It's nice to see that they acknowledge their mistake, years after the fact. I could have told them at the time, you know.
I'd been using Red Hat since about 4.0 or so (not RHEL 4.0 -- Red Hat 4.0); every time a new major release came out (which tended to suck, as all the Red Hat X.0 releases did) I'd try it, because I'd be able to get free CD's from my university. That university? NCSU, where some of the founders of Red Hat got their start.
I did move away, because I got frustrated with the bugginess, and with rpm and its complete lack of dependency handling. This was around Red Hat 7.2 or so, I think. I tried upgrading my installation entirely with rpm, which I would not recommend to anyone. I understand they have better tools for this now, but at the time I switched to Gentoo and never looked back.
However, I never stopped installing Red Hat on some machines, to try it out, and for others to use. I'll be the first to admit that Gentoo isn't for everyone. I installed Red Hat 9.0 on an old box for a little fileserver, shortly before they suddenly discontinued support for it. I've always appreciated their network install feature, and that was a factor in doing it.
Soon after, I tried out FC1 on another machine--I was unthrilled. They broke binary compatibility, and discontinued the top used and recognized Linux distribution for *that*? I bet Microsoft, SuSE, Novell and IBM all sent them a nice big Christmas card that year.
So, to Red Hat; a note from one of your former enthusiasts: too little, too late. Maybe if you shape up your act, you'll get a share of the next generation. But you won't get a lot of us back, for a while. Hopefully you'll learn from this, and not go the way of the SCO (or Corel either, for that matter).
I thought your claim was interesting, so I figured I'd test it. I actually beta-tested Heroes 3 for Linux back in the day, and I liked it so much that I later bought a copy.
Now at the time I ran RedHat, but I've since switched to Gentoo. I just restored my old Heroes3 installation from an archive of it that I had lying around.
It works flawlessly.
Now of course I'm not saying that this will always be the case, but obviously someone's done something right, considering the timeframe involved!
As for running a 5 year old version of Oracle, if it didn't run for some reason on your current version of Red Hat, you could always try it on the original version. Or, you might want to get a current version of Oracle.
Did I say it was? Do you know what the word 'also' means? I just love these erroneous and blind opinions about my posts, mind you, but I doubt it serves anyone well.
Either of your first two claims (if true) would probably be reason enough to shut it down, due to the administration's current stance on terrorist financing. Now, I personally think their definition of 'terrorism' is overly broad, but this specifically is the sort of thing they did have in mind.
$499 gets you the PC I had three years ago, sans mouse and keyboard. You might also want:
* A USB HUB * External audio firewire devices * External hard drive(s)
However, after ringing up that huge extra hardware bill, fortunately, it's not about the hardware. You get the OS environment, the software, the interface, the stability, the lack of virus and spyware and adware and malware. Which, incidentally, is exactly why I started using Linux. And if that's easily worth $500 to you, then I'm getting a huge bargain, woo hoo!
Incidentally I plan on shelling out maybe $500 for a good PC system, building it from scratch. You should price things out nowadays. Athlon 64, at least 512MB RAM, 200GB HD, modern (not 32MB! OMFG WTF??) video card, DVD *burner*, etc., etc. Amazing how cheap it all is when you aren't buying it from Apple. And I don't plan on paying any extra for an OS either, so go figure. No WinXP here!
As for the 'fanless and whisper quiet and smaller than a lunchbox' part--that's very cool. If I got it for anything, that would be it. In fact, if Apple could come up with some cool tiny interfaces for this, I bet it could make an awesome *portable* device. Hook up a little screen mounted in a pair of glasses, use it on an airplane... now that really would be awesome. But there we go again, talking about extras.
As for the "they've liberated you from having to pair up with their overpriced [...] displays" part--maybe that's a big step for them. I remember when they killed the clones too. I don't thank people for lifting ridiculous and artificial restrictions that they created. At best, they get a 'welcome to the rest of the world' from me.
Anyhow, I know I'm totally outside their target market, and perhaps the intended audience for your post as well. Thanks to previous actions of Microsoft, I'm no Windows user--and thanks to previous actions of Apple, I'm no Mac user. If they had released something like this (literally) 2 or 3 years ago, maybe even for $1,000, I might have snapped it up (and put Linux on it, natch).
Instead I got a 1.2Ghz Athlon, with 256MB RAM, 40GB worth of HD space (2x 20GB drives at the time), a 32MB video card (Matrox G400 Max), etc. And yes, in a beige tower. But other than that, the specs sound mighty familiar...:)
In my day, we wrote hundreeds of lines of C to precisely implement the RFC for TFTP--and we liked it!
Also, perhaps the better point here is that P2P apps aren't new, and we use them all the time, for much more than just file(shar|steal)ing. (Hey, are you net-booting that PC? You criminal, you!)
But seriously folks, you'd probably do better to start with links, w3m, arachne, dillo, Contiki, HyperLink, The Wave -- any codebase that was designed to be relatively lightweight from the start. Or, especially in the case of the last three, probably just write a new one.:(
Now on my desktop, I use konqueror because it's snappy; of course the mobile device game is totally different, but I'd expect that people would want some of the same things--notably, a responsive, un-bloated browser.
You've been waiting for The HURD? Oh, whoops, I've been using Linux. It's quite nice, I hear RMS uses it to host webpages and stuff. Perhaps you should try it!
He must have thrown it. He got both Daily Doubles, and drew a blank on both of them. Then he answers "FedEx"? And then what's worse, that smile he has afterwards. No, subconsciously or not, he could have won it and didn't.
Of course the next thing to look into--were people betting on when he was going to lose?
"We can not have free government without elections; and if the rebellion could force us to forego, or postpone a national election it might fairly claim to have already conquered and ruined us." --
Abraham Lincoln, 1864
Yeah, it's pretty amusing to read Ashcroft quotes from that time. It's funny, I remember when both Clinton and Gore were in favor of 'the Clipper chip', and I and much of the nerd community were against it. Then again, it would have made our phone conversations more secure than they are now, and probably more secure against terrorism, so go figure.
However, I can't conscion helping bring World War III any closer than Bush already has, for that reason or really many reasons at all. If we have a World War III, I'm sure our government will change a lot. I don't want to necessarily be here when it happens, though.
I know Kerry won't have Cheney for his VP, and will have a different cabinet, justice dept., etc., and therefore I would expect that fully one third of the gov't would end up in saner hands. I think voting against Ashcroft (which the people already did once, mind you) will help prevent harm to your civil liberties.
Also unlike Bush, Kerry might actually use his veto power to prevent bad legislation from going into law. So that should help check the legislative branch. Finally, in the event that one or more Supreme Court justices retires in the next four years, it will be Kerry and not Bush who gets to pick the appointee. So I've covered all three branches!
Personally I think Bush is worse than Kerry, because Bush appears to trust his staff implicitly, and his staff is not to be trusted. Kerry, on the other hand, can make up his own mind about things. He can also change his mind, which is a strength when you'd otherwise be doing the wrong thing.
I live in NC; I don't expect it to go to Kerry, but I'm still going to do my part. I've seen the margin between the two go below 5%, and I know enough not to trust polls, especially on election day.
I think all bets are off this time around; it'll likely be a close race, and with a surprising amount of people voting, especially given that it's a US election.
As for supporting Badnarik, he sounds more reasonable than some Libertarians out there. I give him credit both for supporting approval voting, and for not giving corporations a blank check. I'm not sure about privatizing education, partially for that reason.
However, I think there are some substantial differences between Bush and Kerry, and I don't think a third party candidate has a reasonable chance in this election. So I'm going to vote the way that my vote can potentially do the most good.
And if NC goes to Kerry, you might have me and people like me to thank--people who didn't give up because someone told them it wasn't supposed to be a "battleground state".
It is a horse race, and I'm not going to throw away my vote by blinding myself to the realities of the situation. I along with Badnarik would also support approval voting, and giving third parties more of a voice, but it isn't going to happen before November 2nd.
Another thing to try--LLVM can use g++ as a front-end to compile C++, and can often do further optimizations to speed things up even more. LLVM also has a C back-end, so you can benchmark other C compilers against each other too!
Of course, the real fun will begin when it has completed Java and C# front-ends.:)
It depends. You might be able to run the latest/greatest game on your hardware, but then you can always up the resolution, and crank up the detail settings...:)
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It's nice to see that they acknowledge their mistake, years after the fact. I could have told them at the time, you know.
I'd been using Red Hat since about 4.0 or so (not RHEL 4.0 -- Red Hat 4.0); every time a new major release came out (which tended to suck, as all the Red Hat X.0 releases did) I'd try it, because I'd be able to get free CD's from my university. That university? NCSU, where some of the founders of Red Hat got their start.
I did move away, because I got frustrated with the bugginess, and with rpm and its complete lack of dependency handling. This was around Red Hat 7.2 or so, I think. I tried upgrading my installation entirely with rpm, which I would not recommend to anyone. I understand they have better tools for this now, but at the time I switched to Gentoo and never looked back.
However, I never stopped installing Red Hat on some machines, to try it out, and for others to use. I'll be the first to admit that Gentoo isn't for everyone. I installed Red Hat 9.0 on an old box for a little fileserver, shortly before they suddenly discontinued support for it. I've always appreciated their network install feature, and that was a factor in doing it.
Soon after, I tried out FC1 on another machine--I was unthrilled. They broke binary compatibility, and discontinued the top used and recognized Linux distribution for *that*? I bet Microsoft, SuSE, Novell and IBM all sent them a nice big Christmas card that year.
So, to Red Hat; a note from one of your former enthusiasts: too little, too late. Maybe if you shape up your act, you'll get a share of the next generation. But you won't get a lot of us back, for a while. Hopefully you'll learn from this, and not go the way of the SCO (or Corel either, for that matter).
I wrote a little something about this a while back; let me know if you find it amusing (or distressing (or both)).
I thought your claim was interesting, so I figured I'd test it. I actually beta-tested Heroes 3 for Linux back in the day, and I liked it so much that I later bought a copy.
Now at the time I ran RedHat, but I've since switched to Gentoo. I just restored my old Heroes3 installation from an archive of it that I had lying around.
It works flawlessly.
Now of course I'm not saying that this will always be the case, but obviously someone's done something right, considering the timeframe involved!
As for running a 5 year old version of Oracle, if it didn't run for some reason on your current version of Red Hat, you could always try it on the original version. Or, you might want to get a current version of Oracle.
Then again, it might work just fine.
Or the classic Don't Copy That Floppy... Gah... :)
(crowd chanting)
Mario! Mario! Mario!
(zoom out)
Mario! Mario! Mario!
(Mario!)
Mind if I give you some pointers? I've done something like that before.
Did I say it was? Do you know what the word 'also' means? I just love these erroneous and blind opinions about my posts, mind you, but I doubt it serves anyone well.
Either of your first two claims (if true) would probably be reason enough to shut it down, due to the administration's current stance on terrorist financing. Now, I personally think their definition of 'terrorism' is overly broad, but this specifically is the sort of thing they did have in mind.
Iran, also not necessarily a 'bastion of freedom'... :)
So, to sum up:
:)
$499 gets you the PC I had three years ago, sans mouse and keyboard. You might also want:
* A USB HUB
* External audio firewire devices
* External hard drive(s)
However, after ringing up that huge extra hardware bill, fortunately, it's not about the hardware. You get the OS environment, the software, the interface, the stability, the lack of virus and spyware and adware and malware. Which, incidentally, is exactly why I started using Linux. And if that's easily worth $500 to you, then I'm getting a huge bargain, woo hoo!
Incidentally I plan on shelling out maybe $500 for a good PC system, building it from scratch. You should price things out nowadays. Athlon 64, at least 512MB RAM, 200GB HD, modern (not 32MB! OMFG WTF??) video card, DVD *burner*, etc., etc. Amazing how cheap it all is when you aren't buying it from Apple. And I don't plan on paying any extra for an OS either, so go figure. No WinXP here!
As for the 'fanless and whisper quiet and smaller than a lunchbox' part--that's very cool. If I got it for anything, that would be it. In fact, if Apple could come up with some cool tiny interfaces for this, I bet it could make an awesome *portable* device. Hook up a little screen mounted in a pair of glasses, use it on an airplane... now that really would be awesome. But there we go again, talking about extras.
As for the "they've liberated you from having to pair up with their overpriced [...] displays" part--maybe that's a big step for them. I remember when they killed the clones too. I don't thank people for lifting ridiculous and artificial restrictions that they created. At best, they get a 'welcome to the rest of the world' from me.
Anyhow, I know I'm totally outside their target market, and perhaps the intended audience for your post as well. Thanks to previous actions of Microsoft, I'm no Windows user--and thanks to previous actions of Apple, I'm no Mac user. If they had released something like this (literally) 2 or 3 years ago, maybe even for $1,000, I might have snapped it up (and put Linux on it, natch).
Instead I got a 1.2Ghz Athlon, with 256MB RAM, 40GB worth of HD space (2x 20GB drives at the time), a 32MB video card (Matrox G400 Max), etc. And yes, in a beige tower. But other than that, the specs sound mighty familiar...
There actually is an Active-X plug-in for other browsers. I don't know why you'd want to use it, though... :)
In my day, we wrote hundreeds of lines of C to precisely implement the RFC for TFTP--and we liked it!
Also, perhaps the better point here is that P2P apps aren't new, and we use them all the time, for much more than just file(shar|steal)ing. (Hey, are you net-booting that PC? You criminal, you!)
See 3. :)
1. Note that strained silicon is already in use.
2. Extra nerd points for quoting what Moore's law *really* states!
3. [...] No profit for you!
a.k.a., konqueror.
:(
*ducks!*
But seriously folks, you'd probably do better to start with links, w3m, arachne, dillo, Contiki, HyperLink, The Wave -- any codebase that was designed to be relatively lightweight from the start. Or, especially in the case of the last three, probably just write a new one.
Now on my desktop, I use konqueror because it's snappy; of course the mobile device game is totally different, but I'd expect that people would want some of the same things--notably, a responsive, un-bloated browser.
You've been waiting for The HURD? Oh, whoops, I've been using Linux. It's quite nice, I hear RMS uses it to host webpages and stuff. Perhaps you should try it!
He must have thrown it. He got both Daily Doubles, and drew a blank on both of them. Then he answers "FedEx"? And then what's worse, that smile he has afterwards. No, subconsciously or not, he could have won it and didn't.
Of course the next thing to look into--were people betting on when he was going to lose?
Now that he's $2.5 million richer, I bet she'll be calling him up, along with everyone else who ever knew him... heh, including you no doubt. :)
Yeah, it's pretty amusing to read Ashcroft quotes from that time. It's funny, I remember when both Clinton and Gore were in favor of 'the Clipper chip', and I and much of the nerd community were against it. Then again, it would have made our phone conversations more secure than they are now, and probably more secure against terrorism, so go figure.
However, I can't conscion helping bring World War III any closer than Bush already has, for that reason or really many reasons at all. If we have a World War III, I'm sure our government will change a lot. I don't want to necessarily be here when it happens, though.
I know Kerry won't have Cheney for his VP, and will have a different cabinet, justice dept., etc., and therefore I would expect that fully one third of the gov't would end up in saner hands. I think voting against Ashcroft (which the people already did once, mind you) will help prevent harm to your civil liberties.
Also unlike Bush, Kerry might actually use his veto power to prevent bad legislation from going into law. So that should help check the legislative branch. Finally, in the event that one or more Supreme Court justices retires in the next four years, it will be Kerry and not Bush who gets to pick the appointee. So I've covered all three branches!
Personally I think Bush is worse than Kerry, because Bush appears to trust his staff implicitly, and his staff is not to be trusted. Kerry, on the other hand, can make up his own mind about things. He can also change his mind, which is a strength when you'd otherwise be doing the wrong thing.
I live in NC; I don't expect it to go to Kerry, but I'm still going to do my part. I've seen the margin between the two go below 5%, and I know enough not to trust polls, especially on election day.
I think all bets are off this time around; it'll likely be a close race, and with a surprising amount of people voting, especially given that it's a US election.
As for supporting Badnarik, he sounds more reasonable than some Libertarians out there. I give him credit both for supporting approval voting, and for not giving corporations a blank check. I'm not sure about privatizing education, partially for that reason.
However, I think there are some substantial differences between Bush and Kerry, and I don't think a third party candidate has a reasonable chance in this election. So I'm going to vote the way that my vote can potentially do the most good.
And if NC goes to Kerry, you might have me and people like me to thank--people who didn't give up because someone told them it wasn't supposed to be a "battleground state".
It is a horse race, and I'm not going to throw away my vote by blinding myself to the realities of the situation. I along with Badnarik would also support approval voting, and giving third parties more of a voice, but it isn't going to happen before November 2nd.
Another thing to try--LLVM can use g++ as a front-end to compile C++, and can often do further optimizations to speed things up even more. LLVM also has a C back-end, so you can benchmark other C compilers against each other too!
:)
Of course, the real fun will begin when it has completed Java and C# front-ends.
It depends. You might be able to run the latest/greatest game on your hardware, but then you can always up the resolution, and crank up the detail settings... :)