Sure, I see the connection... its open source, and somehow if one thinks hard enough they can conjure up a relation to socialism, which obviously to us right-wingers-living-in-our-bomb-shelters might as well be communism spelled differently.
Well, I'm pretty far to the right... and I love Linux. Most of my friends are right-wing too... they also "get it" when it comes to Linux. I like Linux for the same reasons you do... it does what its told and doesn't fuck up every third time like certain other OSes. We evil right-wing capitalists lose a shitload of money when our servers don't run... so we like things that don't crash. We also don't like spending more money when a better solution requires spending less money.
No heavyweight applications?
As for heavyweight applications, well, Linux has plenty. How about Apache? (60% of the Web). Oracle? DB2? First-tier Java support? (I personally love this one, as its saved/made my company hundreds of thousands of dollars.)
Desktop apps, you say?....WordPerfect, CorelDraw, Gimp, KOffice, and StarOffice, Gnumeric, GNUCash... and more little utility apps (Napster clones, MP3 players, FTP clients, Clock applets, Solitaire/Minesweeper games, and NetLoad meters than a big horse can shit.
The only apps I need to make me never even want to look at a Windows box again are CounterStrike and a Mozilla 1.0 based Galeon. I'll put my Mom on it once we get to the point where all desktop-oriented tasks (including software installation/management and hardware configuration) can be done without using a shell. (And Ximian seems to be making some VERY NICE progress on both these fronts).
I can't believe they're calling it hailstorm.... what a stupid name. I mean c'mon, aren't hailstorms those things that crop up during severe thunderstorms, destroying huge amounts of property....
oh, ok, maybe hailstorm isn't such a bad name after all. My bad.
In W2k: It's in the "Display" control panel, which is most easily accessed by right-clicking on the desktop and choosing "Properties". Click the "Effects" tab and then check "Smooth edges of screen fonts" This feature works pretty well, as it doesn't try and smooth fonts less than about 16pt.
I think its in the same place in Win98, but I've never been able to stomach actually using 9x so I don't know for sure:)
Another setting that's nice to check if you're running 16-bit color or higher is "show icons using all possible colors" ---
Personally I heavily agree with Erich (the original poster).
I actually find the Windows GUI incredibly difficult and inefficient to use, and I find my Linux GUI extremely easy and efficient.
For being called "Windows", Windows has about the poorest Window manager ever made. Windows are allowed to manage themselves. If a programs busy you can't move or minimize it. Modal dialogs can take over the entire user interface. Applications are rarely well-threaded. If I have an "open" dialog on the screen, I can't move windows around in a program to see what documents I already have open. Multithreading is poorly done, and I cannot launch an application and then do work in another effectively while I wait for the app to load.
I personally use a combination of CLI and GUI. I use each where they are most appropriate. I've spent plenty of time configuring my GUI to be extremely efficient, to the point where just about every operation I do (even moving windows around the screen) can be down with one or two keypresses and I hardly evevr have to touch the mouse. So far, I've found no way to customize the as-shipped Windows GUI to accomadate such things.
The greatest example of Window's easy-to-learn difficult-to-use situation is Microsoft Word. Yes, I know its just an app, but since it upgrades have of windir/SYSTEM32, I'm going to bitch about it like its a part of the OS....
Anyway, if you start typing a list of numbered items that are each a paragraph long, Word oh-so-nicely formats them into a numbered list just like you wanted. Now try typing one thats five paragraphs long, or say, has a screenshot in the middle. It's very difficult. I don't use Word much, so I ask for help from those who use it all the time. They start cutting and copying and pasting text in weird sequences and hitting backspace in certain places. Oh, and by the way whatever you do don't edit that formatted text, or it'll destroy it and you'll have to cut the text and then paste it like this and hit backspace and then edit the number again twice. (or something like that) It's insane. There is no way to build knowledge about this program. You can use it all the time, yet its difficult to understand "how it works" because it tries to help you do easy stuff all the time.
And then there was WordPerfect 5.1, oh, thank god for the F11 (reveal codes) key... You could actually see what it was thinking, and come to an understanding about how it worked and how to make your documents flow properly. Took a little longer to get accustomed to, but once you get the basic concepts its easy to master.
A person in the business of selling personal computers shall provide with each personal computer sold by that person software that enables the purchaser of the personal computer to automatically block or screen indecent material on the Internet.
There is no software in existance that enables a person to automatically block or screen indecent material on the Internet. We all know censorware doesn't work, and I don't just mean in terms of false positives. It fails to actually censor indecent material. If I SPAM you and 5,000 other texans with naked pictures of your mothers there is no way that you are going to be able to stop me using censorware. Censorware still can't determine if an image is naughty until its been listed in their databases.
So requiring that computers be able to block indecent material isn't possible. In all truth, no one can comply with the law. ---
TCP Sequence Prediction: Class=random positive increments Difficulty=11993 (Worthy challenge)
Remote operating system guess: Windows 2000 RC1 through final release
---- My Linux box (RedHat 7.0, all updates)
TCP Sequence Prediction: Class=random positive increments Difficulty=5472011 (Good luck!)
Remote operating system guess: Linux 2.1.122 - 2.2.14
---- On of work's retired NT4 servers
TCP Sequence Prediction: Class=trivial time dependency Difficulty=4 (Trivial joke)
Remote operating system guess: Windows NT4 / Win95 / Win98
Our WatchGuard firewall returns a dificulty of 9999999.
While you're analogy to cigarettes has some validity, its important to remember the following:
- Cigarette companies claimed that their products had no ill effects, and were not addictive. They advertised this and many people believed it for a very long time. Cigarette companies knew their products were dangerous, and thousands (millions?) of people died or had their lives shortened as a result.
- Cigarette companies targeted advertising at minors who would buy cigarettes illegally. How many people do you know who didn't start smoking until they were eighteen? I know the cigarette companies couldn't stop kids from smoking now if they used ever dollar of profit to do it, but it is undeniable that they contributed to minors smoking.
In contrast, Smith and Wesson makes a product that is intended to be very dangerous, albeit not to the operator. The point here is that while cigarettes and guns are both designed for killing people, the gun companies aren't making any claims otherwise and don't sell.357 revolvers loaded with a single round so you can take a few minutes off work and get some "refreshment." via Russian roulette.
My evil twin who lives in a non-extradition treaty country managed to get DeCSS to work perfectly on his computer, which happens to be an exact replica of mine.:)
Anyway, he reports the following DVDs work properly:
- Titan A.E.
- A Bug's Life
- Jakob the Liar
(These are all the one's he's tried so far)
This was done using the patched DeCSS enabled xine, version 0.3.6, I believe. This player is available from:
http://gape.ist.utl.pt/ment00/linuxdvd.html
I *cough*, I mean he, had to set the DVD drive to region one before Xine would work, using a little prog called rpcmgr11.c, commonly found on the net (just google for it, compile it, read its instructions and set your DVD region code to 1). This worked for both a Toshiba SD-M1401 DVD-ROM and one of those Pioneer slot loading ones, think its called the "305S" or something like that.
I've got at least one DVD, Sting's Brand New Day album, that is not CSS enocded. (Maybe the evil between the MPAA and RIAA cancel each other out:), as its beyond me why this DVD isn't CSSed.)
Sure is neat to be able to watch movies you own on your own Linux box. ---
Yes, you can run ssh on windows. You can even install korn shell and get SOME scripting capabilites. What you can't do is effectively deploy software updates in this manner.
NT4 Service Pack 6a. Thanks for bringing this up. Try grabbing an older NT4 CD with Service Pack 1 and installing 6a on it. I've done this several times... I refused to believe fellow NT admins that upgrading from SP1 to 6a was a bad idea. That is until the systems I installed blew up and died once I configured IIS and JRun, and theirs didn't. Make sure you install 3 or 4 before installing 6a or the system will be VERY unreliable. One of the boxes I did this way bluescreened and never booted again.
I can't wait to tell the sysadmins about your last point: "same amount of time." Both the UNIX and NT guys will find that hilarious. ---
Your anecdotal evidence of MS stuff working can be easily countered with my anecdotal evidence of MS stuff not working. All our Windows boxen run the latest updates of Win2K with SP1, and I have not seen the types of uptimes you have. The reason we moved to 2K is because NT4 was just that bad. The NT4 boxes crashed constantly, even though they ran on high-quality Dell servers and were very well maintained. Today another 2000 machine blew up when we applied a security fix... it now boots to a blue screen.
The Linux environment at work has never had any problems that were not found to be hardware related. Our Linux IT cost is virtually zero by comparison. All our development machines run on it, and their constantly running very much untested software yet their rate of failure is orders of magnitues less than the creative departments machines that run Photoshop and the administrative machines that use Word and ACT, all on up-to-date w2k installs.
At least with Win2K I don't get woken up at 3am just about every Saturday morining when the NT4 IIS boxes blue-screened (and didn't reboot, even though they were supposed too) due to the backup software running. ---
You bring up some interesting peripheral points, but in the end, these don't matter much.
The REAL problem is this:
Microsoft brought an end to the term "computers don't make mistakes" Computers are unreliable as hell in most people's eyes, and rightly so. I get a little upset when I can't get my phone hooked up because the AT&T customer rep tells me that she was just typing in my info and now the screen turned blue.
Microsoft has designed a user interface that allows any idiot to use a computer instantly, without learning anything about what they are doing or how to do it right. They make every effort to get users using computers so they can buy products, but they make NO EFFORT to help people avoid the pitfalls of irresponsibly using a computer.
Microsoft software is not easy to use. It is easy to learn. Word is the most difficult program I have ever used. I love it when I'm writing a technical document and it tries to help me write a letter to grandma. There's a lot of software out there that is difficult to learn but easy to use, a good example of which is Photoshop: it's not intuitive, but once you learn to use it you can be extremely productive with it.
Microsoft has created the need for programs like Virus scanners, uninstallers, disk repair utilities, and all kinds of kludged utilities that let you "roll back" your system state to when it was once stable. They've created "self-repairing" software.... why should software ever break with a good package management system...or just good protection around core shared system libraries?
Microsoft has created an IT industry that spends billions every year working around the massive shortcomings of software that doesn't work.
Microsoft denies all of this.
Is any of this illegal? NO!
Oops, but wait, Microsoft maneuvered into and maintains their monopoly position illegally. They broke the law and action must therefore be taken against them... regardless of what anyone thinks of their software. ---
I've got an Athlon with a GeForce2, running RedHat 7.
Steps to play Quake3 from box with blank hard drive.
Install Red hat 7.
Install XFree86 drivers from NVidia's site:
rpm -ivh foo.rpm bar.rpm
Modify a specific line of/etc/X11/XFree86-4.conf (NVidia is very clear about how to do this... it is slightly annoying) though.
Install Quake3.
Play Quake3 and enjoy 90+ FPS just like the windows folks do (if you don't believe it, look at how good NVidia's linux drivers are at http://www.tomshardware.com)
This is easier than reformatting and reinstalling everything on a fresh Windows ME box when Microsoft MechWarrior 4 blows up slightly after startup because it didn't like something about the DirectX 8 that was installed. I wish all games ran on Linux, it's easier to learn to use Linux than spend hours reformatting Windows every time something goes wrong. ---
These engines (at least most of them) support skinning. What most people think of as GTK+ themes are simply pixmap theme skins.
It's important to note that more changes than just graphics with these themes. Different themes have different capabilities, and some significantly alter the behavior of widgets, such as listboxes, scrollbars, and pane separators.
Maybe you believe that Apple has done more than this. Maybe they have. The problem is that what they have done is EVOLUTIONARY to what the Gnome and KDE folks have done with their theme engines. There is no true innovation here, its just the obvious next step forward. I'm so sick of a brick wall being built in the way of the natural path of a technology by a patent.
The way the patent system works right now, there is probably no legal piece of software out there that isn't more than seventeen years old. ---
Citing Windows 2000 as an example of an OS with built-in package management is highly misleading. Windows 2000 is just barely a year old and was the first Windows to have anything approximating package management. Their implementation appears to be quite poor. I've heard promises of DLL hell being a thing of the past, but I've seen several Win2K boxes go down in flames running only MS software and maintained by people highly proficient with Windows. (For example on a clean install, VB6 ate SQL7's lunch.)
No, RH and Debian were the first consumer oriented OS's with Package Management (I forget, did BeOS too?).
And what the heck does "bolt-on" mean? On a Linux box, everything is bolt-on except the kernel. A better word is "modular". ---
Getting rid of window.close().... I don't think so. My company writes Web apps that behave like real GUI apps. Getting rid of window.close() would destroy such capabilities. (Note: our sites run in intranet/extranent environments only) ---
I had to pay $95 to MS to report a bug in MSJDBCODBC.dll, for which I offered a workaround, and detailed documentation. I had to call their "tech support" hotline so that they could realize it was a bug. They then fixed it six months later. Had I not figured out a damn-near idiotic workaround (I was able to determine which DLL was crashing IIS, and copy a different version from REALLY OLD and UNUPDATED win95 boxen), the project would have gone to the toilet, a project which made up 10% of our company's revenue for that year.
Just to be fair, After hours of haggling, the $95 charge was reversed.
And *that* is the last time I got "support" from MS. ---
It's a bit slow on my old Linux box, a K6/200 w 64M memory. Its worth trying out and having fun with, but it might be annoying for day-to-day use. On my 750 at work and my 1100 at home its completely usable though (I replaced gmc with it), with the smooth graphics turned on.
If you want to use it with a 200MHz machine, you'll probably want to disable "Use smoother (but slower) graphics", turn off "Use Nautilus to draw the desktop" (this capability is much improved, but still buggy and slow, even somewhat slow on the 1100.), and change most of the "speed tradeoffs" options to never. If the box is SCSI, you should be fine leaving a lot of these options on. The packages worked fine on both RH6.2 and RH7.0 systems for me, all of them already had Helix Gnome though. ---
Why would anyone use Gnome? Granted, they done alot of work, and it looks pretty good, but KDE is better for so many reasons. They were the first ones to create a full desktop enviroment. It looks far better than any version of Gnome does, too. Also, they have done so much for the community, creating projects like KOffice, KDevelop, kPPP, and KWM; Gnome just can't compete!
Why would anyone use KDE? Granted, they done alot of work, and it looks pretty good, but Gnome is better for so many reasons. They were the first ones to create a full free desktop enviroment. It looks far better than any version of KDE does, too. Also, they have done so much for the community, creating projects like Gimp, Gnumeric, GnuCash, and Sawfish; KDE just can't compete!
Er, actually, they're both bitchin, and the flamewar is over. I think you (and all the other morons who actually debate this issue) lost. This is why the Ninjas vs. Pancakes debate was created on Slashdot, that way the trolls would have a worthwhile subject to debate that could easily be automatically modded down to -2 via regex.
---
This is obviously my personal experience, but Nautilus PR 1 and 2 had some serious performance and stability issues. I've had PR3 crash a few times, and it still takes too damn long to open new windows, but its definitely worth trying. There is no comparison between this release and the previous two, IMHO.
Also, if you have a 500MHz computer, be sure to turn OFF "smoother but slower graphics" ---
Can't find my copy. All I see is a bunch of RedHat 6.2 CDs with my Dell.
You have windows
No really, I can't find it... All I see is RedHat stuff.
2. Windows has a GUI that is easy to use because it has been developed in conjunction with literally millions of beta testers and focus groups.
I find it odd that not one user in these focus groups got annoyed with the fact that they couldn't move or iconize or move a window if the application owning the window was busy. Are you really SURE they did that, I just don't see it.
3. Windows runs these games faster, and necessarily always will - emulation has to be slower, because there's two layers
WINE is a recursive algorithm for "Wine Is Not an Emulator." It's NOT an emulator. It's an implementation of Win32 libs on x86 Linux boxes. Wine can even use Windows DLLs, so it is running the same stuff.
4. Windows runs the games easier than WINE - you don't have to compile Windows for your PC like you do with Wine (you can get pre-built builds, but they don't work as well).
Uh, Wine 1.0 isn't out yet. I've only used pre-built versions, and have had good results.
5. For WINE to work usably, you are required to have Windows on your PC (true: all those shots of Word running on Linux only happen because Linux is using the dlls and vxds)
All my experiments with Wine have not involved Windows DLLs. It ran quite a number of applications and installers with no problems, and this was more than six months ago.
As for Word though, keep in mind what atrocities Word does to a system... Word reinstalls hundreds of DLLs on a Windows machine. It breaks Microsoft's own "regulations" for software installation. How is this therefore a valid example of why I shouldn't try to run Windows games on my Linux box?
---
I used to write Java COM components with IIS. While the Java libraries (com.ms.blah), were pretty thin wrappers around IIS stuff, I tend to agree that Java/IIS was a pretty good match. It was amazing how little effort they put into the Java versions of their APIs... I remember having to pass in arrays with length 1 to calls in order to get return values. And I remember how it was technologically impossible to retrieve an array of HTTP request parameters (that had the same name) from Java... all you could do was get them back comma delimited (and thus mangled).
Then I remember when we discovered a never-publicized bug in MS' jdbcodbc.dll. The JDBC-ODBC bridge used to blow up if you sent more than 32k to it trying to set a text (CLOB) column. It would bring down the JDBC-ODBC stuff, the JVM, and thus IIS (JVM was running in process). We reported it, had to fight getting charged for tech support, and it was finally fixed six months after they'd escalated it to that mythical maximum level of importance. Were it not for being able to manually copy old versions of jdbcodbc.dll from old Win95 boxes, our client's app would have been DOA. Cost us two weeks tracking the sucker down
too. Maybe we should have written a security exploit around it and made it into a security bug. Perhaps that would have caught their attention.... but oh, wait, it was 1998 and MS didn't give half a rats rear end about security anyway.
Eventually, we figured out that it was probably a good idea to ditch all dependence on MS and go straight J2EE. ---
Slashdot Mirror
Aimed at political leftists?
Sure, I see the connection... its open source, and somehow if one thinks hard enough they can conjure up a relation to socialism, which obviously to us right-wingers-living-in-our-bomb-shelters might as well be communism spelled differently.
Well, I'm pretty far to the right... and I love Linux. Most of my friends are right-wing too... they also "get it" when it comes to Linux. I like Linux for the same reasons you do... it does what its told and doesn't fuck up every third time like certain other OSes. We evil right-wing capitalists lose a shitload of money when our servers don't run... so we like things that don't crash. We also don't like spending more money when a better solution requires spending less money.
No heavyweight applications?
As for heavyweight applications, well, Linux has plenty. How about Apache? (60% of the Web). Oracle? DB2? First-tier Java support? (I personally love this one, as its saved/made my company hundreds of thousands of dollars.)
Desktop apps, you say?....WordPerfect, CorelDraw, Gimp, KOffice, and StarOffice, Gnumeric, GNUCash... and more little utility apps (Napster clones, MP3 players, FTP clients, Clock applets, Solitaire/Minesweeper games, and NetLoad meters than a big horse can shit.
The only apps I need to make me never even want to look at a Windows box again are CounterStrike and a Mozilla 1.0 based Galeon. I'll put my Mom on it once we get to the point where all desktop-oriented tasks (including software installation/management and hardware configuration) can be done without using a shell. (And Ximian seems to be making some VERY NICE progress on both these fronts).
---
see the subject.
---
I can't believe they're calling it hailstorm.... what a stupid name. I mean c'mon, aren't hailstorms those things that crop up during severe thunderstorms, destroying huge amounts of property....
oh, ok, maybe hailstorm isn't such a bad name after all. My bad.
---
In W2k: It's in the "Display" control panel, which is most easily accessed by right-clicking on the desktop and choosing "Properties". Click the "Effects" tab and then check "Smooth edges of screen fonts" This feature works pretty well, as it doesn't try and smooth fonts less than about 16pt.
:)
I think its in the same place in Win98, but I've never been able to stomach actually using 9x so I don't know for sure
Another setting that's nice to check if you're running 16-bit color or higher is "show icons using all possible colors"
---
Personally I heavily agree with Erich (the original poster).
I actually find the Windows GUI incredibly difficult and inefficient to use, and I find my Linux GUI extremely easy and efficient.
For being called "Windows", Windows has about the poorest Window manager ever made. Windows are allowed to manage themselves. If a programs busy you can't move or minimize it. Modal dialogs can take over the entire user interface. Applications are rarely well-threaded. If I have an "open" dialog on the screen, I can't move windows around in a program to see what documents I already have open. Multithreading is poorly done, and I cannot launch an application and then do work in another effectively while I wait for the app to load.
I personally use a combination of CLI and GUI. I use each where they are most appropriate. I've spent plenty of time configuring my GUI to be extremely efficient, to the point where just about every operation I do (even moving windows around the screen) can be down with one or two keypresses and I hardly evevr have to touch the mouse. So far, I've found no way to customize the as-shipped Windows GUI to accomadate such things.
The greatest example of Window's easy-to-learn difficult-to-use situation is Microsoft Word. Yes, I know its just an app, but since it upgrades have of windir/SYSTEM32, I'm going to bitch about it like its a part of the OS....
Anyway, if you start typing a list of numbered items that are each a paragraph long, Word oh-so-nicely formats them into a numbered list just like you wanted. Now try typing one thats five paragraphs long, or say, has a screenshot in the middle. It's very difficult. I don't use Word much, so I ask for help from those who use it all the time. They start cutting and copying and pasting text in weird sequences and hitting backspace in certain places. Oh, and by the way whatever you do don't edit that formatted text, or it'll destroy it and you'll have to cut the text and then paste it like this and hit backspace and then edit the number again twice. (or something like that) It's insane. There is no way to build knowledge about this program. You can use it all the time, yet its difficult to understand "how it works" because it tries to help you do easy stuff all the time.
And then there was WordPerfect 5.1, oh, thank god for the F11 (reveal codes) key... You could actually see what it was thinking, and come to an understanding about how it worked and how to make your documents flow properly. Took a little longer to get accustomed to, but once you get the basic concepts its easy to master.
---
Linux is one of the few systems that actually CAN comply with this law:
Just include a script somewhere on the system:
ipchains -P input DENY
This is just about the ONLY way to comply with a law that REQUIRES computes being able to CENSOR INDECENT material.
---
The text of the law:
A person in the business of selling personal computers shall provide with each personal computer sold by that person software that enables the purchaser of the personal computer to automatically block or screen indecent material on the Internet.
There is no software in existance that enables a person to automatically block or screen indecent material on the Internet. We all know censorware doesn't work, and I don't just mean in terms of false positives. It fails to actually censor indecent material. If I SPAM you and 5,000 other texans with naked pictures of your mothers there is no way that you are going to be able to stop me using censorware. Censorware still can't determine if an image is naughty until its been listed in their databases.
So requiring that computers be able to block indecent material isn't possible. In all truth, no one can comply with the law.
---
These are all results from NMAP
---- My Windows 2000 Pro box w/SP1
TCP Sequence Prediction: Class=random positive increments Difficulty=11993 (Worthy challenge)
Remote operating system guess: Windows 2000 RC1 through final release
---- My Linux box (RedHat 7.0, all updates)
TCP Sequence Prediction: Class=random positive increments Difficulty=5472011 (Good luck!)
Remote operating system guess: Linux 2.1.122 - 2.2.14
---- On of work's retired NT4 servers
TCP Sequence Prediction: Class=trivial time dependency Difficulty=4 (Trivial joke)
Remote operating system guess: Windows NT4 / Win95 / Win98
Our WatchGuard firewall returns a dificulty of 9999999.
---
While you're analogy to cigarettes has some validity, its important to remember the following:
.357 revolvers loaded with a single round so you can take a few minutes off work and get some "refreshment." via Russian roulette.
- Cigarette companies claimed that their products had no ill effects, and were not addictive. They advertised this and many people believed it for a very long time. Cigarette companies knew their products were dangerous, and thousands (millions?) of people died or had their lives shortened as a result.
- Cigarette companies targeted advertising at minors who would buy cigarettes illegally. How many people do you know who didn't start smoking until they were eighteen? I know the cigarette companies couldn't stop kids from smoking now if they used ever dollar of profit to do it, but it is undeniable that they contributed to minors smoking.
In contrast, Smith and Wesson makes a product that is intended to be very dangerous, albeit not to the operator. The point here is that while cigarettes and guns are both designed for killing people, the gun companies aren't making any claims otherwise and don't sell
---
My evil twin who lives in a non-extradition treaty country managed to get DeCSS to work perfectly on his computer, which happens to be an exact replica of mine. :)
:), as its beyond me why this DVD isn't CSSed.)
Anyway, he reports the following DVDs work properly:
- Titan A.E.
- A Bug's Life
- Jakob the Liar
(These are all the one's he's tried so far)
This was done using the patched DeCSS enabled xine, version 0.3.6, I believe. This player is available from:
http://gape.ist.utl.pt/ment00/linuxdvd.html
I *cough*, I mean he, had to set the DVD drive to region one before Xine would work, using a little prog called rpcmgr11.c, commonly found on the net (just google for it, compile it, read its instructions and set your DVD region code to 1). This worked for both a Toshiba SD-M1401 DVD-ROM and one of those Pioneer slot loading ones, think its called the "305S" or something like that.
I've got at least one DVD, Sting's Brand New Day album, that is not CSS enocded. (Maybe the evil between the MPAA and RIAA cancel each other out
Sure is neat to be able to watch movies you own on your own Linux box.
---
Yes, you can run ssh on windows. You can even install korn shell and get SOME scripting capabilites. What you can't do is effectively deploy software updates in this manner.
NT4 Service Pack 6a. Thanks for bringing this up. Try grabbing an older NT4 CD with Service Pack 1 and installing 6a on it. I've done this several times... I refused to believe fellow NT admins that upgrading from SP1 to 6a was a bad idea. That is until the systems I installed blew up and died once I configured IIS and JRun, and theirs didn't. Make sure you install 3 or 4 before installing 6a or the system will be VERY unreliable. One of the boxes I did this way bluescreened and never booted again.
I can't wait to tell the sysadmins about your last point: "same amount of time." Both the UNIX and NT guys will find that hilarious.
---
Your anecdotal evidence of MS stuff working can be easily countered with my anecdotal evidence of MS stuff not working. All our Windows boxen run the latest updates of Win2K with SP1, and I have not seen the types of uptimes you have. The reason we moved to 2K is because NT4 was just that bad. The NT4 boxes crashed constantly, even though they ran on high-quality Dell servers and were very well maintained. Today another 2000 machine blew up when we applied a security fix... it now boots to a blue screen.
The Linux environment at work has never had any problems that were not found to be hardware related. Our Linux IT cost is virtually zero by comparison. All our development machines run on it, and their constantly running very much untested software yet their rate of failure is orders of magnitues less than the creative departments machines that run Photoshop and the administrative machines that use Word and ACT, all on up-to-date w2k installs.
At least with Win2K I don't get woken up at 3am just about every Saturday morining when the NT4 IIS boxes blue-screened (and didn't reboot, even though they were supposed too) due to the backup software running.
---
You bring up some interesting peripheral points, but in the end, these don't matter much.
The REAL problem is this:
Microsoft brought an end to the term "computers don't make mistakes" Computers are unreliable as hell in most people's eyes, and rightly so. I get a little upset when I can't get my phone hooked up because the AT&T customer rep tells me that she was just typing in my info and now the screen turned blue.
Microsoft has designed a user interface that allows any idiot to use a computer instantly, without learning anything about what they are doing or how to do it right. They make every effort to get users using computers so they can buy products, but they make NO EFFORT to help people avoid the pitfalls of irresponsibly using a computer.
Microsoft software is not easy to use. It is easy to learn. Word is the most difficult program I have ever used. I love it when I'm writing a technical document and it tries to help me write a letter to grandma. There's a lot of software out there that is difficult to learn but easy to use, a good example of which is Photoshop: it's not intuitive, but once you learn to use it you can be extremely productive with it.
Microsoft has created the need for programs like Virus scanners, uninstallers, disk repair utilities, and all kinds of kludged utilities that let you "roll back" your system state to when it was once stable. They've created "self-repairing" software.... why should software ever break with a good package management system...or just good protection around core shared system libraries?
Microsoft has created an IT industry that spends billions every year working around the massive shortcomings of software that doesn't work.
Microsoft denies all of this.
Is any of this illegal? NO!
Oops, but wait, Microsoft maneuvered into and maintains their monopoly position illegally. They broke the law and action must therefore be taken against them... regardless of what anyone thinks of their software.
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I've got an Athlon with a GeForce2, running RedHat 7.
/etc/X11/XFree86-4.conf (NVidia is very clear about how to do this... it is slightly annoying) though.
Steps to play Quake3 from box with blank hard drive.
Install Red hat 7.
Install XFree86 drivers from NVidia's site:
rpm -ivh foo.rpm bar.rpm
Modify a specific line of
Install Quake3.
Play Quake3 and enjoy 90+ FPS just like the windows folks do (if you don't believe it, look at how good NVidia's linux drivers are at http://www.tomshardware.com)
This is easier than reformatting and reinstalling everything on a fresh Windows ME box when Microsoft MechWarrior 4 blows up slightly after startup because it didn't like something about the DirectX 8 that was installed. I wish all games ran on Linux, it's easier to learn to use Linux than spend hours reformatting Windows every time something goes wrong.
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GTK+ has several different theme engines that behave differently. On my Gnome 1.4 machine right now there are these engines:
- metal (libmetal.so)
- notif (libnotif.so)
- pixmap (libpixmap.so)
- raleigh (libraleigh.so)
- redmond95 (libredmond95.so)
These engines (at least most of them) support skinning. What most people think of as GTK+ themes are simply pixmap theme skins.
It's important to note that more changes than just graphics with these themes. Different themes have different capabilities, and some significantly alter the behavior of widgets, such as listboxes, scrollbars, and pane separators.
Maybe you believe that Apple has done more than this. Maybe they have. The problem is that what they have done is EVOLUTIONARY to what the Gnome and KDE folks have done with their theme engines. There is no true innovation here, its just the obvious next step forward. I'm so sick of a brick wall being built in the way of the natural path of a technology by a patent.
The way the patent system works right now, there is probably no legal piece of software out there that isn't more than seventeen years old.
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Citing Windows 2000 as an example of an OS with built-in package management is highly misleading. Windows 2000 is just barely a year old and was the first Windows to have anything approximating package management. Their implementation appears to be quite poor. I've heard promises of DLL hell being a thing of the past, but I've seen several Win2K boxes go down in flames running only MS software and maintained by people highly proficient with Windows. (For example on a clean install, VB6 ate SQL7's lunch.)
No, RH and Debian were the first consumer oriented OS's with Package Management (I forget, did BeOS too?).
And what the heck does "bolt-on" mean? On a Linux box, everything is bolt-on except the kernel. A better word is "modular".
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Getting rid of window.close().... I don't think so. My company writes Web apps that behave like real GUI apps. Getting rid of window.close() would destroy such capabilities. (Note: our sites run in intranet/extranent environments only)
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I had to pay $95 to MS to report a bug in MSJDBCODBC.dll, for which I offered a workaround, and detailed documentation. I had to call their "tech support" hotline so that they could realize it was a bug. They then fixed it six months later. Had I not figured out a damn-near idiotic workaround (I was able to determine which DLL was crashing IIS, and copy a different version from REALLY OLD and UNUPDATED win95 boxen), the project would have gone to the toilet, a project which made up 10% of our company's revenue for that year.
Just to be fair, After hours of haggling, the $95 charge was reversed.
And *that* is the last time I got "support" from MS.
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Ninjas. Pancakes. Which is better? Discuss!
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RedHat 6.2 was preinstalled.
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It's a bit slow on my old Linux box, a K6/200 w 64M memory. Its worth trying out and having fun with, but it might be annoying for day-to-day use. On my 750 at work and my 1100 at home its completely usable though (I replaced gmc with it), with the smooth graphics turned on.
If you want to use it with a 200MHz machine, you'll probably want to disable "Use smoother (but slower) graphics", turn off "Use Nautilus to draw the desktop" (this capability is much improved, but still buggy and slow, even somewhat slow on the 1100.), and change most of the "speed tradeoffs" options to never. If the box is SCSI, you should be fine leaving a lot of these options on. The packages worked fine on both RH6.2 and RH7.0 systems for me, all of them already had Helix Gnome though.
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Why would anyone use Gnome? Granted, they done alot of work, and it looks pretty good, but KDE is better for so many reasons. They were the first ones to create a full desktop enviroment. It looks far better than any version of Gnome does, too. Also, they have done so much for the community, creating projects like KOffice, KDevelop, kPPP, and KWM; Gnome just can't compete!
Why would anyone use KDE? Granted, they done alot of work, and it looks pretty good, but Gnome is better for so many reasons. They were the first ones to create a full free desktop enviroment. It looks far better than any version of KDE does, too. Also, they have done so much for the community, creating projects like Gimp, Gnumeric, GnuCash, and Sawfish; KDE just can't compete!
Er, actually, they're both bitchin, and the flamewar is over. I think you (and all the other morons who actually debate this issue) lost. This is why the Ninjas vs. Pancakes debate was created on Slashdot, that way the trolls would have a worthwhile subject to debate that could easily be automatically modded down to -2 via regex.
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This is obviously my personal experience, but Nautilus PR 1 and 2 had some serious performance and stability issues. I've had PR3 crash a few times, and it still takes too damn long to open new windows, but its definitely worth trying. There is no comparison between this release and the previous two, IMHO.
Also, if you have a 500MHz computer, be sure to turn OFF "smoother but slower graphics"
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1. Windows is free with PCS.
Can't find my copy. All I see is a bunch of RedHat 6.2 CDs with my Dell.
You have windows
No really, I can't find it... All I see is RedHat stuff.
2. Windows has a GUI that is easy to use because it has been developed in conjunction with literally millions of beta testers and focus groups.
I find it odd that not one user in these focus groups got annoyed with the fact that they couldn't move or iconize or move a window if the application owning the window was busy. Are you really SURE they did that, I just don't see it.
3. Windows runs these games faster, and necessarily always will - emulation has to be slower, because there's two layers
WINE is a recursive algorithm for "Wine Is Not an Emulator." It's NOT an emulator. It's an implementation of Win32 libs on x86 Linux boxes. Wine can even use Windows DLLs, so it is running the same stuff.
4. Windows runs the games easier than WINE - you don't have to compile Windows for your PC like you do with Wine (you can get pre-built builds, but they don't work as well).
Uh, Wine 1.0 isn't out yet. I've only used pre-built versions, and have had good results.
5. For WINE to work usably, you are required to have Windows on your PC (true: all those shots of Word running on Linux only happen because Linux is using the dlls and vxds)
All my experiments with Wine have not involved Windows DLLs. It ran quite a number of applications and installers with no problems, and this was more than six months ago.
As for Word though, keep in mind what atrocities Word does to a system... Word reinstalls hundreds of DLLs on a Windows machine. It breaks Microsoft's own "regulations" for software installation. How is this therefore a valid example of why I shouldn't try to run Windows games on my Linux box?
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I used to write Java COM components with IIS. While the Java libraries (com.ms.blah), were pretty thin wrappers around IIS stuff, I tend to agree that Java/IIS was a pretty good match. It was amazing how little effort they put into the Java versions of their APIs... I remember having to pass in arrays with length 1 to calls in order to get return values. And I remember how it was technologically impossible to retrieve an array of HTTP request parameters (that had the same name) from Java... all you could do was get them back comma delimited (and thus mangled).
Then I remember when we discovered a never-publicized bug in MS' jdbcodbc.dll. The JDBC-ODBC bridge used to blow up if you sent more than 32k to it trying to set a text (CLOB) column. It would bring down the JDBC-ODBC stuff, the JVM, and thus IIS (JVM was running in process). We reported it, had to fight getting charged for tech support, and it was finally fixed six months after they'd escalated it to that mythical maximum level of importance. Were it not for being able to manually copy old versions of jdbcodbc.dll from old Win95 boxes, our client's app would have been DOA. Cost us two weeks tracking the sucker down
too. Maybe we should have written a security exploit around it and made it into a security bug. Perhaps that would have caught their attention.... but oh, wait, it was 1998 and MS didn't give half a rats rear end about security anyway.
Eventually, we figured out that it was probably a good idea to ditch all dependence on MS and go straight J2EE.
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