Why don't you try the ext3 mailing list instead of Ask Slashdot? I lurk on the list and I've seen a number of questions extremely similar to yours, with answers. The list gurus will even help you track down the problem.
3. Yes the windows GUI tools are better even in the latest versions of Clearcase. Windows users use them more than command line, many Unix users use command line more. I work with vobs hosted on Unix and accessible from both Unix and NT. The best of both worlds. The right answer to "Should it provide a command line interface or a GUI" is of course "Both". Command line tools are excellent for scripting and for situations where all you need/want is a terminal interface. However, there is no denying that a GUI is an easier interface to learn, if for no other reason than the window visually encpasulates the functionality of the app much better than an off-line list of commands. As I said in the previous message, the clearcase GUI tools on unix are so awful that it visually hurts to use them. It looks like a summer intern wrote them in his spare time. It doesn't follow that because unix users hate bad GUIs, they therefore hate good GUIs.
In today's world there is no reason rational could not have made their rewritten GUI admin tools cross platform. There's the QT library, there's JAVA, there's web browsers, and those are just the solutions that pop off the top of my head. Instead, they doggedly rewrite for one platform only and say that they have no plans to port the new tools to the other platforms. What kind of crap is this? I have a sneaking suspicion that the windows clearcase server and unix clearcase server are not even intercompatible with each other's clients.
This is the kind of marketing decision that occurs when a company is so obsessed with short term growth that they compromise their core competencies. This has been the story of irRational across the board. Buy their products at your own risk.
1. Clearcase is admittedly new to Linux, but as for kernel modifications if you don't build your Linux kernel with what an application needs then yes of course you have to rebuild it with them if you want to run the application.
I don't think you understand the full meaning of the problem. There isn't any good reason why someone should mess with their their kernel to run a SCM *CLIENT*. The whole idea of this is off-the-charts idiotic. What makes it that much worse is that clearcase's kernel modifications are proprietary, and they only release them for certain older redhat kernels, and never the most up to date ones from any distribution. You're not easily able to use a custom kernel, as many people need to do for various driver support. You're also not easily able to add security patches to known vulnerabilities or even keep up with the maintenance kernel releases for your distribution. Furthermore, the clearcase modifications, because of their license taint the kernel hampering your community support for the rest of the OS.
This situation is damning, and not just for Linux. The clearcase MVFS features do not justify the "mess with the kernel" architecture. Their filesystem interface should have been implemented in userspace.
Reading your other points make me think that you haven't used SCM systems like perforce or bitkeeper. Your last line, " If you want developers in 3 cities across the US to work together on the same project only Clearcase will do." does not make any sense. Clearcase is a miserable choice for distributed development. It works, but in an ugly, brute force, memorize a stack of manuals, override all the normal unix commands, spend-a-fortune, have a department tuning and fixing it constantly type of way. As someone who has used many different systems, the clearcase way is so much more painful there is no comparision at all with modern alternatives.
The only people I see using clearcase now are companies that bought into it a decade ago when it was more competitive and have no idea what they are missing now, or small windows shops who are relieved that it is better than source safe.
What is so bad about clearcase? From my point of view what *isn't* bad about clearcase is an easier question. Here's my hot list:
1. Needs kernel modifications in order to work. PROFOUNDLY STUPID. It's always an adventure trying to get clearcase to work with any recent linux kernel, and forget trying to keep current with kernel security patches.
2. "Filesystem" style sharing does not scale well outside of a high speed, local network. If your developers are distributed around the internet you need to use clearcase's horrible hack "snapshot" views, or shell out ridiculous amounts of money and complexity to implement multisite. It's very difficult from a performance and a security standpoint to use clearcase over a low-speed VPN.
3. Good GUI administration tools are windows-only. While rational could have created cross platform admin tools when they ported their product to Windows, they didn't. Instead they rewrote their admin tools to be windows only, added many new features, and now the windows tools are 200X more usable than their unix equivalents. When I pressed irRational when the unix tools would be similarly improved they gave the patronizing answer that unix customer's don't want good admin tools. Sounds like a self fullfilling prophesy to me. The unix GUI tools are so awful that it is easier to use the command line! Thus, irRational insures that unix shops with clearcase will always have a brick-wall style learning curve.
4. Vobs don't scale well, especially when you version large binary files, like media. You have to manually tune how many vobs to use and how large to make them.
5. Relies on automounting and persistent filesystem connections for day-to-day work. This design is inferior to a more traditional client-server TCP/IP app in terms of both performance and robustness.
6. Lack of commitment to the unix platform. iRational has stopped future development on their unix bug tracking software (DDTS) in favor of a MS-ACCESS backed solution. A large majority of new clearcase features are windows-only. You would think that Rational would be a cross platform company, but they are not. They make platform-specific solutions for multiple platforms, most of them purchased from some other company and poorly maintained.
7. Extremely high maintenance costs, not just in the licensing but in the dedicated personel needed to throw their careers away doing nothing but babysitting the vobs and views.
If you're buying a proprietary CMS the last thing you should consider is iRational clearcase. Try bitkeeper or perforce and you'll be much happier.
I am not going to spend hundreds of dollars on one of these devices unless it supports my.ogg files!
I suppose I'll be waiting for a while yet, but how hard is it for one of these companies to provide a development environment? These things really ought to be PDAs. Once people can get into the guts of the system, ogg support should be doable.
Software RAID-1 is actually quite fast. In my benchmarks it is as fast or faster than a hardware RAID-1 solution on Linux. I'd expect that MS's implementation performs similarly. It is very cheap to implement:)
If you're doing raid 5 (or 10) you could benefit from more horsepower. You have a few options. They are (in rough order of cheaper cost --> better performance and reliability)
- Buy faster CPUs to make up for the overhead of software RAID-5 or RAID-10. They will still not be as fast as a hardware solution, and it might be a real pain to deal with in a disaster situation. Make sure you have lots of backups.
- Use the 3ware 7850 card to get you cheap IDE RAID-5. Obviously the benefit of this is that you can save a ton of money on disks. In my experience the card performs reasonably well and is stable, but I have to admit I've only been using it for non-critical fileservers over the past 6 months. It may not be a mature solution for all uses.
- Buy a classic SCSI hardware raid card (like a Mylex AccellaRAID 320) with a large battery-backed RAM cache. This type of card will give you the highest performance, and you can safely enable write caching as well, which will tremendously improve your RAID-5 write performance if that is the RAID level you want to use. It's a rock solid, but expensive solution when you count the cost of the scsi drives.
Some pitfalls:
Don't use IDE (hardware or software) RAID with Promise controllers. I don't really have any proof, just lots of annecdotal first and second-hand reports of craptapular performance and instability.
I think Rasterman has a credibility problem. When he left redhat there were many rumours that part of the reason was that enlightenment's code was not maintainable, scalable, and flexible enough to go in the desktop direction redhat wanted.
Now jump forward to the present, with XF86 4.2, Gnome 2.0, Galeon, Mozilla 1.0, Evolution 1.0, Abiword 1.0, OggVorbis 1.0, KDE 3.0, hell, even nautilus is improved. The reality is that RedHat's (and other distos') desktop environment *is* significantly better than it was then.
The only thing that hasn't gone anywhere is rasterman's enlightnenment. Now, I used enlightenment back in the day, and I give it a lot of respect for being the first eye-candy for linux that attracted casual desktop users, but the world has moved on.
It looks like Linux on the desktop is everywhere but dead, and rasterman is a hypocrite for saying differently.
Well this link was a lot less interesting than the writeup!
All there is to see here is some guy's web analysis of what type of laptop people on his site search for.
There's a link to the now archaic windows refund site. There's a few blurbs about laptop companies that abandoned linux over the past few years. Finally there are some links to laptop manufacters and related open source projects.
Nothing really special, and nothing that isn't presented elsewhere in a cleaner, more useful format. Good "web-ring" material.
In the last few weeks I've noticed a disturbing trend when using google. I'll search for something using keywords, and the page that google spits back is 50% full of links to third-tier sites that read "Advance search for [your keywords]". If you go to those pages they are full of ads and do not have the information you're looking for. It looks like someone found an unfortunately effective way to poison google's results.
* Are modern G4 towers quieter and/or cooler than comparable x86 workstations?
YES. I have a high end AMD gaming system with a tweaked out case. Despite buying quality fans it is still very loud. The G4 towers are silent in comparison and the apple case still puts my PC case w/window to shame. The AMD system is probably a faster for windows only games, but that's a mute point, isn't it?
* Is it wiser to spend money on memory or megahertz?
Memory. I think this has always been true. As a rule of thumb try and double the default memory that Apple packages with their hardware.
* Is it best to buy everything directly from Apple, or just a minimum to be fleshed out with cheaper, after-market add-ons?
Unless you want to be dangerously grey market, stick with apple or its official retailers. They all have the same prices. Direct from apple gives you more customization options, while a trip to CompUSA may get you an extra scanner and instant gratification.
* What's the best video option for dual-head on Jaguar?
Don't know this one.. Maybe wait until it is released?
* Does OS X make SMP worth the investment?
Hardly anything makes SMP worth the investment for non-servers. The exception might be if you're doing lots of compiling, ripping, and video encoding. No one wants to admit it, but for many consumery applications (games, cheap software) SMP systems tend to expose more software and driver bugs that single CPU systems.
* Is the SCSI performance gain great enough to be worth the investment over IDE?"
Not if you only have a single drive. I just spent a week with iozone and a 15K RPM SCSI Cheetah drive. Sure it's faster than 7200RPM IDE but not that much faster and it costs a ridiculous amount, and it runs so hot that you *know* you're going to have higher failure rates. Not worth it for a single internal drive. It's more worth it for RAID setups. Don't worry about SCSI on the G4 tower, however.. If you need a fast disk for video work just hook up an external one with Firewire.
I've been following evolution for a long time now.. Early version pre 1.0 were unstable. However, in true unix fashion the post 1.0 versions have had excellent stability.
I've been using it exclusively for more than a year and I would never switch back to netscape mail or mozilla mail at this point. Evolution is much faster on my 600Mhz system, and it looks beautiful. It has a rich set of features, an excellent IMAP implementation, innovative stuff like the VFolders, ability to block external images in html mail, palm synchronization, gpg support... I know this is a little too glowing but I can't say enough about how happy I am with this software.
Evolution and Galeon together provide such a good internet experience that I've been been able to get at least 3 people to switch to Linux.on their merits alone. A coworker just bought an iBook and while she loves OSX she complains all the time that the default browser isn't as good as galeon and the default mailer isn't as nice as evolution.
Evolution can read mbox format. So, just script your mail download via pop3 or imap or whatever just as you would with a command line client. Use Evolution to view it graphically. Use mutt/pine/elm/whatever to get a quick peek at your inbox from the command line.
We are bombarded by too many of them already. No one thinks they affect their own thinking, but yet they do. Although they make for interesting "shell-game" business models, I think that they are intrinsically problematic and we'd all be better off with less of them.
Many ads are nothing more than visual spam.
There Aint No Such Thing as a Free Lunch. People should pay for services instead of pretend that advertising doesn't cost them anything.
The vast majority of ads do nothing to advance humanity. They condition people to be uneducated consumers by manipulating your emotions, subconcious, and lower level thoughts.
Lots of people there say that they can get apache to work with frontpage by patching their current version with the security fix instead of upgrading.
Frontpage for Apache still officially supports RH 7.0. Not supporting anything recent isn't exactly new for them. Anyone who uses this extension has learned to fend for themselves.
I personally would dump frontpage. I don't care if half the world uses it. Educate them. Provide them with something else that is workable. If you're going to complain that your business will go under because you don't support frontpage then run IIS and eat worms in your cake.
Try "Civil Rights Activists", and before you rail at me for being some so-called militant leftist, why don't you actually research the recent government reaction to the Falung Gong movement in China.
If I just have to hit a button, and have never seen or known the person before, and ave no way of getting caught, Chances are Yes.
It doesn't make me less of a moral person; it's just human nature. And my family and kids come before anybody else. If somebody else's death does not affect me in any way, what's stopping me from killing him?
It certainly does make you less of a moral person, in fact I'd say it makes you pretty damn amoral. Your own words, especially the blatantly selfish rationalization are damning.
I think you're making the mistake that simply because something is the most popular solution, it is therefore ideal.
I didn't say NFS wasn't entrenched everywhere, I said that it sucked. The two concepts are not mutually exclusive.
Nor did I claim that there was a good alternative, but the lack of alternatives doesn't make NFS suck less. It still sucks exactly as much.
Filesystems like Coda have promise but are still immature. I personally would love it if Linux supported SMB as a filesystem interface like it is on most other platforms. Instead we have to use an ftp-like client. I'm very glad that the client exists in the first place, of course, but it would need to be implemented as a filesystem in order to replace NFS.
The practical answer to your question is that almost every NFS implementation for windows is slow, buggy, and expensive while SAMBA for most unixes is fast, stable, and free.
On the technical side I would even offer the opinion that CIFS (SMB) is a better file sharing protocol than NFS. For one thing, it is MUCH easier to secure.
Unfortunately, for all its ease of use NFS is a pretty crappy way to share files, even under unix. All those people who whine constantly about replacing the perfectly reasonable X server should really be complaining about replacing NFS.
I have a feeling that all those whiners are single desktop users who never get the idea of network computing.
No, I admit I had not yet read the article before posting. Usually I do, but there wasn't anything to suggest that the words the submitter used were not his own. Oh well. I think the comment is still valid because of the way the submission will be perceived.
What a ridiculous thing to say. Did Jordan Hubbard's education stop after highschool? Was he locked down to whatever knowledge he had gleaned up until that point, never to accomplish any greater intellectual achievements? Did he just sit back and decide to learn nothing? When I was in college most CS programs were far behind industry practices. You might learn plenty of important things in college at that time, but nothing about software engineering that a determined enthusiast could not learn simply by reading Dr. Dobbs.
It's particularly disheartening to read this on a site like Slashdot, where people should know that technology moves so fast that they only way to succeed in the field is to have a large enough intellectual talent to teach oneself. The people that can do this should be respected for their objective accomplishments and not, as the poster implies, be patronized for overcoming a disability. There is more than one road to knowledge.
I'm not in any way diminishing the accomplishments of college graduates, but the way that sentence was written struck me as a bit off.
Quick kudos to the XFree86 team
on
Xinerama Part of X
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
When open source success stories are swapped over the corporate campfires, Apache and Linux are quick to be mentioned. However, XFree86 predates them both, and comprises a much larger tarball! XFree86 has been around so long that perhaps people take it for granted and assume that it has been there.
However, far away from the public spotlight XFree86 was at first spurned by the X consortium of extremely well-funded corporate players, and then grudgingly accepted, and now is the leading force in X development. Now that's an open source success story.
Differences appear minor
on
Gnome 2.0 RC1
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I'm not sure what you mean when you ask "Can Gnome compete with KDE"?
I've installed both KDE-based systems and Gnome-Based systems and shown them to Linux newbies- everyone from relatives to co-workers (caveat: I work in an engineering dept.)
After spending a few hours playing around with each one, my personal experience is that Gnome is their preferred choice, apparently because the icons and screen widgets look better, the interface appears simpler, and most of the engineers like the graphical virtual desktop manager on the gnome panel as opposed to the KDE version.
Granted, I use Gnome a lot and there are some deficiencies.. Nautilus is very slow. Sawfish has focus problems. The panel can behave in unexpected ways. The library dependencies for applications like Evolution are scary, but it generally works well and many people use Gnome as their full time desktop.
It looks to me like KDE may be slightly more stable, and may be easier to program for. Still, the differences between gnome and KDE from a user's point of view do not seem so great that you can call one "high level" and the other "mid level". They both look high level to me.
So, does someone want to try to explain the qualitative user-experience differences between KDE and Gnome, or is it as I suspect very minor?
Yeah, You can make a stable and secure win9X box, but that's like saying you can make a shock-resistant Pinto.
You're trying to get something to behave in a way that it was never designed for. By all means knock yourself out. Still, at the end of the day you would have a much easier time if you started with an OS with some semblence of a security model and a filesystem that doesn't corrupt/fragment itself at the drop of a hat.
Slashdot Mirror
Why don't you try the ext3 mailing list instead of Ask Slashdot? I lurk on the list and I've seen a number of questions extremely similar to yours, with answers. The list gurus will even help you track down the problem.
0 02-July/thread.html#383
https://listman.redhat.com/pipermail/ext3-users/2
3. Yes the windows GUI tools are better even in the latest versions of Clearcase. Windows users use them more than command line, many Unix users use command line more. I work with vobs hosted on Unix and accessible from both Unix and NT. The best of both worlds. The right answer to "Should it provide a command line interface or a GUI" is of course "Both". Command line tools are excellent for scripting and for situations where all you need/want is a terminal interface. However, there is no denying that a GUI is an easier interface to learn, if for no other reason than the window visually encpasulates the functionality of the app much better than an off-line list of commands. As I said in the previous message, the clearcase GUI tools on unix are so awful that it visually hurts to use them. It looks like a summer intern wrote them in his spare time. It doesn't follow that because unix users hate bad GUIs, they therefore hate good GUIs.
In today's world there is no reason rational could not have made their rewritten GUI admin tools cross platform. There's the QT library, there's JAVA, there's web browsers, and those are just the solutions that pop off the top of my head. Instead, they doggedly rewrite for one platform only and say that they have no plans to port the new tools to the other platforms. What kind of crap is this? I have a sneaking suspicion that the windows clearcase server and unix clearcase server are not even intercompatible with each other's clients.
This is the kind of marketing decision that occurs when a company is so obsessed with short term growth that they compromise their core competencies. This has been the story of irRational across the board. Buy their products at your own risk.
This situation is damning, and not just for Linux. The clearcase MVFS features do not justify the "mess with the kernel" architecture. Their filesystem interface should have been implemented in userspace.
Reading your other points make me think that you haven't used SCM systems like perforce or bitkeeper. Your last line, " If you want developers in 3 cities across the US to work together on the same project only Clearcase will do." does not make any sense. Clearcase is a miserable choice for distributed development. It works, but in an ugly, brute force, memorize a stack of manuals, override all the normal unix commands, spend-a-fortune, have a department tuning and fixing it constantly type of way. As someone who has used many different systems, the clearcase way is so much more painful there is no comparision at all with modern alternatives.
The only people I see using clearcase now are companies that bought into it a decade ago when it was more competitive and have no idea what they are missing now, or small windows shops who are relieved that it is better than source safe.
What is so bad about clearcase? From my point of view what *isn't* bad about clearcase is an easier question. Here's my hot list:
1. Needs kernel modifications in order to work. PROFOUNDLY STUPID. It's always an adventure trying to get clearcase to work with any recent linux kernel, and forget trying to keep current with kernel security patches.
2. "Filesystem" style sharing does not scale well outside of a high speed, local network. If your developers are distributed around the internet you need to use clearcase's horrible hack "snapshot" views, or shell out ridiculous amounts of money and complexity to implement multisite. It's very difficult from a performance and a security standpoint to use clearcase over a low-speed VPN.
3. Good GUI administration tools are windows-only. While rational could have created cross platform admin tools when they ported their product to Windows, they didn't. Instead they rewrote their admin tools to be windows only, added many new features, and now the windows tools are 200X more usable than their unix equivalents. When I pressed irRational when the unix tools would be similarly improved they gave the patronizing answer that unix customer's don't want good admin tools. Sounds like a self fullfilling prophesy to me. The unix GUI tools are so awful that it is easier to use the command line! Thus, irRational insures that unix shops with clearcase will always have a brick-wall style learning curve.
4. Vobs don't scale well, especially when you version large binary files, like media. You have to manually tune how many vobs to use and how large to make them.
5. Relies on automounting and persistent filesystem connections for day-to-day work. This design is inferior to a more traditional client-server TCP/IP app in terms of both performance and robustness.
6. Lack of commitment to the unix platform. iRational has stopped future development on their unix bug tracking software (DDTS) in favor of a MS-ACCESS backed solution. A large majority of new clearcase features are windows-only. You would think that Rational would be a cross platform company, but they are not. They make platform-specific solutions for multiple platforms, most of them purchased from some other company and poorly maintained.
7. Extremely high maintenance costs, not just in the licensing but in the dedicated personel needed to throw their careers away doing nothing but babysitting the vobs and views.
If you're buying a proprietary CMS the last thing you should consider is iRational clearcase. Try bitkeeper or perforce and you'll be much happier.
I am not going to spend hundreds of dollars on one of these devices unless it supports my .ogg files!
I suppose I'll be waiting for a while yet, but how hard is it for one of these companies to provide a development environment? These things really ought to be PDAs. Once people can get into the guts of the system, ogg support should be doable.
Software RAID-1 is actually quite fast. In my benchmarks it is as fast or faster than a hardware RAID-1 solution on Linux. I'd expect that MS's implementation performs similarly. It is very cheap to implement :)
If you're doing raid 5 (or 10) you could benefit from more horsepower. You have a few options. They are (in rough order of cheaper cost --> better performance and reliability)
- Buy faster CPUs to make up for the overhead of software RAID-5 or RAID-10. They will still not be as fast as a hardware solution, and it might be a real pain to deal with in a disaster situation. Make sure you have lots of backups.
- Use the 3ware 7850 card to get you cheap IDE RAID-5. Obviously the benefit of this is that you can save a ton of money on disks. In my experience the card performs reasonably well and is stable, but I have to admit I've only been using it for non-critical fileservers over the past 6 months. It may not be a mature solution for all uses.
- Buy a classic SCSI hardware raid card (like a Mylex AccellaRAID 320) with a large battery-backed RAM cache. This type of card will give you the highest performance, and you can safely enable write caching as well, which will tremendously improve your RAID-5 write performance if that is the RAID level you want to use. It's a rock solid, but expensive solution when you count the cost of the scsi drives.
Some pitfalls:
Don't use IDE (hardware or software) RAID with Promise controllers. I don't really have any proof, just lots of annecdotal first and second-hand reports of craptapular performance and instability.
I think Rasterman has a credibility problem. When he left redhat there were many rumours that part of the reason was that enlightenment's code was not maintainable, scalable, and flexible enough to go in the desktop direction redhat wanted.
Now jump forward to the present, with XF86 4.2, Gnome 2.0, Galeon, Mozilla 1.0, Evolution 1.0, Abiword 1.0, OggVorbis 1.0, KDE 3.0, hell, even nautilus is improved. The reality is that RedHat's (and other distos') desktop environment *is* significantly better than it was then.
The only thing that hasn't gone anywhere is rasterman's enlightnenment. Now, I used enlightenment back in the day, and I give it a lot of respect for being the first eye-candy for linux that attracted casual desktop users, but the world has moved on.
It looks like Linux on the desktop is everywhere but dead, and rasterman is a hypocrite for saying differently.
Well this link was a lot less interesting than the writeup!
All there is to see here is some guy's web analysis of what type of laptop people on his site search for.
There's a link to the now archaic windows refund site. There's a few blurbs about laptop companies that abandoned linux over the past few years. Finally there are some links to laptop manufacters and related open source projects.
Nothing really special, and nothing that isn't presented elsewhere in a cleaner, more useful format. Good "web-ring" material.
In the last few weeks I've noticed a disturbing trend when using google. I'll search for something using keywords, and the page that google spits back is 50% full of links to third-tier sites that read "Advance search for [your keywords]". If you go to those pages they are full of ads and do not have the information you're looking for. It looks like someone found an unfortunately effective way to poison google's results.
Yes, that's what I do... I forgot to mention to buy extra memory from someplace like crucial.com, not from apple :)
* Are modern G4 towers quieter and/or cooler than comparable x86 workstations?
YES. I have a high end AMD gaming system with a tweaked out case. Despite buying quality fans it is still very loud. The G4 towers are silent in comparison and the apple case still puts my PC case w/window to shame. The AMD system is probably a faster for windows only games, but that's a mute point, isn't it?
* Is it wiser to spend money on memory or megahertz?
Memory. I think this has always been true. As a rule of thumb try and double the default memory that Apple packages with their hardware.
* Is it best to buy everything directly from Apple, or just a minimum to be fleshed out with cheaper, after-market add-ons?
Unless you want to be dangerously grey market, stick with apple or its official retailers. They all have the same prices. Direct from apple gives you more customization options, while a trip to CompUSA may get you an extra scanner and instant gratification.
* What's the best video option for dual-head on Jaguar?
Don't know this one.. Maybe wait until it is released?
* Does OS X make SMP worth the investment?
Hardly anything makes SMP worth the investment for non-servers. The exception might be if you're doing lots of compiling, ripping, and video encoding. No one wants to admit it, but for many consumery applications (games, cheap software) SMP systems tend to expose more software and driver bugs that single CPU systems.
* Is the SCSI performance gain great enough to be worth the investment over IDE?"
Not if you only have a single drive. I just spent a week with iozone and a 15K RPM SCSI Cheetah drive. Sure it's faster than 7200RPM IDE but not that much faster and it costs a ridiculous amount, and it runs so hot that you *know* you're going to have higher failure rates. Not worth it for a single internal drive. It's more worth it for RAID setups. Don't worry about SCSI on the G4 tower, however.. If you need a fast disk for video work just hook up an external one with Firewire.
I've been following evolution for a long time now.. Early version pre 1.0 were unstable. However, in true unix fashion the post 1.0 versions have had excellent stability.
I've been using it exclusively for more than a year and I would never switch back to netscape mail or mozilla mail at this point. Evolution is much faster on my 600Mhz system, and it looks beautiful. It has a rich set of features, an excellent IMAP implementation, innovative stuff like the VFolders, ability to block external images in html mail, palm synchronization, gpg support... I know this is a little too glowing but I can't say enough about how happy I am with this software.
Evolution and Galeon together provide such a good internet experience that I've been been able to get at least 3 people to switch to Linux.on their merits alone. A coworker just bought an iBook and while she loves OSX she complains all the time that the default browser isn't as good as galeon and the default mailer isn't as nice as evolution.
Evolution can read mbox format. So, just script your mail download via pop3 or imap or whatever just as you would with a command line client. Use Evolution to view it graphically. Use mutt/pine/elm/whatever to get a quick peek at your inbox from the command line.
Ads are just wrong.
We are bombarded by too many of them already. No one thinks they affect their own thinking, but yet they do. Although they make for interesting "shell-game" business models, I think that they are intrinsically problematic and we'd all be better off with less of them.
Many ads are nothing more than visual spam.
There Aint No Such Thing as a Free Lunch. People should pay for services instead of pretend that advertising doesn't cost them anything.
The vast majority of ads do nothing to advance humanity. They condition people to be uneducated consumers by manipulating your emotions, subconcious, and lower level thoughts.
Read The F* Comments in the Article!
Lots of people there say that they can get apache to work with frontpage by patching their current version with the security fix instead of upgrading.
Frontpage for Apache still officially supports RH 7.0. Not supporting anything recent isn't exactly new for them. Anyone who uses this extension has learned to fend for themselves.
I personally would dump frontpage. I don't care if half the world uses it. Educate them. Provide them with something else that is workable. If you're going to complain that your business will go under because you don't support frontpage then run IIS and eat worms in your cake.
Try "Civil Rights Activists", and before you rail at me for being some so-called militant leftist, why don't you actually research the recent government reaction to the Falung Gong movement in China.
It certainly does make you less of a moral person, in fact I'd say it makes you pretty damn amoral. Your own words, especially the blatantly selfish rationalization are damning.
You're right. I wonder why I never noticed that before. I'll try it out today.
I think you're making the mistake that simply because something is the most popular solution, it is therefore ideal.
I didn't say NFS wasn't entrenched everywhere, I said that it sucked. The two concepts are not mutually exclusive.
Nor did I claim that there was a good alternative, but the lack of alternatives doesn't make NFS suck less. It still sucks exactly as much.
Filesystems like Coda have promise but are still immature. I personally would love it if Linux supported SMB as a filesystem interface like it is on most other platforms. Instead we have to use an ftp-like client. I'm very glad that the client exists in the first place, of course, but it would need to be implemented as a filesystem in order to replace NFS.
The practical answer to your question is that almost every NFS implementation for windows is slow, buggy, and expensive while SAMBA for most unixes is fast, stable, and free.
On the technical side I would even offer the opinion that CIFS (SMB) is a better file sharing protocol than NFS. For one thing, it is MUCH easier to secure.
Unfortunately, for all its ease of use NFS is a pretty crappy way to share files, even under unix. All those people who whine constantly about replacing the perfectly reasonable X server should really be complaining about replacing NFS.
I have a feeling that all those whiners are single desktop users who never get the idea of network computing.
No, I admit I had not yet read the article before posting. Usually I do, but there wasn't anything to suggest that the words the submitter used were not his own. Oh well. I think the comment is still valid because of the way the submission will be perceived.
"With just a high school education..."
What a ridiculous thing to say. Did Jordan Hubbard's education stop after highschool? Was he locked down to whatever knowledge he had gleaned up until that point, never to accomplish any greater intellectual achievements? Did he just sit back and decide to learn nothing? When I was in college most CS programs were far behind industry practices. You might learn plenty of important things in college at that time, but nothing about software engineering that a determined enthusiast could not learn simply by reading Dr. Dobbs.
It's particularly disheartening to read this on a site like Slashdot, where people should know that technology moves so fast that they only way to succeed in the field is to have a large enough intellectual talent to teach oneself. The people that can do this should be respected for their objective accomplishments and not, as the poster implies, be patronized for overcoming a disability. There is more than one road to knowledge.
I'm not in any way diminishing the accomplishments of college graduates, but the way that sentence was written struck me as a bit off.
When open source success stories are swapped over the corporate campfires, Apache and Linux are quick to be mentioned. However, XFree86 predates them both, and comprises a much larger tarball! XFree86 has been around so long that perhaps people take it for granted and assume that it has been there.
However, far away from the public spotlight XFree86 was at first spurned by the X consortium of extremely well-funded corporate players, and then grudgingly accepted, and now is the leading force in X development. Now that's an open source success story.
I'm not sure what you mean when you ask "Can Gnome compete with KDE"?
I've installed both KDE-based systems and Gnome-Based systems and shown them to Linux newbies- everyone from relatives to co-workers (caveat: I work in an engineering dept.)
After spending a few hours playing around with each one, my personal experience is that Gnome is their preferred choice, apparently because the icons and screen widgets look better, the interface appears simpler, and most of the engineers like the graphical virtual desktop manager on the gnome panel as opposed to the KDE version.
Granted, I use Gnome a lot and there are some deficiencies.. Nautilus is very slow. Sawfish has focus problems. The panel can behave in unexpected ways. The library dependencies for applications like Evolution are scary, but it generally works well and many people use Gnome as their full time desktop.
It looks to me like KDE may be slightly more stable, and may be easier to program for. Still, the differences between gnome and KDE from a user's point of view do not seem so great that you can call one "high level" and the other "mid level". They both look high level to me.
So, does someone want to try to explain the qualitative user-experience differences between KDE and Gnome, or is it as I suspect very minor?
Yeah, You can make a stable and secure win9X box, but that's like saying you can make a shock-resistant Pinto.
You're trying to get something to behave in a way that it was never designed for. By all means knock yourself out. Still, at the end of the day you would have a much easier time if you started with an OS with some semblence of a security model and a filesystem that doesn't corrupt/fragment itself at the drop of a hat.