Okay, I'm annoyed. Did any of these pinhead moderators know who Zippy is, bother to follow the attached link, or read my sig?
It's called "humor".
Feel free to flag this as "Offtopic", since I'm obviously replying to my own post about bad moderation. Just... please, read the original post and make your own judgements. Looks like more reason to continue to browse at -1... *sigh* --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Actually, IIRC, Microsoft used technology from MainWin (which they later bought--it's a company that specialized in porting Windows applications to UNIX), and MainWin had already ported at least half of Windows to UNIX. IE runs on top of that. But it still sucks, bigtime.:)
As I've said before, IE 3.0 for Windows 3.1 (separate product, woo hoo!) runs fine under Wine, and much better than IE 3.0 "for UNIX" runs on any UNIX.:) I haven't been able to install the other two to test them, but they look like Windows applications to me... --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Remember the RealNetworks vs. Now I'm having INSIPID THOUGHTS about the beautiful, round wives of HOLLYWOOD MOVIE MOGULS encased in PLEXIGLASS CARS and being approached by SMALL BOYS selling FRUIT.. Streambox case a few weeks ago? Well, the judge has decided to lift the injunction against Streambox... Now I think I just reached the state of HYPERTENSION that comes JUST BEFORE you see the TOTAL at the SAFEWAY CHECKOUT COUNTER! They can now resume developing and selling their nifty RealAudio tools."
...It's the only way to read slashdot! --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
We need a "Sort By Lowest Score First" option, because the bottom six incoherent posts that got scored down are far funnier than the top six incoherent posts that got scored up.
Did I mention that slashdot was going to hell? --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Oh man, that was cool, it supported *EGA*, you could have 16 colors, for the first time, just like the Commodore 64 always did.
The sad thing is, Write didn't change significantly from Windows 1.03 to windows 3.10.
(You could still open the same files in each one, the addition was OLE in Windows 3.x, and that was more of a global Windows thing than a Write feature) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
First, if people are going to call Solaris of all things "big iron", then IRIX definitely qualifies. It's true that you can buy a graphics workstation that runs IRIX, but that's not all they sell. I've seen some neat multi-processor monsters with gobs of RAM and disk space running all your nifty UNIX services off of IRIX.
Second, yeah, I always thought of IBM Mainframes and stuff when people talked about "big iron", but it's an old term, and nowadays people use it interchangeably with "enterprise computing"....and, depending on what you want to do, Cray is often not the answer. For fast vector processing, go for it, but for many other things a fast network of computers beats a Cray. (also depends on which Cray, and which Cray computers we're talking about!) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
*sigh* Some developers have it already. Some warez kiddies might have the final version (but more likely have some random-numbered beta).
But most people won't have a copy because it's not sold in stores. Remember the Windows '95 launch? Or when they opened computer stores at midnight to sell Windows '98? That's when it's available.
If I manage to steal a copy, or sleep with microsoft to get one early, that's not the same as when they start selling it. It's available when anyone with the cash can get a copy.
...and I've seen Beta 3. Woo hoo, what a piece of crap. With Microsoft, I probably shouldn't consider it released until the first Service Pack that fixes any important issues is released.:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Of course, this confuses the issue, because anyone who buys a computer in that window could get Windows 2000, but it still won't be sold in stores yet. And, at $220 for the upgrade from Windows '95/'98, it looks like consumers will be advised to wait for "Millenium". (which is due when? Sometime between 2000 and 2001, like most people think the millenium is?)
Of course, if Microsoft wanted a Linux competitor, they should have kept Xenix.;) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
First, Windows 2000 ISN'T OUT YET. I don't know how many times I have to say this, and *still* have people argue with me. I think I'll give up by February.:)
Second, Windows 2000 != Office 2000.
Third, there are "Office clones" avaliable for Linux, and I believe the file format since Word '97 hasn't really changed. Star Office should work fine for this, and I've had good luck with Word Perfect (I like the HTML it generates much better, too).
Fourth, Windows 2000 will contain many technical advances compared to the earlier Windows products, and that *is* why people will migrate to it. Where I am, the IT department is beginning to find out that NT isn't all it's cracked up to be, and they might end up migrating to Red Hat instead. (maybe even running NT in VMWare, as needed!) The truth is, as the article states, Windows 2000 is still playing catch-up to Unix, and it's embarrassing that some free program that developers play with in their spare time is shaping up better than the "industry standard".:)
I doubt this was written specifically to get posted to Slashdot, and ZD Net's track record has gotten a lot better, and this isn't even a ZD Net *article*! However, if this wasn't written now, I'm sure it would have been written later (for the awards, you know, Infoworld, Product of the Year, and all...).
In my experience, Linux's hardware support lies somewhere between Win 95/98 and NT. Since NT has a "supported hardware" list that's iffy at best, and that's *with* corporate backing, I'm glad I can use my generic sound card, TV card, etc. under Linux...
Some drivers under Linux *are* under development. However, many drivers for hardware for NT are, also, and that means *no* driver, not a "perma-beta" driver.
I wouldn't even begin to accociate e-commerce with "big iron". However, if I were to talk about "big iron", I might think of IRIX as well. But IRIX is being dropped, in favor of? Linux, I believe. If SGI puts resources into extending Linux at the higher levels, I'll be pretty happy. Also, realize where your comparison got lost: I'd rather be running a scalable Solaris box than a buggy NT box any day. Also, the BSD's don't necessarily do better here. Any well-configured, stable box should do fine, you don't need the latest new-fangled version of GNOME, *especially* if you're root.:)
This article is saying that if Microsoft isn't careful, it's going to get the bomb dropped on them. In fact, often when pundits say "it is beginning", chances are it's all but over. I thought awarding things to Linux would be so 1998 by now, but apparently we're still the underdog in the media.
Nice little moralistic rant there, Sig11, but you're rambling. Did someone bet you to post something and get it scored up to 5, without reading the article? --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
However, thanks for the Star Control link! (I love those games... Any game that uses mods for sound must be cool.) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Maybe she was programmed by men in the UK. That would explain the "racist" British news focus, too. Hmm...
Besides, what do you care, it's just an interface that reads text, and this is a prototype. I'm sure that if the technology is successful, there will be Canadian men and Asian Aliens and whatever your little 3-D rendered heart could possibly desire.
Me? I'm still rooting for the Cyc project. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Lisp has been doing this stuff forever. Maybe it'd be a good idea to look into the formats that expert systems use to exchange data; I bet they're pretty generic.
Of course, that won't happen, we'll all make our own stripped-down, human-readable versions, with big gaping flaws, until someone either standardizes it, or hides something nasty and binary with a GUI and dominates the market (*hint* I wonder who wants to use XML and "open standards"....) So let's try to come up with a real open format now, instead.:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Let's sue MS-NBC for stealing 2,500 credit card numbers!
These sorts of lawsuits are brought against [cr|h]ackers all the time. The defense? "Um... I wasn't going to use them, I was just... just wanted to see if I could get them! Yeah, that's it!" Yeah, right. And that's what MS-NBC wants you to believe too. So either we'll have a precedent for being able to collect information on the grounds that it's cool, or we'll get to sue MS-NBC back into the dark ages. Sounds good to me.
(all you have to find is one of these companies who actually knew they got hacked... um... never mind.:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
The article was a pretty good historical look at what happened, but the best part was the end, which also showed that the author didn't get it. Also, IMO, the history didn't go back far enough.
AOL *was* a BBS in Virginia in the old days, and in some senses, it still is. (okay, hardly) But originally, it was a BBS that had clients on Commodore 64's! Even though it may suck now, it has been around for a looong time, and that says something.
Jumping to the end, the casual guy dressed formal, and the formal guy dressed casual. This is the same thing that happened when Microsoft and IBM were working on the PC. Five seconds later, everybody laughed, and realized it didn't matter that much. This isn't saying that they don't understand each other, far from it. It's saying that this isn't such a hostile takeover after all, and both sides are doing what they can to make this work--a sign of cooperation. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Maybe if I had a microwave card for my computer, I wouldn't care, but I find it's too much trouble to constantly be heating and stirring those frozen potatoes. They take forever to heat up, and even after that, they don't always have that even consistency.
So I use RedHat 6.0, even though I don't know if I have to microwave a "Hedwig" or not. (Hedwig? Is that an alien from Star Control 2?) However, I guess if I used Debian, I could just try to Slink around the whole issue... --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
The Solaris and HP/UX versions of IE all suck rocks.
If you want to use IE under Linux, I've managed to run IE 3.0 for 16-bit Windows under Wine (the colors are fixed now, yay!). I can't manage to install IE 4.0 or 5.0 yet--they seem to require a network install. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Yeah, the reason I mentioned the DLL / library thing is because I knew it was a problem they were working on (in Windows)--I hope they fix it.
In Linux, either you have to make the libraries come out right (to build the apps in the first place) or hopefully your distribution properly checks dependencies. (Red Hat, for instance, does this, and all of them should)
There's nothing wrong with liking the tools Windows has to offer. The only problem is, if you don't, you're screwed. They don't exactly have as many different toolsets to choose from. (Explorer pissed me off, not that the Program Manager was much better... I use fvwm2, stripped down. Just windows, no buttons, type what you want, four virtual desktops.)
It panicked on you for untarring a file? I hope that wasn't it. I managed to trash a filesystem one time, but I was kinda using an alpha version of some drive compression software...
I saw Windows 2000 Beta 3, and it crashed non-stop in the installation, but it ran okay. I hope more people have the same rock-solid experience that you do (once it's released). --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
You're right, Windows '95-2000 (there's a Y2K bug), Office, and Visual Studio all are very "featured". They also have many "mis-features", and many bugs. Unix has features that people actually *need* (that's why they put them there). Also, Unix is an Operating System, not a Word Processor, let's maintain that distinction. If you want a Word Processor for Unix, I'm sure you can find a good one, but you don't buy it from UNIXSoft, okay?
I'll have to disagree with this next one: Linux looks like Unix, it behaves like Unix, and it's implemented *well* compared to many commercial unixes. Of course, this all depends on what you want, but... ever used HP/UX? Linux makes *much* more sense compared to that. If you've used one particular commercial Unix for a while, you might be biased towards a particular flavor, as I surely am towards Linux, but they all share a lot of similarities.
What I like about Linux is that it caches *very* well, does very efficient process creation, is pretty stable, and supports a lot of devices (a note on these two: of course, some drivers are more stable than others, and there are always patches. That's what happens when you get something in development. However, I've never seen Linux get Unstable in the sense that Windows does--everything happens for a reason in Linux, and you can find out what it is if you know what you're doing.)
VMS is supposed to be good for scalability. I can't personally vouch for that, because I've seen it in situations where it must have been badly misconfigured. But that says something for its stability, because it didn't go down, it just went *really* slow. However, NT didn't get either of those features right. And I've seen Unix be just as stable as VMS, and far more friendly.:)
Win32 *does* have APIs for just about everything. It's a headache. Especially since it manages them with DLLs, which have to be the worst excuse for libraries that I've ever seen. First off, who in their right mind would let a program randomly modify/overwrite crucial system libraries? (or, even worse, let a *user* do this...) And even if you did, what if you have different, incompatible library versions with the same name? Microsoft did this many times in different versions of Office--they would replace a DLL that another Windows program used, such that installing Office breaks the other Windows program! That's apparently Microsoft Binary Compatibility for you. Maybe you could give them different names in a filesystem that did symlinks properly. Hmm...;)
In the meantime, if you want APIs to program with, you can find tons of them for Linux. DGA instead of DirectX, many of the Windows APIs are implemented in Wine, there are many sound / graphics interfaces, some of them crossplatform like SDL, and many widget sets (I wish Windows knew what a widget set was!) and window managers (ditto for that, Windows needs more cool shells) and many free ready-made applications and stuff. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Okay guys, read the article. It sounds like this was an actual physical logo, like a billboard. Not the stupid thing in the bottom-left-hand corner of the screen!
I don't care who owns the transmission, if it's live, I want to see what's there! It's New York, for cris'sake. If they had a partnership with Lipton and digitally changed the big Cup-a-Noodle display or something, I'd be pissed!
(Why? Because I was at Times Square for New Years last year, I stared at that thing for three hours, and I kinda like it. I trust my news for some reality now and then, and if I found out that they lied to me like that, I'd be annoyed.) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Well, how much of any of that was written by Bill is still sometimes disputed, but if he did write it, that might explain what happened to Windows: designed by an assembler programmer good at writing *small* programs... Hmm.
In any case, we know he didn't write DOS, and it's obvious that all the later versions of DOS were pretty much just hacked up from the earlier versions. (FAT12 -> FAT16, and now VFAT / FAT32? Puh-leese.)
Windows 1.0 and 2.0 sucked, and they had teams of people working like that. Of the two, I still like GEOS better. Windows 3.0 and 3.1 was better, and more stable, but still couldn't multi-task well. In Windows '95/'98, they managed to fix the multi-tasking but drop the stability.
In Windows NT, they originally fixed the stability, but raised the resource requirements massively. In later versions, they managed to speed it up some, but now it's less stable.
It will be interesting to see what Windows 2000 brings, but none of this implies that people at Microsoft are good at big projects. Maybe they can all code great small assembler programs, and maybe they should have started with that and stuck to it for a while. After all, that's what got UNIX started. Maybe Microsoft will eventually manage to reinvent it. Or offer a good product at a fair price. Or give good tech support. Or take responsibility for their product's shortcomings, and advertise and benchmark truthfully.
...or they can just sue Al Gore for claiming to invent the Internet when we all *know* it was Bill Gates! That sounds more like it! --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
If we're going to go with this silly bacteria-space-roaming theory, who is to say that life didn't originate on Venus?
Here, I'll propose a (semi-)plausible (alien conspiracy) theory with almost no evidence--tell me what you think.
All life on Earth was engineered by hyper-intelligent beings on Venus. They realized that their planet was moving inhospitably close to the Sun, and they wanted something to survive them. However, they had polluted their planet (wars, manufacturing, whatever) to the point where it was inhospitable, and Earth still was, too, at the time. Now, we have evolved into sentient beings, and they are dead, as is all record of their civilization. (Venus looks pretty nasty right now)
There. So life began on Venus, and as *proof*, notice that nothing can survive on Venus anymore, but it could have in the past. Ooo!
Now you make up your story, and with the new rules of sensationalistic journalism, you too can turn Science Fiction into Science! --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Do my rights online include a decent *color* for a section like this, maybe so I could read it?
Well, apparently not, so I'm browsing in w3m. But the article didn't get any better.
I'm opposed to censorware in principle, but what do you think is going to happen to the little geek kid who runs into a censored web browser? Well, I think he's going to find a way around it. And I think that's wonderful. If this goes through, I'd like to thank Holland, MI, and all the other little towns breeding the next generation of clever hackers and crackers.
Why? Because censorware software is horrible. It's pretty funny when the adults can't get their work done due to the "security measures" in place, while the kids go to all the xxx/porn/warez sites--maybe they aren't even interested in them, maybe it's just the challenge.
Remember, folks. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. And people's "intentions" seem to be getting better all the time...
I don't know whether to admire you know, or tell you to piss off, now. Maybe I should have asked HAL for his opinion...:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
To all those people who claim the article had no substance:
STOP RUNNING IT THROUGH THE PREPROCESSOR!
The proper way to view the article is with a web browser. You're not supposed to download it to article.c, and run 'cc -E article.c' to read the article. (and if you do, at least use the proper definitions for your situation, and remember that all comments will be stripped)
Anyhow, I thought it was a cute gimmick. And isn't that enough for Salon, sometimes? --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, I'm annoyed. Did any of these pinhead moderators know who Zippy is, bother to follow the attached link, or read my sig?
It's called "humor".
Feel free to flag this as "Offtopic", since I'm obviously replying to my own post about bad moderation. Just... please, read the original post and make your own judgements. Looks like more reason to continue to browse at -1... *sigh*
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Um, no.
:)
:) I haven't been able to install the other two to test them, but they look like Windows applications to me...
Actually, IIRC, Microsoft used technology from MainWin (which they later bought--it's a company that specialized in porting Windows applications to UNIX), and MainWin had already ported at least half of Windows to UNIX. IE runs on top of that. But it still sucks, bigtime.
As I've said before, IE 3.0 for Windows 3.1 (separate product, woo hoo!) runs fine under Wine, and much better than IE 3.0 "for UNIX" runs on any UNIX.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Zippy the Pinhead writes with some welcome news:
.. Now I think I just reached the
Remember the RealNetworks vs. Now I'm having INSIPID THOUGHTS about the beautiful, round wives of HOLLYWOOD MOVIE MOGULS encased in
PLEXIGLASS CARS and being approached by SMALL BOYS selling FRUIT.. Streambox case a few weeks
ago? Well, the judge has decided to lift the injunction against Streambox.
state of HYPERTENSION that comes JUST BEFORE you see the TOTAL at the SAFEWAY CHECKOUT COUNTER! They can
now resume developing and selling their nifty RealAudio tools."
...It's the only way to read slashdot!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Hey Andover.net, here's a Linux job for you:
We need a "Sort By Lowest Score First" option, because the bottom six incoherent posts that got scored down are far funnier than the top six incoherent posts that got scored up.
Did I mention that slashdot was going to hell?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
:) Windows 1.03, on six 5+1/4" floppies, right?
Oh man, that was cool, it supported *EGA*, you could have 16 colors, for the first time, just like the Commodore 64 always did.
The sad thing is, Write didn't change significantly from Windows 1.03 to windows 3.10.
(You could still open the same files in each one, the addition was OLE in Windows 3.x, and that was more of a global Windows thing than a Write feature)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Replying to a couple of comments:
...and, depending on what you want to do, Cray is often not the answer. For fast vector processing, go for it, but for many other things a fast network of computers beats a Cray. (also depends on which Cray, and which Cray computers we're talking about!)
First, if people are going to call Solaris of all things "big iron", then IRIX definitely qualifies. It's true that you can buy a graphics workstation that runs IRIX, but that's not all they sell. I've seen some neat multi-processor monsters with gobs of RAM and disk space running all your nifty UNIX services off of IRIX.
Second, yeah, I always thought of IBM Mainframes and stuff when people talked about "big iron", but it's an old term, and nowadays people use it interchangeably with "enterprise computing".
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
*sigh* Some developers have it already. Some warez kiddies might have the final version (but more likely have some random-numbered beta).
:)
But most people won't have a copy because it's not sold in stores. Remember the Windows '95 launch? Or when they opened computer stores at midnight to sell Windows '98? That's when it's available.
If I manage to steal a copy, or sleep with microsoft to get one early, that's not the same as when they start selling it. It's available when anyone with the cash can get a copy.
...and I've seen Beta 3. Woo hoo, what a piece of crap. With Microsoft, I probably shouldn't consider it released until the first Service Pack that fixes any important issues is released.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Thanks for the info...
;)
Of course, this confuses the issue, because anyone who buys a computer in that window could get Windows 2000, but it still won't be sold in stores yet. And, at $220 for the upgrade from Windows '95/'98, it looks like consumers will be advised to wait for "Millenium". (which is due when? Sometime between 2000 and 2001, like most people think the millenium is?)
Of course, if Microsoft wanted a Linux competitor, they should have kept Xenix.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
First, Windows 2000 ISN'T OUT YET. I don't know how many times I have to say this, and *still* have people argue with me. I think I'll give up by February. :)
:)
:)
Second, Windows 2000 != Office 2000.
Third, there are "Office clones" avaliable for Linux, and I believe the file format since Word '97 hasn't really changed. Star Office should work fine for this, and I've had good luck with Word Perfect (I like the HTML it generates much better, too).
Fourth, Windows 2000 will contain many technical advances compared to the earlier Windows products, and that *is* why people will migrate to it. Where I am, the IT department is beginning to find out that NT isn't all it's cracked up to be, and they might end up migrating to Red Hat instead. (maybe even running NT in VMWare, as needed!) The truth is, as the article states, Windows 2000 is still playing catch-up to Unix, and it's embarrassing that some free program that developers play with in their spare time is shaping up better than the "industry standard".
I doubt this was written specifically to get posted to Slashdot, and ZD Net's track record has gotten a lot better, and this isn't even a ZD Net *article*! However, if this wasn't written now, I'm sure it would have been written later (for the awards, you know, Infoworld, Product of the Year, and all...).
In my experience, Linux's hardware support lies somewhere between Win 95/98 and NT. Since NT has a "supported hardware" list that's iffy at best, and that's *with* corporate backing, I'm glad I can use my generic sound card, TV card, etc. under Linux...
Some drivers under Linux *are* under development. However, many drivers for hardware for NT are, also, and that means *no* driver, not a "perma-beta" driver.
I wouldn't even begin to accociate e-commerce with "big iron". However, if I were to talk about "big iron", I might think of IRIX as well. But IRIX is being dropped, in favor of? Linux, I believe. If SGI puts resources into extending Linux at the higher levels, I'll be pretty happy. Also, realize where your comparison got lost: I'd rather be running a scalable Solaris box than a buggy NT box any day. Also, the BSD's don't necessarily do better here. Any well-configured, stable box should do fine, you don't need the latest new-fangled version of GNOME, *especially* if you're root.
This article is saying that if Microsoft isn't careful, it's going to get the bomb dropped on them. In fact, often when pundits say "it is beginning", chances are it's all but over. I thought awarding things to Linux would be so 1998 by now, but apparently we're still the underdog in the media.
Nice little moralistic rant there, Sig11, but you're rambling. Did someone bet you to post something and get it scored up to 5, without reading the article?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
:) You are correct, sir. All part of the humor.
However, thanks for the Star Control link! (I love those games... Any game that uses mods for sound must be cool.)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Ooo, I can answer this one!
Maybe she was programmed by men in the UK. That would explain the "racist" British news focus, too. Hmm...
Besides, what do you care, it's just an interface that reads text, and this is a prototype. I'm sure that if the technology is successful, there will be Canadian men and Asian Aliens and whatever your little 3-D rendered heart could possibly desire.
Me? I'm still rooting for the Cyc project.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Lisp has been doing this stuff forever. Maybe it'd be a good idea to look into the formats that expert systems use to exchange data; I bet they're pretty generic.
:)
Of course, that won't happen, we'll all make our own stripped-down, human-readable versions, with big gaping flaws, until someone either standardizes it, or hides something nasty and binary with a GUI and dominates the market (*hint* I wonder who wants to use XML and "open standards"....) So let's try to come up with a real open format now, instead.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Isn't he the guy who writes the best-selling kid's books?
Explain your cryptic reference, and I'll explain mine:
Go play Star Control 2; you obviously haven't yet.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
This isn't a problem, it's a solution:
:)
Let's sue MS-NBC for stealing 2,500 credit card numbers!
These sorts of lawsuits are brought against [cr|h]ackers all the time. The defense? "Um... I wasn't going to use them, I was just... just wanted to see if I could get them! Yeah, that's it!" Yeah, right. And that's what MS-NBC wants you to believe too. So either we'll have a precedent for being able to collect information on the grounds that it's cool, or we'll get to sue MS-NBC back into the dark ages. Sounds good to me.
(all you have to find is one of these companies who actually knew they got hacked... um... never mind.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
The article was a pretty good historical look at what happened, but the best part was the end, which also showed that the author didn't get it. Also, IMO, the history didn't go back far enough.
AOL *was* a BBS in Virginia in the old days, and in some senses, it still is. (okay, hardly) But originally, it was a BBS that had clients on Commodore 64's! Even though it may suck now, it has been around for a looong time, and that says something.
Jumping to the end, the casual guy dressed formal, and the formal guy dressed casual. This is the same thing that happened when Microsoft and IBM were working on the PC. Five seconds later, everybody laughed, and realized it didn't matter that much. This isn't saying that they don't understand each other, far from it. It's saying that this isn't such a hostile takeover after all, and both sides are doing what they can to make this work--a sign of cooperation.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
This is why I use redhat: no frozen potatoes.
Maybe if I had a microwave card for my computer, I wouldn't care, but I find it's too much trouble to constantly be heating and stirring those frozen potatoes. They take forever to heat up, and even after that, they don't always have that even consistency.
So I use RedHat 6.0, even though I don't know if I have to microwave a "Hedwig" or not. (Hedwig? Is that an alien from Star Control 2?) However, I guess if I used Debian, I could just try to Slink around the whole issue...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
The Solaris and HP/UX versions of IE all suck rocks.
If you want to use IE under Linux, I've managed to run IE 3.0 for 16-bit Windows under Wine (the colors are fixed now, yay!). I can't manage to install IE 4.0 or 5.0 yet--they seem to require a network install.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Yeah, the reason I mentioned the DLL / library thing is because I knew it was a problem they were working on (in Windows)--I hope they fix it.
In Linux, either you have to make the libraries come out right (to build the apps in the first place) or hopefully your distribution properly checks dependencies. (Red Hat, for instance, does this, and all of them should)
There's nothing wrong with liking the tools Windows has to offer. The only problem is, if you don't, you're screwed. They don't exactly have as many different toolsets to choose from. (Explorer pissed me off, not that the Program Manager was much better... I use fvwm2, stripped down. Just windows, no buttons, type what you want, four virtual desktops.)
It panicked on you for untarring a file? I hope that wasn't it. I managed to trash a filesystem one time, but I was kinda using an alpha version of some drive compression software...
I saw Windows 2000 Beta 3, and it crashed non-stop in the installation, but it ran okay. I hope more people have the same rock-solid experience that you do (once it's released).
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
*sigh* I'll be happy to disagree with you here.
:)
;)
You're right, Windows '95-2000 (there's a Y2K bug), Office, and Visual Studio all are very "featured". They also have many "mis-features", and many bugs. Unix has features that people actually *need* (that's why they put them there). Also, Unix is an Operating System, not a Word Processor, let's maintain that distinction. If you want a Word Processor for Unix, I'm sure you can find a good one, but you don't buy it from UNIXSoft, okay?
I'll have to disagree with this next one: Linux looks like Unix, it behaves like Unix, and it's implemented *well* compared to many commercial unixes. Of course, this all depends on what you want, but... ever used HP/UX? Linux makes *much* more sense compared to that. If you've used one particular commercial Unix for a while, you might be biased towards a particular flavor, as I surely am towards Linux, but they all share a lot of similarities.
What I like about Linux is that it caches *very* well, does very efficient process creation, is pretty stable, and supports a lot of devices (a note on these two: of course, some drivers are more stable than others, and there are always patches. That's what happens when you get something in development. However, I've never seen Linux get Unstable in the sense that Windows does--everything happens for a reason in Linux, and you can find out what it is if you know what you're doing.)
VMS is supposed to be good for scalability. I can't personally vouch for that, because I've seen it in situations where it must have been badly misconfigured. But that says something for its stability, because it didn't go down, it just went *really* slow. However, NT didn't get either of those features right. And I've seen Unix be just as stable as VMS, and far more friendly.
Win32 *does* have APIs for just about everything. It's a headache. Especially since it manages them with DLLs, which have to be the worst excuse for libraries that I've ever seen. First off, who in their right mind would let a program randomly modify/overwrite crucial system libraries? (or, even worse, let a *user* do this...) And even if you did, what if you have different, incompatible library versions with the same name? Microsoft did this many times in different versions of Office--they would replace a DLL that another Windows program used, such that installing Office breaks the other Windows program! That's apparently Microsoft Binary Compatibility for you. Maybe you could give them different names in a filesystem that did symlinks properly. Hmm...
In the meantime, if you want APIs to program with, you can find tons of them for Linux. DGA instead of DirectX, many of the Windows APIs are implemented in Wine, there are many sound / graphics interfaces, some of them crossplatform like SDL, and many widget sets (I wish Windows knew what a widget set was!) and window managers (ditto for that, Windows needs more cool shells) and many free ready-made applications and stuff.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Okay guys, read the article. It sounds like this was an actual physical logo, like a billboard. Not the stupid thing in the bottom-left-hand corner of the screen!
I don't care who owns the transmission, if it's live, I want to see what's there! It's New York, for cris'sake. If they had a partnership with Lipton and digitally changed the big Cup-a-Noodle display or something, I'd be pissed!
(Why? Because I was at Times Square for New Years last year, I stared at that thing for three hours, and I kinda like it. I trust my news for some reality now and then, and if I found out that they lied to me like that, I'd be annoyed.)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Well, how much of any of that was written by Bill is still sometimes disputed, but if he did write it, that might explain what happened to Windows: designed by an assembler programmer good at writing *small* programs... Hmm.
In any case, we know he didn't write DOS, and it's obvious that all the later versions of DOS were pretty much just hacked up from the earlier versions. (FAT12 -> FAT16, and now VFAT / FAT32? Puh-leese.)
Windows 1.0 and 2.0 sucked, and they had teams of people working like that. Of the two, I still like GEOS better. Windows 3.0 and 3.1 was better, and more stable, but still couldn't multi-task well. In Windows '95/'98, they managed to fix the multi-tasking but drop the stability.
In Windows NT, they originally fixed the stability, but raised the resource requirements massively. In later versions, they managed to speed it up some, but now it's less stable.
It will be interesting to see what Windows 2000 brings, but none of this implies that people at Microsoft are good at big projects. Maybe they can all code great small assembler programs, and maybe they should have started with that and stuck to it for a while. After all, that's what got UNIX started. Maybe Microsoft will eventually manage to reinvent it. Or offer a good product at a fair price. Or give good tech support. Or take responsibility for their product's shortcomings, and advertise and benchmark truthfully.
...or they can just sue Al Gore for claiming to invent the Internet when we all *know* it was Bill Gates! That sounds more like it!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
If we're going to go with this silly bacteria-space-roaming theory, who is to say that life didn't originate on Venus?
Here, I'll propose a (semi-)plausible (alien conspiracy) theory with almost no evidence--tell me what you think.
All life on Earth was engineered by hyper-intelligent beings on Venus. They realized that their planet was moving inhospitably close to the Sun, and they wanted something to survive them. However, they had polluted their planet (wars, manufacturing, whatever) to the point where it was inhospitable, and Earth still was, too, at the time. Now, we have evolved into sentient beings, and they are dead, as is all record of their civilization. (Venus looks pretty nasty right now)
There. So life began on Venus, and as *proof*, notice that nothing can survive on Venus anymore, but it could have in the past. Ooo!
Now you make up your story, and with the new rules of sensationalistic journalism, you too can turn Science Fiction into Science!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Do my rights online include a decent *color* for a section like this, maybe so I could read it?
Well, apparently not, so I'm browsing in w3m. But the article didn't get any better.
I'm opposed to censorware in principle, but what do you think is going to happen to the little geek kid who runs into
a censored web browser? Well, I think he's going to find a way around it. And I think that's wonderful. If this
goes through, I'd like to thank Holland, MI, and all the other little towns breeding the next generation of clever
hackers and crackers.
Why? Because censorware software is horrible. It's pretty funny when the adults can't get their work done due to the
"security measures" in place, while the kids go to all the xxx/porn/warez sites--maybe they aren't even interested in
them, maybe it's just the challenge.
Remember, folks. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. And people's "intentions" seem to be getting better
all the time...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I kinda like that, actually.
:)
Good Woz quote, too.
I don't know whether to admire you know, or tell you to piss off, now. Maybe I should have asked HAL for his opinion...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
To all those people who claim the article had no substance:
STOP RUNNING IT THROUGH THE PREPROCESSOR!
The proper way to view the article is with a web browser. You're not supposed to download it to article.c, and run 'cc -E article.c' to read the article. (and if you do, at least use the proper definitions for your situation, and remember that all comments will be stripped)
Anyhow, I thought it was a cute gimmick. And isn't that enough for Salon, sometimes?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.