You don't throw out a product with 80% of the market just because you can't get your minority system to work correctly with it.
80%, 90% it does not matter because both are BullShit(RTM). You are forgetting that M$ crap is versioned an that the different versions don't play nice with each other. The most generous of M$ penetration studies from 2 years ago gave M$ a healthy 90% of web clients, but only 40% of those machines were running a single Microsoft OS, Windows2000. The rest had lower percentages. Making all that crap work together is extreemly laborious and not at all garunteed. In fact it's almost certian that many things won't work in a mixed Microsoft shop at any time. Printer methods vary, they have different fonts on each and clients for one don't work on all. This simple analysis does not take into account the pain and suffering of poor security, spyware, silly macro viruses and databases that periodically corrupt themselves and trash user information that require paranoid daily whole data "backups".
When will Linux take over? When it interoperates with everything, so that people can get used to using it. Then, you can slowly migrate systems as needed, instead of going all out with one system, then having to re-train all your workers, and iron out all the bugs at once.
Nonsense. Microsoft will never play nice and gradual migration is impossible. In order to move away from Microshaft, you have to freeze it on the client side, eliminate it from the server side and move on as fast as you can. The retraining issue exists everytime Microsoft "upgrades", though functionality has not greatly improved since winoze 3.1. If you dick around with M$, you will never see the end of "bugs". Blaming others for your bugs is a core M$ value. Places like Largo Florida have little to complain about. Neither do I, outside of outrageous FUD and the continued rape of 80% of computer users.
... in a Windows only environment, it's generally pretty tech-savy people acting as the admins. Sure, they're tech-savy in a windows sort of way...
This is a very important point. My experience is that Windoze, being all secret handshake based, was much more difficult to install and maintain than any Linux distro. For ordinary stuff, email, web browsing, modest image manipulation, free software is easier to aquire, lasts longer and needs much less attention than it's windows counterparts. Free software generally has everything you need right on the install disks with update via the web and more than comercial software companies can offer. People with enough savy to push Microsoft crap have more than enough to make free software work, they simply have to unlearn a few bad habits and get used to a few better practices. Younger people have by and large bypassed the M$ train wreck and have much better computer skills and ability to do things than those trapped in learning M$ tricks, like where in the GUI tangle disk managment sofware is. Despite the bad press about supposed difficulty, there's much more similarity and ease of modification to free software configuration files than there is in Microsoft's registry and the raft of other configuration files the M$ admin is force to remember. When these folks realize how easy to use and configure free software is, they realize that the pain of transition was trivial compaired to continuing down the M$ tunnel and they never look back. Most already have realized and there are only a few hard core M$ ludites and users flooded with M$ adverts left.
I forgot to mention that all important part of American atuomotive engineering, the Radio. The Microsoft radio would be another expensive option, available by no cost free US Postal download. The lease holder for this radio would have to once again prove their identity, via M$ PickPocket, sign a 10 page confesion of theivery and promise eternal servitude to Bill Gates. It would come with earphones only and mostly play advertisments, much like ordinary comercial we know, but Microsoft would be able to change the advertisments and other playlists at will. Playing the headphones loud enough to be enjoyed by passing pedestrians or your horses would terminate your license to the radio and the vehicle which would be routed to Redmond for a thourogh examination of the thief. Yes, pedestrians would go faster than the Microsoft vehicle, especially near end of life is reached, but that is not a problem as sidewalks would be outlawed by the DMCA as a circumvention device. Still, runaway Microsoft vehicles would manage to kill many owners and innocent bystanders each year. Terrorists would take advantage of a buffer overflow in the radio's unused horse interface to cause massive property damage and much dung crashing. The same interface will be available year after year despite Microsoft claims that the problem was solved by secure hay and other user anoyances.
Actually a better comparison would be evaluating a car and saying it doesn't fit on the existing roads.
A Microsoft road would only fit Microsoft vehicles. If we draw the compairison to other M$ bloaty things, such as a browser that has a 1G footprint or a text document that consumes 50kB to say "Hello World", a microsoft car would be powered by three horses in a squirl cage, have 6 steel wheels that only fit on M$ patented rails, gets 2 miles to the gallon. Yes it would consume M$ gasoline as well as M$ geneticaly altered hay. Of course only one person at a time could ride in it and they would have no control over where it goes. The driver would also have to prove their identity via tatoed barcode and RFID tags, though the thing is actually leased and owned by Microsoft. Windshields and a roof would be expensive extra purchases. The horse's diet would be so poor that their performance would fail in two years, requiring the purchase of a new car. There is no owner's manual. The rider would suffer daily crashes of horse dung and often the gasoline would ignite and kill both horse and driver. The express purpose of the vehicle would be to keep everyone where they belong and mindful of their property.
There is no compairing Microsoft's hideous software to any practical device. Any physical device that was so difficult to use, performed so poorly, costs so much and worked so poorly with all established hardware standards would never be made. Ford made the automobile cheap and rugged. It was made to run on the poor roads of the day, be easy to fix and purchase by the common man. His express desire was to make it possible for people to get to know their neighbors, city and country.
Nobody is going to design a new road just to be able to run Linux.
No one ever designed anything to run Windoze either, despite the cute little marketing stickers. Microsoft's hand in hardware "standards" has all been negative, Winmodems, the destruction of unified graphics standards, web cams that require NetMeeting or don't work, sound cards that don't work, scanners and other devices that must be bought again on OS "upgrade". Their new software does not run on older hardware and their older software does now work with new hardware.
In short, M$ blows and it has given everyone a terrible impression of home computing. People are afraid to install and use software much less write any to do useful things. Because Windoze is so touchy, ureliable and sensless, they imagine free software to be a thing of vast complexity impossible to set up, grasp and use. Idiots like these ZDNet people perpetuate these negative impressions when the reality is that free software is extensively documented, configured with text files, extreemly robust and far cheaper to run and use. Because of M$'s bad reputation, people continue to purchase $2,000 computers that are little more than $400 generic computers with Windoze installed and "configured".
I have been wondering for a while how sustainable open source is.
Oh sure you have. In 1976 Bill Gates put it better. It's "Sharing is bad and if you don't pay me money, there will be no software." It's shifted to "free software will never make a working kernel" and "free software will never make easy to use software." and finally, "free software must be stollen to work." Get with the program, you are way out of date. Free software has produced many working kernels, losts of software that's easier to use than comercial software and shows no signs of slowing down.
A few snake oil salesmen have gotting rich does not disprove doctors earn a living or even that you can make a living selling snake oil. People earn a living making things work, not writing one size fits all, must be replaced every two years, standards ignoring, buggy, software. These people will continue to earn a living when Microsoft and friends are just a bad and seemingly unbelievable memory, like national news anchors talking about blow jobs in the White House.
Your question should be reversed and asked elsewhere. "Given the colapse of so many closed source shops, like Netscape, Lotus or SCO, how stable is your firm? Are you going to be here in five years? How can you keep your market when your users are co-operating to make software that works better than the stuff you sell? What do I have to gain from developing software for your platform again?"
Everyone loves free software. The only middleman being cut out is the maker of closed source junk that does not work as well. Vendors can and do package free software distributions and sell them to other vendors who make CDs, Computers and what not. These can and are used by lawyers, shareholders, merchants, CEOs, Marketing departments, even the developers themselves. So, while I agree with you about the uselessness of cross licensing, I don't think anyone doing anything real will miss it.
The parent comment about "cross licensing" falls for new M$ FUD, hook, line and stinker. There's no need to "cross license" free software. It does everything comercial software can do, but does it better, so the free software developer does not need to beg. Everyone can use free software and profit from that use but jerks who want to profit from your former ignorance. Microsoft is just trying to spin their "there will be no quality software unless you pay us money" threat to it's logical conclusion - denial of the vast world of original, legal, free software that out performs their own in features, quality and cost. Companies, such as IBM, that understand the benifits of free software have been GPL'ing their code, in part to save that code from obsolescence.
As this empowers developers, who can now compete with people who once thought patents on "fat lines" was big stuff, we can only hope the practice will spread to other profesions. It may, in the end, be the only way to compete in the international market for services. The dreams of an "information economy" based on hoarding and denying knowledge was a pipe dream. Other people figure out how to do what you do. No one really wins by hoarding information. Your next door neighbor may not be able to take your place at the steel factory, for example, but someone in China can and they will flood your market anyway. The only person you have harmed by hoarding your secrets is your next door neighbor who did not have the resources to be a serious threat to begin with and now can't help you.
I'm not sure what you think "sucks" about dselect. You have not said anything other than "everyone" thinks it sucks. Do you have problems finding packages you want? Do you have trouble understanding what's installed on your computer? It's hard to help you out till you say what's wrong.
In the mean time, the biggest single dselect help is to know that it uses a vi style search. Just type "/" and what you are looking for and you will find it. I think it looks through descriptions as well as catagory, so finding an editor is as easy as typing "/editor" then hitting the enter key and "/" followed by nothing but the enter key to repeat the search until you find what you are looking for.
Well, I'm being a little coy here. I know Squadboy is basically a troll who posts negitive and unhelpful crap all day. The dselect help is offered to those who might really be stumped or find dselect an incovenient tool. Once you can search it, and know how to point/etc/apt/souces.list to any of the hundreds of debian mirrors in the world, the whole world of free software is available for fast and easy download. Apt takes care of dependencies and what not, so that most packages, like quakeII "just work". Sometimes you need to worry about configuration, but howtos are all over the web and knowing just a little about what you are doing is good. I suppose I should have said all of that right away.
Bruce Perens can answer for "the large corporation"? Can you? Me, I'll sell my 10 shares of "the large corporation" if they keep letting themselves be milked by M$ and other rip-off artists. Posting here might have a larger impact.
Something like 2800 hits for "china". It's gonna be lound if that's in counts per second. I wonder if it has an overload protector. Contiuous discharge can make the a poorly consturcted meter fall to zero. As the background is never zero, go back from where you came, call the control room and check your battery. If the battery is good, it's time for first responders and you need one for yourself. SCO, it's like prompt critical - over in notime but hurts to be around. China, is more like lingering waste - you know where it is and stay away.
Having RFIDs antenaes in restaruant tables gives me the creeps too. It would be like every place is Las Vegas, where the clerks know way more than they want to about you.
Understands Unix history? The most impresive thing on his resume is working for Novel in Japan. Not much Unix there, all the way to 1996. Then he goes into a long managerial and sales decline ending with Franklin Covey, which blows even for windoze junk, before sinking to SCO infamy. There is no chance in the world someone so lost in BS could come close to understanding free software, much less where it comes from.
He must be a complete technical incompetent by now. It fits his greasy, steroidal visage. Looks dumb, talks dumb, must be dumb!
Chances are, he saw the line from AIX to AIX PS/2 right next to Linux 0.95 and got confused. "Those evil bastards at IBM have been helping the penguinistas since 1992," he thought, "must destroy them." Oh yeah, he also ignored all the influx of Linux to SCO's junk.
Yep, that's the Microsoft business model, steal someone's work, convice everyone that everyone else is dishonest and that no one would have anything unless they gave Microsoft money. You can see it all in that BASIC you mention. Contrast what he's saying now to this. All the basic ingredients are there: sharing is bad, unless you pay me your computer won't work, you are all a bunch of theives. That, when he dumpster dived the thing in the first place. His model, including poor security, user ignorance and abuse were worked out from the very beginning. Microsoft's first product was not their first revenue generator, bugs and poor security were.
Free software terrifies them because they can't steal it, buy it out or otherwise break it. If stuff "just works" Microsoft's revenues would be drastically reduced. Hardware dongles are the only thing that can stop free software from taking over every funciton their poor quality software now performs. The things that makes free software work, trust co-operation and sharing are all the things that wreck Microsoft's revenues. Make no mistake, they are fighting for their lives.
We must fight harder for something more important, our values. They are using billions of dollars to convince us all to be paranoid jerks. Their latest advertisments promise us all our dreams come true, higher learning, business sucess, love and happiness, all if we simply "submit" to their hard working M$'s IP. It's part of the same song they have always sung. The message of free software is that you can do it yourself and that people will help you the same way you help others.
Bill Gates casts a few vauge chunks of BS about IP and you think free software has problems? Free software only has problems if you buy into the whole vauge "Intelectual Property" trap. The whole issue of ownership of code was settled in the BSD cases where people replaced Bell's Unix with workalike programs. They had access to Bell's source code and even coppied comments to guide themselves in making the code work. Though Novell boght that code from Unix Stystem Labs and terminated the endless lawsuits, the first cases had essentially proved that BSD was an orignial work and could be distributed. The Linux kernel, which was modeled off Minix without souce code and then meticulously built from original code is in an even stronger position as are all the tools from the Free Software Foundation.
Microsoft, on the other hand, has lost many lawsuits for stealing code. They have mostly expanded by buying firms who they could not ripp-off through "cross licensing" or other industrial espionage. Now that they have destroyed all other M$ based comercial software firms and driven all their "developers" to India, they are forced to start their own research effort and will finally pay people to innovate. Their OS functions about as well as you would expect something from a cheats. Their vulnerability is that they can't keep up with free software development and that most people have come to realize that Microsoft's promise of riches through hoarding code were true only for Microsoft. Free software works better for most developers and users. It's only a matter of time before they realize this.
If you write a cloned program from scratch you can't copy any copyrighted source, but you can definitely copy patented UI elements.
Yeah, like M$ ripped off Apple and Apple ripped off Xerox. What total crap.
This is just more of the usual IP and anti-GPL FUD. Microsoft does not want anyone to think it's possible to do things differently from their share nothing, license the hell out of it and charge for binary way. Sorry Bill, people do make things and give them away and what they make works better than your crap.
It could be there. This is great for prototyping.
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Bamboo Bike A Reality
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There's enough space hidden in that rear hub to contain a hub brake. I would want a long arm to stabilize it as opposed to the short one seen on steel frames and apparently absent from this one.
My biggest complaint is the "sustanability" issue. I have a 20 year old steel bike that I ride almost daily. I have a baby seat on it and cary my two year old duaghter. That's not something I'd do with a bambo bike. Durrability is part of sustainability. How many times can you unglue that bamboo before you have to dispose of the knockouts that hold the thing together? Chome-moly frames are probably the most practical because they are high strength (yeah better than bamboo per weight), rust free and can be made without endurance limit. Direct use of petrolium to make composite materials is much better than burning the stuff and carbon composites have a fivefold strenth to weight ration advantage over aluminum.
It's a beautiful and well designed bike and it encouraged in my speedbike experiments by this. I've got plenty of bamboo for prototyping and it's much cheaper than carbon composite tubing. Where did he get those knockouts? Time to hit the search engine. While this is good for a prototype, I would not sell one of these things to anyone but a young healthy person who understood that one day it could fail. For a real production bike, I'd fall back to composite materials or just plane steel.
a photo-shopped picture of a 1998 Mercedes A-Class hatchback morphed to ultra-narrow dimensions,
I would have put more curves into it and made the windows larger. The fiberglass used in the body is much better suited to that than the one they chose that was made for sheet metal and robot arcwelding. Indeed, sharp corners are more difficult to execute and have less structural integrity.
... my current car is a '70 Mercury Marquis convertible (it's a yacht on wheels, basically). I bet it's safer than this little thing even though it only has lap belts.
It might be. They could make this vehicle safer then yours if they expanded it further than the reinforced passenger compartment. It would not have to be much heavier, but the additional crush and cargo space would do you much more good than your car's rigid to the bumper frame. The extra mass of your car helps you, but it's at the cost of control and the safety of other people. The mass war is only possible because people value conspicuous consumption and personal comfort over safety for themselves and others. It never ends because people will always feel compelled to buy the new bigger monster for "safety".
The same forces also work to make new cars uglier. Designers talk about making their vehicles "menacing" and talk about apealing to people's "lizard brains". They have realized that fear sells and large cars with grace, designed to convey an impression of strength are a thing of the past, despite the high price they used to command for providing a car with "more". "More" has to be justified with "practical" concerns, like the ability to move farm equipment, and "safety" represented as the ability to intimidate and harm others with impunity. The squared off "utilitarian" lines of Panzer tanks compete with grills that apear as frowns or bared teeth, and body work that simulate flared nostrils and tensed muscles. Menace is always ugly, but these things are going out of their way to look psychotic. Your vehicle was styled on the easy grace of a large cat.
We don't all have diesel generators in our back sheds to power our homes, because it is cheaper and cleaner to have a high-effeciency power plant supplying millions of homes.
That's true! But we also don't drive "golf carts on steroids" though electric cars were developed before inernal comustion engine cars. That's because it's cheaper to burn gasoline than it is to make, haul and dispose of nasty lead acid batteries. They cost money too and that has to be factored into the equation.
The excitment about newwer battery technologies is justified. Lithium battery fuel cell and motor combinations can have a greater energy desity than internal combusion engines do. That's a tremendous advance and it's why you see battery powered airplanes comming into their own. It's still expensive though I suspect it will eventually be less expensive and enviornemntally damaging than current technology.
Oh yes, it hurts to be stoped. That's when the kinetic energy associated with your body's motion must be disipated. When there's too much of that, your poor body bruises and breaks. When you bruise your whole body, you are dead, like Sadam's two loving boys.
What does this have to do with car mass and crumpling?
The answer is intuitive. The only thing worse than being stopped from 50MPH to 0 in two or three feet of travel is being thrown in the opposite direction. Elastic collisions are a bitch on the riders and this is why rigid framed autos favored by Detroit are more dangerous than sheet metal unibody designs of frugal auto makers from countries that have no steel deposits. Imagine riding various objects in your house on collions. Two tennis balls bounce off each other and your ride would be really violent, though not as bad as the riders of two bowling balls. Riders of bean bags would both do better than riders of tennis balls. Now, a bowling ball rider would not even feel the poor bastard in the tennis ball or bean bag.
See there, you knew it all along. A person in a mini is going to be screwed when some dumb bitch in an H2 cuts them off. The H2 occumpant, unless the mini hits the driver side, will do much better. The H2 is ugly for being both rigid and more massive than is reasonable. The best thing is to have a rigid passenger compartment surrounded by collapsable material. The best of all accidents is when the vehicles shear off each other and neither suffers great accelerations as auto body parts yeild and both vehicles keep going. The worst collision is taking your stupid H2 and running into an object that won't yield. Your H2 will recoil, much like a bowling ball, and your poor body will be yanked to pieces inside it.
It was not long before the young hackers started causing problems. They caused the system to crash several times and broke the computers security system. They even altered the files that recorded the amount of computer time they were using. They were caught and the Computer Center Corporation banned them from the system for several weeks.
Bill Gates, Paul Allen and, two other hackers from Lakeside formed the Lakeside Programmers Group in late 1968... The first opportunity to do this was a direct result of their mischievous activity with the school's computer time. The Computer Center Corporation's business was beginning to suffer due to the systems weak security and the frequency that it crashed. Impressed with Gates and the other Lakeside computer addicts' previous assaults on their computer, the Computer Center Corporation decided to hire the students to find bugs and expose weaknesses in the computer system. In return for the Lakeside Programming Group's help, the Computer Center Corporation would give them unlimited computer time [Wallace, 1992, p. 27]. The boys could not refuse. Gates is quoted as saying "It was when we got free time at C-cubed..."
Was the degraded perfromance was a direct result of Gate's activity? Was this really the model Gates grew up on? It surely matches his company's means of using bugs as a means of extorting money out of their users. Microsoft's time is every bit as over as $1,000/hour charges to run a 16 bit PDP-11. Hopefully, the extortion will end with it.
If user are not completely stupids(did you already read a report and understood all what to be send to MS), 90% of crashes are not reported. And 5% are so crashed they are not in a state to do any reporting. so we now have 100% of all windows installations.
My Windoze 2000 box would crash once every two days or so if I did not reboot it every day. There was nothing special about that computer, so I can believe that 100% of Windows computers that have to run 24/7 crash at least once a week. As the hard drive and incomplete writes errors accumulate, this can only get worse.
My Debian boxes never crash. Ever. Regardless of what dumb things I do to them or what cokeyed program I write, the kernel keeps going. My silly program simply gets a segfault and put away. X and other services are not affected. 5% crashing twice a day? Forget it.
Whenever an app crashes the windows error reporting system fires off a log to microsoft regarding the crash. I bet 90%+ of these crashes have nothing to do with windows.
I don't know enough about windoze junk to know if non-M$ apps trigger this kind of reporting, but it does not matter. The operating system should NEVER crash. If an application can pull the OS down, the OS blows. Every two months or so, something goes wrong with my Mozilla. With all the crappy.asp and other crazy web pages interacting in God knows what way, I'm not surprised Mozilla gets fried once an a while. Mozilla never brings down X, let alone my kernel. Nor do any scripts or funky random programs I might write. This is simply good modular software design, an O$ that does not work this way is not up to it's task.
Not being able to run custom software is a serious drawback. Everything takes debugging and sooner or later that has to happen on a production system. If you can't write your own software to get what you want done, the system is useless. If one little script or custom program brings down the whole works, what use is it?
Yeah, Microsoft themselves suffer from this kind of thing. They have made a dumb one size fits all system with code so spageti coded that you have to have a GUI and all sorts of services running on every machine. Who else would make it so you go through the GUI API to get at a floppy disk? Because there are so many more possible points of failure and any failure can bring the whole thing to a BSoD, is it any wonder that M$ thinks that 60 day up-times are "unheard of" and "insane"? Bah! A "pure" M$ system can blow out just as well as one that's been changed to meet your actual needs.
Don't blame the user. The only thing the user has done wrong is to depend on M$.
I certainly don't mind paying for updates to the software as long as it actually ENHANCES things. I'll be pretty ticked off if I have to pay for FIXES.
Take it easy, all the money you give M$ is going towards Paladium, which will make it so that nothing runs well and software without M$ approval won't run at all. Just imagine all your software and music files having expiration dates so you have to buy them over and over. Also imagine pay by the minute word processing on your own computer or being charged to access your own email. Ahhh, where did you want to go yesterday? Really? Why the hell did you buy XP? Free yourself from that hell before it's too late.
Have you installed Linux on the desktop of a user who is so lost in Windows that they need to hire people to come fix it?
Everyone who uses Windows comes to this point because it stops working and must be "rebuilt" to "clean" it. Still, I don't do windows because other people do that better than me. I send them on their way. I will set people up to dual boot, because that way nothing is lost, but I don't try to fix Windows problems. This is a solution I use myself and recomend to everyone.
Seems like that kind of user would benefit more from the UI research that Microsoft has put into Windows than they would from the stability of Linux.
What UI research? Most M$ "innovations" come from aquiring them and they state publicly that they won't get into a "market" before it has "matured". Microsoft UIs are no exception to this rule. Derivative at best and little changed since their quick and dirty beginings at their worst. I prefer the substantial effort put into the Next desktop, which is available from many fine free window managers, Window Maker and Afterstep. For those corrupted by M$ thinking and habits, KDE provides a superior interface. Nothing is wrong with using other people's ideas unless you consistently pick the worst implementations. The absolute worst thing to do is maintain some kind of consistency with an interface that never was very good.
The article mentions, " If you're desperate, you can probably use an old laptop!" Net4521 price is mo than $200. 486 Laptop on Ebay goes for less than $50. With a little work you can use any CF as a HD storage, but you might as well use the disk that comes with the laptop. Combine this with a $40 worth of pcimcia ethernet and wifi cards and you have something that will work for $100 or so. If you use Debian as the OS, you can ssh into it and apt-get upgrade it to keep it far more secure than any dinky off the shelf box. If you want a switch to go along with it, stick a $20 switch on it, but it would be easier to just wifi into it. The article is a great guide to building one of these things, even for desperate people tempted to buy a $60 access point with software you don't know or control.
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80%, 90% it does not matter because both are BullShit(RTM). You are forgetting that M$ crap is versioned an that the different versions don't play nice with each other. The most generous of M$ penetration studies from 2 years ago gave M$ a healthy 90% of web clients, but only 40% of those machines were running a single Microsoft OS, Windows2000. The rest had lower percentages. Making all that crap work together is extreemly laborious and not at all garunteed. In fact it's almost certian that many things won't work in a mixed Microsoft shop at any time. Printer methods vary, they have different fonts on each and clients for one don't work on all. This simple analysis does not take into account the pain and suffering of poor security, spyware, silly macro viruses and databases that periodically corrupt themselves and trash user information that require paranoid daily whole data "backups".
When will Linux take over? When it interoperates with everything, so that people can get used to using it. Then, you can slowly migrate systems as needed, instead of going all out with one system, then having to re-train all your workers, and iron out all the bugs at once.
Nonsense. Microsoft will never play nice and gradual migration is impossible. In order to move away from Microshaft, you have to freeze it on the client side, eliminate it from the server side and move on as fast as you can. The retraining issue exists everytime Microsoft "upgrades", though functionality has not greatly improved since winoze 3.1. If you dick around with M$, you will never see the end of "bugs". Blaming others for your bugs is a core M$ value. Places like Largo Florida have little to complain about. Neither do I, outside of outrageous FUD and the continued rape of 80% of computer users.
This is a very important point. My experience is that Windoze, being all secret handshake based, was much more difficult to install and maintain than any Linux distro. For ordinary stuff, email, web browsing, modest image manipulation, free software is easier to aquire, lasts longer and needs much less attention than it's windows counterparts. Free software generally has everything you need right on the install disks with update via the web and more than comercial software companies can offer. People with enough savy to push Microsoft crap have more than enough to make free software work, they simply have to unlearn a few bad habits and get used to a few better practices. Younger people have by and large bypassed the M$ train wreck and have much better computer skills and ability to do things than those trapped in learning M$ tricks, like where in the GUI tangle disk managment sofware is. Despite the bad press about supposed difficulty, there's much more similarity and ease of modification to free software configuration files than there is in Microsoft's registry and the raft of other configuration files the M$ admin is force to remember. When these folks realize how easy to use and configure free software is, they realize that the pain of transition was trivial compaired to continuing down the M$ tunnel and they never look back. Most already have realized and there are only a few hard core M$ ludites and users flooded with M$ adverts left.
A Microsoft road would only fit Microsoft vehicles. If we draw the compairison to other M$ bloaty things, such as a browser that has a 1G footprint or a text document that consumes 50kB to say "Hello World", a microsoft car would be powered by three horses in a squirl cage, have 6 steel wheels that only fit on M$ patented rails, gets 2 miles to the gallon. Yes it would consume M$ gasoline as well as M$ geneticaly altered hay. Of course only one person at a time could ride in it and they would have no control over where it goes. The driver would also have to prove their identity via tatoed barcode and RFID tags, though the thing is actually leased and owned by Microsoft. Windshields and a roof would be expensive extra purchases. The horse's diet would be so poor that their performance would fail in two years, requiring the purchase of a new car. There is no owner's manual. The rider would suffer daily crashes of horse dung and often the gasoline would ignite and kill both horse and driver. The express purpose of the vehicle would be to keep everyone where they belong and mindful of their property.
There is no compairing Microsoft's hideous software to any practical device. Any physical device that was so difficult to use, performed so poorly, costs so much and worked so poorly with all established hardware standards would never be made. Ford made the automobile cheap and rugged. It was made to run on the poor roads of the day, be easy to fix and purchase by the common man. His express desire was to make it possible for people to get to know their neighbors, city and country.
Nobody is going to design a new road just to be able to run Linux.
No one ever designed anything to run Windoze either, despite the cute little marketing stickers. Microsoft's hand in hardware "standards" has all been negative, Winmodems, the destruction of unified graphics standards, web cams that require NetMeeting or don't work, sound cards that don't work, scanners and other devices that must be bought again on OS "upgrade". Their new software does not run on older hardware and their older software does now work with new hardware.
In short, M$ blows and it has given everyone a terrible impression of home computing. People are afraid to install and use software much less write any to do useful things. Because Windoze is so touchy, ureliable and sensless, they imagine free software to be a thing of vast complexity impossible to set up, grasp and use. Idiots like these ZDNet people perpetuate these negative impressions when the reality is that free software is extensively documented, configured with text files, extreemly robust and far cheaper to run and use. Because of M$'s bad reputation, people continue to purchase $2,000 computers that are little more than $400 generic computers with Windoze installed and "configured".
Oh sure you have. In 1976 Bill Gates put it better. It's "Sharing is bad and if you don't pay me money, there will be no software." It's shifted to "free software will never make a working kernel" and "free software will never make easy to use software." and finally, "free software must be stollen to work." Get with the program, you are way out of date. Free software has produced many working kernels, losts of software that's easier to use than comercial software and shows no signs of slowing down.
A few snake oil salesmen have gotting rich does not disprove doctors earn a living or even that you can make a living selling snake oil. People earn a living making things work, not writing one size fits all, must be replaced every two years, standards ignoring, buggy, software. These people will continue to earn a living when Microsoft and friends are just a bad and seemingly unbelievable memory, like national news anchors talking about blow jobs in the White House.
Your question should be reversed and asked elsewhere. "Given the colapse of so many closed source shops, like Netscape, Lotus or SCO, how stable is your firm? Are you going to be here in five years? How can you keep your market when your users are co-operating to make software that works better than the stuff you sell? What do I have to gain from developing software for your platform again?"
The parent comment about "cross licensing" falls for new M$ FUD, hook, line and stinker. There's no need to "cross license" free software. It does everything comercial software can do, but does it better, so the free software developer does not need to beg. Everyone can use free software and profit from that use but jerks who want to profit from your former ignorance. Microsoft is just trying to spin their "there will be no quality software unless you pay us money" threat to it's logical conclusion - denial of the vast world of original, legal, free software that out performs their own in features, quality and cost. Companies, such as IBM, that understand the benifits of free software have been GPL'ing their code, in part to save that code from obsolescence.
As this empowers developers, who can now compete with people who once thought patents on "fat lines" was big stuff, we can only hope the practice will spread to other profesions. It may, in the end, be the only way to compete in the international market for services. The dreams of an "information economy" based on hoarding and denying knowledge was a pipe dream. Other people figure out how to do what you do. No one really wins by hoarding information. Your next door neighbor may not be able to take your place at the steel factory, for example, but someone in China can and they will flood your market anyway. The only person you have harmed by hoarding your secrets is your next door neighbor who did not have the resources to be a serious threat to begin with and now can't help you.
In the mean time, the biggest single dselect help is to know that it uses a vi style search. Just type "/" and what you are looking for and you will find it. I think it looks through descriptions as well as catagory, so finding an editor is as easy as typing "/editor" then hitting the enter key and "/" followed by nothing but the enter key to repeat the search until you find what you are looking for.
Well, I'm being a little coy here. I know Squadboy is basically a troll who posts negitive and unhelpful crap all day. The dselect help is offered to those who might really be stumped or find dselect an incovenient tool. Once you can search it, and know how to point /etc/apt/souces.list to any of the hundreds of debian mirrors in the world, the whole world of free software is available for fast and easy download. Apt takes care of dependencies and what not, so that most packages, like quakeII "just work". Sometimes you need to worry about configuration, but howtos are all over the web and knowing just a little about what you are doing is good. I suppose I should have said all of that right away.
Something like 2800 hits for "china". It's gonna be lound if that's in counts per second. I wonder if it has an overload protector. Contiuous discharge can make the a poorly consturcted meter fall to zero. As the background is never zero, go back from where you came, call the control room and check your battery. If the battery is good, it's time for first responders and you need one for yourself. SCO, it's like prompt critical - over in notime but hurts to be around. China, is more like lingering waste - you know where it is and stay away.
Having RFIDs antenaes in restaruant tables gives me the creeps too. It would be like every place is Las Vegas, where the clerks know way more than they want to about you.
He must be a complete technical incompetent by now. It fits his greasy, steroidal visage. Looks dumb, talks dumb, must be dumb!
Chances are, he saw the line from AIX to AIX PS/2 right next to Linux 0.95 and got confused. "Those evil bastards at IBM have been helping the penguinistas since 1992," he thought, "must destroy them." Oh yeah, he also ignored all the influx of Linux to SCO's junk.
Free software terrifies them because they can't steal it, buy it out or otherwise break it. If stuff "just works" Microsoft's revenues would be drastically reduced. Hardware dongles are the only thing that can stop free software from taking over every funciton their poor quality software now performs. The things that makes free software work, trust co-operation and sharing are all the things that wreck Microsoft's revenues. Make no mistake, they are fighting for their lives.
We must fight harder for something more important, our values. They are using billions of dollars to convince us all to be paranoid jerks. Their latest advertisments promise us all our dreams come true, higher learning, business sucess, love and happiness, all if we simply "submit" to their hard working M$'s IP. It's part of the same song they have always sung. The message of free software is that you can do it yourself and that people will help you the same way you help others.
Microsoft, on the other hand, has lost many lawsuits for stealing code. They have mostly expanded by buying firms who they could not ripp-off through "cross licensing" or other industrial espionage. Now that they have destroyed all other M$ based comercial software firms and driven all their "developers" to India, they are forced to start their own research effort and will finally pay people to innovate. Their OS functions about as well as you would expect something from a cheats. Their vulnerability is that they can't keep up with free software development and that most people have come to realize that Microsoft's promise of riches through hoarding code were true only for Microsoft. Free software works better for most developers and users. It's only a matter of time before they realize this.
Yeah, like M$ ripped off Apple and Apple ripped off Xerox. What total crap.
This is just more of the usual IP and anti-GPL FUD. Microsoft does not want anyone to think it's possible to do things differently from their share nothing, license the hell out of it and charge for binary way. Sorry Bill, people do make things and give them away and what they make works better than your crap.
My biggest complaint is the "sustanability" issue. I have a 20 year old steel bike that I ride almost daily. I have a baby seat on it and cary my two year old duaghter. That's not something I'd do with a bambo bike. Durrability is part of sustainability. How many times can you unglue that bamboo before you have to dispose of the knockouts that hold the thing together? Chome-moly frames are probably the most practical because they are high strength (yeah better than bamboo per weight), rust free and can be made without endurance limit. Direct use of petrolium to make composite materials is much better than burning the stuff and carbon composites have a fivefold strenth to weight ration advantage over aluminum.
It's a beautiful and well designed bike and it encouraged in my speedbike experiments by this. I've got plenty of bamboo for prototyping and it's much cheaper than carbon composite tubing. Where did he get those knockouts? Time to hit the search engine. While this is good for a prototype, I would not sell one of these things to anyone but a young healthy person who understood that one day it could fail. For a real production bike, I'd fall back to composite materials or just plane steel.
a photo-shopped picture of a 1998 Mercedes A-Class hatchback morphed to ultra-narrow dimensions,
I would have put more curves into it and made the windows larger. The fiberglass used in the body is much better suited to that than the one they chose that was made for sheet metal and robot arcwelding. Indeed, sharp corners are more difficult to execute and have less structural integrity.
It might be. They could make this vehicle safer then yours if they expanded it further than the reinforced passenger compartment. It would not have to be much heavier, but the additional crush and cargo space would do you much more good than your car's rigid to the bumper frame. The extra mass of your car helps you, but it's at the cost of control and the safety of other people. The mass war is only possible because people value conspicuous consumption and personal comfort over safety for themselves and others. It never ends because people will always feel compelled to buy the new bigger monster for "safety".
The same forces also work to make new cars uglier. Designers talk about making their vehicles "menacing" and talk about apealing to people's "lizard brains". They have realized that fear sells and large cars with grace, designed to convey an impression of strength are a thing of the past, despite the high price they used to command for providing a car with "more". "More" has to be justified with "practical" concerns, like the ability to move farm equipment, and "safety" represented as the ability to intimidate and harm others with impunity. The squared off "utilitarian" lines of Panzer tanks compete with grills that apear as frowns or bared teeth, and body work that simulate flared nostrils and tensed muscles. Menace is always ugly, but these things are going out of their way to look psychotic. Your vehicle was styled on the easy grace of a large cat.
That's true! But we also don't drive "golf carts on steroids" though electric cars were developed before inernal comustion engine cars. That's because it's cheaper to burn gasoline than it is to make, haul and dispose of nasty lead acid batteries. They cost money too and that has to be factored into the equation.
The excitment about newwer battery technologies is justified. Lithium battery fuel cell and motor combinations can have a greater energy desity than internal combusion engines do. That's a tremendous advance and it's why you see battery powered airplanes comming into their own. It's still expensive though I suspect it will eventually be less expensive and enviornemntally damaging than current technology.
What does this have to do with car mass and crumpling?
The answer is intuitive. The only thing worse than being stopped from 50MPH to 0 in two or three feet of travel is being thrown in the opposite direction. Elastic collisions are a bitch on the riders and this is why rigid framed autos favored by Detroit are more dangerous than sheet metal unibody designs of frugal auto makers from countries that have no steel deposits. Imagine riding various objects in your house on collions. Two tennis balls bounce off each other and your ride would be really violent, though not as bad as the riders of two bowling balls. Riders of bean bags would both do better than riders of tennis balls. Now, a bowling ball rider would not even feel the poor bastard in the tennis ball or bean bag.
See there, you knew it all along. A person in a mini is going to be screwed when some dumb bitch in an H2 cuts them off. The H2 occumpant, unless the mini hits the driver side, will do much better. The H2 is ugly for being both rigid and more massive than is reasonable. The best thing is to have a rigid passenger compartment surrounded by collapsable material. The best of all accidents is when the vehicles shear off each other and neither suffers great accelerations as auto body parts yeild and both vehicles keep going. The worst collision is taking your stupid H2 and running into an object that won't yield. Your H2 will recoil, much like a bowling ball, and your poor body will be yanked to pieces inside it.
It was not long before the young hackers started causing problems. They caused the system to crash several times and broke the computers security system. They even altered the files that recorded the amount of computer time they were using. They were caught and the Computer Center Corporation banned them from the system for several weeks.
Bill Gates, Paul Allen and, two other hackers from Lakeside formed the Lakeside Programmers Group in late 1968. .. The first opportunity to do this was a direct result of their mischievous activity with the school's computer time. The Computer Center Corporation's business was beginning to suffer due to the systems weak security and the frequency that it crashed. Impressed with Gates and the other Lakeside computer addicts' previous assaults on their computer, the Computer Center Corporation decided to hire the students to find bugs and expose weaknesses in the computer system. In return for the Lakeside Programming Group's help, the Computer Center Corporation would give them unlimited computer time [Wallace, 1992, p. 27]. The boys could not refuse. Gates is quoted as saying "It was when we got free time at C-cubed ..."
Was the degraded perfromance was a direct result of Gate's activity? Was this really the model Gates grew up on? It surely matches his company's means of using bugs as a means of extorting money out of their users. Microsoft's time is every bit as over as $1,000/hour charges to run a 16 bit PDP-11. Hopefully, the extortion will end with it.
My Windoze 2000 box would crash once every two days or so if I did not reboot it every day. There was nothing special about that computer, so I can believe that 100% of Windows computers that have to run 24/7 crash at least once a week. As the hard drive and incomplete writes errors accumulate, this can only get worse.
My Debian boxes never crash. Ever. Regardless of what dumb things I do to them or what cokeyed program I write, the kernel keeps going. My silly program simply gets a segfault and put away. X and other services are not affected. 5% crashing twice a day? Forget it.
I don't know enough about windoze junk to know if non-M$ apps trigger this kind of reporting, but it does not matter. The operating system should NEVER crash. If an application can pull the OS down, the OS blows. Every two months or so, something goes wrong with my Mozilla. With all the crappy .asp and other crazy web pages interacting in God knows what way, I'm not surprised Mozilla gets fried once an a while. Mozilla never brings down X, let alone my kernel. Nor do any scripts or funky random programs I might write. This is simply good modular software design, an O$ that does not work this way is not up to it's task.
Not being able to run custom software is a serious drawback. Everything takes debugging and sooner or later that has to happen on a production system. If you can't write your own software to get what you want done, the system is useless. If one little script or custom program brings down the whole works, what use is it?
Yeah, Microsoft themselves suffer from this kind of thing. They have made a dumb one size fits all system with code so spageti coded that you have to have a GUI and all sorts of services running on every machine. Who else would make it so you go through the GUI API to get at a floppy disk? Because there are so many more possible points of failure and any failure can bring the whole thing to a BSoD, is it any wonder that M$ thinks that 60 day up-times are "unheard of" and "insane"? Bah! A "pure" M$ system can blow out just as well as one that's been changed to meet your actual needs.
Don't blame the user. The only thing the user has done wrong is to depend on M$.
Take it easy, all the money you give M$ is going towards Paladium, which will make it so that nothing runs well and software without M$ approval won't run at all. Just imagine all your software and music files having expiration dates so you have to buy them over and over. Also imagine pay by the minute word processing on your own computer or being charged to access your own email. Ahhh, where did you want to go yesterday? Really? Why the hell did you buy XP? Free yourself from that hell before it's too late.
Everyone who uses Windows comes to this point because it stops working and must be "rebuilt" to "clean" it. Still, I don't do windows because other people do that better than me. I send them on their way. I will set people up to dual boot, because that way nothing is lost, but I don't try to fix Windows problems. This is a solution I use myself and recomend to everyone.
Seems like that kind of user would benefit more from the UI research that Microsoft has put into Windows than they would from the stability of Linux.
What UI research? Most M$ "innovations" come from aquiring them and they state publicly that they won't get into a "market" before it has "matured". Microsoft UIs are no exception to this rule. Derivative at best and little changed since their quick and dirty beginings at their worst. I prefer the substantial effort put into the Next desktop, which is available from many fine free window managers, Window Maker and Afterstep. For those corrupted by M$ thinking and habits, KDE provides a superior interface. Nothing is wrong with using other people's ideas unless you consistently pick the worst implementations. The absolute worst thing to do is maintain some kind of consistency with an interface that never was very good.
The article was your service all along!
The article mentions, " If you're desperate, you can probably use an old laptop!" Net4521 price is mo than $200. 486 Laptop on Ebay goes for less than $50. With a little work you can use any CF as a HD storage, but you might as well use the disk that comes with the laptop. Combine this with a $40 worth of pcimcia ethernet and wifi cards and you have something that will work for $100 or so. If you use Debian as the OS, you can ssh into it and apt-get upgrade it to keep it far more secure than any dinky off the shelf box. If you want a switch to go along with it, stick a $20 switch on it, but it would be easier to just wifi into it. The article is a great guide to building one of these things, even for desperate people tempted to buy a $60 access point with software you don't know or control.