Just a couple points from someone who's been in the linuz biz for a while:
1) It didn't "talk down" to new users (such as myself).
The people who put the magazine were new users themselves. Just reading it gave you a feel that they hadn't been dealing with non-wintel platforms for very long.
Another thing I had a problem with was mentioined before, all the info in it could have been gleaned off #linpeople on irc.debian.org in about an hour, just through the regular talk on there. And they didn't give you anywhere to go from there. There was no depth. Linux magazine and Linux Journal do the newbie thing right (Linux magazine moreso than LJ), in offerring newbie content along with good information about how to extend your knowledge, plus articles on more technical stuff so the newbie can get at least an idea on what else is out there besides playing with filesystems and setting up X.
2) Each issue came with a CD that had current apps on it. Saves a lot of downloading.
That was the nice thing about the magazine. LJ and Linux Magazine could definately use some CD's with their packaging.
3) The hardware/software reviews were in-depth, complete, and interesting to read.
They were also full of misinformation. I'm sorry, as an ex-DEC employee, I find it hard to like a magazine that prints that alphas were designed by Digital Research (the company that originally brought you DR-DOS). Sparcs haven't been 32-bit in YEARS. The one I own (which is pretty old) sure ain't. FTP does not stand for "File Transfer Point". Windows 95 and up actually do qualify as operating systems, it's windows 3.11 and below that are just shells. X isn't UNIX-specific. I could go on (and on, and on), but you get the idea. Incorrect information is worse than no information. I sent them a 5-page email listing all the inaccuracies I found in one issue of their magazine.
It's nice to have people trying to popularize linux by providing information to new users, but it has to be done right. ML had no quality control, so I can't really say I'm sad to see them go under.
Anyway, let's hope that someone else steps up to the plate and fills in the niche ML left when they went under. Let's just hope they do it correctly.
A lot of browsers have problems with stuff like that. For instance, I have to leave in a lot of html 3.2 stuff just to get netscape 4.x to view pages correctly. On my html 4 pages, netscape just doesn't get the background unless I throw it in the body tag.
As far as IE though, I've not had a problem with it. I don't use frontpage (I use topstyle and homesite at work, vim at home) so I dunno what kind of funky stuff it's throwing into the css. You may consider geting topstyle lite (it's beer-free) for your stylesheets and just tell frontpage to link to them. You may want to set your.css files read only when you have frontpage open though - it may try to screw with them.
If the Linux community is snubbing Java now, just when we're starting to see viable server implementations, what will Sun's response be when the Linux developers start complaining in 2007 that Linux's Java runtimes and support are woefully inadequate, while Java runs like a charm on virtually everything else? How will Linux fare in the business world if Java becomes the language du jour for most programming needs and works well on everything but Linux?
The industry doesn't work that way. Sun doesn't think that linux is popular enough for mainstream linux support. It doesn't help that there's no one company to "partner" with, as far as distributions go. RedHat knows better (at least I hope) than to partner with sun to make a "RedHat only" jvm.
If linux keeps gaining ground, sun will come around. They won't make it free (speech) but they'll eventually add linux as a major port.
I don't see them gpl'ing it soon (or ever, unless they get a clue, and that ain't likely) so it will never get widespread usage in the non-business areas, but once businesses start demanding java on linux, it will come. Just be patient.
I use ns6 on my 2000 box at work, and mozilla at home. Being a (sort of) web guy, I keep ns4 and ie (at work, no 'doze at home) around just to test pages with.
I read a lot of comics, and with ns4, the browser dies all the freakin' time because of the stupid doubleclick and other banner ad companies' trackers. It's rediculous. I've got a button on my gnome bar set to 'killall -9 netscape ; rm/home/spauldo/.netscape/lock' because of this.
Mozilla and ns6 both have no problems with this. I could set up junkbuster, but it's just easier this way.
you just have to trust it to be of the same quality as other kernel-mode code
That's the problem; Microsoft blames drivers for much of their instability. They're probably right in most cases. Still, considering that our drivers aren't written by the people who have full access to the hardware specs, would we fare any better? Probably worse. It's better to keep it out, so that way bad drivers can't bring down the whole system.
Call me old school, but I don't understand why all you people want yer distros to autodetect all this crap. In a corporate environment, where you've got 500 machines with different stuff, yeah, it's nice, but at home? Why? Don't you know what you have? Is xf86config really that hard?
I don't want my computer to autodetect nothin' 'sides the drives and such. I suppose you'd like it to automatically change the settings if it thinks your hardware has changed, too, eh? Ever work on a windoze machine that detects nonexistant hardware every freakin' reboot?
This from a slackware user too. I'm freakin' disappointed.
And we have to redefine the meaning of "Operating System" to accomodate stupid users?
Sorry, no. The average user out there don't even know what "operating system" is. Like you said, my computer doesn't work. Is windoze/macos/UNIX part of your computer?
MacOS and Windoze are software distributions, not just operating systems. The same goes for linux distributions. Just because clueless people call the whole thing as OS don't mean it that's what it is.
Uh, 'cause most mainstream browsers are flaky when it comes to png support?
Re:Dynamic resizing of the X display
on
XFree & Rendering
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· Score: 1
Some people like it. Like me, for instance.
When I zoom in, I want just that - to zoom in. I use it basicly for a cheap xmag.
Actually, I usually run X where at the largest resolution (this damn TNT card won't run 24bit color, so it's not as high as I'd like) is less than the screen size. Gives me more window room.
Just 'cause it's not the same as windoze or what some people call "user friendly" don't mean that it's bad.
Check out the Hyperion series books. Can't seem to recall the author's name, but the books are Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, and The Rise of Endymion.
Good books, and they relate with this issue. Essentially, the internet accidentally breeds AI's, and they end up with their own society, still serving man, but for their own purposes. The series involves a struggle between the various factions of AI's that can't decide whether to destroy mankind, use mankind for their own purposes, or just leave him alone.
Check it out if you haven't read it. You do have to read all four books (in order) to understand the true meaning of it all though.
Depends. I worked at a place I would have gladly tried to make go under, or at least hurt their business, because the working conditions sucked so bad I was sick of it.
The way I looked at it, it was the best paying job I could get (in a town where unemployment was over 10%) so I wasn't gonna quit, but if the company went under, it was well worth it.
Looking back, it seems rather stupid and short sighted, but when you're under opression and low morale, you tend to think a little crazy.
This wouldn't be a good idea for businesses (I have no idea where the main office of my bank is, or musician's friend, or T$R inc.) but would be ideal for home users.
Imagine, for instance, http://john.quincy.public.poncacity.ok.us.nom. It's long to type, but with 6 million people (even though 99% wouldn't have their own homepage for a long time) it's going to be long to type anyway.
With the advent of broadband to the masses, this could be a possible option with your ISP. Imagine if a domain name _came_ with your account. Most people don't change ISP's unless they move, so ownership wouldn't be that big of a hassle for the most part (knowing ISP's these days, they'd probably want ownership). It would be an addon option to have it point to your machine (with IPv6, static IP's should be cheaper hopefully).
Now, this probably isn't going to be how it happens (it's too good for companies to let the customer have it... seems that all the good stuff gets in the way of some company that has the power to keep it from us) but it's a nice thought.
"Those who can't do, teach" is an old quote. Dunno where it comes from.
I ain't slammin' teachers. Good ones are hard to find. I am slamming tech support - most places literally hire people off the street, hand them a script, and tell them to answer the phone. I should know, that's what happened to me:)
Anyway, as for being an idiot, well, you opinion don't amount to a hill of beans to me, so call me what you will.
They ain't talkin' about beowulf, dude - this is something completely different. Read up about clustering sometime.
And BSD has a lot of stuff that's better than linux, but linux has a lot of stuff better than BSD - just depends on what you're doing, and what your techs know.
1: Everybody and their dog knows linux 2: No per-seat licensing (as said above) 3: This is cheap for what you're getting 4: The target customer usually has millions of dollars to spend on IT (i.e. fortune 500, US Govt., etc)
People always try to defend linux when it comes to the whole "Linux has no support", but really - this is bottom line guarantee _we_will_fix_the_problem_. You don't get that through irc or usenet. $2000 for onsite tech support for large systems such as this is beans.
So will hobbiests buy it? No, of course not - they'll figure out how to do it themselves. But enterprise-level networks need this type of stuff, and have the money to burn.
Well, it couldn't be done for linux per se, since the distros differ greatly, but it could be done for individual distros. In fact, slackware would probably be the best distro for this, due to its tarball-->compile-->install nature.
Most folks nowdays don't compile their own stuff, so the binaries do fine for them. apt-get is a wonderful tool.
dunno if yggdrasil existed way back then, but it did exist. They sold the linux bible, prolly the first linux book (may be wrong, I'm just guessing). I saw their website a few months ago it seems, it's still up, but their distro is still REAL old. They haven't upgraded.
more like hungry's site hasn't been touched in two years. I can't find anything under products on their site that's newer than 1998 (I didn't look real extensively though). The only things that seem to be updated have their own websites (japhar and lesstif).
Linux was my first UNIX, and I became rather used to it over time. Lately I've been playing with solaris on a spare sparc at work, and I've often thought that the perfect UNIX would be a mixture of the two.
Commercial UNIX distributions have a lot of nice features (never used SCO, but solaris is nice) but seem lacking in a lot of other places. For instance, the best shell shipped with solaris is ksh. It was great in its day, but bash is faster to use and easier to get used to. There's countless other examples, of course. Lots of GNU utilities are better than the commercial versions.
I know you can put them on commercial UNIX boxes (although I haven't quite figured out ld on solaris yet... some software won't compile for me) but I'd personally love to have a nice unified GNU-meets-commercial environment. Hopefully SCO can give this to us.
I'd love to see sun do this, but somehow I don't think they will... oh well. Hope there's a good free version of this distro...
Java code for GUI applications is too slow for some stuff. Java's not a compiled language (normally, anyway) so it's not as fast as what a program written in C/C++ would be. Depending on the application, this can be a big drawback.
Plus, you have to install a java runtime environment and set it up in order to run java stuff. Last time I downloaded blackdown's JDK it was 10 megs (and their server was really slow). JDK's are normally not included in linux distributions for some reason (prolly lisencing, but I don't know for sure).
GTK+ is a native C toolkit, so GUI programs in C are often written using it. It's the basis for GNOME. KDE uses QT for its toolkit, since it's written in C++.
Slashdot Mirror
Just a couple points from someone who's been in the linuz biz for a while:
1) It didn't "talk down" to new users (such as myself).
The people who put the magazine were new users themselves. Just reading it gave you a feel that they hadn't been dealing with non-wintel platforms for very long.
Another thing I had a problem with was mentioined before, all the info in it could have been gleaned off #linpeople on irc.debian.org in about an hour, just through the regular talk on there. And they didn't give you anywhere to go from there. There was no depth. Linux magazine and Linux Journal do the newbie thing right (Linux magazine moreso than LJ), in offerring newbie content along with good information about how to extend your knowledge, plus articles on more technical stuff so the newbie can get at least an idea on what else is out there besides playing with filesystems and setting up X.
2) Each issue came with a CD that had current apps on it. Saves a lot of downloading.
That was the nice thing about the magazine. LJ and Linux Magazine could definately use some CD's with their packaging.
3) The hardware/software reviews were in-depth, complete, and interesting to read.
They were also full of misinformation. I'm sorry, as an ex-DEC employee, I find it hard to like a magazine that prints that alphas were designed by Digital Research (the company that originally brought you DR-DOS). Sparcs haven't been 32-bit in YEARS. The one I own (which is pretty old) sure ain't. FTP does not stand for "File Transfer Point". Windows 95 and up actually do qualify as operating systems, it's windows 3.11 and below that are just shells. X isn't UNIX-specific. I could go on (and on, and on), but you get the idea. Incorrect information is worse than no information. I sent them a 5-page email listing all the inaccuracies I found in one issue of their magazine.
It's nice to have people trying to popularize linux by providing information to new users, but it has to be done right. ML had no quality control, so I can't really say I'm sad to see them go under.
Anyway, let's hope that someone else steps up to the plate and fills in the niche ML left when they went under. Let's just hope they do it correctly.
A lot of browsers have problems with stuff like that. For instance, I have to leave in a lot of html 3.2 stuff just to get netscape 4.x to view pages correctly. On my html 4 pages, netscape just doesn't get the background unless I throw it in the body tag.
.css files read only when you have frontpage open though - it may try to screw with them.
As far as IE though, I've not had a problem with it. I don't use frontpage (I use topstyle and homesite at work, vim at home) so I dunno what kind of funky stuff it's throwing into the css. You may consider geting topstyle lite (it's beer-free) for your stylesheets and just tell frontpage to link to them. You may want to set your
The industry doesn't work that way. Sun doesn't think that linux is popular enough for mainstream linux support. It doesn't help that there's no one company to "partner" with, as far as distributions go. RedHat knows better (at least I hope) than to partner with sun to make a "RedHat only" jvm.
If linux keeps gaining ground, sun will come around. They won't make it free (speech) but they'll eventually add linux as a major port.
I don't see them gpl'ing it soon (or ever, unless they get a clue, and that ain't likely) so it will never get widespread usage in the non-business areas, but once businesses start demanding java on linux, it will come. Just be patient.
I use ns6 on my 2000 box at work, and mozilla at home. Being a (sort of) web guy, I keep ns4 and ie (at work, no 'doze at home) around just to test pages with.
/home/spauldo/.netscape/lock' because of this.
I read a lot of comics, and with ns4, the browser dies all the freakin' time because of the stupid doubleclick and other banner ad companies' trackers. It's rediculous. I've got a button on my gnome bar set to 'killall -9 netscape ; rm
Mozilla and ns6 both have no problems with this. I could set up junkbuster, but it's just easier this way.
It seems that Nautilus may be too little too late. Had it been released before KDE 2, then matters might be different.
Wouldn't make any difference to me, since I don't particularly like KDE. (it works fine, just not the way I want my desktop to work)
There's some FVWM fanatics around here who probably asked what the big deal about Konqy was when it debuted on here.
That's the problem; Microsoft blames drivers for much of their instability. They're probably right in most cases. Still, considering that our drivers aren't written by the people who have full access to the hardware specs, would we fare any better? Probably worse. It's better to keep it out, so that way bad drivers can't bring down the whole system.
OK, yeah, this is a flame. I don't care.
Call me old school, but I don't understand why all you people want yer distros to autodetect all this crap. In a corporate environment, where you've got 500 machines with different stuff, yeah, it's nice, but at home? Why? Don't you know what you have? Is xf86config really that hard?
I don't want my computer to autodetect nothin' 'sides the drives and such. I suppose you'd like it to automatically change the settings if it thinks your hardware has changed, too, eh? Ever work on a windoze machine that detects nonexistant hardware every freakin' reboot?
This from a slackware user too. I'm freakin' disappointed.
Sorry, no. The average user out there don't even know what "operating system" is. Like you said, my computer doesn't work. Is windoze/macos/UNIX part of your computer?
MacOS and Windoze are software distributions, not just operating systems. The same goes for linux distributions. Just because clueless people call the whole thing as OS don't mean it that's what it is.
Strange that they'd be EST, considering they're in michigan..
Uh, 'cause most mainstream browsers are flaky when it comes to png support?
Some people like it. Like me, for instance. When I zoom in, I want just that - to zoom in. I use it basicly for a cheap xmag. Actually, I usually run X where at the largest resolution (this damn TNT card won't run 24bit color, so it's not as high as I'd like) is less than the screen size. Gives me more window room. Just 'cause it's not the same as windoze or what some people call "user friendly" don't mean that it's bad.
Good books, and they relate with this issue. Essentially, the internet accidentally breeds AI's, and they end up with their own society, still serving man, but for their own purposes. The series involves a struggle between the various factions of AI's that can't decide whether to destroy mankind, use mankind for their own purposes, or just leave him alone.
Check it out if you haven't read it. You do have to read all four books (in order) to understand the true meaning of it all though.
Depends. I worked at a place I would have gladly tried to make go under, or at least hurt their business, because the working conditions sucked so bad I was sick of it.
The way I looked at it, it was the best paying job I could get (in a town where unemployment was over 10%) so I wasn't gonna quit, but if the company went under, it was well worth it.
Looking back, it seems rather stupid and short sighted, but when you're under opression and low morale, you tend to think a little crazy.
How 'bout "It's broke, man!"
Perhaps mix this with your geographic area.
This wouldn't be a good idea for businesses (I have no idea where the main office of my bank is, or musician's friend, or T$R inc.) but would be ideal for home users.
Imagine, for instance, http://john.quincy.public.poncacity.ok.us.nom. It's long to type, but with 6 million people (even though 99% wouldn't have their own homepage for a long time) it's going to be long to type anyway.
With the advent of broadband to the masses, this could be a possible option with your ISP. Imagine if a domain name _came_ with your account. Most people don't change ISP's unless they move, so ownership wouldn't be that big of a hassle for the most part (knowing ISP's these days, they'd probably want ownership). It would be an addon option to have it point to your machine (with IPv6, static IP's should be cheaper hopefully).
Now, this probably isn't going to be how it happens (it's too good for companies to let the customer have it... seems that all the good stuff gets in the way of some company that has the power to keep it from us) but it's a nice thought.
"Those who can't do, teach" is an old quote. Dunno where it comes from.
:)
I ain't slammin' teachers. Good ones are hard to find. I am slamming tech support - most places literally hire people off the street, hand them a script, and tell them to answer the phone. I should know, that's what happened to me
Anyway, as for being an idiot, well, you opinion don't amount to a hill of beans to me, so call me what you will.
They ain't talkin' about beowulf, dude - this is something completely different. Read up about clustering sometime.
And BSD has a lot of stuff that's better than linux, but linux has a lot of stuff better than BSD - just depends on what you're doing, and what your techs know.
1: Everybody and their dog knows linux
2: No per-seat licensing (as said above)
3: This is cheap for what you're getting
4: The target customer usually has millions of dollars to spend on IT (i.e. fortune 500, US Govt., etc)
People always try to defend linux when it comes to the whole "Linux has no support", but really - this is bottom line guarantee _we_will_fix_the_problem_. You don't get that through irc or usenet. $2000 for onsite tech support for large systems such as this is beans.
So will hobbiests buy it? No, of course not - they'll figure out how to do it themselves. But enterprise-level networks need this type of stuff, and have the money to burn.
Most folks nowdays don't compile their own stuff, so the binaries do fine for them. apt-get is a wonderful tool.
I do.
I run slackware. I'll probably download the iso of this tomorrow at work, if the CD writer feels like working.
Good news for me. This isn't just news for you, ya know, news for other people as well.
dunno if yggdrasil existed way back then, but it did exist. They sold the linux bible, prolly the first linux book (may be wrong, I'm just guessing). I saw their website a few months ago it seems, it's still up, but their distro is still REAL old. They haven't upgraded.
more like hungry's site hasn't been touched in two years. I can't find anything under products on their site that's newer than 1998 (I didn't look real extensively though). The only things that seem to be updated have their own websites (japhar and lesstif).
Linux was my first UNIX, and I became rather used to it over time. Lately I've been playing with solaris on a spare sparc at work, and I've often thought that the perfect UNIX would be a mixture of the two.
Commercial UNIX distributions have a lot of nice features (never used SCO, but solaris is nice) but seem lacking in a lot of other places. For instance, the best shell shipped with solaris is ksh. It was great in its day, but bash is faster to use and easier to get used to. There's countless other examples, of course. Lots of GNU utilities are better than the commercial versions.
I know you can put them on commercial UNIX boxes (although I haven't quite figured out ld on solaris yet... some software won't compile for me) but I'd personally love to have a nice unified GNU-meets-commercial environment. Hopefully SCO can give this to us.
I'd love to see sun do this, but somehow I don't think they will... oh well. Hope there's a good free version of this distro...
$ export DISPLAY=192.168.0.2
$ xterm &
Java code for GUI applications is too slow for some stuff. Java's not a compiled language (normally, anyway) so it's not as fast as what a program written in C/C++ would be. Depending on the application, this can be a big drawback.
Plus, you have to install a java runtime environment and set it up in order to run java stuff. Last time I downloaded blackdown's JDK it was 10 megs (and their server was really slow). JDK's are normally not included in linux distributions for some reason (prolly lisencing, but I don't know for sure).
GTK+ is a native C toolkit, so GUI programs in C are often written using it. It's the basis for GNOME. KDE uses QT for its toolkit, since it's written in C++.