On Thu, Jul 27, 2006 at 02:42:30PM +0900, Chad Perrin wrote: > On Thu, Jul 27, 2006 at 02:26:37PM +0900, Keith Gaughan wrote: > > On Thu, Jul 27, 2006 at 01:59:37PM +0900, Chad Perrin wrote: > > > > > > I'm judging it based on running it on Windows. My point is that > > > divorcing it from the only environment in which it runs (natively) is > > > less than strictly sporting of you, when trying to discuss its > > > performance characteristics (or lack thereof). > > > > Wait... I did no such thing. All I said was that what interface > > sluggishness you get from Excel can't be blamed on Excel. They're > > performance characteristics that *can* be divorced from Excel (because > > they're Window's own performance characteristic, not Excel's). Argue > > those points, and you're arguing about the wrong software. > > Design decisions that involve interfacing with interface software that > sucks is related to the software under discussion -- and not all of the > interface is entirely delegated to Windows, either. No software can be > evaluated for its performance characteristics separate from its > environment except insofar as it runs without that environment. Here's all I'm saying: the environment is important, but it's a variable that must be cancelled when talking about some piece of software that's running on top of it. You can only make judgements about the speed of something like Excel by comparing it to another spreadsheet with a similar set of features running on Windows. Otherwise, you're only making guesses as to where the sluggishness and bloat lie. > > But Wine is an emulator, and while it does a good job approaching the > > speed of Windows, it doesn't hit it, nor can it hit it. You're not > > comparing like with like. Now that's far from sporting. > > Actually, no, it's not an emulator. Yes, it is. It's a set of libraries and executables that emulate a Windows environment. > It's a set of libraries (or a > single library -- I'm a little sketchy on the details) that provides the > same API as Windows software finds in a Windows environment. An > emulator actually creates a faux/copy version of the environment it's > emulating. Which both Wine and Cygwin do. To quote the Wikipedia article on emulators: A software emulator allows computer programs to run on a platform (computer architecture and/or operating system) other than the one for which they were originally written. Linux compatibility on FreeBSD is a software emulator that fools Linux executables into thinking they're running on Linux. Because of the commonalities between FreeBSD and Linux, this emulation layer can be thin. > It is to Linux compared with Unix as an actual emulator is > to Cygwin compared with Unix: one is a differing implementation and the > other is an emulator. ? > . . . and, in fact, there are things that run faster via Wine on Linux > than natively on Windows. Not surprising, really. > [ snip ] > > under FreeBSD. Bringing Wine in is a red herring. Software cannot be > > blamed for the environment it's executed in. > > I didn't bring it up. You did. I made a comment about Excel not > working in Linux as a bit of a joke, attempting to make the point that > saying Excel performance can be evaluated separately from its dependence > on Windows doesn't strike me as useful. See above. -- Keith Gaughan - kmgaughan / eircom.net - http://talideon.com/ Abbott's Admonitions: 1: If you have to ask, you're not entitled to know. 2: If you don't like the answer, you shouldn't have asked the question. -- Charles Abbot, dean, University of Virginia