The only problem is that Microsoft decided to use FAT and extended it for Windows 9x, but that's somewhat understandable from a compatibility standpoint.
Where is compatibility an issue? Most software can't tell FAT from NTFS. They simply didn't want to expend the effort to write an NTFS driver 16-bit Windows. The rationale would have been that the end of that platform was in sight, but the real reason would have been that nobody wanted to hack new system software for a platform that was always flaky, and was becomming more and more a nightmare to develop for.
There was always a need for NTFS support on 16-bit Windows, and third parties have provided it. If MS really thought in terms of their customers needs, they would have made a thorough move away from FAT early on. Instead, it's an ongoing problem. Even now, with the transition to NT more or less complete. I recently upgraded a client from ME to XP. It seemed criminal not to upgrade her filesystem to NTFS, but I knew doing so would tempt Captain Murphy.
But who would want to? Low rez computer graphics looks worse on a big screen.
The monitor I'm using right now (a tired old Viewsonic M90) has less than half the screen real-estate of your HDTV, yet can display almost twice as many pixels! I don't see anything on my screen that would look better on a big screen..
Broadcast and computer video have always been apples and oranges, despite their superficial similarity.
The consumer (in this case, your employer) determines what your product (your labor) is worth to him.
So if I determine that a movie is only worth $5 bucks to see, that's all I have to pay to get in?
Of course, you mean that if movie tickets cost more than consumers are willing to pay for them, than moviegoers will vote with their feet. Which is fine for entertainment. But what about little necessities like rent. I can "choose" to move to a place where the rent is cheaper, but that choice also entails moving to a place where there are no jobs...
You are perfectly free to demand high wages (what you think you're worth) -- and employers are perfectly free to not hire you.
"Perfectly free". Interesting concept. Nice for propounding simplistic ethical and economic theories. But in the real world, we deal with less ideal facts. Such as: some people have more power than others. Especially economic power.
Companies with deep pockets can screw people over. They can buy influence, so laws and public policy are made in their favor. They can sell at a loss to drive out competition. And most of all, they can simply set wages as low as they like, and wait for the workers to get hungry enough to accept them.
At this point, you're saying, "Well, what's your solution, state control of everything? Socialism? Anarchism?" No, those are solutions that are as simplistic as simply blindly trusting the marketplace to behave sanely. In the real world, you have to find a middle ground.
What we have here is a collision of the educational realm, where "content" needs to be "distributed" to students with maximum learning, and the entertainment realm, where content needs to be distributed to consumers with maximum profit.
The media companies have never accepted that distinction. Indeed, students have traditionally paid more for their content than entertainment consumers. If DVDs or bestsellers cost $100 each and became unusable in a couple of years, consumers would revolt. But students are a captive market, so they're stuck with expensive textbooks that are "revised" every couple of years to eliminate the value of used copies.
Academic people don't bypass restrictions on content redistribution because they need to "maximize learning". They do it because they can. Which is not to say that I don't seem some ethical justification for a student photocopying an overpriced textbook or a teacher in an underfuneded public school duping software . But they've never been widely recognized as any different from somebody who rips a $15 DVD.
What they need is a presentation on how to create content that can be legally shared (history of GNU, Creative Commons, and so on).
You think a presentation on RMS's world view is going to convince anybody that he represents anything but "giving away" content? Get real!
WTF , how difficult is it to provide a linux or Windows 98/ME , application ?
This question, or one like it, seems to get asked almost daily on Slashdot. People here mostly work in the industry -- why do so few of them understand how much it costs to port, distribute, and support a product on a new platform?
You might as well ask, "How difficult is it to provide an app for BSD, BeOS, QNX, Plan9, AmigaDOS, NextStep..." Not hard, if you're willing to spend the money. How much? Obviously, less than they'd get back in increased customers.
The way that question is asked reveals a profound ignorance of where movie ideas come from. Movies are high-stakes ventures. So in the end, it's not about entertaining people it's about making money. Hollywood likes movie ideas that make money, hates movies ideas that don't. Whether the movie itself is any good is irrelevent.
Marketing is everying. So most movies are based on something that has established name recognition. Twenty years ago, I saw so many bad movies based on song titles, I swore never to watch another one. (Well, I might make an exception for this song.) Popular books always used to get made into movies, even if the book wasn't all that cinematic. And now we're seing movies based on theme park rides. Why? Marketing. Known trademark. Anything but creativity.
I'm suprised it took them so long to get around to video games. Established audience, well-known brand, yada yada.
To answer the question that was meant: can you make a decent movie out of a video game? Hey, you can make a decent movie out of last week's canned peas if you can find the right talent. Look at who is making the movie, not the meaningless marketting noise.
Avoid putting . or ~/bin in your PATH if possible. If you absolutely must do so, put them at the end.
I can't think of any reason you'd have to have. in your PATH. It's not that hard to type "./" before a command. (Though I admit, having learned Unix back in more innocent days, I still usually forget.) But I'd really balk at not being able to have a private bin directory, especially on a machine where I didn't have root access. Nor do I see the point. If you're sophisticated enough to write your own programs, you should know enough not to install trojans.
And if I'm wrong about that, then it's not enough to get rid of your private bin. You also have to hack the shell so it doesn't read startup scripts like.profile or.login. Cause if it does, then a trojan can simply re-write the scripts to add that private bin. Or define aliases.
Unsuprising that this is the very first serious comment -- it was the first thing that came to my mind. Then I thought of an answer: you're always going to have users who demand SU access to their own machines, and inevitably this will include people who don't know as much as they think they do.
OK, now for a SU war story. I used to work at Sun, and shortly before I was hired they instituted a policy that nobody got their machines root password unless they could convince IT they really needed it. This was actually a sensible policy, given some of the stupid stuff people who did have root access did (everybody who'd had it before the policy change was allowed to keep it). One person ran a MySQL-based web application served by her workstation, with no backups. IT innocently overwrote her data during routine maintenance. She was pissed. I was unsympathetic.
Still, I found the policy frustrating -- I was a Solaris newbie, I wanted to learn as much about it as I could, and there's only so much you can learn without fiddling with the system innards.
Finally, Captain Murphy intervened in my favor. My automount daemon kept crashing, and IT couldn't figure it out, and got tired of coming out just to restart it....
Firebird is free now. When the Web started exploding ten years ago, Firebird was still Interbase, and Interbase was still closed-source and reasonably expensive. (No nitpicks about the specific status of Interbase please -- it's complicated and uninteresting.)
PostgreSQL has always been OS, but it didn't appear until 1996. The original Postgres engine goes back much further, but didn't support SQL. Also Stonebraker and other Postgres people saw it as the basis of commercial products not free software.
You're probably right, anyway -- even if Interbase and PosgreSQL had been available for free in 1995, their greater complexity would have kept most web developers from using them. But they weren't so we're dealing in theory.
Sorry, seen too many idiots who don't realize that a misused vehicle is just as much a deadly weapon as a gun. Either, when used correctly and appropriately, is fine by me. But this guy didn't use it correctly.
What do you mean mean, "as much"? Far more people die in traffic accidents than in shootings. And that's in the U.S., where there are a lot of shootings!
I never did understand why magneto optic didn't catch on more.
My guess: it never got cheap enough. CD- and DVD-compatible formats leverage the economies of scale that you get with any consumer technology. MO was always too expensive to be popular, and too unpopular to become unexpensive.
In countries with very low standards of living and wages, jobs are accomplished by throwing lots of labor at them. In countries where workers make more money, employers are more inclined to make capital investments that will lower their labor costs.
An extreme case: Once saw a documentary on the city of Calcutta. Showed a building site where they had to haul materials up to work on the higher floors. In an industrial country you'd have some kind of engine to do the hauling. In a poor country, it's more cost effective to buy a block-and-tackle and hire a lot of street people to pull on it. But in a really poor country (like Calcutta in the 70s), a simple pulley is more cost effective than a block and tackle -- you can hire hundreds of people to yank on the rope for pocket change.
If wages are determined solely by business's need for the cheapest labor possible, then the whole world turns into Calcutta. Not, I submit, a desireable goal.
I realized the potential and suitability of what I called "hashing databases" for web content and much simple content.
Actually, there was a time when you didn't call something a database unless it had some serious data-management function. ISAM files weren't considered databases, just files that supported non-sequential access. Over the years, the term has been applied to just about everything that has any features of a DBMS. The most extreme case was Ashton-Tate's old FrameWork product, which included a "database" that was nothing but a specialized spreadsheet. And it had to fit in DOS memory, so your "database" couldn't be more than 500K!
In retrospect, Perl hackers love hashes and I think they use them in a similar way to BDB.
Not similar, exactly the same. Perl treats a BDB file as a kind of hash.
Well, these guys, these guys, and these guys seem to have no trouble selling 386-based hardware. Not everybody needs the full feature set (or the cost and power requirements) of a Pentium.
For instance, the reason why the world wide web took off was because Microsoft created a HORRIFIC web browser, but since now all computers had a web broswer, everyone had access.
Say what? The web had lots of momentum as early as 95. At which time Microsoft was still in denial about the whole Internet thing. Which is why Windows 95 came with a lot of MSN software and libraries (then based on proprietary protocols) and no TCP/IP stack at all. That fact that MSN began as an "online service" (in the model of pre-Internet AOL and CompuServe) rather than as an ISP indicates how little interest Microsoft had in the Internet in general and the Web in particular.
When Microsoft realized that they had backed the wrong horse, they had to come up with their own Internet strategy in a hurry, or be left behind. That is why early versions of IE were such hack jobs. And for some years, other browsers still did more to raise awareness of the Web. But once the Web was established, nobody bothered to install other browsers -- why bother, when Windows came with one? Between that and Netscape's declining interest in browser development...
As for MySQL: when the Web exploded, web developers needed data engines that didn't cost a lot and were easy to understand. The excluded all serious SQL servers. I'm not sure why nobody picked up on simple ISAM systems like Berkeley DB -- perhaps they all had licensing issues. Anyway, MySQL was something they could use for free, it was easy to understand, and it was powerful enough for most web applications. You can't do the complicated operations that separate a true RDBMS from a simple dataset library -- but most web developers didn't have the skill to use these operations anyway.
You're simply stereotyping somebody who disagrees with you as an OS zealot. Yeah, there are lots of those, but you can have an intelligent opinion about the effect of closing source without getting religious about it. And this guy didn't.
I'm guessing that they'll provide some connection to the grid for backup power.
That would defeat the whole purpose of using solar power in the first place. Which is not to save on the electric bill -- which would not be very high -- but to avoid the cost of running a power line to each and every meter.
A JFS is complex, but also robust. And most of the complexity is in the implementation, not the user interface. From the user's point of view, a JFS is actually simpler than an old-fashioned file system. Interrupt a JFS in the middle of a heavy-duty task, and it just says, "where was I? Oh yeah..." Do the same with a traditional file system and you can spend days fixing it. And no amount of "healing" software can make that easier.
Perhaps instead of "complex" I should have said "kludgy". Techies can never resist the temptaion to hack in just one more feature. Which is fine if all users are techies as well. But ordinary users don't need all that kludgy hyperfeatureness. They need obvious ways to do obvious things. And piling on complex hand-holding software only makes things worse.
If you don't want to repeat Microsoft's mistakes, don't emulate their arrogance.
A computer should be as close to self healing and reliable as possible, and whenever possible it should update and restore itself.
Oh dear. Oh my. Do you realize you've just described the design philosophy of Microsoft Windows?
And it's also the feature that most drives me to distraction -- the software thinks it's smarter than I am. So when something goes wrong, there's never a simple way to fix it. 'Cause the system is supposed to fix itself! Yeah, right.
The mistake both you and Microsoft make is to assume that all the mind-numbing complexity of standard desktop systems is somehow necessary. So when something breaks, it's beyond the ability of most users to deal with it. So you add "healing" "active protection" and "automatic updates" and other stuff that stands in for the overworked system admin.
But that just makes the problem even worse. You're adding yet more complex software, to do that automatic stuff -- and that extra software always has problems of its own.
The right solution is to makes things simple from the start. You don't add complicated software to "heal" and update the system -- you design the system so it's less complex, and thus less fragile. So Fewer fixes and updates are necessary. And when they are necessary, the semi-skilled user can apply them himself.
Which is, of course, never going to happen. That would mean cutting back on cool features. Which is what drives software development -- both in the traditional and open source marketplaces.
For one, to save the 100,000 (well 50,000) thousand jobs left there, and to make them competitive again, all while bringing credit back to the brand.
That's a social reason to buy AT&T. Give me a business reason. If somebody has the cash to buy AT&T and the skill to turn the company around, they can certainly find better places to invest these resources.
I'd argue that Google is already more pervasive than either AOL or Microsoft. The Internet is the thing nowadays, and neither AOL or Microsft are really comfortable with non-proprietary tech. Plus they lag behind Google in brand awareness, even though they both beat us over the heads with the endless ads and gimmicks.
Turn on your TV. For Microsoft and AOL, you see lame commercials about over-hyped products, and news items about anti-trust litigation, failed ventures, and appalling security lapses. For Google you see no serious advertising, but they're always in the news because they're always inventing something. Plus every time a TV show needs to demonstrate the geekiness of a character, they have them use "Google" as a verb.
So yeah, Google is the proverbial 100-pound gorilla. And why not? Somebody has to be. It's the nature of the high-tech marketplace that only the big players really matter. Better the dominant company should be one with a genuine sense of innovation -- and ethics.
But why should they go to the trouble? All AT&T has left is a not terribly competitive long distance business and a thoroughly discredited brand.
If they wanted to go on that kind of crusade, they could buy Sun, kick out all the prima donas, and spin off SPARC and other vanity ventures. What would be left would be server, workstation, and software businesses that they could integrate with their own operation.
But why bother? That sort of missionary work is driven by ego, and IBM seems to have outgrown crap like that.
Good lord, you've tried 3 different distros, but you didn't take the time to try out different desktops? It's not Linux itself that soaks up the cycles -- I've run Linux on 486-33 boxes! But KDE and Gnome have a lot of high end graphics that take a lot of horsepower. A good graphic card doesn't hurt either. These desktops are trying to emulate Windows and/or MacOS, so of course they suck up the resources.
Of course most distros uses KDE or Gnome by default. But it's not that hard to configure a different desktop. Mandrake even lets you choose a different one every time you log in.
This is why it is better for corporations to fail than for governments to fail.
That only works if, when it fails, the company goes out of business. Doesn't always work that way. AT&T has been failing, over and over, for 20 years! Not only is it still there, but nobody seems to have lost their job over it. I don't mean the peons who can downsized because of other people's decisions -- I mean the people who made the decisions.
This is why November 2004 is going to be so hard a choice. Who do vote for? Oh dear oh dear, two choices and two paths to bigger government.
Oops, didn't realize you were simply setting us up for an anti-beltway rant. Which means we're already way offtopic. But before the moderators attack, let me respond.
"Big government" is one of the political cliches I get really tired of. Anything you dislike about what the government does you can conveniently label as "big government". If the government won't let you burn your leaves, and you think that's dumb, it's "big government". But if you care about air pollution, it's government doing it's job. Your necessary program is my "big government".
You're entitled to criticize what the government does (indeed, it's more or less your obligation as a citizen!). But if you hope to actually accomplish anything, try to make your criticisms based on specifics, not vague, subjective terms that mean whatever you chose them to mean.
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There was always a need for NTFS support on 16-bit Windows, and third parties have provided it. If MS really thought in terms of their customers needs, they would have made a thorough move away from FAT early on. Instead, it's an ongoing problem. Even now, with the transition to NT more or less complete. I recently upgraded a client from ME to XP. It seemed criminal not to upgrade her filesystem to NTFS, but I knew doing so would tempt Captain Murphy.
The monitor I'm using right now (a tired old Viewsonic M90) has less than half the screen real-estate of your HDTV, yet can display almost twice as many pixels! I don't see anything on my screen that would look better on a big screen..
Broadcast and computer video have always been apples and oranges, despite their superficial similarity.
Of course, you mean that if movie tickets cost more than consumers are willing to pay for them, than moviegoers will vote with their feet. Which is fine for entertainment. But what about little necessities like rent. I can "choose" to move to a place where the rent is cheaper, but that choice also entails moving to a place where there are no jobs...
"Perfectly free". Interesting concept. Nice for propounding simplistic ethical and economic theories. But in the real world, we deal with less ideal facts. Such as: some people have more power than others. Especially economic power.Companies with deep pockets can screw people over. They can buy influence, so laws and public policy are made in their favor. They can sell at a loss to drive out competition. And most of all, they can simply set wages as low as they like, and wait for the workers to get hungry enough to accept them.
At this point, you're saying, "Well, what's your solution, state control of everything? Socialism? Anarchism?" No, those are solutions that are as simplistic as simply blindly trusting the marketplace to behave sanely. In the real world, you have to find a middle ground.
Academic people don't bypass restrictions on content redistribution because they need to "maximize learning". They do it because they can. Which is not to say that I don't seem some ethical justification for a student photocopying an overpriced textbook or a teacher in an underfuneded public school duping software . But they've never been widely recognized as any different from somebody who rips a $15 DVD.
You think a presentation on RMS's world view is going to convince anybody that he represents anything but "giving away" content? Get real!You might as well ask, "How difficult is it to provide an app for BSD, BeOS, QNX, Plan9, AmigaDOS, NextStep..." Not hard, if you're willing to spend the money. How much? Obviously, less than they'd get back in increased customers.
Marketing is everying. So most movies are based on something that has established name recognition. Twenty years ago, I saw so many bad movies based on song titles, I swore never to watch another one. (Well, I might make an exception for this song.) Popular books always used to get made into movies, even if the book wasn't all that cinematic. And now we're seing movies based on theme park rides. Why? Marketing. Known trademark. Anything but creativity.
I'm suprised it took them so long to get around to video games. Established audience, well-known brand, yada yada.
To answer the question that was meant: can you make a decent movie out of a video game? Hey, you can make a decent movie out of last week's canned peas if you can find the right talent. Look at who is making the movie, not the meaningless marketting noise.
And if I'm wrong about that, then it's not enough to get rid of your private bin. You also have to hack the shell so it doesn't read startup scripts like .profile or .login. Cause if it does, then a trojan can simply re-write the scripts to add that private bin. Or define aliases.
OK, now for a SU war story. I used to work at Sun, and shortly before I was hired they instituted a policy that nobody got their machines root password unless they could convince IT they really needed it. This was actually a sensible policy, given some of the stupid stuff people who did have root access did (everybody who'd had it before the policy change was allowed to keep it). One person ran a MySQL-based web application served by her workstation, with no backups. IT innocently overwrote her data during routine maintenance. She was pissed. I was unsympathetic.
Still, I found the policy frustrating -- I was a Solaris newbie, I wanted to learn as much about it as I could, and there's only so much you can learn without fiddling with the system innards.
Finally, Captain Murphy intervened in my favor. My automount daemon kept crashing, and IT couldn't figure it out, and got tired of coming out just to restart it....
PostgreSQL has always been OS, but it didn't appear until 1996. The original Postgres engine goes back much further, but didn't support SQL. Also Stonebraker and other Postgres people saw it as the basis of commercial products not free software.
You're probably right, anyway -- even if Interbase and PosgreSQL had been available for free in 1995, their greater complexity would have kept most web developers from using them. But they weren't so we're dealing in theory.
If wages are determined solely by business's need for the cheapest labor possible, then the whole world turns into Calcutta. Not, I submit, a desireable goal.
Well, these guys, these guys, and these guys seem to have no trouble selling 386-based hardware. Not everybody needs the full feature set (or the cost and power requirements) of a Pentium.
When Microsoft realized that they had backed the wrong horse, they had to come up with their own Internet strategy in a hurry, or be left behind. That is why early versions of IE were such hack jobs. And for some years, other browsers still did more to raise awareness of the Web. But once the Web was established, nobody bothered to install other browsers -- why bother, when Windows came with one? Between that and Netscape's declining interest in browser development...
As for MySQL: when the Web exploded, web developers needed data engines that didn't cost a lot and were easy to understand. The excluded all serious SQL servers. I'm not sure why nobody picked up on simple ISAM systems like Berkeley DB -- perhaps they all had licensing issues. Anyway, MySQL was something they could use for free, it was easy to understand, and it was powerful enough for most web applications. You can't do the complicated operations that separate a true RDBMS from a simple dataset library -- but most web developers didn't have the skill to use these operations anyway.
Naw, we just got bored with the dude. It's no fun taking potshots at a somebody who's too stupid even to duck!
You're simply stereotyping somebody who disagrees with you as an OS zealot. Yeah, there are lots of those, but you can have an intelligent opinion about the effect of closing source without getting religious about it. And this guy didn't.
Perhaps instead of "complex" I should have said "kludgy". Techies can never resist the temptaion to hack in just one more feature. Which is fine if all users are techies as well. But ordinary users don't need all that kludgy hyperfeatureness. They need obvious ways to do obvious things. And piling on complex hand-holding software only makes things worse.
If you don't want to repeat Microsoft's mistakes, don't emulate their arrogance.
And it's also the feature that most drives me to distraction -- the software thinks it's smarter than I am. So when something goes wrong, there's never a simple way to fix it. 'Cause the system is supposed to fix itself! Yeah, right.
The mistake both you and Microsoft make is to assume that all the mind-numbing complexity of standard desktop systems is somehow necessary. So when something breaks, it's beyond the ability of most users to deal with it. So you add "healing" "active protection" and "automatic updates" and other stuff that stands in for the overworked system admin.
But that just makes the problem even worse. You're adding yet more complex software, to do that automatic stuff -- and that extra software always has problems of its own.
The right solution is to makes things simple from the start. You don't add complicated software to "heal" and update the system -- you design the system so it's less complex, and thus less fragile. So Fewer fixes and updates are necessary. And when they are necessary, the semi-skilled user can apply them himself.
Which is, of course, never going to happen. That would mean cutting back on cool features. Which is what drives software development -- both in the traditional and open source marketplaces.
Turn on your TV. For Microsoft and AOL, you see lame commercials about over-hyped products, and news items about anti-trust litigation, failed ventures, and appalling security lapses. For Google you see no serious advertising, but they're always in the news because they're always inventing something. Plus every time a TV show needs to demonstrate the geekiness of a character, they have them use "Google" as a verb.
So yeah, Google is the proverbial 100-pound gorilla. And why not? Somebody has to be. It's the nature of the high-tech marketplace that only the big players really matter. Better the dominant company should be one with a genuine sense of innovation -- and ethics.
If they wanted to go on that kind of crusade, they could buy Sun, kick out all the prima donas, and spin off SPARC and other vanity ventures. What would be left would be server, workstation, and software businesses that they could integrate with their own operation.
But why bother? That sort of missionary work is driven by ego, and IBM seems to have outgrown crap like that.
Of course most distros uses KDE or Gnome by default. But it's not that hard to configure a different desktop. Mandrake even lets you choose a different one every time you log in.
"Big government" is one of the political cliches I get really tired of. Anything you dislike about what the government does you can conveniently label as "big government". If the government won't let you burn your leaves, and you think that's dumb, it's "big government". But if you care about air pollution, it's government doing it's job. Your necessary program is my "big government".
You're entitled to criticize what the government does (indeed, it's more or less your obligation as a citizen!). But if you hope to actually accomplish anything, try to make your criticisms based on specifics, not vague, subjective terms that mean whatever you chose them to mean.