who's on a crusade? MS craps out all the time and charges people for it. I don't care if it's poor QC that earns that stupid flag on the box, or if it's something Bill Gates wrote himself, it's MS software. No dinky little module should be able to pull the whole OS down like that.
The contrast in treatment is glaring. A few people get blown chips from a piece of hardware and a class action lawsuits and FUD make mainstream news. Hell, my mom heard about this before I did. Yet every year poorly written software dooms millions of PCs to the junk heap. Poor little PC gets unstable under some MS trash and its poor little user thinks the machine is just obsolete and chucks it.
The orignial post makes all the sense in the world to me. Making excuses for MS does not.
Does the prospect of someone modifying an image encoding format slightly to TIFF-FX, then using that to claim ownership to "electronic faxes" or any image sent electronicaly bother you? Go look at the greedy claims being made for this, tunneling, and a whole host of other ideas.
Squabling over Intellectual Property in standard protocols is short sighted. It reduces
the possibility the company holding the IP will be able to have the market advantage
that comes with inclusion of their technology in a atandard (because no one will bother
to include their technology) and potentially harms the quality and viability of the
proposed standard
Wow! This is incredible news: greedy claims to obvious ideas harms everyone! The patent system is broken!
"Any license granted by Xerox under this Statement shall be subject to the following
condition: any party receiving such a grant from Xerox must agree to grant Xerox
Corporation, Xerox Ltd., Fuji Xerox Co. Ltd., Modi Xerox Limited and any
corporation, firm, partnership, individual, or other form of business organization
at least forty percent (40%) owned or controlled, directly or indirectly, by Xerox
Corporation, Xerox Ltd., Fuji Xerox Ltd. or Modi Xerox Limited, upon request, a
license under that party's patents relating to the TIFF-FX standard, on terms and
conditions no less favorable than those granted by Xerox to that party."
So they don't just own your base, they own your hide. Yeah, right. Do you expect people like that to ever be able to co-operate or agree with anyone? That whole site made me sick.
I suppose it goes to lawers who publish dribble like THIS . What an incredible, stupid, greedy list. Picture databases, email faxes? If I get an email fax spam do I get to sue the sender or the liscencer? I wish they had bought dumb chairs instead.
OK, it's not easy getting all of those things when more open standards are available. Still, my wife seems to like her linux web experience.
Plugger for quicktime. Looks like a workable pain in the neck. I'll wait for Macromedia to give it up and make a free project.
Windows Media? Why bother with what is sure to become a former "standard" in the ever shifting sands of MS file formats?
Vietnamese fonts. Try this then go here for more help. Good luck, it's hard for me to judge any of this. Still, I can only imagine that you will do better with Linux than any MS software.
No, I did not read Steigler's book. The only David's sling I'm familiar with was used to throw a few round stones that killed a giant. Seems appropriate enough for a 250ft wing that could be brought down with a sling shot. Less apropriate when you imagine the types of folks who would want to use such a dinky weapon would more likely be named Yasser.
and a good portion of linux users are not inclined to help newbies out.
That's not true. I've gotten far more help learning to use Linux than I ever got with MS. There are Linux User Groups (LUG) everywhere, and people I hardly know have helped me at work and sat with me at my house. I got to know them better that way. I've got no problem returning the favor and so far I've set up two other people's computers.
It's funny, because Linux is easier to figure out. Win3.1 was so poorly documented a friend HAD to show me how to use it. Going to 95 was a painful experience and I regret all the time I put into it. 98 was also painful, but more regretible. Linux, at times was not easy to get used to, but man pages online documents and books are all excellent sources of help. In fact, despite the useability claims Redmond makes, MS interfaces are are the hardest I've ever dealt with. The list includes VAX, VMS, Solaris, OS2, Mac, MSDOS, Win3.1, Win98, Win98 and WinME. Mac was a pain, but I liked it much better and learned it much faster than Win3.1. MS's position is paradoxical. They wish to convince users that PC's are hard to use, while prommising them that MS is easy to use. If they spent as much time making things as easy as they said instead of fudding, they might get somewhere.
I don't think you can advocate a unilateral switch to Linux, even for hardcore techies.
I advocated this for my non technical wife and she likes it. She prefers Netscape to IE and is learning to like GIMP better than paint shop pro (who can afford photoshop?). At work, she uses Star Office, and will soon be wishing it ran on a better OS.
Not having worked with C++ much, I can't say much about debugging it. The book I learned C++ with came with GCC, but I used Watcom at the time and have not needed anything more than C since. Having GCC as a free, stable (both API and output code) compiler more than makes up for any inconvienence I might feel not using that horrible MS Developer's Studio package, shudders at the bad memories. In any case, I suspect this concern has about as much validity as wanting to run IIS instead of Apache, Media dominated Video players over free Video for Linux programs or any of the other obsurdly constricting and unfree software you can spend your hard earned cash on instead of using what is freely available, freely changeable and technically superior.
It doesn't really matter, because they're not going to suddenly start thinking like kernel hackers because we think they should.
kernel hackers read asm and binary. I read text. Windows is difficult to modify. Linux is easy. Force comes from MS and others who seek to profit at your expense.
Code Red bunging up my apache logs has made me think:
Posit: once Linux reaches a certain saturation, it will suffer the same security issues as Microsoft does.
Unplace excriment: Apache runs more web servers than IIS, the victim of Code Red. Saturation reached, failure not suffered. Think about it for a while.
Well, the last release required you to know the structure of the install CD. This was a pain that required a newbie to pop the CD out and surf the web for debian specific terms like potato.
This has been fixed, thank goodness, and other little things work better now too. Setting up your/etc/apt/sources.list file is just a matter of removing comment #s, but really knowing takes time. Program names, etc. Other distros used to be easier to install.
Debian is a great system to install for someone you are willing to help out. Once they get it, it's much easier for them to move on with. I really like how stable their configuration files have been, and your friends will like that too. If you don't have that kind of time, throw Red Hat at them with a book like Linux Unleashed. That's what I did to myself, so it must have worked.
That's what I said about 95
on
Windows in 2020
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
It did take a little forcing. It was so much easier to install that 98 update when 95 was failing on my machines. Like you, I had my eyes open and it was a good thing. The force was an old FORTRAN program. Thank God for G77 and Red Hat, they saved my but in that CFD class.
The more I used, the more I learned and the easier linux became, and the harder MS looked. Looking back on things, it's amazing to me that anyone would trust configurations to anything but a human readable text file. The amount of trust required of MS to do anything is amazing. Good grief, just look at that sloppy NetBIOS. Look at all the hidden stuff. How does anyone memorize that awful pile of symbols that are the ever shifting MS interface? Work, with NT desktops, it painfully constricted and limiting. No compilers, how can people stand it? Only a single window manager with a single virtual screen? Only one crippled shell? I have no regrets as 98 dies on it's last machines in my house. It sucked, then it died. Win2k? No way!
The sooner you move, the happier you will be. The things you learn from MS are either counter productive or plain useless. Want stability, get Debian potato. Want privacy, get ssh.
MS interfaces change all the time, are poorly documented and difficult to use. A typical tweek involves plowing through the start button tree, a forest of tabs to find a check box where not rational person would put it, to make a change in a non human readable registry file! These changes are often system wide and break when undone by the next user. BARF. People who think that is easy are either brainwashed or paid by MS.
Compare that to the simple, user specific, text based config files and programs like linuxconfig that manipulate them for those who demand a GUI. Don't like KDE? Run TWM or Afterstep. Ever run a different window manager under an MS OS?
take Windows and disable just about everything (something Windows handles really well)
Windows 3.1 maybe. Doze machines have had to start up the GUI ever since 95. You can't tell it not to run in w2k. Why fool around with that junk?
you don't know my wife. As a child she would refuse PBJ sadwiches that were served to her "upside down" with the jelly on the bottom. Picky, picky. She's using linux now for security and lack of functioning windows boxes. As the windows boxes die, I leave them that way. They are also not alowed on my subnet. Firewall or no, we both got sick of privacy invading insecure junk.
The NT network here at work could be SO much nicer if they would change it out. Running NT is a BAD idea in terms of support. Not a week goes by that someone does not curse their crashing computer on my floor.
ME, Win2k, 98, XP all have a Start button. All has the File,Edit, menues. All can copy/pase with the same key shortcuts.
Wow, Bachus. If that's all it takes, KDE fits right in. You should have installed it for your friends and told them it was a new version of 98 with reasonable networking and many other new features.
Last weekend, I had a rotten time working with my mom's ME laptop. It was very different from 98, 95, 3.1 and NT.
ME, Win2k, 98, XP all have different interfaces! Figuring out how to use them is a pain. People might as well learn to use an interface that works when the time comes to "upgrade", or that poor old computer feels obsolete because MS won't run on it anymore. If me and my wife can use Linux, anyone can.
Windows stability is no indicator of Linux stability! I've never had an MS box newer than 95 first release on a 486 last more than two years (record MS DOS on an XT lasted me ten years before dissasembly for box and power supply). The same systems worked great under Red Hat 6.0 and 6.2. Don't let MS instability convince you that you have bad hardware and so keep your computer crippled.
The only advantage there was to the trouble of a MS install was some hardware reporting from the system properties and DOS utilities. I could get an idea of how much video ram I had. This was often misleading and better information can be had from modprobe and online today. Setting old ISA cards, such as 3com 509b network cards, with the DOS utility was useful and you might want to make and install a small DOS partition before you install Linux.
Do check hardware compatibility as many above have suggested. MS is constantly encouraging new dumb devices, such as WinModems, that are brain dead and not worth buying or writing device drivers for. Also of particular heartbreak are nicer devices like many parallel scanners and some digital cameras.
Oh. It would be nice to do things properly, but I'll settle for the job the cable company did for me. Their little name for my box cx####.btnrug1.la.home.com has dns set up for it and it seems to work. Some dull mail set ups, like the NT system where I work, take a little time to find the IP, but they get it eventually.
RJ45 type ethernet is also "multidrop", but the wire has been strung out into a star around a hub. Having a switch instead of a hub is much nicer, and from your swich you can have routers.
There is no reason the cable folks can't do this, and many already have. This is why you get such good down feed. Like I said, packets are packets. You should be able to send them up as easily as you send them down.
The only way that would be different is if everyone on your subnet all wanted exactly the same packets at the same time, or you could cache out "popular" information on the sub net. You can forget the first one, it's never going to happen unless the cable renames TV internet. The second one works when you have more than 20 or so users with similar tastes.
Of course, there's a large difference between the junk the average comercial crap site puts up (intensive flash trash, and other animations) and what normal people have to share (text, a few static pictures). The cable company gimps the boxes to favor the comercial junk.
BS. Ethernet works that way too. There's plenty of room on it for all. If more capacity is needed they can always (and already have) route subnets. Gee.
No way! POOP and PUKE were Tany embrace extentions. They thought they would rule the BASIC world with their superior technology. VB would run databases, email, ecomerce and webservers!
See, they really knew what they were doing but those spoilsports in Redmond, M$, took over the world with their inferior version of BASIC that they bundled with the OS. It has caused untold missery across the world. Millions of Dollars have been lost, hundreds of millions of man hours wasted trying to fix things. It would all be OK if only they had POOP and PUKE.
Timex Sinclair also had superior IT, and my site uses a 1600, much expanded. It takes a licking and keeps on ticking.
Slashdot Mirror
The contrast in treatment is glaring. A few people get blown chips from a piece of hardware and a class action lawsuits and FUD make mainstream news. Hell, my mom heard about this before I did. Yet every year poorly written software dooms millions of PCs to the junk heap. Poor little PC gets unstable under some MS trash and its poor little user thinks the machine is just obsolete and chucks it.
The orignial post makes all the sense in the world to me. Making excuses for MS does not.
Does the prospect of someone modifying an image encoding format slightly to TIFF-FX, then using that to claim ownership to "electronic faxes" or any image sent electronicaly bother you? Go look at the greedy claims being made for this, tunneling, and a whole host of other ideas.
Squabling over Intellectual Property in standard protocols is short sighted. It reduces the possibility the company holding the IP will be able to have the market advantage that comes with inclusion of their technology in a atandard (because no one will bother to include their technology) and potentially harms the quality and viability of the proposed standard
Wow! This is incredible news: greedy claims to obvious ideas harms everyone! The patent system is broken!
from the listed Xerox rights assertment:
"Any license granted by Xerox under this Statement shall be subject to the following condition: any party receiving such a grant from Xerox must agree to grant Xerox Corporation, Xerox Ltd., Fuji Xerox Co. Ltd., Modi Xerox Limited and any corporation, firm, partnership, individual, or other form of business organization at least forty percent (40%) owned or controlled, directly or indirectly, by Xerox Corporation, Xerox Ltd., Fuji Xerox Ltd. or Modi Xerox Limited, upon request, a license under that party's patents relating to the TIFF-FX standard, on terms and conditions no less favorable than those granted by Xerox to that party."
So they don't just own your base, they own your hide. Yeah, right. Do you expect people like that to ever be able to co-operate or agree with anyone? That whole site made me sick.
What a depressing organization.
No, tiny Tim, we are not going to pay to write for Slashdot.
I prefer to play asteroids on my ATM's MGA.
Plugger for quicktime. Looks like a workable pain in the neck. I'll wait for Macromedia to give it up and make a free project.
Windows Media? Why bother with what is sure to become a former "standard" in the ever shifting sands of MS file formats?
Vietnamese fonts. Try this then go here for more help. Good luck, it's hard for me to judge any of this. Still, I can only imagine that you will do better with Linux than any MS software.
No, I did not read Steigler's book. The only David's sling I'm familiar with was used to throw a few round stones that killed a giant. Seems appropriate enough for a 250ft wing that could be brought down with a sling shot. Less apropriate when you imagine the types of folks who would want to use such a dinky weapon would more likely be named Yasser.
That's not true. I've gotten far more help learning to use Linux than I ever got with MS. There are Linux User Groups (LUG) everywhere, and people I hardly know have helped me at work and sat with me at my house. I got to know them better that way. I've got no problem returning the favor and so far I've set up two other people's computers.
It's funny, because Linux is easier to figure out. Win3.1 was so poorly documented a friend HAD to show me how to use it. Going to 95 was a painful experience and I regret all the time I put into it. 98 was also painful, but more regretible. Linux, at times was not easy to get used to, but man pages online documents and books are all excellent sources of help. In fact, despite the useability claims Redmond makes, MS interfaces are are the hardest I've ever dealt with. The list includes VAX, VMS, Solaris, OS2, Mac, MSDOS, Win3.1, Win98, Win98 and WinME. Mac was a pain, but I liked it much better and learned it much faster than Win3.1. MS's position is paradoxical. They wish to convince users that PC's are hard to use, while prommising them that MS is easy to use. If they spent as much time making things as easy as they said instead of fudding, they might get somewhere.
I advocated this for my non technical wife and she likes it. She prefers Netscape to IE and is learning to like GIMP better than paint shop pro (who can afford photoshop?). At work, she uses Star Office, and will soon be wishing it ran on a better OS.
Not having worked with C++ much, I can't say much about debugging it. The book I learned C++ with came with GCC, but I used Watcom at the time and have not needed anything more than C since. Having GCC as a free, stable (both API and output code) compiler more than makes up for any inconvienence I might feel not using that horrible MS Developer's Studio package, shudders at the bad memories. In any case, I suspect this concern has about as much validity as wanting to run IIS instead of Apache, Media dominated Video players over free Video for Linux programs or any of the other obsurdly constricting and unfree software you can spend your hard earned cash on instead of using what is freely available, freely changeable and technically superior.
kernel hackers read asm and binary. I read text. Windows is difficult to modify. Linux is easy. Force comes from MS and others who seek to profit at your expense.
Posit: once Linux reaches a certain saturation, it will suffer the same security issues as Microsoft does.
Unplace excriment: Apache runs more web servers than IIS, the victim of Code Red. Saturation reached, failure not suffered. Think about it for a while.
This has been fixed, thank goodness, and other little things work better now too. Setting up your /etc/apt/sources.list file is just a matter of removing comment #s, but really knowing takes time. Program names, etc. Other distros used to be easier to install.
Debian is a great system to install for someone you are willing to help out. Once they get it, it's much easier for them to move on with. I really like how stable their configuration files have been, and your friends will like that too. If you don't have that kind of time, throw Red Hat at them with a book like Linux Unleashed. That's what I did to myself, so it must have worked.
The more I used, the more I learned and the easier linux became, and the harder MS looked. Looking back on things, it's amazing to me that anyone would trust configurations to anything but a human readable text file. The amount of trust required of MS to do anything is amazing. Good grief, just look at that sloppy NetBIOS. Look at all the hidden stuff. How does anyone memorize that awful pile of symbols that are the ever shifting MS interface? Work, with NT desktops, it painfully constricted and limiting. No compilers, how can people stand it? Only a single window manager with a single virtual screen? Only one crippled shell? I have no regrets as 98 dies on it's last machines in my house. It sucked, then it died. Win2k? No way!
The sooner you move, the happier you will be. The things you learn from MS are either counter productive or plain useless. Want stability, get Debian potato. Want privacy, get ssh.
Compare that to the simple, user specific, text based config files and programs like linuxconfig that manipulate them for those who demand a GUI. Don't like KDE? Run TWM or Afterstep. Ever run a different window manager under an MS OS?
take Windows and disable just about everything (something Windows handles really well)
Windows 3.1 maybe. Doze machines have had to start up the GUI ever since 95. You can't tell it not to run in w2k. Why fool around with that junk?
The NT network here at work could be SO much nicer if they would change it out. Running NT is a BAD idea in terms of support. Not a week goes by that someone does not curse their crashing computer on my floor.
Wow, Bachus. If that's all it takes, KDE fits right in. You should have installed it for your friends and told them it was a new version of 98 with reasonable networking and many other new features. Last weekend, I had a rotten time working with my mom's ME laptop. It was very different from 98, 95, 3.1 and NT.
ME, Win2k, 98, XP all have different interfaces! Figuring out how to use them is a pain. People might as well learn to use an interface that works when the time comes to "upgrade", or that poor old computer feels obsolete because MS won't run on it anymore. If me and my wife can use Linux, anyone can.
The only advantage there was to the trouble of a MS install was some hardware reporting from the system properties and DOS utilities. I could get an idea of how much video ram I had. This was often misleading and better information can be had from modprobe and online today. Setting old ISA cards, such as 3com 509b network cards, with the DOS utility was useful and you might want to make and install a small DOS partition before you install Linux.
Do check hardware compatibility as many above have suggested. MS is constantly encouraging new dumb devices, such as WinModems, that are brain dead and not worth buying or writing device drivers for. Also of particular heartbreak are nicer devices like many parallel scanners and some digital cameras.
Oh. It would be nice to do things properly, but I'll settle for the job the cable company did for me. Their little name for my box cx####.btnrug1.la.home.com has dns set up for it and it seems to work. Some dull mail set ups, like the NT system where I work, take a little time to find the IP, but they get it eventually.
HaiLHaiL asked about crypto.
the OpenBSD crypto page talks about encryption. How is that off topic?
There is no reason the cable folks can't do this, and many already have. This is why you get such good down feed. Like I said, packets are packets. You should be able to send them up as easily as you send them down.
The only way that would be different is if everyone on your subnet all wanted exactly the same packets at the same time, or you could cache out "popular" information on the sub net. You can forget the first one, it's never going to happen unless the cable renames TV internet. The second one works when you have more than 20 or so users with similar tastes.
Of course, there's a large difference between the junk the average comercial crap site puts up (intensive flash trash, and other animations) and what normal people have to share (text, a few static pictures). The cable company gimps the boxes to favor the comercial junk.
Get versed! Spend an hour or two with OpenBSD . They gotta liscence or two, hee hee. Now go forth and kick some ass, Hailman.
BS. Ethernet works that way too. There's plenty of room on it for all. If more capacity is needed they can always (and already have) route subnets. Gee.
See, they really knew what they were doing but those spoilsports in Redmond, M$, took over the world with their inferior version of BASIC that they bundled with the OS. It has caused untold missery across the world. Millions of Dollars have been lost, hundreds of millions of man hours wasted trying to fix things. It would all be OK if only they had POOP and PUKE.
Timex Sinclair also had superior IT, and my site uses a 1600, much expanded. It takes a licking and keeps on ticking.