[ale] canon Pixma

[Michael Trausch]

On Thu, 2010-05-13 at 09:49 -0400, Scott Castaline wrote:
> I agree, if one is going to claim to be Linux Compatible than it
> should
>  be universal and not limited. Otherwise it should state that it's
>  compatible only on certain platforms, much like they have to say
>  Window$ XP or Vi$ta etc and they have to support both 32 & 64 bit
>  variants. I consider it false advertising in saying that you are
>  compatible with something, get it home (or work), set it up and it
>  doesn't work. Then you spend hours, possibly days to find out that
>  it's only supported on x86_32 and you are running ppc64 or x86_64 or
>  whatever else. 

I always try to check binaries when I get them.  Even when IA-32 systems
were the only ones that really mattered, I always hated getting
binaries.  Anyone know what happens when you take a binary compiled for
a 386 and run it on a 486?  Or a binary compiled on a 486 and run on
anything else that's not a 486?  It was always awful, because gcc would
optimize for the CPU you told it to optimize for, and the 486 ran things
in a rather quirky way as I recall.

This is one reason that I actually do not have a problem with the
CLR---it permits a programmer to create a bytecode compiled binary that
can be compiled for the user's CPU at installation time, without having
to go through the heavyweight process of compiling from source.  For
distributions such as Debian and Ubuntu that ship binaries by default
and whose users don't want the installation and setup times of Gentoo
just to build the software for their CPU and get the most out of it,
that's pretty excellent.

Unfortunately, the community seems to not care that the CLR has not one,
but at least two free software implementations that run decently well,
nor do they seem to care about the efficiencies it can bring.  For that
reason, it has been kept at the level of not having many applications
written for it, keeping the cost of installing it and using it for the
few applications that do run on it at present relatively high.  If an
entire software stack were written using it, the cost would be low,
though, since the runtime system would only have to be loaded into
memory once---for the first application that uses it.

Oh, well.  Now I'm hopelessly off-topic...

	--- Mike

-- 
Even if their crude and anticompetitive business practices don't make
you think about using their software, their use of sweatshops and child
labor should:  boycott Microsoft like you would any other amoral child
abuser:  http://is.gd/btW8m

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