Nekochan Net

I hear this often, yet I never see any serious efforts at a FLTK version of any major browser.


That's a good one!


Yeah. I still use FF daily on all my main machines, but I do wonder whatever happened to the "stripped down, just-a-browser" ideal.

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Principle Over Politics : http://www.ConstitutionParty.org

You need a strong leader to avoid featuritis in open source software. Never mind that -- you need one in any software development project that involves more than one person.

I think WebKit is the way to go just because the toolkit was already abstracted - the only issue is that it abuses GCC4 and C++ which makes it a lot more fun to debug.

As for the PROM, I don't know how much the source would help anyway except in the very specific case of the O2 where we have a pin and bus compatible CPU module with different initialization parameters. It wouldn't help much with porting third-party OSes since it's just bringup and runs before the OS anyway - plus, for most systems (Indy, O2, Octane with VPro, and increasingly Fuel and Origin3xxx) the reverse-engineering heavy work was done long ago, and what remains is just a lack of implementation. For example, BSDs have real accelerated CRIME support but Linux doesn't, and VPro is understood and we can render triangles on it but nobody wants to write an X.Org driver.

An open-source IRIX would be great if thousands of programmers with endless amounts of free time suddenly emerged from the woodwork to maintain it and add the features people want (USB, video drivers, and so on)... but for some reason I don't see that happening even if the source were available right now.



I can't second this enough. Open-source projects with fairly strong leaders (Linux, at least until recently when things have been getting iffier) or corporate management (notice how WebCore/WebKit took off after Apple grabbed KHTML) tend to do really well. Open-source projects with only spirit and no strong leadership tend to either fall into disrepair and abandonment (too many to count) or a complete and utter mess (Firefox) depending on how popular they are.

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hi, sorry but i hope i didn't barged in with a stupid question, but where exactly does the PROM reside? which specific chip? coz i got this universal reader? maybe i could read and copy the contents from that chip? and from there we could reverse engineer all the arranged bits based from ROM datasheet and MIPS datasheet and ARCS standard command or APIs? please correct me if i'm wrong but is this possible? i know time is not usually in our side.. also, its easier to say than done..but hmmm theres no harm in trying ayt?

how about lets help each other for this dream, you point the direction while i can volunteer to do the mess, i believe i still can squeeze some time and resource to do this

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(Sakura) (Sasuke) (Naruto) ... lil Jesse! (O2 laptop)
“Imagination is more important than knowledge.“ – A. Einstein

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1071&hilit=prom&start=285

It's been done - jan-jaap grabbed a PROM image (not sure if he dumped it or got one of the flashable images from an IRIX distribution) and started disassembling it - I'm sure others have as well and they all gave up.

At any rate, again, reversing a PROM would only be genuinely useful (as anything more than an exercise/research case/nifty hack) in one specific case (a pin-and-bus compatible CPU with different initialization procedure) which as far as I know only happens (and only will happen) on the O2.

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There is one other valid scenario, an R5K-type CPU which in theory should work in Indy. I forget the model, but Joe said it was 866MHz.

Re O2, Joe & I had been hoping to do a 900, but there's also a 1.5GHz Sandcraft chip which might be doable - definitely need the full
PROM source for that one though. Joe talked to IBM about faster/larger L2/L3. At least for the 900, our initial goal had been for a 900MHz
chip with 16MB L2 running 50% faster than the usual L2. IBM said the cache speed increase was important to keep the chip fed properly.
Woulda been sweet, but there ya go. No PROM source, not possible.

Ian.

for the reasons that SAQ delineated, and the quote that Ian articulated; still a dead horse everyone (again). move on.

on the subject of browsers: all you guys with lots of systems? xhost+ form a cheap atom, it's all you need, and you get flash too.

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DECUS Member 368596

That's true, but it still pisses me off on general principle.

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That's a practical solution. People still running SGIs don't want practical solutions

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i could tell; FF3 on SGI? not-practical!

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DECUS Member 368596

I use IE8 and have no problems with it. Comes with the computer.

I suppose FF is a stripped down version of Mozilla, considering they took out the PIM and Mail parts.

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(Maradona) (DavidVilla) A1186 (Xavi)
A1370 (Messi) dp43tf (Puyol) A1387 (Abidal) A1408 (Guardiola)

"InfiniteReality Graphics - Power Through Complexity"

I knew a guy once who had access to some Windows source code (he was a developer at Intel or something, I forget now). He recompiled
some bits so they ran with native code on PII, it ran 5X faster or more compared to the normal version.

Ian.

One of the biggest mistakes in software development, and I say this as a developer myself, is giving developers fast machines. It makes them lazy, and they produce lazy code. It gets bundled into a library and reused by more lazy programmers.

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I couldn't agree more, although some developers I know also err the other way - spending two days of optimization to gain 5 seconds in a reporting system that gets run once a day usually isn't worth it.

I can't live without a fast machine just because waiting minutes and minutes for a build, test, or sim is painful and irritating, especially when I'm debugging and know it's probably going to fail.

The growing number of crappy open-source libraries amazes me sometimes - people are so anxious for e-fame that they'll release absolutely awful code to catch the latest fad. Twitter are awful in this way - they tend to push apps to their GitHub that are both untested in production and mostly worthless, but their fan train of web developers who don't know better eat it up.

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Ya, what happened to mozilla communicator? If it still existed, then firefox would still be the light/fast younger cousin, not the main project!
Old mozilla for IRIX is faster than the latest firefox..