Sigil 0.8.1 Released

[Ghitulescu]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

A lot of XP installs are on computers with processors that are not up to the task. The processors are too old. They need to at least support SSE2. So what would happen is people with too old hardware would install Sigil and have it fail and then want support for it when it's the computer that's the problem.

Are you telling me that editing text in 2014 needs a computing farm of Crays dipped in cryogenic nitrogen or else the mouse will not move on the screen? When I started editing for the University' Press I used a 286 (remember? ) at 20MHz with 1MB RAM (from which a sensible part was taken by BIOS) and 80 MB HDD, it was a giant back then (12 and 16 MHz were standard, so 256kB RAM and 20MB HDD).

I made a test. I wrote Hello world! in MS Word 2010 and save it as .DOCX. Wow, almost 16kB instead of 12B, the size of the ROM in an 1982 personal computer like Sinclair Spectrum ZX, which contained the BASIC interpreter as well.

Well, my point was anyway another - a working system has not to be changed.

You see, in the past if one needed more power for their projects, they went for a higher spec'ed PC, like our At286/20, then 386. We needed matlab or a faster rendering in AutoCAD, we added the 387 math coproc and more RAM. And people noticed that 386/40 was faster than 386/16. Today one has to upgrade to keep the same working speed. That's something wrong happening, that people born yesterday don't get it, because they were born in this world.

And concerning end-of-cycle for XP, I really really don't understand the craze. The fear. The urge. Please raise your hand all those that relied on MS support, that you fear you lost it when MS announced they ended their support. My music computer works happily with W98SE (15 years old) and have no issues at all.

[faltradl]

Why this useless debate? Look instead into this thread: Unofficial Sigil v0.8.0 for Legacy Windows

[Ghitulescu]

Originally Posted by faltradl

Why this useless debate? Look instead into this thread: Unofficial Sigil v0.8.0 for Legacy Windows

Maybe it's useless to you, but I have installed software on my computer that I don't want to port on another computer (licences, dongles and stuff) because of a software upgrade.

Sure I can buy another computer

PS: thank you fo the hint, found it..

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Ghitulescu

Are you telling me that editing text in 2014 needs a computing farm of Crays dipped in cryogenic nitrogen or else the mouse will not move on the screen? When I started editing for the University' Press I used a 286 (remember? ) at 20MHz with 1MB RAM (from which a sensible part was taken by BIOS) and 80 MB HDD, it was a giant back then (12 and 16 MHz were standard, so 256kB RAM and 20MB HDD).

I made a test. I wrote Hello world! in MS Word 2010 and save it as .DOCX. Wow, almost 16kB instead of 12B, the size of the ROM in an 1982 personal computer like Sinclair Spectrum ZX, which contained the BASIC interpreter as well.

Well, my point was anyway another - a working system has not to be changed.

Sure a working system works, but the software moves on and you need capabilities that not all working systems have. if you have an older processor that runs XP but does not have SSE2, you may as well forget using Sigil and you may as well forget using Calibre 2. Windows 8.1 (and I would think any Windows after that) needs to have PAE, NX, and SSE2. It's not that you need faster or more cores, but you do need certain instructions as pointed out and if youre process doesn't have them, then you'll eventually need a new processor and that also may very well include a new motherboard and new memory. If you use the old style of hard drives (not SATA), then you will have to replace any hard drives/DVD drives as well. Things move on and when it gets to the point where what you have will no longer run what you want, then no matter how much you want to keep what you have because it works, you have to move on as well and if that means a new computer, so be it.

And concerning end-of-cycle for XP, I really really don't understand the craze. The fear. The urge. Please raise your hand all those that relied on MS support, that you fear you lost it when MS announced they ended their support. My music computer works happily with W98SE (15 years old) and have no issues at all.

If what you run still runs on older hardware and an older OS< that's fine. But Sigil and Calibre do not and will not and the only thing you can do is upgrade. Someday, new Calibre plugins won't run with Qt4. Someday you might find new features of Sigil or Calibre are what you want but they won't run. So while things are working well enough for now, start saving to upgrade so by then time you have to upgrade, you'll have the money to do so.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by faltradl

Why this useless debate? Look instead into this thread: Unofficial Sigil v0.8.0 for Legacy Windows

But if the processor in use doesn't at least support SSE2, the unofficial Sigil will not work well.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

But if the processor in use doesn't at least support SSE2, the unofficial Sigil will not work well.

The official Sigil packages stopped working on non-sse2 hardware before the switch to Qt5 ever occurred. That limitation is not something that needs to be continually harped upon. Sigil users with older hardware ran into that paricular wall somewhere around version 6 (maybe even earlier), so they have a pretty good idea that there's no magic build that's going to bring support back for their aging hardware. So let's let it go. The legacy thread clearly indicates who/what has a reasonable expectation of success.

[Toxaris]

Originally Posted by Ghitulescu

I made a test. I wrote Hello world! in MS Word 2010 and save it as .DOCX. Wow, almost 16kB instead of 12B, the size of the ROM in an 1982 personal computer like Sinclair Spectrum ZX, which contained the BASIC interpreter as well.

Tests are fine, but this is apples and pears. The ROM of an Spectrum was 16kB, not 12B of course. It had a very limited instruction set (although it was phenomenal at its time and I loved it), not compared to the current processors of course. Also, Tasword2, the wordprocessor of the Spectrum, was nowhere near in functionality compared to Word of course.
Even if you just created a Hello World! in Notepad and saved it as pure text, it would still be at least 1kB due to the blocksize. A Word file has much more information contained in it, due to the increased functionality. Is there overhead? Yes, of course. But not as bad as you describe.

If you are fine on working with unsupported (OS) software, great. That is your call. You cannot however expect that you can run the latest version of other programs on an unsupported OS. If it does, you are in luck. If not, you can always run the older versions.
Qt5 offers many improvements against version 4 and it makes a lot of sense to use it. Of course it contains new bug, but also solves a lot of others. If all developers had your line of thinking, there would not be progress and improvements.

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by Ghitulescu

Are you telling me that editing text in 2014 needs a computing farm of Crays dipped in cryogenic nitrogen or else the mouse will not move on the screen? When I started editing for the University' Press I used a 286 (remember? ) at 20MHz with 1MB RAM (from which a sensible part was taken by BIOS) and 80 MB HDD, it was a giant back then (12 and 16 MHz were standard, so 256kB RAM and 20MB HDD).

I made a test. I wrote Hello world! in MS Word 2010 and save it as .DOCX. Wow, almost 16kB instead of 12B, the size of the ROM in an 1982 personal computer like Sinclair Spectrum ZX, which contained the BASIC interpreter as well.

Well, my point was anyway another - a working system has not to be changed.

You see, in the past if one needed more power for their projects, they went for a higher spec'ed PC, like our At286/20, then 386. We needed matlab or a faster rendering in AutoCAD, we added the 387 math coproc and more RAM. And people noticed that 386/40 was faster than 386/16. Today one has to upgrade to keep the same working speed. That's something wrong happening, that people born yesterday don't get it, because they were born in this world.

And concerning end-of-cycle for XP, I really really don't understand the craze. The fear. The urge. Please raise your hand all those that relied on MS support, that you fear you lost it when MS announced they ended their support. My music computer works happily with W98SE (15 years old) and have no issues at all.

To continue to do the same stuff will not require updated hardware.

To take advantage of new stuff, like for instance Qt5 you will need hardware that can handle ALL the new stuff.

The alternative is using your own Qt5 that you fork and strip out anything which XP cannot handle.

And compile Qt yourself without SSE2. Sure, it will not run as fast as regular Qt5 would, but better than not running at all.
Just don't expect software maintainers to target old hardware when they compile programs for general use. That would slow everyone down to your level.

[Ghitulescu]

I don't want to bother anyone more with this subject, this is my last submission to this point.

I know all these arguments. I used them myself to justify my ideas of progress when I was a young programmer. And had no responsibilities towards the customers. When I got the next position I told them that I prefer to see them programming code rather than paying them debugging code.

The point I was made, has little to do with the old hardware. Although a new software may have problems running on older hardware, so there is a also a link to new software.

My point was - changing to a new, say upgraded version of QT, what improvements has it brought? Yes, I've read the log. There is no major change, like supporting ePub 3.0 (which by the unwritten code should have increased the major version to the consecutive ordinal, like 1.00 - instead Sigil remained still in so-called alpha, ie versions below 1.00). But this small, cosmetic change, simply dismissed a whole range of computers, probably the largest base of installed OS*, weeks only after the official cease of support.

It was not my point to argue anything else, including criticism to the author, older HW better than new one, and whatever else.

Besides I'm in this new game of eBooks only for some months, since I've got my (first) Sony, and imagine this would not help me any better in this jungle. I was also informed in a very recent thread that the calibre I had downloaded when I bought the Sony jumped from 0.94 to 2.5 in this short time, again leaving the XP support out ...

Sorry for this trouble, I'll stick then with the last versions that work on XP. I stress again, this was not criticism, just the need to understand the reasons for this citius, altius, fortius.

*AFAIK many Vista computers have been downgraded to XP. I did it myself.

[eschwartz]

Wouldn't a Vista computer that was downgraded have SSE2? So the unofficial builds should work marvelously, because there is no hardware problem.

Besides, that is (one of the reasons) why we have decent OSes like linux... so we don't have to worry about MS end-of-life products.

[theducks]

There is tools to query your CPU chip to see what feature set it supports.
While the tool my be OS dependent, this issue is mostly a OLD hardware problem.

BTW I agree, A NEW computer that came with Vista probably supports
SSE2

BTW Did you happen to notice that the MS tool to check if your hardware can run W7 DOES not estimate your 'Windows Experience' value for that HW

[Toxaris]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

Besides, that is (one of the reasons) why we have decent OSes like linux... so we don't have to worry about MS end-of-life products.

Hah! That is of course complete nonsense. Also with Linux there are end-of-life products and end of support. Upgrade not always possible, depending on version or distro. Good luck compiling/running programs on an older system and you cannot upgrade the dependencies or the mismatch of versions.
In some ways the issues with this are even bigger on Linux than Windows.

One big advantage to Linux is the fact that it can run on older hardware, even newer versions. I give you that.

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by Toxaris

Hah! That is of course complete nonsense. Also with Linux there are end-of-life products and end of support. Upgrade not always possible, depending on version or distro. Good luck compiling/running programs on an older system and you cannot upgrade the dependencies or the mismatch of versions.
In some ways the issues with this are even bigger on Linux than Windows.

One big advantage to Linux is the fact that it can run on older hardware, even newer versions. I give you that.

When can't you upgrade linux to the next version? All the popular distros continue to come out with new versions, which is my main point that you are never locked into running old OSes over the cost.

dist-upgrade usually works fairly well, if your system breaks (I assume that is what you meant?) you simply reinstall from the latest install iso and preserve /home/

[Toxaris]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

When can't you upgrade linux to the next version? All the popular distros continue to come out with new versions, which is my main point that you are never locked into running old OSes over the cost.

dist-upgrade usually works fairly well, if your system breaks (I assume that is what you meant?) you simply reinstall from the latest install iso and preserve /home/

Try upgrading CentOS 5 to CentOS 6... The only method is a reinstall. Home is preserved, but that is it. It is also not the first time. I also have to keep 3 versions of python, because various programs only work on those versions. And the fun part, that is not even an exception.

I love Linux, but for servers only I am afraid.

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by Toxaris

Try upgrading CentOS 5 to CentOS 6... The only method is a reinstall. Home is preserved, but that is it. It is also not the first time. I also have to keep 3 versions of python, because various programs only work on those versions. And the fun part, that is not even an exception.

I love Linux, but for servers only I am afraid.

So, when you say "upgrade is not always possible" ... ?

I am aware that on any OS a dist-upgrade can go horribly wrong, and the worst that ever means is, as you say, reinstall and preserve only /home/ -- and this is not better or worse than Windows except that once again, the sole point I was trying to make is applicable. That you are not forced to stick with an old OS or shell out more money to use your perfectly good hardware with newer versions of free software.

And for the record, rolling-release distros rule.

Question: what does keeping 3 versions of python have to do with anything that anyone has said?