Re:SuSE has done this for a while...
on
Debian On DVD
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· Score: 2
I know SuSE, at least with Professionl, give you both.
When I bought 7.1, professional was the only way to get a DVD (at least for x86). I've been really happy with it. The only machines I have that don't have DVD drives are so old that I'm doing totally stripped down installs anyway, and everything I need is on the first and second CDs.
Maybe one of these days I'll get around to setting myself up for network install...
My father never signed an agreement with Earthlink, his agreement was with JPS when they were only in California. JPS was bought by Onemain, and Onemain was bought by Earthlink. I'm not a lawyer either, but it seems to me that it would be difficult to hold someone to an agreement that they never agreed to, or to changes in the agreement that they were never informed of. Doesn't contract law require that both parties agree to the contract?
The really funny thing was that in this particular case it was Earthlink who made the threat. They were trying to double-bill him, and were threatening to cut him off because he refused to pay twice. He learned long ago to keep every single scrap of paper ever sent to him, so he would have no problem proving that A) they were trying to double bill him, and B) he was never informed of any changes in his TOS (and yes, he has a copy of the one he agreed to, though I haven't actually seen it so I don't know what rights it gives him). In this particular case they ended up giving him 6 months of free service.
Corporations have no problem throwing around vague legal threats, and depend on the ignorance of the average Joe for it to be effective. He just throws it back in their faces. It's so effective because it's unexpected, I think.
I don't know how similar Urban Terror is to CS, if it's the same game with a newer engine then I might install Q3 again and check it out. The reason people play CS is because it's FUN. The standard deathmatch-style play you get with Q3 is older and lamer than CS. In fact the only other FPS game I know of that comes to CS in fun is Alien v. Predator's Alien Tag, which is also an old game.
I'll take fun/origional/interesting over eyecandy any day (although I do have my limits in that respect, I can no longer stomach the graphics of my old favorites, X-Wing and Daggerfall).
No Lawyers allowed where I'm at (Nevada County, California). My Dad has been in small claims court a couple of times, so I know that for a fact. Small claims has become his favorite threat against companies that are trying to screw him (most recently Earthlink). They always laugh and say something like "Fine, my Lawyers will squash you like a bug " (I'm paraphrasing, of course), but they always seem to change their tune when he politely explains to them that there are no lawyers allowed and if they don't show up they lose and that he doesn't care that they live in Chicago or where ever.
It's fun to watch actually. He's not really aggressive or litigious, but he won't let somebody screw him over, particularly big companies who are used to walking all over the common man.
I'm afraid my experiences with AT&T Broadband have soured me on all things AT&T. I hope the technology succeeds, because I think it's pretty cool, but I wouldn't buy it from AT&T, regardless of price. Customer service is that important to me, and AT&T has proved to me time and again that it won't provide it.
Yes, Pacific Bell is a monopoly telco here, but they maintain their monopoly by providing superior service (at least that's the case in my town, I know others disagree). AT&T Broadband is actually more of a monopoly, because they aren't required to allow other companies access to their lines. Their service and support are crap, which is why so many people in my area jumped ship to DirectTV as soon as they could. Cable modems aren't even an option here, since AT&T won't be upgrading the lines to be able to handle it for a few years (according to my brother-in-law, who was an AT&T installer until about 6 months ago).
I appreciate your position and your sentiments, though. I'm sure I would feel the same.
Not true. Halflife is (when you include Counter-Strike). In fact it's been over a year since I've even played Quake3, and I don't know anyone else who still plays it either.
The only place I know of where Quake3 is the biggest game out there is for benchmarks. That's why it's unethical. ATI is trying to manipulate benchmarks to make their product seem better than it really is.
I have never dealt with a company that has worse support for their products. Drivers, on the rare occasions that they actually exist, are almost impossible to find and their documentation is equally poor. Here's a summary of my experiences so far:
An 8x4x32 CD-RW that was bundled with burning software (adaptec) that didn't support the drive. Why on earth would you bundle software that doesn't support your product? I'll never know. After 2 hours of trying to find any info about the drive I gave up and downloaded Nero, which worked flawlessly as usual.
A Mini-DV Camcorder. I can't get it to communicate through firewire because I have no drivers for it. The only thing on the CD is some crappy editing software and USB drivers. The USB works, but it won't allow me to transfer clips longer than 30 seconds, which is probably good since a 30 second clip takes just under an hour to transfer. There are no firewire drivers to be found anywhere for the camcorder I have. I tried talking to customer support about it, but I couldn't seem to get through to an actual person.
Finally, the old dotmatrix printer that payroll is printed on at my company. This is my one success story with Panasonic, actually. I had no problem finding info about the printer online, and the info page had a link to their ftp site. not actually a link to the driver, mind you, just to the top-level directory. It took me about an hour to find the actual driver I was looking for. Too bad it wasn't actually for my printer (at least, that's what win2k told me). Another half hour on hold finally put me in tough with a tech support rep who informed me that Panasonic only supports Canadians. (He didn't actually say that, but that's the only place I could find useful information and drivers that worked.)
So, Panasonic gets my vote for the worst product support of any company in the world.
IBM has always been great though, in fact the IBM hard drive story refered to above is not about bad customer support. If you actually read it (Cliff) IBM's support was pretty good, and there is no mention that they were difficult to deal with or reluctant to send a replacement. I was going to link to my theory on what was really going on, but my comment seems to have been removed. But here's another one that I think is plausible. My comment was basically that if you keep replacing the part and it keeps failing, then the failure is being caused by something else, and I presented some personal experiences to back up my assesment.
The US has Small Claims Court for disputes involving less than $5000. Additionally, there are no lawyers allowed. If one party doesn't physically show up they lose. At least, that's how it works in California. I'm not sure if you can sue a Corporation in Small Claims or not, but it's worth looking in to.
Isn't this the third time this year that AT&T has left a large number of customers high and dry? It's really irritating to me when companies do that, but it's especially bad when the company is as spontaneous and unappologetic as AT&T has been about it.
I have to say that it fits with all my other experiences with AT&T though. They are the cable TV provider in my area and they suck. The picture quality is even worse than the channel selection they "offer", and in fact is exceded in lack of quality only by their customer service. If I could get any reception with an antena at my house I would drop them entirely. Unfortunately I just can't justify the expense of DSS with as little TV as I watch.
I'm guessing it's only carry-on stuff that's subject to these searches, so just don't carry it on. If they're huffy about the stuff being in checked baggage, just ship it overnight to yourself. It's not as expensive as you think.
That's actually not a bad idea. As long as you aren't bringing in anything that you aren't allowed to have with you, or that you could get fired for bringing in (like the goat pr0n, though there's no reason you couldn't have it in your car if they're searching that too), why not have fun with it? You'll lessen the stress it puts on you (after all, you're carrying stuff you WANT them to find) and at the same time demonstrating the absurdity of what you're being subjected to.
All those listed are hardware companies, and as such the bulk of their IP is covered by patents. The SSSCA is designed to protect copyright, which is a completely different animal.
However, that doesn't mean big corporations want a free market either. The ultimate goal of any true capitalist is to eliminate the competition and thus establish a monopoly. I'm not advocating communism, because communism sucks even more than capitalism. I really like the idea of the free market, it's really good for me as a consumer. But I think people need to realize that it is the free market that allows capitalism, not the other way around, and the free market is what we really need to protect. Totally unrestricted capitalism will destroy the free market just as surely as communism will.
How scaled? I'm not a mac guy, so I haven't payed close attention, but I remember reviews saying that OSX was sluggish on dual G4s with 1.5G RAM. Seems to me there'd be a WHOLE LOT of scaling to do to get it usable on PDA hardware.
I'm sure a few of you are running OSX, how is it? What is your opinion on how successful a scale-down would be? Would it be better to try and scale down the whole thing, or maybe just the key parts of it, like the kernel, and build the rest from scratch maybe using the OSX GUI as a guideline? And is it really worthwile for Apple to throw resources at something like this?
Infiniband is more of an open standard than Firewire is. Intel is really just a leader in the Infiniband community.
I used to go around saying "&%^$& Intel and their *(^%*( proprietary Infiniband crap!", but then I did some research into it for a class project and I've changed my mind about it. The combination of Infiniband and Hypertransport is going to bring us some really fast computers in the near future (and no, despite common misconception, Infiniband and Hypertransport are not competing technologies).
A quick google search will bring you a wealth of info about it, and I highly recomend it. It was a real eye-opener for me.
There are businesses trying to make money with Linux, but Linux is not a business! He says that there is too much focus on the desktop and that it robs developers from "Linux' real place in the world". What a bunch of crap. If Linux were a business, this arguement might hold water. You could go to the CEO of Linux Corp. and say "Why are you wasting all of these developers on developing desktop apps when your real strength is on the server?" Of course, there is no Linux Corp. There is no product strategy developed by market annalysts studying focus groups. There's just a bunch of folks who know how to write code working on what THEY want. I will continue to support Linux on the desktop because that's where I want it! I don't have a server, and if that's all Linux did it would be useless to me.
Konquerer, an open source browser, doesn't even track market share figures.
Of course it doesn't, because Linux is not a business!
that doesn't take into account the... steep learning curve for most desktop users.
This is the anti-Linux arguement that I hate the most, because it's total BS. There is no steep learning curve for the Linux desktop. How do I know this? Because the 3 least technical people I know (my mom, wife, and sister) all managed to figure it out without any help from me. In fact my sister actually likes Linux better, she feels it's easier to use than windows. My wife is indifferent as long as she can surf the web and check her email. My mom feel's the same as my wife does about it, but she has the additional requirement of needing to process Word.docs for work (and no, I haven't tried StarOffice6 yet).
...real enemy is - Unix vendors like Sun
Huh?!?!? How can you call someone your enemy when they've done so much to help you? Big Unix vendors, like Sun, IBM, Compaq, and SGI are all supporting Linux in some way. Sun and IBM especially. Why? It's hard to say sometimes, but I suspect that most of them see Linux as a great way to leverage their vast investment and experience in Unix for the future. I also suspect that they see Linux as the only way that true cross-vendor Unix compatability will ever really happen, something that has been tried a few times.
Wouldn't a competent integrated development platform be more useful than an office suite?
No, not really. If you're a developer, learn how to use the command line. Thanks to pipes, the developement platform is as integrate as you want it to be, and it's integrated in exactly the way you want it to be. How many of the "competent" IDEs can claim that? If you use one particular combination frequently, write a script.
Wouldn't a graphical debugger be better than a whizzy file manager?
Absolutely not. I'll take gdb over any graphical debugger any day of the week. gdb is so powerful precisely because it isn't hampered by a GUI. Don't get me wrong, GUIs have their place, like file managers for instance, but for things like debugging I far prefer the power and flexibility that only the command line has been able to provide. And how would you use this cool graphical debugger without a GUI desktop? Don't GNOME and KDE both offer graphical debuggers (or at least graphical front-ends to gdb)?
Wouldn't a pro 3-D package be more targeted than an Outlook clone?
Again, how are you going to use this pro 3-D package without all of this developement time being "wasted" on developing Linux as a graphical platform? Of course, pro graphics on Linux has already been discussed recently, so I won't go into it any firther. I will say, though, that without an Outlook clone to go with it, this Linux 3-D app doesn't have a snowballs chance at my company. We use 3-D apps for mechanical design, and if anyone knows of a Linux-based alternative to SolidWorks 2001 I would love to hear about it, but unless there are also alternatives to MS Outlook and Project as well, my bosses will never go for it.
As if the lack of applications weren't enough of an obstacle, self-inflicted public relations problems - in the form of bad behavior by vocal Linux proponents - are casting a dark shadow over Linux.
First he complains that there are too many apps for Linux, and now there are too few. Make up your mind. He makes a good point about Linux zealots, though.
In short, Linux is not a business! And because of that, business annalasys will always fail on Linux. Red Hat is a business, annalize it till the cows come home, but don't make the mistake of thinking that Linux==Linux_Companies. There's only one thing that can be proved by that kind of comparison; that the person making it doesn't understand Linux.
Linux can be all things to all people, that's the true beauty of Open Source. It's already a great server OS, everyone seems to agree on that point. I happen to think it's a great desktop OS, too. Some think it's a great realtime/embedded OS, and if I were into that I would probably agree. The closed source embedded OSs can be a real pain in the ass to work with. And as for scalability, how many of those "scalable" OSs can run on a wristwatch? The only thing really keeping Linux from scaling the other way is access to system specs.
I don't think that passport will generate enough traffic to necessitate broadband on it's own, but MS has certainly broached the subject of providing apps online on a pay-per-use basis. I certainly wouldn't want to try running Word remotely over a modem. Using vi over a modem is bad enough...
But unfortunately I don't have time to find it. The guy who wrote it had set up an 802.11 NAN with basic ISP services including internet access through his broadband account. I beleive he used Linux for his servers and maybe BSD for the firewall. Check rootprompt or the various linux*.* sites. I'm pretty sure it was linked on rootprompt, but it was a few weeks ago and they don't seem to have an archive search engine.
An interesting take on it. I hadn't thought about it from that perspective.
I do have a counterexample (sort of), Infiniband. At least according to the documentation I've read it's p2p. Granted, it will only be implemented in high-end offerings anytime soon, Intel has claimed to be aiming it at the desktop eventually.
I agree in some sense, but I'm thinking of something to replace both of them. The way I read it that's kind of where Intel is headed with Infiniband. Basically you have you're main chipset that controls IO and everything else is just a module attached to it through a p2p protocol. So, you have a mass storage module, a networking module, etc. The chipset is basically the router for for your system area network. There's no real reason Infiniband couldn't use fiber for physical transport, and Intel says that Infiniband will end up on the desktop eventually. When that day comes, I would love to have all my peripherals daisy-chained into one or two fiber ports on a really small motherboard.
Just think how small your mobo would be without having to make space for IDE, parallel, serial, ps/2, AGP, Ethernet, and PCI connectors. That's what I'm looking at. I realize that isn't what the article is saying, but that doesn't mean I can't extrapolate their direction 10 or 20 years off.
The thing I like about USB is that it makes it possible to remove basically all the other ports from the motherboard; serial, paralell, ps/2, even audio if you're so inclined. I don't think USB1 is fast enough to be practical for some applications like external drives, but USB2 and firewire are fast enough to at least get me thinking about it. If you plan on replacing either of these you're going to have to support the low bandwidth peripherals like keyboards and mice also, and nobody's going to go for it if they need a seperate power cable for their keyboard.
No, my keyboard doesn't need Gb bandwidth, but all the combined peripherals daisy-chained into that one fiber port might benefit from it.
As for bending the wire sharply, copper has the same problem, although it's not quite as guaranteed as it is with fiber. With cat5, for example, the minimum bend radius is 4 times the outside diameter of the cable. And yes, I have had plenty of copper cables go bad from being bent sharply. In fact, it's the most common reason cables go bad.
Slashdot Mirror
When I bought 7.1, professional was the only way to get a DVD (at least for x86). I've been really happy with it. The only machines I have that don't have DVD drives are so old that I'm doing totally stripped down installs anyway, and everything I need is on the first and second CDs.
Maybe one of these days I'll get around to setting myself up for network install...
That's the error I'm getting. Could it possibly be slashdotted in only 3 minutes?
Too bad, I was hoping I could say something meaningful, or maybe even relevant...
The really funny thing was that in this particular case it was Earthlink who made the threat. They were trying to double-bill him, and were threatening to cut him off because he refused to pay twice. He learned long ago to keep every single scrap of paper ever sent to him, so he would have no problem proving that A) they were trying to double bill him, and B) he was never informed of any changes in his TOS (and yes, he has a copy of the one he agreed to, though I haven't actually seen it so I don't know what rights it gives him). In this particular case they ended up giving him 6 months of free service.
Corporations have no problem throwing around vague legal threats, and depend on the ignorance of the average Joe for it to be effective. He just throws it back in their faces. It's so effective because it's unexpected, I think.
I'll take fun/origional/interesting over eyecandy any day (although I do have my limits in that respect, I can no longer stomach the graphics of my old favorites, X-Wing and Daggerfall).
It's fun to watch actually. He's not really aggressive or litigious, but he won't let somebody screw him over, particularly big companies who are used to walking all over the common man.
Yes, Pacific Bell is a monopoly telco here, but they maintain their monopoly by providing superior service (at least that's the case in my town, I know others disagree). AT&T Broadband is actually more of a monopoly, because they aren't required to allow other companies access to their lines. Their service and support are crap, which is why so many people in my area jumped ship to DirectTV as soon as they could. Cable modems aren't even an option here, since AT&T won't be upgrading the lines to be able to handle it for a few years (according to my brother-in-law, who was an AT&T installer until about 6 months ago).
I appreciate your position and your sentiments, though. I'm sure I would feel the same.
The only place I know of where Quake3 is the biggest game out there is for benchmarks. That's why it's unethical. ATI is trying to manipulate benchmarks to make their product seem better than it really is.
An 8x4x32 CD-RW that was bundled with burning software (adaptec) that didn't support the drive. Why on earth would you bundle software that doesn't support your product? I'll never know. After 2 hours of trying to find any info about the drive I gave up and downloaded Nero, which worked flawlessly as usual.
A Mini-DV Camcorder. I can't get it to communicate through firewire because I have no drivers for it. The only thing on the CD is some crappy editing software and USB drivers. The USB works, but it won't allow me to transfer clips longer than 30 seconds, which is probably good since a 30 second clip takes just under an hour to transfer. There are no firewire drivers to be found anywhere for the camcorder I have. I tried talking to customer support about it, but I couldn't seem to get through to an actual person.
Finally, the old dotmatrix printer that payroll is printed on at my company. This is my one success story with Panasonic, actually. I had no problem finding info about the printer online, and the info page had a link to their ftp site. not actually a link to the driver, mind you, just to the top-level directory. It took me about an hour to find the actual driver I was looking for. Too bad it wasn't actually for my printer (at least, that's what win2k told me). Another half hour on hold finally put me in tough with a tech support rep who informed me that Panasonic only supports Canadians. (He didn't actually say that, but that's the only place I could find useful information and drivers that worked.)
So, Panasonic gets my vote for the worst product support of any company in the world.
IBM has always been great though, in fact the IBM hard drive story refered to above is not about bad customer support. If you actually read it (Cliff) IBM's support was pretty good, and there is no mention that they were difficult to deal with or reluctant to send a replacement. I was going to link to my theory on what was really going on, but my comment seems to have been removed. But here's another one that I think is plausible. My comment was basically that if you keep replacing the part and it keeps failing, then the failure is being caused by something else, and I presented some personal experiences to back up my assesment.
I have to say that it fits with all my other experiences with AT&T though. They are the cable TV provider in my area and they suck. The picture quality is even worse than the channel selection they "offer", and in fact is exceded in lack of quality only by their customer service. If I could get any reception with an antena at my house I would drop them entirely. Unfortunately I just can't justify the expense of DSS with as little TV as I watch.
Hey, it's just like every other MS product I've ever used!
However, that doesn't mean big corporations want a free market either. The ultimate goal of any true capitalist is to eliminate the competition and thus establish a monopoly. I'm not advocating communism, because communism sucks even more than capitalism. I really like the idea of the free market, it's really good for me as a consumer. But I think people need to realize that it is the free market that allows capitalism, not the other way around, and the free market is what we really need to protect. Totally unrestricted capitalism will destroy the free market just as surely as communism will.
I'm sure a few of you are running OSX, how is it? What is your opinion on how successful a scale-down would be? Would it be better to try and scale down the whole thing, or maybe just the key parts of it, like the kernel, and build the rest from scratch maybe using the OSX GUI as a guideline? And is it really worthwile for Apple to throw resources at something like this?
I used to go around saying "&%^$& Intel and their *(^%*( proprietary Infiniband crap!", but then I did some research into it for a class project and I've changed my mind about it. The combination of Infiniband and Hypertransport is going to bring us some really fast computers in the near future (and no, despite common misconception, Infiniband and Hypertransport are not competing technologies).
A quick google search will bring you a wealth of info about it, and I highly recomend it. It was a real eye-opener for me.
There are businesses trying to make money with Linux, but Linux is not a business! He says that there is too much focus on the desktop and that it robs developers from "Linux' real place in the world". What a bunch of crap. If Linux were a business, this arguement might hold water. You could go to the CEO of Linux Corp. and say "Why are you wasting all of these developers on developing desktop apps when your real strength is on the server?" Of course, there is no Linux Corp. There is no product strategy developed by market annalysts studying focus groups. There's just a bunch of folks who know how to write code working on what THEY want. I will continue to support Linux on the desktop because that's where I want it! I don't have a server, and if that's all Linux did it would be useless to me.
Konquerer, an open source browser, doesn't even track market share figures.
Of course it doesn't, because Linux is not a business!
that doesn't take into account the ... steep learning curve for most desktop users.
This is the anti-Linux arguement that I hate the most, because it's total BS. There is no steep learning curve for the Linux desktop. How do I know this? Because the 3 least technical people I know (my mom, wife, and sister) all managed to figure it out without any help from me. In fact my sister actually likes Linux better, she feels it's easier to use than windows. My wife is indifferent as long as she can surf the web and check her email. My mom feel's the same as my wife does about it, but she has the additional requirement of needing to process Word .docs for work (and no, I haven't tried StarOffice6 yet).
Huh?!?!? How can you call someone your enemy when they've done so much to help you? Big Unix vendors, like Sun, IBM, Compaq, and SGI are all supporting Linux in some way. Sun and IBM especially. Why? It's hard to say sometimes, but I suspect that most of them see Linux as a great way to leverage their vast investment and experience in Unix for the future. I also suspect that they see Linux as the only way that true cross-vendor Unix compatability will ever really happen, something that has been tried a few times.
Wouldn't a competent integrated development platform be more useful than an office suite?
No, not really. If you're a developer, learn how to use the command line. Thanks to pipes, the developement platform is as integrate as you want it to be, and it's integrated in exactly the way you want it to be. How many of the "competent" IDEs can claim that? If you use one particular combination frequently, write a script.
Wouldn't a graphical debugger be better than a whizzy file manager?
Absolutely not. I'll take gdb over any graphical debugger any day of the week. gdb is so powerful precisely because it isn't hampered by a GUI. Don't get me wrong, GUIs have their place, like file managers for instance, but for things like debugging I far prefer the power and flexibility that only the command line has been able to provide. And how would you use this cool graphical debugger without a GUI desktop? Don't GNOME and KDE both offer graphical debuggers (or at least graphical front-ends to gdb)?
Wouldn't a pro 3-D package be more targeted than an Outlook clone?
Again, how are you going to use this pro 3-D package without all of this developement time being "wasted" on developing Linux as a graphical platform? Of course, pro graphics on Linux has already been discussed recently, so I won't go into it any firther. I will say, though, that without an Outlook clone to go with it, this Linux 3-D app doesn't have a snowballs chance at my company. We use 3-D apps for mechanical design, and if anyone knows of a Linux-based alternative to SolidWorks 2001 I would love to hear about it, but unless there are also alternatives to MS Outlook and Project as well, my bosses will never go for it.
As if the lack of applications weren't enough of an obstacle, self-inflicted public relations problems - in the form of bad behavior by vocal Linux proponents - are casting a dark shadow over Linux.
First he complains that there are too many apps for Linux, and now there are too few. Make up your mind. He makes a good point about Linux zealots, though.
In short, Linux is not a business! And because of that, business annalasys will always fail on Linux. Red Hat is a business, annalize it till the cows come home, but don't make the mistake of thinking that Linux==Linux_Companies. There's only one thing that can be proved by that kind of comparison; that the person making it doesn't understand Linux.
Linux can be all things to all people, that's the true beauty of Open Source. It's already a great server OS, everyone seems to agree on that point. I happen to think it's a great desktop OS, too. Some think it's a great realtime/embedded OS, and if I were into that I would probably agree. The closed source embedded OSs can be a real pain in the ass to work with. And as for scalability, how many of those "scalable" OSs can run on a wristwatch? The only thing really keeping Linux from scaling the other way is access to system specs.
I do have a counterexample (sort of), Infiniband. At least according to the documentation I've read it's p2p. Granted, it will only be implemented in high-end offerings anytime soon, Intel has claimed to be aiming it at the desktop eventually.
Just think how small your mobo would be without having to make space for IDE, parallel, serial, ps/2, AGP, Ethernet, and PCI connectors. That's what I'm looking at. I realize that isn't what the article is saying, but that doesn't mean I can't extrapolate their direction 10 or 20 years off.
No, my keyboard doesn't need Gb bandwidth, but all the combined peripherals daisy-chained into that one fiber port might benefit from it.
As for bending the wire sharply, copper has the same problem, although it's not quite as guaranteed as it is with fiber. With cat5, for example, the minimum bend radius is 4 times the outside diameter of the cable. And yes, I have had plenty of copper cables go bad from being bent sharply. In fact, it's the most common reason cables go bad.
Perhaps you should try thinking before you flame.