Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Mainstreaming, Lux, Ports
Show of hands if you think Windows is easy to use ... If I'm driving a car with a radio, I usually fiddle with the dials way down around 88-90 FM to listen to NPR, for Car Talk, All Things Considered, and the occasional science show. Now AlKini gives me another reason: "National Public Radio's "High Tech" section covers the Linux World Expo: Linux Moves to Heart of Corporate America (top item ATM).
NPR's Chris Arnold for All Things Considered: www.npr.org/ramfiles/atc/200008 16.atc.07.ram (Real Audio)"
A major issue raised by the High Tech section article is ease of use; maybe I'm crazy, but putting on Mandrake and going nuts with the included programs is pretty darn easy. Putting on 98 and NT I thought was rather a nightmare.
Well, surely all this has shown ... something! OK. Perhaps now everyone can stop submitting the story about the experiment which has been reported as showing a previously unheard of increase in the speed of light. drinkypoo writes: "It turns out that 'Not only does the speed of light remain unsurpassed, but Wang's experiment wasn't even about that.' To be specific, 'the team developed a method of manipulating the wavelengths of a beam of light, thereby altering the way it arrives at its destination. Because short wavelengths become longer and long ones become shorter, the natural fanning outward that marks a light pulse is eliminated; consequently the shape of the pulse at its destination appears the same as at its origin.' It seems that the journalistic frenzy and a NEC press release are to blame. Salon Magazine is carrying the full story here."
Reports have been greatly exaggerated. We reported a few days ago that IBM's Project Monterey had been killed. Not so, says dentar, who writes: "I am attending SCO Forum 2000, and contrary to what was published in Sm@rt-aleck Reseller, IBM is NOT ditching Monterey. It is going to be called AIX-5L. (NOT AIX-RL like the article says). The Sm@rt reseller article is very poorly researched and is pure yellow journalism. In fact, IBM is very ticked about the article."
Where are the software-release-date betting pool sites? fonixmunkee writes: "Found an interesting story on BetaNews regarding Microsoft reportedly working on porting some of their software to linux. Check it out here."
For either P.R. or experimental purposes at least, though, doesn't it seem like Microsoft will offer some Linux software soon? While there's often no accounting for corporate decision making, to ignore the large, vibrant, growing Linux market would be to ... ignore a large, vibrant and growing market. Fine by me; I never much like having my words mangled by Word, and I have never pined for Outlook.
The more numerous the laws ... werdna writes: "Counsel for Napster, Inc. just submitted their initial brief on Appeal, explaining why the preliminary injunction should be reversed. The brief sets other arguments, any one of which could be a basis for reversal.
Whatever may be said of Judge Patel's decision, she set forth her reasoning squarely, which made it possible for Mr. Boies to crisply and concisely join the issue: Whether the test for contributory infringement of an internet service will be that the services has a "mere capacity for substantial non-infringing uses" (the test adopted by the Supreme Court for VCR's), or Judge Patel's new creation of a "present primary purpose " test, in direct contravention of the Supreme Court's decision in the Betamax case. The answer to this question can have broad-sweeping impact on the internet as a whole.
Interestingly, the brief shows that the Ninth Circuit itself originally adopted the "primary purpose" test when it first reviewed the Betamax case, noting that the Supreme Court expressly rejected that argument there. It is sometimes advocacy to a judge to remind them that the District Court they are reviewing just made the same mistake they made years ago."
Everyone here claims windows is the OS for idiots or the average dumb consumer, yet have trouble installing it :)
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
the line "I have never pined for Outlook" is hilarious.
Seriously though, I doubt microsoft will port much if anything to Linux. The reason MS dominates so often is that any windows box you buy, comes straight from the manufacturer with lots of its software installed. Of course IE beat out Netscape in browser wars, its right there on the desktop when you boot up for the first time. Similarly, I dont think people, especially not-so-techy people, will go out of they're way to install new MS software on a Linux box when it comes with free defaults ready to go. Add to that the fact that much of Linux's appeal is that it is free, who would want to ruin that by shelling out for some proprietary software?
peas,
-Kabloona
We recently migrated to Outlook due to corporate, and I made the comment: I never thought anything would make me pine for CC Mail again....
I work in a Unix shop where we all have to share one Winblows box for e-mail and I must say that Outlook is a major PIA. (Pain in the Artichokes)
But at least the web access works with Netscape. (At least until the next Exchange patch...)
And more to the point made by Kabloona, MS cannot port anything to Linux without losing much of the mindshare they currently enjoy. Our desktops are getting slicker, (Check out KDE2) our uptime is still better, and our reputation is better.
But heck, I just applied for a job as a Solaris admin and got: "Could you send me your resume in DOC format??" I sent it as a perl app instead.
~Hammy
"We're all Devo!" ~Boogie Boy
My Intro to EE professor told us a story about the preliminary discussions at Sony concerning VCPs (video cassette players). Some VIP at Sony asked "Why would someone want to see movies at home when they could go out and see them?".
One of the designers turned and said "Porn", and that was that.
--
Mando
Your right. Slashdot is editorial biased against Windows and just about anything Microsoft. There is a "reason" for this (however "unreasonable" it may be.) Just as the Macintosh was built around a backround of "beating the enemy, IBM", Linux is kind of being built around a background of "beating the enemy, Microsoft." This makes Linux an interesting candidate for sucess. I agree, a lot of the anti-microsoft clamor that we so often hear is based more on emotion than on pure fact (what you refered to as "FUD".) I work primarily on Windows NT based workstations, and for the most part they have proven to be very stable (the biggest drawback is the numerous reboots that I have to do when installing new software.) I disagree with your statement about installing '98. I have had more problems installing '98 then with any other operating system. While not necessarily a "difficult" install, it is one that tries my patience. I find the installation Windows NT 4.0 and RedHat Linux (text mode install) to both be way more intuitive and user-friendly. My preference for Linux does not abound from a feeling that Linux is technically superior. It stims from the political side of the open source movement. I like the idea of software that is free (as in both beer and speech.)
Brought to you by Frobozz Magic Penguin Fodder.
It does seem that someone... whether NEC or reporters, I'm not sure... was a little irresponsible with the "faster-than-light" story. Even the title of the Nature article, "Gain-assisted superluminal light propagation," seems a little misleading. Although all the articles clearly indicated that this experiment was not at odds with Einsteinian relativity, none of them really explained it.
I don't know that much about physics, but I knew something weird was happening here, and I found a little bit of explanation in the Feynman Lectures on Physics (Volume 1, Chapter 31).
For light of frequency omega, in a material with electrons having resonant frequency omega0, the index of refraction is:
n = 1 + (Ne^2)/(2 epsilon0 m (omega0^2 - omega^2))
The dependence on omega shows that a material transmits light at different speeds, depending on the frequency (or, from a different point of view, the wavelength) of the light. This phenomenon is called "dispersion." Now, for some frequencies, (omega0^2 - omega^2) will be negative and n can be less than one, implying "superluminal" propagation in the sense that light of that frequency may be transmitted faster than "c", the speed of light in vacuum.
Feynman notes that the difference in index of refraction indicates a "that the phase shift which is produced by the scattered light can be either positive or negative." However, he is careful to point out that signals themselves are not transmitted faster than c, because transmission of a signal depends on the index of refraction at multiple frequencies. The index tells the speed at which the node of the wave travels, but the node in itself can carry no information. In order to transmit information, the frequency of the wave must be varied.
So, it appears that the idea of sending light at "faster-than-light" speeds is an old one, well understood by physicists. The theory of relativity has not been violated, and this has been known for some time. Feynman, apparently, taught it to beginning physics students at Caltech in the 1960s. News sources must have simply been attempting to make the story into something more appealing to the public. "Laws of physics break down!" But in reality, no laws have been violated, physics is fundamentally unchanged, and the net result seems to have been a confused public.
Matt Reece
I disagree with this idea that "windows is easy to install". Here is a little rant that I sent off a couple days ago on the subject which explains why.
... fdisk gets
... the problem is that
\begin{rant}
I've installed Linux on several machinces in the last year, including a
bleeding-edge laptop, an older laptop, and a couple of desktops, one
overclocked. I've installed windows (mostly 98, once 2000) on all of
them at least once, as well.
Windows WILL find the hardware, every time, and doesn't have the right
drivers for it, and will drive your 21 inch monitor hooked to a big,
fast 3d card at 640x480x8bit until you take it by the hand, after many
reboots, and lead it to a driver for your card, and another for your
monitor, which YOU must dig up. Then you must reboot AGAIN!
Contrast this to Linux: it correctly detects the card, just as does
windows, and then loads a good driver for it. It offers you a sensible
default resolution, and you're off. All the other hardware is handled
similarly by Linux: it finds it, gives you a decent driver, and things
just work. The windows example is also standard: it finds some kind of
hardware, loads a lowest common denominator driver, and then expects YOU
to do the work of making it work right.
Don't try to install Win98 to replace NT, by the way
baffled, scandisk crashes, setup.exe craps out
they don't know that NTFS isn't FAT, and die in an uninformative
manner. I had to use Linux's fdisk to repartition as ef2s, then MSfdisk
thought that the partition was "unformatted", or some such, and could
work with it.
In short, it seems to me that Windows is MUCH harder to install than is
Linux. Windows does have a fancy graphical installation tool, not quite
so nice as Corel's, perhaps, but it really doesn't DO anything for you!
Linux, with or without the eye-candy, gives you far fewer hassles, far
fewer reboots than even win2000, and seems to me to require a bit less
knowlege of the hardware, as well. Linux only requires that you guess
which interrupt your soundcard wants. That you can get by trial and
error (some day I'll write down which one works, so I don't have to try
the guessing game at each install on a given machine).
Windows requires that you have the manufacturer's driver on hand for
EVERY part in your machine! For a frankenstein box, assembled out of
old parts, that can be a big problem. You have to know what you have,
and go find the drivers, and on and on. First stop, the FCC website, to
try to find out who made each board, and then go find out that the
manufacturer is out of business and no more drivers. For a Compaq (don't
buy Compaq if you want to run windows), knowing your hardware is still a
big problem. Finding the drivers on the Compaq disk is painfull. For
Linux, all the drivers are on one CD, and the installer finds the right
one for you. THAT'S easy.
Yes, Linux app's do seem to be lagging a bit yet, but Staroffice 5.2 is
getting pretty close to MSOffice. You will soon be able to do
Microsofty things as well as MS, and serious work is already much easier
on Unix. By the way, administering NT on a home system doesn't seem any
easier to me than the same chores on Linux. Maybe even harder, since at
least with Linux, I know what's behind the GUI. You never really know
that with MS.
It always bugs me to hear this "Linux is hard to install" line, since
that exactly contradicts my experience.
\end{rant}
Nels Tomlinson
See what I've been reading.