I never thought of Open Source as freeing the R&D department from the marketing department, but that seems to be quite true. It also explains why Microsoft seems so afraid of truly embracing Open Source.
I'm not in high school, but I'm sure a lot of Linux advocates are. I don't care what someone's 'nick' is, or what they put in their documentation. I worship Linus Torvalds and Future Crew, because they can write good code, and I curse Microsoft because they screw everything up too much...
Oh, and I read the column, but I don't agree that the 'slashdot community' should admit to wrongdoing. *I* didn't do anything wrong. Here you are confusing the actions of individuals with that of a group. The 'slashdot community' isn't very organized, but we are, each of us, responsible for our own actions. And this could very well be the work of a "rotten few", but unfortunately users come in a sort of pyramid. At the top, there are the gods, the developers. Below that, you have the speakers, the well-known activists, the kernel hackers, the people who write major applications. Then you have the early adherents, the sysadmins, the people who write small applications... eventually you get to the newbies, and there are a *lot* more of them than there are of the rest of us.
I only really started learning about UNIX in 1994 or so, before then I was doomed to reimplement it on DOS (I wrote commands that worked like 'which' and 'df' and 'du', in Pascal, actually)... I found out about Linux in 1995, and only really started using it in 1996 or so... However, I'd consider myself to be a longtime veteran when I look at the people in the community now... this is that pyramid effect at work.
I read slashdot before we had user accounts, so my user # is 1020. I guess that makes me part of this community for a long time.:) I see by your number that you're in the thirty-thousands or so, which shows how many accounts we must have now...
I'm sure there are a lot of newbies out there, but judging by their experience, I'm sure I'd consider most of them to be pretty low on the pyramid... The problem is trying to explain this to who they flame, because we can't train them all. Most of them will learn eventually, on their own, but by then there will be far more of them. This is the same thing that happened to the emulator scene, and it practically crumbled under the weight of the d00dZ who wanted their RoMz.
Also, the columnist didn't really fess up, all he said was that he had gotten *one* fact wrong, and exaggerated the rest, and he portrayed Linux/Open Source advocates as either raving lunatic crackers or flaky activists, which I think most of us aren't. Therefore, I'm not sorry he got flamed. Maybe I would be if he tried to revise his article to make it more accurate... Even if I didn't agree with his opinion, I could at least respect him if he got his facts right and tried to have an original thought or two.
Re:Is there any reason to stay with the 2.0.x seri
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Linux 2.0.37 Released
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mpg123 comes with RedHat 6.0. Install the RPM, it worked fine for me.
I don't love RedHat packages, but if you use them in RedHat, it makes life easier. If you don't use them, use SlackWare, or just compile anything.
Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of well-designed computers...
Trademarking this term is an obvious attempt to protect its meaning, which is a very important thing in the computer industry, or any technical field.
In a perfect world, a 17" monitor would be SEVENTEEN inches on the diagonal, a 56K modem could transfer 7KB/s, a Java applet would run on all platforms with any Java Virtual Machine, a 300Mhz processor wouldn't have a performance rating, but would actually run at 300 million cycles/second, etc., etc.
Standards *need* strict definitions to protect them from marketing. In my mind, Open Source doesn't mean "free", or "I get to see some source code", it means compatible with the DFSG--the Debian Free Software Guidelines. That interpretation is a strict interpretation on what Open or free means. It doesn't mean certified by the Open Consortium, or it's freeware. In fact, if it didn't sound so stupid, I'd suggest replacing the term 'Open Source' with DFSG-compatible, because it gets across the meaning.
...but here I am foiled yet again by the forces of marketing and hype, which you so clearly represent. I guess I'd be happy enough if we just had an RFC defining what Open Source is. (I haven't read them all, so maybe we do...:)
Office costs somewhere around $300-$700 depending on what you purchase, and this gives you a random number of Office applications with different features depending on how much money you want to throw away.
However, Office wants you to have all the other Microsoft programs you can get to comfortably integrate together...
Code-signing is no excuse, anyone can *sign* code, and I'm sure people will forge signatures next. And "you're stupid enough to run a macro-ridden file" when you have a Word document that *needs* Macros! It's a feature Office provides, and some people actually use it for something other than viruses. If you want to add a feature into a product, and not implement it properly, and think that your users are *stupid* for trying to use the features YOU gave them, then you deserve everything you get.
I *know* Microsoft doesn't care about their customers. Either that, or they can't identify properly written software, or have no qualms about shipping bad software, charging for the fixes, and adding new bugs. If that's your definition of caring for the customer, then Microsoft must REALLY care.
First, admit that the only reason for 'including' all that stuff you don't *need* for an Office suite is to encourage you to buy the FULL versions of all of those nifty new expensive Microsoft products. Like everyone has already said "the first hit's free"...
Now, I'll tell you what's "included" in that full version: the only office suite to promote macro viruses.
That's right, folks, the dumbest security hole of the '90s award goes to... Microsoft! No surprise there. The Goodtimes virus used to be a joke until they came along.
Also, I believe if I wanted to try Wordperfect for Linux, it would cost me... nothing. And what about Word for Linux? Oh, I'm sorry, it isn't supported. Well, that's okay, since Internet Explorer on a SPARC runs better under *SoftWindows* than it does natively! It's more stable, too, which just goes to show that Microsoft can't port anything properly either!
I think I'll just stick to StarOffice and Linux. Even if it is free, I'd rather support what I believe in, good free software with open standards, and people who care about quality and helping their fellow man. If I thought Microsoft cared about their customers, or produced superior software, then maybe I'd pay for or seriously use one of their products. The only use I've found for Windows so far is for playing videos recorded with proprietary CODECs, and hopefully MPEG video and DVD's will make this nearly obselete.
It's really ugly to lots of people in the community too.
Actually, here's a good topic for a slashdot poll:
The Open Source Trademark Should Be Owned By:
Bruce Eric SPI OSI The Open Source Community etc., etc.
Personally, I think it should be jointly owned by all developers / programmers / companies who release program(s) complying to the DFSG... i.e. those who support the right to freedom of code, as it were.
This sounds like another reason to run a Unix clone instead of actual Unix...:)
I'd love to have Unix commands under NT, and I've used (half-assed) packages that tried to do that, but unfortunately, my next questions are "why is this so slow", "why are these files so big", etc, etc. It's about as pretty as Unix on top of VMS (and scarily related), (or like running all your Unix commands in DOS, with DOS extenders in the binaries, except slower...) and it reaffirms my commitment in Linux.
Also, isn't X probably one of the *only* "successful consortium developed open standards-based technologies"? Especially when you consider what the "Open Group" must consider an open standard... (or is that Open standard? Maybe it just means that they made it... hmm.)
NT is the only reason these servers were quad-processor PIII/500's, and NT's resource hogging is exactly the reason that I don't run it on my personal box. I have it running on a P133, and I laugh at it sometimes.
If I had a high-end server, I'd try Linux and NT again, and... well, I bet I'd be laughing at NT pretty soon. It isn't exactly impressive running on uniprocessor PII/400's, but the bluescreens are cute. Really, how much CPU does an OS need just to crash?:)
:) That Linus thread in your sig is incredibly funny. I need to read more news...
Hey, xmame compiles fine on Linux and Solaris, we don't need any of this to play Dig Dug.:)
I don't see why linux binary compatibility should be such a big thing for Solaris. On SPARCs, the binary-only applications already get ported, so all this sounds like is Sun further giving up their commitment to x86 Solaris, and leaving the market to Linux, while doing a half-assed job of trying to keep their existing customers.
That's ok, since I run Linux, and I've seen x86 Solaris, I think this is all pretty silly anyhow. However, it's nice to see iBCS going the other way around now, we know we've won in being an accepted Unix, I just didn't know we'd be *the* accepted Unix.:)
All I'm saying is that if Apple weren't so arrogant in the first place, and let other vendors sell their hardware, I would have supported that, and bought their hardware. Or if they offered their systems at reasonable prices, preferably without MacOS I would have considered it. So they lost my business, how are they supposed to make money that way?
The bottom line is, I don't support arrogance. Anyone who thinks that their hardware or software is so "insanely great" that I should pay extra for the priviledge of using it deserves the shafting they get when I and other unblinded people don't buy their products and support the alternatives. This is also why I don't run Windows, I'm not about to pay for an OS that sucks so badly.
Also, MacOS is free and sucks, MacOS X is not free, and probably does not suck, because Apple didn't develop it. The PowerPC doesn't suck either, because Apple didn't develop it either. In fact, if IBM or Motorola marketed it better, I might have bought it. However, Motorola just makes the chips, and IBM can't market a paper bag.
Therefore, I have a K6/300 that runs Linux, and I can laugh at Apple. Their prices suck in comparison, and their machines are annoying and ugly. Much of this is opinion, which is why I can laugh at them.:)
Heh. If the Windows 2000 source code was actually stolen, it'd be invaluable to Bill. He'd have a decent excuse for the delays in NT5 other than "We can't program worth sh*t"...
Just like Apple and Copland, this will set Microsoft back some, and they'd love to have something decent to blame besides themselves.
In Mitnick's case, the government is still looking for a scapegoat. All of this already happened in The Hacker Crackdown of 1990, stupid public documents were overvalued then. Today, people don't understand what "stolen" means.
Mitnick has always been an annoying dude, but never a 'dangerous hacker'... I just wish he'd grown out of it earlier for his sake, or at least learned not to get caught.
All the really famous 'hackers' are famous because they got caught, which is pitiful. The only real hackers amongst them were probably RTM (since The Internet Worm was basically an accident) and maybe some of the real virus writers like The Dark Avenger, but they never got really famous.
However, I still have much sympathy for Mitnick. No matter how stupid he acted, he still hasn't acted stupider than our government has in handling this. They were so paranoid about giving him *anything* electronic, thinking that he was MacGuyver or something. He should be recompensed for the stupidity he had to endure.:)
Heh, JWZ entertains me. Once you realize that all operating systems suck, it'll start to make sense.
Also, I've never made that much money working on a software project, or known that much about X, or really *used* IRIX (although the big machines are really impressive) so I'm really not in a position to judge.
However, JWZ gets much respect for what he has managed to write under X, even though it sucks. (everyone knows about xdaliclock, and some people even use xscreensaver, especially with the new matrix mode, written by... guess who?)
According to BYTEMark Integer tests, you might as well buy a K6 instead of a PII, which is what I did, but that isn't what you'd want for games. In fact, if you believe id Software (I do, 'cause they're just that cool:) you wouldn't want a G3 for games, either.
I wouldn't want a G3 because of the Apple baggage: the extra price, the crappy OS that I'd just format, and the limited hardware support... but the chip looks nice. At least MacOS X is based around UNIX, but that will just make the price go up, because it's a commercial UNIX. Maybe the hardware support will eventually get better too, but I still don't like the design, the philosophy, the business model...
The only reason Apple would want to get in on Open Source this late in the game is to cash in on it, not to change their evil ways. If they really cared, then I could walk down to the store, and buy a cheap G3 from another company, preinstalled with Linux or BeOS or something, and have Apple's blessing as a hardware reseller. Yeah, right, not in this Universe. They'd be another Microsoft, if they thought they could pull it off.
However, when have minimum requirements ever been right? I have an old ZIP drive that lists a 386 as one of the requirements. Why? I don't know, maybe because they expect you to use Win '95 or something.:) It works fine on a 286 running DOS. In fact, that's a great use for a ZIP drive, transferring lots of files off of an old computer...
I also just got a TV card, which listed not just Windows '95, 20MB of RAM and whatnot as requirements, but also certain supported video cards (!)... it works great under Linux, with my (unlisted) cheap Trident card.
Really, I believe system requirements about as much as I believe benchmarks, or Apple press releases. In all cases, only real usage will give you the answers you need.
Yep. Last time when they did a Netware 5 vs. Linux comparison, here was the server:
Our server was outfitted with a 266MHz Pentium II processor, 64MB of memory, and a single 4GB IDE disk.
Bandwidth? 100Mbps. Why not include NT? Probably because it runs like a dog on that hardware. However, if you throw enough money at it, you get the funky Mindcraft configuration benchmark, which is what they did this time.
I would *love* to see them run a comparison of Linux on reasonable hardware (like the configuration shown above, or a little better) and then everything else. Call it, maybe, servers for under $2000. Even if you ignore the cost of NT Licensing, NT still loses.
Um... do you mean NT4SP4, because SP5 does not exist...
I've never seen a load higher than 1.00 from a process gone awry, and certainly not on a recent distribution. What were you doing?
And yes, I like benchmarks, especially when they coincide to real-world tasks, unlike this benchmark. (why would I run Solaris on Intel? why would I get four Pentium ]|[/500's with four network cards in one box to serve static pages? I'd have a huge networked game of Quake ]|[, and play it locally as well, of course. Benchmark that.:)
If I remember correctly,.slp had options for supporting the other three, and alien can convert the others. This isn't perfect, but it's better.
Really, any of the package formats get the job done in their given distribution. It would be nice, however, if we had a consistent interface for the packages, some kind of database that we could all agree upon. At the moment there are probably more.rpm's available than anything else, but obviously we could change that if needed, with the tools we have now.
I'm more interested in seeing window managers and widgets/toolkits supported as themes or resources. The more we can make all the applications on the system look the same (and look like whatever we want) the less people whine about not having a consistent interface. I think we should be able to have a consistent interface that can look like *anything we want it to look like*.:)
Photomosaics are ascii-art or ANSI art, except that they use little images instead of text. The same concept applies: make up a palette entry for each tile, dither the picture to the palette entries, and look up some good tiles. That's really it.
Actually, I just got a TV card, and I've been capturing pictures... I could do it from porn movies, but I'd rather do it from Transformers: The Movie.:) Yep, a photomosaic app for Linux sounds good right about now. Who's with me?
Thanks, that was a good, fair reply. I admit that some of the things I said were a bit troll-like in nature, but I like to see people think before they spout off.:)
I realize that BeOS does "persistent" multi-threading, and I'm sure that makes the SMP a lot finer, assuming that your task benefits from this, and the syncronization doesn't slow things down.
However, UNIX really designs for this from the start. You don't have to use threads, fork should work fine too, but sometimes threads are theoretically more efficient (though not as portable IMO) if done correctly. Actually, you can run commands in the background, or use commands that do this for you. The obvious one is 'make -j'...:) But yes, for large graphical operations, it would be good to make sure that your OS is using all the processors and video card hardware features, that speeds things up a lot.
I admit that X still has lots of cruft slowing it down, and there are projects to fix that, but generally it's fast enough for my needs. Since I don't do large, multimedia projects, and I don't have the hardware for it, I can't really compare them here though.
My favorite MS-DOS graphics app was Improces, it was shareware, and I never could find another app that did quite what that program did. It was only in 256 colors, but that's all we used back then...:) When DOS was created, digital video was sci-fi too, but it's easy to grab the processor, and the screeen, and play movies, assuming you have an app for it. X has DGA, which speeds up at least the screen-grabbing, and hopefully you'd have hardware for real movie-playing. (Did I mention I'm getting a TV card for my Linux box?:) However, for video editing, I'd have to find a good app, and I don't know what Linux has. I'll take your word for it here that it doesn't support it as well, because there seems to be less need for this sort of thing in the Linux community.
Well, if done properly, you *can* add stuff here and there to make it more "multimedia", I admit that sometimes this adds cruft and needs to be reworked, but that happens too. Huge and bloated actually seem to be synonymous with multimedia, but it has more requirements than the command line does, so that's expected. Unstable and inefficient... well, not in this case, I have yet to have *that* problem in Linux.
But I agree that if you have a tool that's designed for a specific task, it'll probably do better than a general-purpose tool. However, Linux is a really good general-purpose tool, and it even has a few specific purposes now, since people change and adapt it for new tasks. So it'll be interesting to see what happens here.
Of course, if I had the money, I'd try BeOS out, but since I'm running a one-processor system, I really doubt I'd see that many benefits over Linux.
Give me an example where *Solaris on x86* outperforms Linux on x86. Linux runs their binaries, and the kernel syscalls are generally faster. Sun hasn't really done much with x86 Solaris lately, and their market share there has been eaten by Linux. I wonder why... I'd use x86 Solaris as an alternative to SCO, but not to Linux.
Generally, it has been my experience that Linux performs faster and better on x86 than x86 Solaris can dream of. I would love to see objections. *Solaris on SPARC* works great for huge servers, with many processors, but that's not the question.
And Linux works for very large networks, like the Internet. Many ISP's use it. It also works well for clusters, like Beowulf clusters. The only thing that needs some work is support for multiple processors, and that's supposed to be better in 2.2 (I'm sure it's better than NT).
Linux on x86 has *massively* more driver support than x86 Solaris, and it's generally on par with WIndows NT, and probably better than Windows 2000. And sound isn't really necessary for a server, but it's a nice thing to have as an OS feature. I'm going to get a TV card for Linux...:)
Yes, I think Sun is doing something like that with Solaris, for non-commercial use, or something. It isn't very well publicized. But I was talking about the hardware that comes with your average SPARC. (because x86 Solaris isn't a viable option compared to Linux)
However, with the thin-client model, this UltraSPARC we use for a campus computer would be obselete. Cool.
Slashdot Mirror
I never thought of Open Source as freeing the R&D department from the marketing department, but that seems to be quite true. It also explains why Microsoft seems so afraid of truly embracing Open Source.
I'm not in high school, but I'm sure a lot of Linux advocates are. I don't care what someone's 'nick' is, or what they put in their documentation. I worship Linus Torvalds and Future Crew, because they can write good code, and I curse Microsoft because they screw everything up too much...
:) I see by your number that you're in the thirty-thousands or so, which shows how many accounts we must have now...
Oh, and I read the column, but I don't agree that the 'slashdot community' should admit to wrongdoing. *I* didn't do anything wrong. Here you are confusing the actions of individuals with that of a group. The 'slashdot community' isn't very organized, but we are, each of us, responsible for our own actions. And this could very well be the work of a "rotten few", but unfortunately users come in a sort of pyramid. At the top, there are the gods, the developers. Below that, you have the speakers, the well-known activists, the kernel hackers, the people who write major applications. Then you have the early adherents, the sysadmins, the people who write small applications... eventually you get to the newbies, and there are a *lot* more of them than there are of the rest of us.
I only really started learning about UNIX in 1994 or so, before then I was doomed to reimplement it on DOS (I wrote commands that worked like 'which' and 'df' and 'du', in Pascal, actually)... I found out about Linux in 1995, and only really started using it in 1996 or so... However, I'd consider myself to be a longtime veteran when I look at the people in the community now... this is that pyramid effect at work.
I read slashdot before we had user accounts, so my user # is 1020. I guess that makes me part of this community for a long time.
I'm sure there are a lot of newbies out there, but judging by their experience, I'm sure I'd consider most of them to be pretty low on the pyramid... The problem is trying to explain this to who they flame, because we can't train them all. Most of them will learn eventually, on their own, but by then there will be far more of them. This is the same thing that happened to the emulator scene, and it practically crumbled under the weight of the d00dZ who wanted their RoMz.
Also, the columnist didn't really fess up, all he said was that he had gotten *one* fact wrong, and exaggerated the rest, and he portrayed Linux/Open Source advocates as either raving lunatic crackers or flaky activists, which I think most of us aren't. Therefore, I'm not sorry he got flamed. Maybe I would be if he tried to revise his article to make it more accurate... Even if I didn't agree with his opinion, I could at least respect him if he got his facts right and tried to have an original thought or two.
mpg123 comes with RedHat 6.0. Install the RPM, it worked fine for me.
I don't love RedHat packages, but if you use them in RedHat, it makes life easier. If you don't use them, use SlackWare, or just compile anything.
Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of well-designed computers...
Trademarking this term is an obvious attempt to protect its meaning, which is a very important thing in the computer industry, or any technical field.
:)
In a perfect world, a 17" monitor would be SEVENTEEN inches on the diagonal, a 56K modem could transfer 7KB/s, a Java applet would run on all platforms with any Java Virtual Machine, a 300Mhz processor wouldn't have a performance rating, but would actually run at 300 million cycles/second, etc., etc.
Standards *need* strict definitions to protect them from marketing. In my mind, Open Source doesn't mean "free", or "I get to see some source code", it means compatible with the DFSG--the Debian Free Software Guidelines. That interpretation is a strict interpretation on what Open or free means. It doesn't mean certified by the Open Consortium, or it's freeware. In fact, if it didn't sound so stupid, I'd suggest replacing the term 'Open Source' with DFSG-compatible, because it gets across the meaning.
...but here I am foiled yet again by the forces of marketing and hype, which you so clearly represent. I guess I'd be happy enough if we just had an RFC defining what Open Source is. (I haven't read them all, so maybe we do...
Office costs somewhere around $300-$700 depending on what you purchase, and this gives you a random number of Office applications with different features depending on how much money you want to throw away.
However, Office wants you to have all the other Microsoft programs you can get to comfortably integrate together...
Code-signing is no excuse, anyone can *sign* code, and I'm sure people will forge signatures next. And "you're stupid enough to run a macro-ridden file" when you have a Word document that *needs* Macros! It's a feature Office provides, and some people actually use it for something other than viruses. If you want to add a feature into a product, and not implement it properly, and think that your users are *stupid* for trying to use the features YOU gave them, then you deserve everything you get.
I *know* Microsoft doesn't care about their customers. Either that, or they can't identify properly written software, or have no qualms about shipping bad software, charging for the fixes, and adding new bugs. If that's your definition of caring for the customer, then Microsoft must REALLY care.
Eight years ago, DOS was the dominant platform, I was writing in Borland Turbo Pascal, and Linux was just a gleam in Linus' eye.
:)
Now Windows is the dominant platform, I'm writing in SVGALIB/C, and Linux is huge! Borland may die, but their legacy will live on.
P.S. My favorite Linux programmer's editor is RHIDE. The Turbo Vision interface is so comfortable after years of programming in Turbo Pascal.
First, admit that the only reason for 'including' all that stuff you don't *need* for an Office suite is to encourage you to buy the FULL versions of all of those nifty new expensive Microsoft products. Like everyone has already said "the first hit's free"...
Now, I'll tell you what's "included" in that full version: the only office suite to promote macro viruses.
That's right, folks, the dumbest security hole of the '90s award goes to... Microsoft! No surprise there. The Goodtimes virus used to be a joke until they came along.
Also, I believe if I wanted to try Wordperfect for Linux, it would cost me... nothing. And what about Word for Linux? Oh, I'm sorry, it isn't supported. Well, that's okay, since Internet Explorer on a SPARC runs better under *SoftWindows* than it does natively! It's more stable, too, which just goes to show that Microsoft can't port anything properly either!
I think I'll just stick to StarOffice and Linux. Even if it is free, I'd rather support what I believe in, good free software with open standards, and people who care about quality and helping their fellow man. If I thought Microsoft cared about their customers, or produced superior software, then maybe I'd pay for or seriously use one of their products. The only use I've found for Windows so far is for playing videos recorded with proprietary CODECs, and hopefully MPEG video and DVD's will make this nearly obselete.
It's really ugly to lots of people in the community too.
Actually, here's a good topic for a slashdot poll:
The Open Source Trademark Should Be Owned By:
Bruce
Eric
SPI
OSI
The Open Source Community
etc., etc.
Personally, I think it should be jointly owned by all developers / programmers / companies who release program(s) complying to the DFSG... i.e. those who support the right to freedom of code, as it were.
This sounds like another reason to run a Unix clone instead of actual Unix... :)
I'd love to have Unix commands under NT, and I've used (half-assed) packages that tried to do that, but unfortunately, my next questions are "why is this so slow", "why are these files so big", etc, etc. It's about as pretty as Unix on top of VMS (and scarily related), (or like running all your Unix commands in DOS, with DOS extenders in the binaries, except slower...) and it reaffirms my commitment in Linux.
Also, isn't X probably one of the *only* "successful consortium developed open standards-based technologies"? Especially when you consider what the "Open Group" must consider an open standard... (or is that Open standard? Maybe it just means that they made it... hmm.)
The old data I had when I tried to run NT.
:)
NT is the only reason these servers were quad-processor PIII/500's, and NT's resource hogging is exactly the reason that I don't run it on my personal box. I have it running on a P133, and I laugh at it sometimes.
If I had a high-end server, I'd try Linux and NT again, and... well, I bet I'd be laughing at NT pretty soon. It isn't exactly impressive running on uniprocessor PII/400's, but the bluescreens are cute. Really, how much CPU does an OS need just to crash?
:) That Linus thread in your sig is incredibly funny. I need to read more news...
:)
:)
Hey, xmame compiles fine on Linux and Solaris, we don't need any of this to play Dig Dug.
I don't see why linux binary compatibility should be such a big thing for Solaris. On SPARCs, the binary-only applications already get ported, so all this sounds like is Sun further giving up their commitment to x86 Solaris, and leaving the market to Linux, while doing a half-assed job of trying to keep their existing customers.
That's ok, since I run Linux, and I've seen x86 Solaris, I think this is all pretty silly anyhow. However, it's nice to see iBCS going the other way around now, we know we've won in being an accepted Unix, I just didn't know we'd be *the* accepted Unix.
All I'm saying is that if Apple weren't so arrogant in the first place, and let other vendors sell their hardware, I would have supported that, and bought their hardware. Or if they offered their systems at reasonable prices, preferably without MacOS I would have considered it. So they lost my business, how are they supposed to make money that way?
:)
The bottom line is, I don't support arrogance. Anyone who thinks that their hardware or software is so "insanely great" that I should pay extra for the priviledge of using it deserves the shafting they get when I and other unblinded people don't buy their products and support the alternatives. This is also why I don't run Windows, I'm not about to pay for an OS that sucks so badly.
Also, MacOS is free and sucks, MacOS X is not free, and probably does not suck, because Apple didn't develop it. The PowerPC doesn't suck either, because Apple didn't develop it either. In fact, if IBM or Motorola marketed it better, I might have bought it. However, Motorola just makes the chips, and IBM can't market a paper bag.
Therefore, I have a K6/300 that runs Linux, and I can laugh at Apple. Their prices suck in comparison, and their machines are annoying and ugly. Much of this is opinion, which is why I can laugh at them.
Heh. If the Windows 2000 source code was actually stolen, it'd be invaluable to Bill. He'd have a decent excuse for the delays in NT5 other than "We can't program worth sh*t"...
:)
Just like Apple and Copland, this will set Microsoft back some, and they'd love to have something decent to blame besides themselves.
In Mitnick's case, the government is still looking for a scapegoat. All of this already happened in The Hacker Crackdown of 1990, stupid public documents were overvalued then. Today, people don't understand what "stolen" means.
Mitnick has always been an annoying dude, but never a 'dangerous hacker'... I just wish he'd grown out of it earlier for his sake, or at least learned not to get caught.
All the really famous 'hackers' are famous because they got caught, which is pitiful. The only real hackers amongst them were probably RTM (since The Internet Worm was basically an accident) and maybe some of the real virus writers like The Dark Avenger, but they never got really famous.
However, I still have much sympathy for Mitnick. No matter how stupid he acted, he still hasn't acted stupider than our government has in handling this. They were so paranoid about giving him *anything* electronic, thinking that he was MacGuyver or something. He should be recompensed for the stupidity he had to endure.
Heh, JWZ entertains me. Once you realize that all operating systems suck, it'll start to make sense.
Also, I've never made that much money working on a software project, or known that much about X, or really *used* IRIX (although the big machines are really impressive) so I'm really not in a position to judge.
However, JWZ gets much respect for what he has managed to write under X, even though it sucks. (everyone knows about xdaliclock, and some people even use xscreensaver, especially with the new matrix mode, written by... guess who?)
According to BYTEMark Integer tests, you might as well buy a K6 instead of a PII, which is what I did, but that isn't what you'd want for games. In fact, if you believe id Software (I do, 'cause they're just that cool :) you wouldn't want a G3 for games, either.
:) It works fine on a 286 running DOS. In fact, that's a great use for a ZIP drive, transferring lots of files off of an old computer...
I wouldn't want a G3 because of the Apple baggage: the extra price, the crappy OS that I'd just format, and the limited hardware support... but the chip looks nice. At least MacOS X is based around UNIX, but that will just make the price go up, because it's a commercial UNIX. Maybe the hardware support will eventually get better too, but I still don't like the design, the philosophy, the business model...
The only reason Apple would want to get in on Open Source this late in the game is to cash in on it, not to change their evil ways. If they really cared, then I could walk down to the store, and buy a cheap G3 from another company, preinstalled with Linux or BeOS or something, and have Apple's blessing as a hardware reseller. Yeah, right, not in this Universe. They'd be another Microsoft, if they thought they could pull it off.
However, when have minimum requirements ever been right? I have an old ZIP drive that lists a 386 as one of the requirements. Why? I don't know, maybe because they expect you to use Win '95 or something.
I also just got a TV card, which listed not just Windows '95, 20MB of RAM and whatnot as requirements, but also certain supported video cards (!)... it works great under Linux, with my (unlisted) cheap Trident card.
Really, I believe system requirements about as much as I believe benchmarks, or Apple press releases. In all cases, only real usage will give you the answers you need.
Yep. Last time when they did a Netware 5 vs. Linux comparison, here was the server:
Our server was outfitted with a 266MHz Pentium II processor, 64MB of memory, and a single 4GB IDE disk.
Bandwidth? 100Mbps. Why not include NT? Probably because it runs like a dog on that hardware. However, if you throw enough money at it, you get the funky Mindcraft configuration benchmark, which is what they did this time.
I would *love* to see them run a comparison of Linux on reasonable hardware (like the configuration shown above, or a little better) and then everything else. Call it, maybe, servers for under $2000. Even if you ignore the cost of NT Licensing, NT still loses.
Um... do you mean NT4SP4, because SP5 does not exist...
:)
I've never seen a load higher than 1.00 from a process gone awry, and certainly not on a recent distribution. What were you doing?
And yes, I like benchmarks, especially when they coincide to real-world tasks, unlike this benchmark. (why would I run Solaris on Intel? why would I get four Pentium ]|[/500's with four network cards in one box to serve static pages? I'd have a huge networked game of Quake ]|[, and play it locally as well, of course. Benchmark that.
If I remember correctly, .slp had options for supporting the other three, and alien can convert the others. This isn't perfect, but it's better.
.rpm's available than anything else, but obviously we could change that if needed, with the tools we have now.
:)
Really, any of the package formats get the job done in their given distribution. It would be nice, however, if we had a consistent interface for the packages, some kind of database that we could all agree upon. At the moment there are probably more
I'm more interested in seeing window managers and widgets/toolkits supported as themes or resources. The more we can make all the applications on the system look the same (and look like whatever we want) the less people whine about not having a consistent interface. I think we should be able to have a consistent interface that can look like *anything we want it to look like*.
Photomosaics are ascii-art or ANSI art, except that they use little images instead of text. The same concept applies: make up a palette entry for each tile, dither the picture to the palette entries, and look up some good tiles. That's really it.
:) Yep, a photomosaic app for Linux sounds good right about now. Who's with me?
Actually, I just got a TV card, and I've been capturing pictures... I could do it from porn movies, but I'd rather do it from Transformers: The Movie.
Neat! I would love to see that. Just the vague details are heartening. Now if they can teach a later model English, I'll be *really* impressed.
Thanks, that was a good, fair reply. I admit that some of the things I said were a bit troll-like in nature, but I like to see people think before they spout off. :)
:) But yes, for large graphical operations, it would be good to make sure that your OS is using all the processors and video card hardware features, that speeds things up a lot.
:) When DOS was created, digital video was sci-fi too, but it's easy to grab the processor, and the screeen, and play movies, assuming you have an app for it. X has DGA, which speeds up at least the screen-grabbing, and hopefully you'd have hardware for real movie-playing. (Did I mention I'm getting a TV card for my Linux box? :) However, for video editing, I'd have to find a good app, and I don't know what Linux has. I'll take your word for it here that it doesn't support it as well, because there seems to be less need for this sort of thing in the Linux community.
I realize that BeOS does "persistent" multi-threading, and I'm sure that makes the SMP a lot finer, assuming that your task benefits from this, and the syncronization doesn't slow things down.
However, UNIX really designs for this from the start. You don't have to use threads, fork should work fine too, but sometimes threads are theoretically more efficient (though not as portable IMO) if done correctly. Actually, you can run commands in the background, or use commands that do this for you. The obvious one is 'make -j'...
I admit that X still has lots of cruft slowing it down, and there are projects to fix that, but generally it's fast enough for my needs. Since I don't do large, multimedia projects, and I don't have the hardware for it, I can't really compare them here though.
My favorite MS-DOS graphics app was Improces, it was shareware, and I never could find another app that did quite what that program did. It was only in 256 colors, but that's all we used back then...
Well, if done properly, you *can* add stuff here and there to make it more "multimedia", I admit that sometimes this adds cruft and needs to be reworked, but that happens too. Huge and bloated actually seem to be synonymous with multimedia, but it has more requirements than the command line does, so that's expected. Unstable and inefficient... well, not in this case, I have yet to have *that* problem in Linux.
But I agree that if you have a tool that's designed for a specific task, it'll probably do better than a general-purpose tool. However, Linux is a really good general-purpose tool, and it even has a few specific purposes now, since people change and adapt it for new tasks. So it'll be interesting to see what happens here.
Of course, if I had the money, I'd try BeOS out, but since I'm running a one-processor system, I really doubt I'd see that many benefits over Linux.
Give me an example where *Solaris on x86* outperforms Linux on x86. Linux runs their binaries, and the kernel syscalls are generally faster. Sun hasn't really done much with x86 Solaris lately, and their market share there has been eaten by Linux. I wonder why... I'd use x86 Solaris as an alternative to SCO, but not to Linux.
:)
Generally, it has been my experience that Linux performs faster and better on x86 than x86 Solaris can dream of. I would love to see objections. *Solaris on SPARC* works great for huge servers, with many processors, but that's not the question.
And Linux works for very large networks, like the Internet. Many ISP's use it. It also works well for clusters, like Beowulf clusters. The only thing that needs some work is support for multiple processors, and that's supposed to be better in 2.2 (I'm sure it's better than NT).
Linux on x86 has *massively* more driver support than x86 Solaris, and it's generally on par with WIndows NT, and probably better than Windows 2000. And sound isn't really necessary for a server, but it's a nice thing to have as an OS feature. I'm going to get a TV card for Linux...
Yes, I think Sun is doing something like that with Solaris, for non-commercial use, or something. It isn't very well publicized. But I was talking about the hardware that comes with your average SPARC. (because x86 Solaris isn't a viable option compared to Linux)
However, with the thin-client model, this UltraSPARC we use for a campus computer would be obselete. Cool.
Thank you!
:)
Yes, Linux isn't big iron, Solaris is definitely better for that. Ultra-thin clients I think Linux might pull off better, but only time will tell.
And yeah, of course UNIX is better than NT.
Sorry, it's http://www.cyc.com.