I do think Dell has some of the sexiest server cases out there...
Dell does seem to be pretty good about the commodity thing, apart from their obsessive reliance on Intel. I am inclined to agree though that you're better off going small-time or self-built sometimes.
You're assuming Nessie is in fact a predator. I've never gotten the sense that the legend was ever particularly clear on that point. Besides, the predator isn't always the big fish in the pond, so to speak -- a lot of times the prey is bigger.
"obvious bias" only counted outside the courtroom, IMHO. Jackson has a history of dismissing his own experts if their testimony makes no sense -- ask a perpetual-motion pusher named Joseph Newman how he was supposedly screwed by Jackson.
I've gotten the sense that Jackson is actually quite conscientious about his work. In the above-mentioned case Jackson threw out the testimony of an expert witness that claimed Newman's suspiciously efficient electric motor generated more power than it took in because it simply didn't make any sense scientifically. What killed him was his inability to keep a poker face about the situation, which in practice is probably rather meaningless but still doesn't look good in public.
Well... to Judge Jackson this is the rebuke that vindicates. I didn't think the appeals court would be so smart about it. Proves he knows the law, but also proves he can't keep his mouth shut when he has to.
I'm thinking that this is frustrating, but in theory it's nothing more than a delay of the inevitable. I say in theory because you never quite know what the Ashcroft DoJ is likely to do in a situation like this. I will say this -- I hope the judge that gets the case factors in Microsoft's recent behavior and their open defiance of the breakup order. If said judge is doing his/her job properly the second time around could be worse.
Then again, that's assuming the best of the courts. After the whole Florida fiasco I don't think we can be too sure.
Coelacanth. (Though I think coelo- is acceptable as well -- I get hits for both.)
The thing about Nessie: if there is such a beast, in all likelihood there are a number of them, with a decent-sized gene pool. If that's the case, how is it that we have never seen anything that fits the description? Surely the bottom of Loch Ness has been dragged a number of times -- how is it that we've never found anything resembling a Nessie skeleton? No mystery carcasses washed up on the beach (like, say, giant squids), no locals salting them down and eating them (like the above mentioned ancient fish).
I can't quite tell whether you're defending or discounting the Nessie hypothesis, so I can't say whether I'm strengthening or rebutting your point. But the idea that there are real monsters on Earth doesn't mean that we're going to find Nessie.
Is that enough for the coffin nails, then?
on
Fortune on Rambus
·
· Score: 3
That's the thing about non-mainstream press, isn't it? Someone else will often break the story first, long before the mainstream picks up on it, but you have to wade through so much garbage to get to it.
I think it's pretty clear that what Rambus was doing was pretty slimy, and they were found guilty with good reason. JEDEC members had an understanding. Rambus trampled on it and then jumped ship to avoid facing the music. I do think the "running scared" comment that someone pointed out does indicate a sense of delusion on the part of the Rambus partisans; I mean, I said the same thing about Intel's advertising FUD back when Apple started shipping Power Macs, but the comment actually made sense at the time.
I look at it this way: any memory bus that requires anything even vaguely resembling a terminator is probably broken anyway.
Ada and C++ are both monstrosities. I think the difference is in their relationships to their ancestors. Ada just seems gratuitously different; there's more on this at the end of the post.
That bit about C was something I wasn't aware of, but it was probably quite true in those days anyway. Old C is pretty slack compared to current C.
Not so much not catching on in and of itself as the fact that the fact that it didn't has rendered it irrelevant makes it antiquated. I think Smalltalk sadly falls into the same category -- AFAIK IBM is the only company doing anything the least bit significant with it. It's a question of influence, and Ada has so far failed to be influential to the point where it looks strange even to Pascal programmers.
Ada83 was not OO in the sense we normally associate with the term -- no inheritance, for example. I think it was a little closer to VB in that regard.
Of course Ada and Fortran are both in the same boat -- niche/legacy languages with no likelihood of realizing the promise their supporters claim outside their sandboxes. As for technical vs. sociopolitical... I think the two overlap in this case. Ada, as I said originally, is a mess. The only reason C++ is what it is now is because it evolved that way as people were taking it up -- Ada was like that from the beginning and only got worse. As for languages no longer being necessary, Perl and Python coexist primarily for esthetic reasons; Ada and C/C++, however, seem to inhabit basically the same problem domain with only a little disjunction, and C/C++ simply has evolved to handle it better, warts and all.
Ada is an overdeveloped mess of a language. I have a copy of the annotated draft standard at home -- it's an even more effective murder weapon than the third edition of the C++ Programming Language.
Ada was the right answer in 1979 -- C hadn't yet achieved its current prominence, and the DoD had a Tower of Babel to deal with. I won't argue that point. But it also points out a danger of design by committee -- the design of Ada is not enough like its closest ancestor Pascal to be really familiar to anybody, and it became rather antiquated long before the Ada95 standard came out simply because it didn't catch on outside the defense industry. The fact that it keeps on going makes it something of a niche product akin to Fortran -- the only reason that it might be the best for what it does is that it's been what people have been using since '79, not because it's the best overall.
As for calling it object-oriented, that's a stretch -- Ada83 is somewhat closer to Modula-2 in conception, and OO was a bag on the side added to the system in the 1995 standard.
Ada simply is no longer necessary, which is why the USDoD revoked the Ada mandate a couple of years ago. It will keep being used because it's a major legacy component in the DoD's IT infrastructure, but it won't ever take the place that its supporters want for it.
Does the term "deadpan" mean anything to anybody here?
The fact is that the DoD is using an Open Source product. The Linux comment was jumping to conclusions and should not have been made, but it's a good move. (And it's free to them as well, to those who didn't read that part -- it's already covered under their current support contracts.)
Now if they'd just do it on some of their Windows hardware.
The Pentium Pro, Pentium II, Celeron, and Pentium III are all variants on the original P6/i686 core. The main differences are architectural issues involving L2 cache and the addition of MMX and then Screaming Cindy (okay, so I like how the Register thinks) to the later chips.
I suspect the Willamette (P4) core would probably qualify as i786 but for the existence of Itanium; it is quite different from the P6 chips on the silicon level. (No, I don't know what the hardware detectors call it)
I just have to put this line in the same category as Schopenhauer's Fallacy and "They laughed at Einstein..." Really, sir, do you wish to be looked at as a crackpot? You definitely sound like one.
Are you trolling or just making fun of John Q. SixSlash?
I have to say, though -- I think the idea of black-icing a browser is pretty cool if you're trying to make a point*. I remember a demo page back in the Early Days Of The Web (tm) that was designed to kill almost any browser it came across. I think Netscape/Mac was the only one it couldn't kill, mainly because the browser was broken in some way or another. Very Goedel, Escher, Bach, that idea.
/Brian
* Of course the point would be that Open Source is good because you can edit the source code to work around said hole...
It's a good thing this is only a Windows-only deal. It's not just a bad idea, it's outright deranged.
The BIOS is firmware. That's all it is, and that's all it should behave as. And the point about reflashing BIOSes is worth remembering -- don't forget that nasty little firmware update that B&W G3 Mac users had to deal with last year.
I'd go so far as to say that it's a shame that OpenBIOS and LinuxBIOS aren't as far along as they could be -- at least the early IBM PC users could look through the listing for security holes and such. This is just flat out ridiculous.
(For the record, the LinuxBIOS idea seems to be a pretty specialized design -- too clunky and potentially difficult to maintain IMHO. I wouldn't use it personally, though OpenBIOS seems to have potential even if it's a comatose project.)
Solaris is an enterprise-level system. Linux started on the desktop and hasn't grown to that level yet. I'm not saying it won't, but it's not there yet.
But there is a logic to this -- essentially Compaq, being somewhat back of the pack, is hedging their bets on the possibility that Linux will attain enterprise respectability. At the same time they know it won't be much of a profit center for them, so they're open sourcing it.
DEC isn't a company, it's a virus that nearly killed Compaq when it infected itself. I've always gotten the impression that DEC managed to succeed (I use the term loosely) solely on its product merits; its management has always come off as being somewhat clueless and idiotic. (I live in the Boston area, so reports of Digital layoffs have always been commonplace events to me.)
I've never thought especially highly of DEC; I sort of always put them in the same broad category as Apple for a company that made excellent products but can't quite be trusted. The main difference: with Apple it's always been virulent egotism (especially under Steve -- being a Mac fan at the dawn of the 21st is a rollercoaster), but with Digital it was always abject and inexcusable cluelessness (viz. Ken Olson's comments about Unix vs. VMS and DEC's failed first entries into the PC market).
I actually have somewhat more respect for Compaq now that they've started to get some of the DEC toxins out of the system while still maintaining DEC's R&D rep. But I still wouldn't buy one of their systems new -- their home systems are ugly, their business systems are just sort of cheezy-looking (except for those workstation cases -- silver and black with Jenna Jameson-level sex appeal) -- even worse than IBM's VogonBoxen. (I do have an old Compaq Prolinea, a system so dumbed down that I've had a love-hate relationship since the day I bought it for $90 heavily used, but it's been retired.)
I do think they could do a little better in the TLA department, but it's nice to see something like this. It's the kind of thing open source should be -- at least if there's bloat it's cool bloat.
Consultancy is exactly what they're trying to do. If they can continue to turn a profit, they will be the first to validate the predictions about viable open source business plans: give away razors, give away razor blades, sell styptic pencils:-)
I got one from a cooperative RadioShack manager -- he said he wasn't supposed to but gave it to me anyway. He didn't even give me the chance to offer him a bribe...
That's probably a good point -- if the New York Times is feeding lousy data, people might get fired, but it's rather unlikely the people who make decisions based on data in the daily newspaper are getting their data from that source. On the other hand, the people who read the Journal read it because it has information they need to keep their companies afloat.
I'd say for papers like the WSJ and the Financial Times, good reporting is rather more important than it is for Joe's Herald and Fishwrapper. If the biz press isn't keeping the biz honest, they'd have to take some responsibility in a slide.
Of course, not being much of a Good Capitalist myself, this is only speculation, but...
That's the thing -- I do think there's such a thing as hardware bloat. My current PC is a P2/333, and I don't think I'm going to be upgrading it for a while (unless I get that PC-tech job I'm looking at...). I have a PowerMac 6500/250 whose only faults are having one too few PCI slots and lobotomized Open Firmware -- if it wasn't for that, it would do MacOS X just fine. And on top of that I have a PowerBook 5300 -- doesn't even run Cardbus, but apart from that it's as good a portable machine for what I do with it as a TiBook (though admittedly I don't much feel the need to watch DVDs on airplanes...).
My name is Brian, and I'm a technovulture.
The upside of being a technical neophile is that computer equipment rarely costs as much as high-end audio equipment (f'rinstance; granted there must be a couple of people out there with an IBM S/390 or zSeries in their basements). But that still means that unless you're running games or supercomputing clusters where you can see the difference, you don't need the latest and greatest -- the bottleneck is never the processor anymore anyway.
I mentioned hardware bloat -- that's the ugly dark side of Moore's Law, a special case of Parkinson's Law IMHO where features increase to fill processing power and/or storage space available. I don't think there's a good excuse for that when we've got things like QNX-on-a-floppy or Midori Linux. Sometimes it's used to good end -- Apple, for example, putting the level of polish that they did on OS X, is to some people a good thing. The flip side is the MS effect -- massive, unnecessary software bloat, or in the case of most current Linux distributions (most egregiously SuSE and RedHat), not so much bloat as a state of muscleboundness where the package fills up with well-written shovelware.
I maintain that the core of any OS written for current hardware should be usable on platforms equal to the following:
-Pentium-90 or PowerPC 603/100
-16MB RAM
-120MB hard drive
-PCI slots
And that, in my opinion, is being quite generous, particularly with regard to memory.
Why is this so hard? Why can't Apple get MacOS X supported on my 6500 when all they have to do is write a working MacOS Classic bootloader package the size of two floppy disks (half of which already exists on a standard Disk Tools floppy)? Why can't I wedge a workable SuSE package onto a gig of hard drive space? Why in the world does Windows need a P2?
The fact is that it's good that we have the capabilities we have now. But there's no reason that the system requirements of the OS should have to grow to keep pace with it. The same argument applies to apps; why is OpenOffice such a monstrosity to download when a copy of VisiCalc will almost fit in a boot block (well, not really, but...)? There's no good reason for this.
Alright, I've ranted. But I don't apologize for it...
/Brian
Re:I'm tired of the argument
on
Star In A Jar
·
· Score: 2
Which is an attitude I've found more and more attractive. What I find disturbing is the other inevitable idea that my mind seems to have cooked up -- God, such as he is, might just be only human. But if I ever come to accept that, I might never feel right setting foot in a church again...
I do sincerely believe (and I've said it before on Slashdot) that atheists are just as misguided as religious fundamentalists of any stripe -- you can't use logic to say there is no God any more certainly than you can do the same to assert that there is. Religion or not, dogma is dogma, and I've always found it rather interesting that being an agnostic and a believing Christian at the same time are not mutually exclusive (think about that for a moment).
Slashdot Mirror
I do think Dell has some of the sexiest server cases out there...
Dell does seem to be pretty good about the commodity thing, apart from their obsessive reliance on Intel. I am inclined to agree though that you're better off going small-time or self-built sometimes.
/Brian
Not in any way that matters...
/Brian
You're assuming Nessie is in fact a predator. I've never gotten the sense that the legend was ever particularly clear on that point. Besides, the predator isn't always the big fish in the pond, so to speak -- a lot of times the prey is bigger.
/Brian
"obvious bias" only counted outside the courtroom, IMHO. Jackson has a history of dismissing his own experts if their testimony makes no sense -- ask a perpetual-motion pusher named Joseph Newman how he was supposedly screwed by Jackson.
I've gotten the sense that Jackson is actually quite conscientious about his work. In the above-mentioned case Jackson threw out the testimony of an expert witness that claimed Newman's suspiciously efficient electric motor generated more power than it took in because it simply didn't make any sense scientifically. What killed him was his inability to keep a poker face about the situation, which in practice is probably rather meaningless but still doesn't look good in public.
/Brian
Well... to Judge Jackson this is the rebuke that vindicates. I didn't think the appeals court would be so smart about it. Proves he knows the law, but also proves he can't keep his mouth shut when he has to.
I'm thinking that this is frustrating, but in theory it's nothing more than a delay of the inevitable. I say in theory because you never quite know what the Ashcroft DoJ is likely to do in a situation like this. I will say this -- I hope the judge that gets the case factors in Microsoft's recent behavior and their open defiance of the breakup order. If said judge is doing his/her job properly the second time around could be worse.
Then again, that's assuming the best of the courts. After the whole Florida fiasco I don't think we can be too sure.
/Brian
Coelacanth. (Though I think coelo- is acceptable as well -- I get hits for both.)
The thing about Nessie: if there is such a beast, in all likelihood there are a number of them, with a decent-sized gene pool. If that's the case, how is it that we have never seen anything that fits the description? Surely the bottom of Loch Ness has been dragged a number of times -- how is it that we've never found anything resembling a Nessie skeleton? No mystery carcasses washed up on the beach (like, say, giant squids), no locals salting them down and eating them (like the above mentioned ancient fish).
I can't quite tell whether you're defending or discounting the Nessie hypothesis, so I can't say whether I'm strengthening or rebutting your point. But the idea that there are real monsters on Earth doesn't mean that we're going to find Nessie.
/Brian
Project BLUE SCREEN, ye eedjit!
/Brian
That's the thing about non-mainstream press, isn't it? Someone else will often break the story first, long before the mainstream picks up on it, but you have to wade through so much garbage to get to it.
I think it's pretty clear that what Rambus was doing was pretty slimy, and they were found guilty with good reason. JEDEC members had an understanding. Rambus trampled on it and then jumped ship to avoid facing the music. I do think the "running scared" comment that someone pointed out does indicate a sense of delusion on the part of the Rambus partisans; I mean, I said the same thing about Intel's advertising FUD back when Apple started shipping Power Macs, but the comment actually made sense at the time.
I look at it this way: any memory bus that requires anything even vaguely resembling a terminator is probably broken anyway.
/Brian
Ada and C++ are both monstrosities. I think the difference is in their relationships to their ancestors. Ada just seems gratuitously different; there's more on this at the end of the post.
That bit about C was something I wasn't aware of, but it was probably quite true in those days anyway. Old C is pretty slack compared to current C.
Not so much not catching on in and of itself as the fact that the fact that it didn't has rendered it irrelevant makes it antiquated. I think Smalltalk sadly falls into the same category -- AFAIK IBM is the only company doing anything the least bit significant with it. It's a question of influence, and Ada has so far failed to be influential to the point where it looks strange even to Pascal programmers.
Ada83 was not OO in the sense we normally associate with the term -- no inheritance, for example. I think it was a little closer to VB in that regard.
Of course Ada and Fortran are both in the same boat -- niche/legacy languages with no likelihood of realizing the promise their supporters claim outside their sandboxes. As for technical vs. sociopolitical... I think the two overlap in this case. Ada, as I said originally, is a mess. The only reason C++ is what it is now is because it evolved that way as people were taking it up -- Ada was like that from the beginning and only got worse. As for languages no longer being necessary, Perl and Python coexist primarily for esthetic reasons; Ada and C/C++, however, seem to inhabit basically the same problem domain with only a little disjunction, and C/C++ simply has evolved to handle it better, warts and all.
Just my opinions, of course.
/brian
Ada is an overdeveloped mess of a language. I have a copy of the annotated draft standard at home -- it's an even more effective murder weapon than the third edition of the C++ Programming Language.
Ada was the right answer in 1979 -- C hadn't yet achieved its current prominence, and the DoD had a Tower of Babel to deal with. I won't argue that point. But it also points out a danger of design by committee -- the design of Ada is not enough like its closest ancestor Pascal to be really familiar to anybody, and it became rather antiquated long before the Ada95 standard came out simply because it didn't catch on outside the defense industry. The fact that it keeps on going makes it something of a niche product akin to Fortran -- the only reason that it might be the best for what it does is that it's been what people have been using since '79, not because it's the best overall.
As for calling it object-oriented, that's a stretch -- Ada83 is somewhat closer to Modula-2 in conception, and OO was a bag on the side added to the system in the 1995 standard.
Ada simply is no longer necessary, which is why the USDoD revoked the Ada mandate a couple of years ago. It will keep being used because it's a major legacy component in the DoD's IT infrastructure, but it won't ever take the place that its supporters want for it.
/Brian
Does the term "deadpan" mean anything to anybody here?
The fact is that the DoD is using an Open Source product. The Linux comment was jumping to conclusions and should not have been made, but it's a good move. (And it's free to them as well, to those who didn't read that part -- it's already covered under their current support contracts.)
Now if they'd just do it on some of their Windows hardware.
/Brian
Close, but no cigar.
The Pentium Pro, Pentium II, Celeron, and Pentium III are all variants on the original P6/i686 core. The main differences are architectural issues involving L2 cache and the addition of MMX and then Screaming Cindy (okay, so I like how the Register thinks) to the later chips.
I suspect the Willamette (P4) core would probably qualify as i786 but for the existence of Itanium; it is quite different from the P6 chips on the silicon level. (No, I don't know what the hardware detectors call it)
/Brian
Wow, a new post from the BSDbot.
And of course the fact that JH is going to work for one of the largest BSD vendors out there is just one more data point...
This is one of the most boring trolls, I have to say.
YCTWS*. YHL. HAND.
/brian
*You Can't Troll Worth Shit
Control-click. Or do like the powerusers do and buy a 2-button mouse with the required control panel.
/Brian
"I shall be moderated into oblivion..."
I just have to put this line in the same category as Schopenhauer's Fallacy and "They laughed at Einstein..." Really, sir, do you wish to be looked at as a crackpot? You definitely sound like one.
/Brian
Are you trolling or just making fun of John Q. SixSlash?
I have to say, though -- I think the idea of black-icing a browser is pretty cool if you're trying to make a point*. I remember a demo page back in the Early Days Of The Web (tm) that was designed to kill almost any browser it came across. I think Netscape/Mac was the only one it couldn't kill, mainly because the browser was broken in some way or another. Very Goedel, Escher, Bach, that idea.
/Brian
* Of course the point would be that Open Source is good because you can edit the source code to work around said hole...
It's a good thing this is only a Windows-only deal. It's not just a bad idea, it's outright deranged.
The BIOS is firmware. That's all it is, and that's all it should behave as. And the point about reflashing BIOSes is worth remembering -- don't forget that nasty little firmware update that B&W G3 Mac users had to deal with last year.
I'd go so far as to say that it's a shame that OpenBIOS and LinuxBIOS aren't as far along as they could be -- at least the early IBM PC users could look through the listing for security holes and such. This is just flat out ridiculous.
(For the record, the LinuxBIOS idea seems to be a pretty specialized design -- too clunky and potentially difficult to maintain IMHO. I wouldn't use it personally, though OpenBIOS seems to have potential even if it's a comatose project.)
/Brian
Solaris is an enterprise-level system. Linux started on the desktop and hasn't grown to that level yet. I'm not saying it won't, but it's not there yet.
But there is a logic to this -- essentially Compaq, being somewhat back of the pack, is hedging their bets on the possibility that Linux will attain enterprise respectability. At the same time they know it won't be much of a profit center for them, so they're open sourcing it.
/Brian
DEC isn't a company, it's a virus that nearly killed Compaq when it infected itself. I've always gotten the impression that DEC managed to succeed (I use the term loosely) solely on its product merits; its management has always come off as being somewhat clueless and idiotic. (I live in the Boston area, so reports of Digital layoffs have always been commonplace events to me.)
I've never thought especially highly of DEC; I sort of always put them in the same broad category as Apple for a company that made excellent products but can't quite be trusted. The main difference: with Apple it's always been virulent egotism (especially under Steve -- being a Mac fan at the dawn of the 21st is a rollercoaster), but with Digital it was always abject and inexcusable cluelessness (viz. Ken Olson's comments about Unix vs. VMS and DEC's failed first entries into the PC market).
I actually have somewhat more respect for Compaq now that they've started to get some of the DEC toxins out of the system while still maintaining DEC's R&D rep. But I still wouldn't buy one of their systems new -- their home systems are ugly, their business systems are just sort of cheezy-looking (except for those workstation cases -- silver and black with Jenna Jameson-level sex appeal) -- even worse than IBM's VogonBoxen. (I do have an old Compaq Prolinea, a system so dumbed down that I've had a love-hate relationship since the day I bought it for $90 heavily used, but it's been retired.)
I do think they could do a little better in the TLA department, but it's nice to see something like this. It's the kind of thing open source should be -- at least if there's bloat it's cool bloat.
/Brian
Consultancy is exactly what they're trying to do. If they can continue to turn a profit, they will be the first to validate the predictions about viable open source business plans: give away razors, give away razor blades, sell styptic pencils :-)
/Brian
I got one from a cooperative RadioShack manager -- he said he wasn't supposed to but gave it to me anyway. He didn't even give me the chance to offer him a bribe...
And now I have it plugged into my Mac.
/Brian
The closest equivalents to blueprints are things like flowcharts and UML descriptions, both of somewhat dubious utility.
Why can't people just compare source code to recipes and be done with it? It's a lot closer to the truth anyway...
/brian
That's probably a good point -- if the New York Times is feeding lousy data, people might get fired, but it's rather unlikely the people who make decisions based on data in the daily newspaper are getting their data from that source. On the other hand, the people who read the Journal read it because it has information they need to keep their companies afloat.
I'd say for papers like the WSJ and the Financial Times, good reporting is rather more important than it is for Joe's Herald and Fishwrapper. If the biz press isn't keeping the biz honest, they'd have to take some responsibility in a slide.
Of course, not being much of a Good Capitalist myself, this is only speculation, but...
/brian
That's the thing -- I do think there's such a thing as hardware bloat. My current PC is a P2/333, and I don't think I'm going to be upgrading it for a while (unless I get that PC-tech job I'm looking at...). I have a PowerMac 6500/250 whose only faults are having one too few PCI slots and lobotomized Open Firmware -- if it wasn't for that, it would do MacOS X just fine. And on top of that I have a PowerBook 5300 -- doesn't even run Cardbus, but apart from that it's as good a portable machine for what I do with it as a TiBook (though admittedly I don't much feel the need to watch DVDs on airplanes...).
My name is Brian, and I'm a technovulture.
The upside of being a technical neophile is that computer equipment rarely costs as much as high-end audio equipment (f'rinstance; granted there must be a couple of people out there with an IBM S/390 or zSeries in their basements). But that still means that unless you're running games or supercomputing clusters where you can see the difference, you don't need the latest and greatest -- the bottleneck is never the processor anymore anyway.
I mentioned hardware bloat -- that's the ugly dark side of Moore's Law, a special case of Parkinson's Law IMHO where features increase to fill processing power and/or storage space available. I don't think there's a good excuse for that when we've got things like QNX-on-a-floppy or Midori Linux. Sometimes it's used to good end -- Apple, for example, putting the level of polish that they did on OS X, is to some people a good thing. The flip side is the MS effect -- massive, unnecessary software bloat, or in the case of most current Linux distributions (most egregiously SuSE and RedHat), not so much bloat as a state of muscleboundness where the package fills up with well-written shovelware.
I maintain that the core of any OS written for current hardware should be usable on platforms equal to the following:
-Pentium-90 or PowerPC 603/100
-16MB RAM
-120MB hard drive
-PCI slots
And that, in my opinion, is being quite generous, particularly with regard to memory.
Why is this so hard? Why can't Apple get MacOS X supported on my 6500 when all they have to do is write a working MacOS Classic bootloader package the size of two floppy disks (half of which already exists on a standard Disk Tools floppy)? Why can't I wedge a workable SuSE package onto a gig of hard drive space? Why in the world does Windows need a P2?
The fact is that it's good that we have the capabilities we have now. But there's no reason that the system requirements of the OS should have to grow to keep pace with it. The same argument applies to apps; why is OpenOffice such a monstrosity to download when a copy of VisiCalc will almost fit in a boot block (well, not really, but...)? There's no good reason for this.
Alright, I've ranted. But I don't apologize for it...
/Brian
Which is an attitude I've found more and more attractive. What I find disturbing is the other inevitable idea that my mind seems to have cooked up -- God, such as he is, might just be only human. But if I ever come to accept that, I might never feel right setting foot in a church again...
I do sincerely believe (and I've said it before on Slashdot) that atheists are just as misguided as religious fundamentalists of any stripe -- you can't use logic to say there is no God any more certainly than you can do the same to assert that there is. Religion or not, dogma is dogma, and I've always found it rather interesting that being an agnostic and a believing Christian at the same time are not mutually exclusive (think about that for a moment).
/Brian