Yea, I'm a transplanted Brit anyway.. So any UK remarks are made from the viewpoint of being a citizen of that country:) I only recently moved to the USA anyway, so calm ye self:>
I DO think that the domains should be organised by country so people can look for better host connections, I'm not saying that the US should have.com,.org,.net 'to ourselves'.. if you'd actually READ my post you'd have seen I mentioned instead of the example apple.farms it would be better having apple.farms.us.. so people in the US would know that's a US site and should have a faster connection than going to apple.farms.au which seems likely based around the other side of the world.
Noone wants to do WHOIS lookups either (to the AC post #241) to find out where sites are.. they'd rather just have a simple but INFORMATIVE URL.
And yea.. I was really making the point about doofer.com and doofer.net as the guy above me had said it would END domain 'camping'.. which I know annoyed me in the example I gave.
Will ICANN do this? Heck no. Bidding wars over limited domains generates big $$$. And trademark holders like the idea of "buying up all variations of our name so no one else can use it". So between the $$$ and politics, I suppose this sensible suggestion will never happen.
Sadly, you're probably right.. although I love your proposal.. sounds like it's exactly where the internet needs to go.
In a sense (admittedly not 'technically' - your idea for subdividing based on letter is a good one), you are effectively doing away with TLDs altogether and instead making people have domains of something.something.. kinda like you can have anytexthere.com,.org,.net at the moment, i.e. any text you like in the DOMAIN part of the name.
Adding the established country codes to those domains, like apple.farms.us etc. would be a nice touch too, as it's nice to know where a particular company is and for multi-nationals, to have various websites for faster access.. apple.farms.uk for those in the UK etc..
Yes it also pisses me off that some crappy 'internet company' in the UK has 'doofer.net' and 'doofer.com' 'to protect your brand'.. bastards.. I wanted doofer.org anyway 'just because'.. but it's still annoying to find those parasites out there. --
I don't have a problem with racial distinctions if it's to, for example, indicate someone that you can't differentiate by any other means.. like if one person doesn't know a person's name and you're trying to indicate them out of a crowd or across a room.. 'Go see Bob, That's Bob *point*'.. 'Who?'.. 'Bob, the black guy over there, see him?'.. that sort of thing.
No, what I have a problem with is labelling people by their race (or sexuality for that matter) and leaving it like that or making BROAD GENERALISATIONS about people based solely on their race or sexual orientation.
I'm confused that an attitude of 'try not to offend' is bemoaned by you.. Who wants to offend people by mistake?.. noone!.. we all just want to get along!.. is that so bad?... The instant someone says something that DOES offend (even without meaning to), all sorts of people come forth and shout 'racist!'.. is it any wonder that with that sort of thing to worry about (yes, people do tend to worry about how they're perceived by others) that people normally want to err on the side of caution - these people to which they're refering or talking to may be people they personally care a lot about. It's merely because it's a hell of a lot of an easier life if you ARE careful in what you say.
I'll be happy to just see everyone living happily together.. and I would have thought that a 'just make it go away' attitude (if you meant 'just make RACISM go away') would be a very GOOD thing as people can then concentrate on how they interact with each other as people and not have to have people lumped as 'black', 'white' etc. It's kinda perverse I think that you seem to be against 'making it all go away'.. Sure, the lessons need to be remembered, and must be remembered to save future generations from growing up in previous abominations - slavery, rascism, apartheid, opression.. everyone KNOWS it happened.. yes, it's BAD, and racism does still happen of course today.. but people MUST forget to make such distinctions and generalisations about people. BOTH sides must forget and move on if there's ever to be any sort of progress. These days it seems that there are a number (here I go with a generalisation of my own:/) of non-caucasians seem to want to 'make the whites pay' for racism in the past and WON'T let the whole thing lie. In fact they seem to delight in expounding the differences between races to the point of being racist to caucasians. I think that drives a lot of people nuts, I know it does for me. Now that's not necessarily YOU MrKai, I don't know how you feel about that, but I have seen individuals (personally and on TV) say those sorts of things and make everything RACIAL when it really shouldn't be.. That guy William on BigBrother seems to be just one of those people and I think that's sad.
This applies for anything... ending discrimination in any forms, making peace after wars etc. Problem is that it's just not easy for some people to do and they don't WANT to let things go.
Well that guy (William I think) on BigBrother last night sure gave african-american guys a bad image by being SO obsessed with race it wasn't even possible to take him seriously. Noone else cares about race, we're all just people ya dumbass I felt like saying to him.. *grumble*.. Saying that he (to paraphrase from my memory) 'represents black men' must have been quite an insult to all african-americans. I'm caucasian and I felt offended by him..
Anyway.. I digress.. you're right about the 'geek' stereotype, that seems to be bandied around.. quite sad really.. I like to think of myself as a geek and I'm proud of it.. I felt like saying 'me too!' to your post:) --
Hopefully Ray Park didn't do a David Prowse (actor who played Darth Vader, although dubbed by James Earl Jones) and take a flat salary (at least in the first Star Wars film, episode IV - I'm not certain about the others) in place of a cut of the profits... talk about a DOH moment.
Okay, so I'm wrong.. I thought I very well could be..:) I just seem to remember them saying on that Candid Camera program that it was illegal in some states (I thought it was WA, maybe it's just OR.. it was somewhere in the north-west USA) to pump your own gas (their whole premise for this stunt rested on this as it was meant to be a 'shifty' sort of deal).. I wonder if anyone else knows of this law or has seen that program and remembers the details (because I don't)
Anyway.. my real point was that there ARE people out there that don't know how to pump their own gas.. and that's a little scary.. but it marries up well with the analogy of installing software is like putting gas in the car.. simple stuff... but some people are afraid/unsure of it. --
The original example was people who can't install their own software. That requires no knowledge of the internals of an OS. The car analog to installing your own software IS putting gas in.
Yea... and what are those states that drivers that grow up in them don't even know how to pump gas as it's ILLEGAL there?.. Washington and Oregon I believe. I remember seeing a show of Candid Camera and it had people offering 'cut price gasoline' to these drivers if they pumped it themselves and LOTS of drivers just DIDN'T KNOW HOW!.. Now having drivers that don't know how to pump gas but can drive on the roads is just SCARY.
I want computers to be used by everyone too.. but it seems to be a common theme that everything has to be 'dumbed down' in order for the 'public' to use them.. that's just crap as it makes these people even LESS likely to learn anything useful that can help THEM by training them not to ask such stupid questions or do such stupid things but to FIND OUT FOR THEMSELVES (a novel concept in this age where everyone expects everything to be handed to them on a plate). Everyone that's ever dealt with inexperienced users knows that it can get very tiresome when these people don't want to learn for themselves but it's very gratifying if they go on to take at least a passing interest in learning about the computers they use.
Maybe it's just this pervasive societal idea that morons should be able to use computers without contributing anything to learning about them that's the problem... i.e. AOL. --
Yea, why does Slashdot think it's such a good idea to fuck up urls (more precisely the anchor tag itself) in posts and the user-info?.. I like putting links to external sites with a target="_blank" attribute in them so it doesn't replace the page.. I do that for my own pages and with habit I do it in posts too.. plus wanting to make the average./ers life slightly easier if they forget to middle-click the link (or right-button - new window in windows).. It pisses me off that it gets all corrupted if you add these attributes.. it probably shouldn't annoy me but it does... must be one of those days.
Maybe that bug is on a long to-do list of Rob's.. maybe.
Well yea, apparently today IS 'Intern Appreciation Day'.. according to the amusing DJ on the radio this morning it's the 3rd anniversary of the Prez's own appreciation of Monica.. --
nslookup quova.com returns 208.37.145.34, a completely different network by the looks of it.
www.quova.com is running apache in a name virtual host setup that doesn't appear to be configured that well.. if you do a raw HTTP request with specifying the Host: header, you get a 404.. So yes, the website could well be under some hosting company somewhere and nowhere near their actual 'HQ'.
Hi to the user at 141.204.214.xx (last digits removed for security) who had a glance around my websites from my page link in this thread about half an hour ago...
No that's not meant to intimidate people, I think that's just a case in point for people that like to know what's going on.. just have some sort of logging for unknown hosts and know what part of your system is available to the public and what isn't.
Of course this works both ways... I was able to see which pages this particular (very welcome in this case) visitor was looking at and in what order.. now that's what marketing people REALLY want to do.. not ping and traceroute networks. As many people pointed out, that's pretty worthless information.
Fortunately I am not one of them and I maintain a fairly comprehensive website logging just because:
a) I felt like it b) I wanted to play with PHP and MySQL c) I love knowing how people find my pages and what they actually find of interest about what I like to put on the web
Of course c is closest to the what the 'marketroids' want.. in the right hands it's just interesting.. in the wrong hands it's scary.
On their website www.quova.com they have a contact page giving various email addresses including one for concerns.. I don't see what there is to get upset about really.
If you have sensitive services that you don't want accessible by the whole internet, use hosts.allow / hosts.deny etc... seeing if a machine is alive does not endanger security.. only if AFTER establishing that then particular security flaw exploits are attempted on these services is there a problem. Use qmail for smtp, apache for www, and lock down ssh to only a few allowed hosts or networks and that should help alleviate a lot of fear imho. For those that would whine about ssh, if you allow telnet then you're not serious about security.
If your network and system is secure, who gives a flying fuck what people do on the internet?.. it IS a public network after all..
All the more reason to ban insecure internet cafes that supply insecure methods of connecting to the internet, thereby almost encouraging people to spray their cleartext passwords everywhere and not only endanger their accounts but everyone elses.
If the internet cafes don't have SSH clients available, then most wise people should steer well clear. And there's enough free windows clients now to make that whining of 'no windows clients' completely moot.
AFAIK what I use (TeraTerm + SSH) are freely available without restrictions. The TeraTerm SSH component is written by Robert O'Callaghan in Australia (home page here) and does not come with any RSA encumbered algorithms by default like PuTTY does.
Together with OpenSSH for Linux (where I SSH to), I'm a happy camper:)
Yes, that reminds me of a case that happened at my university (DeMontfort in Leicester, England) where the Unix network (an HP-UX network) also had a 386 or something PC connected to it to facilitate FTP. This was vital when you wanted to download stuff very fast from the university network and sneaker-net it home on floppies:).. Such as I did before I had internet access from home the following year.
Anyway, this PC got cracked very easily (the obvious fact that it had a floppy drive on it to do the ftp also meant it was bootable via that) and a password sniffer was installed, thereby getting everyone's password when they used the FTP program to get their files via FTP from the HP network.
They caught the guy very quickly though, I can't remember how now but it was easy because he was local.. I don't know if the external security was much tighter, I believe it was though. I remember the network admin coming around telling people to change their passwords as they had reason to believe they'd been compromised, of which I was one of them... Hi AJC, if you're reading:)
I'm blathering anyway.. but I agree with the above two posts that yes, universities are 'almost' as bad as the real world.. I think that's because people (students) tend to view the campus network as more of a 'playground' and would try things they'd never try against a company that might sue them into obvlivion. --
An X display might be nice but why would you want to run Quake on it (apart from 'because I can')?.. it's not got much in the way of graphics hardware to be able to do it.
It would be nicer IMHO to turn a regular computer into a Tivo (get a license for the software?) than to turn a tivo back into a regular computer.. that just seems like lots of work and little resultant benefit.
he goes on raving about the same things that the Linux community has been raving about for the last few years.
EXACTLY!.. Because the people that use Linux now and were some of the first ones to get interested in it were precisely the ones who were into the home computer platforms such as Amiga, Atari, Acorn etc. back in the late 1980s before Linux came about. When Linux grew larger (about the mid 1990s) a lot of people (myself included, I used to have an Amiga500 and Amiga1200) were there using Linux and moved over to that platform, still extoling the same basic stuff about how wonderful it is (as we had done with our Amigas vs. Atari 'fights' in the past) and that these silly dos/windows users now needed to 'see the light'. --
Heh.. I feel I have to join in too. I made the switch to Linux in 1996 though and at the time I just wanted a 486 Linux PC to run 'alongside' the Amiga, to do the internet dialup etc. FWIW, Slackware 3.6 was the first Linux distro I used.
I got tempted by games too and was dismayed at how the Amiga had been left so far behind (of course it was 4 or 5 year technology by then). When I eventually got a K6-2/300 it fairly much sealed the Amiga's fate for me (especially with the Voodoo2 I bought for it).
The biggest difference I noticed was doing stuff with VistaPro, it was something I enjoyed doing on the Amiga 1200 (50 Mhz 68EC030 / 68882, 18MB RAM) with Imagine. On the PC I used VistaPro (it was on a coverdisc of all things) and it blew me away just how much faster the K6-2 was.. of course it's like 6 times the clockspeed, but still.. it illustrated the evolution of the computers.
In terms of the difference of the operating systems (Linux and AmigaOS).. yes, they're quite different.. I prefer the multi-user environment of Linux though and having Unix at home to play with (I got into Unix at university in 1994 and enjoyed it a lot). AmigaOS was, as you mention, slicker than slick. Part of the fun with Linux I found was , as I felt in my early days of the Amiga, finding things out and getting things to work. Once the last config file is tweaked and the last Prefs program honed to perfection then there's less to do with playing with the OS. That's when applications/games etc. are the key issue. That's where the Amiga lost me I have to say.. That and the exorbitant hardware prices.. I still get jittery thinking how much I paid for an 8MB SIMM at the start of 1996.. --
Slashdot Mirror
Yea, I'm a transplanted Brit anyway.. So any UK remarks are made from the viewpoint of being a citizen of that country :) I only recently moved to the USA anyway, so calm ye self :>
.com,.org,.net 'to ourselves' .. if you'd actually READ my post you'd have seen I mentioned instead of the example apple.farms it would be better having apple.farms.us .. so people in the US would know that's a US site and should have a faster connection than going to apple.farms.au which seems likely based around the other side of the world.
.. which I know annoyed me in the example I gave.
I DO think that the domains should be organised by country so people can look for better host connections, I'm not saying that the US should have
Noone wants to do WHOIS lookups either (to the AC post #241) to find out where sites are.. they'd rather just have a simple but INFORMATIVE URL.
And yea.. I was really making the point about doofer.com and doofer.net as the guy above me had said it would END domain 'camping'
--
Hmm.. I'd have pronounced that as:
.. .. you really go around call ing the power supply of your computer a poosoo?
:>
pee-ees-you ed-you
Odd.. Each to their own I guess..
--
Will ICANN do this? Heck no. Bidding wars over limited domains generates big $$$. And trademark holders like the idea of "buying up all variations of our name so no one else can use it". So between the $$$ and politics, I suppose this sensible suggestion will never happen.
.. kinda like you can have anytexthere.com,.org,.net at the moment, i.e. any text you like in the DOMAIN part of the name.
.. bastards.. I wanted doofer.org anyway 'just because' .. but it's still annoying to find those parasites out there.
Sadly, you're probably right.. although I love your proposal.. sounds like it's exactly where the internet needs to go.
In a sense (admittedly not 'technically' - your idea for subdividing based on letter is a good one), you are effectively doing away with TLDs altogether and instead making people have domains of something.something
Adding the established country codes to those domains, like apple.farms.us etc. would be a nice touch too, as it's nice to know where a particular company is and for multi-nationals, to have various websites for faster access.. apple.farms.uk for those in the UK etc..
Yes it also pisses me off that some crappy 'internet company' in the UK has 'doofer.net' and 'doofer.com' 'to protect your brand'
--
I don't have a problem with racial distinctions if it's to, for example, indicate someone that you can't differentiate by any other means.. like if one person doesn't know a person's name and you're trying to indicate them out of a crowd or across a room .. 'Go see Bob, That's Bob *point*' .. 'Who?' .. 'Bob, the black guy over there, see him?' .. that sort of thing.
.. Who wants to offend people by mistake? .. noone! .. we all just want to get along! .. is that so bad? ... The instant someone says something that DOES offend (even without meaning to), all sorts of people come forth and shout 'racist!' .. is it any wonder that with that sort of thing to worry about (yes, people do tend to worry about how they're perceived by others) that people normally want to err on the side of caution - these people to which they're refering or talking to may be people they personally care a lot about. It's merely because it's a hell of a lot of an easier life if you ARE careful in what you say.
.. Sure, the lessons need to be remembered, and must be remembered to save future generations from growing up in previous abominations - slavery, rascism, apartheid, opression .. everyone KNOWS it happened .. yes, it's BAD, and racism does still happen of course today.. but people MUST forget to make such distinctions and generalisations about people. BOTH sides must forget and move on if there's ever to be any sort of progress. These days it seems that there are a number (here I go with a generalisation of my own :/) of non-caucasians seem to want to 'make the whites pay' for racism in the past and WON'T let the whole thing lie. In fact they seem to delight in expounding the differences between races to the point of being racist to caucasians. I think that drives a lot of people nuts, I know it does for me. Now that's not necessarily YOU MrKai, I don't know how you feel about that, but I have seen individuals (personally and on TV) say those sorts of things and make everything RACIAL when it really shouldn't be.. That guy William on BigBrother seems to be just one of those people and I think that's sad.
No, what I have a problem with is labelling people by their race (or sexuality for that matter) and leaving it like that or making BROAD GENERALISATIONS about people based solely on their race or sexual orientation.
I'm confused that an attitude of 'try not to offend' is bemoaned by you
I'll be happy to just see everyone living happily together.. and I would have thought that a 'just make it go away' attitude (if you meant 'just make RACISM go away') would be a very GOOD thing as people can then concentrate on how they interact with each other as people and not have to have people lumped as 'black', 'white' etc. It's kinda perverse I think that you seem to be against 'making it all go away'
This applies for anything... ending discrimination in any forms, making peace after wars etc. Problem is that it's just not easy for some people to do and they don't WANT to let things go.
--
Well that guy (William I think) on BigBrother last night sure gave african-american guys a bad image by being SO obsessed with race it wasn't even possible to take him seriously. Noone else cares about race, we're all just people ya dumbass I felt like saying to him.. *grumble* .. Saying that he (to paraphrase from my memory) 'represents black men' must have been quite an insult to all african-americans. I'm caucasian and I felt offended by him..
.. quite sad really .. I like to think of myself as a geek and I'm proud of it.. I felt like saying 'me too!' to your post :)
Anyway.. I digress.. you're right about the 'geek' stereotype, that seems to be bandied around
--
Hopefully Ray Park didn't do a David Prowse (actor who played Darth Vader, although dubbed by James Earl Jones) and take a flat salary (at least in the first Star Wars film, episode IV - I'm not certain about the others) in place of a cut of the profits... talk about a DOH moment.
--
Ah.. this is it: .. Yes it's Oregon, not Washington ..
Dumb Laws - Oregon
You may not pump your own gas in service stations.
Weird.
--
Okay, so I'm wrong.. I thought I very well could be.. :) I just seem to remember them saying on that Candid Camera program that it was illegal in some states (I thought it was WA, maybe it's just OR .. it was somewhere in the north-west USA) to pump your own gas (their whole premise for this stunt rested on this as it was meant to be a 'shifty' sort of deal) .. I wonder if anyone else knows of this law or has seen that program and remembers the details (because I don't)
.. simple stuff... but some people are afraid/unsure of it.
Anyway.. my real point was that there ARE people out there that don't know how to pump their own gas.. and that's a little scary.. but it marries up well with the analogy of installing software is like putting gas in the car
--
The original example was people who can't install their own software. That requires no knowledge of the internals of an OS. The car analog to installing your own software IS putting gas in.
.. Washington and Oregon I believe. I remember seeing a show of Candid Camera and it had people offering 'cut price gasoline' to these drivers if they pumped it themselves and LOTS of drivers just DIDN'T KNOW HOW! .. Now having drivers that don't know how to pump gas but can drive on the roads is just SCARY.
.. but it seems to be a common theme that everything has to be 'dumbed down' in order for the 'public' to use them .. that's just crap as it makes these people even LESS likely to learn anything useful that can help THEM by training them not to ask such stupid questions or do such stupid things but to FIND OUT FOR THEMSELVES (a novel concept in this age where everyone expects everything to be handed to them on a plate). Everyone that's ever dealt with inexperienced users knows that it can get very tiresome when these people don't want to learn for themselves but it's very gratifying if they go on to take at least a passing interest in learning about the computers they use.
... i.e. AOL.
Yea... and what are those states that drivers that grow up in them don't even know how to pump gas as it's ILLEGAL there?
I want computers to be used by everyone too
Maybe it's just this pervasive societal idea that morons should be able to use computers without contributing anything to learning about them that's the problem
--
Slashdot's HTML on their site is just crap anyway.. ever had a look at the source?
/. .. and on many other sites too.
Try this link to run the main page through the W3C's HTML validator.
Fixing their quotes problem is one on a very long list of things to solve the problems with the HTML on
--
Yea, why does Slashdot think it's such a good idea to fuck up urls (more precisely the anchor tag itself) in posts and the user-info?
Maybe that bug is on a long to-do list of Rob's
</RANT>
--
Well yea, apparently today IS 'Intern Appreciation Day' .. according to the amusing DJ on the radio this morning it's the 3rd anniversary of the Prez's own appreciation of Monica..
--
Mon website est gris-bleu. Je suis sûr!
--
Indeed...
.. So yes, the website could well be under some hosting company somewhere and nowhere near their actual 'HQ'.
nslookup www.quova.com returns 205.177.226.233
and
nslookup quova.com returns 208.37.145.34, a completely different network by the looks of it.
www.quova.com is running apache in a name virtual host setup that doesn't appear to be configured that well.. if you do a raw HTTP request with specifying the Host: header, you get a 404
--
Hi to the user at 141.204.214.xx (last digits removed for security) who had a glance around my websites from my page link in this thread about half an hour ago ...
.. just have some sort of logging for unknown hosts and know what part of your system is available to the public and what isn't.
.. now that's what marketing people REALLY want to do .. not ping and traceroute networks. As many people pointed out, that's pretty worthless information.
.. in the right hands it's just interesting.. in the wrong hands it's scary.
No that's not meant to intimidate people, I think that's just a case in point for people that like to know what's going on
Of course this works both ways... I was able to see which pages this particular (very welcome in this case) visitor was looking at and in what order
Fortunately I am not one of them and I maintain a fairly comprehensive website logging just because:
a) I felt like it
b) I wanted to play with PHP and MySQL
c) I love knowing how people find my pages and what they actually find of interest about what I like to put on the web
Of course c is closest to the what the 'marketroids' want
--
On their website www.quova.com they have a contact page giving various email addresses including one for concerns .. I don't see what there is to get upset about really.
.. seeing if a machine is alive does not endanger security .. only if AFTER establishing that then particular security flaw exploits are attempted on these services is there a problem. Use qmail for smtp, apache for www, and lock down ssh to only a few allowed hosts or networks and that should help alleviate a lot of fear imho. For those that would whine about ssh, if you allow telnet then you're not serious about security.
.. it IS a public network after all..
If you have sensitive services that you don't want accessible by the whole internet, use hosts.allow / hosts.deny etc.
If your network and system is secure, who gives a flying fuck what people do on the internet?
--
All the more reason to ban insecure internet cafes that supply insecure methods of connecting to the internet, thereby almost encouraging people to spray their cleartext passwords everywhere and not only endanger their accounts but everyone elses.
If the internet cafes don't have SSH clients available, then most wise people should steer well clear. And there's enough free windows clients now to make that whining of 'no windows clients' completely moot.
--
AFAIK what I use (TeraTerm + SSH) are freely available without restrictions. The TeraTerm SSH component is written by Robert O'Callaghan in Australia (home page here) and does not come with any RSA encumbered algorithms by default like PuTTY does.
:)
Together with OpenSSH for Linux (where I SSH to), I'm a happy camper
--
Yes, that reminds me of a case that happened at my university (DeMontfort in Leicester, England) where the Unix network (an HP-UX network) also had a 386 or something PC connected to it to facilitate FTP. This was vital when you wanted to download stuff very fast from the university network and sneaker-net it home on floppies :) .. Such as I did before I had internet access from home the following year.
.. I don't know if the external security was much tighter, I believe it was though. I remember the network admin coming around telling people to change their passwords as they had reason to believe they'd been compromised, of which I was one of them ... Hi AJC, if you're reading :)
.. I think that's because people (students) tend to view the campus network as more of a 'playground' and would try things they'd never try against a company that might sue them into obvlivion.
Anyway, this PC got cracked very easily (the obvious fact that it had a floppy drive on it to do the ftp also meant it was bootable via that) and a password sniffer was installed, thereby getting everyone's password when they used the FTP program to get their files via FTP from the HP network.
They caught the guy very quickly though, I can't remember how now but it was easy because he was local
I'm blathering anyway.. but I agree with the above two posts that yes, universities are 'almost' as bad as the real world
--
My question is how did they write that web page without once regressing into a monster-truck announcer's voice?
:>
They probably do if you phone them up
--
The IP is 64.66.159.96 for those with flakey DNS
Works fine for me.
--
Heh .. I should have read your post first :) .. I agree with you totally :)
--
An X display might be nice but why would you want to run Quake on it (apart from 'because I can')? .. it's not got much in the way of graphics hardware to be able to do it.
It would be nicer IMHO to turn a regular computer into a Tivo (get a license for the software?) than to turn a tivo back into a regular computer.. that just seems like lots of work and little resultant benefit.
--
he goes on raving about the same things that the Linux community has been raving about for the last few years.
.. Because the people that use Linux now and were some of the first ones to get interested in it were precisely the ones who were into the home computer platforms such as Amiga, Atari, Acorn etc. back in the late 1980s before Linux came about. When Linux grew larger (about the mid 1990s) a lot of people (myself included, I used to have an Amiga500 and Amiga1200) were there using Linux and moved over to that platform, still extoling the same basic stuff about how wonderful it is (as we had done with our Amigas vs. Atari 'fights' in the past) and that these silly dos/windows users now needed to 'see the light'.
EXACTLY!
--
Heh.. I feel I have to join in too. I made the switch to Linux in 1996 though and at the time I just wanted a 486 Linux PC to run 'alongside' the Amiga, to do the internet dialup etc. FWIW, Slackware 3.6 was the first Linux distro I used.
.. of course it's like 6 times the clockspeed, but still .. it illustrated the evolution of the computers.
.. I still get jittery thinking how much I paid for an 8MB SIMM at the start of 1996 ..
I got tempted by games too and was dismayed at how the Amiga had been left so far behind (of course it was 4 or 5 year technology by then). When I eventually got a K6-2/300 it fairly much sealed the Amiga's fate for me (especially with the Voodoo2 I bought for it).
The biggest difference I noticed was doing stuff with VistaPro, it was something I enjoyed doing on the Amiga 1200 (50 Mhz 68EC030 / 68882, 18MB RAM) with Imagine. On the PC I used VistaPro (it was on a coverdisc of all things) and it blew me away just how much faster the K6-2 was
In terms of the difference of the operating systems (Linux and AmigaOS).. yes, they're quite different.. I prefer the multi-user environment of Linux though and having Unix at home to play with (I got into Unix at university in 1994 and enjoyed it a lot). AmigaOS was, as you mention, slicker than slick. Part of the fun with Linux I found was , as I felt in my early days of the Amiga, finding things out and getting things to work. Once the last config file is tweaked and the last Prefs program honed to perfection then there's less to do with playing with the OS. That's when applications/games etc. are the key issue. That's where the Amiga lost me I have to say.. That and the exorbitant hardware prices
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