wow...1996, and having to reinstall every three or four weeks due to library drift. really brings back memories.
interesting about package management, but it appears apt/dpkg is still the best of breed.
at some point it would be nice to have keywords (something like what "apropos/man -k" is to man pages) for packaging systems. I don't like having to go on the net to find commands/packages to get when I need a program to do "whatever".
some of these news sites ("userlocal.com" in this case) are pretty cool. I prefer the articles that mix some tech background, review, and a bit of getting started all-in-one.
yes, yes, yes...i suppose if i said "slavic peoples" someone would write in about the non-slavs...the region, as far as i'm concerned, is still very much connected...and at the time of the chernobyl incident, far more connected.
The USSR was the primary lead for the cleanup operation, and took nearly all international commentary/focus.
When people discuss TMI, do they mention Pennsylvania or the USA? The DOE? Please.
I agree fission is history, but certainly the strategy of the NIF (small scale fusion of pellets) is much, much safer.
If something happens to the containment vessel, the pellets can no longer fire...there is no way the lasers can ignite them after a gross malfunction.
Even then, just hit the "off" button on the conveyor belt...no more pellets, nothing to track, the lasers can ignite anything.
Hydroelectric? Silting eventually makes all dams relics. The amount of energy required to desilt a dam exceeds all energy ever provided by the dam.
Solar? Well, the efficiencies are too low to really make it feasible.
If I had to dream about it, I remember reading an article by two scientists (circa 1997?) wherein, after the consumption of imported beer, they outlined a plan for a "big science" project.
In esscence:
1) "Manhattan" style project. Basically, unlimited funding to solve the task.
2) Massive increase in solar efficiency was paramount.
3) Construction of massive "solar farms" in the sunniest areas of the US (this was a US scheme).
4) The solar farms would be completely automated from end-to-end...robots repair all the panels.
But I have to say, I'm more excited by the NIF at this point. Regardless of the naysayers who yap about it just being a front for DOE atomic research (to get past the test bans -- which I don't believe, by the way) the process of pellet combustion appears to be absolutely safe and entirely controlled...there is simply no possible way to have a major accident with an NIF style fusion reactor.
European/International events/people are always a good read...even the tragedies. (from the American perspective, anyway).
Ernst Rudel ("Stuka Pilot"), the battle of Kursk (which was the turning point for WWII) are both excellent reads.
Surely there are books about Chernobyl that are a quality read...I'm not talking about just an internet search, but maybe someone in the industry can post what they think about the various books?
As I recall, the acts of heroism displayed by the workers and military personnel in the aftermath of Chernobyl are chilling...literally, many volunteering to the task even though they knew the result was certain death.
"Mother Russia" : from monarchy to communism to tragedies like Chernobyl and the rampant organized crime and the current thrashed economy...but undeniably a wonderful contributor to the arts and sciences.
1) Son of a Bush settles the federal case.
2) SOB pushes M$ throughout government.
3) M$ starts running a major PR campaign against linux, with a bunch of "frankenstein" horror stories, replete with viruses, hacks, etc from their "linux labs".
There is hope that the strong presence of IBM and AMD in Texas may well mitigate the uber-rights' influence on SOB to perform tasks 1/2...not to mention the close election...he may not want to infuriate the CA and UT reps/senators at this point.
But if the uber-right forces SOB to perform 1/2, I have no doubt M$ will push 3), then it would only be a short time till they control it all and start sending us monthly bills...the grand microsoft end game.
Then it will be up to a few of the euro and asian countries (perhaps china) to pull Linux back.
Great Big Googly Moogly, M$ has at least 30B in cash, plus a wide variety of investment income, and several apps that are selling at least somewhat at this point.
All they need now is for SOB to make DOJ settle the fed case...after which several states will drop out...and it will be back to "fleecing as usual".
I can't believe people are buying into the whole "oh yeah, i want to pay a microsoft bill every month, just like my phone bill". Geez, people, just stop using their crap and help Linux...that's the single best way to get rid of M$...and insure you never end up with a monthly software "Bill".
First, the usual false statements ("Ultimately UNIX is a command line system", "UNIX was so primitive in the 70's compared to other systems...")
"CPUs are so ideal...software is such a lagger" If that's true, go build a corporate web page in one day with nothing but transistors, ass. It's been done with development tools on the market today.
Ahem, many UNIX library calls have no CLI influence whatsoever...they existed BEFORE the shell!
Primitive to what systems? DOS? DOS disn't exist in the seventies...digitals' RTX? Quite like DOS really. The call infrastructure is cleaner under UNIX according to most old timers I've talked to.
Windows2000? I've used the win32 api...golly, many of those system calls look like they were lifted right from Unix. Just what OS is so superior to Unix?
What a bunch of fanboy crap. Here's my official response: "Wannabe dreadlock-hairstyled, artificially-color-enhanced-contact-wearing musicians who hang out in tribeca coffee shops yapping about how much software they didn't write sucks...should be shot for being the asses they are"
But I have to say I'm suprised at the number of people posting who think "puffer fish are so different from humans"
Let me remind you of a fair number of similarities...bilateral symmetry, two eyes, fins vs. arms, spine, oxygen/co2 exchange is somewhat similar as I recall.
I've always thought most animals are quite similar. Not as much as say, bonobos and humans, which are some 97% genetically identical, if memory serves, but most animals share a number of basic traits that are probably nearly identical in the genome coding.
plus i've heard a lot of a given animals genetic makeup is dormant garbage left over from ages of evolution. In that case, there could well be a puffer hidden in all of us (and not via the sushi method)
...was pretty cool. i've heard this trick is common in both mil and finance networks.
all you do is hook a basic box to the web for normal https processing, but on the back end you convert critical data to udp packets and broadcast those via a one-way phiber link to a transaction box.
the transaction box burns the transaction packets onto write-once cds.
note that although it is possible to lose *some* info from the insecure side, or to have *some* incoming data distorted by the wiliest of hacker, it is impossible, without inside help or truly clueless administration, to have anyone get/distort all the records.
the one-way link trick is pretty standard for sensitive data. truly hi-level secret stuff isn't connected to the web in any fashion. that would be idiocy.
I bought the aluminum box, and have been playing for months on my debian system.
I've done many, many "apt-get update ; ap-get dist-upgrades" over the same time period.
Absolutely no problem installing, and I consistently get 40-50 fps on a old K6-2 with a voodoo banshee.
The single issue I had was the game would slow to something like 1fps if the lighting was set to "lightmap" instead of "vertex", and I fixed that by experimenting with settings.
As far as slow sales, well, that's the "linux communitys'" fault. Freedom is not free, and you're gettig exactly what you pay for when you don't buy Linux products.
I'll be honest with you -- I consider myself to be a low-to-mid level programmer, and a proud linux enthusiast.
As far as the subscription model, most everything that they charge for is free on the Debian website, and is actually accessible as well (I've never been able to upgrade my system on the free side of RH).
I know of no tiered model of RHN as I described.
When I first used Linux, it was slackware, around 1995. Maybe every 4-6 months I had to redo the system due to tarball drift.
RH 7.0 was a nightmare to me. The kernel wouldn't compile, PIs DRM/XFree 4.0 wouldn't compile, netscape seemed to go bonkers (even worse than usual) We tried oracle on it at work, and had to revert to 6.2...the queries would just hang the GUI.
I like being able to use newer stuff, but I want it stable. I switched over to Debian, and it just seems very rock solid. XFree 4.0, helix-gnome, accerated openGL and quake3 -- all work great on my Debian boxes. I've never had this consistently on RH.
Debian has a major learning curve, but I believe it is a better, more stable distro. magicfilterconfig is not as nice as the RH utilities.
My only point is...if RH is so good at big projects and doing the GUI interfaces...and in many cases this is true...why not leave the distro integration and testing to Debian? When I read the Debian bug database and compare it to RedHats...some of the people at Debian really, really shine.
There are great people at RH, too....obviously. Maybe they should pool their talents...that's all I'm trying to say.
How many other dot coms have plunged steeper over the same period, and have no product on the shelves at all? Quite a few. At least RH has real labs, real contracts, real projects and a real product.
Half a staff of 25 in a closed San Francisco office gets job offers in Oakland and Sunnyvale. Not to be insensitive, but out of 550 employees, this is hardly "a crisis" for RedHat.
I'll be the first to admit that RedHat has made/is making/shall make serious mistakes, but this closure is very mild (unless you're part of the half with no offer, that would/does suck, I've been there)
My advice to RH is the same as it has always been:
1) Drop the dumb subscriber model -- have a free login that is as good as Debian's Apt (you could learn a lot about packaging by watching "apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade" run on a debian box!)
2) Have a "silver/gold/platinum" tiered subscription model, in addition to the free one, w/ guaranteed response time/login (higher level == better performance/response). Be willing to sell "one time" tickets as well as annual subscriptions.
3) Somehow, someway, accelerate the various Gnome/Nautilus/Glade and other development tools such that its easier to manage and handle projects, create docs, etc. I know there are people out there working on "javadoc" like things for c/C++ -- hire them and make it nice.
4) Consider starting/sponsoring a project to CLEAN UP/etc and/var make a GUI to handle them.
5) Consider dropping your distro and adopting Debian. I know you are proud of RH, but the realeases appear to have significant flaws...7.0, 6.0, 5.0 were all disasters.
The BUSH administration is urging all swinging singles to impregnate as many shagadelic girls as possible in order to increase deposits to the "Slashdot Aborted Foetus Bank for Aging Geeks".
In short, shag wildly now so you're sure to get a compatible foetus later when you really need it (Altzeimers,too much X, Microsoft 2K).
I enjoyed it, and I might well see it again. This is more of an art film than a mainstream american movie -- much simpler than sixth sense, and not as much of a shocker when it's over.
When I initially left the theatre, I was bummed. I thought, "Well, what an obvious way to end the movie" and "That's a weak Bruce Willis movie, and what a shitty ending".
Now that I've had a few days to think it over, there really is some neat pacing and eerie footage.
After reading some of the other comments, I like the movie even more. It's painfully low tech at times, with a surreal pace. Once over, the plot is astoundingly simple, and the finale obvious.
I'd see it again. It's very artsy, and a great role (IMHO) for Samuel L. Jackson. He's right on target, and a joy to watch.
I've been using 6 for a week or so as my main browser. The annoyances are:
1) Use the back button too fast and it goes boom.
2) The mail agent seems to get confused after a bunch of folders get created, and after some mail gets mails diverted to them -- it simply stopped letting me create new folders until the next session.
3) Launches a bunch (16?) "java_vm"s that show in the process table.
4) Won't load newsgroup names. My ISP has a 2MB (or so) list of newsgroups, and I have yet to see the newsgroup downloader in NS6 successfully d/l it. It always crashes. At least 4.75 showed you the groups it *did get*, as I recall.
5) The scrollbars seem to get confused if the mouse is refocused while scrolling. The states seem to get hosed between window resizing and scrolling sometimes.
6) Window rendering gets ugly when the page is loading and you move it around.
It does feel a bit slow, especially the first time scrolling down a large web page -- like a slashdot article with a lot of responses (viewed flat). After getting to the bottom once, it scrolls fairly fast.
IE suffers from a similar list of oddities, but is faster starting and "in general" has more of a quality feel.
Of course, the use of Microsoft products by a zealot like me is completely out of the question, so my big hope is that netscape or staroffice will do something to improve the browsing situation. I'm not a KDE/QT person, so Konquerer and Opera are not an option (for me) either.
I wish the product was better, but I also wish I could get a decent electric car that would go a couple hundred miles and recharge in four hours...it just ain't happening yet, ya know?
There was a time when there was no accelerated OGL on Linux; but I bought q3a for Linux and it runs better than any game I've ever played. 40 fps (consistently) on an old voodoo banshee 400 mhz K62 machine is not bad.
Things will improve. Actually, even if they get
the above items fixed, I'll still hold my nose over the geegaws. I don't like all the geegaws in NS6.
I've been trying it since the beginning, maybe every six months or so.
The hype factor is a real turn off. The benchmarks don't tell the real story. "90% as fast as C++!" then you write a simple GUI and (literally) watch buttons render themselve -- at least you can watch for 5 minutes or so til it freezes.
The idea is great, the implementations are substantially less than great.
Slashdot Mirror
i didn't have an internet connection and would bring stuff back to my room on floppies or tapes.
sometimes it would get to the point where much of the system would not boot or things would stop compiling or things would start coring.
after a couple of hours of searching the green book, and not being able to fix the thing, with homework due in the morning...well, reinstall.
i don't think it was that terrible of an option, considering how rapidly things were changing and the woeful state of dependency checking.
wow...1996, and having to reinstall every three or four weeks due to library drift. really brings back memories.
interesting about package management, but it appears apt/dpkg is still the best of breed.
at some point it would be nice to have keywords (something like what "apropos/man -k" is to man pages) for packaging systems. I don't like having to go on the net to find commands/packages to get when I need a program to do "whatever".
some of these news sites ("userlocal.com" in this case) are pretty cool. I prefer the articles that mix some tech background, review, and a bit of getting started all-in-one.
I've bought a couple things through slashdot banners.
I can't remember the last time I bought anything through the tube...or even the last time I watched TV.
Oh, it was about 6 weeks ago, and we watched a dvd, not broadcast.
This will do nothing but piss me off and give me a negative impression of the advertisers and site.
Damn it, inquiring trolls want to know.
How can I post some tasty bait w/o this essential information?
yes, yes, yes...i suppose if i said "slavic peoples" someone would write in about the non-slavs...the region, as far as i'm concerned, is still very much connected...and at the time of the chernobyl incident, far more connected.
The USSR was the primary lead for the cleanup operation, and took nearly all international commentary/focus.
When people discuss TMI, do they mention Pennsylvania or the USA? The DOE? Please.
so, any good books to recommend?
I agree fission is history, but certainly the strategy of the NIF (small scale fusion of pellets) is much, much safer.
If something happens to the containment vessel, the pellets can no longer fire...there is no way the lasers can ignite them after a gross malfunction.
Even then, just hit the "off" button on the conveyor belt...no more pellets, nothing to track, the lasers can ignite anything.
Hydroelectric? Silting eventually makes all dams relics. The amount of energy required to desilt a dam exceeds all energy ever provided by the dam.
Solar? Well, the efficiencies are too low to really make it feasible.
If I had to dream about it, I remember reading an article by two scientists (circa 1997?) wherein, after the consumption of imported beer, they outlined a plan for a "big science" project.
In esscence:
1) "Manhattan" style project. Basically, unlimited funding to solve the task.
2) Massive increase in solar efficiency was paramount.
3) Construction of massive "solar farms" in the sunniest areas of the US (this was a US scheme).
4) The solar farms would be completely automated from end-to-end...robots repair all the panels.
But I have to say, I'm more excited by the NIF at this point. Regardless of the naysayers who yap about it just being a front for DOE atomic research (to get past the test bans -- which I don't believe, by the way) the process of pellet combustion appears to be absolutely safe and entirely controlled...there is simply no possible way to have a major accident with an NIF style fusion reactor.
while(1)
{
drop_pellet();
track_and_ignite_with_laser();
}
European/International events/people are always a good read...even the tragedies. (from the American perspective, anyway).
Ernst Rudel ("Stuka Pilot"), the battle of Kursk (which was the turning point for WWII) are both excellent reads.
Surely there are books about Chernobyl that are a quality read...I'm not talking about just an internet search, but maybe someone in the industry can post what they think about the various books?
As I recall, the acts of heroism displayed by the workers and military personnel in the aftermath of Chernobyl are chilling...literally, many volunteering to the task even though they knew the result was certain death.
"Mother Russia" : from monarchy to communism to tragedies like Chernobyl and the rampant organized crime and the current thrashed economy...but undeniably a wonderful contributor to the arts and sciences.
I was going to buy a imac for my neice this weekend...now I think I'll just giver her a clone.
Thanks for helping me with the decision, Mr. Jobs.
1) Son of a Bush settles the federal case.
2) SOB pushes M$ throughout government.
3) M$ starts running a major PR campaign against linux, with a bunch of "frankenstein" horror stories, replete with viruses, hacks, etc from their "linux labs".
There is hope that the strong presence of IBM and AMD in Texas may well mitigate the uber-rights' influence on SOB to perform tasks 1/2...not to mention the close election...he may not want to infuriate the CA and UT reps/senators at this point.
But if the uber-right forces SOB to perform 1/2, I have no doubt M$ will push 3), then it would only be a short time till they control it all and start sending us monthly bills...the grand microsoft end game.
Then it will be up to a few of the euro and asian countries (perhaps china) to pull Linux back.
Great Big Googly Moogly, M$ has at least 30B in cash, plus a wide variety of investment income, and several apps that are selling at least somewhat at this point.
All they need now is for SOB to make DOJ settle the fed case...after which several states will drop out...and it will be back to "fleecing as usual".
I can't believe people are buying into the whole "oh yeah, i want to pay a microsoft bill every month, just like my phone bill". Geez, people, just stop using their crap and help Linux...that's the single best way to get rid of M$...and insure you never end up with a monthly software "Bill".
Duron lost it's luster? A little Turtle Wax and a buffer will fix that right up.
...this guy is a great example.
First, the usual false statements ("Ultimately UNIX is a command line system", "UNIX was so primitive in the 70's compared to other systems...")
"CPUs are so ideal...software is such a lagger" If that's true, go build a corporate web page in one day with nothing but transistors, ass. It's been done with development tools on the market today.
Ahem, many UNIX library calls have no CLI influence whatsoever...they existed BEFORE the shell!
Primitive to what systems? DOS? DOS disn't exist in the seventies...digitals' RTX? Quite like DOS really. The call infrastructure is cleaner under UNIX according to most old timers I've talked to.
Windows2000? I've used the win32 api...golly, many of those system calls look like they were lifted right from Unix. Just what OS is so superior to Unix?
What a bunch of fanboy crap. Here's my official response: "Wannabe dreadlock-hairstyled, artificially-color-enhanced-contact-wearing musicians who hang out in tribeca coffee shops yapping about how much software they didn't write sucks...should be shot for being the asses they are"
Anyone wanna refute that?
(...biologist)
But I have to say I'm suprised at the number of people posting who think "puffer fish are so different from humans"
Let me remind you of a fair number of similarities...bilateral symmetry, two eyes, fins vs. arms, spine, oxygen/co2 exchange is somewhat similar as I recall.
I've always thought most animals are quite similar. Not as much as say, bonobos and humans, which are some 97% genetically identical, if memory serves, but most animals share a number of basic traits that are probably nearly identical in the genome coding.
plus i've heard a lot of a given animals genetic makeup is dormant garbage left over from ages of evolution. In that case, there could well be a puffer hidden in all of us (and not via the sushi method)
...the linux substrate registry won't correctly identify this manufacturing process.
yes, there are probably computers on the internet containing classified material.
but there are also bad people around planning bank robberies. such is the nature of our planet.
note that you are legally obligated to share your knowedge of those 8 computers with your infosec POC.
in fact, anyone whith a clearance who reads your post is legally bound to report it.
...was pretty cool. i've heard this trick is common in both mil and finance networks.
all you do is hook a basic box to the web for normal https processing, but on the back end you convert critical data to udp packets and broadcast those via a one-way phiber link to a transaction box.
the transaction box burns the transaction packets onto write-once cds.
note that although it is possible to lose *some* info from the insecure side, or to have *some* incoming data distorted by the wiliest of hacker, it is impossible, without inside help or truly clueless administration, to have anyone get/distort all the records.
the one-way link trick is pretty standard for sensitive data. truly hi-level secret stuff isn't connected to the web in any fashion. that would be idiocy.
I bought the aluminum box, and have been playing for months on my debian system.
I've done many, many "apt-get update ; ap-get dist-upgrades" over the same time period.
Absolutely no problem installing, and I consistently get 40-50 fps on a old K6-2 with a voodoo banshee.
The single issue I had was the game would slow to something like 1fps if the lighting was set to "lightmap" instead of "vertex", and I fixed that by experimenting with settings.
As far as slow sales, well, that's the "linux communitys'" fault. Freedom is not free, and you're gettig exactly what you pay for when you don't buy Linux products.
Look forward to trying this...congratulations mozilla and netscape (and others) for keeping the dream of freedom-based computing platform alive.
I'll be honest with you -- I consider myself to be a low-to-mid level programmer, and a proud linux enthusiast.
As far as the subscription model, most everything that they charge for is free on the Debian website, and is actually accessible as well (I've never been able to upgrade my system on the free side of RH).
I know of no tiered model of RHN as I described.
When I first used Linux, it was slackware, around 1995. Maybe every 4-6 months I had to redo the system due to tarball drift.
RH 7.0 was a nightmare to me. The kernel wouldn't compile, PIs DRM/XFree 4.0 wouldn't compile, netscape seemed to go bonkers (even worse than usual) We tried oracle on it at work, and had to revert to 6.2...the queries would just hang the GUI.
I like being able to use newer stuff, but I want it stable. I switched over to Debian, and it just seems very rock solid. XFree 4.0, helix-gnome, accerated openGL and quake3 -- all work great on my Debian boxes. I've never had this consistently on RH.
Debian has a major learning curve, but I believe it is a better, more stable distro. magicfilterconfig is not as nice as the RH utilities.
My only point is...if RH is so good at big projects and doing the GUI interfaces...and in many cases this is true...why not leave the distro integration and testing to Debian? When I read the Debian bug database and compare it to RedHats...some of the people at Debian really, really shine.
There are great people at RH, too....obviously. Maybe they should pool their talents...that's all I'm trying to say.
What a crap article.
/etc and /var make a GUI to handle them.
How many other dot coms have plunged steeper over the same period, and have no product on the shelves at all? Quite a few. At least RH has real labs, real contracts, real projects and a real product.
Half a staff of 25 in a closed San Francisco office gets job offers in Oakland and Sunnyvale. Not to be insensitive, but out of 550 employees, this is hardly "a crisis" for RedHat.
I'll be the first to admit that RedHat has made/is making/shall make serious mistakes, but this closure is very mild (unless you're part of the half with no offer, that would/does suck, I've been there)
My advice to RH is the same as it has always been:
1) Drop the dumb subscriber model -- have a free login that is as good as Debian's Apt (you could learn a lot about packaging by watching "apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade" run on a debian box!)
2) Have a "silver/gold/platinum" tiered subscription model, in addition to the free one, w/ guaranteed response time/login (higher level == better performance/response). Be willing to sell "one time" tickets as well as annual subscriptions.
3) Somehow, someway, accelerate the various Gnome/Nautilus/Glade and other development tools such that its easier to manage and handle projects, create docs, etc. I know there are people out there working on "javadoc" like things for c/C++ -- hire them and make it nice.
4) Consider starting/sponsoring a project to CLEAN UP
5) Consider dropping your distro and adopting Debian. I know you are proud of RH, but the realeases appear to have significant flaws...7.0, 6.0, 5.0 were all disasters.
The BUSH administration is urging all swinging singles to impregnate as many shagadelic girls as possible in order to increase deposits to the "Slashdot Aborted Foetus Bank for Aging Geeks".
In short, shag wildly now so you're sure to get a compatible foetus later when you really need it (Altzeimers,too much X, Microsoft 2K).
Yes, the camera angles are all over the place.
Yes, it is all about the superhero comics.
I enjoyed it, and I might well see it again. This is more of an art film than a mainstream american movie -- much simpler than sixth sense, and not as much of a shocker when it's over.
When I initially left the theatre, I was bummed. I thought, "Well, what an obvious way to end the movie" and "That's a weak Bruce Willis movie, and what a shitty ending".
Now that I've had a few days to think it over, there really is some neat pacing and eerie footage.
After reading some of the other comments, I like the movie even more. It's painfully low tech at times, with a surreal pace. Once over, the plot is astoundingly simple, and the finale obvious.
I'd see it again. It's very artsy, and a great role (IMHO) for Samuel L. Jackson. He's right on target, and a joy to watch.
Take a look at where he writes about his trip to moscow to fly the MIG 29 and L 39 trainers.
Oh yeah, so long Ken. You've done great things that helped a lot of people get through their day.
I've been using 6 for a week or so as my main browser. The annoyances are:
1) Use the back button too fast and it goes boom.
2) The mail agent seems to get confused after a bunch of folders get created, and after some mail gets mails diverted to them -- it simply stopped letting me create new folders until the next session.
3) Launches a bunch (16?) "java_vm"s that show in the process table.
4) Won't load newsgroup names. My ISP has a 2MB (or so) list of newsgroups, and I have yet to see the newsgroup downloader in NS6 successfully d/l it. It always crashes. At least 4.75 showed you the groups it *did get*, as I recall.
5) The scrollbars seem to get confused if the mouse is refocused while scrolling. The states seem to get hosed between window resizing and scrolling sometimes.
6) Window rendering gets ugly when the page is loading and you move it around.
It does feel a bit slow, especially the first time scrolling down a large web page -- like a slashdot article with a lot of responses (viewed flat). After getting to the bottom once, it scrolls fairly fast.
IE suffers from a similar list of oddities, but is faster starting and "in general" has more of a quality feel.
Of course, the use of Microsoft products by a zealot like me is completely out of the question, so my big hope is that netscape or staroffice will do something to improve the browsing situation. I'm not a KDE/QT person, so Konquerer and Opera are not an option (for me) either.
I wish the product was better, but I also wish I could get a decent electric car that would go a couple hundred miles and recharge in four hours...it just ain't happening yet, ya know?
There was a time when there was no accelerated OGL on Linux; but I bought q3a for Linux and it runs better than any game I've ever played. 40 fps (consistently) on an old voodoo banshee 400 mhz K62 machine is not bad.
Things will improve. Actually, even if they get
the above items fixed, I'll still hold my nose over the geegaws. I don't like all the geegaws in NS6.
I've been trying it since the beginning, maybe every six months or so.
The hype factor is a real turn off. The benchmarks don't tell the real story. "90% as fast as C++!" then you write a simple GUI and (literally) watch buttons render themselve -- at least you can watch for 5 minutes or so til it freezes.
The idea is great, the implementations are substantially less than great.
Maybe Sun should license Ids' qvm technology?
okay, i'm an unabashed netscape supporter. i'm also a developer (not for netscape).
the installer did not work on my debian box, so i bought the CD. it got here in a couple days; about $6 total.
The product is a little rough. Seems slow to do things sometimes. This looks ugly in my process table:
000 S 1000 261 255 0 60 0 - 37251 unix_d ? 00:00:04 java_vm
040 S 1000 262 261 0 60 0 - 37251 poll ? 00:00:00 java_vm
040 S 1000 263 262 0 60 0 - 37251 nanosl ? 00:00:00 java_vm
040 S 1000 264 262 0 60 0 - 37251 rt_sig ? 00:00:00 java_vm
040 S 1000 265 262 0 60 0 - 37251 rt_sig ? 00:00:00 java_vm
040 S 1000 266 262 0 60 0 - 37251 nanosl ? 00:00:00 java_vm
040 S 1000 267 262 0 60 0 - 37251 rt_sig ? 00:00:00 java_vm
040 S 1000 268 262 0 60 0 - 37251 rt_sig ? 00:00:00 java_vm
040 S 1000 269 262 0 60 0 - 37251 rt_sig ? 00:00:00 java_vm
040 S 1000 270 262 0 60 0 - 37251 rt_sig ? 00:00:00 java_vm
040 S 1000 271 262 0 60 0 - 37251 rt_sig ? 00:00:00 java_vm
040 S 1000 272 262 0 60 0 - 37251 rt_sig ? 00:00:00 java_vm
040 S 1000 273 262 0 60 0 - 37251 poll ? 00:00:00 java_vm
040 S 1000 274 262 0 60 0 - 37251 nanosl ? 00:00:00 java_vm
040 S 1000 275 262 0 60 0 - 37251 rt_sig ? 00:00:00 java_vm
040 S 1000 276 262 0 60 0 - 37251 tcp_re ? 00:00:00 java_vm
...but, overall, it has become my main browser and mail agent, win, lose or draw.
What the heck, if I have to suffer for a bit while a company fine tunes their product, I don't mind. Freedom is never free.