Remember, if you have a problem or question, 100 to 1, somebody else has had it too, so Google probably already knows the answer (or at least the question:-P);
I've found this is true, and you can almost always find an answer like "Just add frobuz=1 to the foobar.conf file".
Except then I find that: 1) My distro has renamed foobar.conf to conf.foobar and stuffed it in an odd directory 2) The command has changed from frobuz=1 to nofrobuz=false 3) I can't figure out the configuration file syntax and have to look it up (or do more googling) 4) Finally I learn that entire foobar subsystem became obsolete with kernel 2.6 and has been replaced with something that works entirely differently.
Anyway, googling for Linux answers is like a maze of twisty passages, all alike. You'll probably get through, but it won't be quick.
Keep in mind this story is several years old, and comes from a era when Linux's USB support was half-assed and printing support was a mess of different little programs. In all likelyhood the "drivers" existed, but the autoconfiguration infrastructure didn't, which meant that every particular configuration had to be put together by-hand, which could take hours and is too difficult to explain over IRC.
Which follows a general pattern for Linux: 1) Linux Distros have some infrastructure issue which make it more difficult to use than Windows 2) Linux Zealots spend several years explaining how it's not a problem and you need to grow a bigger nerdpenis 3) Finally someone writes the missing software and everything works great 4) Life moves on.
Had a similar experience the first time I used Linux. After reading about how "robust" and "stable" it was, I installed RedHat 5.?, su'ed to root, and started copying files over to the Linux partition.
Well, in those days, apparently root was immune to "Disk Full" errors, so the files kept copying even though there was no space, totally scrambling the ext2 partition, hanging the machine, and leaving Linux unbootable. So, I'd been using Linux for 30 minutes and it was so "robust" that I'd already crashed it and destroyed it.
Of course I was told this error was entirely my fault, and proof that the Linux filesystem was better than NTFS.
Not at all. My point was more that people don't like to play typical corridor-crawl FPSes anymore. If Valve would have made another HL1, it would never have been as popular.
The MS Origami devices coming out have a novel onscreen keyboard interface. Who knows how well it works, but at least it's a different appraoch than the traditional "picture of a keyboard" approach.
Well, yes, but starting by saying "This went from a 90 to a 70" is a really bad way to editorialize your point. My first reaction was wondering what the hell is he was talking about, until I realized it's some sort of game reviewer circlejerk jargon. It's not like joe gamer looks at his collection and says "Doom3, that's an 83!".
In Half-Life 2, you get to drive an airboat, solve physics puzzles, throw barrels, drive a buggy, move planks, order insects around, follow a girl, set up robotic guns, and throw guys like ragdolls. However, for maybe 25% of the game you will actually need to point your crosshairs at guys and shoot them. Just a warning.
It seems to me that where a computer is finally assembled is the least important part. They take a high-tech CPU from Malaysia, a high-tech motherboard from China, and a high-tech LCD from Korea, and then a low-tech worker somewhere screwdrivers it all together.
Dell does it's PC assembly in the US, but you can hardly call it high-tech manufacturing. More like sticking legos together.
Also Who|Where it's built is not really that important because they bin-sort the parts based on each OEM's quality standards. Motherboard passes all the tests with flying colors? It goes to Apple or IBM. Borderline? It ends up in a consumer Compaq. Fails a few? Ends up in a generic model.
Similar situation for me (personal PBG4, work T31 -- which is smaller than the PB) -- Obviously the Mac wins on style, and like the ThinkPad is a well-built machine (lid closes tightly, no gaps or big seams).
However, the PowerBook really feels like a delicate piece of electronics that needs to be handled with care. The lid bends easily. It's not comfortable to hold in one hand. The keyboard is mushy. If I ever dropped it, I doubt it would survive. If it wasn't for the shiny aluminum, it would feel cheap.
The ThinkPad? Like people are saying -- it's a brick. Pick it up, drop it on the desk, push and pull the lid -- except for the stupid finikey DVD drive, it just feels solid.
Anyway, the Mac makes a great personal laptop. But if a company rolled them out to their sales force, half of them would be destroyed within a few weeks. It just doesn't have that commercial-quality solidity.
So now that IBM, the venerable old company, is not producing laptops, we'll go with HP. Rock solid, I tell you.
There's something to that. There's many companies out there that run Dell Desktops, Dell Servers, Dell Laptops... until you get to the executive suite, where it's IBM ThinkPad all the way. Which of course is a complete pain in the ass from an IT perspective.
The Levano models come out, they're supposedly the same. But they aren't quite. The buttons are cheaper and fuglier. The lids are shiney rather than black rubber. The keyboard layout is a little different. The docking stations aren't compatible anymore. Anyone looking for an excuse to get rid of the ThinkPads has just found several.
Oh, I won't deny that everything got slapped with blue plastic at the last minute and that the iMac spurred a lot of USB sales. I just disagree that these products were designed for the Mac market in particular or that this effect lasted longer than a couple months. Once Windows 98 got out there, PC users started switching to USB -- as they would have with or without the iMac ever existing.
No, actually that doesn't make sense. HP did not scramble to introduce a line of USB-based printers within a month just because the iMac came out. Those products were ready and waiting for Windows 98.
Mac users tend to project their own situation onto others. USB was great for Macs because the ADB/LocalTalk perhiphrials was ridiclously expensive and rare. From the PC side, however, USB provided only minor improvements over the existing interfaces and there was really no need for immediate adoption.
Apple made the original FCC request for "personal wireless device spectrum" back in the early 1990s -- now used by 802.11.
At the time people barely had ethernet and it seemed kind of crazy. But this is certainly something Apple had been working on for a looong time and didn't just buy it from Lucent.
This is an old argument, that's been beaten to death, but oh well...
FOlks point out that USB was a wintel thing, and Windows had it since 1996 or 1997.
That is only partially correct. USB didn't really work correctly until Windows 98 shipped... about 2 months after the iMac came out. So your line of argument gives Apple enormous credit for what was only a brief advantage. All of those USB products you remember were being readied for the big Windows release -- nobody even knew Apple was going to USB.
I will agree that removing the legacy ports was a genius-level plan to solve Apple's retail problems. Mac Peripheral sales exploded as users were forced to replace their printers and zip drives. Great for Apple, not so good for Apple customers.
BIOS complete sucks for boot device management. It's "good enough" for most personal, standalone PCs with one hard drive (like iMacs for example), but for servers and workstation systems it blows. It also lacks remote managability and other corporate friendly features. And as Intel has pointed out, there never really was a BIOS spec for option ROMs, they just sorta worked through fate alone. Plus, it's 2006 and GRUB and Dell still can't agree on how to boot my SCSI/IDE machine. Fuckos.
Anyway, this update just added a BIOS to Macs, so it's a moot point. 100% PC AT Compability has been achieved.
OS/2 users also preferred native apps over Windows apps.
Well, that's a blanket statement. I recall reading a tidbit that the by-far most-popular office suite on OS/2 was Microsoft Office for Windows. (Of course, had there been a MS Office/2, that's what OS/2ers would have run.)
People like to paint OS/2's Windows support as a failure, but what they're overlooking is that OS/2 had between 5%-10% marketshare at it's peak, which is a hellava lot more than Apple has today! Windows support isn't why OS/2 failed, Windows support is why OS/2 succeeded (to the extent that it did).
Imagine if Apple could sextuple their marketshare through better Windows support. I think that would be very, very tempting to Cupertino.
And is it really worth going to the wall for this PowerBook? As I recall, they had so many defects that Apple offered to buy them all back from the users at one point.
Also, since the apocryphal story about the 5300, there's been many production models of laptops with battery fire problems -- Dells, Sonys, HPs. It's not as big of a story as it was at one time.
Only somewhat true. The Court of Appeals tossed most of the verdict against MS, and that limited the DOJs ability to get any really serious punishments out of the case.
The simple version is this -- it behaves something like an organic content management system (i.e. like Wikipedia, say) which anyone with sufficient privileges can tack stuff onto (i.e. add or modify new nodes anywhere) AND you can store any chunk(s) of the tree on your hard disk and work with them offline and then merge back as appropriate
Admittedly this was a cool feature back in 1988. Shades of Ted Nelson/Xanadu, etc. But Lotus never effectively integrated it with anything, so Notes largely just became a proprietary island -- there's no advantage to an "unstructured document store" that can't fricken talk to MS Word. So everyone wisely gave up on it as a development platform, and now Notes is nothing more than a bad email/calendar client.
I hear bits and pieces about WinFS, and part of me wants to think that it could be Notes done right.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember, if you have a problem or question, 100 to 1, somebody else has had it too, so Google probably already knows the answer (or at least the question :-P);
I've found this is true, and you can almost always find an answer like "Just add frobuz=1 to the foobar.conf file".
Except then I find that:
1) My distro has renamed foobar.conf to conf.foobar and stuffed it in an odd directory
2) The command has changed from frobuz=1 to nofrobuz=false
3) I can't figure out the configuration file syntax and have to look it up (or do more googling)
4) Finally I learn that entire foobar subsystem became obsolete with kernel 2.6 and has been replaced with something that works entirely differently.
Anyway, googling for Linux answers is like a maze of twisty passages, all alike. You'll probably get through, but it won't be quick.
Keep in mind this story is several years old, and comes from a era when Linux's USB support was half-assed and printing support was a mess of different little programs. In all likelyhood the "drivers" existed, but the autoconfiguration infrastructure didn't, which meant that every particular configuration had to be put together by-hand, which could take hours and is too difficult to explain over IRC.
Which follows a general pattern for Linux:
1) Linux Distros have some infrastructure issue which make it more difficult to use than Windows
2) Linux Zealots spend several years explaining how it's not a problem and you need to grow a bigger nerdpenis
3) Finally someone writes the missing software and everything works great
4) Life moves on.
Had a similar experience the first time I used Linux. After reading about how "robust" and "stable" it was, I installed RedHat 5.?, su'ed to root, and started copying files over to the Linux partition.
Well, in those days, apparently root was immune to "Disk Full" errors, so the files kept copying even though there was no space, totally scrambling the ext2 partition, hanging the machine, and leaving Linux unbootable. So, I'd been using Linux for 30 minutes and it was so "robust" that I'd already crashed it and destroyed it.
Of course I was told this error was entirely my fault, and proof that the Linux filesystem was better than NTFS.
Actually, IBM churned out quite a few crappy "retail" ThinkPads over the years. (380 model, etc)
> And these are bad things to have in an FPS?
Not at all. My point was more that people don't like to play typical corridor-crawl FPSes anymore. If Valve would have made another HL1, it would never have been as popular.
The MS Origami devices coming out have a novel onscreen keyboard interface. Who knows how well it works, but at least it's a different appraoch than the traditional "picture of a keyboard" approach.
- shows-origami-ui/
Pix here:
http://www.engadget.com/2006/03/08/cebit-web-site
Well, yes, but starting by saying "This went from a 90 to a 70" is a really bad way to editorialize your point. My first reaction was wondering what the hell is he was talking about, until I realized it's some sort of game reviewer circlejerk jargon. It's not like joe gamer looks at his collection and says "Doom3, that's an 83!".
In Half-Life 2, you get to drive an airboat, solve physics puzzles, throw barrels, drive a buggy, move planks, order insects around, follow a girl, set up robotic guns, and throw guys like ragdolls. However, for maybe 25% of the game you will actually need to point your crosshairs at guys and shoot them. Just a warning.
It seems to me that where a computer is finally assembled is the least important part. They take a high-tech CPU from Malaysia, a high-tech motherboard from China, and a high-tech LCD from Korea, and then a low-tech worker somewhere screwdrivers it all together.
Dell does it's PC assembly in the US, but you can hardly call it high-tech manufacturing. More like sticking legos together.
Also Who|Where it's built is not really that important because they bin-sort the parts based on each OEM's quality standards. Motherboard passes all the tests with flying colors? It goes to Apple or IBM. Borderline? It ends up in a consumer Compaq. Fails a few? Ends up in a generic model.
Similar situation for me (personal PBG4, work T31 -- which is smaller than the PB) -- Obviously the Mac wins on style, and like the ThinkPad is a well-built machine (lid closes tightly, no gaps or big seams).
However, the PowerBook really feels like a delicate piece of electronics that needs to be handled with care. The lid bends easily. It's not comfortable to hold in one hand. The keyboard is mushy. If I ever dropped it, I doubt it would survive. If it wasn't for the shiny aluminum, it would feel cheap.
The ThinkPad? Like people are saying -- it's a brick. Pick it up, drop it on the desk, push and pull the lid -- except for the stupid finikey DVD drive, it just feels solid.
Anyway, the Mac makes a great personal laptop. But if a company rolled them out to their sales force, half of them would be destroyed within a few weeks. It just doesn't have that commercial-quality solidity.
So now that IBM, the venerable old company, is not producing laptops, we'll go with HP. Rock solid, I tell you.
... until you get to the executive suite, where it's IBM ThinkPad all the way. Which of course is a complete pain in the ass from an IT perspective.
There's something to that. There's many companies out there that run Dell Desktops, Dell Servers, Dell Laptops
The Levano models come out, they're supposedly the same. But they aren't quite. The buttons are cheaper and fuglier. The lids are shiney rather than black rubber. The keyboard layout is a little different. The docking stations aren't compatible anymore. Anyone looking for an excuse to get rid of the ThinkPads has just found several.
Oh, I won't deny that everything got slapped with blue plastic at the last minute and that the iMac spurred a lot of USB sales. I just disagree that these products were designed for the Mac market in particular or that this effect lasted longer than a couple months. Once Windows 98 got out there, PC users started switching to USB -- as they would have with or without the iMac ever existing.
No, actually that doesn't make sense. HP did not scramble to introduce a line of USB-based printers within a month just because the iMac came out. Those products were ready and waiting for Windows 98.
Mac users tend to project their own situation onto others. USB was great for Macs because the ADB/LocalTalk perhiphrials was ridiclously expensive and rare. From the PC side, however, USB provided only minor improvements over the existing interfaces and there was really no need for immediate adoption.
that worked so well for OS/2, let's do it for the mac!
Actually it did work for OS/2:
OS/2 Marketshare (peak): 10-15%
Mac Marketshare (current): 2%
Oh wait.
If Apple could somehow "fail" like OS/2, while quadrupling their sales, I think they would interested.
Apple made the original FCC request for "personal wireless device spectrum" back in the early 1990s -- now used by 802.11.
At the time people barely had ethernet and it seemed kind of crazy. But this is certainly something Apple had been working on for a looong time and didn't just buy it from Lucent.
This is an old argument, that's been beaten to death, but oh well...
... about 2 months after the iMac came out. So your line of argument gives Apple enormous credit for what was only a brief advantage. All of those USB products you remember were being readied for the big Windows release -- nobody even knew Apple was going to USB.
FOlks point out that USB was a wintel thing, and Windows had it since 1996 or 1997.
That is only partially correct. USB didn't really work correctly until Windows 98 shipped
I will agree that removing the legacy ports was a genius-level plan to solve Apple's retail problems. Mac Peripheral sales exploded as users were forced to replace their printers and zip drives. Great for Apple, not so good for Apple customers.
In the 1990s, a federal law was passed to reimburse telcoms for wiretapping equipment.
What is wrong with the BIOS?
BIOS complete sucks for boot device management. It's "good enough" for most personal, standalone PCs with one hard drive (like iMacs for example), but for servers and workstation systems it blows. It also lacks remote managability and other corporate friendly features. And as Intel has pointed out, there never really was a BIOS spec for option ROMs, they just sorta worked through fate alone. Plus, it's 2006 and GRUB and Dell still can't agree on how to boot my SCSI/IDE machine. Fuckos.
Anyway, this update just added a BIOS to Macs, so it's a moot point. 100% PC AT Compability has been achieved.
OS/2 users also preferred native apps over Windows apps.
Well, that's a blanket statement. I recall reading a tidbit that the by-far most-popular office suite on OS/2 was Microsoft Office for Windows. (Of course, had there been a MS Office/2, that's what OS/2ers would have run.)
People like to paint OS/2's Windows support as a failure, but what they're overlooking is that OS/2 had between 5%-10% marketshare at it's peak, which is a hellava lot more than Apple has today! Windows support isn't why OS/2 failed, Windows support is why OS/2 succeeded (to the extent that it did).
Imagine if Apple could sextuple their marketshare through better Windows support. I think that would be very, very tempting to Cupertino.
And is it really worth going to the wall for this PowerBook? As I recall, they had so many defects that Apple offered to buy them all back from the users at one point.
Also, since the apocryphal story about the 5300, there's been many production models of laptops with battery fire problems -- Dells, Sonys, HPs. It's not as big of a story as it was at one time.
This is just wrong. Most of the convictions were thrown out. Sure Bush pulled his punches, but the fact is the case was seriously weakened.
Only somewhat true. The Court of Appeals tossed most of the verdict against MS, and that limited the DOJs ability to get any really serious punishments out of the case.
I think it's a safe bet that IBM makes a lot more money off Lotus than they did selling G5s to Apple.
The simple version is this -- it behaves something like an organic content management system (i.e. like Wikipedia, say) which anyone with sufficient privileges can tack stuff onto (i.e. add or modify new nodes anywhere) AND you can store any chunk(s) of the tree on your hard disk and work with them offline and then merge back as appropriate
Admittedly this was a cool feature back in 1988. Shades of Ted Nelson/Xanadu, etc. But Lotus never effectively integrated it with anything, so Notes largely just became a proprietary island -- there's no advantage to an "unstructured document store" that can't fricken talk to MS Word. So everyone wisely gave up on it as a development platform, and now Notes is nothing more than a bad email/calendar client.
I hear bits and pieces about WinFS, and part of me wants to think that it could be Notes done right.
IBM spent millions of dollars tying OS/2 and PS/2 together through advertisements, so if people are confused, blame them.