I don't know of people who complain that Word is too slow on a modern machine. If this is the case - RAM is your answer.
This will make a difference for doing things like
browsing the web (one process per window) which will improve tremendously with badly behaved flash and java applets.
playing quakelike games - one processor for the game physics - one for the bots and the networking
video - one for the video - the other for the sound and the rest of your PC
cd writing - on an SMP machine you can burn CD's under load even in Windows. Lots of people complain that their computers lock up whilst burning CD's
Photoshop
This covers a fair number of things - this will make a difference for many 'normal' users, they will just discover that their PC doesn't appear to slow down when working hard.
As far as I am aware the VAT has to applied to the full value of the book - so if you publish a £10000 book and attach a CD Single you have to pay VAT on the full value of the book - not just the CD single value. This is to avoid all computer software being a manual with a free CD to demonstrate the program.
And if, 5 years ago, people were paying 2k+ for computers, it stands to reason, due to inflation and all, that people would be willing to pay 3k+ or so for their PCs today. However, since PCs are actually cheaper, that leaves room for nifty Digicams, wide format color inkjet printers, etc.
However, the people who were paying $2k five years ago are now spending $3k now - on computers + other good stuff. However many more people have started buying PC's because they are only $1k now - or $660 5 years ago. The market has expanded because the PC has got cheaper.
If he had telnet enabled and you had an account already (since you have ftp and telnet access) couldn't you have just logged in and ran the script anyway?
How is this hacking and not normal usage.
I can compromise my friend Tom's machine - that's because I know the root password - this is not (h)(cr)acking though.
Well, my solution would be connect digital output of one soundcard into digital input of the other soundcard in the other computer.
Of course, the majority of people don't have this luxury and I realise the real difficulty is to remove the watermark.
Here the proposed micro-payments are the solution. The plan (in the UK) is for pay-as-you-go mobile type cards for internet micro-payments. The pay as you go mobile market is essentially anonymous - the telcos do not know who owns which phone and I suspect that the internet cards will be similar.
Then it's easy to distribute music that will only play in cracked players.
After all, we are currently assuming that the players will refuse to play non-SDMI music, just like all DVD players obey the region coding....
Hmm, it looks to me like Windows 2000 with larger and better drawn icons.
Better drawn icons - good.
Large Icons - bad.
My screen space is expensive. Why do I have to throw away a few hundred pixels on the side of the folder just to be told it's name in big letters. I suspect this will be unusable at anything less than 1024 x 768
>RedHat is actually going to charge money for people downloading rpm's??
RedHat is going to charge for priority access to fast, guarunteed servers and to notify you of updates.
I have no problem with this. I pay money, I get a service. If I choose not to pay money, I can go to the hassle of doing it myself.
Similarly, if I want to download Debian over my (free) modem then I can do. I can also choose to buy my friend with a cable modem a beer in exchange for his greater bandwidth.
The thing that really swung me over to linux was when I wanted to do a dual boot install - Win 98 + RedHat 6.1 on my laptop (a recently bought second hand P133, 40Mb RAM, 1.6Gb disk).
It came with a buggered copy of Windows 95 on it.
Having used linux before I knew I had to partition the disk. Win 95 had thrown system files everywhere so FIPS[1] was no use. Hmm, nothing for it but to pretend I'd had a disk crash and do a complete repartition, reformat reinstall.
[1]FIPS is the non destructive disk partitioner which works providing that Windows hasn't done something stupid[2] and rendered the disk impossible to modify.
[2]This could be approximated to hasn't been booted yet.
Step 1: Drop down to fdisk, create my 500Mb FAT partition. Leave space for Linux, swap and shared later on.
Step 2: Install Win 98.
STep 3: Discover that it is impossible to install Win98 without a working CD rom drive or a copy on the hard disk. There is no way to make the PCMCIA network card go without installing Win 98.
Step 4: Install DOS from floppy, attempt to pull Win 98 over a serial connection. Give up due to being very slow.
Step 5 : Give up, insert Linux boot floppy, spend 20 minutes installing RedHat 6.1. Let it correctly autodetect all of my Hardware and set up LILO to dual boot to the dos partition. Create a boot floppy.
Step 6: Use ftp, mirror the Win 98 CD to the hard disk.
Step 7: Boot to dos disk, install Win 98, watch it destroy the boot sector.
Step 8 : Rebuild boot sector with LILO - working computer.
Conclusion, the correct way to install Windows 98 onto a machine with no CDROM drive is to install Linux first.
Microsofts installer is good at detecting hardware.
However, it does not allow me to partition the disk (to install a fresh dual boot system I had to repartition after the first install of Win98), it will not share the boot sector.
What we need are manufacturers to create dual boot systems by default and sell those. That gets over the inital difficulties with Linux (i.e. that it tends to destroy your Windows partitions unless you are careful).
Actually I think the problem is worse than you state. What usually happens is someone with some windows experience (often quite alot) has been told that linux is a good operating system to have. Consequently - feeling adventurous they try and install it. For a first time windows user the result is usually either a failed install or a failed install and a trashed Windows installation (i.e. won't boot and windows user doesn't know about fdisk/mbr). This certainly happened to me and put me off Linux considerably. Now, things have got much better recently so most people can actually get the install going.
However, your typical user still has to deal with making all of the hardware work correctly - this is not a problem with a preinstalled computer because the user doesn't yet know that all the hardware doesn't work correctly - however our experience windows user is fully aware that the computer does not work as well under linux as windows. This is not a suprise, our user has spent some time making it work under windows, tweaking from the default buggered install. However, we now have to deal with the fact that - there is no control panel to fix the system with, none of the familiar commands work and we have no documentation. This is a major barrier to actually making the transition.
I made the transition from linux hater to linux user because I had network access to a machine I wasn't adminstrator on and found applications that were useful with no obvious windows counterpart (e.g. using cron to automatically email companies that don't respond). Then an experienced friend of mine led me through a complex RedHat 6 install making all of the network and modem go to route out the network on my house. Then I installed a simpler Laptop of my own and then did a reinstall of my server. Now I'm quite happy with command line + Linux and my laptop no longer runs X to give me more battery life.
To make the transition decent answers have to be given to
why use linux?
how do I install linux?
how do I make it work?
I think your best market now is Win2K users who can't burn CD's (adaptecs software is f****d under win2k). Show them a linux system that will burn under heavy load and they may be persuaded to try it out.
In my house, there's me, my girlfriend and our house mate. We've two desktops and a laptop connecting to a server (RH6.2) doing proxying / caching over dialup. It's also got a CD writer, printer and lots of disk space for media serving. I'm contemplating moving the DVD drive into it too (it's 100Mbit ethernet) and possibly the TV card.
To make it easy for my girlfriend (who hates computers but likes games) all of the linux functions can be called from the web homepage - it has buttons for - "Start The Internet" - "Copy a CD" - "Play Audio CD" etc.
4GB of RAM, how far off is that now? 1994 saw me with 4MB, 1996 with 16MB, 1998 with 128Mb and now in 2000 I'm running on 192 or 512 MB. I reckon 4GB of real memory in my home machine will occur by about 2003 so I want to move to 64bit addressing as soon as possible so the software has time to catch up before it needs to.
Maybe the reason that open source projects work more effciently is that geeks are the only people who are capable of writing a spec that programmers can understand.
Assuming a plane to be travelling at ~ 300 m/s (just below the speed of sound) then fractionally it's travelling at 1 millionth the speed of light producing a 1 part per million frequency shift - this undoubtedly much smaller than the frequency line width anyway.
Do you actually need to shield the hard disk from bumps. My Laptop seems to survive relatively rough train and car journeys without any difficulty and I suspect you'll need to access the disk a lot less with some decent buffering.
It's a breach between two of the internal layers of security, it doesn't make it more likely for people to get in but makes it more damaging if they do.
Home users do not need the bandwidth that SCSI provides. More bandwidth is nice but not essential.
More bandwidth is worth paying a few pounds more for, I'm prepared to pay 5% extra for more bandwidth, I'm not prepared to pay 300% extra for SCSI.
I think that the gameplay still matters. I think the problem is we have a few games with outstanding gameplay - so outstanding that people play the same game for several years.
I personally have been playing Starcraft multiplayer now for over 2 years. I still play Starcraft frequently multiplayer. I haven't bought any other RTS game because everything I've demoed just doesn't compare to Starcraft. I want to buy and play a better RTS than Starcraft but there still isn't a game that can compare to Starcraft + Expansion + 8 revisions to balance the game and bugfix on version 1.0. The other advantage is that Starcraft runs on low end hardware - I have 4 machines that can play Starcraft in my house against 1 (arguably 2) that can play Q3A or most of the latest games. Consequently when I feel like playing with friends, we play Starcraft on the LAN because we can all play. We still play warcraft 2 mutliplayer too because it's easy to pick up for new players.
If anything it's multiplayer thats killing games, a single player game lasts ~1-2 months. A multiplayer game lasts 2-3 years.
Well, as far as I am aware (IANAL) numbers can't be copyrighted (hence the Pentium) so, surely the best solution is to write out the entire source as a (lenghty!) binary number, convert to decimal and post it on your webpage / T-Shirt / Car etc.
Whilst your at it post the encryption key numbers up too.
Remind me for a second, where does the current campaign money go. The media perchance? Do you think that CNN might get a fraction of this and might just be a little biased.
I suspect that if this does start we can expect lots of public exposure a la southpark (paraphrased badly)
"If you sell your vote, you murder children. You don't murder children do you?"
Well, in my experience of a couple of friends mobiles (I don't own one - no brain tumours for me!) they have to be rebooted from time to time. (I've also heard it from time to time on the train, switching the phone off and on again to make the funny mode go away) However, because mobiles boot in a couple of seconds people don't view this as a problem. Maybe it's a solution for microsoft - get the boot time of windows down to 2-3 seconds.
Re:Can I have one in my underwear?
on
Techno Jacket
·
· Score: 1
Wear this clothing and you'll have no problems with bowel movements (cue bad taste joke...)
Wear this, and so many people will take the piss you'll never have to go to the toilet again.
Re:The problem with today's users
on
A Praise To Unix
·
· Score: 1
Absolutely correct, no one will switch over to linux as a desktop operating system until is offers them a significant advantage, large enough to offset the install time and hassle of learning.
I use Win2k as a desktop OS and have a linux machine on the network I use remotely. I don't like windows but I'm not switching until :
Quake 3, Starcraft, Warcraft 3, Baldurs Gate work out of the box with network play.
DVD's can be watched out of the box with no configuration.
A decent web browser rolls along (unfortunately I don't like the look of Mozilla).
Photoshop.
However, I have a linux box which is allocated the following tasks because it does them much better / atall
burns CD's without impacting my normal computer usage
routes the 4 machines to the internet via a dial on demand modem using NAT
allows me to write documents with equations in, and on low powered hardware (my laptop)
acts as a file server for me and my two housemates
I use linux mostly on my laptop because it's too slow for mutlimedia and crawls under windows, however it's fast under linux.
People will convert to linux when applicationX which they view as necessary works _much_ better on linux / only exists on linux. The killer application is still missing. Windows is not so unreliable on a standard home machine that the crash proof is it.
In summary, I use linux for doing useful stuff - however I use X over the network to my windows machine and multimedia stuff on Win2k simply because it works better.
The revolution begins when joe bloggs unveils the free cereal duplicating machine that copies and distributes the cereal for free and the cereal companies begin to sue everyone in sight in the interests of protecting the farmer, when the farmer has signed a contract along the lines of
The farmer borrows lots of money to buy and produce the cereal
The farmer only get 5% of the sale price of the cereal
When, and only when the loan has been paid off is the farmer allowed to receive any of the profits
The cereal company still owns the farm and relevant equipment, and, should the farmer ever try and start a new cereal business the cereal company owns that too.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know of people who complain that Word is too slow on a modern machine. If this is the case - RAM is your answer.
This will make a difference for doing things like
browsing the web (one process per window) which will improve tremendously with badly behaved flash and java applets.
playing quakelike games - one processor for the game physics - one for the bots and the networking
video - one for the video - the other for the sound and the rest of your PC
cd writing - on an SMP machine you can burn CD's under load even in Windows. Lots of people complain that their computers lock up whilst burning CD's
Photoshop
This covers a fair number of things - this will make a difference for many 'normal' users, they will just discover that their PC doesn't appear to slow down when working hard.
As far as I am aware the VAT has to applied to the full value of the book - so if you publish a £10000 book and attach a CD Single you have to pay VAT on the full value of the book - not just the CD single value. This is to avoid all computer software being a manual with a free CD to demonstrate the program.
And if, 5 years ago, people were paying 2k+ for computers, it stands to reason, due to inflation and all, that people would be willing to pay 3k+ or so for their PCs today. However, since PCs are actually cheaper, that leaves room for nifty Digicams, wide format color inkjet printers, etc.
However, the people who were paying $2k five years ago are now spending $3k now - on computers + other good stuff. However many more people have started buying PC's because they are only $1k now - or $660 5 years ago. The market has expanded because the PC has got cheaper.
If I'm right the argument is
"Microsoft would increase the price of Windows until people stopped buying computers"
with the optimal profit point being $1000 for a copy of Windows - raising the cost of a $2000 PC to $3000.
Does anyone other than me think that Apple Mac sales will go up here?
If he had telnet enabled and you had an account already (since you have ftp and telnet access) couldn't you have just logged in and ran the script anyway?
How is this hacking and not normal usage.
I can compromise my friend Tom's machine - that's because I know the root password - this is not (h)(cr)acking though.
Well, my solution would be connect digital output of one soundcard into digital input of the other soundcard in the other computer.
Of course, the majority of people don't have this luxury and I realise the real difficulty is to remove the watermark.
Here the proposed micro-payments are the solution. The plan (in the UK) is for pay-as-you-go mobile type cards for internet micro-payments. The pay as you go mobile market is essentially anonymous - the telcos do not know who owns which phone and I suspect that the internet cards will be similar.
Then it's easy to distribute music that will only play in cracked players.
After all, we are currently assuming that the players will refuse to play non-SDMI music, just like all DVD players obey the region coding....
Hmm, it looks to me like Windows 2000 with larger and better drawn icons.
Better drawn icons - good.
Large Icons - bad.
My screen space is expensive. Why do I have to throw away a few hundred pixels on the side of the folder just to be told it's name in big letters. I suspect this will be unusable at anything less than 1024 x 768
It's Windows 2000 Large Print edition.
>RedHat is actually going to charge money for people downloading rpm's??
RedHat is going to charge for priority access to fast, guarunteed servers and to notify you of updates.
I have no problem with this. I pay money, I get a service. If I choose not to pay money, I can go to the hassle of doing it myself.
Similarly, if I want to download Debian over my (free) modem then I can do. I can also choose to buy my friend with a cable modem a beer in exchange for his greater bandwidth.
I pay my money, I take my choice.
Hmm,
The thing that really swung me over to linux was when I wanted to do a dual boot install - Win 98 + RedHat 6.1 on my laptop (a recently bought second hand P133, 40Mb RAM, 1.6Gb disk).
It came with a buggered copy of Windows 95 on it.
Having used linux before I knew I had to partition the disk. Win 95 had thrown system files everywhere so FIPS[1] was no use. Hmm, nothing for it but to pretend I'd had a disk crash and do a complete repartition, reformat reinstall.
[1]FIPS is the non destructive disk partitioner which works providing that Windows hasn't done something stupid[2] and rendered the disk impossible to modify.
[2]This could be approximated to hasn't been booted yet.
Step 1: Drop down to fdisk, create my 500Mb FAT partition. Leave space for Linux, swap and shared later on.
Step 2: Install Win 98.
STep 3: Discover that it is impossible to install Win98 without a working CD rom drive or a copy on the hard disk. There is no way to make the PCMCIA network card go without installing Win 98.
Step 4: Install DOS from floppy, attempt to pull Win 98 over a serial connection. Give up due to being very slow.
Step 5 : Give up, insert Linux boot floppy, spend 20 minutes installing RedHat 6.1. Let it correctly autodetect all of my Hardware and set up LILO to dual boot to the dos partition. Create a boot floppy.
Step 6: Use ftp, mirror the Win 98 CD to the hard disk.
Step 7: Boot to dos disk, install Win 98, watch it destroy the boot sector.
Step 8 : Rebuild boot sector with LILO - working computer.
Conclusion, the correct way to install Windows 98 onto a machine with no CDROM drive is to install Linux first.
Microsofts installer is good at detecting hardware.
However, it does not allow me to partition the disk (to install a fresh dual boot system I had to repartition after the first install of Win98), it will not share the boot sector.
What we need are manufacturers to create dual boot systems by default and sell those. That gets over the inital difficulties with Linux (i.e. that it tends to destroy your Windows partitions unless you are careful).
Please, Robotic Lifeforms?
Until they are quite definitely shown to be alive I think we should refrain from calling them lifeforms.
Slashdot Extra : Washing Machine Lifeforms abused by society and used as slaves.
Actually I think the problem is worse than you state. What usually happens is someone with some windows experience (often quite alot) has been told that linux is a good operating system to have. Consequently - feeling adventurous they try and install it. For a first time windows user the result is usually either a failed install or a failed install and a trashed Windows installation (i.e. won't boot and windows user doesn't know about fdisk /mbr). This certainly happened to me and put me off Linux considerably. Now, things have got much better recently so most people can actually get the install going.
However, your typical user still has to deal with making all of the hardware work correctly - this is not a problem with a preinstalled computer because the user doesn't yet know that all the hardware doesn't work correctly - however our experience windows user is fully aware that the computer does not work as well under linux as windows. This is not a suprise, our user has spent some time making it work under windows, tweaking from the default buggered install. However, we now have to deal with the fact that - there is no control panel to fix the system with, none of the familiar commands work and we have no documentation. This is a major barrier to actually making the transition.
I made the transition from linux hater to linux user because I had network access to a machine I wasn't adminstrator on and found applications that were useful with no obvious windows counterpart (e.g. using cron to automatically email companies that don't respond). Then an experienced friend of mine led me through a complex RedHat 6 install making all of the network and modem go to route out the network on my house. Then I installed a simpler Laptop of my own and then did a reinstall of my server. Now I'm quite happy with command line + Linux and my laptop no longer runs X to give me more battery life.
To make the transition decent answers have to be given to
why use linux?
how do I install linux?
how do I make it work?
I think your best market now is Win2K users who can't burn CD's (adaptecs software is f****d under win2k). Show them a linux system that will burn under heavy load and they may be persuaded to try it out.
In my house, there's me, my girlfriend and our house mate. We've two desktops and a laptop connecting to a server (RH6.2) doing proxying / caching over dialup. It's also got a CD writer, printer and lots of disk space for media serving. I'm contemplating moving the DVD drive into it too (it's 100Mbit ethernet) and possibly the TV card.
To make it easy for my girlfriend (who hates computers but likes games) all of the linux functions can be called from the web homepage - it has buttons for - "Start The Internet" - "Copy a CD" - "Play Audio CD" etc.
Works very nicely.
4GB of RAM, how far off is that now? 1994 saw me with 4MB, 1996 with 16MB, 1998 with 128Mb and now in 2000 I'm running on 192 or 512 MB. I reckon 4GB of real memory in my home machine will occur by about 2003 so I want to move to 64bit addressing as soon as possible so the software has time to catch up before it needs to.
I never want to do the 640k thing ever again.
Maybe the reason that open source projects work more effciently is that geeks are the only people who are capable of writing a spec that programmers can understand.
Assuming a plane to be travelling at ~ 300 m/s (just below the speed of sound) then fractionally it's travelling at 1 millionth the speed of light producing a 1 part per million frequency shift - this undoubtedly much smaller than the frequency line width anyway.
Do you actually need to shield the hard disk from bumps. My Laptop seems to survive relatively rough train and car journeys without any difficulty and I suspect you'll need to access the disk a lot less with some decent buffering.
I think the worry is that it turns any arbitrary
obtain a remote shell account exploit into a
obtain a remote root shell account exploit.
It's a breach between two of the internal layers of security, it doesn't make it more likely for people to get in but makes it more damaging if they do.
Home users do not need the bandwidth that SCSI provides. More bandwidth is nice but not essential. More bandwidth is worth paying a few pounds more for, I'm prepared to pay 5% extra for more bandwidth, I'm not prepared to pay 300% extra for SCSI.
I think that the gameplay still matters. I think the problem is we have a few games with outstanding gameplay - so outstanding that people play the same game for several years.
I personally have been playing Starcraft multiplayer now for over 2 years. I still play Starcraft frequently multiplayer. I haven't bought any other RTS game because everything I've demoed just doesn't compare to Starcraft. I want to buy and play a better RTS than Starcraft but there still isn't a game that can compare to Starcraft + Expansion + 8 revisions to balance the game and bugfix on version 1.0. The other advantage is that Starcraft runs on low end hardware - I have 4 machines that can play Starcraft in my house against 1 (arguably 2) that can play Q3A or most of the latest games. Consequently when I feel like playing with friends, we play Starcraft on the LAN because we can all play. We still play warcraft 2 mutliplayer too because it's easy to pick up for new players.
If anything it's multiplayer thats killing games, a single player game lasts ~1-2 months. A multiplayer game lasts 2-3 years.
Well, as far as I am aware (IANAL) numbers can't be copyrighted (hence the Pentium) so, surely the best solution is to write out the entire source as a (lenghty!) binary number, convert to decimal and post it on your webpage / T-Shirt / Car etc.
Whilst your at it post the encryption key numbers up too.
Then see the legal wranglings go ahead.
CNN tells us that this is illegal
Remind me for a second, where does the current campaign money go. The media perchance? Do you think that CNN might get a fraction of this and might just be a little biased.
I suspect that if this does start we can expect lots of public exposure a la southpark (paraphrased badly)
"If you sell your vote, you murder children. You don't murder children do you?"
Well, in my experience of a couple of friends mobiles (I don't own one - no brain tumours for me!) they have to be rebooted from time to time. (I've also heard it from time to time on the train, switching the phone off and on again to make the funny mode go away) However, because mobiles boot in a couple of seconds people don't view this as a problem. Maybe it's a solution for microsoft - get the boot time of windows down to 2-3 seconds.
Wear this clothing and you'll have no problems with bowel movements (cue bad taste joke...)
Wear this, and so many people will take the piss you'll never have to go to the toilet again.
Absolutely correct, no one will switch over to linux as a desktop operating system until is offers them a significant advantage, large enough to offset the install time and hassle of learning.
I use Win2k as a desktop OS and have a linux machine on the network I use remotely. I don't like windows but I'm not switching until :
Quake 3, Starcraft, Warcraft 3, Baldurs Gate work out of the box with network play.
DVD's can be watched out of the box with no configuration.
A decent web browser rolls along (unfortunately I don't like the look of Mozilla).
Photoshop.
However, I have a linux box which is allocated the following tasks because it does them much better / atall
burns CD's without impacting my normal computer usage
routes the 4 machines to the internet via a dial on demand modem using NAT
allows me to write documents with equations in, and on low powered hardware (my laptop)
acts as a file server for me and my two housemates
I use linux mostly on my laptop because it's too slow for mutlimedia and crawls under windows, however it's fast under linux.
People will convert to linux when applicationX which they view as necessary works _much_ better on linux / only exists on linux. The killer application is still missing. Windows is not so unreliable on a standard home machine that the crash proof is it.
In summary, I use linux for doing useful stuff - however I use X over the network to my windows machine and multimedia stuff on Win2k simply because it works better.
The revolution begins when joe bloggs unveils the free cereal duplicating machine that copies and distributes the cereal for free and the cereal companies begin to sue everyone in sight in the interests of protecting the farmer, when the farmer has signed a contract along the lines of
The farmer borrows lots of money to buy and produce the cereal
The farmer only get 5% of the sale price of the cereal
When, and only when the loan has been paid off is the farmer allowed to receive any of the profits
The cereal company still owns the farm and relevant equipment, and, should the farmer ever try and start a new cereal business the cereal company owns that too.
Then we backlash against the cereal companies