I'm happy about the reincarnation of this brand name, now I just hope they dont just run blindly after technologies like ID software, and stick to some old Atari style games. Theres definitely a market and the brand name is well respected. People miss it.
The market apple is strong in is the graphics market, and 128MB is like undermining themselves. They need firewire, USB2, 256MB starting RAM (possibly with 400FSB) and a good useable mouse, not a hockey puck.
Both the radeon and 17" monitor are good choices there, but 128MB ram just doesnt go with it. DVD authoring would also be preferrable, but maybe not on the base model.
I wonder if they should release a lower end than the basic eMac, with a 2d graphics card (or a Rive tnt2, or ati rage) 128MB ram, ~10GB harddisk, 500MHz CPU, 15" monitor and sell it at about $400. That would be a good way to get more people to use the Mac, especially during these recession times when everyones going for cheaper cars etc.
<i> PCs have become messes, and it's a worthy goal to try to deal with that. Kudos to Apple for taking some steps in the right direction, such as eliminating floppy drives and switching to LCD monitors for home models.</i>
Think of ALL the old software theyre breaking by removing the floppy. We cant part from old standards because the whole computer industry is built around it. You cant turn an 18-wheeler too sharply. Think of USSR's turn from communism to democracy and think of Chinas turn.
<i>PCs are still based around what's essentially become pointless upgrading,</i>
When people upgrade, they dont just want to get a new computer. They want ALL the software they ran on the old one to run here too. Its peoples past experiences being carried on in a new machine. Its not just a new computer. The Be Workstation was such a beautiful work of art, and it didnt run Zeliard or Civilization. People couldnt chat on MSN with their friends, so whats the point of a new machine? Its not just about the push for the future, its the unescapable influence of the past. Its why EVERYONE doesnt just switch to Linux.
<i> something that is now completely ignored by everyone except a certain set of gamers and hardware fanboys. (If you aren't shooting for bleeding edge games, any video card made since 2000 and any sound card made since 1995--including motherboard sound--is just grand.) </i>
Youre right there. In fact I actively look for older soundblasters so my fav DOS games work. They have trouble with soundblaster emulation with the newer $150 cards.
In fact this is why on-board sound and video is a success, people dont need fancy stuff to write something in ms word.. or openoffice. But you must admit the soundblaster audigy sounds sweet with mp3s, and the radeon card plus a 19" monitor is some serious fun. I'd spend there if I had the dough. I would even dare to call it progess, since theres no other direction for progress.
<i> Linux, for me, is only worthwhile if it improves the overall computing experience. It does that well, for some things, but for others it has become a retro object d'art. Perhaps the most damning thing about Linux is the hugely conservative community surrounding it. Cries of "If you want change then _you_ do it" and endless arguments about sticking with Emacs and the X11 standard are all so inbred and meaningless. </i>
The whole social structure of Linux is different from microsoft. In a capitalist place, you cant complain about what you havent paid for. Will YOU fix my tokenring drivers?? And make a new DRI driver for my old card? Its this package that comes with using Linux, and most Linux users are happy with it because theres no real alternative, pay microsoft and some hardware will still fail. And they dont just make something you ask for.
Linux for you is something that does some things better than windows, choices to be made, but youre asking for a paradigm change, or just ranting randomly. If youre asking for a paradigm change in computing, read the top para about turning too fast, market momentum. You cannot pry people out of their outlooks and lotus notes, and civilizations and ultimas and bash command lines and network neighborhoods. <i> I will make fun of Microsoft along with everyone else as long as Bill Gates & company are stagnant and producing poor products. But as much as I hate to say it, they're moving forward with some interesting ideas. Sure, those ideas aren't original (what is?) but the key is that they have a direction and purpose. </i>
Ok now I know youre ranting randomly. 2 days ago I booted knoppix on a clients system just to download network card drivers from the internet so he could use the internet. The whole family loved the look of KDE and I ended up giving them a cd copy.
Who is more innovative in networking now. Think of tridgell's work on Samba, and its improvements over SMB. The free software communitys crawling
I doubt they can do it successfully
on
Microsoft's Athens PC
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Linux made its way into the Xbox, and can easily make it into any system that is based on x86. Should Microsoft move to a non-x86 architecture it will be the best thing that ever happened to Linux, Apple and Sun. Microsoft will never shift from x86, and Linux can always be made to boot in face of any mod chips and drm technologies..
If nothing else, a win32 version of loadlin could be made that will replace everything in the memory with a linux kernel and boot it. All the while people would stick to their clone PCs trying out Linux once in a while. I think Microsoft execs have been smoking some Redmond grass and need to see the only leverage they have in the market is the huge pile of x86 code that wont execute anywhere else. Theres really no other reason for people not to move to Linux.
I wonder if this game resembles Return Fire.. Thats one game I miss in Linux. If I had the time, I would try to build a multiplayer version of Return Fire (not like Return Fire 2) in SDL.
Here in Canada, broadband was much faster and a little cheaper 2 years ago. Thats when telecoms actually competed. While more networks are being laid and Rogers and Sympatico are growing, their offerings have been shrinking. I think profit margins are inflating up here, and suspect the sames true down there. ATT and Bell have slowed cheap Internet on this continent.
They used to pour money into a dotcom just because its a goodlooking dotcom, but its different now. You can buy a dotcom domain for $10, install J2EE servers, register the business and an ecommerce account and pay some marketing people, but the Investors would look at what youre trying to sell. In that sense the dotcom has merged with the rest of the industry, no longer clearly outlined as just IT. The winners should be niche markets like accounting software etc, and maybe video games would move to cottage industries, but their success would depend on their material, and they would have to fight over whats left of IT investors now.
I'm not too sure if windows XP supports ipv6 out of the box, but I know windows98, the most popularly used, doesnt. ISPs have routers that do support ipv6 but some have disabled it. I dont mind moving my LAN and servers to IPv6 if a threshold number of clients can access it, about half of all averare users, and we're not there yet. Unfortunately even for this switch, we have to wait for Microsofts move and wonder if they would introduce non-standard patented changes.
I wonder who would fork out for an OS/2 for his desktop, beside the old users with critical apps that wont run elsewhere. The features page is filled with marketing blabber and doesnt have anything a measly Windows 95 on a 486 dx4 cant do. Sure the Internet Java and XML are the future, and they can be supported by a 386 with 8 MB ram too(with Linux).
Certain people obviously do spend for OS/2... I wonder what those critical apps are, I could make money building Linux/BSD/win32 app upgrades there.
Dreamcast is terriffic for its price and ability to run Linux and NetBSD off CDs. Ive always wanted to put a beowulf cluster of dreamcasts on my resume.. but have yet to buy the first dreamcast. The problem is I'm always considering PS2 that might fall in price after the PS3 is debuted, which has native Linux support. The dreamcast also has its BBA thats too expensive.. dont you just wish it had an ISA slot instead?
Your headache really is switching the OS for your aunt too many times. Let her get used to OSX for a while now, dont let her try Lindows, Lycoris and Knoppix before she calls some other tech guy who reinstalls win98.
Think of the webpad my microsoft thats supposed to kill laptops....
Now think about it. People need a computer they can carry and use. It better have a monitor, drives, keyboard.. and you got a laptop. Can a PDA replace it? No too small a screen and keyboard. Increase the screen and keyboard size and youve got a picturebook. Similar to a laptop but that harddisk needs an upgrade..
So a webpad is something more expensive. People dont need it. Some might buy it. Just like the some who buy PDAs and use it for maybe 2 minutes each day for nothing really important, except maybe games, for which the laptops still the best tool.
So we will continue to see things that their makers will claim will kill the laptop and picturebook and pda and webpad and intel thingy.
Heretic scared me most during the nights... but Monkey Island series and the Indiana Jones adventure series took enormous portions of my time. Not as much as civilization did, but had a deeper impact on my head.
Unreal and Counterstrike are also notable games there. Counterstrike has completely changed the way people see FPS games now and it hasnt lost its top title in five years, and thats doing better than doom.
It simply makes too much sense. A monolithic corporation losing market to a community effort. They have tried but just cant beat the quality of software produced by the community. So they keep changing the standards, protocols etc to break interoperability with the community's efforts, but their competitors all line up behind the community and become a crude huge competitor.
So they need to do something about Linux, but badmouthing isnt working. Simply attacking RedHat doesnt work, SuSE will rise and there are dozens of other distro companies. Any marketing they do goes against them every time.. look at the 'TCO' articles by Linux zealots out there. And every MCSE out there, every computer repairman recommends Linux over Microsoft any time. The corporation is facing a slow and painful decline, with too much capital on their hands and little ideas on how to protect themselves. Even expired Microsoft employees use Linux/BSD at home.
So Microsoft attacks on the Linux community is imminent, and I mean something more effective than badmouthing the code quality and criticizing Linus's developer organization. They need companies to be unsure of Linux's quality and future. So they start looking around for a sinking Linux company that needs the dough. Heck SCO might even introduce buggy code that will get pointed to by MSNBC soon enough.
Youre Bill and youre on a sinking Titanic. What do you do?
But IBM did not take code from SCO Linux
on
SCO DOS'ed
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The code that was given to IBM was given as Unix, not under GPL. SCO claims IBM released THAT code under Linux. They can release it now.. and IBM could even claim they took the code released under SCO, incorporated that GPL code into their products, but theyre not claiming that now. Theyre claiming they never did release SCO code under Linux. We dont even know what product of Linux is accused of containing tainted code.
This kinda makes DOS the champion. Even todays BIOS updates are distributed on DOS floppy disks. Care to buy a tokenring card made in 2003? The driver disk supports DOS among others.
Before DOS there was BASIC, but BASIC programs unfortunately werent interchangeable much. A commodore64 program wouldnt run on a BBC. DOS and the x86 architecture were the first hardware and OS standards that crossed the threshold. Today, Intels releasing the Itanium, but making sure the 32-bit x86 emulation works well. Microsofts releasing Windows 2003, which will still run DOS apps.
If theyre not referring to the kernel, what are they referring to??
If its not the kernel that has SCO code, theyre not really suing Linux. If they are suing patches, might be one distro or even an application. Thus they might not be suing all Linux companies. Trouble is noone knows what are they suing about, except that they have a grudge against IBM.
I hope IBM does not buy any part or share of SCO, and makes sure none of its associated subcompanies hires anyone from SCOs top management. Same should be done by RedHat, SuSE, Sun and others. Who knows how much the SCO people are getting paid by microsoft to dive the whole company into a suicide bomb, but an example must be made of them. They should not get employed by any Linux company. Its too much risk anyway.
The whole pleasure of programming in console is doing it in your text editor, and compiling it on the shell by typing make. Theres RHIDE, and EMACS does fancy compiling, but nothing beats the simplicity of joe editor + bash command line.
As for curses, try ncurses. Ive been wanting a simple replacement for these, but I suppose getting used to ncurses and working with sleepycat databasen is the way to go. Need bigger databases?? Go with Postgresql, but build a good stable foundation underneath with FreeBSD or a stable linux kernel and glibc.
I still second your claim that someone on the command line (I think here you mean text mode GUI not command line) could work faster. A well designed GUI and a person used to it can work faster than any command liner. Fewer keys to press.
Since we have to pay for it, they should really offer something worth $70 over other free distros. Firstly, if they can somehow offer the drivers with the package, nvidia, tokenring in default installs, they'd be QUITE different.
But I would personally pay for a distro that can completely strip down the binaries, even stripping off READMEs and man pages, and compiling it optimised for size. Knoppix is one awesome distro that can detect most hardware, and comes with so much command line utilities, but something that can beat that would be worth 70.
Should you ever need to get tokenring cards here in Toronto, they cost about $2 each.. good working PCI cards with Linux/Solaris drivers available. A 16-port 10mbps hub cost me $14, and there was a pile where they were selling em. 2500 series Cisco routers that interface between TR and eth are about $250 used, and all this goes well with the Pentium 1 machines people are throwning out with their spring cleaning. Care for a cheap beowulf?
I have been trying the madge mk2, mk3, bm2, and olicom 3140 PCI cards with kernels 2.2, 2.4 and 2.5. I have tried the builtin kernel drivers, madge drivers version 231, 241, and the olicom drivers.
They all work fine as a single card in the system. But I have been trying to use them in the SNAT, a 3com 3c59x is connected to a dsl modem. The most common crashes occur with 2 different counter strike hosts inside the LAN updating the servers. netstat shows enormous connections, so I increased conntrack_limit all the way to 65536. Note: the number of connections still does not exceed this limit.
Another problem is when I'm downloading large files from fast (close) servers. Downloading multiple files from fileplanet for instance crashes the server. In almost ALL servers.. the crash symbols are tokenring receive buffers, But Ive seen crashes in the transmit buffer, and in the 3com receive buffer. The same setup works perfectly between two ethernet cards.
Another fact may help.. Putting in 3 network cards.. a tokenring, ethernet and an arcnet card crashes the server more frequently. And another fact... I get the same crash in FreeBSD with a much lower frequency.. once a month say (in linux is about once every two days or under high traffic).
Now I am running the network under Solaris x86 8 01/01, with an uptime of 3 months. madge has been releasing official drivers for Solaris, but all drivers for FreeBSD and Linux versions are beta. I am running Linux hosts with these drivers with no problems (occasional drop out of the ring no big deal), but cant do that in the firewall.
The firewall is a pentium 200mmx with 64mb ram. I have tried slackware 8, debian and redhat 8. I have also tried several different cards of the same model and a different server of the same approximate specs.
Currently I'm working on 231/241 madge drivers, cleaning up some code and possibly making new drivers for the kernel.
Game makers have been rushing to make everything 3D and support directx9 opengl and the fancy nvidia, ati extensions. Companies are no longer focusing on the storyline and art so much.
Even lucasarts were'nt immune to this. Remember what they did to monkey island?? Monkey Island 3 was a big success, at least for an adventure game, but then there was the obscene monkey island 4, made in 3d, dysfunctional and uninteresting.
I occasionally play sonic2, wonderboy and some atari, commodore64 games. Theres nothing wrong with a good sidescroller or adventure game and they still have their own place. But game developers are focused elsewhere.
Until I realize I am the only one around with the biggest pile of tokenring cards and hubs for testing. Maybe in the summer vacation, I could work on some of the code, and try fixing the receive buffer problems. This is assuming I'm a better programmer by then.
I hope the rest of the kernel is stable as hell by the release time. Most geeks in their homes with x86 clones dont need more functionality, we need stability that kicks Solaris and BSD.
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I'm happy about the reincarnation of this brand name, now I just hope they dont just run blindly after technologies like ID software, and stick to some old Atari style games. Theres definitely a market and the brand name is well respected. People miss it.
The market apple is strong in is the graphics market, and 128MB is like undermining themselves. They need firewire, USB2, 256MB starting RAM (possibly with 400FSB) and a good useable mouse, not a hockey puck. Both the radeon and 17" monitor are good choices there, but 128MB ram just doesnt go with it. DVD authoring would also be preferrable, but maybe not on the base model. I wonder if they should release a lower end than the basic eMac, with a 2d graphics card (or a Rive tnt2, or ati rage) 128MB ram, ~10GB harddisk, 500MHz CPU, 15" monitor and sell it at about $400. That would be a good way to get more people to use the Mac, especially during these recession times when everyones going for cheaper cars etc.
<i> PCs have become messes, and it's a worthy goal to try to deal with that. Kudos to Apple for taking some steps in the right direction, such as eliminating floppy drives and switching to LCD monitors for home models.</i>
Think of ALL the old software theyre breaking by removing the floppy. We cant part from old standards because the whole computer industry is built around it. You cant turn an 18-wheeler too sharply. Think of USSR's turn from communism to democracy and think of Chinas turn.
<i>PCs are still based around what's essentially become pointless upgrading,</i>
When people upgrade, they dont just want to get a new computer. They want ALL the software they ran on the old one to run here too. Its peoples past experiences being carried on in a new machine. Its not just a new computer. The Be Workstation was such a beautiful work of art, and it didnt run Zeliard or Civilization. People couldnt chat on MSN with their friends, so whats the point of a new machine? Its not just about the push for the future, its the unescapable influence of the past. Its why EVERYONE doesnt just switch to Linux.
<i> something that is now completely ignored by everyone except a certain set of gamers and hardware fanboys. (If you aren't shooting for bleeding edge games, any video card made since 2000 and any sound card made since 1995--including motherboard sound--is just grand.)
</i>
Youre right there. In fact I actively look for older soundblasters so my fav DOS games work. They have trouble with soundblaster emulation with the newer $150 cards.
In fact this is why on-board sound and video is a success, people dont need fancy stuff to write something in ms word.. or openoffice. But you must admit the soundblaster audigy sounds sweet with mp3s, and the radeon card plus a 19" monitor is some serious fun. I'd spend there if I had the dough. I would even dare to call it progess, since theres no other direction for progress.
<i>
Linux, for me, is only worthwhile if it improves the overall computing experience. It does that well, for some things, but for others it has become a retro object d'art. Perhaps the most damning thing about Linux is the hugely conservative community surrounding it. Cries of "If you want change then _you_ do it" and endless arguments about sticking with Emacs and the X11 standard are all so inbred and meaningless. </i>
The whole social structure of Linux is different from microsoft. In a capitalist place, you cant complain about what you havent paid for. Will YOU fix my tokenring drivers?? And make a new DRI driver for my old card? Its this package that comes with using Linux, and most Linux users are happy with it because theres no real alternative, pay microsoft and some hardware will still fail. And they dont just make something you ask for.
Linux for you is something that does some things better than windows, choices to be made, but youre asking for a paradigm change, or just ranting randomly. If youre asking for a paradigm change in computing, read the top para about turning too fast, market momentum. You cannot pry people out of their outlooks and lotus notes, and civilizations and ultimas and bash command lines and network neighborhoods.
<i>
I will make fun of Microsoft along with everyone else as long as Bill Gates & company are stagnant and producing poor products. But as much as I hate to say it, they're moving forward with some interesting ideas. Sure, those ideas aren't original (what is?) but the key is that they have a direction and purpose.
</i>
Ok now I know youre ranting randomly. 2 days ago I booted knoppix on a clients system just to download network card drivers from the internet so he could use the internet. The whole family loved the look of KDE and I ended up giving them a cd copy.
Who is more innovative in networking now. Think of tridgell's work on Samba, and its improvements over SMB. The free software communitys crawling
Linux made its way into the Xbox, and can easily make it into any system that is based on x86. Should Microsoft move to a non-x86 architecture it will be the best thing that ever happened to Linux, Apple and Sun. Microsoft will never shift from x86, and Linux can always be made to boot in face of any mod chips and drm technologies..
If nothing else, a win32 version of loadlin could be made that will replace everything in the memory with a linux kernel and boot it. All the while people would stick to their clone PCs trying out Linux once in a while. I think Microsoft execs have been smoking some Redmond grass and need to see the only leverage they have in the market is the huge pile of x86 code that wont execute anywhere else. Theres really no other reason for people not to move to Linux.
I wonder if this game resembles Return Fire.. Thats one game I miss in Linux. If I had the time, I would try to build a multiplayer version of Return Fire (not like Return Fire 2) in SDL.
Here in Canada, broadband was much faster and a little cheaper 2 years ago. Thats when telecoms actually competed. While more networks are being laid and Rogers and Sympatico are growing, their offerings have been shrinking. I think profit margins are inflating up here, and suspect the sames true down there. ATT and Bell have slowed cheap Internet on this continent.
Does it say "priscilla" in golden letters and is shiny purple all over? I dont think it would appeal to me much, I'll stick with GBA SP I think.
They used to pour money into a dotcom just because its a goodlooking dotcom, but its different now. You can buy a dotcom domain for $10, install J2EE servers, register the business and an ecommerce account and pay some marketing people, but the Investors would look at what youre trying to sell. In that sense the dotcom has merged with the rest of the industry, no longer clearly outlined as just IT. The winners should be niche markets like accounting software etc, and maybe video games would move to cottage industries, but their success would depend on their material, and they would have to fight over whats left of IT investors now.
I'm not too sure if windows XP supports ipv6 out of the box, but I know windows98, the most popularly used, doesnt. ISPs have routers that do support ipv6 but some have disabled it. I dont mind moving my LAN and servers to IPv6 if a threshold number of clients can access it, about half of all averare users, and we're not there yet. Unfortunately even for this switch, we have to wait for Microsofts move and wonder if they would introduce non-standard patented changes.
I wonder who would fork out for an OS/2 for his desktop, beside the old users with critical apps that wont run elsewhere. The features page is filled with marketing blabber and doesnt have anything a measly Windows 95 on a 486 dx4 cant do. Sure the Internet Java and XML are the future, and they can be supported by a 386 with 8 MB ram too(with Linux).
Certain people obviously do spend for OS/2... I wonder what those critical apps are, I could make money building Linux/BSD/win32 app upgrades there.
Dreamcast is terriffic for its price and ability to run Linux and NetBSD off CDs. Ive always wanted to put a beowulf cluster of dreamcasts on my resume.. but have yet to buy the first dreamcast. The problem is I'm always considering PS2 that might fall in price after the PS3 is debuted, which has native Linux support. The dreamcast also has its BBA thats too expensive.. dont you just wish it had an ISA slot instead?
I'm considering upgrading my Linux workstation to SGI. Ive heard it plays doom really well.
Your headache really is switching the OS for your aunt too many times. Let her get used to OSX for a while now, dont let her try Lindows, Lycoris and Knoppix before she calls some other tech guy who reinstalls win98.
Think of the webpad my microsoft thats supposed to kill laptops....
Now think about it. People need a computer they can carry and use. It better have a monitor, drives, keyboard.. and you got a laptop. Can a PDA replace it? No too small a screen and keyboard. Increase the screen and keyboard size and youve got a picturebook. Similar to a laptop but that harddisk needs an upgrade..
So a webpad is something more expensive. People dont need it. Some might buy it. Just like the some who buy PDAs and use it for maybe 2 minutes each day for nothing really important, except maybe games, for which the laptops still the best tool.
So we will continue to see things that their makers will claim will kill the laptop and picturebook and pda and webpad and intel thingy.
Heretic scared me most during the nights... but Monkey Island series and the Indiana Jones adventure series took enormous portions of my time. Not as much as civilization did, but had a deeper impact on my head.
Unreal and Counterstrike are also notable games there. Counterstrike has completely changed the way people see FPS games now and it hasnt lost its top title in five years, and thats doing better than doom.
It simply makes too much sense. A monolithic corporation losing market to a community effort. They have tried but just cant beat the quality of software produced by the community. So they keep changing the standards, protocols etc to break interoperability with the community's efforts, but their competitors all line up behind the community and become a crude huge competitor.
So they need to do something about Linux, but badmouthing isnt working. Simply attacking RedHat doesnt work, SuSE will rise and there are dozens of other distro companies. Any marketing they do goes against them every time.. look at the 'TCO' articles by Linux zealots out there. And every MCSE out there, every computer repairman recommends Linux over Microsoft any time. The corporation is facing a slow and painful decline, with too much capital on their hands and little ideas on how to protect themselves. Even expired Microsoft employees use Linux/BSD at home.
So Microsoft attacks on the Linux community is imminent, and I mean something more effective than badmouthing the code quality and criticizing Linus's developer organization. They need companies to be unsure of Linux's quality and future. So they start looking around for a sinking Linux company that needs the dough. Heck SCO might even introduce buggy code that will get pointed to by MSNBC soon enough.
Youre Bill and youre on a sinking Titanic. What do you do?
The code that was given to IBM was given as Unix, not under GPL. SCO claims IBM released THAT code under Linux. They can release it now.. and IBM could even claim they took the code released under SCO, incorporated that GPL code into their products, but theyre not claiming that now. Theyre claiming they never did release SCO code under Linux. We dont even know what product of Linux is accused of containing tainted code.
Therefore they should be dDosed
This kinda makes DOS the champion. Even todays BIOS updates are distributed on DOS floppy disks. Care to buy a tokenring card made in 2003? The driver disk supports DOS among others.
Before DOS there was BASIC, but BASIC programs unfortunately werent interchangeable much. A commodore64 program wouldnt run on a BBC. DOS and the x86 architecture were the first hardware and OS standards that crossed the threshold. Today, Intels releasing the Itanium, but making sure the 32-bit x86 emulation works well. Microsofts releasing Windows 2003, which will still run DOS apps.
If theyre not referring to the kernel, what are they referring to??
If its not the kernel that has SCO code, theyre not really suing Linux. If they are suing patches, might be one distro or even an application. Thus they might not be suing all Linux companies. Trouble is noone knows what are they suing about, except that they have a grudge against IBM.
I hope IBM does not buy any part or share of SCO, and makes sure none of its associated subcompanies hires anyone from SCOs top management. Same should be done by RedHat, SuSE, Sun and others. Who knows how much the SCO people are getting paid by microsoft to dive the whole company into a suicide bomb, but an example must be made of them. They should not get employed by any Linux company. Its too much risk anyway.
The whole pleasure of programming in console is doing it in your text editor, and compiling it on the shell by typing make. Theres RHIDE, and EMACS does fancy compiling, but nothing beats the simplicity of joe editor + bash command line.
As for curses, try ncurses. Ive been wanting a simple replacement for these, but I suppose getting used to ncurses and working with sleepycat databasen is the way to go. Need bigger databases?? Go with Postgresql, but build a good stable foundation underneath with FreeBSD or a stable linux kernel and glibc.
I still second your claim that someone on the command line (I think here you mean text mode GUI not command line) could work faster. A well designed GUI and a person used to it can work faster than any command liner. Fewer keys to press.
Since we have to pay for it, they should really offer something worth $70 over other free distros. Firstly, if they can somehow offer the drivers with the package, nvidia, tokenring in default installs, they'd be QUITE different.
But I would personally pay for a distro that can completely strip down the binaries, even stripping off READMEs and man pages, and compiling it optimised for size. Knoppix is one awesome distro that can detect most hardware, and comes with so much command line utilities, but something that can beat that would be worth 70.
Should you ever need to get tokenring cards here in Toronto, they cost about $2 each.. good working PCI cards with Linux/Solaris drivers available. A 16-port 10mbps hub cost me $14, and there was a pile where they were selling em. 2500 series Cisco routers that interface between TR and eth are about $250 used, and all this goes well with the Pentium 1 machines people are throwning out with their spring cleaning. Care for a cheap beowulf?
Glad you asked.
I have been trying the madge mk2, mk3, bm2, and olicom 3140 PCI cards with kernels 2.2, 2.4 and 2.5. I have tried the builtin kernel drivers, madge drivers version 231, 241, and the olicom drivers.
They all work fine as a single card in the system. But I have been trying to use them in the SNAT, a 3com 3c59x is connected to a dsl modem. The most common crashes occur with 2 different counter strike hosts inside the LAN updating the servers. netstat shows enormous connections, so I increased conntrack_limit all the way to 65536. Note: the number of connections still does not exceed this limit.
Another problem is when I'm downloading large files from fast (close) servers. Downloading multiple files from fileplanet for instance crashes the server. In almost ALL servers.. the crash symbols are tokenring receive buffers, But Ive seen crashes in the transmit buffer, and in the 3com receive buffer. The same setup works perfectly between two ethernet cards.
Another fact may help.. Putting in 3 network cards.. a tokenring, ethernet and an arcnet card crashes the server more frequently. And another fact... I get the same crash in FreeBSD with a much lower frequency.. once a month say (in linux is about once every two days or under high traffic).
Now I am running the network under Solaris x86 8 01/01, with an uptime of 3 months. madge has been releasing official drivers for Solaris, but all drivers for FreeBSD and Linux versions are beta. I am running Linux hosts with these drivers with no problems (occasional drop out of the ring no big deal), but cant do that in the firewall.
The firewall is a pentium 200mmx with 64mb ram. I have tried slackware 8, debian and redhat 8. I have also tried several different cards of the same model and a different server of the same approximate specs.
Currently I'm working on 231/241 madge drivers, cleaning up some code and possibly making new drivers for the kernel.
Game makers have been rushing to make everything 3D and support directx9 opengl and the fancy nvidia, ati extensions. Companies are no longer focusing on the storyline and art so much.
Even lucasarts were'nt immune to this. Remember what they did to monkey island?? Monkey Island 3 was a big success, at least for an adventure game, but then there was the obscene monkey island 4, made in 3d, dysfunctional and uninteresting.
I occasionally play sonic2, wonderboy and some atari, commodore64 games. Theres nothing wrong with a good sidescroller or adventure game and they still have their own place. But game developers are focused elsewhere.
Until I realize I am the only one around with the biggest pile of tokenring cards and hubs for testing. Maybe in the summer vacation, I could work on some of the code, and try fixing the receive buffer problems. This is assuming I'm a better programmer by then.
I hope the rest of the kernel is stable as hell by the release time. Most geeks in their homes with x86 clones dont need more functionality, we need stability that kicks Solaris and BSD.