I've been using BeOS for a while now, and while typical "control panel" tasks are handled very nicely, application installs still have a bit of work, and typically require some Unix knowledge to get right (as most everything I've seen is done in Unix style).
Is it really worth all of this construction? With Win98 there really isn't all that much damage done if they just hit the switch. I mean if you want to spend 3 or 4 days burning CD's, setting up your logging system, filesystems and configuring applications and desktop for your grandpa so he can use an OS that isn't really any better suited for his tasks than the OS that's already on his system, feel free. I don't understand why Linux users are always so masochistic when it comes to this sort of thing. Set him up with something he can use and won't take you a week to install.
I disagree entirely -- Linux is not suitable for this task.
when someone says "windows is easier", its probably because they learned windows at some point in their life, then had to set up linux from scratch/distro...
Sit someone down in front of a PC that has had zero computer experience at all. There's NO way they are going to ever be as proficient under Linux as they could be under MacOS or Windows unless they have some Linuxhead do the installation of software and administration for them.
With Macintosh/Windows, they can go into a store, buy a game, take it home, put the CD in the drive, close the drive, click 'Next' a few times (as per the directions that magically pop up on the screen), click 'Finish' and have instant access to a new piece of software.
"So have them download the software from the 'Net." Right there you open up a whole new can of worms. With IE and Windows, you can click on a link to an install file and get a nice window asking if you'd like to open that item. "Sure." Installation proceeds as above. Linux in its current state does not NEARLY meet the requirements of a "new" computer user or one who wants to do very simple, minimal tasks.
instead of having to know the PHYSICAL mapping of your drives (C:, D:, etc) which is rather pointless, you only need to understand the LOGICAL placement of files.
Where are files under Macintosh and Windows? Click on the "Computer" object (Windows). Click on the "Hard Drive" object (or "CD-ROM Drive" object). Click on the "My Documents" folder. This does not require the user to know anything about separate drive mappings, etc. To be fair, a suitably configured KDE/Gnome desktop can provide just as much abstraction, but this abstraction is not taken down to the application level. The same Gnome/KDE "objects" are replaced with application-specific dialogs that rarely bear any resemblence to that simplicity.
where are my files???
Inside "my computer." Inside my "hard drive." Inside the folder labeled "my files." "/home/grampa? how do I get there from here?"
next... in windows and mac, granpa can go in and REALLY mess up the system if he gets exploratory/lost... under unix, he logs in as a user, and can't delete/move/remove libraries, system files, programs, etc etc.. MUCH safer, with no manual set up required...
He can still do plenty of damage, mucking with application settings and any control panel available to him that does things setuid root. Any administrative time you specifically spend "securing" a Linux system from these kinds of forays could easily be spent under Windows marking things read-only or hidden, so they don't appear in folders. I imagine this would be pretty damn easy to do, also. Win98 even defaults to refusing to show you the contents of C:\Windows immediately.
next... it won't crash as often.
I won't disagree with you here, but a properly set up Windows system doesn't crash as much as people seem to think. I've had my Win98 system up for 12 days now, and my NT system at work (mainly due to the hard work of our PC support folks ensuring software and service packs we install are as stable as possible) has been up for not quite a month. If your "grandpa" isn't downloading and installing a bunch of 3rd party crap and device drivers from the 'net (like most of the windows slashdot demographic), most of his crashes will be uptime-related, and it sounds like in this case, computer activities will be limited in duration, allowing him to keep the machine turned off and turn it on only when he needs to use it.
next... security. with linux, grandpa won't have to worry about stupid things like virii, word macros jumping out to eat his system, etc...
He won't have to worry about these under Windows, either, so long as his activities (as the poster suggests) will be limited in scope to a few simple tasks. A simple background virus scanner is all that's required if he ever decides to get adventurous. I've never in my life had a computer virus under Windows. It has a lot to do with *how* you use your computer.
next... remote admin. say grampa DOES get into a bind. grandson can ssh in (you're not using telnet still, right????) and fix it from home righ then and there. much nicer than a half hour drive. for both
This is a good thing, certainly, but of course you assume this "bind" he's in won't prevent him from dialing up to his ISP. There are also "remote administration" tools available for Windows, for argument's sake.
finally... don't underestimate grandpa. after a few months of "just" word processing and web surfing, he just MIGHT want to do something a bit more.. advanced. SURPRISE! the elderly are people too. and not as slow as some of us think.
It's common knowledge that the learning curve for Linux is much higher than the learning curve for traditional operating systems like Windows and MacOS. Assuming you aren't foolishly disagreeing here, what OS do YOU think would entice people to try and learn more, one where they can grasp the basics and migrate to slightly more complex operations, or one where they have to study to grasp the basics to begin with? I guarantee people will become disenchanted with Linux and won't WANT to try and learn any further.
I'm not trying to diss Linux here. I use it as a small router/web server for my home network. I read my e-mail on it. I IRC from it. But people that are so overzealously touting Linux as the OS for Everyone and Everything need to realize that other operating systems DO beat Linux for certain tasks. I'm writing this message in IE (far superior CSS and XML support and faster than anything available for Linux) under Win98. I run my X apps (at the moment a simple xterm) remotely here (the Linux box has no keyboard/monitor). My roommate understands this concept as well (he has two PC's, one Windows and one Linux).
A lot of you started playing with Linux because it was an "alternative" and because it Did Stuff Better than the current mainstream OS's. At the same time, most of you are blinding yourselves with this "Linux is the best" crap that you are failing to see that there are ALSO alternatives to *Linux*, and some of those alternatives DO do things better than Linux. I see people saying "Don't lock yourself into one OS!" as a reason to try Linux while at the same time they're screaming to everyone "Don't use anything but Linux!" which is exactly the opposite mentality. Stop being so short-sighted that you fail to see when alternatives will be better.
Don't use an OS because you think it's cool and you want to be a l33t hacker cause it's what all the l33t hackers use. Use what's best for the task.
But data users are the norm nowadays when you consider total phone usage (residential AND business use).
I think that's the heart of the matter right there. By your logic, then, would it have been acceptable when the total line usage by data users had been minimal? When that usage exceeds that of normal voice traffic, it's no longer OK for data users to pay more?
You might as well say, why should Granny Mae pay for phone upgrades to the LD network when she only makes local calls, or why to pay for supporting touch-tone dialing when she still uses her ol' rotary phone.
I don't know about your phone company, but Southwestern Bell *does* charge extra for these features. They're all part of their "standard" calling package, but if you ask them for an extremely minimal service, you'll find that you CAN remove things like touch tone, long distance access and flat-rate service.
I see your point, but if you use the "by-the-majority" mentality for determining who pays what, as soon as the amount of data traffic started exceeding the voice traffic (an assumption by you I'm not fully ready to believe just yet without real data), the phone company should have started basing their flat rates on data usage instead of voice usage, which would have instantly easily tripled your phone bill (or more).
The fact is, data calls are being billed at voice rates. Back when voice traffic was all there was, the phone company based their capacity and flat rates on the resources the average telephone user consumed during the average month. Data users by far are not "average" users, as they use up many many times the amount of resources non-data users use. As far as I'm concerned, the phone company did data users a *favor* by continuing to use their existing flat rate service regardless of the traffic.
Rather than switching to metered rates, the phone companies bit the bullet at first and dipped into their profits to increase the capacity of their networks so that people would not be getting "all circuits are busy" recordings when they tried to make a legitimate voice phone call. To get themselves back into the profit-making game, I imagine telephone flat rates slowly started climbing to make up for the difference.
I think ISDN behaves pretty much like a normal phone line. A virtual circuit is established to make a call and it's torn down when the call ends. As far as metered rates, it depends on your phone company. Some do, some don't. When I had ISDN it was a flat rate (very nice).
With DSL, though, I think everything is built for 24/7 connectivity, and even your voice calls are handled with data packets. I'm not 100% sure about this, though. Maybe somebody else has a better idea. If this is the case, though, DSL might not be taxed as a normal phone line via your ISP (like cable modems)...
Microsoft can "secretly" (or publicly for that matter) port the hell out of GPL'ed tools, mangle them, and use them throughout Microsoft in binary-only form and they wouldn't be doing anything wrong.
The reason they are in the clear is they are not DISTRIBUTING these modified versions of the GPL'ed software. They are using them internally for proprietary projects, which is perfectly fine, legal, and even desirable.
Second, in Linux, it's very uncommon to see programs installing their own libraries. This is quite common on NT.
This is very true. I think the practice of applications shipping with their own hacked up versions of pretty standard DLL's is a horrible practice.
I rather like the method RPM uses, by versioning everything and using a list of dependencies to discover when something can/can't be installed or removed. Very effective, but potentially cumbersome for use in Windows where installations are typically pointy-clicky.
Mainly I was just pointing out that a poorly administered Linux system can be just as difficult as a poorly administered NT system. Fortunately for Linux, though, learning how to use the tools and how to run the system will get you ALL the way to stability (since you CAN prevent conflicts mentioned above), whereas the same under NT will only get you half-way there, since the applications themselves are responsible for the conflicts, and it's currently a pain in the ass for any administrator to track it down and repair it.
But the last NT machine I saw still needed reboots 4-5 times a day.
5 reboots a day, at, say, 5-10 minutes of lost time per reboot is 25-50 minutes/day of lost time. With a salary of $30k, that's upwards of $12/day in lost revenue, or about $4400/year. You'd think this would cover the cost of "more mainstream" hardware and perhaps, depending on the number of machines, the salary of an extra PC support guy specifically to test the reliability of software and fixes, yes?:)
I don't really think the physical property argument flies at all as a valid analogy, for this reason.
The DNS system is unique in this respect. I can think of no good analogies. It's like property in some respects while being a title/name subject to existing IP laws in another.
In Windows, you have dozens of things conflicting with each others (something you notice yourself), and make things terribly fragile. I have yet to see a single such conflict in Linux, after having used lots of different distributions on lots of different machines.
It's not uncommon that I find incompatible libraries (especially in the early days of GTK/GDK). The transition to glibc was a painful one, and resulted in lots of broken apps. I've had more trouble in the past with Linux library incompatibilities than I've ever had with Windows DLL incompatibilities. Of course, since I started using RPM's exclusively and stopped compiling my own stuff when I didn't need to, those have largely been eliminated, since the RPM system keeps track of versions of things like that and knows when something needs to be upgraded and when not.
Second, using `mainstream hardware' isn't always feasible. Some PCs simply don't come with mainstream hardware, and you'll just have to live with it.
Oh, I agree, but if you're building an NT system, this needs to be a consideration. If you feel you need to cut corners, you do so at the potential expense of stability. Like I said, I'm mentioning this from the POV of a large corporate structure, where the resources exist to get lots of PC's with precisely the hardware we need.
BTW, a crashing module does _not_ crash the kernel.
Back when people were talking about the GPL and how Linus had made an exception re: the kernel that allowed vendors to supply binary-only kernel modules, I always heard one of the major arguments against this was the fact that, since there was no code/quality review of the modules, there was a good chance of inserting buggy code into the kernel and causing the system to crash. I've never personally had a module crash on me (but then I tend to stick with production kernels), but I was always told that the introduction of a buggy module meant the kernel could become unstable.
But if things work as you say they do, then I agree, this isn't so much of a problem. I guess I was misinformed. Though I do imagine that some of these binary/buggy modules could leave hardware in an unstable state, where simply re-loading the module won't bring the services back. Things like video cards and multimedia devices tend to be relatively tempermental like this.
Third, what's the point of a bugfix if you shouldn't install it?
The PC support folks treat service packs like any other new version of software. They wait until it can be thoroughally tested on reference machines and don't introduce instability (as has been the case on occasion). It's all about caution.
While it's important to have stable software, you should also keep in mind that the time spent recovering from a crashing program is much lower than that of a crashed machine.
In the "extreme" corporate setting like where I work, this isn't necessarily the case. A relatively small amount of testing and evaluation by a relatively select staff combined with the fact that all of our PC's are essentially homogenous when it comes to brands and type of hardware lets us do this rather effectively, since we have a lot of employees under this umbrella.
Exactly, except the difference would be that.tm items would *have* to be registered as a trademark at the level they're registering. AFAIK,.co.uk is effectively the same as.com. This would have the benefit of more or less *forcing* companies to act within the scope of their market and no further. There would never be competition for domains between the Corner Store in Hickville (corner-store.hickville.tx.us) and the national Corner Store, Inc. chain (corner-store.tm.us).
Plus, since two-letter state abbreviations are already given priority under the.us domain,.co.us = Colorado. But yah, the general idea is the same.
The point I was trying to make was that property is not available at fixed rates, regardless of its strategic value at the time. Domains are offered on a first-come, first-served basis with no regards to actual value. This is where the analogy fails. I was simply trying to twist it around to where it made more sense.
I would have no problem getting rid of generic TLD's entirely and moving everything into country codes.
Unfortunately the.us TLD is 100% geopolitical. In order to register Microsoft, you would have to put it at microsoft.redmond.wa.us, which is rather unwieldy, especially for those that don't know where MS's headquarters are.
What if an additional subdomain under.us were created, say.tm. Items trademarked at the national level would have reserved domain names amounting like "microsoft.tm.us." Things at more local levels would be handled like "bobs-garage.tm.mytown.tx.us." (or just bobs-garage.mytown.tx.us in the absense of a local trademark, assuming such a thing exists).
Unfortunately, this doesn't cover the possibility of "dual" trademarks. AFAIK, some construction company can be named "Microsoft Construction, Inc.", for example, and might be just as entitled to that microsoft.tm.us domain. At this point I suppose it's possible to stick with the "first come, first served" policy and force subsequent registrants to modify the name slightly (e.g. microsoft-construction.tm.us).
The analogy is flawed to begin with, but if we have to use it, it would be more akin to this:
All unused acres of land belong to the government, which sells that land at a fixed rate of $50 an acre. Company X owns 1 acre someplace, where their new corporate headquarters exists. An adjacent Acre Y lies between Company X and the nearest highway. There is a sign marked "Company X" on Acre Y. Squatter Z comes along and buys Acre Y between Company X's headquarters and the nearest highway at $50, before Company X had a chance to. Company X has little choice but to buy Acre Y from Squatter Z in order to efficiently reach the highway, and to keep people from being confused as they exit the highway seeing the sign marked "Company X" on the adjacent Acre Y. Squatter Z charges an obscenely high rate.
Do you think this is particularly fair? If Acre Y had been priced for what it was worth (what Company X had been willing to pay), or had been auctioned off, Squatter Z wouldn't have had a chance. Real estate today goes by market value. You cannot buy a piece of land and sell it next week for a 10000% profit.
If a domain name has little value when it is purchased, "speculating" is perfectly fine. Generic names like "business.com" and "shopping.com" I have no problem with people buying and trying to sell. When somebody takes the name of a KNOWN trademark, they are taking ADVANTAGE of the system by purchasing it for a value much less than what the domain is actually worth and re-selling it at that higher rate. It reeks of unethical business practice.
An interesting page, but here are a few questions/points:
So you have this enormous volume of people that have been elected (with at least 1 vote). Will these people "rule" from their homes, or will they be required to live in DC? How are they made accountable for their votes and actions if they are not physically present?
Your proposal begins to sound an awful lot like a direct democracy (with people being able to exercise the option of proxy by "voting" for somebody else to vote for them). One of the main strengths of the representative nature of our government is that we effectively *pay* our representatives to educate themselves on legislation and to act with our interests in mind. If you require all of our representatives to hold "day jobs," how can you ensure that even our more highly-voted-for representatives can find the time to devote to legislating?
A possible answer would be to allow people to change their votes at any time. When a representative does something against the wishes of those who have voted for him, votes would shift, decreasing the value of that representative (or removing him from office altogether).
It sounds like this idea would be horribly complex no matter how you managed to do it.
To be honest, it sounds like this style of governing might be more appropriate at a more local level (community, city, county or (at most) state), where the sheer bulk of people with votes will be manageable.
Agreed. If you dislike the fact that companies are allowed to buy influence in your representatives, make it clear that you will not vote for somebody that takes the interests of a cash contributor over that of the normal constituents.
Remember: No amount of cash can help an election candidate if nobody will vote for them.
This all goes back to the whole lack of an informed public, which might not make this as effective as you'd hope, but if enough people write letters expressing this sentiment, you can bet your representatives will listen.
So long as the "authors" can remain unbiased (rare on Slashdot) and leave the bias to the comments and posts, I think a medium like that would be a great way to disseminate information about candidates and legislation.
We desperately need a place where people can go to get ALL of the information about election candidates (instead of just the biased advertising we see on TV) in one easy place. Nobody watches debates anymore because they tend to be long-winded and full of BS and evasion. Have standardized templates for describing candidates as unbiased as is possible.
Likewise with upcoming legislation. On Slashdot whenever we see an "alert" about some evil piece of legislation, it's usually the result of somebody reading a biased/uninformed take on the legislation, reporting it to Slashdot, which then takes it and posts an "article" with at least as much bias as the original report. Only in the comments do we see people say, "Uhh, this isn't as bad as you guys seem to make it out to be. Why don't you read the legislation first?" Ideally, a site like this would eliminate such confusion by providing a clear, concise plain-english description of the legislation. Phrases like "big brother" would be forbidden. Let the subsequent threads of comments be the bias.
Have the site pay for itself via non-political advertising.
I've been playing with this idea for a while, but nobody seems to think it's worth pursuing.. Unfortunately something like this is very difficult to just "start up" due to the fact that it would need to cover a lot of stuff in as much depth as possible (which means we'd need legal and political experts behind us in some fashion (NOT for the purpose of editorializing or making predictions, but for understanding what it is we're seeing, etc.)).
I work in a severe corporate environment, so much that we aren't even "allowed" to upgrade system components (like service packs) or device drivers on our NT systems.
You might at first think this is horribly inefficient and a sucky way to manage (or let others manage) their systems, but it does have one tremendous payoff:
Our NT systems are collectively as stable as any Windows-based PC I've ever seen. I am forced to reboot my PC on average once every month, sometimes longer. Usually this is due to a memory leak of some kind (source unknown) where I start getting messages about insufficient resources.
People constantly bitch and moan about daily reboots (it's frequent that they're exaggarating, but that's beside the point), but if you manage your system cautiously, things like this don't happen.
Use mainstream hardware. Hardware that is popular and well-supported in the market will have the greatest chance of having bug-free device drivers under NT. It's usually the device drivers that cause blue-screens. This would be equivalent to using binary-only Linux modules. If these are the least bit buggy, your "stable" Linux kernel thus behaves buggy, and will crash.
Don't install experimental, unreviewed software or bug fixes. The reason our PC's are "managed" by the PC support people is that they are constantly reviewing released fixes and the latest versions of major pieces of software (such as Internet Explorer, Office, etc.) to ensure stability. If a product in its current form causes problems and conflicts, it is not permitted to be installed on the PC's. To this day IE's Active Desktop and even Outlook 98 are on this list. Of course, you're free to install these things if you like (I have IE5 and Outlook98 on my PC), but it's generally a Good Idea to trust your PC support folks. If they say a particular application is causing problems, it probably is.
If you don't have a PC support department of your own, just be cautious. Don't install a new release/version of an application immediately. Wait a few months to see what the reviews are like. Monitor the release of updates and bug fixes.
Under Linux, people are under the misconception that things like buggy software don't matter as much, since the Linux Kernel stays afloat.
This isn't entirely the best way to look at things. Sure, the kernel is A-OK, but is your WORK ENVIRONMENT the same? If you tickle a bug that brings your KDE/Gnome desktop down, is this really all that different from a Win* crash? You've still lost your GUI applications' data. In all fairness, though, if a large application dies under NT, there's a pretty decent chance you're about to experience some more evilness from NT, whereas under Linux, if a non-critical application dies, you're usually pretty safe. This may change for the worst, though, as we start seeing more "core" applications running providing services to other user applications. If there's a bug in the core or a bug in an application that the core doesn't know how to handle, it could just as easily bring your environment down.
Is it really worth all of this attention?
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I don't see what all of the fuss is about.. It's an obscure government-sponsored anti-computer crime campaign. It's obviously low-budget and if it hadn't been posted here on Slashdot I doubt many people would have ever heard about it.
So it's dumbing stuff down. So what? The target audience is children, not us. If you really think they need to mention some other stuff on the site, why don't you try writing them an e-mail instead of whining on Slashdot and bashing the "evil government". Or is that all these YRO pieces are about nowadays?
The constant repetition of "boys and girls" was annoying as hell, too.
I've heard tell about some sort of IO standard that Intel's been pushing of late that supposedly 'replaces all current bus technology'. Anybody know more about this?
I personally am looking forward to hearing more about Jini, which is Sun's initiative to do to hardware what Java is doing to software.
Basically, they move the device abstraction out of the OS driver and into the device itself. So you basically plug a Jini-enabled device into the network, and it immediately registers itself and makes its services available to other devices on the network.
No OS-specific drivers, no kludges/workarounds. Things just "work".
Hmm.. Good point. Perhaps this is our way of maintaining genetic diversity.
Traits that are a major hinderance result in death. People with traits that result in minor problems (ill health, low mental facilities) tend to mate with others like them at an increased rate.
So you basically have more above-average PEOPLE mating at normal rates, but less below-average people MATING at higher rates, so it all balances out and the net result is a relatively diverse gene pool.
However, there was a case a couple years ago of a hacker in Brazil (I think), who hacked Harvard and a couple other places. They caught him by setting up some kind of 'intelligent' program that recognized and filtered his keystroke/traffic from everyone elses on a router, or backbone, or something to that effect.
This was done with Harvard's (obvious) consent. As it would then be a privately owned network (not given "common carrier" status awarded to our lovely telephone networks), it would not be considered to be any form of privacy invasion (legally).
You're only awarded protections against unauthorized searches/wiretaps when it comes to public networks. Your ISP/private university can choose to let the FBI see whatever they want. (At least that's how I understand things.)
Most (all?) of this influence occurs at the legislative level, which is in fact one of the most open aspects of our government, open to all sorts of public scrutiny. Is this where your mistrust lies, or are you alluding to some other area of evil corporate influence?
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I've been using BeOS for a while now, and while typical "control panel" tasks are handled very nicely, application installs still have a bit of work, and typically require some Unix knowledge to get right (as most everything I've seen is done in Unix style).
but why bother when all you have to say is "This is your username and password, use them to log on."
Or "When you see the screen asking for your logon, just type 'go.'" No password needed. *shrug*.
I'm also pretty sure it'd be a small matter to hack up xdm/xlogin/whatever it is and just have it automatically login without prompting.
Is it really worth all of this construction? With Win98 there really isn't all that much damage done if they just hit the switch. I mean if you want to spend 3 or 4 days burning CD's, setting up your logging system, filesystems and configuring applications and desktop for your grandpa so he can use an OS that isn't really any better suited for his tasks than the OS that's already on his system, feel free. I don't understand why Linux users are always so masochistic when it comes to this sort of thing. Set him up with something he can use and won't take you a week to install.
I disagree entirely -- Linux is not suitable for this task.
.. advanced. SURPRISE! the elderly are people too. and not as slow as some of us think.
when someone says "windows is easier", its probably because they learned windows at some point in their life, then had to set up linux from scratch/distro...
Sit someone down in front of a PC that has had zero computer experience at all. There's NO way they are going to ever be as proficient under Linux as they could be under MacOS or Windows unless they have some Linuxhead do the installation of software and administration for them.
With Macintosh/Windows, they can go into a store, buy a game, take it home, put the CD in the drive, close the drive, click 'Next' a few times (as per the directions that magically pop up on the screen), click 'Finish' and have instant access to a new piece of software.
"So have them download the software from the 'Net." Right there you open up a whole new can of worms. With IE and Windows, you can click on a link to an install file and get a nice window asking if you'd like to open that item. "Sure." Installation proceeds as above. Linux in its current state does not NEARLY meet the requirements of a "new" computer user or one who wants to do very simple, minimal tasks.
instead of having to know the PHYSICAL mapping of your drives (C:, D:, etc) which is rather pointless, you only need to understand the LOGICAL placement of files.
Where are files under Macintosh and Windows? Click on the "Computer" object (Windows). Click on the "Hard Drive" object (or "CD-ROM Drive" object). Click on the "My Documents" folder. This does not require the user to know anything about separate drive mappings, etc. To be fair, a suitably configured KDE/Gnome desktop can provide just as much abstraction, but this abstraction is not taken down to the application level. The same Gnome/KDE "objects" are replaced with application-specific dialogs that rarely bear any resemblence to that simplicity.
where are my files???
Inside "my computer." Inside my "hard drive." Inside the folder labeled "my files." "/home/grampa? how do I get there from here?"
next... in windows and mac, granpa can go in and REALLY mess up the system if he gets exploratory/lost... under unix, he logs in as a user, and can't delete/move/remove libraries, system files, programs, etc etc.. MUCH safer, with no manual set up required...
He can still do plenty of damage, mucking with application settings and any control panel available to him that does things setuid root. Any administrative time you specifically spend "securing" a Linux system from these kinds of forays could easily be spent under Windows marking things read-only or hidden, so they don't appear in folders. I imagine this would be pretty damn easy to do, also. Win98 even defaults to refusing to show you the contents of C:\Windows immediately.
next... it won't crash as often.
I won't disagree with you here, but a properly set up Windows system doesn't crash as much as people seem to think. I've had my Win98 system up for 12 days now, and my NT system at work (mainly due to the hard work of our PC support folks ensuring software and service packs we install are as stable as possible) has been up for not quite a month. If your "grandpa" isn't downloading and installing a bunch of 3rd party crap and device drivers from the 'net (like most of the windows slashdot demographic), most of his crashes will be uptime-related, and it sounds like in this case, computer activities will be limited in duration, allowing him to keep the machine turned off and turn it on only when he needs to use it.
next... security. with linux, grandpa won't have to worry about stupid things like virii, word macros jumping out to eat his system, etc...
He won't have to worry about these under Windows, either, so long as his activities (as the poster suggests) will be limited in scope to a few simple tasks. A simple background virus scanner is all that's required if he ever decides to get adventurous. I've never in my life had a computer virus under Windows. It has a lot to do with *how* you use your computer.
next... remote admin. say grampa DOES get into a bind. grandson can ssh in (you're not using telnet still, right????) and fix it from home righ then and there. much nicer than a half hour drive. for both
This is a good thing, certainly, but of course you assume this "bind" he's in won't prevent him from dialing up to his ISP. There are also "remote administration" tools available for Windows, for argument's sake.
finally... don't underestimate grandpa. after a few months of "just" word processing and web surfing, he just MIGHT want to do something a bit more
It's common knowledge that the learning curve for Linux is much higher than the learning curve for traditional operating systems like Windows and MacOS. Assuming you aren't foolishly disagreeing here, what OS do YOU think would entice people to try and learn more, one where they can grasp the basics and migrate to slightly more complex operations, or one where they have to study to grasp the basics to begin with? I guarantee people will become disenchanted with Linux and won't WANT to try and learn any further.
I'm not trying to diss Linux here. I use it as a small router/web server for my home network. I read my e-mail on it. I IRC from it. But people that are so overzealously touting Linux as the OS for Everyone and Everything need to realize that other operating systems DO beat Linux for certain tasks. I'm writing this message in IE (far superior CSS and XML support and faster than anything available for Linux) under Win98. I run my X apps (at the moment a simple xterm) remotely here (the Linux box has no keyboard/monitor). My roommate understands this concept as well (he has two PC's, one Windows and one Linux).
A lot of you started playing with Linux because it was an "alternative" and because it Did Stuff Better than the current mainstream OS's. At the same time, most of you are blinding yourselves with this "Linux is the best" crap that you are failing to see that there are ALSO alternatives to *Linux*, and some of those alternatives DO do things better than Linux. I see people saying "Don't lock yourself into one OS!" as a reason to try Linux while at the same time they're screaming to everyone "Don't use anything but Linux!" which is exactly the opposite mentality. Stop being so short-sighted that you fail to see when alternatives will be better.
Don't use an OS because you think it's cool and you want to be a l33t hacker cause it's what all the l33t hackers use. Use what's best for the task.
But data users are the norm nowadays when you consider total phone usage (residential AND business use).
I think that's the heart of the matter right there. By your logic, then, would it have been acceptable when the total line usage by data users had been minimal? When that usage exceeds that of normal voice traffic, it's no longer OK for data users to pay more?
You might as well say, why should Granny Mae pay for phone upgrades to the LD network when she only makes local calls, or why to pay for supporting touch-tone dialing when she still uses her ol' rotary phone.
I don't know about your phone company, but Southwestern Bell *does* charge extra for these features. They're all part of their "standard" calling package, but if you ask them for an extremely minimal service, you'll find that you CAN remove things like touch tone, long distance access and flat-rate service.
I see your point, but if you use the "by-the-majority" mentality for determining who pays what, as soon as the amount of data traffic started exceeding the voice traffic (an assumption by you I'm not fully ready to believe just yet without real data), the phone company should have started basing their flat rates on data usage instead of voice usage, which would have instantly easily tripled your phone bill (or more).
The fact is, data calls are being billed at voice rates. Back when voice traffic was all there was, the phone company based their capacity and flat rates on the resources the average telephone user consumed during the average month. Data users by far are not "average" users, as they use up many many times the amount of resources non-data users use. As far as I'm concerned, the phone company did data users a *favor* by continuing to use their existing flat rate service regardless of the traffic.
Rather than switching to metered rates, the phone companies bit the bullet at first and dipped into their profits to increase the capacity of their networks so that people would not be getting "all circuits are busy" recordings when they tried to make a legitimate voice phone call. To get themselves back into the profit-making game, I imagine telephone flat rates slowly started climbing to make up for the difference.
I'm an American and I think he had quite a valid point.
So now are you going to find some way to insult me and my country in order to make your point?
I think ISDN behaves pretty much like a normal phone line. A virtual circuit is established to make a call and it's torn down when the call ends. As far as metered rates, it depends on your phone company. Some do, some don't. When I had ISDN it was a flat rate (very nice).
With DSL, though, I think everything is built for 24/7 connectivity, and even your voice calls are handled with data packets. I'm not 100% sure about this, though. Maybe somebody else has a better idea. If this is the case, though, DSL might not be taxed as a normal phone line via your ISP (like cable modems)...
There is no violation.
Microsoft can "secretly" (or publicly for that matter) port the hell out of GPL'ed tools, mangle them, and use them throughout Microsoft in binary-only form and they wouldn't be doing anything wrong.
The reason they are in the clear is they are not DISTRIBUTING these modified versions of the GPL'ed software. They are using them internally for proprietary projects, which is perfectly fine, legal, and even desirable.
Second, in Linux, it's very uncommon to see programs installing their own libraries. This is quite common on NT.
:)
This is very true. I think the practice of applications shipping with their own hacked up versions of pretty standard DLL's is a horrible practice.
I rather like the method RPM uses, by versioning everything and using a list of dependencies to discover when something can/can't be installed or removed. Very effective, but potentially cumbersome for use in Windows where installations are typically pointy-clicky.
Mainly I was just pointing out that a poorly administered Linux system can be just as difficult as a poorly administered NT system. Fortunately for Linux, though, learning how to use the tools and how to run the system will get you ALL the way to stability (since you CAN prevent conflicts mentioned above), whereas the same under NT will only get you half-way there, since the applications themselves are responsible for the conflicts, and it's currently a pain in the ass for any administrator to track it down and repair it.
But the last NT machine I saw still needed reboots 4-5 times a day.
5 reboots a day, at, say, 5-10 minutes of lost time per reboot is 25-50 minutes/day of lost time. With a salary of $30k, that's upwards of $12/day in lost revenue, or about $4400/year. You'd think this would cover the cost of "more mainstream" hardware and perhaps, depending on the number of machines, the salary of an extra PC support guy specifically to test the reliability of software and fixes, yes?
I don't really think the physical property argument flies at all as a valid analogy, for this reason.
The DNS system is unique in this respect. I can think of no good analogies. It's like property in some respects while being a title/name subject to existing IP laws in another.
In Windows, you have dozens of things conflicting with each others (something you notice yourself), and make things terribly fragile. I have yet to see a single such conflict in Linux, after having used lots of different distributions on lots of different machines.
It's not uncommon that I find incompatible libraries (especially in the early days of GTK/GDK). The transition to glibc was a painful one, and resulted in lots of broken apps. I've had more trouble in the past with Linux library incompatibilities than I've ever had with Windows DLL incompatibilities. Of course, since I started using RPM's exclusively and stopped compiling my own stuff when I didn't need to, those have largely been eliminated, since the RPM system keeps track of versions of things like that and knows when something needs to be upgraded and when not.
Second, using `mainstream hardware' isn't always feasible. Some PCs simply don't come with mainstream hardware, and you'll just have to live with it.
Oh, I agree, but if you're building an NT system, this needs to be a consideration. If you feel you need to cut corners, you do so at the potential expense of stability. Like I said, I'm mentioning this from the POV of a large corporate structure, where the resources exist to get lots of PC's with precisely the hardware we need.
BTW, a crashing module does _not_ crash the kernel.
Back when people were talking about the GPL and how Linus had made an exception re: the kernel that allowed vendors to supply binary-only kernel modules, I always heard one of the major arguments against this was the fact that, since there was no code/quality review of the modules, there was a good chance of inserting buggy code into the kernel and causing the system to crash. I've never personally had a module crash on me (but then I tend to stick with production kernels), but I was always told that the introduction of a buggy module meant the kernel could become unstable.
But if things work as you say they do, then I agree, this isn't so much of a problem. I guess I was misinformed. Though I do imagine that some of these binary/buggy modules could leave hardware in an unstable state, where simply re-loading the module won't bring the services back. Things like video cards and multimedia devices tend to be relatively tempermental like this.
Third, what's the point of a bugfix if you shouldn't install it?
The PC support folks treat service packs like any other new version of software. They wait until it can be thoroughally tested on reference machines and don't introduce instability (as has been the case on occasion). It's all about caution.
While it's important to have stable software, you should also keep in mind that the time spent recovering from a crashing program is much lower than that of a crashed machine.
In the "extreme" corporate setting like where I work, this isn't necessarily the case. A relatively small amount of testing and evaluation by a relatively select staff combined with the fact that all of our PC's are essentially homogenous when it comes to brands and type of hardware lets us do this rather effectively, since we have a lot of employees under this umbrella.
Exactly, except the difference would be that .tm items would *have* to be registered as a trademark at the level they're registering. AFAIK, .co.uk is effectively the same as .com. This would have the benefit of more or less *forcing* companies to act within the scope of their market and no further. There would never be competition for domains between the Corner Store in Hickville (corner-store.hickville.tx.us) and the national Corner Store, Inc. chain (corner-store.tm.us).
.us domain, .co.us = Colorado. But yah, the general idea is the same.
Plus, since two-letter state abbreviations are already given priority under the
This rebuttal seems a bit unrealistic.
I stated as much.
The point I was trying to make was that property is not available at fixed rates, regardless of its strategic value at the time. Domains are offered on a first-come, first-served basis with no regards to actual value. This is where the analogy fails. I was simply trying to twist it around to where it made more sense.
I would have no problem getting rid of generic TLD's entirely and moving everything into country codes.
.us TLD is 100% geopolitical. In order to register Microsoft, you would have to put it at microsoft.redmond.wa.us, which is rather unwieldy, especially for those that don't know where MS's headquarters are.
.us were created, say .tm. Items trademarked at the national level would have reserved domain names amounting like "microsoft.tm.us." Things at more local levels would be handled like "bobs-garage.tm.mytown.tx.us." (or just bobs-garage.mytown.tx.us in the absense of a local trademark, assuming such a thing exists).
Unfortunately the
What if an additional subdomain under
Unfortunately, this doesn't cover the possibility of "dual" trademarks. AFAIK, some construction company can be named "Microsoft Construction, Inc.", for example, and might be just as entitled to that microsoft.tm.us domain. At this point I suppose it's possible to stick with the "first come, first served" policy and force subsequent registrants to modify the name slightly (e.g. microsoft-construction.tm.us).
Just some ideas..
The analogy is flawed to begin with, but if we have to use it, it would be more akin to this:
All unused acres of land belong to the government, which sells that land at a fixed rate of $50 an acre. Company X owns 1 acre someplace, where their new corporate headquarters exists. An adjacent Acre Y lies between Company X and the nearest highway. There is a sign marked "Company X" on Acre Y. Squatter Z comes along and buys Acre Y between Company X's headquarters and the nearest highway at $50, before Company X had a chance to. Company X has little choice but to buy Acre Y from Squatter Z in order to efficiently reach the highway, and to keep people from being confused as they exit the highway seeing the sign marked "Company X" on the adjacent Acre Y. Squatter Z charges an obscenely high rate.
Do you think this is particularly fair? If Acre Y had been priced for what it was worth (what Company X had been willing to pay), or had been auctioned off, Squatter Z wouldn't have had a chance. Real estate today goes by market value. You cannot buy a piece of land and sell it next week for a 10000% profit.
If a domain name has little value when it is purchased, "speculating" is perfectly fine. Generic names like "business.com" and "shopping.com" I have no problem with people buying and trying to sell. When somebody takes the name of a KNOWN trademark, they are taking ADVANTAGE of the system by purchasing it for a value much less than what the domain is actually worth and re-selling it at that higher rate. It reeks of unethical business practice.
So you have this enormous volume of people that have been elected (with at least 1 vote). Will these people "rule" from their homes, or will they be required to live in DC? How are they made accountable for their votes and actions if they are not physically present?
Your proposal begins to sound an awful lot like a direct democracy (with people being able to exercise the option of proxy by "voting" for somebody else to vote for them). One of the main strengths of the representative nature of our government is that we effectively *pay* our representatives to educate themselves on legislation and to act with our interests in mind. If you require all of our representatives to hold "day jobs," how can you ensure that even our more highly-voted-for representatives can find the time to devote to legislating?
A possible answer would be to allow people to change their votes at any time. When a representative does something against the wishes of those who have voted for him, votes would shift, decreasing the value of that representative (or removing him from office altogether).
It sounds like this idea would be horribly complex no matter how you managed to do it.
To be honest, it sounds like this style of governing might be more appropriate at a more local level (community, city, county or (at most) state), where the sheer bulk of people with votes will be manageable.
Agreed. If you dislike the fact that companies are allowed to buy influence in your representatives, make it clear that you will not vote for somebody that takes the interests of a cash contributor over that of the normal constituents.
Remember: No amount of cash can help an election candidate if nobody will vote for them.
This all goes back to the whole lack of an informed public, which might not make this as effective as you'd hope, but if enough people write letters expressing this sentiment, you can bet your representatives will listen.
So long as the "authors" can remain unbiased (rare on Slashdot) and leave the bias to the comments and posts, I think a medium like that would be a great way to disseminate information about candidates and legislation.
We desperately need a place where people can go to get ALL of the information about election candidates (instead of just the biased advertising we see on TV) in one easy place. Nobody watches debates anymore because they tend to be long-winded and full of BS and evasion. Have standardized templates for describing candidates as unbiased as is possible.
Likewise with upcoming legislation. On Slashdot whenever we see an "alert" about some evil piece of legislation, it's usually the result of somebody reading a biased/uninformed take on the legislation, reporting it to Slashdot, which then takes it and posts an "article" with at least as much bias as the original report. Only in the comments do we see people say, "Uhh, this isn't as bad as you guys seem to make it out to be. Why don't you read the legislation first?" Ideally, a site like this would eliminate such confusion by providing a clear, concise plain-english description of the legislation. Phrases like "big brother" would be forbidden. Let the subsequent threads of comments be the bias.
Have the site pay for itself via non-political advertising.
I've been playing with this idea for a while, but nobody seems to think it's worth pursuing.. Unfortunately something like this is very difficult to just "start up" due to the fact that it would need to cover a lot of stuff in as much depth as possible (which means we'd need legal and political experts behind us in some fashion (NOT for the purpose of editorializing or making predictions, but for understanding what it is we're seeing, etc.)).
You might at first think this is horribly inefficient and a sucky way to manage (or let others manage) their systems, but it does have one tremendous payoff:
Our NT systems are collectively as stable as any Windows-based PC I've ever seen. I am forced to reboot my PC on average once every month, sometimes longer. Usually this is due to a memory leak of some kind (source unknown) where I start getting messages about insufficient resources.
People constantly bitch and moan about daily reboots (it's frequent that they're exaggarating, but that's beside the point), but if you manage your system cautiously, things like this don't happen.
- Use mainstream hardware. Hardware that is popular and well-supported in the market will have the greatest chance of having bug-free device drivers under NT. It's usually the device drivers that cause blue-screens. This would be equivalent to using binary-only Linux modules. If these are the least bit buggy, your "stable" Linux kernel thus behaves buggy, and will crash.
- Don't install experimental, unreviewed software or bug fixes. The reason our PC's are "managed" by the PC support people is that they are constantly reviewing released fixes and the latest versions of major pieces of software (such as Internet Explorer, Office, etc.) to ensure stability. If a product in its current form causes problems and conflicts, it is not permitted to be installed on the PC's. To this day IE's Active Desktop and even Outlook 98 are on this list. Of course, you're free to install these things if you like (I have IE5 and Outlook98 on my PC), but it's generally a Good Idea to trust your PC support folks. If they say a particular application is causing problems, it probably is.
- If you don't have a PC support department of your own, just be cautious. Don't install a new release/version of an application immediately. Wait a few months to see what the reviews are like. Monitor the release of updates and bug fixes.
Under Linux, people are under the misconception that things like buggy software don't matter as much, since the Linux Kernel stays afloat.This isn't entirely the best way to look at things. Sure, the kernel is A-OK, but is your WORK ENVIRONMENT the same? If you tickle a bug that brings your KDE/Gnome desktop down, is this really all that different from a Win* crash? You've still lost your GUI applications' data. In all fairness, though, if a large application dies under NT, there's a pretty decent chance you're about to experience some more evilness from NT, whereas under Linux, if a non-critical application dies, you're usually pretty safe. This may change for the worst, though, as we start seeing more "core" applications running providing services to other user applications. If there's a bug in the core or a bug in an application that the core doesn't know how to handle, it could just as easily bring your environment down.
I don't see what all of the fuss is about.. It's an obscure government-sponsored anti-computer crime campaign. It's obviously low-budget and if it hadn't been posted here on Slashdot I doubt many people would have ever heard about it.
So it's dumbing stuff down. So what? The target audience is children, not us. If you really think they need to mention some other stuff on the site, why don't you try writing them an e-mail instead of whining on Slashdot and bashing the "evil government". Or is that all these YRO pieces are about nowadays?
The constant repetition of "boys and girls" was annoying as hell, too.
I've heard tell about some sort of IO standard that Intel's been pushing of late that supposedly 'replaces all current bus technology'. Anybody know more about this?
I personally am looking forward to hearing more about Jini, which is Sun's initiative to do to hardware what Java is doing to software.
Basically, they move the device abstraction out of the OS driver and into the device itself. So you basically plug a Jini-enabled device into the network, and it immediately registers itself and makes its services available to other devices on the network.
No OS-specific drivers, no kludges/workarounds. Things just "work".
http:/www.sun.com/jini/
Apple is willing to sacrifice backward-compatibility and make some really pretty logical choices in their hardware.
As much as I've disliked MacOS in the past, Apple has done an excellent job making hardware decisions.
It's funny. Five years ago I never would have thought I'd be supporting Apple, but you have to admit they've gotten their act together.
Hmm.. Good point. Perhaps this is our way of maintaining genetic diversity.
Traits that are a major hinderance result in death. People with traits that result in minor problems (ill health, low mental facilities) tend to mate with others like them at an increased rate.
So you basically have more above-average PEOPLE mating at normal rates, but less below-average people MATING at higher rates, so it all balances out and the net result is a relatively diverse gene pool.
I bet somebody has done a study on this...
However, there was a case a couple years ago of a hacker in Brazil (I think), who hacked Harvard and a couple other places. They caught him by setting up some kind of 'intelligent' program that recognized and filtered his keystroke/traffic from everyone elses on a router, or backbone, or something to that effect.
This was done with Harvard's (obvious) consent. As it would then be a privately owned network (not given "common carrier" status awarded to our lovely telephone networks), it would not be considered to be any form of privacy invasion (legally).
You're only awarded protections against unauthorized searches/wiretaps when it comes to public networks. Your ISP/private university can choose to let the FBI see whatever they want. (At least that's how I understand things.)
Not that I'm arguing with you, but:
Most (all?) of this influence occurs at the legislative level, which is in fact one of the most open aspects of our government, open to all sorts of public scrutiny. Is this where your mistrust lies, or are you alluding to some other area of evil corporate influence?