear framebuffer base address (if your kernel supports MTRR features).
Is that what you consider a "recompile?" Perhaps you're berating older versions of the kernel. Would you serve a million hits off SunOS 3? Is it relevant?
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And I'll take you up on that bet. I have an Alpha sitting right here that I've never had a problem with; it runs all the software I've tried to compile. How many non-Intel machines do you own, and can you name an operating system component that isn't usable on it? I'm expecting a reply.
It's a good thing we'll never see any such mutant operating system become popular, especially in the network, server, technical, and research fields where we work, because we might all get fired if we do something incompetent and don't have anyone else to blame! At least with an industry interested in protecting its valuable "intellectual property investment" above all else (very high indeed above the wishes of its annoying little customers), we're safely tucked away under our own warm fuzzy security blankets, and we'll sleep well knowing we'll never have to worry about the nuisances in life, like personal choice or freewill.
They changed the numbers to be much larger and clearer (sans-serif, bold font), to be more easily readable to those with poor eyesight. They also used some more special, glittery ink, and new watermarking designs and interwoven metallic strips to stop counterfeit operations.
Tim O'Reilly and company don't care about your freedom to use software. Tim O'Reilly and company don't care about software at all, any more than it sells books. They deal largely in proprietary information--books you can't share with friends, and have little interest in writing about anything that doesn't rake in cash.
You misspelled gullible.
Free software works.
I can't access their CGI script on the page, and I've configured xmcd to use cddbp://freecddb.freecddb.org:888, but requests just time out.
Perhaps that's why he can't get them to deliver.
Linux was written by a single man? That man was "Linus Torvald?" The FSF preaches that all software should be "Open Source?" What a waste of electrons.
Or, if you have a decent Voodoo card (like the ones Canopus Corp. _used_ to make), hook a TV to the S-Video or Composite output.
It's a perfectly logical reply to someone who wants to make illogical decisions for other peoples' children. You have no right to tell another person, adult or child, what he or she has the "right" to view. Since when do you issue peoples' rights? If you have that power, so do I, and by my power, I revoke your right to life, and order you dead by tomorrow by your own hand. Do you still feel so empowered?
Render farming sounds like something only someone with 20 machines would need, but that's not quite true. I have an SMP machine with 2 Pentium II processors. Blender, however, isn't threaded, nor is the renderer seperate from the front-end. For this reason, if I want to render either a frame inside Blender, I'm held to a single CPU. Render jobs take about twice as long as they could.
There are two alternatives I see here, but since I don't have any Blender code I can only speculate on the difficulty of implementing each. The first is the hard way, and that involves tweaking the renderer to use either threads or fork off new renderers to handle chunks of the same frame (even/odd scanlines, maybe something BSPed). This is hard, and Ton has stated that a big overhaul of the engine would be required to do this.
The second, and easiest (almost trivial) solution is to let the front end fork off another renderer to handle every Nth frame. This is almost the way I do it now (I use a shell script to run Blender in render-only mode on sequential frames, keeping two resident at any time), but I have no integration with the modeling environment.
Blender has a "Render Daemon" button which seems to do nothing in the latest release, but I sure wish it did.
I've used blender; it's nice software. It's got a very powerful set of features, and an interface you've gotta learn to like, but it's good software.
I bought the manual for a single reason: I hoped it would supply Ton the cash it would take to let him free Blender, and convince him there's money to be made in the business he appeared to be endorsing (selling manuals or support, freeing the software). Maybe I was just optimistic, but this was seriously the route NaN _appeared_ to be heading.
It appears he'd rather remain proprietary and punish his users. An Alpha version of Blender was promised so long ago, and I have read that it does now exist, but I've lost the actual interest to download. It took too long to release, it was done by a single guy (as is most of this work), and it's now just another piece of proprietary software I don't care to try to coax to run somewhere not "standard". More binaries I can't fix bugs in, and believe me, there were painful bugs in previous releases (for example, the popup menus would lose their fonts, and I'd have to kill Blender to read anything again).
Mail me when I can share the software with friends, not my wallet with strangers.
What's your problem? I use a G100, 8 MB, AGP, in 1280x1024 @ 16bpp all day long at work, and it's really fast and I haven't had a single problem with it. Make sure you're running the very latest XFree86 X servers (I think I'm using 3.3.3.1), and it will even set the /proc/mtrr values for write-combining at the linear framebuffer base address (if your kernel supports MTRR features).
A quick run of limit shows, and sets, per user, the maximum number of file handles one can have open.
/proc/sys/fs
root@dogbert [~] cd
root@dogbert [fs] cat inode-max
8196
root@dogbert [fs] echo 10240 > inode-max
root@dogbert [fs] cat inode-max
10240
root@dogbert [fs]
Is that what you consider a "recompile?" Perhaps you're berating older versions of the kernel. Would you serve a million hits off SunOS 3? Is it relevant?