Excuse me, but it's absurd to blame all "Americans" for the actions of a powerful, greedy handful of major companies. Many of us aren't any more thriolled with their actions than Gil or you.
Oddly enough, I work for an "American" [1] corporation that uses far more Linux than it does the other OSes here put together. I thought we were just doing our jobs, being innovative, building products, and here we are being subversive!
Despite my other problems with SuSe 9.1 Pro, I have been quite happy with the fonts provided. They're quite nice. My eyes aren't that great, so I'm picky about that...
I've always run RedHat and Slackware at home. We've been using RedHat at work for years. But with the new RedHat price structure, I decided it was time to look around more. I bought SuSe 9.1 Professional and installed it at home. Between things I was reading on the net and the positive experience we had with two Penguin dual Opteron servers that came with SuSe EL 8 preinstalled, I was psyched.
What a nigtmare.
The graphical installer refused to recognize the S3 card; I had to use text install. When initially installed, I could only find KDE. I reinstalled per something I found on the net-- installing just Gnome, then adding KDE after configuration.
My directory is automounted from a RH8 system. I can't get KDE or Gnome to work properly, so I go back to ctwm. Eventually I get both Gnome and KDE working, but Gnome is never quite right now on either the RH8 or the SuSe9.1Pro system. Works fine for root, but not for other users. ( realize the Gnome issues may not be SuSe's fault, exactly, but they did choose the version to include on the CDs.)
Overall, most things are slower, from booting and shutdown to popping up a new window. Yast2, in particular, takes forever to initialize. Granted it does some things the RH config tools don't, and it's much more consistent, but it's definitely slower. Maybe I wouldn't notice this on a new, fast system, but on my 400MHz and 500MHz systems at home, there's a clear difference.
Yast2 does a bunch of cool stuff, but that makes some of the missing things even odder. Why, for instance, is there no entry for a Logitech PS2 Mouseman when configuring a mouse?
I'll grant you things look really nice in SuSe. But I prefer substance over appearance. In some cases it has the substance, in others it doesn't.
To top it all off, my emails to SuSe support went unanswered.
I'm almost certainly going to switch back to RedHat (or possibly some other distro) at home. And SuSe is not at the top of my list for consideration art work.
I know there are lots of happy SuSe customers. I was one based on the Penguins. But 9.1 left a bad taste in my mouth.
Does 9.2 resolve any of these issues? Not that I'm really considering tossing another $60 at SuSe to upgrade...
They/.'d the NSA OS X hacker honeypot. Traffic recording and analysis is proceeding just fine, thank you. As are the webcams. I hope your co-workers don't use that keyboard-- don't you have a handkerchief?
Step 1: Pack Windows system in appropriate shipping container Step 2:Mark container "Target" Step 3: Have courier deliver container to nearest FBI shooting range
TiVo is a victim. They're a victim of doing the right thing. The whole "information wants to be free" thing has gotten insanely out of hand. This is a logical waystation for us to be at, sadly enough, given society today. "If I want it, I should have it, and it doesn't matter that I signed a contract saying something different. Besides, it's not *really* theft, it's just a movie."
[Wish I could offer you a job, but (a) we're not hiring and (b) we're not in Ohio. But integrity and understanding right and wrong are high on my list for qualifying applicants. And getting harder to find.]
Yeah, my first thought was that if they did allow those features in cars here, they jolly well better let me buy a car with VVM (vehicle to vehicle missles) and some serious armor. Or just sell me an M1 Abrams. Whichever.
Experience shows that brand recognition counts. If you just have a random collection of better mousetraps, I mean browsers, the world will *not* beat a path to your door. It will continue to use whatever came with the OS, which in the vast majority of cases means Windows, which means IE.
OTOH, if you have 1 (or even 2 or 3) well-marketed, better whatsits, you have a reasonable chance of moving the 900 pound gorilla towards 0%, especially when he's sleeping (as MS is with IE).
Otherwise, the only 0% is your chance of moving the gorilla even vaguely in the direction of 0%.
These are great ideas, but I'm curious - how much should go into PROM/flash vs disk and what are the cost tradeoffs?
We can certainly produce a $100 consumer system today. There are already systems out there for $150 to $200. We're talking reasonably fast systems (close to 3GHz, but crappy busses, etc). How long would it last? I have no idea. I wouln't touch it with a 10 foot pole. We already have way too much disposable crap. I don't want to move faster down the path to buying a 10 pack of disposable computer systems like we do razors.
OTOH, if we decide to go disposable, with the OS and apps completely embedded, we can lop off 5GB to 10GB of disk space for the OS and related apps. Or whatever your OS choice takes up these days. Eventually we'll get away rfom disks completely, and just use some form of Personal Stoarge Device we can insert and remove.
But perhaps MS doesn't *want* computers to last. Maybe they want the average consumer to buy a new computer every year "because the old one wore out". Oh, gee, MS got more money off the OS shipped on the new system (well, not off *mine* as I don't use Windows). Imagine that.
Regardless, the real issue isn't SW piracy. I may detest some business practices and product quality of MS, but they certainly aren't as stupid as this Ballmer quote sounds.
Follow the money.
You can get to their website?
on
Cray XT-3 Ships
·
· Score: 1
Obviously they aren't using one of these for their webserver. Or if they are, they need something more than a modem for their internet connection!
Actually, there was quite a bit of evidence against the Davidians. That doesn't change the fact that the government screwed up big time with the assault or that the trials were pretty farcical. But there was lots of evidence.
If you can find it, read _Mad Man in Waco_. It's a very even-handed book about the whole affair, showing just how evil Koresh was, and how evil the government response was.
Until the bottled water craze really took off a few years ago, what do you think everyone in the USA and Canada (and half of Europe) was drinking? What comes out of your tap is recycled water in most cases-- just like this.
When I had a paper route as a teenager, one of my customers was the local water treatment plant. They gave me a personal, guided tour. It was pretty cool. Up til then I really hadn't thought much about water purification, and afterwards I just didn't worry about it. They did a great job, and everyone was healthy as could be.
I have no problem drinking water like this. I would have a problem paying bottled water prices for it anywhere besides a third world country.
We don't even own one. We're hardly flat-Earthers; we have plenty of stereos and computers at home. Just no TV. problem solved (at home, anyway).
My pet peeve isn't the TVs in restaurants, it's the people who have to have a TV on wherever they are. You go to visit, and they try to visit an dwatch TV 9or channel flip) all at once, the whole time.
Then they come to our house, and really get wigged out!
Yeah, the S/N sucks, and it's infested with vermin, but it's alive and well... enough.
At least, some groups are. Judicious use of killfiles help a lot.
My current filters mean I never even see about 75% of the posts in alt.guitar.amps . About half of what makes it through is still junk, but it's manageable.
Yeah. we have lost good people because of the S/N, and a lot of others look in, their eyes pop out of their heads, and they feel screaming down the hall, flapping their arms like chickens. And that's sad, because they could learn a lot there. But it's not dead, yet.
If only it were legal to go all vigilante on spammers (email, newsgroups, phone, whatever), the poroblem would solve itself in no time. Most of these folks just need the good whuppin' their parents never gave them. 8^/
It's actually quite strange that we had to wait until the invention of the walkman in the 1980's before portable music really became popular because the technology has been around since the late '50's.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here; portable music was huge fairly quickly. It was even big before the transistor radio. My parents had a portable, RCA, tube, AM radio (width and height of a school lunchbox, maybe 2 inches (5 cm) deep) from when they were dating. That puts it at late 40s or early 50s. Rock and roll took off with the aid of electronics - electric guitars, TV, car radios and...portable radios. By the mid-60s, when I was 11 or 12, every teenager I knew, from rich to poor (in a small town, you know them all) had a transistor radio. (Van Morrison mentions them in "Wild Night", which came out in the mid to late 60s, knowing that practically everyone had one.)
I remember sneaking one to school so we could listen during recess to the World Series. The teachers understood; so long as it only came out at recess, they ignored it - but only for something like the World Series. (Now kids text message each other in class!)
Yeah, it was a bargain, comparatively. But you still had to come up with the money. If yuu're a well-paid geek, no problem. If you're a teenager who has to work for the money, or even a low end working Joe or Jane with a family to provide, it's not as cheap as you seem to think.
I'll be 50 next year. I'd forgotten I have to call the transistor radio, "sir".
It's not really odd to me that most folks have no clue what a vacuum tube is. It's a bit odd that most folks have no clue what a transistor is. Society has changed as much as technology over the last 50 years, at least in the USA.
50 years ago, almost everyone knew what a tube was, whether they cared or not (and most cared to some degree).[0] Today most people know what a computer or iPod is, whether they care or not, but an awful lot of folks aren't real sure what a chip is (insert joke here), and very few people under, say, 25, have more than the vaguest understanding of what a transistor is. And almost nobody cares (outside the geek communities). [1]
Part of that is simply the technology maturity, but it's also partly sociological (the two are also intertwined more than a lot of people realize).
[0] Then again, they really needed to, since instead of sending a dead TV or radio to the landfill, you generally had one or more tubes replaced, and it worked again. We weren't such a disposable society in the Tubozoic Era. [1] In and of itself, that's neither good nor bad (or more likely both). I present it solely as a data point.
The typical B battery was about the size of a cassette Walkman[tm], but weighed quite a bit more, several pounds (weight US, not monetary, UK). Then you had to have your A battery for the filaments, and your C battery for the grid (technically, you might skip this one with cathode bias). Add in the wight of the larger components, the extra heat dissipated, the heavier chassis and case to protect the glass tubes from breakage (and the wearer from heat and broken glass), and you had a substantial package of fairly delicate weight and heat to tote around.
There are some things I prefer tubes for, but a hearing aid isn't one of them!
Slashdot Mirror
Excuse me, but it's absurd to blame all "Americans" for the actions of a powerful, greedy handful of major companies. Many of us aren't any more thriolled with their actions than Gil or you.
Oddly enough, I work for an "American" [1] corporation that uses far more Linux than it does the other OSes here put together. I thought we were just doing our jobs, being innovative, building products, and here we are being subversive!
[1] i.e., USAian
Doesn't SUSE allow network installs?
Despite my other problems with SuSe 9.1 Pro, I have been quite happy with the fonts provided. They're quite nice. My eyes aren't that great, so I'm picky about that...
I've always run RedHat and Slackware at home. We've been using RedHat at work for years. But with the new RedHat price structure, I decided it was time to look around more. I bought SuSe 9.1 Professional and installed it at home. Between things I was reading on the net and the positive experience we had with two Penguin dual Opteron servers that came with SuSe EL 8 preinstalled, I was psyched.
What a nigtmare.
The graphical installer refused to recognize the S3 card; I had to use text install. When initially installed, I could only find KDE. I reinstalled per something I found on the net-- installing just Gnome, then adding KDE after configuration.
My directory is automounted from a RH8 system. I can't get KDE or Gnome to work properly, so I go back to ctwm. Eventually I get both Gnome and KDE working, but Gnome is never quite right now on either the RH8 or the SuSe9.1Pro system. Works fine for root, but not for other users. ( realize the Gnome issues may not be SuSe's fault, exactly, but they did choose the version to include on the CDs.)
Overall, most things are slower, from booting and shutdown to popping up a new window. Yast2, in particular, takes forever to initialize. Granted it does some things the RH config tools don't, and it's much more consistent, but it's definitely slower. Maybe I wouldn't notice this on a new, fast system, but on my 400MHz and 500MHz systems at home, there's a clear difference.
Yast2 does a bunch of cool stuff, but that makes some of the missing things even odder. Why, for instance, is there no entry for a Logitech PS2 Mouseman when configuring a mouse?
I'll grant you things look really nice in SuSe. But I prefer substance over appearance. In some cases it has the substance, in others it doesn't.
To top it all off, my emails to SuSe support went unanswered.
I'm almost certainly going to switch back to RedHat (or possibly some other distro) at home. And SuSe is not at the top of my list for consideration art work.
I know there are lots of happy SuSe customers. I was one based on the Penguins. But 9.1 left a bad taste in my mouth.
Does 9.2 resolve any of these issues? Not that I'm really considering tossing another $60 at SuSe to upgrade...
They didn't /. us^H^Hthe NSA.
/.'d the NSA OS X hacker honeypot. Traffic recording and analysis is proceeding just fine, thank you. As are the webcams. I hope your co-workers don't use that keyboard-- don't you have a handkerchief?
They
Step 1: Pack Windows system in appropriate shipping container
Step 2:Mark container "Target"
Step 3: Have courier deliver container to nearest FBI shooting range
TiVo is a victim. They're a victim of doing the right thing. The whole "information wants to be free" thing has gotten insanely out of hand. This is a logical waystation for us to be at, sadly enough, given society today. "If I want it, I should have it, and it doesn't matter that I signed a contract saying something different. Besides, it's not *really* theft, it's just a movie."
[Wish I could offer you a job, but (a) we're not hiring and (b) we're not in Ohio. But integrity and understanding right and wrong are high on my list for qualifying applicants. And getting harder to find.]
I think some of the MSies, such as Ballmer, can officially be declared rabid. or at least werewolves in Redmond. (Warren, we need ya!)
What??? The initial change from any OS to any other OS would cost money? Don't they cover this sort of thing in economics 101?
Yeah, my first thought was that if they did allow those features in cars here, they jolly well better let me buy a car with VVM (vehicle to vehicle missles) and some serious armor. Or just sell me an M1 Abrams. Whichever.
Experience shows that brand recognition counts. If you just have a random collection of better mousetraps, I mean browsers, the world will *not* beat a path to your door. It will continue to use whatever came with the OS, which in the vast majority of cases means Windows, which means IE.
OTOH, if you have 1 (or even 2 or 3) well-marketed, better whatsits, you have a reasonable chance of moving the 900 pound gorilla towards 0%, especially when he's sleeping (as MS is with IE).
Otherwise, the only 0% is your chance of moving the gorilla even vaguely in the direction of 0%.
These are great ideas, but I'm curious - how much should go into PROM/flash vs disk and what are the cost tradeoffs?
We can certainly produce a $100 consumer system today. There are already systems out there for $150 to $200. We're talking reasonably fast systems (close to 3GHz, but crappy busses, etc). How long would it last? I have no idea. I wouln't touch it with a 10 foot pole. We already have way too much disposable crap. I don't want to move faster down the path to buying a 10 pack of disposable computer systems like we do razors.
OTOH, if we decide to go disposable, with the OS and apps completely embedded, we can lop off 5GB to 10GB of disk space for the OS and related apps. Or whatever your OS choice takes up these days. Eventually we'll get away rfom disks completely, and just use some form of Personal Stoarge Device we can insert and remove.
But perhaps MS doesn't *want* computers to last. Maybe they want the average consumer to buy a new computer every year "because the old one wore out". Oh, gee, MS got more money off the OS shipped on the new system (well, not off *mine* as I don't use Windows). Imagine that.
Regardless, the real issue isn't SW piracy. I may detest some business practices and product quality of MS, but they certainly aren't as stupid as this Ballmer quote sounds.
Follow the money.
Obviously they aren't using one of these for their webserver. Or if they are, they need something more than a modem for their internet connection!
Actually, there was quite a bit of evidence against the Davidians. That doesn't change the fact that the government screwed up big time with the assault or that the trials were pretty farcical. But there was lots of evidence.
If you can find it, read _Mad Man in Waco_. It's a very even-handed book about the whole affair, showing just how evil Koresh was, and how evil the government response was.
Until the bottled water craze really took off a few years ago, what do you think everyone in the USA and Canada (and half of Europe) was drinking? What comes out of your tap is recycled water in most cases-- just like this.
When I had a paper route as a teenager, one of my customers was the local water treatment plant. They gave me a personal, guided tour. It was pretty cool. Up til then I really hadn't thought much about water purification, and afterwards I just didn't worry about it. They did a great job, and everyone was healthy as could be.
I have no problem drinking water like this. I would have a problem paying bottled water prices for it anywhere besides a third world country.
The most horrendous monsters of all...
DiNuCi and RoNuCi.
Run for your lives!
[ob-hint: the letters in caps stand for the two major parties in the USA's political system]
If temperature was the pprimary concern, all those businesses would just relocate to south Texas, New Mexico, Alabama, etc.
And a *lot* of us don't want it that warm. If it gets above 74 or so, most of the people in our office get sluggish.
We don't even own one. We're hardly flat-Earthers; we have plenty of stereos and computers at home. Just no TV. problem solved (at home, anyway).
My pet peeve isn't the TVs in restaurants, it's the people who have to have a TV on wherever they are. You go to visit, and they try to visit an dwatch TV 9or channel flip) all at once, the whole time.
Then they come to our house, and really get wigged out!
Yeah, the S/N sucks, and it's infested with vermin, but it's alive and well... enough.
At least, some groups are. Judicious use of killfiles help a lot.
My current filters mean I never even see about 75% of the posts in alt.guitar.amps . About half of what makes it through is still junk, but it's manageable.
Yeah. we have lost good people because of the S/N, and a lot of others look in, their eyes pop out of their heads, and they feel screaming down the hall, flapping their arms like chickens. And that's sad, because they could learn a lot there. But it's not dead, yet.
If only it were legal to go all vigilante on spammers (email, newsgroups, phone, whatever), the poroblem would solve itself in no time. Most of these folks just need the good whuppin' their parents never gave them. 8^/
For those who can't be bothered to RTFA...
Or those who can't get to it because it's slashdotted...
On behalf of those of use who can't read it yet, we thank you for the summary.
We also chastise you for both your condescending attitude and your not posting the article.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here; portable music was huge fairly quickly. It was even big before the transistor radio. My parents had a portable, RCA, tube, AM radio (width and height of a school lunchbox, maybe 2 inches (5 cm) deep) from when they were dating. That puts it at late 40s or early 50s. Rock and roll took off with the aid of electronics - electric guitars, TV, car radios and
I remember sneaking one to school so we could listen during recess to the World Series. The teachers understood; so long as it only came out at recess, they ignored it - but only for something like the World Series. (Now kids text message each other in class!)
Yeah, it was a bargain, comparatively. But you still had to come up with the money. If yuu're a well-paid geek, no problem. If you're a teenager who has to work for the money, or even a low end working Joe or Jane with a family to provide, it's not as cheap as you seem to think.
Well, which three do you see?
I'll be 50 next year. I'd forgotten I have to call the transistor radio, "sir".
It's not really odd to me that most folks have no clue what a vacuum tube is. It's a bit odd that most folks have no clue what a transistor is. Society has changed as much as technology over the last 50 years, at least in the USA.
50 years ago, almost everyone knew what a tube was, whether they cared or not (and most cared to some degree).[0] Today most people know what a computer or iPod is, whether they care or not, but an awful lot of folks aren't real sure what a chip is (insert joke here), and very few people under, say, 25, have more than the vaguest understanding of what a transistor is. And almost nobody cares (outside the geek communities). [1]
Part of that is simply the technology maturity, but it's also partly sociological (the two are also intertwined more than a lot of people realize).
[0] Then again, they really needed to, since instead of sending a dead TV or radio to the landfill, you generally had one or more tubes replaced, and it worked again. We weren't such a disposable society in the Tubozoic Era.
[1] In and of itself, that's neither good nor bad (or more likely both). I present it solely as a data point.
The typical B battery was about the size of a cassette Walkman[tm], but weighed quite a bit more, several pounds (weight US, not monetary, UK). Then you had to have your A battery for the filaments, and your C battery for the grid (technically, you might skip this one with cathode bias). Add in the wight of the larger components, the extra heat dissipated, the heavier chassis and case to protect the glass tubes from breakage (and the wearer from heat and broken glass), and you had a substantial package of fairly delicate weight and heat to tote around.
There are some things I prefer tubes for, but a hearing aid isn't one of them!