Just out of curiosity, why are they sticking with Red Hat,
My guess would be name recognition, if nothing else. Compaq may also owe some loyalty to Red Hat because of their support for the Alpha.
considering that A) Their latest offering has taken a lot of flak about being weighted down
Maybe among technical audiences like Slashdot, but I doubt this criticism is widespread amongst Compaq's target audience, which includes a fair number of newbies and nontechies.
with two desktop environments
Personally, not a bad thing in my opinion. I am not yet ready to limit myself to only KDE or only GNOME, and I may never want to. New machines are big (RAM, HD) and fast enough that space isn't that big a concern.
and seems rushed
Then again, much of Compaq's target audience are used to Microsoft's products, which usually suffer the same sort of problems.
and B) OpenLinux has all the features of Red Hat plus a graphical install,
For the preload market we are talking about here, a graphical install is much less of an issue. Its not like we are talking about Windows, where the user may have to repeatedly re-install when the OS eats itself.
etc.
I don't mean to cause a flamewar here, but think about it...Red Hat seems to be abandoning the desktop in favor of corporate customers,
I don't know that I see evidence of this happening, and even if it was true, the corporate customer market is Compaq's target, so why not Red Hat?
and there are better desktop-oriented distros out there
But history has shown us that too often technical issues about which is 'better' and which is better marketed are different issues. If customers mention Red Hat more often than Caldera, SuSE or Debian, Compaq is likely to go with Red Hat.
(Corel's version of debian should be interesting, to say the least).
True, but isn't that targeted towards StrongARM? Corel has taken a fair bit of flak on Slashdot for doing 'yet another distribution', so I am not sure Compaq would be well served by doing their own distro or building their own variant.
This is good news, albiet I am not a big fan of Compaq's desktop machines. They build solid, mostly reliable machines from what I've seen, but they seem to be a bit too proprietary for my taste in a lot of their units, particularly machines on the lower end of their line. Unfortunately, this seems to be true more often than not in the big name PC's in general these days.
While I wouldn't buy a Compaq myself (I generally build my own), I might be inclined to recommend them to less technically inclined people if they offer formalized Linux support.
Fortunately the third party product you are talking about works really well and appears to be one of the more stable bits of my NT system.
I'm sorry, but that makes me more, rather than less suspicious about NT in general.
ISTR it wasn't that expensive either.
After checking the article again, it appears that it is nearly the cost of the street price of the average Linux distribution. While that is not terribly expensive, when you add it to the street price of NT (even the gray market NTW prices), the whole package seems less than attractively priced, especially since that isn't the only 3rd party add-on that I'd consider necessary (and most of the others are not so cheap).
It would only be surprising if when they won, the losers didn't act like the crybabies they are.
So companies are just supposed to let someone cheat and not say anything? I don't think so.
Let's be real here. Good business is competetive.
Which is why Microsoft is bad. They eliminate competition through dirty tactics instead of legitimate competition.
Government intervention is almost never good for business.
Almost isn't always. I am not a big fan of government intervention, but in some cases when a market shows it is incapable of correcting itself (which generally only seems to result from gross abuses by the largest player(s)), then unfortunately, government intervention may be the only alternative.
Crybaby companies who rely on government intervention because they're losers will always cry 'cheat' if they can.
You might have a point if it was just one or two companies, but it is just about the entire computer industry against Microsoft this time, with the exception of the few companies that are completely in Microsoft's pocket. One or two companies might be believable as crybabies, but companies like IBM hardly can be categorized that way.
Even if it was just a couple of companies complaining, it still wouldn't make it right for the biggest player (who doesn't need to cheat) to use such tactics. It only shows that Microsoft is morally and intellectually bankrupt, and that tends to taint anyone who defends them by association.
i'd give him especially annoying. i'd say the "especially dangerous" ones are the crackers distributed these 'scripts' in the first place.
Actually in one way script kiddies are more dangerous than crackers. Crackers generally are more knowledgeable, and better at covering their tracks. This in general means that they usually don't do malicious things or disrupt the general operation of systems because that would give themselves away. Script kiddies, unfortunately are often malicious little brats who don't have the self restraint not to trash things or are clueless morons who unintentionally destroy things.
Another mistake in the article was the continual reference to NT being able to see FAT32 filesystems. Unless they've finally fixed that, NT and FAT32 are completely incompatible.
Microsoft hasn't fixed that as far as I know, however I read in Infoworld a few weeks ago that a 3rd party company has announced an extra cost add-on for NT which does add FAT32/FAT32X compatibility. Of course, this means adding 3rd party code to the kernel level of a closed source product and adding expense to an already expensive product. This seems like a bad thing from the standpoint of stability, bloat, etc.
I would agree about PCMCIA support not being so bad under Linux. I have a MegaHertz dual function (33.6 modem, 10mbit Ethernet) PCMCIA card that I use in a ThinkPad 355Cs. SuSE found it for both modem and Ethernet during install with no problems, and this was with a 2.0.x kernel. I've also had occasion to plug in a few other PCMCIA cards (such as a 10/100 LinkSys Ethernet card) and they were automatically found and the proper modules loaded...
Unless you can get your 'local' stations to sign a waver or you are over a certain distance from their transmitters.
Or... If you know a little secret. If you tell them you will be using your dish on an RV (recreational vehicle) where you will not be able to receive local channels, then you can get it.
From what I gathered from the original post he/she was not tying to discredit FORTRAN or praise C.
Well, while you are correct that it wasn't my express intent with that post to do that, I do have an active dislike of Fortran and a fondness for C.
The post was just a funny story about the difficulties that occur when you take a verteran A programmer and try to make them a B programmer.
That was indeed the real intent of the post. I guess I struck a nerve with someone who either is a big Fortran fan or (obviously) a big time C/C++ hater.
I know I had a tough time once I left nursery school (Java) and moved out into the real world (C/C++).
On the other hand, going from C++ to Java is pretty easy (at least it was for me). Going directly from C to Java would be a bit more of a leap of course.
Are you sure this wasn't an old FORTRAN program that had been run through something like Cobalt Blue's FORTRAN-to-C translator?
Unless it generates significantly worse code than f2c (which I am familiar with), I doubt it. This code, if it was translated, appeared to have been done by hand. A friend of mine also had occasion to talk to the guy who wrote the code and he seemed to think it was hand written.
I'll be happy to put down any Fortran 77 or older. The incident described in the initial posting happened in the late 80's, way before Fortran 90 came out. I haven't seen enough Fortran 90 to make an honest judgement yet (and hopefully won't have the occasion to).
(and Fortran programmers),
I wouldn't put down all Fortran programmers, this particular guy probably wrote lousy Fortran code by Fortran standards.
while forgetting that the C language in is only marginally better.
C is a much better general purpose language than Fortran 77, and nearly infinitely better for systems programming.
One can just as easily put down C
C isn't perfect, but it provides everything necessary to write good code. Fortran 77 is missing a lot of things I consider necessary to write good code. That being said, C was written by experts, for experts, and it has a fairly steep learning curve for the inexperienced.
and C programmers.
There are good C programmers, and bad C programmers. Technically speaking, I wouldn't consider the guy who wrote the code I was describing a C programmer at all. He was a Fortran programmer trying to fool the C compiler into compiling thinly disguised Fortran code.
Most C programs are composed of really poor quality code.
The same thing could be said about just about any language. This doesn't necessarily mean the language is bad. It also doesn't mean that there isn't a lot of really good, clean C code out there. C provides what is necessary to write good code, but it doesn't go out of its way to force you to do it. It also provides a number of features which provide a tremendous amount of power that are dangerous if misused.
They consist of code that is not modular, a nightmare to read, figure out, maintain, and extend.
I've had to maintain some of it. I've also seen code in Pascal, various BASICk dialects and even some Java that was pretty horrid. Some of the code I've seen in other languages has been just as bad as the worst C code I've seen (other than IOCC entries of course). Even languages that attempt to force people to do the right thing can be circumvented by the truly lazy, truly clueless or truly warped.
C in fact encourages the writing really poor quality code because it is so primitive and lacks several important features while supporting some really awful features.
Oh please. I'm not saying that C is ideal for every use, but to say that it actively encourages bad programming is a little much. For some things C is the right tool for the job, for some others, C++, Java, Perl, etc.
Most C programs are also full of bugs.
Again, this is something that could be said about just about any language. I've seen plenty of buggy code written in languages that supposedly do more to try to insulate inexperienced, lazy or bad programmers from themselves.
Especially prominent are bugs cause by abnormal conditions which the programmer didn't think of or which are too much work to take care of in C.
The problem of not handling all abnormal conditions is in no way unique to C. I've seen this sort of bug in every language I've had the occasion to deal with.
See the "Fuzz Revisited" paper for ample evidence of this.
I've probably seen it before, but do you by chance have an URL?
Real FORTRAN programmers can write FORTRAN in any language
Ugh. I know this to be true. Back in the mid 80's I had the misfortune of seeing some code written by an old Fortran programmer that was purportedly C code... What it really was, was FORTRAN code that was just marginally close enough to C that it would pass through the compiler without errors (although prodigious warnings). Lint positively went postal at the sight of that code.
Imagine this: All the code was in the main(), no other functions were used (so sometimes the main was 20 or 30 pages of code). Flow control consisted mainly of liberal use of 'goto' to mostly numeric labels (like 'L010030'). Instead of using #define for constants, the programmer used global variables set to the value of the constant. The programmer didn't seem to understand C looping functions, so mostly did things with do and while loops instead of using for loops where appropriate. Things that should have been done with real data structures such as trees, linked lists, etc. were all done with arrays (apparently the guy didn't understand pointers). The programmer didn't seem to understand printf() very well either, so the way that he did output was abhorrent.
What a horrible, wretched mess. It segment faulted and bus errored right and left. I was glad I wasn't the guy who had to maintain that stuff...
Visual Age for Java is the preferred Java development tool where I work. This will be another great opportunity for me to advocate and use Linux at work.
Despite some people's opinions, Java is far from dead. Now that the hype has died down, businesses are switching to it for use as a primary enterprise development language. Applets aren't really even that important. We are using it more for Servelets and full fledged applications.
Contrary to what some people also say, write once, run anywhere is not that difficult. I've written Java apps that run fine on Solaris, NT and Linux.
Also in my experience Java performance is not that bad, especially when you consider that most uses of it are for things that would have otherwise been done in either (ick) Visual Basic or PowerBuilder (both of which are as slow or slower than Java for most things and neither offers anywhere near the cross-platform capability of Java). Sure, its no competitor in speed to C or C++, but how hard is it to write a complex (something that is over 50,000 lines of code, uses multithreading, a GUI, etc) C or C++ program that is multiplatform? I know from experience it isn't easy, it can be done, but it isn't easy and it isn't usually pretty. Multiple *nix variants and Linux are no problem, but it is no fun to make something run on standard platforms and also on Windows due to poor standards adherence in most Windows C/C++ compilers. Porting stuff to the Mac isn't much better because while the basics of the compilers there seems reasonably robust, their standard library implementations seem quite weak and the Toolbox works quite differently from Win32 SDK or the POSIX API.
All that being said, I wouldn't advocate Java for everything. I like and use C, C++ and Perl for lots of things also, but people who want to poo-pooh Java just because it isn't the latest thing just seem to me like they are deluded. I've seem to many things dismissed for dead too quickly while they slowly build acceptance for me to believe it that easily.
I've made it a point to replace any two button mice that come my way (usually with used machines). I've found a few decent (PS/2 style) generic 3-button mice in the $5-$10 range (albiet a lot of cheap mice are crap). I also managed to find several Logitech Mouseman 3-button PS/2 style mice on clearance at a local Wal-Mart, and I bought all of them they had for $15 each. Those are probably my favorite mouse, although I also have a couple of Mouse Systems 3-button combo serial-PS/2 mice that are O.K.
But as a recent convert from Windows, I'm getting the hang of clicking both buttons at once
Ugh. Chord middle... I am stuck with that on my laptop, because the built in (trackpoint) device has only two buttons. Its not fun. I tend to plug in an external mouse when possible.
I certainly wish I could. Although I am completely free of it at home, I am sometimes forced to deal with it at work.
switch to NT.
No Thanks. Tried it, not impressed, not one iota.
Just as stable as the Unix boxes
My experience has definitely been the opposite.
but supports the Win32 API
That, IMNEFCTHO, is a bad thing. Win32 is unecessarily bloated, complex and obtuse. I've had to write code for Win32, and it was not a pleasant experience.
so you can use IE and other Windows apps.
I don't have all that much interest anymore. I prefer Navigator over Explorer even on Windows. and I've got native Linux equivalents at home to everything I am forced to do on Windows at work. If it weren't for the 'standards' at work, I would never need to use Windows.
And for what its worth, NT doesn't run just everything that runs on Windows 95/98. There is a lot of software that is incompatible. And a lot of software that does work under NT seems to require that you relax security under NT so it is closer to what is on 95/98 (weak) in order to work, thus negating significant advantages of NT over 95/98. Additionally, some software that runs under NT does slow either just plain slower or more eratically than it does under 95/98. Another problem with NT compared to 95/98 is hardware support. While 95/98 are widely supported by hardware, support is not nearly so consistant under NT. In fact, in some areas Linux is better supported than NT. NT also has weak support for laptops.
I've never had either crash on me (IE or NT).
I've seen NT crash plenty. Registry problems, lost data on blown NTFS partitions, etc. Linux and Solaris are far more reliable in my experience.
Plus all the Unix freeware of interest has been ported to NT as well.
Hardly. And you then have to go out and round up all that stuff and add additional stuff to NT which is already significantly bloated out of the box. And from what I've seen, a lot of the freeware that has been ported to NT doesn't work nearly as well there as it does under *nix. If freeware is a major interest, Linux is now the best platform. Most distributions come out of the box with most of the important stuff to begin with. Anything else tends to be developed first or second on Linux. Win32 is generally one of the last platforms to be supported, if at all.
There's no need for Windows anymore
This I could wholeheartedly agree with, but I'd include NT here as well. (or Unix for that matter).
This I cannot agree with. I prefer just about any *nix to NT, even SCO, which I don't like much at all. I prefer Linux to most commercial *nixes, especially for home or small business uses. Linux runs far better on modest to moderate hardware than does NT. For high end purposes, NT is not yet worthy of consideration compared to any of the major *nixes such as Solaris.
I sure would. In fact, it would give me another reason to try out Linux (no, I have never tried it). I can't stand Netscape,
I can't think of any reason to like Explorer over Navigator. I am not saying that Navigator is perfect, but I'd rather use it than Explorer even if I was stuck using MS-Windows. Unlike what other people (mostly anonymous cowards) have reported, Netscape has been fairly reliable for me on both Linux and Solaris. I avoid doing anythin on Windows where possible, but I use Netscape on Windows when forced, and it seems as good as can be expected there. I have also used Netscape on MacOS, and it works fine there too.
so I'd be overjoyed if MS brought over IE5 to Linux. I guess I just don't understand why it seems like everyone at Slashdot hates MS and absolutly loves Linux.
I absolutely love Linux because it works, it works well, and the price is right. I don't like Microsoft's way of doing business and I don't like their products.
It seems as though yall think EVERYTHING from MS sucks, which it doesn't.
I have yet to see a Microsoft product I was favorably impressed by. While not all of them completely suck, I would be hard pressed to think of one that was the best in its niche. And most of them really are pretty awful. Flashy in most cases, but in terms of overall usability and reliability, most of them are fatally flawed.
Sure, it has a monopoly on the computer market, but I like most of it's products, and it seems like most of the computer mags do to, otherwise they wouldn't rank them as high as they do.
One thing I've noticed is that most magazine reviewers tend to rate things on something I like to call a feature chart comparison. This tends to favor the most bloated product. Microsoft's design strategy seems to be: announce early (vaporware), ship pathetic initial version alpha version labeled as beta (and charge for it), ship (and charge for) lots of subsequent "upgrades" (read as bug fixes) which add any feature chart bullets the reviewers don't award to the Microsoft product.
And no, it's not a conspiracy by MS paying off computer magazines.
Oh, its true that its not that overt in most cases. Its partially the subltle pressures of what magazine is going to write a bad review of a product of their largest advertiser? That is a hard thing for large media companies to do -- they are also ruled by the bottom line. Microsoft has a well deserved reputation of being vendictive towards those that are not favorable to their products.
I'm so glad though, that MS is possibly going to get IE on Linux.
Personally, I could care less. I probably won't use Explorer even if it was available.
I've been doing some GTK+ development in C on a 486SX-33 laptop with 36M of RAM in it, and while its not exactly breathtakingly quick, it is usable. I don't see GTK+ performance as being a problem relative to Qt performance. I haven't done any Qt programming as of yet, but I do use KDE on the laptop (1.0 as distributed with SuSE 5.3), and Qt apps don't seem significantly different in performance to GTK+ apps.
I went from SunOS and MacOS to Linux. I was subjected to MS-DOS some at work, but I never really bought into it at home. I started out with the Apple II (back in the early 1980s), and started working with various *nixes (beginning with 4.2BSD on VAXen) in the mid 80's). By the time MS-DOS became very popular I was already learning UNIX, and in comparison MS-DOS seemed pretty pathetic.
I still use Solaris 2.x and SunOS 4.1.x pretty heavily (I use Sparcs at work and also have a couple of old SparcStations at home -- but my primary home platform is Linux). I still have a couple of Macs, but they don't get used very much anymore, pretty much only for some occasional PageMaker use. The newest Mac I have is an old 68k based IIfx.
Sheesh. Such negativity. I have no intention of ever switching to Windows. For me it wouldn't be switching back either, I've never used it on any of my own machines, and have only used it for work under protest.
Why don't you check on Freshmeat and see if you still think we haven't gotten anything. There is tons of new stuff coming out all the time, and new versions of existing stuff coming out daily.
I think it is way to soon to think that Mozilla or the Netwinder are flops. Despite JWZ's disenchantment with Mozilla, I still think that it will end up with us getting a great open sourced browser. Sometimes you just gotta have a little patience.
As for multimedia formats, if they become anything important they will come to Linux. I am inclined to wonder how many new multimedia formats we need.
I don't know where your definition of evidence comes in, but it doesn't fit with common usage. It also doesn't take into consideration such concepts as anecdotal evidence. It also doesn't seem to fit with what the courts allow as admissable evidence these days (which often looks a lot more like conjecture than hard evidence).
It would be interesting to know if they are counting attempted downloads, completed downloads, or registrations for keys. If they are doing either of the latter two as I'd suspect, then most of your assertations are false.
Slashdot Mirror
Just out of curiosity, why are they sticking with Red Hat,
My guess would be name recognition, if nothing else. Compaq may also owe some loyalty to Red Hat because of their support for the Alpha.
considering that A) Their latest offering has taken a lot of flak about being weighted down
Maybe among technical audiences like Slashdot, but I doubt this criticism is widespread amongst Compaq's target audience, which includes a fair number of newbies and nontechies.
with two desktop environments
Personally, not a bad thing in my opinion. I am not yet ready to limit myself to only KDE or only GNOME, and I may never want to. New machines are big (RAM, HD) and fast enough that space isn't that big a concern.
and seems rushed
Then again, much of Compaq's target audience are used to Microsoft's products, which usually suffer the same sort of problems.
and B) OpenLinux has all the features of Red Hat plus a graphical install,
For the preload market we are talking about here, a graphical install is much less of an issue. Its not like we are talking about Windows, where the user may have to repeatedly re-install when the OS eats itself.
etc.
I don't mean to cause a flamewar here, but think about it...Red Hat seems to be abandoning the desktop in favor of corporate customers,
I don't know that I see evidence of this happening, and even if it was true, the corporate customer market is Compaq's target, so why not Red Hat?
and there are better desktop-oriented distros out there
But history has shown us that too often technical issues about which is 'better' and which is better marketed are different issues. If customers mention Red Hat more often than Caldera, SuSE or Debian, Compaq is likely to go with Red Hat.
(Corel's version of debian should be interesting, to say the least).
True, but isn't that targeted towards StrongARM? Corel has taken a fair bit of flak on Slashdot for doing 'yet another distribution', so I am not sure Compaq would be well served by doing their own distro or building their own variant.
This is good news, albiet I am not a big fan of Compaq's desktop machines. They build solid, mostly reliable machines from what I've seen, but they seem to be a bit too proprietary for my taste in a lot of their units, particularly machines on the lower end of their line. Unfortunately, this seems to be true more often than not in the big name PC's in general these days.
While I wouldn't buy a Compaq myself (I generally build my own), I might be inclined to recommend them to less technically inclined people if they offer formalized Linux support.
Fortunately the third party product you are talking about works really well and appears to be one of the more stable bits of my NT system.
I'm sorry, but that makes me more, rather than less suspicious about NT in general.
ISTR it wasn't that expensive either.
After checking the article again, it appears that it is nearly the cost of the street price of the average Linux distribution. While that is not terribly expensive, when you add it to the street price of NT (even the gray market NTW prices), the whole package seems less than attractively priced, especially since that isn't the only 3rd party add-on that I'd consider necessary (and most of the others are not so cheap).
It would only be surprising if when they won, the losers didn't act like the crybabies they are.
So companies are just supposed to let someone cheat and not say anything? I don't think so.
Let's be real here. Good business is competetive.
Which is why Microsoft is bad. They eliminate competition through dirty tactics instead of legitimate competition.
Government intervention is almost never good for business.
Almost isn't always. I am not a big fan of government intervention, but in some cases when a market shows it is incapable of correcting itself (which generally only seems to result from gross abuses by the largest player(s)), then unfortunately, government intervention may be the only alternative.
Crybaby companies who rely on government intervention because they're losers will always cry 'cheat' if they can.
You might have a point if it was just one or two companies, but it is just about the entire computer industry against Microsoft this time, with the exception of the few companies that are completely in Microsoft's pocket. One or two companies might be believable as crybabies, but companies like IBM hardly can be categorized that way.
Even if it was just a couple of companies complaining, it still wouldn't make it right for the biggest player (who doesn't need to cheat) to use such tactics. It only shows that Microsoft is morally and intellectually bankrupt, and that tends to taint anyone who defends them by association.
Yup. It's called good business tactics.
Good=monopolistic? Monopolistic bordering on illegal?
That's why they're #1 in the world.
It would only be surprising if they cheated and didn't win, at least in the short term.
i'd give him especially annoying. i'd say the "especially dangerous" ones are the crackers distributed these 'scripts' in the first place.
Actually in one way script kiddies are more dangerous than crackers. Crackers generally are more knowledgeable, and better at covering their tracks. This in general means that they usually don't do malicious things or disrupt the general operation of systems because that would give themselves away. Script kiddies, unfortunately are often malicious little brats who don't have the self restraint not to trash things or are clueless morons who unintentionally destroy things.
Attempting to consolidate the market by controlling their most credible development tools competitor.
Attempting to control the market by being able to influence what platforms Borland develops for.
Hedging their bets by investing in a competing technology as they have done with SCO and Apple, for example.
Insuring that while effectively controlled, a competitor will not outright cease to exist in order to keep the feds off their case.
Insuring that their R&D (which is mostly done by their competitors) doesn't dry up.
This is just another example of business as usual for Microsoft.
Another mistake in the article was the continual reference to NT being able to see FAT32 filesystems. Unless they've finally fixed that, NT and FAT32 are completely incompatible.
Microsoft hasn't fixed that as far as I know, however I read in Infoworld a few weeks ago that a 3rd party company has announced an extra cost add-on for NT which does add FAT32/FAT32X compatibility. Of course, this means adding 3rd party code to the kernel level of a closed source product and adding expense to an already expensive product. This seems like a bad thing from the standpoint of stability, bloat, etc.
I would agree about PCMCIA support not being so bad under Linux. I have a MegaHertz dual function (33.6 modem, 10mbit Ethernet) PCMCIA card that I use in a ThinkPad 355Cs. SuSE found it for both modem and Ethernet during install with no problems, and this was with a 2.0.x kernel. I've also had occasion to plug in a few other PCMCIA cards (such as a 10/100 LinkSys Ethernet card) and they were automatically found and the proper modules loaded...
can't get networks unless you have an antenna
Unless you can get your 'local' stations to sign a waver or you are over a certain distance from their transmitters.
Or... If you know a little secret. If you tell them you will be using your dish on an RV (recreational vehicle) where you will not be able to receive local channels, then you can get it.
From what I gathered from the original post he/she was not tying to discredit FORTRAN or praise C.
Well, while you are correct that it wasn't my express intent with that post to do that, I do have an active dislike of Fortran and a fondness for C.
The post was just a funny story about the difficulties that occur when you take a verteran A programmer and try to make them a B programmer.
That was indeed the real intent of the post. I guess I struck a nerve with someone who either is a big Fortran fan or (obviously) a big time C/C++ hater.
I know I had a tough time once I left nursery school (Java) and moved out into the real world (C/C++).
On the other hand, going from C++ to Java is pretty easy (at least it was for me). Going directly from C to Java would be a bit more of a leap of course.
Are you sure this wasn't an old FORTRAN program that had been run through something like Cobalt Blue's FORTRAN-to-C translator?
Unless it generates significantly worse code than f2c (which I am familiar with), I doubt it. This code, if it was translated, appeared to have been done by hand. A friend of mine also had occasion to talk to the guy who wrote the code and he seemed to think it was hand written.
You seem to be putting down Fortran
I'll be happy to put down any Fortran 77 or older. The incident described in the initial posting happened in the late 80's, way before Fortran 90 came out. I haven't seen enough Fortran 90 to make an honest judgement yet (and hopefully won't have the occasion to).
(and Fortran programmers),
I wouldn't put down all Fortran programmers, this particular guy probably wrote lousy Fortran code by Fortran standards.
while forgetting that the C language in is only marginally better.
C is a much better general purpose language than Fortran 77, and nearly infinitely better for systems programming.
One can just as easily put down C
C isn't perfect, but it provides everything necessary to write good code. Fortran 77 is missing a lot of things I consider necessary to write good code. That being said, C was written by experts, for experts, and it has a fairly steep learning curve for the inexperienced.
and C programmers.
There are good C programmers, and bad C programmers. Technically speaking, I wouldn't consider the guy who wrote the code I was describing a C programmer at all. He was a Fortran programmer trying to fool the C compiler into compiling thinly disguised Fortran code.
Most C programs are composed of really poor quality code.
The same thing could be said about just about any language. This doesn't necessarily mean the language is bad. It also doesn't mean that there isn't a lot of really good, clean C code out there. C provides what is necessary to write good code, but it doesn't go out of its way to force you to do it. It also provides a number of features which provide a tremendous amount of power that are dangerous if misused.
They consist of code that is not modular, a nightmare to read, figure out, maintain, and extend.
I've had to maintain some of it. I've also seen code in Pascal, various BASICk dialects and even some Java that was pretty horrid. Some of the code I've seen in other languages has been just as bad as the worst C code I've seen (other than IOCC entries of course). Even languages that attempt to force people to do the right thing can be circumvented by the truly lazy, truly clueless or truly warped.
C in fact encourages the writing really poor quality code because it is so primitive and lacks several important features while supporting some really awful features.
Oh please. I'm not saying that C is ideal for every use, but to say that it actively encourages bad programming is a little much. For some things C is the right tool for the job, for some others, C++, Java, Perl, etc.
Most C programs are also full of bugs.
Again, this is something that could be said about just about any language. I've seen plenty of buggy code written in languages that supposedly do more to try to insulate inexperienced, lazy or bad programmers from themselves.
Especially prominent are bugs cause by abnormal conditions which the programmer didn't think of or which are too much work to take care of in C.
The problem of not handling all abnormal conditions is in no way unique to C. I've seen this sort of bug in every language I've had the occasion to deal with.
See the "Fuzz Revisited" paper for ample evidence of this.
I've probably seen it before, but do you by chance have an URL?
Real FORTRAN programmers can write FORTRAN in any language
Ugh. I know this to be true. Back in the mid 80's I had the misfortune of seeing some code written by an old Fortran programmer that was purportedly C code... What it really was, was FORTRAN code that was just marginally close enough to C that it would pass through the compiler without errors (although prodigious warnings). Lint positively went postal at the sight of that code.
Imagine this: All the code was in the main(), no other functions were used (so sometimes the main was 20 or 30 pages of code). Flow control consisted mainly of liberal use of 'goto' to mostly numeric labels (like 'L010030'). Instead of using #define for constants, the programmer used global variables set to the value of the constant. The programmer didn't seem to understand C looping functions, so mostly did things with do and while loops instead of using for loops where appropriate. Things that should have been done with real data structures such as trees, linked lists, etc. were all done with arrays (apparently the guy didn't understand pointers). The programmer didn't seem to understand printf() very well either, so the way that he did output was abhorrent.
What a horrible, wretched mess. It segment faulted and bus errored right and left. I was glad I wasn't the guy who had to maintain that stuff...
Visual Age for Java is the preferred Java development tool where I work. This will be another great opportunity for me to advocate and use Linux at work.
Despite some people's opinions, Java is far from dead. Now that the hype has died down, businesses are switching to it for use as a primary enterprise development language. Applets aren't really even that important. We are using it more for Servelets and full fledged applications.
Contrary to what some people also say, write once, run anywhere is not that difficult. I've written Java apps that run fine on Solaris, NT and Linux.
Also in my experience Java performance is not that bad, especially when you consider that most uses of it are for things that would have otherwise been done in either (ick) Visual Basic or PowerBuilder (both of which are as slow or slower than Java for most things and neither offers anywhere near the cross-platform capability of Java). Sure, its no competitor in speed to C or C++, but how hard is it to write a complex (something that is over 50,000 lines of code, uses multithreading, a GUI, etc) C or C++ program that is multiplatform? I know from experience it isn't easy, it can be done, but it isn't easy and it isn't usually pretty. Multiple *nix variants and Linux are no problem, but it is no fun to make something run on standard platforms and also on Windows due to poor standards adherence in most Windows C/C++ compilers. Porting stuff to the Mac isn't much better because while the basics of the compilers there seems reasonably robust, their standard library implementations seem quite weak and the Toolbox works quite differently from Win32 SDK or the POSIX API.
All that being said, I wouldn't advocate Java for everything. I like and use C, C++ and Perl for lots of things also, but people who want to poo-pooh Java just because it isn't the latest thing just seem to me like they are deluded. I've seem to many things dismissed for dead too quickly while they slowly build acceptance for me to believe it that easily.
'cept I only have 2 mouse buttons
I've made it a point to replace any two button mice that come my way (usually with used machines). I've found a few decent (PS/2 style) generic 3-button mice in the $5-$10 range (albiet a lot of cheap mice are crap). I also managed to find several Logitech Mouseman 3-button PS/2 style mice on clearance at a local Wal-Mart, and I bought all of them they had for $15 each. Those are probably my favorite mouse, although I also have a couple of Mouse Systems 3-button combo serial-PS/2 mice that are O.K.
But as a recent convert from Windows, I'm getting the hang of clicking both buttons at once
Ugh. Chord middle... I am stuck with that on my laptop, because the built in (trackpoint) device has only two buttons. Its not fun. I tend to plug in an external mouse when possible.
Forget Windows,
I certainly wish I could. Although I am completely free of it at home, I am sometimes forced to deal with it at work.
switch to NT.
No Thanks. Tried it, not impressed, not one iota.
Just as stable as the Unix boxes
My experience has definitely been the opposite.
but supports the Win32 API
That, IMNEFCTHO, is a bad thing. Win32 is unecessarily bloated, complex and obtuse. I've had to write code for Win32, and it was not a pleasant experience.
so you can use IE and other Windows apps.
I don't have all that much interest anymore. I prefer Navigator over Explorer even on Windows. and I've got native Linux equivalents at home to everything I am forced to do on Windows at work. If it weren't for the 'standards' at work, I would never need to use Windows.
And for what its worth, NT doesn't run just everything that runs on Windows 95/98. There is a lot of software that is incompatible. And a lot of software that does work under NT seems to require that you relax security under NT so it is closer to what is on 95/98 (weak) in order to work, thus negating significant advantages of NT over 95/98. Additionally, some software that runs under NT does slow either just plain slower or more eratically than it does under 95/98.
Another problem with NT compared to 95/98 is hardware support. While 95/98 are widely supported by hardware, support is not nearly so consistant under NT. In fact, in some areas Linux is better supported than NT. NT also has weak support for laptops.
I've never had either crash on me (IE or NT).
I've seen NT crash plenty. Registry problems, lost data on blown NTFS partitions, etc. Linux and Solaris are far more reliable in my experience.
Plus all the Unix freeware of interest has been ported to NT as well.
Hardly. And you then have to go out and round up all that stuff and add additional stuff to NT which is already significantly bloated out of the box. And from what I've seen, a lot of the freeware that has been ported to NT doesn't work nearly as well there as it does under *nix. If freeware is a major interest, Linux is now the best platform. Most distributions come out of the box with most of the important stuff to begin with. Anything else tends to be developed first or second on Linux. Win32 is generally one of the last platforms to be supported, if at all.
There's no need for Windows anymore
This I could wholeheartedly agree with, but I'd include NT here as well.
(or Unix for that matter).
This I cannot agree with. I prefer just about any *nix to NT, even SCO, which I don't like much at all. I prefer Linux to most commercial *nixes, especially for home or small business uses. Linux runs far better on modest to moderate hardware than does NT. For high end purposes, NT is not yet worthy of consideration compared to any of the major *nixes such as Solaris.
I sure would. In fact, it would give me another reason to try out Linux (no, I have never tried it). I can't stand Netscape,
I can't think of any reason to like Explorer over Navigator. I am not saying that Navigator is perfect, but I'd rather use it than Explorer even if I was stuck using MS-Windows. Unlike what other people (mostly anonymous cowards) have reported, Netscape has been fairly reliable for me on both Linux and Solaris. I avoid doing anythin on Windows where possible, but I use Netscape on Windows when forced, and it seems as good as can be expected there. I have also used Netscape on MacOS, and it works fine there too.
so I'd be overjoyed if MS brought over IE5 to Linux. I guess I just don't understand why it seems like everyone at Slashdot hates MS and absolutly loves Linux.
I absolutely love Linux because it works, it works well, and the price is right. I don't like Microsoft's way of doing business and I don't like their products.
It seems as though yall think EVERYTHING from MS sucks, which it doesn't.
I have yet to see a Microsoft product I was favorably impressed by. While not all of them completely suck, I would be hard pressed to think of one that was the best in its niche. And most of them really are pretty awful. Flashy in most cases, but in terms of overall usability and reliability, most of them are fatally flawed.
Sure, it has a monopoly on the computer market, but I like most of it's products, and it seems like most of the computer mags do to, otherwise they wouldn't rank them as high as they do.
One thing I've noticed is that most magazine reviewers tend to rate things on something I like to call a feature chart comparison. This tends to favor the most bloated product. Microsoft's design strategy seems to be: announce early (vaporware), ship pathetic initial version alpha version labeled as beta (and charge for it), ship (and charge for) lots of subsequent "upgrades" (read as bug fixes) which add any feature chart bullets the reviewers don't award to the Microsoft product.
And no, it's not a conspiracy by MS paying off computer magazines.
Oh, its true that its not that overt in most cases. Its partially the subltle pressures of what magazine is going to write a bad review of a product of their largest advertiser? That is a hard thing for large media companies to do -- they are also ruled by the bottom line. Microsoft has a well deserved reputation of being vendictive towards those that are not favorable to their products.
I'm so glad though, that MS is possibly going to get IE on Linux.
Personally, I could care less. I probably won't use Explorer even if it was available.
Just don't use Shift-Insert (to paste text)
Personally, I use the middle mouse button to paste text. It has never crashed any application.
I've been doing some GTK+ development in C on a 486SX-33 laptop with 36M of RAM in it, and while its not exactly breathtakingly quick, it is usable. I don't see GTK+ performance as being a problem relative to Qt performance. I haven't done any Qt programming as of yet, but I do use KDE on the laptop (1.0 as distributed with SuSE 5.3), and Qt apps don't seem significantly different in performance to GTK+ apps.
How can Linux ever grab the attentions of enterprise users with it's current DB selection?
Sybase ASE
Informix-SE
Oracle 8i
Solid
InterBase
etc...
What commercial database do you want that isn't available?
Availability of database software really isn't that much of a problem anymore.
I went right from DOS 5 to Linux.
I went from SunOS and MacOS to Linux. I was subjected to MS-DOS some at work, but I never really bought into it at home. I started out with the Apple II (back in the early 1980s), and started working with various *nixes (beginning with 4.2BSD on VAXen) in the mid 80's). By the time MS-DOS became very popular I was already learning UNIX, and in comparison MS-DOS seemed pretty pathetic.
I still use Solaris 2.x and SunOS 4.1.x pretty heavily (I use Sparcs at work and also have a couple of old SparcStations at home -- but my primary home platform is Linux). I still have a couple of Macs, but they don't get used very much anymore, pretty much only for some occasional PageMaker use. The newest Mac I have is an old 68k based IIfx.
Sheesh. Such negativity. I have no intention of ever switching to Windows. For me it wouldn't be switching back either, I've never used it on any of my own machines, and have only used it for work under protest.
Why don't you check on Freshmeat and see if you still think we haven't gotten anything. There is tons of new stuff coming out all the time, and new versions of existing stuff coming out daily.
I think it is way to soon to think that Mozilla or the Netwinder are flops. Despite JWZ's disenchantment with Mozilla, I still think that it will end up with us getting a great open sourced browser. Sometimes you just gotta have a little patience.
As for multimedia formats, if they become anything important they will come to Linux. I am inclined to wonder how many new multimedia formats we need.
Evidence makes something obvious.
I don't know where your definition of evidence comes in, but it doesn't fit with common usage. It also doesn't take into consideration such concepts as anecdotal evidence. It also doesn't seem to fit with what the courts allow as admissable evidence these days (which often looks a lot more like conjecture than hard evidence).
It would be interesting to know if they are counting attempted downloads, completed downloads, or registrations for keys. If they are doing either of the latter two as I'd suspect, then most of your assertations are false.