The collected works of mattst88 - Page 2

jdboyd wrote: BTW, it seems that there was linux driver work as recently as 2010 for GLINT based cards.

That was actually me. I'd be interested in it for that purpose, but I can't say I'll have time to work on it.

My code is here: http://code.google.com/p/google-summer- ... loads/list

And my project proposal is here: http://mattst88.com/blog/2010/04/11/My_ ... _proposal/

hamei wrote:

NCommander wrote: When did firefox start depending on Xrender :-/. ...

Pretty sure that was right about the same time that they stuck their heads firmly up their asses

Ugh! I know, right?!

What the heck were they thinking when they started depending on technologies that our beloved IRIX doesn't have?! Don't they know how many IRIX users they have? I can't believe they'd alienate such a huge and important user-base like that. And, doing all of that over the objections of the many IRIX developers who begged and pleaded with them to just not use such a new (from the year 2000!) technology like Xrender.

(Apologies to the original poster. If this were a mailing list, I'd have changed the Subject line.)

(snipped some butt-hurt trolling from your quote)

hamei wrote:

mattst88 wrote: What the heck were they thinking when they started depending on technologies that our beloved IRIX doesn't have?! Don't they know how many IRIX users they have? I can't believe they'd alienate such a huge and important user-base like that. And, doing all of that over the objections of the many IRIX developers who begged and pleaded with them to just not use such a new (from the year 2000!) technology like Xrender.

To be serious for a moment, what did they accomplish by making this change ? On purpose, I keep up to date with Fireflop on Windows and use it at least half an hour a day.

I don't know if you know what XRender is, so to make sure everyone's on the same page: it's a hardware-accelerated 2D rendering API for X dating back to XFree86 4.0.1 in 2000. So, by using it, they accelerate the rendering of webpages, specifically anti-aliased text. Of course you wouldn't see any benefits from this on Windows.

hamei wrote: From a user's perspective, it is not one bit better than version 2 on Irix. It doesn't crash as often but that's the only improvement.

Why do you think anyone upstream would care about IRIX? The people working on Firefox (and all other Free Software for that matter) are doing it because (1) they're paid by their employer to do so (ie, paid to care), or (2) because they've got a personal desire to do so.

If you expect that some employer should care about IRIX, then you're deluding yourself. But I don't think you think that. So, that leaves us with individuals who personally care about Firefox on IRIX.

Perhaps you should complain to them about how Firefox on IRIX sucks. That's only marginally more ridiculous than the current attitude that no one who works on Firefox knows what the fuck he's doing and if they'd only just listen to you (and perhaps support IRIX!) then everything would be right with the world.

hamei wrote: And oh ! the Javascript is 200 times faster ! That's nice. Now websites can add 200 extra javascripts to track me. That's a real improvement. Super, Mozilla. Thanks.

Although you may be too much of a luddite to recognize it, that is actually quite nice indeed. Maybe you don't care about sites like Gmail or any other Google site, or any of the benefits a JavaScript JIT compiler provides.

hamei wrote: It's all well and good to sneer at users because we aren't current, uptodate, high-falutin' gofast groovy withit technogeeks but that voice would carry a little more weight if all this churn actually accomplished something.

I think your view of how free software is developed is totally warped. You shouldn't expect someone to maintain something like IRIX support when they're (1) not being paid to do it, and (2) have no personal interest in it. If it's important to you, then you should help maintain Firefox on IRIX.


I wouldn't normally bother to respond to things like this, but I've noticed that this how dare they not support IRIX?! attitude around here way too much. I don't know if it comes from a weird sense of entitlement or from a lack of understanding of how the free software you're lucky to have is developed. The people who write it don't write it for you. They don't owe a thing to you and in fact you should be quite thankful that they did spend their time and effort to write something as complex as Firefox or gcc, which I often see bitched about around here), or any of the other countless free software projects that work on IRIX.

As IRIX heads into oblivion (eg, gcc 4.8 has dropped IRIX 6.5) it becomes easier to make the comparison to older operating systems like ULTRIX. Would it be reasonable for the last remaining ULTRIX user to complain loudly about how recent gcc doesn't support his DECstation 5000/240?

So, I don't know. If you care about free software continuing to run on IRIX then write some code, and if you can't write code then you could pay someone who can. If you can't do either of these, maybe ask nicely? If you can't do that, then you shouldn't talk at all.

It's 10 GHz since it's only an R1600.

I have one of these cards. Is there something interesting about it?

Edit: Yeah, I've got one with the 16 MB DIMM.

GL1zdA wrote: There are only NT drivers:
ftp://ftp.es.com/drivers/AccelECLIPSE/

Requires a username and password?

I've had good experiences with the Syba SY-PCX40009. 4 ports, 64-bit PCI (I think 66MHz+). It does 64-bit DMA. Supported by the sata_sil (CONFIG_SATA_SIL) driver (or maybe it's the sata_sil24/CONFIG_SATA_SIL24?). It's about $30 on eBay.

I have some 3ware cards, and I was annoyed by them. They have a BIOS program that sets up the disks, and I wasn't able to use it as a result in my MIPS system.

The SATA_SIL card I recommended had no such problem.

The MIPS system I have sata_sil on is a Broadcom BCM91250a .

As far as I remember, I was not able to access any drives on the 3ware card without configuring them in the BIOS program.