Ever tryed installing something with dependancies?
Sure; that's why I use Debian. "apt-get install kword" would be all the Debian user needs, and I wouldn't fear walking my mom or anyone else through that. With RPM-based distros, however, your point is well-taken.
If you like to built quiet computers, probably you can recommend us a quiet fun!
I haven't found the perfect CPU fan yet.
I have used the Orb fans; the computer I'm typing this on has a Chrome Orb. The web site I bought it from claims it is 29 decibels, which is quieter than most, but that CPU fan is by far the loudest thing in this computer.
So I'm still looking. Here are my top contenders:
Silverado -- as reviewed on Tom's Hardware. But I don't know where to buy one (my web search found a place in England that sells them, but I don't know where to get one in the USA).
Thermalright SK6 -- an all-copper heat sink; you can put any 60mm fan you like on top. So, if I can find a really quiet 60mm fan, this would be a winner. Because it is copper, this heat sink really works; copper is better than aluminum.
Zelman CNPS3100g -- this heat sink is gold-plated copper, for maximum heat sinkage. It looks like a flower. It comes with a separate fan, which is said to be very quiet.
Now, as a rule, small fans with high RPMs will be noisier than big fans with lower RPMs. So my next computer will have a 120mm on the back, below the power supply. I'm hoping that if I put the Zelman on a Duron that I just might be able to get away with no CPU cooling fan; the 120mm fan might draw enough air over the Zelman to make it work. I can only try, and if it doesn't work, I'll go with a CPU cooling fan after all. We'll see.
I heard that in a month or two there will be heat sinks available that use 80mm fans instead of 60mm fans! Since bigger, slower fans are quieter than smaller, faster fans, in theory an 80mm fan should be able to be very quiet. And I have some very quiet 80mm fans (the so-called "Silencer" fan from PC Power and Cooling). The Silencer fan uses a hard drive power connector though, and I'd rather use a 3-pin connector (with tach for the motherboard to monitor the fan). Still, the Silencer shows how quiet an 80mm fan can be.
There is a gadget called the Digital Doc 5 that mounts in a 5.25" drive bay, and controls multiple fans. It can be set to keep an eye on the temperature, and turn on more fans if it goes too high. So perhaps I can set up the Zelman with its fan, but its fan will default to being off; and if the fan is needed, the Digital Doc 5 will turn it on.
I try to build very quiet computers. I hate computer noise, and the cooling fans are the worst.
This new Duron dissipates 41 Watts typical, 46 Watts maximum; a 1.4 GHz Thunderbird dissipates 65 Watts typical, 72 Watts maximum, or about 60% more heat. (Numbers from the AMD web site.)
Less heat means a better chance of making the computer really quiet. Instead of a noisy high-volume cooling fan for the heat sink, I can use a quieter low-volume cooling fan.
The mobile version is even tastier: only about 24 Watts for the 900 MHz version. I would drool for a MicroATX board with a couple of mobile Durons on it running SMP!
the Feds should fund the development of an operating system and office suite.
One of your points is that it wouldn't take very much money, by government standards. And that is true.
But just because government is already spending piles of money it shouldn't spend, doesn't make it right to have government spend even more money it shouldn't.
You know, safe cars are important. Instead of letting the car makers come up with safe cars, maybe the federal government should spend a few bombers worth of money on safe cars? And I hate it when little children fall into swimming pools. Should the federal government spend money on developing a really good fence to put around swimming pools? Just because something is good and worthwhile, doesn't mean that it is appropriate to have the federal government spend money on it. There is no end to cool projects they could fund, and if I approve of them doing the one I like, I have no moral grounds to disapprove of them doing the ones I don't like.
Besides, I would hate to see a free software project made into a pork-barrel project. It would not be pretty.
One of the problems: government loves attaching little strings to the money. Federal money for software development! But 60% of it must be spent in Senator Kennedy's district. And the new products have to be approved by a comittee that will check it to make sure none of the messages offend anyone. (And I mean anyone.) And the armed forces will make up a 10,000 page document of requirements that the program must meet, and it won't be shipped until it meets them all, and the requirements will be continually updated... the whole thing would be a nightmare.
It is possible for government to do things quickly and efficiently, but that's not the way to bet!
Now, an idea I would approve of: require all federal offices to gradually phase out proprietary software and phase in free software, over (say) the next 10 years. If a department finds that the free software doesn't meet its needs, it can fund developers to add the missing features. 10 years is very generous; they could do it much sooner than that if motivated.
One thing that bugs me: when a program (e.g. Nautilus) builds a thumbnail for an image file, the thumbnail isn't attached to the file, it is stashed somewhere (e.g. in a hidden directory called ".thumbnails" or something like that). This is a hack.
It's worse when you have multiple programs that want thumbnails; there isn't a standard yet and you get multiple thumbnails.
What I really want is some metadata attached to the image file, and the thumbnail in there. Then when you copy or move the file, the thumbnail goes along. And of course we need a standard so all the programs that want thumbnails will all do it the same way.
If copyright were abolished, both reverse engineering and redistribution would be safe and legal.
I say again: this isn't enough for the FSF, or else they would be content with BSD-style licenses. They want everyone to release source to everything.
Vendors might even return to publishing software once they notice public decompilations of their binaries are getting improvements that can't be readily merged into the proprietary source.
I'm sorry, but it is a decidedly nontrivial task to decompile something like Microsoft Word, and then recompile it, and add features. It would be far, far easier to start up a competing product. The above comment is complete fantasy.
It's just funny to me that *laws* are coersion, but market operations are not coersion.
The coercion of laws: break the law, and men with guns (the police) come and take you away. They throw you in prison. Resisting can get you hurt or even killed (depends on how strongly you resist).
The ocercion of the market: The product you want to buy might be expensive.
Is it just me, or is the second one less dangerous?
Now, we don't have a pure market; we have government mixed in. Government can use laws to prop up a business, and then you get both types of coercion at once; this can be a very bad thing, I well agree. But it's hard to see how a company can really coerce anyone in a truly free market.
The most important difference between a market and a law: you can choose not to participate in a market. You can decide to forget about computers and just use a typewriter, if computers get bad enough; but a bad law is not something you can easily avoid. And a dumb company will go out of business, sooner or later, but a dumb law can hang around on the books forever.
Libertarians like me argue that free markets tend to be better for freedom, overall, than heavily regulated markets. This doesn't mean all government interference in all markets is always bad; it's just mostly that way.
So let's let all the powerful monopolies and oligopolies incorporate arbitrary licensing schemes into every commercial transaction of semi-durable goods, rather than selling it outright.
In the short run, the powerful companies can be very annoying if they do this. In the long run, they will go out of business, or change their ways. IBM used to have a death grip over the business computer market; it was not government, but the free market in computers, that broke IBM's stranglehold. These days IBM is actually behaving pretty well.
Now, if a company can get a govenment-enforced monopoly, and combine it with onerous licensing requirements, that would really suck. But libertarians aren't big fans of government-enforced monopolies.
steveha
Re:What are the weakest parts of Linux?
on
IBM Wants Linux
·
· Score: 2
Linux doesn't have STREAMS
Could you please explain STREAMS, or at least point me to some documentation? I'm not sure what you are talking about.
Would this be a file-system thing allowing multiple data chunks in a single file? (Because if so, I remember seeing a post from Linus saying he wanted Linux to be able to deal with files like that. He wants you to be able to, for example, mount an NTFS file system and fully access all files correctly.)
P.S. I did do a web search, but the results were split 50/50 between pages saying "Linux doesn't have streams" and pages about streaming multimedia. Nowhere was there a "this is what streams are all about" page, that I found; if you know of one, just point to it and I'll be happy. Thanks for your time.
That's just a temporary hack of the current system, employed while working for the ultimate goal: the abolishment of copyrights.
If the FSF does get copyright discarded, they will want something in its place that requires the release of source code. If you know any way to prevent Microsoft, Corel, etc. from keeping their source code secret just by getting rid of copyright, please explain it to me.
There was a time when we knew that no one owned the earth, that we were merely stewards of it.
And during that time, we hunted down and ate all the Woolly Mammoths: Yum! Tasty!
This "primitive people were so much nobler" meme is fatuous.
Or you can just wait until MegaConglomoCorp owns all the air and charges you a fee to breath.
Because of the rigid definition of flerbage, we can plainly see that the situation you define is in fact a reduction in flerbage; thus ESR is opposed to MegaConglomoCorp being able to imprison or kill you if you fail to pay for breathing.
The Network Effect means that my flerbage is certainly decreased in the case of proprietary software.
Not so. The reason he coined the term "flerbage" was so he could be very specific about what it means, and you cannot argue that even network effect proprietary software decreases flerbage. How does MS Windows take your life, your property, or your time without your consent?
By working in a business where you have customers who want to use Windows, you are making it your business to interoperate with Windows, so at some level you are consenting to what is going on. But you are always free to say "To heck with this", walk away, and do something else to make money. You could even write your own software that competes with Microsoft.
Sure, the market can't put me in "prison" with "guns" but it sure feels like it when I don't have any *actual* choice.
You always have an actual choice. You could run nothing but Linux, for example. If customers want you to help them do something with Windows, you are free to tell them you won't do that.
In any event, if you look at the long term, even network effects aren't enough to ensure that Windows will plague you forever. Look at how good SAMBA is. It would take force of government (patents or whatever) to block free software from full Windows compatability; and EMS won't be in favor of that.
History has shown that, unless government holds them in place, monopolies don't last forever. The free market always means competition, which can bring down a monopoly. But the free market can be both slow and messy. The law regulating monopolies in the US is intended to keep things from getting messy, but sometimes the cure works out worse than the disease. Libertarians like ESR and me are very suspicious of attempts to use laws to force companies to behave a certain way; it doesn't always work out as you had hoped.
I couldn't find anything in the Kuhn/RMS piece suggesting other licenses be made illegal. No FSF activity that I know of works towards such a goal.
ESR didn't state as fact that Kuhn and RMS want other licenses to be made illegal; he openly asked the question, and challenged them to respond.
This is a master stroke. If they say no, then they pretty much have wiped out the basis of their whole attack on Tim O'Reilly; if they say yes, they have admitted that they are way out there on the fringe.
I predict they will refuse to answer either yes or no; any answer they give will be long and complicated.
Instead, they argue that choice of license is insufficiently free to be called free. [...] What's wrong with that?
Dude, the topic here is that Kuhn and RMS attacked Tim O'Reilly. In so many words, they said his idea of freedom was actually power over others.
He should call it "powerplay zero" in contrast with our "freedom zero".
ESR has posed a legitimate question.
By the way, RMS wrote, right in the
GNU Manifesto,
these words: "a person who enforces a copyright [on software] is harming society as a whole both materially and spiritually". He also proposed that a "software tax" could collected by government and used to support software development. Given what he wrote in the GNU Manifesto and in other places, I believe that if RMS had the chance to outlaw non-GPL licenses, he would do it.
The truth is that even if people strongly dislike the license terms of Microsoft software, they will still buy it because in many cases, there is no alternative.
In the short term. But long term, if people strongly dislike the license terms of MS software, they will move to something else. Before GNOME and KDE, Linux really wasn't an acceptable alternative to Windows; now it is. Unless MS can use patents or something to lock down a feature, that feature can and will appear in free software.
So ESR's point stands: any particular developer cannot cause great harm to others by choosing a particular license. The users can choose to walk away. And if you ask ESR whether the government should help MS lock down features so no one else can implement them, trust me: he won't be in favor of it.
the FSF is not asking for a law banning proprietary licenses; rather, they are asking that we do away with the idea of 'license' altogether.
Not so. The FSF wants licenses that force all developers to always divulge all source code they write. This is very different from doing away with the idea of a license.
If you were correct, the FSF would love the BSD license. To a first approximation, the BSD license is what you described: no limits at all on what you can do. The FSF says that is not enough.
The official line is that the DVD is finishing the film.
Oh, I hope so. Specifically, I hope the "Doug Trumbull" ending gets put on!
I read in some SF fan magazine that they had an ending planned where, at the very end when V'Ger makes a bright flash of light and disappears, V'Ger first spit out all the stuff it ate, including a Federation space station and a few Klingon battlecruisers. The Klingons, noticing that they are now right next to Earth and all Earth defenses are at the moment shut down, start attacking things, and a pitched battle (Enterprise vs. 3 Klingon cruisers) ensues. Enterprise wins, but damage is heavy and they have to eject the saucer!
I doubt they can finish it that far because I don't think any of the scenes involving actors were ever filmed. And the whole thing could have just been a rumor. But it would have been cool...
I guess this is the point a lot of people don't get. Most people buy Macs because we like the OS.
But I do get this. That's why I claimed Apple was able to force its customers to do things, within limits; people wanted to be able to run Apple software, and they were willing to buy Apple stuff to run it, even when the Apple stuff was more expensive.
I hate to break it to you, but they didn't write Word or Excel, they bought them. If you look it up,
I don't have to look it up. From 1990 to 1996 I worked at Microsoft, and all the time I was there I worked on Word in one way or another.
Word was written at Microsoft. It was on the Mac before it was on Windows, true, but it was on DOS before that. Excel was written at Microsoft. Before Excel, Microsoft shipped an earlier Mac spreadsheet called Multiplan; that was based on DOS Multiplan. DOS Word versions 1 through 5 were all written with a Multiplan-like UI; DOS Word 5.5 and 6.0 had a GUI-like text interface based on COW (Character Oriented Windows, and yes people at Microsoft can have a sense of humor).
M$ asked Apple if they could license the GUI elements for a PC version.
Sorry, wrong. Bill Gates had been to PARC, just like Steve Jobs, and he thought GUI was the way the future would be, just like Steve Jobs, and his company had its very own GUI project, just like Steve Jobs's company. Apple very much wanted Microsoft applications on the Mac, to help establish the legitimacy of the platform. Microsoft agreed, with one caveat: if MS supported the Mac, then Apple had to agree not to sue MS over Windows. In other words, first Apple agreed not to sue MS; then Apple sued MS over the very thing they agreed not to sue over. Once upon a time I was a fan of Apple, but not after that.
M$ was supposed to stop using the Apple code after Windows 1.0, but didn't, which brought on the first Apple law suit.
Sorry, wrong. Apple sued Microsoft under the theory that Windows infringed the "look and feel" of MacOS. After a long lawsuit, Apple lost. The judge ruled that "look and feel" doesn't work, and then he went down the hundreds of items Apple listed as infringing. Each one was found to be something permitted to Microsoft by the agreement, with the exception of about 12. Then he went down that much shorter list. Each was found to be something Apple didn't own (something invented at Xerox PARC). With literally nothing left of Apple's case, the judge ruled for MS.
As it should have been, IMHO; Apple was clearly in the wrong. And if Apple had won, we wouldn't have either KDE or GNOME today; Apple would own GUI, and we would all have to buy Macs if we wanted GUI.
so we had that historic moment when M$ "invested" a large chunk of money in Apple, which we all know was an out of court settlement for patent infringement.
The only time I know that MS put a huge chunk of money into Apple was many years later, right after Jobs came on board for the second time. Apple was in danger of total collapse. What Microsoft got for its money was Internet Explorer shipped on every Mac, and some say they also got a rival propped up (with no Apple left, MS would look even more like a monopoly). Is there some other time I missed, or are you just smoking crack?
Apple has quit a bit more patents then M$ does also, by the way.
Actually, while I was at MS, one day they announced that the wanted everyone to start trying to patent things. The announcement said that historically MS was never much interested in patents, but now that patents were starting to be used as weapons, it was necessary for MS to put together a patent portfolio in self-defense. You may think that MS was lying even to its own workers, but I don't think so. In any event, MS is patenting just as much as anyone else, these days.
You still see early Apple GUI things like the tool bar from MacPaint in Photoshop etc.
True. And you still see drop-down menus and pop-up dialogs from Xerox PARC everywhere. And you still see combo drop-down pick list and text entry boxes, like MS introduced in Word, everywhere. And you still see the formatting toolbars MS introduced in Word everywhere.
This article contained a lot of straw-man attacks against Drexler's ideas. But it missed the point. K. Eric Drexler never said that his vision of little mechanical machines is the only way to go about things.
For example, Drexler focused on mechanical computers, with little rods moving back and forth. Does he think nanoscale quantum computers, driven by electricity, can never work? No, but for his book he wanted to focus on things he could be sure would work. Because nature includes little machines, he was sure you could use little machines to build things like tiny computers.
His first book,
Engines of Creation,
is pretty much about existance proofs. He figures you can probably make an assembler with just 150 million atoms, so then he assumes it will take a billion atoms (just to be on the safe side) for the rest of the discussion.
And in his discussion of how we will get these magic assemblers, he said that one possible route was biological: use tailored cells to make new cells that are closer to what we want, and iterate. He isn't ignoring biology, or reality.
The article is weak. Read Drexler's book instead; it's online so you can read it now for free.
Within some limits, you can. In the late 80's the Mac had a stable, working, easy-to-use GUI; meanwhile PCs had character-based apps, and Windows was a joke. Anyone who wanted a GUI computer had only one reasonable choice, the Mac.
And Apple ruthlessly exploited this fact. They charged the highest margins in the industry; they forced people to buy Macs with Apple hard drives, even though people wanted to buy third-party hard drives that cost less; and they refused to license out their ROMs or OS to anyone, preventing third-party computers from under-cutting their price. They maximized short-term profit, and then when Windows 3.0 shipped (the first version of Windows that didn't suck too horribly) the customers started deserting Apple and going to PCs.
If Apple had licensed out the ROMs and OS, they would have made less money per customer but they could have had oh so many more customers. They had GUI working great long before MS; they could have owned the computer market and Windows could have been an also-ran. But because they chose short-term profit over long-term--to be blunt, because they decided to rape their own customers for maximum dollars--they now have a tiny slice of the market.
Another moronic point
And the POINT is... in your EYE!!
you guys see the mac has something you dont (usb, 3.5 inch drives, TV on the desktop to name a few) and you guys go running to the nearest forum to try and boost your crumbling self-confidence
Okay, let's go over it again; see if you can keep up. The original poster said that we have convenient 3.5" floppy disks now because Apple used them. I pointed out that we have them because people wanted them. I never said anywhere that Apple never gave the users what they want; you might have noticed that I said the PowerBook was a home run, exactly what the users wanted, just years too late.
its clear you dislike macs.
Not so; I dislike paying too much for a computer that will not perform as well as the computers I build for myself. If I could affordably build my own Mac, I might... I'd run Linux on it, though.
you actually sound as if you beleive everything MS tells you is true.
Dude, you are hearing what you want to hear. Go back and read what I wrote. I'll tell you what I believe: I believe what I remember from those years, since I was around, playing with computers and reading the news.
What I want now, more than anything, are open computers (where I can build them and fix them myself) running open software (Linux, GNOME, etc.) Your attempt to paint me as a mindless MS fanatic is amusing.
Actually Palm's first product was Grafitti for Newton.
True. Palm's original idea was to be the Microsoft of PDAs -- i.e. they would not build a PDA, they would release software that ran on everyone else's PDAs. But everyone else's PDAs sucked, so sales of PDAs were low, so there was only a small market to sell Graffiti into, so they weren't making enough money. One day Jeff Hawkins was complaining, saying everyone was doing PDAs wrong. A member of the board for Palm was there and said (paraphrased from memory) "Let me get this straight. You say everyone else is doing it wrong, but you know how to do it right?" Hawkins said yes. "Then let's do it." And that was how Palm decided to get into the PDA business itself.
A Newton with grafitti is far better IMHO than a Palm.
Hey, if you're happy, that's great. A Newton doesn't fit well in my pocket, and that matters to me. I think it is too bad Steve Jobs betrayed you and all other Newton owners.
The home PC. Would it have happened? Yes, but Apple was there first with some innovations
I'll grant you this one. Woz deserves the credit, though, more than "Apple Computer".
what about the CD drive?
Ummm... Microsoft pushed it just as hard as Apple. Even before MS had a decent GUI, they were shipping "Bookshelf", a CD with reference works on it. MS hosted an annual CD-ROM conference, back when few people had CD-ROM drives. Apple had it on all their machines first, but that was just because they had control over the platform and were able to force the customers to buy things.
And while we are on removeable media, Apple essentially standardized the little 3.25 in hard plastic floppy.
This is the benefit of not having an installed base. PCs needed to ship with 5.25" drives because that was the standard. Over time 3.5" drives won against 5.25" drives because people wanted them, not because Apple used them. (And I find the use of the word "standardized" sort of interesting, since Apple used a weird disk format for years.)
The first real portable computers.
Good grief, man! Here is where you lost it! PC users had real portables for years before Mac users! Mac users were begging Apple to ship decent portables, and years went by without any, and then Apple shipped the giant and heavy Mac Portable, which actually sold a few since people were so desperate but it wasn't what the users wanted. Yes, the PowerBook was a perfect home run; it was exactly what the users wanted... years late. Don't you remember how third-party companies were buying complete Macs, taking them apart to get the ROM chips out, and building laptops with the ROM chips? These laptops cost $7,000 or so each, since the cost-of-goods for each one included an entire Mac at retail! Summary: no, Apple does not get credit for this one.
The Newton was way ahead of its time, but would we have Palm Pilots without it?
Yes, we would. The Newton was one of several PDAs, none of which sold well. The Palm Pilot was invented single-handedly by Jeff Hawkins, and was successful because it fit in a pocket, cost under $300, connected to your PC, and had reliable text entry. Which of these did the Newton pioneer, exactly? (The price of the reliable text entry is that you have to adapt to it, by learning "Graffiti"; the Newton tried to adapt to you, but was not reliable.)
I'm going to skip over most of the rest of your points; your article is too long for a full point-by-point. I'll just make the general observation that Apple liked making cool hardware that was really expensive and not especially high-performance. They had total control of the platform, which really helped with plug-and-play, but didn't lead to lower prices. Apple spent a pile of money on research and development, and most of it never turned into saleable products... example, one "first" you didn't mention, Apple was first to ship voice-command software on all their computers. It was sort of interesting, not all that useful, and it didn't sell any computers.
Apple was the first company to go to an all LCD line.
Scores no points with me. If the users want a CRT, Apple should sell them one. Why is it visionary to try to force your customers to pay more money for a smaller display?
Windows certainly owes much to Apple
Both Windows and the Mac owe much to the research at Xerox PARC. And some of the well-loved Mac interface widgets were invented at Microsoft when they wrote Word and Excel; the flow of ideas wasn't one-way.
I have no idea why Apple does not spend any marketing efforts on showing the world how innovative they are
They have tried this. When Windows 95 first shipped, Apple ran an ad with two columns: "News" and "Old News". Basic GUI stuff the Mac has had since 1984 was "Old News"; fair enough. The stuff under "News" was all pathetic: balloon help and such. I was thinking to myself "This is all they have invented in 11 years?"
Apple, with its complete control of the Mac platform, had some advantages (better plug-and-play, for example). But because they insisted on doing all the engineering themselves, the Mac fell further and further behind the rest of the industry. 3D cards did not appear first on the Mac!
Back when Apple had the only decent GUI, they charged rapacious prices--they had the highest margins in the industry by far! Now that Windows is a decent enough GUI to compete with the Mac, they can no longer force their customers to pay too much for locked-in proprietary hardware. Now, Apple is actually using standards such as IDE, and selling decent products at affordable prices (still too much IMHO but at least not insane). And Apple now will actually make deals with other companies; at least they aren't trying to invent their own 3D chipset or something.
You could extend FORTH easily to do what you describe. FORTH is very extensible. Here is FORTH code to make the first line work:
: Variable ; IMMEDIATE
: to SWAP ;
: be ; IMMEDIATE
: setting ! ;
"Variable" and "be" do nothing and compile to nothing; they are just syntactic sugar. "to" does a SWAP so you can say "x to 10 !" rather than "10 x !". "setting" just does a ! (store) operation.
Actually, you could make "to" and "setting" IMMEDIATE words; you would just need to make them compile in the words they implement. I'm very rusty on my FORTH, but I think you can do it this way:
: to COMPILE SWAP ; IMMEDIATE
Then "to" compiles a reference to SWAP, instead of creating a subroutine that calls SWAP and then returns. The IMMEDIATE version saves one subroutine call and one return.
This would make a nice short article to publish in Dr. Dobb's or some similar magazine, right around April Fool's Day.
I have fond memories of an April-Fools article on FORTH, describing how to add GOSUB to FORTH. He went through several versions, before finally arriving at this very efficient solution:
: GOSUB ; IMMEDIATE
In other words, GOSUB does nothing and compiles to nothing. FORTH is all subroutine calls anyway; it never really needed GOSUB in the first place.
I've tried Mandrake. It had a great installer; it was very easy to get going. It should be a good way to get started with Linux and hack around.
But I am a rabid fan of Debian. Debian is easy to maintain; once a Debian system is working, it is so easy to keep it up-to-date. The Debian volunteers do a great job of putting together the packages, and the apt-get system is just wonderful.
But many folks find Debian hard to install. Thus I recommend you give Progeny Debian a try. Progeny is available for free download, or as a packaged product with support. Be sure to check and see if your hardware is supported, however; if the installer melts down, it isn't any fun.
Slashdot Mirror
Ever tryed installing something with dependancies?
Sure; that's why I use Debian. "apt-get install kword" would be all the Debian user needs, and I wouldn't fear walking my mom or anyone else through that. With RPM-based distros, however, your point is well-taken.
steveha
I haven't found the perfect CPU fan yet.
I have used the Orb fans; the computer I'm typing this on has a Chrome Orb. The web site I bought it from claims it is 29 decibels, which is quieter than most, but that CPU fan is by far the loudest thing in this computer.
So I'm still looking. Here are my top contenders:
Silverado -- as reviewed on Tom's Hardware. But I don't know where to buy one (my web search found a place in England that sells them, but I don't know where to get one in the USA).
Thermalright SK6 -- an all-copper heat sink; you can put any 60mm fan you like on top. So, if I can find a really quiet 60mm fan, this would be a winner. Because it is copper, this heat sink really works; copper is better than aluminum.
Zelman CNPS3100g -- this heat sink is gold-plated copper, for maximum heat sinkage. It looks like a flower. It comes with a separate fan, which is said to be very quiet.
Now, as a rule, small fans with high RPMs will be noisier than big fans with lower RPMs. So my next computer will have a 120mm on the back, below the power supply. I'm hoping that if I put the Zelman on a Duron that I just might be able to get away with no CPU cooling fan; the 120mm fan might draw enough air over the Zelman to make it work. I can only try, and if it doesn't work, I'll go with a CPU cooling fan after all. We'll see.
I heard that in a month or two there will be heat sinks available that use 80mm fans instead of 60mm fans! Since bigger, slower fans are quieter than smaller, faster fans, in theory an 80mm fan should be able to be very quiet. And I have some very quiet 80mm fans (the so-called "Silencer" fan from PC Power and Cooling). The Silencer fan uses a hard drive power connector though, and I'd rather use a 3-pin connector (with tach for the motherboard to monitor the fan). Still, the Silencer shows how quiet an 80mm fan can be.
There is a gadget called the Digital Doc 5 that mounts in a 5.25" drive bay, and controls multiple fans. It can be set to keep an eye on the temperature, and turn on more fans if it goes too high. So perhaps I can set up the Zelman with its fan, but its fan will default to being off; and if the fan is needed, the Digital Doc 5 will turn it on.
http://www.macpower.com.tw/digitaldoc5.htm
steveha
I try to build very quiet computers. I hate computer noise, and the cooling fans are the worst.
This new Duron dissipates 41 Watts typical, 46 Watts maximum; a 1.4 GHz Thunderbird dissipates 65 Watts typical, 72 Watts maximum, or about 60% more heat. (Numbers from the AMD web site.)
Less heat means a better chance of making the computer really quiet. Instead of a noisy high-volume cooling fan for the heat sink, I can use a quieter low-volume cooling fan.
The mobile version is even tastier: only about 24 Watts for the 900 MHz version. I would drool for a MicroATX board with a couple of mobile Durons on it running SMP!
steveha
the Feds should fund the development of an operating system and office suite.
One of your points is that it wouldn't take very much money, by government standards. And that is true.
But just because government is already spending piles of money it shouldn't spend, doesn't make it right to have government spend even more money it shouldn't.
You know, safe cars are important. Instead of letting the car makers come up with safe cars, maybe the federal government should spend a few bombers worth of money on safe cars? And I hate it when little children fall into swimming pools. Should the federal government spend money on developing a really good fence to put around swimming pools? Just because something is good and worthwhile, doesn't mean that it is appropriate to have the federal government spend money on it. There is no end to cool projects they could fund, and if I approve of them doing the one I like, I have no moral grounds to disapprove of them doing the ones I don't like.
Besides, I would hate to see a free software project made into a pork-barrel project. It would not be pretty.
One of the problems: government loves attaching little strings to the money. Federal money for software development! But 60% of it must be spent in Senator Kennedy's district. And the new products have to be approved by a comittee that will check it to make sure none of the messages offend anyone. (And I mean anyone.) And the armed forces will make up a 10,000 page document of requirements that the program must meet, and it won't be shipped until it meets them all, and the requirements will be continually updated... the whole thing would be a nightmare.
It is possible for government to do things quickly and efficiently, but that's not the way to bet!
Now, an idea I would approve of: require all federal offices to gradually phase out proprietary software and phase in free software, over (say) the next 10 years. If a department finds that the free software doesn't meet its needs, it can fund developers to add the missing features. 10 years is very generous; they could do it much sooner than that if motivated.
steveha
One thing that bugs me: when a program (e.g. Nautilus) builds a thumbnail for an image file, the thumbnail isn't attached to the file, it is stashed somewhere (e.g. in a hidden directory called ".thumbnails" or something like that). This is a hack.
It's worse when you have multiple programs that want thumbnails; there isn't a standard yet and you get multiple thumbnails.
What I really want is some metadata attached to the image file, and the thumbnail in there. Then when you copy or move the file, the thumbnail goes along. And of course we need a standard so all the programs that want thumbnails will all do it the same way.
steveha
If copyright were abolished, both reverse engineering and redistribution would be safe and legal.
I say again: this isn't enough for the FSF, or else they would be content with BSD-style licenses. They want everyone to release source to everything.
Vendors might even return to publishing software once they notice public decompilations of their binaries are getting improvements that can't be readily merged into the proprietary source.
I'm sorry, but it is a decidedly nontrivial task to decompile something like Microsoft Word, and then recompile it, and add features. It would be far, far easier to start up a competing product. The above comment is complete fantasy.
steveha
It's just funny to me that *laws* are coersion, but market operations are not coersion.
The coercion of laws: break the law, and men with guns (the police) come and take you away. They throw you in prison. Resisting can get you hurt or even killed (depends on how strongly you resist).
The ocercion of the market: The product you want to buy might be expensive.
Is it just me, or is the second one less dangerous?
Now, we don't have a pure market; we have government mixed in. Government can use laws to prop up a business, and then you get both types of coercion at once; this can be a very bad thing, I well agree. But it's hard to see how a company can really coerce anyone in a truly free market.
The most important difference between a market and a law: you can choose not to participate in a market. You can decide to forget about computers and just use a typewriter, if computers get bad enough; but a bad law is not something you can easily avoid. And a dumb company will go out of business, sooner or later, but a dumb law can hang around on the books forever.
Libertarians like me argue that free markets tend to be better for freedom, overall, than heavily regulated markets. This doesn't mean all government interference in all markets is always bad; it's just mostly that way.
So let's let all the powerful monopolies and oligopolies incorporate arbitrary licensing schemes into every commercial transaction of semi-durable goods, rather than selling it outright.
In the short run, the powerful companies can be very annoying if they do this. In the long run, they will go out of business, or change their ways. IBM used to have a death grip over the business computer market; it was not government, but the free market in computers, that broke IBM's stranglehold. These days IBM is actually behaving pretty well.
Now, if a company can get a govenment-enforced monopoly, and combine it with onerous licensing requirements, that would really suck. But libertarians aren't big fans of government-enforced monopolies.
steveha
Linux doesn't have STREAMS
Could you please explain STREAMS, or at least point me to some documentation? I'm not sure what you are talking about.
Would this be a file-system thing allowing multiple data chunks in a single file? (Because if so, I remember seeing a post from Linus saying he wanted Linux to be able to deal with files like that. He wants you to be able to, for example, mount an NTFS file system and fully access all files correctly.)
P.S. I did do a web search, but the results were split 50/50 between pages saying "Linux doesn't have streams" and pages about streaming multimedia. Nowhere was there a "this is what streams are all about" page, that I found; if you know of one, just point to it and I'll be happy. Thanks for your time.
steveha
That's just a temporary hack of the current system, employed while working for the ultimate goal: the abolishment of copyrights.
If the FSF does get copyright discarded, they will want something in its place that requires the release of source code. If you know any way to prevent Microsoft, Corel, etc. from keeping their source code secret just by getting rid of copyright, please explain it to me.
steveha
And during that time, we hunted down and ate all the Woolly Mammoths: Yum! Tasty!
This "primitive people were so much nobler" meme is fatuous.
Or you can just wait until MegaConglomoCorp owns all the air and charges you a fee to breath.
Because of the rigid definition of flerbage, we can plainly see that the situation you define is in fact a reduction in flerbage; thus ESR is opposed to MegaConglomoCorp being able to imprison or kill you if you fail to pay for breathing.
steveha
Not so. The reason he coined the term "flerbage" was so he could be very specific about what it means, and you cannot argue that even network effect proprietary software decreases flerbage. How does MS Windows take your life, your property, or your time without your consent?
By working in a business where you have customers who want to use Windows, you are making it your business to interoperate with Windows, so at some level you are consenting to what is going on. But you are always free to say "To heck with this", walk away, and do something else to make money. You could even write your own software that competes with Microsoft.
Sure, the market can't put me in "prison" with "guns" but it sure feels like it when I don't have any *actual* choice.
You always have an actual choice. You could run nothing but Linux, for example. If customers want you to help them do something with Windows, you are free to tell them you won't do that.
In any event, if you look at the long term, even network effects aren't enough to ensure that Windows will plague you forever. Look at how good SAMBA is. It would take force of government (patents or whatever) to block free software from full Windows compatability; and EMS won't be in favor of that.
History has shown that, unless government holds them in place, monopolies don't last forever. The free market always means competition, which can bring down a monopoly. But the free market can be both slow and messy. The law regulating monopolies in the US is intended to keep things from getting messy, but sometimes the cure works out worse than the disease. Libertarians like ESR and me are very suspicious of attempts to use laws to force companies to behave a certain way; it doesn't always work out as you had hoped.
steveha
ESR didn't state as fact that Kuhn and RMS want other licenses to be made illegal; he openly asked the question, and challenged them to respond.
This is a master stroke. If they say no, then they pretty much have wiped out the basis of their whole attack on Tim O'Reilly; if they say yes, they have admitted that they are way out there on the fringe.
I predict they will refuse to answer either yes or no; any answer they give will be long and complicated.
Instead, they argue that choice of license is insufficiently free to be called free. [...] What's wrong with that?
Dude, the topic here is that Kuhn and RMS attacked Tim O'Reilly. In so many words, they said his idea of freedom was actually power over others.
ESR has posed a legitimate question.
By the way, RMS wrote, right in the GNU Manifesto, these words: "a person who enforces a copyright [on software] is harming society as a whole both materially and spiritually". He also proposed that a "software tax" could collected by government and used to support software development. Given what he wrote in the GNU Manifesto and in other places, I believe that if RMS had the chance to outlaw non-GPL licenses, he would do it.
steveha
In the short term. But long term, if people strongly dislike the license terms of MS software, they will move to something else. Before GNOME and KDE, Linux really wasn't an acceptable alternative to Windows; now it is. Unless MS can use patents or something to lock down a feature, that feature can and will appear in free software.
So ESR's point stands: any particular developer cannot cause great harm to others by choosing a particular license. The users can choose to walk away. And if you ask ESR whether the government should help MS lock down features so no one else can implement them, trust me: he won't be in favor of it.
steveha
Not so. The FSF wants licenses that force all developers to always divulge all source code they write. This is very different from doing away with the idea of a license.
If you were correct, the FSF would love the BSD license. To a first approximation, the BSD license is what you described: no limits at all on what you can do. The FSF says that is not enough.
steveha
The official line is that the DVD is finishing the film.
Oh, I hope so. Specifically, I hope the "Doug Trumbull" ending gets put on!
I read in some SF fan magazine that they had an ending planned where, at the very end when V'Ger makes a bright flash of light and disappears, V'Ger first spit out all the stuff it ate, including a Federation space station and a few Klingon battlecruisers. The Klingons, noticing that they are now right next to Earth and all Earth defenses are at the moment shut down, start attacking things, and a pitched battle (Enterprise vs. 3 Klingon cruisers) ensues. Enterprise wins, but damage is heavy and they have to eject the saucer!
I doubt they can finish it that far because I don't think any of the scenes involving actors were ever filmed. And the whole thing could have just been a rumor. But it would have been cool...
steveha
No need; it's in Chapter 4. Just follow that link, and search for the word "billion", and read the paragraph under your cursor.
My guess is that 150 million atoms is more like the requirements for an assembler system or perhaps even a self-replicating system.
150 million is for a general-purpose assembler capable of self-replication. And then he rounds up to a billion just to add margin for error.
steveha
But I do get this. That's why I claimed Apple was able to force its customers to do things, within limits; people wanted to be able to run Apple software, and they were willing to buy Apple stuff to run it, even when the Apple stuff was more expensive.
steveha
I don't have to look it up. From 1990 to 1996 I worked at Microsoft, and all the time I was there I worked on Word in one way or another.
Word was written at Microsoft. It was on the Mac before it was on Windows, true, but it was on DOS before that. Excel was written at Microsoft. Before Excel, Microsoft shipped an earlier Mac spreadsheet called Multiplan; that was based on DOS Multiplan. DOS Word versions 1 through 5 were all written with a Multiplan-like UI; DOS Word 5.5 and 6.0 had a GUI-like text interface based on COW (Character Oriented Windows, and yes people at Microsoft can have a sense of humor).
M$ asked Apple if they could license the GUI elements for a PC version.
Sorry, wrong. Bill Gates had been to PARC, just like Steve Jobs, and he thought GUI was the way the future would be, just like Steve Jobs, and his company had its very own GUI project, just like Steve Jobs's company. Apple very much wanted Microsoft applications on the Mac, to help establish the legitimacy of the platform. Microsoft agreed, with one caveat: if MS supported the Mac, then Apple had to agree not to sue MS over Windows. In other words, first Apple agreed not to sue MS; then Apple sued MS over the very thing they agreed not to sue over. Once upon a time I was a fan of Apple, but not after that.
M$ was supposed to stop using the Apple code after Windows 1.0, but didn't, which brought on the first Apple law suit.
Sorry, wrong. Apple sued Microsoft under the theory that Windows infringed the "look and feel" of MacOS. After a long lawsuit, Apple lost. The judge ruled that "look and feel" doesn't work, and then he went down the hundreds of items Apple listed as infringing. Each one was found to be something permitted to Microsoft by the agreement, with the exception of about 12. Then he went down that much shorter list. Each was found to be something Apple didn't own (something invented at Xerox PARC). With literally nothing left of Apple's case, the judge ruled for MS.
As it should have been, IMHO; Apple was clearly in the wrong. And if Apple had won, we wouldn't have either KDE or GNOME today; Apple would own GUI, and we would all have to buy Macs if we wanted GUI.
so we had that historic moment when M$ "invested" a large chunk of money in Apple, which we all know was an out of court settlement for patent infringement.
The only time I know that MS put a huge chunk of money into Apple was many years later, right after Jobs came on board for the second time. Apple was in danger of total collapse. What Microsoft got for its money was Internet Explorer shipped on every Mac, and some say they also got a rival propped up (with no Apple left, MS would look even more like a monopoly). Is there some other time I missed, or are you just smoking crack?
Apple has quit a bit more patents then M$ does also, by the way.
Actually, while I was at MS, one day they announced that the wanted everyone to start trying to patent things. The announcement said that historically MS was never much interested in patents, but now that patents were starting to be used as weapons, it was necessary for MS to put together a patent portfolio in self-defense. You may think that MS was lying even to its own workers, but I don't think so. In any event, MS is patenting just as much as anyone else, these days.
You still see early Apple GUI things like the tool bar from MacPaint in Photoshop etc.
True. And you still see drop-down menus and pop-up dialogs from Xerox PARC everywhere. And you still see combo drop-down pick list and text entry boxes, like MS introduced in Word, everywhere. And you still see the formatting toolbars MS introduced in Word everywhere.
steveha
For example, Drexler focused on mechanical computers, with little rods moving back and forth. Does he think nanoscale quantum computers, driven by electricity, can never work? No, but for his book he wanted to focus on things he could be sure would work. Because nature includes little machines, he was sure you could use little machines to build things like tiny computers.
His first book, Engines of Creation, is pretty much about existance proofs. He figures you can probably make an assembler with just 150 million atoms, so then he assumes it will take a billion atoms (just to be on the safe side) for the rest of the discussion.
And in his discussion of how we will get these magic assemblers, he said that one possible route was biological: use tailored cells to make new cells that are closer to what we want, and iterate. He isn't ignoring biology, or reality.
The article is weak. Read Drexler's book instead; it's online so you can read it now for free.
Engines of Creation
steveha
Makes sense to me. :-)
steveha
Within some limits, you can. In the late 80's the Mac had a stable, working, easy-to-use GUI; meanwhile PCs had character-based apps, and Windows was a joke. Anyone who wanted a GUI computer had only one reasonable choice, the Mac.
And Apple ruthlessly exploited this fact. They charged the highest margins in the industry; they forced people to buy Macs with Apple hard drives, even though people wanted to buy third-party hard drives that cost less; and they refused to license out their ROMs or OS to anyone, preventing third-party computers from under-cutting their price. They maximized short-term profit, and then when Windows 3.0 shipped (the first version of Windows that didn't suck too horribly) the customers started deserting Apple and going to PCs.
If Apple had licensed out the ROMs and OS, they would have made less money per customer but they could have had oh so many more customers. They had GUI working great long before MS; they could have owned the computer market and Windows could have been an also-ran. But because they chose short-term profit over long-term--to be blunt, because they decided to rape their own customers for maximum dollars--they now have a tiny slice of the market.
Another moronic point
And the POINT is... in your EYE!!
you guys see the mac has something you dont (usb, 3.5 inch drives, TV on the desktop to name a few) and you guys go running to the nearest forum to try and boost your crumbling self-confidence
Okay, let's go over it again; see if you can keep up. The original poster said that we have convenient 3.5" floppy disks now because Apple used them. I pointed out that we have them because people wanted them. I never said anywhere that Apple never gave the users what they want; you might have noticed that I said the PowerBook was a home run, exactly what the users wanted, just years too late.
its clear you dislike macs.
Not so; I dislike paying too much for a computer that will not perform as well as the computers I build for myself. If I could affordably build my own Mac, I might... I'd run Linux on it, though.
you actually sound as if you beleive everything MS tells you is true.
Dude, you are hearing what you want to hear. Go back and read what I wrote. I'll tell you what I believe: I believe what I remember from those years, since I was around, playing with computers and reading the news.
What I want now, more than anything, are open computers (where I can build them and fix them myself) running open software (Linux, GNOME, etc.) Your attempt to paint me as a mindless MS fanatic is amusing.
steveha
True. Palm's original idea was to be the Microsoft of PDAs -- i.e. they would not build a PDA, they would release software that ran on everyone else's PDAs. But everyone else's PDAs sucked, so sales of PDAs were low, so there was only a small market to sell Graffiti into, so they weren't making enough money. One day Jeff Hawkins was complaining, saying everyone was doing PDAs wrong. A member of the board for Palm was there and said (paraphrased from memory) "Let me get this straight. You say everyone else is doing it wrong, but you know how to do it right?" Hawkins said yes. "Then let's do it." And that was how Palm decided to get into the PDA business itself.
A Newton with grafitti is far better IMHO than a Palm.
Hey, if you're happy, that's great. A Newton doesn't fit well in my pocket, and that matters to me. I think it is too bad Steve Jobs betrayed you and all other Newton owners.
steveha
I'll grant you this one. Woz deserves the credit, though, more than "Apple Computer".
what about the CD drive?
Ummm... Microsoft pushed it just as hard as Apple. Even before MS had a decent GUI, they were shipping "Bookshelf", a CD with reference works on it. MS hosted an annual CD-ROM conference, back when few people had CD-ROM drives. Apple had it on all their machines first, but that was just because they had control over the platform and were able to force the customers to buy things.
And while we are on removeable media, Apple essentially standardized the little 3.25 in hard plastic floppy.
This is the benefit of not having an installed base. PCs needed to ship with 5.25" drives because that was the standard. Over time 3.5" drives won against 5.25" drives because people wanted them, not because Apple used them. (And I find the use of the word "standardized" sort of interesting, since Apple used a weird disk format for years.)
The first real portable computers.
Good grief, man! Here is where you lost it! PC users had real portables for years before Mac users! Mac users were begging Apple to ship decent portables, and years went by without any, and then Apple shipped the giant and heavy Mac Portable, which actually sold a few since people were so desperate but it wasn't what the users wanted. Yes, the PowerBook was a perfect home run; it was exactly what the users wanted... years late. Don't you remember how third-party companies were buying complete Macs, taking them apart to get the ROM chips out, and building laptops with the ROM chips? These laptops cost $7,000 or so each, since the cost-of-goods for each one included an entire Mac at retail! Summary: no, Apple does not get credit for this one.
The Newton was way ahead of its time, but would we have Palm Pilots without it?
Yes, we would. The Newton was one of several PDAs, none of which sold well. The Palm Pilot was invented single-handedly by Jeff Hawkins, and was successful because it fit in a pocket, cost under $300, connected to your PC, and had reliable text entry. Which of these did the Newton pioneer, exactly? (The price of the reliable text entry is that you have to adapt to it, by learning "Graffiti"; the Newton tried to adapt to you, but was not reliable.)
I'm going to skip over most of the rest of your points; your article is too long for a full point-by-point. I'll just make the general observation that Apple liked making cool hardware that was really expensive and not especially high-performance. They had total control of the platform, which really helped with plug-and-play, but didn't lead to lower prices. Apple spent a pile of money on research and development, and most of it never turned into saleable products... example, one "first" you didn't mention, Apple was first to ship voice-command software on all their computers. It was sort of interesting, not all that useful, and it didn't sell any computers.
Apple was the first company to go to an all LCD line.
Scores no points with me. If the users want a CRT, Apple should sell them one. Why is it visionary to try to force your customers to pay more money for a smaller display?
Windows certainly owes much to Apple
Both Windows and the Mac owe much to the research at Xerox PARC. And some of the well-loved Mac interface widgets were invented at Microsoft when they wrote Word and Excel; the flow of ideas wasn't one-way.
I have no idea why Apple does not spend any marketing efforts on showing the world how innovative they are
They have tried this. When Windows 95 first shipped, Apple ran an ad with two columns: "News" and "Old News". Basic GUI stuff the Mac has had since 1984 was "Old News"; fair enough. The stuff under "News" was all pathetic: balloon help and such. I was thinking to myself "This is all they have invented in 11 years?"
Apple, with its complete control of the Mac platform, had some advantages (better plug-and-play, for example). But because they insisted on doing all the engineering themselves, the Mac fell further and further behind the rest of the industry. 3D cards did not appear first on the Mac!
Back when Apple had the only decent GUI, they charged rapacious prices--they had the highest margins in the industry by far! Now that Windows is a decent enough GUI to compete with the Mac, they can no longer force their customers to pay too much for locked-in proprietary hardware. Now, Apple is actually using standards such as IDE, and selling decent products at affordable prices (still too much IMHO but at least not insane). And Apple now will actually make deals with other companies; at least they aren't trying to invent their own 3D chipset or something.
steveha
: Variable ; IMMEDIATE
: to SWAP ;
: be ; IMMEDIATE
: setting ! ;
"Variable" and "be" do nothing and compile to nothing; they are just syntactic sugar. "to" does a SWAP so you can say "x to 10 !" rather than "10 x !". "setting" just does a ! (store) operation.
Actually, you could make "to" and "setting" IMMEDIATE words; you would just need to make them compile in the words they implement. I'm very rusty on my FORTH, but I think you can do it this way:
: to COMPILE SWAP ; IMMEDIATE
Then "to" compiles a reference to SWAP, instead of creating a subroutine that calls SWAP and then returns. The IMMEDIATE version saves one subroutine call and one return.
This would make a nice short article to publish in Dr. Dobb's or some similar magazine, right around April Fool's Day.
I have fond memories of an April-Fools article on FORTH, describing how to add GOSUB to FORTH. He went through several versions, before finally arriving at this very efficient solution:
: GOSUB ; IMMEDIATE
In other words, GOSUB does nothing and compiles to nothing. FORTH is all subroutine calls anyway; it never really needed GOSUB in the first place.
steveha
But I am a rabid fan of Debian. Debian is easy to maintain; once a Debian system is working, it is so easy to keep it up-to-date. The Debian volunteers do a great job of putting together the packages, and the apt-get system is just wonderful.
But many folks find Debian hard to install. Thus I recommend you give Progeny Debian a try. Progeny is available for free download, or as a packaged product with support. Be sure to check and see if your hardware is supported, however; if the installer melts down, it isn't any fun.
steveha