I'd argue that what "mere mortals" want is to get a job done, and any interface that does that for them is what they're looking for.
Hear, hear. Where I work we still have some apps, like personnel databases, on the S/390 (IBM Mainframe). It takes the secretary about 0.23 seconds to find something, she just pops open a 3270 emulator window and flies through the interface.
Heck, my Grandmother is a computer programmer, and is making my Grandpa (who is retired) take courses at UIUC. She is probably the main reason I am interested in computers. I remember very fondly playing Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and MS Flight Simulator on her old PCjr. Heck, one of her boys is a SysAdmin and the other an Engineer at a chip fab.
I don't believe that you understand Linux or Unix at all. Some counter examples to your argument would be TiVo, Cobalt, Corel Linux, MacOS X, NeXTStep, etc. There is no reason that a Linux based system could not be as easy to use (In fact Unix has a great history in this area, which people often forget) as you wish, as well as having all the (Object Oriented) power under the hood that is the CLI. MacOS X Server already implements the MacOS style over BSD Unix (By way of OpenSTEP), what is easier to use than that?
Point by point:
1. A bulletproof install. It must work, out of the box, no questions asked
Checked out Corel Linux, it almost asks no questions during install. Much easier than Windows. What about Lothar the Mandrake developed tool that does automatic hardware detection and module loading.
2. Hardware support for everything. Drivers need to be there for the hardware and they have to be installed automatically. Don't make the user guess what brand of video or sound card they have, 'cause generally, they don't know.
Right on, brother. I hate having to take apart a computer and writing down chip ID's and serial numbers to try to find out what driver belongs to a particular card. Fortunately this does not often happen with PCI/AGP devices because their device ID's are well documented. In fact it is emminetly possible to read all PCI IDs and match with drivers/modules, not only kernel modules but for X (XFree86 4) modules as well. Take a look at lspci some time.
As far as hardware support: When Linux/Unix/OpenSource is the dominate model then the manufacturers will have to write drivers for the dominant system first. Until that happens we are going to have to rely on vendors publishing specs and code, there will therefore always be a lag between new hardware and drivers. It will probably also mean that new drivers will not be able to use all the nifty (3D Video/Audio, etc) features right away, if ever. Definately a problem (at least while Linux is not the dominant system)
3. Get rid of the UNIX model. Yeah, no more user IDs, passwords or any of that. It can be too confusing on your grandma to have more names and numbers to remember.
BIG mistake. Especially for home users. Even if there is only one user account, with no password, you still have the seperation of user versus system privilages, you can also more easily hide the inner workings (make it so that the user cannot normally cd above/home, for example). It also more easily allows you to have a maintenance contract with a third party, who could log into your system to do work and fix things if/when they need fixing. Personally I would like built-in smart-card authentication (Think SecurID, etc), the system sits at the xdm/kdm/gdm window, you insert your card and you are logged in. No passwords needed and it is probably more secure (as long as you don't lose the card), it is also easier to use than password auth.
4. Get rid of GNU. Yeah, that's right, drop the command line utilities that you know and love, and lose all that power. If granny can't remember her password how's she supposed to remember arcane commands?
Annother big mistake. There is no reason that the user would be forced to use (bash, awk, sed, grep, cat, etc) these tools but they are so darned useful, for system maintenance and also as a user, it would be a shame to throw them away. Just tuck under the hood, you can pull them out when needed.
5. The gui must be the OS. This means, goodbye X. Most of the newbies who ask me for help request help with setting up X (well, networking comes close). X must disappear, or it must become so much a part of Linux that it's just there, and it just works, no matter what video card, RAMDac, or whatever the user has on their machine.
This should not preclude a simple, text based, interface, something less demanding on the hardware being correctly installed and configured. Ability to configure (with a full featured environment, like Unix) from a network, USB, serial/parallel connection is a plus (for when things get _really_ hosed). For most users, though, it should boot into a graphical environment, this does not in any way preclude X. X may be an old protocol, but it keeps re-inventing itself to keep from being obsolete. Berlin or some unknown Display GhostScript model would be best, but this is a ways off.
Really X is about as, or more, complicated than the kernel of the OS. Integrating the two would drastically increase the number and severity of software failures. Alot of work needs, and is being, done to make the XFree86 implementation of the X network protocol more stable, alot of work is, and needs to be, done to make it more hardware agnostic (automatically detecting and configuring without user intervention). This does not preclude the use of the X protocol though, the implementations just need to keep getting better.
6. This GUI must be slicker than whale shit in an ice flow. Yeah, it must blow all other existing GUIs out of the water for ease of use, configurability, etc.
Damn Straight! Fortunately in the Free Unix world there is more graphical environments than you can shake a stick at. I personally like BlackBox window manager with the KDE toolkit. There is more work (KDE, GNOME, XFCE, GNUStep, etc.) being done in this area than in any proprietary system. I have complete confidence that the next big thing in UI development will happen here because the cost of tinkering to "just see what happens" is so low. When that paradigm (ooh, I used a buzzword) shift happens the OpenSource community and Linux will be at the forefront.
Anyway, there are several very usable GUI environements for Linux, just look at SuSE and its umpteen window managers/desktop environments. For new users I would recommend WindowMaker/GNOME, WindowMaker/GNUStep, XFCE, KDE (esp Corel Linux configuration), QVWM if they have Windows experience. Really, though, for the greenest and most fearful users, locking a system down so they only have access to what they need makes for great fault prevention (Think MacOS). Real users can exploit every capability of the system while new users can have unobtrusive training wheels attached. This of course (because of different distros) does not preclude advanced Guru users from the system they want (think Corel/Debian relationship)
7. Did I mention that this stuff must work, right out of the box? It has to be so simple that the user can install it and configure it without a thought.
Everyone is working feverishly on easy install tools, that war is almost won (actually many Linux distros are already easier than Windows to install, the fact that Windows is pre-installed is the only thing that is truly easier). Configuration is a slightly different matter. When a system installs it should ask the user some simple questions about how they want to use the system and how they want some basic things configured. The trick is to not go overboard on pre-written config tools (that become an unmanagable mess), and to make them integrate seemlessly with hand configured files. Give the users the options they need to get started, if they need something more complicated don't make a GUI tool that will get in the way. If, however, you can make a GUI tool that can handle the verbosity of options in your standard Unix service than so be it, but be very careful because Not Quite is worse than Not At All.
It's high time some of you stopped deluding yourselves into thinking that GNU/Linux is the be-all and end-all of Operating Systems.
We are not deluded,it is being continuously redesigned based on the requirements of the people who use it. Whatever the future of OS design holds, Linux and GNU will be there.
Link to Bablefish, man. Then you don't have to worry about doing translations, of course your campaign might end up being about "incontinant eggs" and "shoe swimmingist bologne". I guess you get what you pay for when you translate with Bablefish.
Actually, although I can't speak for the Navy, they may already have lock-in to Outlook 98/2K. When I left, the Air Force was beginning their roll-out of DMS (Defense Messaging System) which uses and Outlook plugin along with X.400 directory services and Fortezza cards (embedded crypto on PCMCIA cards) for secure encrypted message passing. Unless they rewrite and re-roll out this system they are going to be using Outlook for some time.
On annother note, except for being extremely bloated Outlook is not too bad. Although based on what I have read (I haven't used it myself) it is no competition for Lotus Notes. I use Novell GroupWise now and it has some pretty neat features, but the butt-ugliest client you could imagine (I used to use Netscape Communicator over GW LDAP to manage my mail until my mailbox caused the service to crash, repeadedly. I can't manage my mail lists with the Windows or Web based clients, they have no message threading).
After I finished MGS for the second time I went looking for a MSX emulator and roms of the earlier Metal Gear and Policenauts games. I didn't find anything that would work right under Linux. Have you had any luck, and could you share it with me? I very fondly remember playing Metal Gear on my NES, as well as Snakes Revenge.
Finally, someone else noticed this. At least I installed XFCE, which changed the default color scheme to something less "gray". And what about the crappy File:Open/Save dialog?
Personally I use KDE, I don't even have GNOME installed, and use the Motif look-alike widgets but they look far better in Qt. And the File dialog box works the way I like it (I learned DOS and Windows first, so sue me)
The way he is looking at it, the files may be property but asking him to give up the key, that would be testimony.
In reference to annother post, asking about Double Jeopardy, that wouldn't apply if they could find evidence of a crime that he hasn't yet been charged with. For example evidence that he broke into a server that he has yet to be charged with breakin into. They'll just find a different statute and claim that they are charging for a different crime. Then annother 5 years in maximum security without trial for Kevin.
Of course you are wrong about there being no virus scanners for Linux. I happen to have a trial copy of McAfee AV for Linux installed right now (also available for just about every other Unix). A couple of other AV vendors make Unix versions of their products, that already or can be easily ported to Linux. Unfortunately many people who run Linux (Samba) fileservers seem not to realize this. McAfee doesn't really advertise their Unix versions and other companies do the same. There are even some native Unix (not ports of DOS/Win utils) AV tools, but these are pretty rare (and usually only scan for DOS/Win and Mac viruses). You are absolutely right about the damage that could be done within one user account, on single user machines. The only thing that prevents this is the fact that most mailreaders don't run scripts in mail and most users don't have '.' or '~' in their path. That doesn't help if you are using a graphical filemanager, it is very easy to run an executable in your home directory from there.
Just a note about X on NetWare 5.x, it is a port of XFree86 (3.3.x) to the Novell NLM format.
I didn't know that all NLMs run at ring 0, that explains a few things about why ABENDs can do so much damage. I just brought down our GroupWise server recently, I use Netscape Communicator to access my mailbox over LDAP and a corrupt message was causing the LDAP service to crash, which eventually (after about a dozen+ crashes) trashed the server. A quick reboot and all was well, but the admin refuses to run LDAP services anymore, sigh. I have to use the GroupWise client from Win98 in VMWare.
As a file serving NOS NetWare is excellent, we have heavily trafficed machines serving files to student labs with year+ uptimes. As an OS arch, though, it is pretty cryptic and crufty. Oh, I wish, wish that when Novell purchased UNIX from AT&T they would have ported NDS and NCP to it, and dropped NetWare OS. Then we could have an OS equally good at serving files, applications, and users (shell accounts, X11 workstations, etc).
They _do_ offer small licenses for home and demo use. I have a 3 license NetWare 5 server CD sitting on my desk that I got many moons ago. I'm sure that if you look around on their website you could find it (currently NetWare 5.1).
In my limited experience there is nothing better to serve Win9x/NT clients than NetWare/NDS/ZENWorks. I use it at a local Tech College and have been very impressed.
Actually that is the complete _opposite_ of the Winmodem which moves the hardware functionality into a large driver.
There is actually NICs with TCP/IP implemented in hardware, but the only drivers are for WinNT. I don't know that you would even want such a beast for Linux.
I was going to reply and say how silly that sounded but I think I'll reconsider. While we have already found most (all?) of the hidden code blocks that they announced on their page they might have set up a second contest that is _much_ harder to find. I say go ahead and look for steganographic encoding, the rest of us can work over the text blocks we already have (this code was broken and broadcast on a British TV news show already anyway). If you find something (ala Contact) let us know and we can bring all our guns to bear.
While I must admit I wasn't aware of all those other English speaking outlets of information my argument still applies to the masses of Soccer Moms and SUV drivers who seem to populate our country. They don't want to even read the newspapers let alone look for news elsewhere than People and the evening news. And as everybody knows, what the majority says goes (Democracy == Anarchy/Mob Rule much of the time). Whoever can control public opinion will get their way, even if it is provably wrong.
That scene is so sad, just reading it almost made me cry, having ones mind ripped out piece by piece is a fate far worse than death. When HAL starts going senile and sings Daisy it is almost too much for my heart to bear.
1) The US already grows more food than we can possibly eat, even though we are the fattest nation on the planet. When we can afford to use cornstarch as a _packing material_, that's pretty bad. In fact agribusiness in the US is failing at a spectacular rate because there is so much food supply the prices have fallen through the floor. Government subsidies aren't helping either, they just encourage people to keep making products that we cannot use. A better approach would be to _export_ as much as possible, sure some people won't like eating soyburgers and cornmuffins but at least nobody in the world need starve to death.
2) We will probably never solve all the worlds problems, and waiting until we do to go out and expore space is foolish. Just like a bus could run over Linus tomorrow, a comet could strike our planet with little warning. ACC said that "The reason the Dinosaurs died out was the fact that they didn't have a space program." Anyway just like WWII canceled the Great Depression an effort like Mars terraforming would create jobs and inject mass quantities of money back into the system.
3) (not in direct response to your post) I have noted a few people stating that money for NASA should be extracted from the DoD. The DoD consumes only 1/3 of the national budget, the rest is spent on everything else with the vast majority going to welfare, pork barrel projects and social engineering (Government control at its worst). Just think of what would happen if you stuck all the money you pay to SSI into an IRA, right now all money paid to SSI goes into the black pit called the foetid^h^h^h^h^h^h federal budget.
Heck, or Akira, for that matter. They keep pushing the date of Tokyo's destruction (What is it with the Japanese and Tokyo anyway? Giant lizards, psionic children, giant 'bots, Tokyo never survives).
look at freshmeat.net they are the largest database of Linux software. Just do a search for NNTP or Usenet or look in their Appindex.
For X I use the Netscape reader but xrn, krn, knode, XEmacs + + + should work. For console/xterm mode I use tin (actually it is probably better than the Netscape reader, much faster), there are several others (anyone still use rn?)
This may be redundant to your statement but in several ways this analogy does not hold. A VW or Honda can easilly succeede because they are equivelent or better then their US counterparts. The only foreign news service I can think of that falls in this category is the BBC. Not too many people are going to learn German or Japanese or Chinese (whatever dialect they speak in Hong Kong) just to get mass media news. PBS is the only TV/Radio station that carries BBC News (or any foreign program) AFAIK.
The only people that this doesn't effect strongly are Spanish speakers, they can get Mexican or Spanish news and have their own TV in Univision. I don't know how independant of the big 6 media giants Univision is, though.
Hopefully this will be made irrevelant by the _real_ Internet, sites like Slashdot provide semi-independant forums where the only megalomanical dictator is CmdrTaco. I worry a about his motivations far less than Case, Turner, Murdoch, etc.
Of course most of Slashdot news consists of links to other sources. If those sources are owned by the evil, social engineering, corporations than what. Right now the big corporations have the resources to fund journalists all over the globe. Not every potential news source has a computer and there is no repository for gathered information, or any way to search and find it.
First off let me apologize for my assuming that by morality you meant a Judeo-Christian interpretation, and for the lateness of my reply.
That said I still stand by my statements, although the way I define current morality my differ from yours. I should have stated this in my previous post instead of further obfuscating the issue. The way I define morality is a central set of beliefs, not based on logic but handed down as part of your particular culture or society. Since we, the human race, don't have an independant, provable, moral code I believe that most opinions about morality are useless and are not worthy of being codified into law. What is worthy, however, is a system of laws based on personal liberties. For example killing annother is outlawed because that infringes on the killed parties liberty, same with assult or rape or robbery. By reducing the laws to this you can create a simple, hiearcheal structure where laws are only a refinement of that one guiding principal of liberty. Like a fractal landscape each more detailed iteration reveals only the same terrain and principals that have preceded it. Hopefully, in the future, we can have a system of morals that one can believe in, not because of blind faith but because of the true application of science and fact.
Personally I was raised in a Lutheran household and while I still have a substantial faith in the existance of a God I have very little faith in organized religion and humanities management of religious subjects.
WRT Federal spending: I was just released from military service and I believe that it is a travesty what the "drawdown" has done. Military spending is very low and it shows in lack of training, lack of support services and lack of coordination even within ones own service. Also the US Military is tasked like never before, we have far more ongoing and lengthy missions than any time during the Eighties. We have had troops deployed to Somalia, Bosnia, Sierra Leone (IIRC), Saudi and more with ongoing commitments in Europe, Korea, Japan, Panama (recently released I believe), Cuba, etc. All this on a shoestring budget means that most of the time is spent in crisis management mode, reacting to stress instead of building a good and efficient organization. As a first termer I know of no one in my job who was planning in reenlisting, everyone believed that the organization was too screwed up and any effort they made would probably not go unpunished, they did not see a future where they could look back and feel proud about what they had accomplished. It is only getting worse as the smart people leave and the experienced retire early. While throwing more money at the military would NOT solve all our problems it brings tears to my eyes to see the discrepency between DoD spending and the massive amounts spent on failed social engineering.
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Hear, hear. Where I work we still have some apps, like personnel databases, on the S/390 (IBM Mainframe). It takes the secretary about 0.23 seconds to find something, she just pops open a 3270 emulator window and flies through the interface.
Heck, my Grandmother is a computer programmer, and is making my Grandpa (who is retired) take courses at UIUC. She is probably the main reason I am interested in computers. I remember very fondly playing Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and MS Flight Simulator on her old PCjr. Heck, one of her boys is a SysAdmin and the other an Engineer at a chip fab.
I don't believe that you understand Linux or Unix at all. Some counter examples to your argument would be TiVo, Cobalt, Corel Linux, MacOS X, NeXTStep, etc. There is no reason that a Linux based system could not be as easy to use (In fact Unix has a great history in this area, which people often forget) as you wish, as well as having all the (Object Oriented) power under the hood that is the CLI. MacOS X Server already implements the MacOS style over BSD Unix (By way of OpenSTEP), what is easier to use than that?
Point by point:
Checked out Corel Linux, it almost asks no questions during install. Much easier than Windows. What about Lothar the Mandrake developed tool that does automatic hardware detection and module loading.
Right on, brother. I hate having to take apart a computer and writing down chip ID's and serial numbers to try to find out what driver belongs to a particular card. Fortunately this does not often happen with PCI/AGP devices because their device ID's are well documented. In fact it is emminetly possible to read all PCI IDs and match with drivers/modules, not only kernel modules but for X (XFree86 4) modules as well. Take a look at lspci some time.
As far as hardware support: When Linux/Unix/OpenSource is the dominate model then the manufacturers will have to write drivers for the dominant system first. Until that happens we are going to have to rely on vendors publishing specs and code, there will therefore always be a lag between new hardware and drivers. It will probably also mean that new drivers will not be able to use all the nifty (3D Video/Audio, etc) features right away, if ever. Definately a problem (at least while Linux is not the dominant system)
BIG mistake. Especially for home users. Even if there is only one user account, with no password, you still have the seperation of user versus system privilages, you can also more easily hide the inner workings (make it so that the user cannot normally cd above /home, for example). It also more easily allows you to have a maintenance contract with a third party, who could log into your system to do work and fix things if/when they need fixing. Personally I would like built-in smart-card authentication (Think SecurID, etc), the system sits at the xdm/kdm/gdm window, you insert your card and you are logged in. No passwords needed and it is probably more secure (as long as you don't lose the card), it is also easier to use than password auth.
Annother big mistake. There is no reason that the user would be forced to use (bash, awk, sed, grep, cat, etc) these tools but they are so darned useful, for system maintenance and also as a user, it would be a shame to throw them away. Just tuck under the hood, you can pull them out when needed.
This should not preclude a simple, text based, interface, something less demanding on the hardware being correctly installed and configured. Ability to configure (with a full featured environment, like Unix) from a network, USB, serial/parallel connection is a plus (for when things get _really_ hosed). For most users, though, it should boot into a graphical environment, this does not in any way preclude X. X may be an old protocol, but it keeps re-inventing itself to keep from being obsolete. Berlin or some unknown Display GhostScript model would be best, but this is a ways off.
Really X is about as, or more, complicated than the kernel of the OS. Integrating the two would drastically increase the number and severity of software failures. Alot of work needs, and is being, done to make the XFree86 implementation of the X network protocol more stable, alot of work is, and needs to be, done to make it more hardware agnostic (automatically detecting and configuring without user intervention). This does not preclude the use of the X protocol though, the implementations just need to keep getting better.
Damn Straight! Fortunately in the Free Unix world there is more graphical environments than you can shake a stick at. I personally like BlackBox window manager with the KDE toolkit. There is more work (KDE, GNOME, XFCE, GNUStep, etc.) being done in this area than in any proprietary system. I have complete confidence that the next big thing in UI development will happen here because the cost of tinkering to "just see what happens" is so low. When that paradigm (ooh, I used a buzzword) shift happens the OpenSource community and Linux will be at the forefront.
Anyway, there are several very usable GUI environements for Linux, just look at SuSE and its umpteen window managers/desktop environments. For new users I would recommend WindowMaker/GNOME, WindowMaker/GNUStep, XFCE, KDE (esp Corel Linux configuration), QVWM if they have Windows experience. Really, though, for the greenest and most fearful users, locking a system down so they only have access to what they need makes for great fault prevention (Think MacOS). Real users can exploit every capability of the system while new users can have unobtrusive training wheels attached. This of course (because of different distros) does not preclude advanced Guru users from the system they want (think Corel/Debian relationship)
Everyone is working feverishly on easy install tools, that war is almost won (actually many Linux distros are already easier than Windows to install, the fact that Windows is pre-installed is the only thing that is truly easier). Configuration is a slightly different matter. When a system installs it should ask the user some simple questions about how they want to use the system and how they want some basic things configured. The trick is to not go overboard on pre-written config tools (that become an unmanagable mess), and to make them integrate seemlessly with hand configured files. Give the users the options they need to get started, if they need something more complicated don't make a GUI tool that will get in the way. If, however, you can make a GUI tool that can handle the verbosity of options in your standard Unix service than so be it, but be very careful because Not Quite is worse than Not At All.
We are not deluded,it is being continuously redesigned based on the requirements of the people who use it. Whatever the future of OS design holds, Linux and GNU will be there.
Link to Bablefish, man. Then you don't have to worry about doing translations, of course your campaign might end up being about "incontinant eggs" and "shoe swimmingist bologne". I guess you get what you pay for when you translate with Bablefish.
Actually, although I can't speak for the Navy, they may already have lock-in to Outlook 98/2K. When I left, the Air Force was beginning their roll-out of DMS (Defense Messaging System) which uses and Outlook plugin along with X.400 directory services and Fortezza cards (embedded crypto on PCMCIA cards) for secure encrypted message passing. Unless they rewrite and re-roll out this system they are going to be using Outlook for some time.
On annother note, except for being extremely bloated Outlook is not too bad. Although based on what I have read (I haven't used it myself) it is no competition for Lotus Notes. I use Novell GroupWise now and it has some pretty neat features, but the butt-ugliest client you could imagine (I used to use Netscape Communicator over GW LDAP to manage my mail until my mailbox caused the service to crash, repeadedly. I can't manage my mail lists with the Windows or Web based clients, they have no message threading).
Just my $0.02 from the Peanut Gallery.
Only your hand-"one-eye" coordination. 8-)
Yes, Oh Yes!
After I finished MGS for the second time I went looking for a MSX emulator and roms of the earlier Metal Gear and Policenauts games. I didn't find anything that would work right under Linux. Have you had any luck, and could you share it with me? I very fondly remember playing Metal Gear on my NES, as well as Snakes Revenge.
Finally, someone else noticed this. At least I installed XFCE, which changed the default color scheme to something less "gray". And what about the crappy File:Open/Save dialog?
Personally I use KDE, I don't even have GNOME installed, and use the Motif look-alike widgets but they look far better in Qt. And the File dialog box works the way I like it (I learned DOS and Windows first, so sue me)
The way he is looking at it, the files may be property but asking him to give up the key, that would be testimony.
In reference to annother post, asking about Double Jeopardy, that wouldn't apply if they could find evidence of a crime that he hasn't yet been charged with. For example evidence that he broke into a server that he has yet to be charged with breakin into. They'll just find a different statute and claim that they are charging for a different crime. Then annother 5 years in maximum security without trial for Kevin.
Of course you are wrong about there being no virus scanners for Linux. I happen to have a trial copy of McAfee AV for Linux installed right now (also available for just about every other Unix). A couple of other AV vendors make Unix versions of their products, that already or can be easily ported to Linux. Unfortunately many people who run Linux (Samba) fileservers seem not to realize this. McAfee doesn't really advertise their Unix versions and other companies do the same. There are even some native Unix (not ports of DOS/Win utils) AV tools, but these are pretty rare (and usually only scan for DOS/Win and Mac viruses). You are absolutely right about the damage that could be done within one user account, on single user machines. The only thing that prevents this is the fact that most mailreaders don't run scripts in mail and most users don't have '.' or '~' in their path. That doesn't help if you are using a graphical filemanager, it is very easy to run an executable in your home directory from there.
Just a note about X on NetWare 5.x, it is a port of XFree86 (3.3.x) to the Novell NLM format.
I didn't know that all NLMs run at ring 0, that explains a few things about why ABENDs can do so much damage. I just brought down our GroupWise server recently, I use Netscape Communicator to access my mailbox over LDAP and a corrupt message was causing the LDAP service to crash, which eventually (after about a dozen+ crashes) trashed the server. A quick reboot and all was well, but the admin refuses to run LDAP services anymore, sigh. I have to use the GroupWise client from Win98 in VMWare.
As a file serving NOS NetWare is excellent, we have heavily trafficed machines serving files to student labs with year+ uptimes. As an OS arch, though, it is pretty cryptic and crufty. Oh, I wish, wish that when Novell purchased UNIX from AT&T they would have ported NDS and NCP to it, and dropped NetWare OS. Then we could have an OS equally good at serving files, applications, and users (shell accounts, X11 workstations, etc).
They _do_ offer small licenses for home and demo use. I have a 3 license NetWare 5 server CD sitting on my desk that I got many moons ago. I'm sure that if you look around on their website you could find it (currently NetWare 5.1).
In my limited experience there is nothing better to serve Win9x/NT clients than NetWare/NDS/ZENWorks. I use it at a local Tech College and have been very impressed.
Actually that is the complete _opposite_ of the Winmodem which moves the hardware functionality into a large driver.
There is actually NICs with TCP/IP implemented in hardware, but the only drivers are for WinNT. I don't know that you would even want such a beast for Linux.
I was going to reply and say how silly that sounded but I think I'll reconsider. While we have already found most (all?) of the hidden code blocks that they announced on their page they might have set up a second contest that is _much_ harder to find. I say go ahead and look for steganographic encoding, the rest of us can work over the text blocks we already have (this code was broken and broadcast on a British TV news show already anyway). If you find something (ala Contact) let us know and we can bring all our guns to bear.
Then again that might just be the qualities they are looking for.
While I must admit I wasn't aware of all those other English speaking outlets of information my argument still applies to the masses of Soccer Moms and SUV drivers who seem to populate our country. They don't want to even read the newspapers let alone look for news elsewhere than People and the evening news. And as everybody knows, what the majority says goes (Democracy == Anarchy/Mob Rule much of the time). Whoever can control public opinion will get their way, even if it is provably wrong.
That scene is so sad, just reading it almost made me cry, having ones mind ripped out piece by piece is a fate far worse than death. When HAL starts going senile and sings Daisy it is almost too much for my heart to bear.
So that means that Win98 is more advanced than HAL 9000, right!?!
(/me usually doesn't get into these pointless MS bashing threads, but what the hell.)
It's nice to meet a stark, raving optimist now and again 8-)
Whoops, sorry about part 3, I just noticed that you are from France and could probably not care less about the US budget or NASA.
Two points:
1) The US already grows more food than we can possibly eat, even though we are the fattest nation on the planet. When we can afford to use cornstarch as a _packing material_, that's pretty bad. In fact agribusiness in the US is failing at a spectacular rate because there is so much food supply the prices have fallen through the floor. Government subsidies aren't helping either, they just encourage people to keep making products that we cannot use. A better approach would be to _export_ as much as possible, sure some people won't like eating soyburgers and cornmuffins but at least nobody in the world need starve to death.
2) We will probably never solve all the worlds problems, and waiting until we do to go out and expore space is foolish. Just like a bus could run over Linus tomorrow, a comet could strike our planet with little warning. ACC said that "The reason the Dinosaurs died out was the fact that they didn't have a space program." Anyway just like WWII canceled the Great Depression an effort like Mars terraforming would create jobs and inject mass quantities of money back into the system.
3) (not in direct response to your post) I have noted a few people stating that money for NASA should be extracted from the DoD. The DoD consumes only 1/3 of the national budget, the rest is spent on everything else with the vast majority going to welfare, pork barrel projects and social engineering (Government control at its worst). Just think of what would happen if you stuck all the money you pay to SSI into an IRA, right now all money paid to SSI goes into the black pit called the foetid^h^h^h^h^h^h federal budget.
Heck, or Akira, for that matter. They keep pushing the date of Tokyo's destruction (What is it with the Japanese and Tokyo anyway? Giant lizards, psionic children, giant 'bots, Tokyo never survives).
look at freshmeat.net they are the largest database of Linux software. Just do a search for NNTP or Usenet or look in their Appindex.
For X I use the Netscape reader but xrn, krn, knode, XEmacs + + + should work. For console/xterm mode I use tin (actually it is probably better than the Netscape reader, much faster), there are several others (anyone still use rn?)
This may be redundant to your statement but in several ways this analogy does not hold. A VW or Honda can easilly succeede because they are equivelent or better then their US counterparts. The only foreign news service I can think of that falls in this category is the BBC. Not too many people are going to learn German or Japanese or Chinese (whatever dialect they speak in Hong Kong) just to get mass media news. PBS is the only TV/Radio station that carries BBC News (or any foreign program) AFAIK.
The only people that this doesn't effect strongly are Spanish speakers, they can get Mexican or Spanish news and have their own TV in Univision. I don't know how independant of the big 6 media giants Univision is, though.
Hopefully this will be made irrevelant by the _real_ Internet, sites like Slashdot provide semi-independant forums where the only megalomanical dictator is CmdrTaco. I worry a about his motivations far less than Case, Turner, Murdoch, etc.
Of course most of Slashdot news consists of links to other sources. If those sources are owned by the evil, social engineering, corporations than what. Right now the big corporations have the resources to fund journalists all over the globe. Not every potential news source has a computer and there is no repository for gathered information, or any way to search and find it.
First off let me apologize for my assuming that by morality you meant a Judeo-Christian interpretation, and for the lateness of my reply.
That said I still stand by my statements, although the way I define current morality my differ from yours. I should have stated this in my previous post instead of further obfuscating the issue. The way I define morality is a central set of beliefs, not based on logic but handed down as part of your particular culture or society. Since we, the human race, don't have an independant, provable, moral code I believe that most opinions about morality are useless and are not worthy of being codified into law. What is worthy, however, is a system of laws based on personal liberties. For example killing annother is outlawed because that infringes on the killed parties liberty, same with assult or rape or robbery. By reducing the laws to this you can create a simple, hiearcheal structure where laws are only a refinement of that one guiding principal of liberty. Like a fractal landscape each more detailed iteration reveals only the same terrain and principals that have preceded it. Hopefully, in the future, we can have a system of morals that one can believe in, not because of blind faith but because of the true application of science and fact.
Personally I was raised in a Lutheran household and while I still have a substantial faith in the existance of a God I have very little faith in organized religion and humanities management of religious subjects.
WRT Federal spending: I was just released from military service and I believe that it is a travesty what the "drawdown" has done. Military spending is very low and it shows in lack of training, lack of support services and lack of coordination even within ones own service. Also the US Military is tasked like never before, we have far more ongoing and lengthy missions than any time during the Eighties. We have had troops deployed to Somalia, Bosnia, Sierra Leone (IIRC), Saudi and more with ongoing commitments in Europe, Korea, Japan, Panama (recently released I believe), Cuba, etc. All this on a shoestring budget means that most of the time is spent in crisis management mode, reacting to stress instead of building a good and efficient organization. As a first termer I know of no one in my job who was planning in reenlisting, everyone believed that the organization was too screwed up and any effort they made would probably not go unpunished, they did not see a future where they could look back and feel proud about what they had accomplished. It is only getting worse as the smart people leave and the experienced retire early. While throwing more money at the military would NOT solve all our problems it brings tears to my eyes to see the discrepency between DoD spending and the massive amounts spent on failed social engineering.