What are you babbling about? You are seriously suggesting HP make an OS that doesn't suck, with a text installer? What are you, like 200 years old? And HP makes hardware, not operating systems, so suggesting they make such a mythical thing as "an OS that doesn't suck" would be like telling McDonalds to sell groceries. Read a book on market anaysis jackass.
Oh, right. Because computers are so perfect nowadays, that programmers should spend their efforts on buildling a better graphical installer.
NEWS FLASH: You USE the computer's software more times than you INSTALL it. If you are doing anything productive, that is.
Put MY money in making an OS that doesn't SUCK, instead of a glitzy installer that won't run on non-graphical hardware anyway....
Reviewers should automatically give any OS +100 points (on a scale of 0-500) if it has a nice simple text interface that lets you CHOOSE whether to install some unreliable graphical abomination. Red Hat has been steadily losing ground on this, incidentally, their once-sleek text installer is eroding into a disorganized mess.
Novell has a fine product that I used for many years. Their eDirectory is cross-platform compatible, can be made RFC-compliant with little effort, is strongly supported, and scales far beyond what AD can handle in real-world use.
Active Directory is another "embrace and extend" powerplay that doesn't scale to the level of Novell's eDirectory or integrate to the level of Open Source. It's non-RFC-standard to the point that I just call it "broken" and use OpenLDAP to ameliorate its deficiencies.
We run an OpenLDAP infrastructure that securely unifies our identity and attribute management across HPUX, Red Hat, Slack, Solaris, and Windows. But it was very tricky to build (took years, literally) so I cannot recommend it as a quick or easy solution, even though it is tremendously robust, powerful, and cost-effective.
My employers have purposely chosen to invest in really smart people who can handle an Open Source solution instead of really smart software that works out of the box. You may find it better to go the other way; it depends on your business model really. We need those smart people for other reasons, so it makes sense to spend lots on salaries and little on software (please don't take that to mean we are freeloaders - we pay for our OSS, just far less than Novell or Microsoft charges for the same functions).
The Victorian age saw lots of great names, no longer used much - like Tarquin and Pindar and Cyril and Adelaide.
Help! It's Hurricane Tark!
The Victorians liked to name their spawn with the names of their favorite flowers or foods, too, so you get kids named Daisy and Rue and Cabbage (really!).
And of course, if the wife died in childbirth, the grieving husband might well name the child "bane" or "murder".
Tracking the average rise in global temperature (or the percentage of carbon in the atmosphere for that matter) provides a useful measurement of how much we are modifying the Earth's albedo.
For at least a decade, reputable scientists have predicted that if the albedo is decreased, weather becomes more energetic; if the albedo is increased, weather becomes less energetic. More or less energy in weather systems results in changing weather patterns that do not necessarily warm or chill your immediate environment.
Blaming anything whatsoever on "global warming" is like blaming pollution on tons (because pollutants are measured in tons per year, get it?).
Hypermodification of the Earth's albedo will result in climate crash. Your particular microenvironment may get hotter, colder, erupt into magma, or sink underwater. But make a sufficent modification - regardless of whether it's a man or a planetary event that does it - and the human species will go extinct.
I prefer the phrase "climate crash" when talking about the possibility of catastrophic climate change due to albedo modification. "Global warming" is confusing, and it sounds too friendly - who doesn't want to be warm?
Thus spake Calvin: "Isn't it weird how scientists can imagine all the matter of the universe exploding out of a dot smaller than the head of a pin, but they can't come up with a more evocative name for it than 'the Big Bang'? That's the whole problem with science. You've got a bunch of empiricists trying to describe things of unimaginable wonder."
"Aggregated Diamond Nanorods?" Criminy, they couldn't call it "admantium" or something? Do they call their shirts "woven cotton planes aproximately tailored to the human torso"?
As a side question, who thinks that as all of the advanced carbon materials become readily available over the next 50 years, and demand increases, that we may have found our solution to global warming? We'll scrub CO2 from the atmosphere to build our carbon products!
We've been doing that for years. It's called "carpentry" and it uses these cool bio-tech machines called "trees" to convert atomospheric carbon and water into complex hydrocarbon structures known as "wood".
You have to have a source of trace minerals (typically through a "ground" or "earth" connection) but the majority of the created structures are built from atmospheric carbon and hydrogen from water. The created material is incredibly useful and can be formed with little effort using commonly available tools.
Oh, and the best part is, the process is entirely solar-powered. There's a little reverse carbon leakage when solar energy is not available (a condition we call "night") but it's negligible.
Because complexity is the enemy of reliability, as Alan Robertson likes to say.
LILO is simple. Therefore, beginners find it frightening and cannot use it. They need the complexity of GRUB, because they are not knowledgeable enough to use the simpler tool. Pro carpenters don't need to lug around heavy, expensive, laser-guided miter saws that require a 120 VAC infrastructure, because they can cut a true angle with a simpler toolset. That makes it possible for them to do more things and for their methods to be more adaptable and more reliable.
Rewriting your BIOS, of course, is even better than LILO. But again, not for the n00bs.
GRUB has its place. That place is not in the hands of experienced professionals.
Now DSL can be just like cable - a hideous warren of viruses and worms; an incompetently administered, fertile field for criminals.
Ever notice how phone technology, when it was no longer the province of regional monopolies, suddenly became astronomically more powerful and fantastically cheaper?
That's the majic of competition, the "invisible hand" that guides the marketplace, the cornerstone of capitalism.
True "laissez faire" capitalism - where there is no law at all - leads inevitably to monopolies, and those monopolies are always dominated by Murder, Inc. Look at the illegal markets, which are the only truly "unmanaged" capitalism. If I can murder my competition, that's cheaper than making my products better than theirs. If I can monopolize delivery of a service, that's cheaper than making my service better than the other guy's.
When customers cannot "vote with their feet" - when they have no choice of services - there is absolutely no incentive to provide quality service to the customer.
Capitalism is a great system under proper social conditions. Without laws to foster competition, though, capitalism just becomes another form of feudalism.
Testify, brother! I hate things that use electricity (i.e. money) to absolutely no useful purpose.
I've got a 1950 Western Electric 500 with a G1 handset right here on the desk next to me. I had to modify it with a paperclip so the ringer would work on a 2-wire system (it was made for 4-wire) but it sounds just fine - better than a cell phone or a modern chinese-made phone.
And unlike the people with powered, push-button, memory-chip phones, I can actually remember the phone numbers of my friends and relations... choosing to store their numbers in a chip, when you can easily fit dozens in your head, is just training yourself to be retarded.
Vendors should certainly make a distinction between tested, supported, recommended patches and raw, untested, hopefully correct patches - for example, they could be on two different download servers, or you could be required to click through a warning page before you could get untested patches.
But the truth is, you can't depend on any vendor. Even if the vendor is completely trustworthy, which I would say is highly unlikely these days, that doesn't mean every single person that works for them is a totally competent stone-cold genius who never makes mistakes.
It seems to me that you are saying vendors should protect customers from themselves, and not allow customers to make their own decisions about how much testing of a patch is sufficient. That doesn't work for me! Give me the code, tell me if you think it is dangerously untested, and let me decide if I want to risk my business on it.
Are you saying that nobody should release code until they have tested all possible circumstances under which failure could occur?
That'll be pretty hard for anything with more than fifty lines of code. Are you prepared to wait 15 or 20 months for patches to vulnerabilities that are being exploited now?
Another big event was the publication "The Fountainhead", which is basically a rape fantasy centered around Frank Lloyd Wright.
Anybody who doesn't recognize the characters doesn't know much about the Stanford White era of American architecture. There is no attempt to disguise them.
...my firewall doesn't go "nuts". It just blocks all the unwanted incomming connections, and keeps on routing packets.
Mine runs screaming through the room and into the garage, fires up the old Buick, and roars off into the night scattering beer cans and half-smoked cigarettes in its wake.
As far as I know, only DuPont and DEC ever came close to the DECnet node address limitation (perhaps the other large nets didn't like to brag about their size).
If DEC had sunk the amount of capital they wasted on DECnet-OSI into DECnet phase IV, then opened the specs and bundled DECnet with all their products, we might be using it instead of TCP/IP today! Ah, the glory of hindsight.
In an attempt to satisfy the federal government, DEC actually implemented the OSI reference model. The whole bloody thing, as documented by the model itself, which is how the world found out it is a bad idea.
I've installed it. I've used it. I remember the whole GOSIP debacle. I remember ripping it out by the roots and reinstalling DECnet Phase IV - which was excellent, although a bit bursty on low bandwidth links.
Slashdot Mirror
It's pretty hard to take you seriously.
See HERE my good man.
My 6-year-old daughter likes Microsoft Windows (preferably blue, because pink is for babies
You've got no mercy for the n00bs, have you? ;)
http://www.hp.com/workstations/risc/standard/oper
http://h71000.www7.hp.com/openvms/index.html
http://h30097.www3.hp.com/index.html
http://docs.hp.com/en/32650-90421/ch01s02.html
http://www.mcspotlight.org/media/press/mcds/times
And it's spelled "analysis".
Oh, right. Because computers are so perfect nowadays, that programmers should spend their efforts on buildling a better graphical installer.
NEWS FLASH: You USE the computer's software more times than you INSTALL it. If you are doing anything productive, that is.
Put MY money in making an OS that doesn't SUCK, instead of a glitzy installer that won't run on non-graphical hardware anyway....
Reviewers should automatically give any OS +100 points (on a scale of 0-500) if it has a nice simple text interface that lets you CHOOSE whether to install some unreliable graphical abomination. Red Hat has been steadily losing ground on this, incidentally, their once-sleek text installer is eroding into a disorganized mess.
The subject line pretty much says it all.
Novell has a fine product that I used for many years. Their eDirectory is cross-platform compatible, can be made RFC-compliant with little effort, is strongly supported, and scales far beyond what AD can handle in real-world use.
Active Directory is another "embrace and extend" powerplay that doesn't scale to the level of Novell's eDirectory or integrate to the level of Open Source. It's non-RFC-standard to the point that I just call it "broken" and use OpenLDAP to ameliorate its deficiencies.
We run an OpenLDAP infrastructure that securely unifies our identity and attribute management across HPUX, Red Hat, Slack, Solaris, and Windows. But it was very tricky to build (took years, literally) so I cannot recommend it as a quick or easy solution, even though it is tremendously robust, powerful, and cost-effective.
My employers have purposely chosen to invest in really smart people who can handle an Open Source solution instead of really smart software that works out of the box. You may find it better to go the other way; it depends on your business model really. We need those smart people for other reasons, so it makes sense to spend lots on salaries and little on software (please don't take that to mean we are freeloaders - we pay for our OSS, just far less than Novell or Microsoft charges for the same functions).
The Victorian age saw lots of great names, no longer used much - like Tarquin and Pindar and Cyril and Adelaide.
Help! It's Hurricane Tark!
The Victorians liked to name their spawn with the names of their favorite flowers or foods, too, so you get kids named Daisy and Rue and Cabbage (really!).
And of course, if the wife died in childbirth, the grieving husband might well name the child "bane" or "murder".
Aggh! RUN! It's HURRICANE MURDER!!!!
Tracking the average rise in global temperature (or the percentage of carbon in the atmosphere for that matter) provides a useful measurement of how much we are modifying the Earth's albedo.
For at least a decade, reputable scientists have predicted that if the albedo is decreased, weather becomes more energetic; if the albedo is increased, weather becomes less energetic. More or less energy in weather systems results in changing weather patterns that do not necessarily warm or chill your immediate environment.
Blaming anything whatsoever on "global warming" is like blaming pollution on tons (because pollutants are measured in tons per year, get it?).
Hypermodification of the Earth's albedo will result in climate crash. Your particular microenvironment may get hotter, colder, erupt into magma, or sink underwater. But make a sufficent modification - regardless of whether it's a man or a planetary event that does it - and the human species will go extinct.
I prefer the phrase "climate crash" when talking about the possibility of catastrophic climate change due to albedo modification. "Global warming" is confusing, and it sounds too friendly - who doesn't want to be warm?
Oh, we're all Americans, so you must mean maize.
Pay no attention to those British gits, what right have they to tell us what English words mean!
Just like Dr. Mengele and Dr. Oppenheimer!
In the defense industry we used it for "Another Unpronounceable Abbreviation".
AFA was "Another Fucking Acronym", though.
Thus spake Calvin: "Isn't it weird how scientists can imagine all the matter of the universe exploding out of a dot smaller than the head of a pin, but they can't come up with a more evocative name for it than 'the Big Bang'? That's the whole problem with science. You've got a bunch of empiricists trying to describe things of unimaginable wonder."
"Aggregated Diamond Nanorods?" Criminy, they couldn't call it "admantium" or something? Do they call their shirts "woven cotton planes aproximately tailored to the human torso"?
We've been doing that for years. It's called "carpentry" and it uses these cool bio-tech machines called "trees" to convert atomospheric carbon and water into complex hydrocarbon structures known as "wood".
You have to have a source of trace minerals (typically through a "ground" or "earth" connection) but the majority of the created structures are built from atmospheric carbon and hydrogen from water. The created material is incredibly useful and can be formed with little effort using commonly available tools.
Oh, and the best part is, the process is entirely solar-powered. There's a little reverse carbon leakage when solar energy is not available (a condition we call "night") but it's negligible.
Sorry, I couldn't help myself.
Because complexity is the enemy of reliability, as Alan Robertson likes to say.
LILO is simple. Therefore, beginners find it frightening and cannot use it. They need the complexity of GRUB, because they are not knowledgeable enough to use the simpler tool. Pro carpenters don't need to lug around heavy, expensive, laser-guided miter saws that require a 120 VAC infrastructure, because they can cut a true angle with a simpler toolset. That makes it possible for them to do more things and for their methods to be more adaptable and more reliable.
Rewriting your BIOS, of course, is even better than LILO. But again, not for the n00bs.
GRUB has its place. That place is not in the hands of experienced professionals.
Now DSL can be just like cable - a hideous warren of viruses and worms; an incompetently administered, fertile field for criminals.
Ever notice how phone technology, when it was no longer the province of regional monopolies, suddenly became astronomically more powerful and fantastically cheaper?
That's the majic of competition, the "invisible hand" that guides the marketplace, the cornerstone of capitalism.
True "laissez faire" capitalism - where there is no law at all - leads inevitably to monopolies, and those monopolies are always dominated by Murder, Inc. Look at the illegal markets, which are the only truly "unmanaged" capitalism. If I can murder my competition, that's cheaper than making my products better than theirs. If I can monopolize delivery of a service, that's cheaper than making my service better than the other guy's.
When customers cannot "vote with their feet" - when they have no choice of services - there is absolutely no incentive to provide quality service to the customer.
Capitalism is a great system under proper social conditions. Without laws to foster competition, though, capitalism just becomes another form of feudalism.
Testify, brother! I hate things that use electricity (i.e. money) to absolutely no useful purpose.
I've got a 1950 Western Electric 500 with a G1 handset right here on the desk next to me. I had to modify it with a paperclip so the ringer would work on a 2-wire system (it was made for 4-wire) but it sounds just fine - better than a cell phone or a modern chinese-made phone.
And unlike the people with powered, push-button, memory-chip phones, I can actually remember the phone numbers of my friends and relations... choosing to store their numbers in a chip, when you can easily fit dozens in your head, is just training yourself to be retarded.
It has come to punish Hayden Christensen.
I, for one, welcome our new Sith overlords.
I think that's crazy talk.
Vendors should certainly make a distinction between tested, supported, recommended patches and raw, untested, hopefully correct patches - for example, they could be on two different download servers, or you could be required to click through a warning page before you could get untested patches.
But the truth is, you can't depend on any vendor. Even if the vendor is completely trustworthy, which I would say is highly unlikely these days, that doesn't mean every single person that works for them is a totally competent stone-cold genius who never makes mistakes.
It seems to me that you are saying vendors should protect customers from themselves, and not allow customers to make their own decisions about how much testing of a patch is sufficient. That doesn't work for me! Give me the code, tell me if you think it is dangerously untested, and let me decide if I want to risk my business on it.
Are you saying that nobody should release code until they have tested all possible circumstances under which failure could occur?
That'll be pretty hard for anything with more than fifty lines of code. Are you prepared to wait 15 or 20 months for patches to vulnerabilities that are being exploited now?
Another big event was the publication "The Fountainhead", which is basically a rape fantasy centered around Frank Lloyd Wright.
Anybody who doesn't recognize the characters doesn't know much about the Stanford White era of American architecture. There is no attempt to disguise them.
Your firewall is very boring.
As far as I know, only DuPont and DEC ever came close to the DECnet node address limitation (perhaps the other large nets didn't like to brag about their size).
:)
If DEC had sunk the amount of capital they wasted on DECnet-OSI into DECnet phase IV, then opened the specs and bundled DECnet with all their products, we might be using it instead of TCP/IP today! Ah, the glory of hindsight.
At least we didn't end up with SNA.
In an attempt to satisfy the federal government, DEC actually implemented the OSI reference model. The whole bloody thing, as documented by the model itself, which is how the world found out it is a bad idea.
I've installed it. I've used it. I remember the whole GOSIP debacle. I remember ripping it out by the roots and reinstalling DECnet Phase IV - which was excellent, although a bit bursty on low bandwidth links.