Yes. It's called GCC, which stands for "Gnu Compiler Collection." It can do C, C++, Objective C, Java, Fortran and Ada. Apple uses compiled native Java rather than VM Java as one of the programming languages officially supported by Xtools. You can use GCC to compile Java code into native binaries on just about every platform GCC runs on.
If you don't do lots of.doc editing, but do a lot of word processing that's destined to end up as dead trees or.pdf, the Mac with Pages is clearly the better choice. Even for simple.doc stuff like Resumes, you still come out ahead.
This is insane. Spyware stems directly from Microsoft's inability to engineer a secure computing architecture... something =every single one= of its competitors can do. Buying a single anti-spyware product isn't going to fix the problems that make spyware possible in the first place. It will merely offer a false sense of security to the foolish.
It's like tossing a half-full Dixie cup onto a raging housefire you set in the first place. A half-assed placebo to gull the gullible.
Any Mac or Linux user can tell you: Spyware isn't a problem. Windows is a problem.
You could simply buy an iBook and look at it as a peripheral for your cryo-cooled 1337-gamerboi PC.
You use the PC for playing "City of HalfEverDiabloCraft III" and for generating dubious overclocking benchmarks and storing your MP3's on your terrabyte RAID with the windowed 250gb SATA disks.
You use the Mac for web surfing, email and IM, to store critical documents you don't want eaten by Virii (making sure to back them up to CD-R every now and again) and generally Doing Usefull Stuff.
That way, your precious game time is uninterrupted by Microsoft's Keystone Kops approach to secuirty and monoculture attacks. Let's face it... you ain't never gonna be able to lock down your Windows box, no matter how much money and third party utilities you throw at the problem.
Alternatively, OpenBSD on any old laptop is another way to dodge the spyware bullet, if your Unix Fu is the stronger.
The old fashioned Jeep hasn't seen service since 'Nam, and you know it. Furthermore, the old Go-Devil four banger was hardly fuel efficient... check the EPA stats on the civvie 4cyl Jeep. Better than a humvee or a gamma-goat, but that ain't saying much.
The HUMMWV has been used as a FAV by the Army and Marines for more than 20 years now, and it's configuration reflects this. It's also being used as an armored scout car these days. It may offend the sensibilities of those who insists there's a proper tool for every job, but there you go. Unfortunately, the HUMMWV was the wrong platform to go with, as anyone who's actually bought one for civillian use has found out. It only seats four, and doesn''t cram too much cargo, it's too wide for a good recreational off-road vehicle or city driving. This means it's useless if you've got to drive it through the woods or on patrol through an urban theater.
This is why the humvee is loathed by the Marines because it's too big and inefficient for what it's asked to do, but the DOJ forced it on them. They'd rather use the Galendawagen. I don't think the Shadow, which looks even bulkier with less crew and cargo carrying capability, is going to make them happy. It looks just like an armored scoutcar, without the serious armor. What's up with those wheels?
Making millitary vehicles more efficient is just good logistical sense. Maybe they'll find a more worthy vehicle platform to put this hybrid tech in.
It's almost a given that the "Clovis horizon" has been broached. This is only the latest in a long string of discoveries of non-Clovis paleolithic artifacts predating 11000-13000ybp. Arguing against earlier settlement is a bit like sticking to Epicycles after Einstein at this point - completely counter-productive.
The current model must be updated to show progressive waves of settlement, rather than a single event, and try to discern differences between each of the successive cultures, and try to find where they cross-influenced each other.
Y'know, on the face of it, assuming Microsoft's gaping secuirty holes in it's default Windows distribution could be attributed to its massive popularity. a twist on the old OSS saw that many eyes make all bugs (or holes big enough to drive a herd of mastadons through) obvious. This is usually a canned reply by Windows Partisians to Linux/Mac/Etc. Partisians when they gloat about the latest OE bug or self-installing spyware package.
But it doesn't hold much water when you look at the wider world, where Microsoft doesn't dominate.
Oracle and MySQL dwarf SQL Server's installed base, yet it's the Microsoft product that's caused the most headaches to IT security teams over the years. Ditto Apache vs. IIS... Apache is everywhere, source code is available and documented, and it is nowhere near as hackable as IIS, assuming admins of equal ability managing either system.
I think it's just that Microsoft's monopoly position has extinguished any sense of urgency in meeting it's customer's actual needs.
Isn't this a bit like the stories Fox News reports about the Gay African-American Republicans* endorsing Bush? It's only interesting from a "man-bites-dog" perspective... the companies doing this have more money than sense.
SoupIsGood Food
( *They really exist. The Abraham Lincoln Log Cabin Republican Organization. This does not represent a groundswell of pro-bush support in the African-American Homosexual demographic... it's a bizzarre circus sideshow. Much like Linux-to-Windows migrations.)
I dunno. If what you need is a pocketable Linux workstation, the newest Zaurus, at $600 or so, is probably a much better option. It will even run X-windows apps with a little work and recompilation. Is the Oqo worth $1200 in convienience? Will recompiling the apps you need for the Zaurus cost you more than $1200 in billable time? It's unlikely.
I suppose if you're tied to proprietary apps, or just want to compile x86 code while sitting on the airplane toilet, the Oqo is a fine choice.
Windows users tied to windows-only vertical apps but requiring high mobility (FSTs, sales reps, etc.) will adore this thing. It will also let you play Starcraft while sitting on the airplain toilet.
"Tight authority" in this case means forced relocation to labor camps, without compensation for lost property and the cost to relocate. They were promised new land and money to make a new start... they were instead bundled into relocation camps, and either forced to work on the construction project, unpaid or so grossly underpaid, even for mainland china, they might as well not have bothered, or allowed to sit idle and starve. If this doesn't qualify as enslavement, I don't know what does.
This isn't in the '60s under Mao, mind you, this was a few years ago under "modern" leadership.
The modern, brilliant China you see in Beijing and Shanghai is built on the broken backs of the rural farmers and tradesmen. Never forget it.
That electricity has to come from someplace... in China, that means mostly oil and coal powerplants with none of the pollution controls found in the west, or hydroelectric dams, like Three Gorges, that displace and literally enslave hundreds of thousands of people while destroying archaeological and historical sites. The most lethal dam disaster in history was a Chinese hydoelectric project gone wrong.
Electric vehicles by themselves are not enviornmentally friendly. In conjunction with strict pollution controls and smart energy infrastructures, they can be. That's not the case in China. They'd be better off with a reliable fleet of diesel busses and subways.
OK, now we've got the second best science-fiction comedy cartoon of all time un-cancelled, a concerted effort must be made to rescue Invader Zim from Nickelodeon. Irkan dominance must not be denied!
A long term Lunar presence, either a permanent station or colony, is probably unworkable. The largest obstacle, apart from the supply chain, is the Lunar regolith, which is very sharp and abrasive stuff... without weathering, it's more like ground up, pwdered glass than dust or dirt.
Lagrange point space stations are a better plan, and a non-permanent station on the moon for science and exploration. Mars would be more workable, once the supply chain problems are licked... and Lagrange point space habitats are a great step in that direction.
Hitchcock also sells New Balance sneakers in extra-wide versions, tho they tend to run between $60 and $90.
Still, not bad for such a small-batch product, and still a definite savings over what you'd find for sale in a Footlocker or somesuch sneaker superstore.
I firmly believe offshoring is a pale attempt to mask out-of-control management costs. Implement good management, and you'll save enough money where the costs and liabilities in setting up factories overseas aren't worth it, unless your customers or raw materials are there, too.
The start button in Windows 2000 has "settings", not "Control Panels" like in XP. Some versions of XP even make you click a button for "more options" in order to see the Control Panels. And many of the control panels have new names and icons, and most of them have a completely different interface... not look-and-feel, but a completely different way to accomplish the same task. The changes don't even come close to ending there, either. And that's just between XP and 2000. The differences between ME and XP would make your head swim.
Fuck, I'm a Mac and big-box Unix guy, I don't even own a PC, and I've had enough exposure to Windows to know this.
So, you're not a Windows user, or you've not really used anything except XP.
The point is, PC users expect things to be upended and arbitrarily changed every few years. They adjust and move on. There's no need to mimic Windows... just come up with a user-friendly interface that works better than Windows, and they'll adapt with no troubles, even if several "core assumptions" are changed.
I've got an odd shoe size... extra-extra-extra wide. I can't go into a shoe store and buy a pair of sneakers, as none of them will fit.
I have to order my sneaks from a company that specializes in wide sizes, Hitchcock Shoe, and their house brand is the only model that fits right.
My sneakers are of high quality, and interesting style, and cost $35. They're made in the US... all of Hitchcock's house brands are made in either the US or England. First world countries, with unionized shops and first world wages, benefits, and protections. It's not like the product has a huge market to drive down the prices or subsidise their marketing, either.
Thirty five bucks.
How much did your made-in-China, sweatshop produced Nikes cost you?
Offshoring is a dodge management uses to hide their incompetence. American labor is a phenomenal value: literate, educated, adaptable and to-the-grindstone efficient. It's why Nissan, Mercedes, Toyota, Honda and Hyundai all have factories here. American managers are a bunch of fad-addled buffoons who can't see past the next quarter and insist on ludicrous compensation, so get their asses kicked by more reasonable and intelligent European and Asian companies.
I really don't see the point. People claim that users will be "comfortable" with a Microsoft work-alike, like aping Microsoft's interface will somehow ease the path for regular users.
Fast flash: Microsoft breaks all of their UI conventions with every major rev. Everything from the start menu to common control panels to file managers are all wildly different from one rev to the next. A slavish adherence to Microsoft standards will only put you behind when they move on to the next mediocre interface, wasting a lot of effort that could be geared towards making a better, friendlier, easier-to-grok-than-Microsoft interface that "Joe User" will take to like a fish to water. Kinda like, you know, how Apple does with the Macintosh? And no, this does not mean to mimic the MOSX interface. Get creative and think everything through to the logical end, and you'll be all right. See the earlier article on ROX.
Aping Microsoft won't steal users, it will just confuse them when stuff breaks because it doesn't precisely match up with the way its Microsoft analogue works.
SoupIsGood Food
Jumping the Shark
on
Red Hat Recap
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
More and more, I get the feeling that Red Hat has jumped the shark.
Novell is moving aggressively into the corporate market, while reveling in the power of viral marketing by "doing the right thing" by the Open Source community. It's agressively pursuing big deals, like the recent one to put SuSe on IBM's boxes. Knoppix and Mandrake have the n00b market all but cornered, and Debian and Gentoo are the must-haves for the Power Users.
Fedora is the odd distro out: not as approachable as Mandrake, not as stable as Debian, not as bleeding edge as Gentoo, and without the corporate cred of Novell. Red Hat, in spinning off Fedora, has really alienated a lot of potential customers, most of which buy on the say-so of seasoned geeks. Geeks are no longer saying Red Hat.
Oddly enough, Slackware is seeing something of a renaissance... stable and secure and with support contracts available is very attractive to a lot of traditional Unix shops who don't need flash and flair.
This is the triumph and glory of open source: no-one can say what you should be doing. If you're really interested in Linux documentation, and really interested in content design and display and really interested in CSS and engines to format stuff in CSS, then shine on, you crazy diamond. Fork that bitch and add CSS to your heart's content.
If your project turns out super keen, they might roll it back into the main project, and if they don't, hey... you've got that CSS itch scratched and you better believe some people will like the look and use your doc project instead of the main one.
Go for it. Don't bother asking anyone's permission, just grab the code and go. Such is the power of OSS.
I've got an Ultra2, and it installed like a champ first time out of the box. Did it a few times, once to see what it was like, another to set the partitions to the way I liked it, and a third time after getting sick of trying to get Debian to run. I've given it up for Solaris, as the Creator3D UPA fast frame buffer isn't supported, but it seemed stable and straightforward, and the 64-bit packages I tried installed fine. (OpenBSD doesn't support SMP, and FreeBSD doesn't support Ultra2's and earlier. Linux makes Baby Jesus cry.)
That said, the U5 is a very common piece of hardware, and it bodes ill that it's not well supported. I understand a lot of the problem is GCC, but GCC 3.3.3 is supposed to cure that for 2.0.
This is some serious, next level science these kids are doing with only a high school education. The first and third place finishers, especially have industry revolutionizing breakthroughs to their name. This is stuff businesses and Universities toss hundreds of millions of dollars in R&D money at... and hobbyists came up with the solution, in between swim meets and cleaning out the stables and getting straight A's in highschool.
I did read the article, and was not impressed with what I saw. It's ugly, and still far more complicated and convoluted than it should be. You really need to take a look at the NetBSD installation process... from soup to nuts in all of 15 minutes. Boot from the cd-rom, accept the default setting at all the prompts, and you've got Unix in the time it takes you to figure out what went wrong with your first attempt at fdisk under Debian.
If you want to see =really= "stupid friendly", take a look at the MacOS X install process sometime... and shudder to realize this is a complete unix OS underneath a happy shiny consumer GUI. Power and sophistication comes from simplicity.
Debian, even with the new (and still ugly pseudo-GUI) installer has a huge usability gap. Easier than what you've got with 3.0r, true, but that's not much of a goal to shoot for...
(I'm also not a big fan of apt, but that's a rant for another time.)
I've been playing around with various operating systems on an old dual-processor Sun Ultra2 Creator3D, including Debian.
By far the easiest and quickest install was NetBSD and OpenBSD... if it weren't for lack of SMP support (OpenBSD) or Creator3D ffb framebuffer support (NetBSD), I'd stick with one of them and be happy.
Gentoo required a copy of the install guide at hand, but it went smoothly until the time came to unpack the stage from the LiveCD... all three were corrupted, choked and died in mid un-tar. I'm going to see if there are newer LiveCD ISO's available, but it's not a rolicking start, and requires too much command line fiddling to start the show. Still, apart from the abject failure to install the tarballs, the process itself is very straight forward.
Unlike Debian, which has a miserable interface that's at once too convoluted and too spartan to be of any use, and is rotten at picking reasonable defaults. I spent the better part of two days trying to get a booting, networked operating system out of the damn thing.
Maybe Splack, Aurora and SuSe are better... haven't tried them yet, but compared to NetBSD's clean ASCI console installer, the two popular Linux distros come up way short. (Solaris isn't much of an improvement.)
Here's the trick: simplify and automate wherever you can, and pick reasonable defaults while offering options to users who know what they're doing. No need for bright, shiny MS-DOS psuedo-GUI's, just a reasonable curses-based interactive program that prompts the user when needed, but otherwise goes and installs a working operating system on its own with minimal intervention required, but available if wanted.
Right out of the box, it screwed up the partition sizes using the defaults to where needed packages couldn't be installed. Hand-tweaking was a PITA because of the lack of clear documentation about how much space/var and/usr actually need. So I punked out and set it up all as one giant partition, which needs a fsck in single user mode to repair serious errors on every reboot. This was using both the graphical installer (stop laughing! How was I to know it still sucked two revs later?) and the text based installer on Disc One. Neither of which installed the device driver for the qfe card... nope, that required re-installing the whole damn thing as an update. Had to configure the ports by hand, because both the installer and sys-unconfig wouldn't see any of the ports, qfe or happymeal, once the driver was installed.
I wanted to tinker with Gnome, but it wasn't configured to run with my video hardware, so it was dithered and had a nasty habit of crashing back to the login screen. CDE actually worked with the Creator3D card, but kept tanking, usually in the middle of something important. Admintool, useradd and the new web console thingamabob all failed to create a new user account, but vipw still worked, thank god.
This is with a bone-stock Solaris 9 install. It's the most fundamentally broken version of Solaris I've ever installed. Even 2.3 and 2.5 before 2.5.5 with their various memory leaks and log overflows was a cakewalk compared to this.
(I know about pkg-get. I was using Sun Freeware back when there was no pkg-get and the available packages insisted on installing everything in/opt, whippersnapper. Or was that the HP-UX freeware site? I forget. It's selection is still woefully small compared to any of the available packages for an OSS system, or even MacOS X's Fink.)
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Yes. It's called GCC, which stands for "Gnu Compiler Collection." It can do C, C++, Objective C, Java, Fortran and Ada. Apple uses compiled native Java rather than VM Java as one of the programming languages officially supported by Xtools. You can use GCC to compile Java code into native binaries on just about every platform GCC runs on.
~ SoupIsGood Food
If you don't do lots of .doc editing, but do a lot of word processing that's destined to end up as dead trees or .pdf, the Mac with Pages is clearly the better choice. Even for simple .doc stuff like Resumes, you still come out ahead.
SoupIsGood Food
There are a buncha them, ranging from the ubiquitous Griffin iMic up to big-bucks multi-channel Firewire rigs.
SoupIsGood Food
This is insane. Spyware stems directly from Microsoft's inability to engineer a secure computing architecture... something =every single one= of its competitors can do. Buying a single anti-spyware product isn't going to fix the problems that make spyware possible in the first place. It will merely offer a false sense of security to the foolish.
It's like tossing a half-full Dixie cup onto a raging housefire you set in the first place. A half-assed placebo to gull the gullible.
Any Mac or Linux user can tell you: Spyware isn't a problem. Windows is a problem.
SoupIsGood Food
You could simply buy an iBook and look at it as a peripheral for your cryo-cooled 1337-gamerboi PC.
You use the PC for playing "City of HalfEverDiabloCraft III" and for generating dubious overclocking benchmarks and storing your MP3's on your terrabyte RAID with the windowed 250gb SATA disks.
You use the Mac for web surfing, email and IM, to store critical documents you don't want eaten by Virii (making sure to back them up to CD-R every now and again) and generally Doing Usefull Stuff.
That way, your precious game time is uninterrupted by Microsoft's Keystone Kops approach to secuirty and monoculture attacks. Let's face it... you ain't never gonna be able to lock down your Windows box, no matter how much money and third party utilities you throw at the problem.
Alternatively, OpenBSD on any old laptop is another way to dodge the spyware bullet, if your Unix Fu is the stronger.
SoupIsGood Food
The old fashioned Jeep hasn't seen service since 'Nam, and you know it. Furthermore, the old Go-Devil four banger was hardly fuel efficient... check the EPA stats on the civvie 4cyl Jeep. Better than a humvee or a gamma-goat, but that ain't saying much.
The HUMMWV has been used as a FAV by the Army and Marines for more than 20 years now, and it's configuration reflects this. It's also being used as an armored scout car these days. It may offend the sensibilities of those who insists there's a proper tool for every job, but there you go. Unfortunately, the HUMMWV was the wrong platform to go with, as anyone who's actually bought one for civillian use has found out. It only seats four, and doesn''t cram too much cargo, it's too wide for a good recreational off-road vehicle or city driving. This means it's useless if you've got to drive it through the woods or on patrol through an urban theater.
This is why the humvee is loathed by the Marines because it's too big and inefficient for what it's asked to do, but the DOJ forced it on them. They'd rather use the Galendawagen. I don't think the Shadow, which looks even bulkier with less crew and cargo carrying capability, is going to make them happy. It looks just like an armored scoutcar, without the serious armor. What's up with those wheels?
Making millitary vehicles more efficient is just good logistical sense. Maybe they'll find a more worthy vehicle platform to put this hybrid tech in.
SoupIsGood Food
It's almost a given that the "Clovis horizon" has been broached. This is only the latest in a long string of discoveries of non-Clovis paleolithic artifacts predating 11000-13000ybp. Arguing against earlier settlement is a bit like sticking to Epicycles after Einstein at this point - completely counter-productive.
The current model must be updated to show progressive waves of settlement, rather than a single event, and try to discern differences between each of the successive cultures, and try to find where they cross-influenced each other.
SoupIsGood Food
Y'know, on the face of it, assuming Microsoft's gaping secuirty holes in it's default Windows distribution could be attributed to its massive popularity. a twist on the old OSS saw that many eyes make all bugs (or holes big enough to drive a herd of mastadons through) obvious. This is usually a canned reply by Windows Partisians to Linux/Mac/Etc. Partisians when they gloat about the latest OE bug or self-installing spyware package.
But it doesn't hold much water when you look at the wider world, where Microsoft doesn't dominate.
Oracle and MySQL dwarf SQL Server's installed base, yet it's the Microsoft product that's caused the most headaches to IT security teams over the years. Ditto Apache vs. IIS... Apache is everywhere, source code is available and documented, and it is nowhere near as hackable as IIS, assuming admins of equal ability managing either system.
I think it's just that Microsoft's monopoly position has extinguished any sense of urgency in meeting it's customer's actual needs.
SoupIsGood Food
Isn't this a bit like the stories Fox News reports about the Gay African-American Republicans* endorsing Bush? It's only interesting from a "man-bites-dog" perspective... the companies doing this have more money than sense.
SoupIsGood Food
( *They really exist. The Abraham Lincoln Log Cabin Republican Organization. This does not represent a groundswell of pro-bush support in the African-American Homosexual demographic... it's a bizzarre circus sideshow. Much like Linux-to-Windows migrations.)
I dunno. If what you need is a pocketable Linux workstation, the newest Zaurus, at $600 or so, is probably a much better option. It will even run X-windows apps with a little work and recompilation. Is the Oqo worth $1200 in convienience? Will recompiling the apps you need for the Zaurus cost you more than $1200 in billable time? It's unlikely.
I suppose if you're tied to proprietary apps, or just want to compile x86 code while sitting on the airplane toilet, the Oqo is a fine choice.
Windows users tied to windows-only vertical apps but requiring high mobility (FSTs, sales reps, etc.) will adore this thing. It will also let you play Starcraft while sitting on the airplain toilet.
"Nuclear launch detected!"
"Tight authority" in this case means forced relocation to labor camps, without compensation for lost property and the cost to relocate. They were promised new land and money to make a new start... they were instead bundled into relocation camps, and either forced to work on the construction project, unpaid or so grossly underpaid, even for mainland china, they might as well not have bothered, or allowed to sit idle and starve. If this doesn't qualify as enslavement, I don't know what does.
This isn't in the '60s under Mao, mind you, this was a few years ago under "modern" leadership.
The modern, brilliant China you see in Beijing and Shanghai is built on the broken backs of the rural farmers and tradesmen. Never forget it.
"Western" doesn't mean "ignorant and stupid."
That electricity has to come from someplace... in China, that means mostly oil and coal powerplants with none of the pollution controls found in the west, or hydroelectric dams, like Three Gorges, that displace and literally enslave hundreds of thousands of people while destroying archaeological and historical sites. The most lethal dam disaster in history was a Chinese hydoelectric project gone wrong.
Electric vehicles by themselves are not enviornmentally friendly. In conjunction with strict pollution controls and smart energy infrastructures, they can be. That's not the case in China. They'd be better off with a reliable fleet of diesel busses and subways.
SoupIsGood Food
OK, now we've got the second best science-fiction comedy cartoon of all time un-cancelled, a concerted effort must be made to rescue Invader Zim from Nickelodeon. Irkan dominance must not be denied!
SoupIsGood Food
A long term Lunar presence, either a permanent station or colony, is probably unworkable. The largest obstacle, apart from the supply chain, is the Lunar regolith, which is very sharp and abrasive stuff... without weathering, it's more like ground up, pwdered glass than dust or dirt.
Lagrange point space stations are a better plan, and a non-permanent station on the moon for science and exploration. Mars would be more workable, once the supply chain problems are licked... and Lagrange point space habitats are a great step in that direction.
SoupIsGood Food
Hitchcock also sells New Balance sneakers in extra-wide versions, tho they tend to run between $60 and $90.
Still, not bad for such a small-batch product, and still a definite savings over what you'd find for sale in a Footlocker or somesuch sneaker superstore.
I firmly believe offshoring is a pale attempt to mask out-of-control management costs. Implement good management, and you'll save enough money where the costs and liabilities in setting up factories overseas aren't worth it, unless your customers or raw materials are there, too.
SoupIsGood Food
Wrong, am I?
The start button in Windows 2000 has "settings", not "Control Panels" like in XP. Some versions of XP even make you click a button for "more options" in order to see the Control Panels. And many of the control panels have new names and icons, and most of them have a completely different interface... not look-and-feel, but a completely different way to accomplish the same task. The changes don't even come close to ending there, either. And that's just between XP and 2000. The differences between ME and XP would make your head swim.
Fuck, I'm a Mac and big-box Unix guy, I don't even own a PC, and I've had enough exposure to Windows to know this.
So, you're not a Windows user, or you've not really used anything except XP.
The point is, PC users expect things to be upended and arbitrarily changed every few years. They adjust and move on. There's no need to mimic Windows... just come up with a user-friendly interface that works better than Windows, and they'll adapt with no troubles, even if several "core assumptions" are changed.
SoupIsGood Food
I've got an odd shoe size... extra-extra-extra wide. I can't go into a shoe store and buy a pair of sneakers, as none of them will fit.
I have to order my sneaks from a company that specializes in wide sizes, Hitchcock Shoe, and their house brand is the only model that fits right.
My sneakers are of high quality, and interesting style, and cost $35. They're made in the US... all of Hitchcock's house brands are made in either the US or England. First world countries, with unionized shops and first world wages, benefits, and protections. It's not like the product has a huge market to drive down the prices or subsidise their marketing, either.
Thirty five bucks.
How much did your made-in-China, sweatshop produced Nikes cost you?
Offshoring is a dodge management uses to hide their incompetence. American labor is a phenomenal value: literate, educated, adaptable and to-the-grindstone efficient. It's why Nissan, Mercedes, Toyota, Honda and Hyundai all have factories here. American managers are a bunch of fad-addled buffoons who can't see past the next quarter and insist on ludicrous compensation, so get their asses kicked by more reasonable and intelligent European and Asian companies.
SoupIsGood Food
I really don't see the point. People claim that users will be "comfortable" with a Microsoft work-alike, like aping Microsoft's interface will somehow ease the path for regular users.
Fast flash: Microsoft breaks all of their UI conventions with every major rev. Everything from the start menu to common control panels to file managers are all wildly different from one rev to the next. A slavish adherence to Microsoft standards will only put you behind when they move on to the next mediocre interface, wasting a lot of effort that could be geared towards making a better, friendlier, easier-to-grok-than-Microsoft interface that "Joe User" will take to like a fish to water. Kinda like, you know, how Apple does with the Macintosh? And no, this does not mean to mimic the MOSX interface. Get creative and think everything through to the logical end, and you'll be all right. See the earlier article on ROX.
Aping Microsoft won't steal users, it will just confuse them when stuff breaks because it doesn't precisely match up with the way its Microsoft analogue works.
SoupIsGood Food
More and more, I get the feeling that Red Hat has jumped the shark.
Novell is moving aggressively into the corporate market, while reveling in the power of viral marketing by "doing the right thing" by the Open Source community. It's agressively pursuing big deals, like the recent one to put SuSe on IBM's boxes. Knoppix and Mandrake have the n00b market all but cornered, and Debian and Gentoo are the must-haves for the Power Users.
Fedora is the odd distro out: not as approachable as Mandrake, not as stable as Debian, not as bleeding edge as Gentoo, and without the corporate cred of Novell. Red Hat, in spinning off Fedora, has really alienated a lot of potential customers, most of which buy on the say-so of seasoned geeks. Geeks are no longer saying Red Hat.
Oddly enough, Slackware is seeing something of a renaissance... stable and secure and with support contracts available is very attractive to a lot of traditional Unix shops who don't need flash and flair.
SoupIsGood Food
This is the triumph and glory of open source: no-one can say what you should be doing. If you're really interested in Linux documentation, and really interested in content design and display and really interested in CSS and engines to format stuff in CSS, then shine on, you crazy diamond. Fork that bitch and add CSS to your heart's content.
If your project turns out super keen, they might roll it back into the main project, and if they don't, hey... you've got that CSS itch scratched and you better believe some people will like the look and use your doc project instead of the main one.
Go for it. Don't bother asking anyone's permission, just grab the code and go. Such is the power of OSS.
SoupIsGood Food
I've got an Ultra2, and it installed like a champ first time out of the box. Did it a few times, once to see what it was like, another to set the partitions to the way I liked it, and a third time after getting sick of trying to get Debian to run. I've given it up for Solaris, as the Creator3D UPA fast frame buffer isn't supported, but it seemed stable and straightforward, and the 64-bit packages I tried installed fine. (OpenBSD doesn't support SMP, and FreeBSD doesn't support Ultra2's and earlier. Linux makes Baby Jesus cry.)
That said, the U5 is a very common piece of hardware, and it bodes ill that it's not well supported. I understand a lot of the problem is GCC, but GCC 3.3.3 is supposed to cure that for 2.0.
SoupIsGood Food
This is some serious, next level science these kids are doing with only a high school education. The first and third place finishers, especially have industry revolutionizing breakthroughs to their name. This is stuff businesses and Universities toss hundreds of millions of dollars in R&D money at... and hobbyists came up with the solution, in between swim meets and cleaning out the stables and getting straight A's in highschool.
I'm seriously impressed.
SoupIsGood Food
I did read the article, and was not impressed with what I saw. It's ugly, and still far more complicated and convoluted than it should be. You really need to take a look at the NetBSD installation process... from soup to nuts in all of 15 minutes. Boot from the cd-rom, accept the default setting at all the prompts, and you've got Unix in the time it takes you to figure out what went wrong with your first attempt at fdisk under Debian.
If you want to see =really= "stupid friendly", take a look at the MacOS X install process sometime... and shudder to realize this is a complete unix OS underneath a happy shiny consumer GUI. Power and sophistication comes from simplicity.
Debian, even with the new (and still ugly pseudo-GUI) installer has a huge usability gap. Easier than what you've got with 3.0r, true, but that's not much of a goal to shoot for...
(I'm also not a big fan of apt, but that's a rant for another time.)
SoupIsGood Food
I've been playing around with various operating systems on an old dual-processor Sun Ultra2 Creator3D, including Debian.
By far the easiest and quickest install was NetBSD and OpenBSD... if it weren't for lack of SMP support (OpenBSD) or Creator3D ffb framebuffer support (NetBSD), I'd stick with one of them and be happy.
Gentoo required a copy of the install guide at hand, but it went smoothly until the time came to unpack the stage from the LiveCD... all three were corrupted, choked and died in mid un-tar. I'm going to see if there are newer LiveCD ISO's available, but it's not a rolicking start, and requires too much command line fiddling to start the show. Still, apart from the abject failure to install the tarballs, the process itself is very straight forward.
Unlike Debian, which has a miserable interface that's at once too convoluted and too spartan to be of any use, and is rotten at picking reasonable defaults. I spent the better part of two days trying to get a booting, networked operating system out of the damn thing.
Maybe Splack, Aurora and SuSe are better... haven't tried them yet, but compared to NetBSD's clean ASCI console installer, the two popular Linux distros come up way short. (Solaris isn't much of an improvement.)
Here's the trick: simplify and automate wherever you can, and pick reasonable defaults while offering options to users who know what they're doing. No need for bright, shiny MS-DOS psuedo-GUI's, just a reasonable curses-based interactive program that prompts the user when needed, but otherwise goes and installs a working operating system on its own with minimal intervention required, but available if wanted.
SoupisGood Food
Right out of the box, it screwed up the partition sizes using the defaults to where needed packages couldn't be installed. Hand-tweaking was a PITA because of the lack of clear documentation about how much space /var and /usr actually need. So I punked out and set it up all as one giant partition, which needs a fsck in single user mode to repair serious errors on every reboot. This was using both the graphical installer (stop laughing! How was I to know it still sucked two revs later?) and the text based installer on Disc One. Neither of which installed the device driver for the qfe card... nope, that required re-installing the whole damn thing as an update. Had to configure the ports by hand, because both the installer and sys-unconfig wouldn't see any of the ports, qfe or happymeal, once the driver was installed.
/opt, whippersnapper. Or was that the HP-UX freeware site? I forget. It's selection is still woefully small compared to any of the available packages for an OSS system, or even MacOS X's Fink.)
I wanted to tinker with Gnome, but it wasn't configured to run with my video hardware, so it was dithered and had a nasty habit of crashing back to the login screen. CDE actually worked with the Creator3D card, but kept tanking, usually in the middle of something important. Admintool, useradd and the new web console thingamabob all failed to create a new user account, but vipw still worked, thank god.
This is with a bone-stock Solaris 9 install. It's the most fundamentally broken version of Solaris I've ever installed. Even 2.3 and 2.5 before 2.5.5 with their various memory leaks and log overflows was a cakewalk compared to this.
(I know about pkg-get. I was using Sun Freeware back when there was no pkg-get and the available packages insisted on installing everything in
SoupIsGood Food