And what did you use for analog computers? I just don't recall any... Analog music, well analog recordings, sure. But was a turntable an analog computer? Think not... A turntable ? Sice it doesn't do any computation, no. But there were and still are, I believe, lots of analog computers. Unfortunately they have to deal with a number of problems, among which typically being built only to deal with a very specific set of problems.
No, as those were analog sources. They cant use the DMCA in those cases. Why do you think there is this big push to 100% digital? Maybe it's time we started working on analog computers again ?
It wasn't in the original post, it was in a later one, I suppose you didn't browse the whole thread (can't blame you);)
Anyway laptop CPUs were often welded to the motherboard at the time, changing them wasn't practical. Probably still isn't for that matter.
I'll have to try the Google apps on my PictureBook some day to see whether they're usable. I recall that StarOffice ran more or less ok at the time (I have 192Megs of RAM on that machine)
Many licenses would *NOT* allow the military (or whoever) to legitimately use the code in their closed source apps. That's not all licenses, but there are ones that might legally force the military to release their modifications to the original source code. I can't believe some people *still* haven't figured out how those licences (GNU and GNU derived) work... As pointed out above, you have to redistribute the source of the stuff you distribute. Presumably the military wouldn't redistribute their stuff.
OTOH, I have seen a few licences that explicitely prohibited military use.
The real solution is to give sexual predators the punishment they truly deserve in the first place, which is life in prison without possibility of parole.
Which may or may not correspond with current lists of "sex offenders".
Those who want to be soft on sex offenders are most likely not parents, and most definitely not parents of a child who has been abused.
Except for those parents who are themselves abusers... Which oddly enough is the *huge* majority of cases.
To make the children safe maybe they should all be locked away from their parents ? Or maybe all the parents should be locked away, just in case ? After all they're the ones who are statistically more dangerous. Maybe parents should be on the sex offender lists, after all they have shown they have weapons and aren't afraid to use them. Bah.
Until we have domestic sexbots subject to control by remote attackers, you simply can't rape or beat someone over the internet. I've seen Internet beatings happen numerous times, it often involves a large fish for some reason. Perverts all of them I say.
And for the record, I believe "sex offender" laws as they exist in the US are purely "feel good" laws that are of no use whatsoever. Helping the people with psychic disorders they can't handle would be way more useful. But as in most countries, justice isn't meant to help solve problems, just to make people feel that "justice has been served" however futile that is.
OTOH, your reaction WRT the iBook seems an overreaction. Debian installs just fine on the Mac Notebook, and I presume that it would install without problems on the iBook. (Apple generally makes *very* good hardware. I'm less impressed with their software, but I'm not their target audience.) Quite, I considered slapping on a PPC distro since I had mostly bought the machine for the hardware, but since apparently wireless wasn't supported and a number of tools couldn't be installed in non-X86 Linux (still an irritating problem that in most people's mind Linux is x86 Linux) such as Bibble or even just Flash (although for that one the open alternatives seem to be getting there at last). This plus the inconvenience of the 1 button mouse made me switch to the Samsung Q35 which is much more comfortable for me. I haven't figured what to do with the iBook yet, I'll have to see if those things have any resale value.
I guess that's a bit too late to make an appearance at MWSF in January. Then again, as long as they don't have a recording function, who needs Blu-Ray in a Laptop anyway. There's bound to be some software distributed on BlueRay (or HD DVD) sooner or later. And there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to watch a film on your laptop. Or should you always buy both the DVD and the BlueRay versions (assuming you decided to go with BlueRay) ?
Let me get this clear, you think that destroying a fairly vital part of the internet infrastructure by a ddos is a good use of a bot net ? If it's what it takes to get the ICANN to acknowledge that that vital part is severely broken, I think there's some merit to the idea. I doubt anything else will motivate anyone to fix this mess.
Umm... since hashes are one-way, how is the recipient of the whois request to know which domain to look up for you? Brute force? Nice try, but back to the drawing board. I don't know... a79f888f1c2dc50c6b354c0d816f5bf5.com has a nice ring to it...
In my experience (but of course it varies wildly with the apps you run), the brittle side was a real problem when I was running Mandrake (roughly up to one year before they changed their name to Mandriva). It was by far the distribution with the most broken packages. I've run (not in that order) RH, Slackware, Mandrake, Debian (still use it on servers), Gentoo and now (K)Ubuntu because it's less of a hassle.
The brittle side really depends on the choices made by the distribution packagers (at the time Mandrake tended to always package the latest bleeding edge beta of everything) but it seems to me that (at least with Ubuntu lately) it's definitely gotten quite a bit better.
OTOH I've had a number of odd crashes in XP as well (where the only applications I run are store bought games, an antivirus, and sometimes Firefox) in drivers, various apps, etc. No system is immune (oh and my Mac running 10.4 had its share of problems too):(
Software nowadays... well, it's not as good as it used to be ya know;)
Vista asked me a bunch of questions and then rebooted a few times and ran. XP has less hardware support and so is a bit trickier, since every time it sees an unrecognized piece of hardware it asks you for the disk. Worst case, you don't have the disk and fetch the driver online. Wait, does that "should I fetch the driver online" thing ever work ? It's in XP too and I've never once seen it report anything but "sorry, no driver for you".
Regarding your install problem, you could easily have had the same thing happen with a Microsoft install. The variations in hardware are such that getting something to work 100% of the time just isn't possible (unless you install on your own hardware à la Sun or Apple). It sucks that you were unlucky but it's not really a problem with the system.
I'm comparing ease of use, availability of quality software, reliability, and hardware compatability.
Granted, I'm not a typical user and run developer tools on my desktop, but even for basic things Linux would fall short, and there ARE bugs, whether fanboys lke to admit it or not (no, I'm not calling you a fanboy). There are bugs in all systems. And in my experience I haven't had trouble finding quality software, running reliable systems or finding compatible hardware (granted the latter sometimes require a little planning prior to shopping). I've used Linux on my desktops for the past 10 years at least and for the last 5 the various distros have been very useable.
Granted YMMV depending on the type of work you do. For my use : high end photo management, light development, a lot of writing and a bit of poking at the backend of a few websites, it works fine. But there still are a number of domains where users have no good tools. For example if you do CAD or prepress there aren't many solutions at the moment.
In my case I can't recall ever thinking "I wish I was running Windows so I could use this essential tool" (apart from games which indeed do have a dedicated XP partition).
But then to each his own. There's room for everybody;)
Ubuntu is nice, but it still isn't as noob-friendly as I'd like to see. Your points (regarding a few brittle or sometimes, broken apps making it into the repositories) are quite insightful and while seasoned users won't have much trouble with them it certainly can be a problem for newcomers. OTOH of course neither Windows nor MacOS (although the latter can do quite a lot more out of the box than Windows) come with such a vast number of applications, so a 1:1 comparison doesn't really make sense.
And regarding the "noob friendliness", this is always put forward with Windows although I keep seeing Windows users that just can't manage to make head from tails from their system, haven't really figured how to install or remove stuff or how to change basic settings. I don't really see the difference between that and pretty much any other graphical system/interface. If you don't know how to use it, you don't know how to use it. Whether it's Windows, MacOS or Unix doesn't really matter much. The interface is fairly similar anyway when you aren't already conditioned into the quirks of a specific system.
What's currently considered friendly is what you're used to. No more no less. I find Unix/Linux very friendly because I'm quite used to it and understand the way it works. I find Windows downright hostile when I have to use it because none of it makes much sense to me. I can still use it fine because I've been around computers for a while, I just avoid it. Pretty much the same thing with MacOS : I have an iBook which I used for a year before getting fed up with it and replacing it with a small Samsung running Linux.
To be fair, in the same article he also recommends just installing Ubuntu on a cheap PC. However it does so with strong undertones of "you could always install Linux (but it's complicated and not really good for anything except displaying a few web pages and doing basic stuff) if you're *that* cheap".
I had no idea people still even had a use for kvm switches.
Absolutely there's a use. KVM over IP, especially is critical.
none of ssh, remote X, or rdesktop let you get into the BIOS screens to adjust settings, RAID cards come up before the computer boots as well and without something like a KVM (or dedicated keyboard monitors etc), you don't get to fix those problems without driving down to the cage;-) Yes I guess I overlooked that case which mostly comes up during setup, but I suppose that when a lot of maintenance on remote boxes is involved and there are no trained monkeys on site, it's a welcome addition:)
By the way, for the original poster: For mere pocketchange, many, many "Socket 6" motherboards can be upgraded to 500MHz [or higher] with a K6-2 [or, in some instances, a K6-3] Hard to do on a laptop (which is what he said he was using). I have a similar machine myself which also runs a 400MHz mobile Pentium 2 on a Sony PCG-C1XD PictureBook (similar model on the cowboyneal site). The battery life kind of sucks (especially since I now have a dead battery) but it's a fun little machine that was quite popular. I intend to revive it one of these days with a more modern distro (currently running an old Mandrake).
Here's a translation of a blog post about MIAU, for those who want to get an idea of what it's about. Judging from the name it's obviously some kind of cat appreciation club.
But that bit about the xenophobia is true. I've noticed it. You'd think that they'd want to encourage immigration with their population declining and all that... That's why robots are so big over there. Once a large segment of the population is made of robots, it becomes easy to check whether the robot is Japanese by checking its serial number.
And the apparent slow return to the 1920s mentality over there is indeed a bit disturbing. Especially when you see how that turned out (not really taught in western schools for some reason despite it being a large part of WWII)...
With synergy, ssh and/or X11 (and the remote display thing in Windows, the name of which I have forgotten), I had no idea people still even had a use for kvm switches.
Maybe there are more CP/M users left than I thought ?
If you think the US would use this to combat global warming. More like use it to combat "terrorists". After all there is merely a "fight" going on against global warming whereas there is a *war* going on against terrorism. Not at all the same thing.
Unless the thing against global warming escalates to full scale war (maybe somebody could "find" that Kerdjikistan has Weapons of Mass Marming and invade them ?)...
My AP Bio teacher back in the day talked about this technology being about the worst thing possible for global warming, as it actually increases the amount of energy coming in to the Earth. So does the sun, every single second. Quick, somebody douse the damn thing !
Maybe we should start allowing the use of some performance enhancing drugs (we already do that to some extent by allowing them to eat any kind of food - at least we don't specify the number of calories they are allowed to take on board each day unlike motor racing where you only get a certain amount of fuel) Certain drugs which have been shown to be relatively safe should be legalized and the trick would be for the athlete to find the right combination of the different things to get the best performance.
Hopefully if they are already doped up to the eyeballs there wont be any incentive to test some wonder drug made in a dirty sink by a backstreet criminal organization. I feel sorry for athletes and what the progress of our society has done to them. They knew very well what they were doing when they went into competition. They're *all* pumped full of drugs.
IMO doping should be allowed with no exception, including body modifications, genetic enhancements, etc. Not only would it rationalise the ridiculous amounts top athletes are paid for running around but it would also be beneficial to the medical field and the population at large. And the athletes would at least presumably be with proper doctors instead of quacks.
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Sice it doesn't do any computation, no. But there were and still are, I believe, lots of analog computers. Unfortunately they have to deal with a number of problems, among which typically being built only to deal with a very specific set of problems.
A summery summary would brighten up my day !
It wasn't in the original post, it was in a later one, I suppose you didn't browse the whole thread (can't blame you) ;)
Anyway laptop CPUs were often welded to the motherboard at the time, changing them wasn't practical. Probably still isn't for that matter.
I'll have to try the Google apps on my PictureBook some day to see whether they're usable. I recall that StarOffice ran more or less ok at the time (I have 192Megs of RAM on that machine)
OTOH, I have seen a few licences that explicitely prohibited military use.
Which may or may not correspond with current lists of "sex offenders".
Those who want to be soft on sex offenders are most likely not parents, and most definitely not parents of a child who has been abused.
Except for those parents who are themselves abusers... Which oddly enough is the *huge* majority of cases.
To make the children safe maybe they should all be locked away from their parents ? Or maybe all the parents should be locked away, just in case ? After all they're the ones who are statistically more dangerous. Maybe parents should be on the sex offender lists, after all they have shown they have weapons and aren't afraid to use them. Bah.
rape or beat someone over the internet. I've seen Internet beatings happen numerous times, it often involves a large fish for some reason. Perverts all of them I say.
And for the record, I believe "sex offender" laws as they exist in the US are purely "feel good" laws that are of no use whatsoever. Helping the people with psychic disorders they can't handle would be way more useful. But as in most countries, justice isn't meant to help solve problems, just to make people feel that "justice has been served" however futile that is.
Then again, as long as they don't have a recording function, who needs Blu-Ray in a Laptop anyway. There's bound to be some software distributed on BlueRay (or HD DVD) sooner or later. And there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to watch a film on your laptop. Or should you always buy both the DVD and the BlueRay versions (assuming you decided to go with BlueRay) ?
In my experience (but of course it varies wildly with the apps you run), the brittle side was a real problem when I was running Mandrake (roughly up to one year before they changed their name to Mandriva). It was by far the distribution with the most broken packages.
:(
;)
I've run (not in that order) RH, Slackware, Mandrake, Debian (still use it on servers), Gentoo and now (K)Ubuntu because it's less of a hassle.
The brittle side really depends on the choices made by the distribution packagers (at the time Mandrake tended to always package the latest bleeding edge beta of everything) but it seems to me that (at least with Ubuntu lately) it's definitely gotten quite a bit better.
OTOH I've had a number of odd crashes in XP as well (where the only applications I run are store bought games, an antivirus, and sometimes Firefox) in drivers, various apps, etc. No system is immune (oh and my Mac running 10.4 had its share of problems too)
Software nowadays... well, it's not as good as it used to be ya know
Regarding your install problem, you could easily have had the same thing happen with a Microsoft install. The variations in hardware are such that getting something to work 100% of the time just isn't possible (unless you install on your own hardware à la Sun or Apple). It sucks that you were unlucky but it's not really a problem with the system.
Granted, I'm not a typical user and run developer tools on my desktop, but even for basic things Linux would fall short, and there ARE bugs, whether fanboys lke to admit it or not (no, I'm not calling you a fanboy). There are bugs in all systems. And in my experience I haven't had trouble finding quality software, running reliable systems or finding compatible hardware (granted the latter sometimes require a little planning prior to shopping). I've used Linux on my desktops for the past 10 years at least and for the last 5 the various distros have been very useable.
Granted YMMV depending on the type of work you do. For my use : high end photo management, light development, a lot of writing and a bit of poking at the backend of a few websites, it works fine.
But there still are a number of domains where users have no good tools. For example if you do CAD or prepress there aren't many solutions at the moment.
In my case I can't recall ever thinking "I wish I was running Windows so I could use this essential tool" (apart from games which indeed do have a dedicated XP partition).
But then to each his own. There's room for everybody
And regarding the "noob friendliness", this is always put forward with Windows although I keep seeing Windows users that just can't manage to make head from tails from their system, haven't really figured how to install or remove stuff or how to change basic settings. I don't really see the difference between that and pretty much any other graphical system/interface. If you don't know how to use it, you don't know how to use it. Whether it's Windows, MacOS or Unix doesn't really matter much. The interface is fairly similar anyway when you aren't already conditioned into the quirks of a specific system.
What's currently considered friendly is what you're used to.
No more no less. I find Unix/Linux very friendly because I'm quite used to it and understand the way it works. I find Windows downright hostile when I have to use it because none of it makes much sense to me. I can still use it fine because I've been around computers for a while, I just avoid it. Pretty much the same thing with MacOS : I have an iBook which I used for a year before getting fed up with it and replacing it with a small Samsung running Linux.
Doesn't really qualify as unbiased reporting.
Absolutely there's a use. KVM over IP, especially is critical.
none of ssh, remote X, or rdesktop let you get into the BIOS screens to adjust settings, RAID cards come up before the computer boots as well and without something like a KVM (or dedicated keyboard monitors etc), you don't get to fix those problems without driving down to the cage
I intend to revive it one of these days with a more modern distro (currently running an old Mandrake).
And the apparent slow return to the 1920s mentality over there is indeed a bit disturbing. Especially when you see how that turned out (not really taught in western schools for some reason despite it being a large part of WWII)...
With synergy, ssh and/or X11 (and the remote display thing in Windows, the name of which I have forgotten), I had no idea people still even had a use for kvm switches.
Maybe there are more CP/M users left than I thought ?
Unless the thing against global warming escalates to full scale war (maybe somebody could "find" that Kerdjikistan has Weapons of Mass Marming and invade them ?)...
Hopefully if they are already doped up to the eyeballs there wont be any incentive to test some wonder drug made in a dirty sink by a backstreet criminal organization. I feel sorry for athletes and what the progress of our society has done to them. They knew very well what they were doing when they went into competition. They're *all* pumped full of drugs.
IMO doping should be allowed with no exception, including body modifications, genetic enhancements, etc. Not only would it rationalise the ridiculous amounts top athletes are paid for running around but it would also be beneficial to the medical field and the population at large.
And the athletes would at least presumably be with proper doctors instead of quacks.