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Jim Henderson <nos### [at] nospam com> wrote:
> Simply not true. Even in college back in the early 90's, most of the
> software that was installed on our Sun systems was precompiled binaries,
> not built from source.
Especially true since Unix and Unix software started as proprietary,
closed-source commercial systems. The open source mentality didn't prevail
until well into the 90's.
--
- Warp
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On Thu, 05 Mar 2009 14:24:18 -0500, Warp wrote:
> Jim Henderson <nos### [at] nospamcom> wrote:
>> Simply not true. Even in college back in the early 90's, most of the
>> software that was installed on our Sun systems was precompiled
>> binaries, not built from source.
>
> Especially true since Unix and Unix software started as proprietary,
> closed-source commercial systems. The open source mentality didn't
> prevail until well into the 90's.
Yes, generally right after the BSD court cases completed IIRC.
Jim
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>> "The Gentoo documentation was repeatedly labelled as the best online
>> documentation of any distribution."
>>
>> Wuh? o_O
>>
>> Looks like I'll have to recheck their website. Last time I looked, it
>> consisted only of a few dozen scrappy little wiki pages where it takes
>> an age to clean anything useful. (All the pages assume you already know
>> almost everything.)
>
> Wiki? Are you sure you didn't go to gentoo-wiki.com?
Nope. I typed "www.gentoo.org" and followed the links for
"documentation". (Don't bother looking today - it's probably long since
changed. I tried it a few years back.)
The documentation seemed like a brain-dump from a person who knew what
they were talking about but writing too fast. Maybe it's improved since
then...
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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>> They dropped Alpha now, right?
>
> Probably. Hard to say if they still support it internally and just
> aren't selling it.
I know they supported it for Windows NT, but I thought it was never that
popular?
>> But they have IA-32, AMD64 and IA64, AFAIK...
>
> Don't forget all the "Windows CE" if you're going to count all of MS's
> operating systems they call "Windows." :-) And someone got Win98
> running on a Nokia phone, altho I don't know what chip it is.
Is Windows CE even remotely related to the other Windows editions?
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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Orchid XP v8 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> > Don't forget all the "Windows CE" if you're going to count all of MS's
> > operating systems they call "Windows." :-) And someone got Win98
> > running on a Nokia phone, altho I don't know what chip it is.
> Is Windows CE even remotely related to the other Windows editions?
It's Windows in name only. It probably doesn't share any code (at least
at kernel level) with the regular Windows.
This is in contrast with eg. the Linux or NetBSD kernels, which are
designed to be compiled as-is to different architectures (including
many embedded ones).
--
- Warp
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Warp wrote:
> It's Windows in name only. It probably doesn't share any code (at least
> at kernel level) with the regular Windows.
It supports many of the same APIs, tho. Basically, your knowlege of how
things work is supposed to be portable. The actual code itself? Probably
much less so.
> This is in contrast with eg. the Linux or NetBSD kernels, which are
> designed to be compiled as-is to different architectures (including
> many embedded ones).
Yeah. I wonder if Vista et al is as portable as NT used to be, like whether
they managed/bothered to maintain that for the most part or not.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
My fortune cookie said, "You will soon be
unable to read this, even at arm's length."
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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Yeah. I wonder if Vista et al is as portable as NT used to be, like whether
> they managed/bothered to maintain that for the most part or not.
Keeping portability to diverse architectures costs time and money.
Having portability is not a great commercial asset in the case of Windows.
I wouldn't be surprised if they had made the decision of forgetting
portability a long time ago. It's simply not cost-efficient in this case.
--
- Warp
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Warp wrote:
> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>> Yeah. I wonder if Vista et al is as portable as NT used to be, like whether
>> they managed/bothered to maintain that for the most part or not.
>
> Keeping portability to diverse architectures costs time and money.
> Having portability is not a great commercial asset in the case of Windows.
> I wouldn't be surprised if they had made the decision of forgetting
> portability a long time ago. It's simply not cost-efficient in this case.
Yeah, that's what I wondered. On the other hand, once it's done, it's not
*that* hard to maintain, or at least make it easy. The hard part is
separating out the non-portable parts (into the HAL for example) and then
not making machine assumptions at the application level (like endian-ness or
word size). I just wondered if there was some mandate in Microsoft that the
OS and such are supposed to be kept portable, in case the x86 architecture
ever gets a serious competitor again.
I.e., they already support x86 and x64, which are sufficiently different
that you can't really make a lot of assumptions about the machine from the
two. It wouldn't surprise me if a lot of the software MS has could be ported
to other architectures with relative ease, given that not too long ago it
was designed to run on something with a different architecture and it runs
on at least two architectures now.
I wouldn't expect it to be simply a recompile, but I'd be surprised if it
was a *lot* more work than porting the same amount of Linux-based code.
Especially given their push towards .NET and all that, that's completely
machine independent.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
My fortune cookie said, "You will soon be
unable to read this, even at arm's length."
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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> Nope. I typed "www.gentoo.org" and followed the links for
> "documentation". (Don't bother looking today - it's probably long since
> changed. I tried it a few years back.)
>
> The documentation seemed like a brain-dump from a person who knew what
> they were talking about but writing too fast. Maybe it's improved since
> then...
It must have been pre-March 2003. The Gentoo Web site design (as in
navigation, etc) has not changed since then. And the docs were damn good
back then.
--
Ground yourself, THEN hug your motherboard!
/\ /\ /\ /
/ \/ \ u e e n / \/ a w a z
>>>>>>mue### [at] nawazorg<<<<<<
anl
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Mueen Nawaz wrote:
>
> It must have been pre-March 2003. The Gentoo Web site design (as in
> navigation, etc) has not changed since then. And the docs were damn good
> back then.
>
Yep. Already back in 2003 the installation guide was so good that you
could give to someone who has no idea of Linux (but knows English;) and
(s)he could install Gentoo with it pretty easily. Note that back then
there wasn't an installer available and the official way was with stage1
-install (build everything).
-Aero
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