If Microsoft ditched support for RFC 822 and started using their own email, would you argue that it's their perrogative?
Yes. Ignore any RFC they want.
That they could do so and claim to be RFCxxx complaint, would be a different matter.
But they are welcome to implement whatever technologies they legitimately own, and ignore any existing technologies, even if they have a right to do so (such as RFC822).
You and I could implement an email system right now, which we both understand, and screw the rest of the world. Microsoft have the same rights.
Just because they've been shown to be not-nice-people-to-do-business-with, doesn't mean that they have to comply with every standard that the industry comes up with
So if they choose to disable features in their software, that's fine by me, especially if it's something as common as QuickTime, etc... this and their lack of (real) Java support can only push users towards non-MS browsers.
What result could you want from the court case, but for MS to initiate actions which result in people actually making a choice about their browser?
Most people I know don't know the difference between Windows and Office... I've lost count of the number of times people have claimed to be running "Windows 97".
This way, people like my mother will have a chance of seeing that just because they're using Windows from MS doesn't mean their web browsing, word-processing, or other software has to be from Redmond.
Good for you. I'm working on a tool at the moment, supposedly with a cow-orker, who is totally unmotivated (young, cocky, knows jack shit but doesn't realise it yet).
I tried to involve him, but I'm not prepared to waste my time doing the (management) job of motivating him, when I could be coding/designing.
Possibly I'd benefit from his input, could he care, but I certainly benefit from using my time to code, instead of doing management's job for them, just because they can't see how to do it. As far as I'm concerned, he can sit there eating the profits I earn, or disappear, or get a grip. I still get paid.
The UltraIIIs come with nice new toys, too - they're available in the E3800, E4800 and E6800, which can all run a cluster-in-a-box, amongst other things.
Also, many people are still using Solaris 2.6 because they like it and see no need to change. Because the UltraIIIs require Solaris 8, people get to see the new toys in that, too (IPMP - redundant network connections, and other such goodies)
discl: I work with Sun, though not for them.
I give people a phone interview before they get to come to our offices for a more in-depth interview. I ask them about their CV - "I see you've worked with A5200s - what volume management did you use?" - if they give a valid answer to that, I ask them more about that product. If they don't know, I note that, but prompt them - if they've only worked with one, they're not so likely to know what it's called, just that it's the tool they use.
There are certain things we need them to be experienced in, so I'll ask about them, if they don't know, you can normally get a feel for how easily they'll pick it up.
I'll start to ask more awkward questions as the need arises - assuming they seem to know the basics, I'll try to gague their level by asking about scenarios - ones from their experiences, things I've seen, or hypothetical situations.
If they're good with networking, I'll give them some networking problems, if they're good with storage management, I'll go into that.
There's no point asking the difference between RAID0+1 and RAID1+0 if they've never worked with RAID, but it is worth trying to catch them out - good techs enjoy the challenge if you don't try to come over as some kind of God.
The office suite that's being replaced is Applix, not Microsoft
Sun switched over from Applix to StarOffice shortly after acquiring it. As such, I and many others "have to" use StarOffice.
Now don't get me wrong - StarOffice is not going to kill MSOffice any time soon.
But if I had to use MSOffice, I'd be booting Windows just to run that app, and booting back to *nix for email, etc.
If you're using *nix anyway, it makes a lot of sense to use StarOffice - especially if everyone you *share* documents uses it.
Another point - Many businesses swap *.doc files by email, and consider them legally binding contracts, etc. Only give a customer *.pdf or equivalent un-editable document. If things get legal later on, it makes life much simpler if you can be sure they've not tampered with the document!
I'm not going to be swayed by
advertisements. Never have, never will. I doubt they'll even figure out much of a way to target me with things that interest me.
Ever bought anything? If so, have you always decided, "I need a good work shirtX store until I find one of good quality"? Or have you said, "I'll go to [ STORE Y ] because I know they'll have the price/quality I'm after?
Did STORE Y ever advertise on TV?
I find myself unconvinced by ads, but if it didn't work, companies wouldn't keep shelling out many millions of dollars for them. And sometimes brands I do buy advertise on TV. So what does that mean?
Slashdot knows their article is in their favour. That's why they advertise thinkgeek.com, not aol.com. They get more money from the advertiser, since it's targetted.
ThinkGeek get more clickthroughs from/. than they would from MSN.
If the TV channels I watch know my demographic, and can get more money for that, that's good for me.
WHY?
There are more TV channels coming up every day.
There are fixed consumer funds (ie, I've only got so much money to spend)
So there more TV channels there are, the less each of them get for advertising. Therefore, the quality of programming goes down.
I'm not giving away privacy; look at it like this: If I say I don't need a loan, I can get rid of all those crazy loan adverts on TV.
Of course, I'll get adverts still, but won't have the current situation, whereby every advert seems to be for claiming compensation, or getting a loan (presumably, to pay someone else's compensation!)
Steve
So what? Let M$ own the desktop, and let them make billions out of it.
If it weren't M$, then what? KDE? Gnome? It'd still be a monopoly, or there'd be nothing for Word Processor developers to write to.
But who out there wants to be a WP developer? Who'se innermost craving is to write the next talking paperclip? It's been done before.
Computing, as in the stuff M$ don't understand, is in the Data Centre. These places are stuffed full of Sun and HP kit, and some EMC storage, as far as the eye can see.
Now that's somewhere M$ will never get; it's where the big boys play, where no customer will accept embrace-and-extinguish, where the ultimate requirement is, "we buy this from you so long as we are not dependant on you" - open protocols.
Okay, these customers pay a lot for hardware, but they retain their FREEDOM to chose an alternate vendor of CLOSED *PLATFORMS* and code.
Try telling AT&T that their HP boxes are closed; they don't care; the HP/UX they use are similar to the Solaris their closed Sun boxes use. They can swap-and change easily; they all use the same protocols.
If the 1-800 system changed from (say) HP to (say) IBM, you as an end-user would never notice the difference.
Get out of the shallow end. Let M$ have it; let them plough millions into research of which paperclip we want today. The intelligent CS is in the high end, where nobody will take any embrace-and-extinguish suitor seriously.
So you can sniff my password - if you're within line of sight, really.
Good for you.
You can see the commands I type, but not their output.
The main users of these devices are slobs who want to stay on the sofa. You're not working on confidential data, you're surfing the net.
I get a variety of mail clients, graphical or shell, which are faster and more robust than garbage like exchange (ever try to close a multi-thousand message box? Better have something else to do for a while), as well as not being easy victims for every virus writer on the planet.
This is a very thin-ice argument, unfortunately. The two reasons Outlook is targetted, are:
It's by Microsoft, so security is a secondary issue
It's the most common mail client
It's the 2nd point which is the most significant. So saying Linux is safe from viral attacks because not enough people use it, is a poor argument to get more people to use it.
And don't fall for the "but *nix is too secure for viruses" - sure, if my "sparkz" account does something weird, then the / filesystem is safe. But if I can write to my data, I can trash it. So everyone's still vulnerable to viral attacks, Linux is currently pretty safe because it's such a small part of the email and web user-base.
Netscape is utterly stable, when you discount Java, which I have off on ALL platforms due to that instability
Now there's a thing... Does anyone else have Netscape timing out on DNS lookups (regardless of nsswitch.conf) on startup, but behaving fine afterwards?
Or is it just me?
I use Konqueror for much stuff, anyway, but testing web pages, I NTK it works with Netscap.
Not taken as flamebait here, don't worry. I agree with your gripes about X.
I can't say the opposite for Windows, though.
Today I installed DirectX 8 onto Windows, and after installing (using totally bizarre dialogs to give me the progress, and no indication as to how far through the whole process it had got), I expected the normal "Do you want to restart Windows now? (Yes/No)", I got "Press OK to restart Windows (OK)".
This is not just a break from the standard "Ohmigod! Something changed, reboot now or later" dialog, it would force many users into rebooting immediately, regardless of whether or not that was convenient.
And don't get me started on the "File | Save" and "File | Open" dialogs. It's kind of convenient to create directories using Save, but it's not just a Save dialog anymore. More so with "File | Open".Whenever I've installed a new app on my mother's PC, I get phone calls saying, "How do I open a file in app X?", to which I reply, "How do you do it in Word?"... "File | Open"... "So how do you do it in app X?"... "Dunno"... "Take a wild guess"... "Dunno"... "File | Open"... "Oh, I see".
In my experience, nothing is intuitive to the genuinely confused. See SatireWire for details.
imagine installing a fresh copy of Debian on a Pentium, and giving it to your grandmother? My grandma's 94, and can't use a calculator. But if your grandma's never used a computer before, she's not got the Windoze history, she can learn one as easily as another.
Obviously she can't call the guys at GNOME for customer support, or the guys at KDE to ask why Konqueror isn't rending a webpage properly
And you *can* call M$?!! The only thing I've ever had is "call your OEM", even with an obvious and unfixed Windows bug. Do M$ even *have* a tech support team?!!! OTOH, I recently raised a Konqueror bug, and got back a straight answer. Admittedly, that answer was, "IE does the same, so it must be right...", but it's more than I'd get from M$.
a telnet server running, in fact its a huge security risk for the average home user And M$ win on this? Last I heard, a standard Win9x to Win2k upgrade left the Administrator password blank, a telnet server running, with the ability to set up remote Admin control.
Thats the only thing I give Windows, I can install it for my parents, show them the icon for IE, put a few games on for my Dad, show him the icons, show my mom the "Word" icon, and how to print, and they're set, happy and have little problems.. I only need to teach them when blue screens pop up, or things lock up, press the reset button and start over.
So why can't you show them the icon for Konqueror, Mozilla, Netscrape or Opera, and the icon for StarOffice, AbiWord or KOffice?
For myself, I [have to] use StarOffice at work. It crashes more than M$ Office under Solaris, less under Windows, and is totally stable under Linux (though thrashes the disk most under Linux).
Now I must admit, that my parents both use Win9x, as does my wife. My folks are both (I don't get this one myself...) into digital cameras and camcorders, and I know of nothing under Linux which will do this at all. My wife just refuses on basic principles: Linux takes up all your free time, so I want nothing to do with it...
the intensely irritating "Period"
That's be the ". Period." Or, "period Period period". As an English English-speaker, I find this intensely annoying. But anyway...
the UI differences between different versions of MS Office are often greater than those between MS Office and StarOffice
I've found, having now seen bits of Office2K, that there's been pretty much no change since Word 2.0 (which I used to support 600 users on!). The only real difference I've seen between Office versions is the file formats, forcing users to buy new software.
"Does it run Word?" and until this question can be answered "Yes!" (which presumably means a radically different Microsoft to the one we have now
There's nothing technical or legal to stop M$ porting Office to Linux. Office for Mac exists because there are so many Mac users out there. If M$ saw a genuine business reason to port Office to Linux, which overrode their own distaste for the development environment, then they would.
I see this as the chicken-and-egg situation; M$ won't port to it until it's got success; it won't get success until M$ port to it.
No animals were harmed in the creation of this posting.
In 1997, Tesco - the largest UK supermarket - rolled out its new "Progress" POS terminals - I know, because I installed and serviced them (for Siemens Nixdorf).
Their requirements were that it be simple and run a single application.
So what OS did they choose? Linux? Windows? OS/2?
No.
MS-DOS.
Yes, you heard right. They used DOS5, as I recall. Proprietary PCs, with the LCD touch-screens, and the appropriate drivers, but the thing ran DOS. There's no need for anything more.
Nobody would claim that DOS is a great OS (or even any kind of OS!), but it's damn' simple. It's also cheap. They used P133 CPUs, which were pretty good at the time, and the hardware was overall quite costly. The software was written specifically, so that's a major cost, too. But the OS was the cheapest part of the system.
Why bother about the OS? As the posts have (unwittingly) observed, the hardware and software are the issues; it's these two which SNI (and therefore Tesco's) spent the money on; DOS is far more stable than Windows, and simpler than Linux.
I never thought this was an area Linux was interested in; it's an area where you'd tend to go one of four ways:
a) Simple (who cares?) = DOS
b) Usable (crashes, insecure) = Windows
c) Hard to configure, hard to use = Linux
d) No config, hard to use = Embedded
I've got no problem here with SNI/Tesco's approach. Makes perfect sense.
A brief summary for those with better things to do with their time than to read two pages of drivel - and get LinuxPlanet some banner-ad hits...
Executive Summary
The author, DEP, wants good code gratis. He expects for-profit organisations to offer code for free, and non-profit orgs to do the same. The author believes that the FSF should not co-operate with for-profit orgs, despite the GPL being quite clear on its stance regarding money.
In more detail: Issue: Freedom
RMS: Free as in "speech"
DEP: I want Free as in "beer"
DEP: Eazel are a for-profit company asking for money! This is ludicrous! KDE are a non-profit org who are not asking for money!
READER: Err... point being?
DEP: These FSF idiots don't understand the word "Free"
DEP: KDE is Free by my definition; Eazel less so. Therefore the FSF shouldn't support Eazel.
Issue: GPL
DEP: And it would make an interesting case, GPLed code as an asset in a bankruptcy proceeding, wouldn't it? There is something symmetrically ironic about the GPL's first court test taking place in that milieu.
READER: And the value of WordStar without Broderbund support? The value of PowerPoint without a Microsoft? The value of Doom just because it's been around a few years?
DEP: Oh. Erm, well...
From the logic of these arguments, I can only surmise that the author (DEP) is, or expects to be, on trial for some serious crime, and is generating evidence prior to making an insanity plea.
No software product which can, under any circumstances, cause data corruption, should ever be released.
I heard recently of a claim that Oracle using SunCluster caused data corruption when the primary node PANICed. Oracle were on to it immediately, investiagting to clear their name (which they did), since under *no* circumstances should data be corrupted.
Any software which does not live up to this kind of scrutiny should never be applied. An NFS link may die; a NIS server may disappear; the whole FS could disappear from under you; if your code cannot deal with *all* error conditions, you should be shot. fd=fopen() isn't enough; check for error conditions EVERYWHERE. This is something which Ada does right; okay, nobody uses Ada, but at least you have to check for everything. This *should* be done in every circumstance in every software project.
Unfortunately, this is very rarely, if ever, true.
The SunRay does this; Sun themselves use them internally, and it's pretty good; start writing a document, visit another office, you can just borrow a SunRay (there tend to be a few public areas with SunRays lying around), swipe in and continue editing the document you were working on before. Exactly where you left off.
The drawback to this, is that a server which serves 200 people may only have 100 people logged in at a time; with this system, the sessions are kept active all the time on the server, meaning: get out a purchase order for a nice big new Sun server!
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. Ignore any RFC they want.
That they could do so and claim to be RFCxxx complaint, would be a different matter.
But they are welcome to implement whatever technologies they legitimately own, and ignore any existing technologies, even if they have a right to do so (such as RFC822).
You and I could implement an email system right now, which we both understand, and screw the rest of the world. Microsoft have the same rights.
Just because they've been shown to be not-nice-people-to-do-business-with, doesn't mean that they have to comply with every standard that the industry comes up with
So if they choose to disable features in their software, that's fine by me, especially if it's something as common as QuickTime, etc... this and their lack of (real) Java support can only push users towards non-MS browsers.
What result could you want from the court case, but for MS to initiate actions which result in people actually making a choice about their browser? ... I've lost count of the number of times people have claimed to be running "Windows 97".
Most people I know don't know the difference between Windows and Office
This way, people like my mother will have a chance of seeing that just because they're using Windows from MS doesn't mean their web browsing, word-processing, or other software has to be from Redmond.
And / must be a ExecCGI directory, of course... Add "ExecCGI" to the options of your DocumentRoot entry.
validator.w3.org has a field day with the MSNBC article!
I'm logging requests to my Apache box ... and sending them a coredump, just to add to the fun!
Good for you. I'm working on a tool at the moment, supposedly with a cow-orker, who is totally unmotivated (young, cocky, knows jack shit but doesn't realise it yet).
I tried to involve him, but I'm not prepared to waste my time doing the (management) job of motivating him, when I could be coding/designing.
Possibly I'd benefit from his input, could he care, but I certainly benefit from using my time to code, instead of doing management's job for them, just because they can't see how to do it. As far as I'm concerned, he can sit there eating the profits I earn, or disappear, or get a grip. I still get paid.
The UltraIIIs come with nice new toys, too - they're available in the E3800, E4800 and E6800, which can all run a cluster-in-a-box, amongst other things.
Also, many people are still using Solaris 2.6 because they like it and see no need to change. Because the UltraIIIs require Solaris 8, people get to see the new toys in that, too (IPMP - redundant network connections, and other such goodies)
discl: I work with Sun, though not for them.
I ask them about their CV - "I see you've worked with A5200s - what volume management did you use?" - if they give a valid answer to that, I ask them more about that product. If they don't know, I note that, but prompt them - if they've only worked with one, they're not so likely to know what it's called, just that it's the tool they use.
There are certain things we need them to be experienced in, so I'll ask about them, if they don't know, you can normally get a feel for how easily they'll pick it up.
I'll start to ask more awkward questions as the need arises - assuming they seem to know the basics, I'll try to gague their level by asking about scenarios - ones from their experiences, things I've seen, or hypothetical situations.
If they're good with networking, I'll give them some networking problems, if they're good with storage management, I'll go into that.
There's no point asking the difference between RAID0+1 and RAID1+0 if they've never worked with RAID, but it is worth trying to catch them out - good techs enjoy the challenge if you don't try to come over as some kind of God.
#include <stddiscl.h>
Sun switched over from Applix to StarOffice shortly after acquiring it. As such, I and many others "have to" use StarOffice.
Now don't get me wrong - StarOffice is not going to kill MSOffice any time soon.
But if I had to use MSOffice, I'd be booting Windows just to run that app, and booting back to *nix for email, etc.
If you're using *nix anyway, it makes a lot of sense to use StarOffice - especially if everyone you *share* documents uses it.
Another point - Many businesses swap *.doc files by email, and consider them legally binding contracts, etc. Only give a customer *.pdf or equivalent un-editable document. If things get legal later on, it makes life much simpler if you can be sure they've not tampered with the document!
#include <stddiscl.h>
Ever bought anything? If so, have you always decided, "I need a good work shirtX store until I find one of good quality"? Or have you said, "I'll go to [ STORE Y ] because I know they'll have the price/quality I'm after?
Did STORE Y ever advertise on TV?
I find myself unconvinced by ads, but if it didn't work, companies wouldn't keep shelling out many millions of dollars for them. And sometimes brands I do buy advertise on TV. So what does that mean?
#include <stddiscl.h>
ThinkGeek get more clickthroughs from
If the TV channels I watch know my demographic, and can get more money for that, that's good for me.
WHY?
-
There are more TV channels coming up every day.
-
There are fixed consumer funds (ie, I've only got so much money to spend)
-
So there more TV channels there are, the less each of them get for advertising. Therefore, the quality of programming goes down.
I'm not giving away privacy; look at it like this: If I say I don't need a loan, I can get rid of all those crazy loan adverts on TV.Of course, I'll get adverts still, but won't have the current situation, whereby every advert seems to be for claiming compensation, or getting a loan (presumably, to pay someone else's compensation!)
Steve
#include <stddiscl.h>
If it weren't M$, then what? KDE? Gnome? It'd still be a monopoly, or there'd be nothing for Word Processor developers to write to.
But who out there wants to be a WP developer? Who'se innermost craving is to write the next talking paperclip? It's been done before.
Computing, as in the stuff M$ don't understand, is in the Data Centre. These places are stuffed full of Sun and HP kit, and some EMC storage, as far as the eye can see.
Now that's somewhere M$ will never get; it's where the big boys play, where no customer will accept embrace-and-extinguish, where the ultimate requirement is, "we buy this from you so long as we are not dependant on you" - open protocols.
Okay, these customers pay a lot for hardware, but they retain their FREEDOM to chose an alternate vendor of CLOSED *PLATFORMS* and code.
Try telling AT&T that their HP boxes are closed; they don't care; the HP/UX they use are similar to the Solaris their closed Sun boxes use. They can swap-and change easily; they all use the same protocols.
If the 1-800 system changed from (say) HP to (say) IBM, you as an end-user would never notice the difference.
Get out of the shallow end. Let M$ have it; let them plough millions into research of which paperclip we want today. The intelligent CS is in the high end, where nobody will take any embrace-and-extinguish suitor seriously.
Steve.
#include <stddiscl.h>
#include <stddiscl.h>
This is a very thin-ice argument, unfortunately. The two reasons Outlook is targetted, are:
- It's by Microsoft, so security is a secondary issue
- It's the most common mail client
It's the 2nd point which is the most significant. So saying Linux is safe from viral attacks because not enough people use it, is a poor argument to get more people to use it.And don't fall for the "but *nix is too secure for viruses" - sure, if my "sparkz" account does something weird, then the / filesystem is safe. But if I can write to my data, I can trash it. So everyone's still vulnerable to viral attacks, Linux is currently pretty safe because it's such a small part of the email and web user-base.
#include <stddiscl.h>
Now there's a thing
Or is it just me?
I use Konqueror for much stuff, anyway, but testing web pages, I NTK it works with Netscap.
#include <stddiscl.h>
Not taken as flamebait here, don't worry. I agree with your gripes about X.
I can't say the opposite for Windows, though.
Today I installed DirectX 8 onto Windows, and after installing (using totally bizarre dialogs to give me the progress, and no indication as to how far through the whole process it had got), I expected the normal "Do you want to restart Windows now? (Yes/No)", I got "Press OK to restart Windows (OK)".
This is not just a break from the standard "Ohmigod! Something changed, reboot now or later" dialog, it would force many users into rebooting immediately, regardless of whether or not that was convenient.
And don't get me started on the "File | Save" and "File | Open" dialogs. It's kind of convenient to create directories using Save, but it's not just a Save dialog anymore. More so with "File | Open" .Whenever I've installed a new app on my mother's PC, I get phone calls saying, "How do I open a file in app X?", to which I reply, "How do you do it in Word?" ... "File | Open" ... "So how do you do it in app X?" ... "Dunno" ... "Take a wild guess" ... "Dunno" ... "File | Open" ... "Oh, I see".
In my experience, nothing is intuitive to the genuinely confused. See SatireWire for details.
#include <stddiscl.h>
My grandma's 94, and can't use a calculator. But if your grandma's never used a computer before, she's not got the Windoze history, she can learn one as easily as another.
Obviously she can't call the guys at GNOME for customer support, or the guys at KDE to ask why Konqueror isn't rending a webpage properly
And you *can* call M$?!! The only thing I've ever had is "call your OEM", even with an obvious and unfixed Windows bug. Do M$ even *have* a tech support team?!!! OTOH, I recently raised a Konqueror bug, and got back a straight answer. Admittedly, that answer was, "IE does the same, so it must be right...", but it's more than I'd get from M$.
a telnet server running, in fact its a huge security risk for the average home user
And M$ win on this? Last I heard, a standard Win9x to Win2k upgrade left the Administrator password blank, a telnet server running, with the ability to set up remote Admin control.
Thats the only thing I give Windows, I can install it for my parents, show them the icon for IE, put a few games on for my Dad, show him the icons, show my mom the "Word" icon, and how to print, and they're set, happy and have little problems.. I only need to teach them when blue screens pop up, or things lock up, press the reset button and start over.
Now I must admit, that my parents both use Win9x, as does my wife. My folks are both (I don't get this one myself...) into digital cameras and camcorders, and I know of nothing under Linux which will do this at all. My wife just refuses on basic principles: Linux takes up all your free time, so I want nothing to do with it...So why can't you show them the icon for Konqueror, Mozilla, Netscrape or Opera, and the icon for StarOffice, AbiWord or KOffice?
For myself, I [have to] use StarOffice at work. It crashes more than M$ Office under Solaris, less under Windows, and is totally stable under Linux (though thrashes the disk most under Linux).
#include <stddiscl.h>
the intensely irritating "Period"
That's be the ". Period." Or, "period Period period". As an English English-speaker, I find this intensely annoying. But anyway...
the UI differences between different versions of MS Office are often greater than those between MS Office and StarOffice
I've found, having now seen bits of Office2K, that there's been pretty much no change since Word 2.0 (which I used to support 600 users on!). The only real difference I've seen between Office versions is the file formats, forcing users to buy new software.
"Does it run Word?" and until this question can be answered "Yes!" (which presumably means a radically different Microsoft to the one we have now
No animals were harmed in the creation of this posting.There's nothing technical or legal to stop M$ porting Office to Linux. Office for Mac exists because there are so many Mac users out there. If M$ saw a genuine business reason to port Office to Linux, which overrode their own distaste for the development environment, then they would.
I see this as the chicken-and-egg situation; M$ won't port to it until it's got success; it won't get success until M$ port to it.
#include <stddiscl.h>
Their requirements were that it be simple and run a single application.
So what OS did they choose? Linux? Windows? OS/2?
No.
MS-DOS.
Yes, you heard right. They used DOS5, as I recall. Proprietary PCs, with the LCD touch-screens, and the appropriate drivers, but the thing ran DOS. There's no need for anything more.
Nobody would claim that DOS is a great OS (or even any kind of OS!), but it's damn' simple. It's also cheap. They used P133 CPUs, which were pretty good at the time, and the hardware was overall quite costly. The software was written specifically, so that's a major cost, too. But the OS was the cheapest part of the system.
Why bother about the OS? As the posts have (unwittingly) observed, the hardware and software are the issues; it's these two which SNI (and therefore Tesco's) spent the money on; DOS is far more stable than Windows, and simpler than Linux.
I never thought this was an area Linux was interested in; it's an area where you'd tend to go one of four ways:
a) Simple (who cares?) = DOS
b) Usable (crashes, insecure) = Windows
c) Hard to configure, hard to use = Linux
d) No config, hard to use = Embedded
I've got no problem here with SNI/Tesco's approach. Makes perfect sense.
#include <stddiscl.h>
Executive Summary
The author, DEP, wants good code gratis. He expects for-profit organisations to offer code for free, and non-profit orgs to do the same. The author believes that the FSF should not co-operate with for-profit orgs, despite the GPL being quite clear on its stance regarding money.
In more detail:
Issue: Freedom
RMS: Free as in "speech"
DEP: I want Free as in "beer"
DEP: Eazel are a for-profit company asking for money! This is ludicrous! KDE are a non-profit org who are not asking for money!
READER: Err... point being?
DEP: These FSF idiots don't understand the word "Free"
DEP: KDE is Free by my definition; Eazel less so. Therefore the FSF shouldn't support Eazel.
Issue: GPL DEP: And it would make an interesting case, GPLed code as an asset in a bankruptcy proceeding, wouldn't it? There is something symmetrically ironic about the GPL's first court test taking place in that milieu. ...
READER: And the value of WordStar without Broderbund support? The value of PowerPoint without a Microsoft? The value of Doom just because it's been around a few years?
DEP: Oh. Erm, well
From the logic of these arguments, I can only surmise that the author (DEP) is, or expects to be, on trial for some serious crime, and is generating evidence prior to making an insanity plea.
#include <stddiscl.h>
I heard recently of a claim that Oracle using SunCluster caused data corruption when the primary node PANICed. Oracle were on to it immediately, investiagting to clear their name (which they did), since under *no* circumstances should data be corrupted.
Any software which does not live up to this kind of scrutiny should never be applied. An NFS link may die; a NIS server may disappear; the whole FS could disappear from under you; if your code cannot deal with *all* error conditions, you should be shot. fd=fopen() isn't enough; check for error conditions EVERYWHERE. This is something which Ada does right; okay, nobody uses Ada, but at least you have to check for everything. This *should* be done in every circumstance in every software project.
Unfortunately, this is very rarely, if ever, true.
#include <stddiscl.h>
The drawback to this, is that a server which serves 200 people may only have 100 people logged in at a time; with this system, the sessions are kept active all the time on the server, meaning: get out a purchase order for a nice big new Sun server!
#include <stddiscl.h>
AFAIK, a USB device doesn't have a 10.x.x.x address at all; and as has been pointed out, 10.x.x.x is private from the net.
Someone clarify this to save many
#include <stddiscl.h>
Now there's a meta-quote, if ever there was....
#include <stddiscl.h>
#include <stddiscl.h>