If I recall correctly, the woman who runs that site wrote a book and sells audio versions of her reading the book for $80! And she has no qualifications, in either psych* or computer*
Perhaps, if they don't require somthing like AOL's special DNS client software to set up your system. They do have a bad tendency to require their own proprietary software.
Well, that's just for the actual AOL client. The did, for instance, release the specs to the AIM protocol (of course, that's after someone had almost completely reverse-engineered it)
To my knowledge, there is not a single objection to Red Hat that can't be answered with "Mandrake/Berolinux", and there's a lot of good things to be said about them.
But Micrsoft tries to make one OS for everybody, for both those who seek the workings and those who don't care. They could have done it the Linux+X+WM+GNOME/KDE way, where it's pretty seemless once set up but the underlying mechanics are still availible. Instead, they did it the Microsoft way, where your best bet to understanding how things work is to play with regedit (Fun!)
Who cares about RedHat?
on
Red Hat 6.0
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· Score: 1
I keep wondering if they're going to start selling stock so I can buy some and ride it on up:)
Ok, I loved Neal Stephnson's essay. Sure, it had problems, but that's not going to stop me from fanatically defending it:)
1. Stephenson's point was not that GUIs are bad. Maybe he got the history wrong, but he got the important part. The people at PARC were not trying to hide the workings of the computer behind a graphical interface. They were trying to enhance the computer through a graphical interface. This is not what Apple and Microsoft do, though they may pretend to. What they do is hide the computer behind the interface. This is what Stephenson says is bad. Arnett's example of weather tries to set up Stephenson as saying something he's not. It would be a valid analogy if looking at a weather report somehow prevented you from looking at the indivdual molecules in the atmosphere. Stephenson is not against GUIs. He's against them replacing CLIs. Come on, can anybody who likes Enlightenment be against GUIs? Oh, the irony that Arnett mentions the straw-man argument in his essay!
2. In most cases, selling stock is really selling equity, but this is a technology stock we're talking about. With these things, the price of the stock is several orders of magnitude times earnings. Usually you would be selling equity, but with high-tech stocks (especially now with e-trading), it really is like financing a loan. Microsoft does not have that much equity. You would have to be pretty naive to believe that the stock market (especially the high-tech stuff) can sustain itself at that level. It's unsunstainable, therefore it's not really selling equity and can be seen, as Stephenson chooses, as financing a loan against the future burst of the bubble.
3. What, pray tell, is the difference between Bill Gates "winning" and Micrsoft having bigger profits? Is there such an important distinction? His obligation is not short-term profits but long-term profits, which seems to be the same thing as "winning" in most cases.
4. Arnett says that it's not price or features that OSes compete on, but momentum. He then says it's phenomenal that Linux has such momentum so young. But what about when Linux first started out? It had zero momentum. According to this theory, it should still have zero momentum, but we all know that's false. It has competed on features and price. Also look at Windows 98. It's not necassary for anything. You can still use 95. Did people buy it? Yes. Why? Not because they had to. They did it becaus OSes compete on price (ok, 98 loses there), feaures (yeah, they seem to the average consumer to do well there), and marketing (which Stephenson mentions, but not in the same place). And I'm willing to bet that if Hurd shapes up, people will use it. If it shapes up well, it people will use it instead of Linux, or *BSD, or whatever. Open source reduces the impact of momentum, as we've seen many times.
5. Stephenson was not entirely against the Disneyfication process. I recall him saying it was better that a million people see the Disneyfied temple than that 10,000 cardiovascular surgeons go see the real thing for the same amount of money.
The whirlpool/chaos metaphor is at least as confusing/misleaing as any metaphor Stephenson uses." what do you get if you break a whirlpool into pieces?" This is misleading. Breaking up Micrsoft would have an impact. The point of the antitrust case is that they not be allowed to expand their monopoly into other areas, causing things to stagnate. Arnett says Micrsoft does not own the internet. True, it doesn't now. That's the point. We shouldn' let them own the Internet. Breaking the division of Microsoft that deals with OSes from the part that deals with the Internet would help (look back to Arnett's argument about momentum; without the OS division behind it, MS-Internet would not have the unfair momentum)
The use of the chaos example is particularly interesting. Arnett claims that we can find simple things from the general in a chaotic system. Ok, I'll buy that. But the reverse in a chaotic system is that you can't understand what the whole will look like from some of the pieces. This is not what a computer should be like, and that's part of Stephenson's arguments. I should be bottom-up, not top-down. We should be understanding computers from the simple parts and then extrapolating the big picture (with the help of a GUI if necessary). Arnett says that we should be understing the big picture (through the GUI) and from that inferring the underlying system. Me, I'll take the former system. It gives me more information. It's my computer, and I don't want to have to guess what's going on. True, dragging an icon may represent mounds of complexity, but I prefer the GNOME/KDE dragging, where I can know what the dragging means, to the Microsoft/Apple dragging, where it's all abstracted behind recognition.
There, I'm sure I have lots of holes. I like this. Arnett wrote a good piece in response to (what I believe to be) a better piece. Now I've written a worse piece than Arnett. Now someone reply to me. I like this.
The CS department here is offering a class that revolves around Mindstorm next semester ("Programming with Uncertainty" or something.) I so wish my schedule worked out that I could take it.
I know he's not a real hacker (I'm not either, for that matter), but he seems a WHOLE lot more hackerish than any other sci-fi writer or tech-reporter I've ever read. From the back of Snow Crash (which I bought because of In the Beginning):
[Stephenson] began his higher education as a physics major, then switched to geography when it appeared that this would enable him to scam more free time on his university's mainframe computer.
I'm lefthanded, and I've always used a mouse with my right hand. I started using them with a Apple IIGS, so it's not like I was using a teardrop shaped one or anything. I think I do it because I type better with my left hand. It's really only the great unwashed who control their computers mostly through the mouse. Punching hotkeys with my left hand and moving the mouse with my right seems like a good combination. I guess I can see your argument, but I don't know anybody who uses a mouse with their lefthand, even when the mouse they use is symmetric.
I bought a 3M "Precise Mousing Surface" which is basically a 1mm thick mousepad that is about as floppy as newspaper and feels like it's made out of some magic material 3M came up with. It cost $12. In addition to being better for control, it has tiny, tiny grooves in it to collect gunk. I use it with my Logitech Cordless Desktop's mouse, which I've been using for about a year now. I open the mouse up and try to clean it about once a month, but there has never been any nasty stuff on it like I get with normal mouspads. Well worth the $12, and it looks pretty cool too.
Did you guys read Microsoft's press release for this mouse? This is the only time I've ever heard anyone brag about the MIPS in a mouse.
But then why give IE for Windows (and Solaris?) away for free, too? I know why, and I know you have a point (I did mention the gobs of strings attached to their "giving away"). It just doesn't look like they're living up to their word. (big surprise there).
Check back "Ask-slashdot"s. There was one of ergo keyboards about a month ago. It was very informative. Bottom line was, if you don't know Dvorak, learn it; if you do, get a--darn, I can't remember the name.
This is at least somewhat on topic, and it's been on my mind, so I'll mention it.
Ever notice how one of the standard anti-free software arguments is that no one will be willing to work for something that's going to be given away. When Microsoft makes this argument, they usually include some statement such as, "And even though OSS may work for little things like pong (or something), it can't work for something big, like a web browser" (I know they've said web browser before.)
But Micrsoft effectively killed anyone's chance of making serious money selling a web browser when they released IE for free (I know--Opera--but I doubt they're raking it in). And yet, Microsoft and Netscape continue to make software that they give away (ok, IE has a whole lot of strings attached to their version of "give away").
It just seems a little contradictory. On the one hand, they keep saying no one will work for something that they'e no going to get money for. On the other hand, they say that OSS doesn't work for big projects, like web browsers. But there's an example of an OSS web browser right under their nose and another example of software that people don't get paid for right in their own company.
I may not have thought this out right, and maybe it should make sense. I just chalk it up to MS tending to be hypocritical.
I got it from my Computer Science book, "A Computer Science Tapestry" by Owen Astrachan. I sure hope Prof. Astrachan didn't make it up! It's in the context of Bill Gates describing going through the trash of the CS building at Harvard, reading the source to their operating systems (if Bill Gats rooting for OS source in a trash-pile is not a perfect image, I don't know what is).
This reminds me of a question that I've had but haven't gotten answered. If I have a 300W power supply, does that mean the coputer will be drawing 300W constantly or will it just draw what it needs? I ask because, when building a server or some other type of computer that would be up 24-7 but not necessarily saturated, it would be a pretty serious concern if you could maybe get by with 250W, saving about 50MW/yr (I've got to be doing that math wrong, but still a lot). So, who knows?
You don't seem to understand antitrust law, or you do and don't agree with it's purpose.
The general purpose of antitrust law is not to punish wrongdoing. It's, in effect, to punish success. This sounds stupid, I know, but let me explain.
Most (certainly not all) of America's laws are based on a balance of personal liberty and promoting capitalism. Most of the laws we have work well doing both at the same time, since in a competetive market (which is most of them), the best way to promote capitalism is to do nothing at all.
But sometimes monopolies form, and we have to have special rules in this case. When mopolies form, everyone is worse off except for the person who owns the monopoly. With a normal business, the business doing better is good for everyone, consumer and producer alike. But monopolies are bad for consumers, because they result in under-production and over-pricing.
That's why we have antitrust laws. Really, the first anti-trust laws were sponsored by big business to stamp out labor unions, but now they're supposed to serve a good pupose. I like the example of AT&T. People say Microsoft has made computers easier to use, so we should leave them alone. Well, AT&T made telephones much more common than they were before AT&T. But after a while, they were broken up, and we're better off now (except for that slamming stuff). AT&T didn't really do anything wrong, but they were a monopoly, and thus bad for society. So they were broken up.
Now Microsoft. Yes, Microsoft should be "disintegrated" (for lack of a better word) because they are a monopoly. But they should be punished because of the illegal and immoral things they have done in addition to being a monopoly.
I take it back, there's no bebugging info. But it definitely seems faster than NS Com 4.5 to me. I would be posting with it, but it's form handling is not so good.
Well, to be fair, your run-of-the-mill Netscape Communicator and IE aren't spouting debugging info. Isn't M4? I don't know, I haven't gotten it yet, but I think M3 did spout a lot, which would slow it down.
It was hardly all pro-Linux. He acknowledged that support is hard to find. He also said that Linux might not be able to beat the NT machine even in a fair test with Linux tuned. It was mostly Mindcraft-bashing, not Linux-loving.
Sometime in the middle of the next decade, broadcasters will stop using non-digital formats and will go all HDTV (at least that's the FCC requirement; they're doing pretty slow, so no telling what the requirement will actually end up as). After that, you'll have to buy a converter to see broadcast tv on your non-digital set.
Yes, but the flip side of that is, if the market does not like these restrictions, the movie will fail because no one will be willing to show it. I don't think that will happen, do you?
Slashdot Mirror
If I recall correctly, the woman who runs that site wrote a book and sells audio versions of her reading the book for $80! And she has no qualifications, in either psych* or computer*
Perhaps, if they don't require somthing like AOL's special DNS client software to set up your system. They do have a bad tendency to require their own proprietary software.
Well, that's just for the actual AOL client. The did, for instance, release the specs to the AIM protocol (of course, that's after someone had almost completely reverse-engineered it)
To my knowledge, there is not a single objection to Red Hat that can't be answered with "Mandrake/Berolinux", and there's a lot of good things to be said about them.
Ok, you're right. In my haste, I didn't really think it through. I, an econ major, am ashamed. But those stock prices are still way too high!
But Micrsoft tries to make one OS for everybody, for both those who seek the workings and those who don't care. They could have done it the Linux+X+WM+GNOME/KDE way, where it's pretty seemless once set up but the underlying mechanics are still availible. Instead, they did it the Microsoft way, where your best bet to understanding how things work is to play with regedit (Fun!)
I keep wondering if they're going to start selling stock so I can buy some and ride it on up :)
Because WordPerfect is only free for indivdual use, not for educational insitutions or business use. This would be an exception.
Ok, I loved Neal Stephnson's essay. Sure, it had problems, but that's not going to stop me from fanatically defending it :)
1. Stephenson's point was not that GUIs are bad. Maybe he got the history wrong, but he got the important part. The people at PARC were not trying to hide the workings of the computer behind a graphical interface. They were trying to enhance the computer through a graphical interface. This is not what Apple and Microsoft do, though they may pretend to. What they do is hide the computer behind the interface. This is what Stephenson says is bad. Arnett's example of weather tries to set up Stephenson as saying something he's not. It would be a valid analogy if looking at a weather report somehow prevented you from looking at the indivdual molecules in the atmosphere. Stephenson is not against GUIs. He's against them replacing CLIs. Come on, can anybody who likes Enlightenment be against GUIs? Oh, the irony that Arnett mentions the straw-man argument in his essay!
2. In most cases, selling stock is really selling equity, but this is a technology stock we're talking about. With these things, the price of the stock is several orders of magnitude times earnings. Usually you would be selling equity, but with high-tech stocks (especially now with e-trading), it really is like financing a loan. Microsoft does not have that much equity. You would have to be pretty naive to believe that the stock market (especially the high-tech stuff) can sustain itself at that level. It's unsunstainable, therefore it's not really selling equity and can be seen, as Stephenson chooses, as financing a loan against the future burst of the bubble.
3. What, pray tell, is the difference between Bill Gates "winning" and Micrsoft having bigger profits? Is there such an important distinction? His obligation is not short-term profits but long-term profits, which seems to be the same thing as "winning" in most cases.
4. Arnett says that it's not price or features that OSes compete on, but momentum. He then says it's phenomenal that Linux has such momentum so young. But what about when Linux first started out? It had zero momentum. According to this theory, it should still have zero momentum, but we all know that's false. It has competed on features and price. Also look at Windows 98. It's not necassary for anything. You can still use 95. Did people buy it? Yes. Why? Not because they had to. They did it becaus OSes compete on price (ok, 98 loses there), feaures (yeah, they seem to the average consumer to do well there), and marketing (which Stephenson mentions, but not in the same place). And I'm willing to bet that if Hurd shapes up, people will use it. If it shapes up well, it people will use it instead of Linux, or *BSD, or whatever. Open source reduces the impact of momentum, as we've seen many times.
5. Stephenson was not entirely against the Disneyfication process. I recall him saying it was better that a million people see the Disneyfied temple than that 10,000 cardiovascular surgeons go see the real thing for the same amount of money.
The whirlpool/chaos metaphor is at least as confusing/misleaing as any metaphor Stephenson uses." what do you get if you break a whirlpool into pieces?" This is misleading. Breaking up Micrsoft would have an impact. The point of the antitrust case is that they not be allowed to expand their monopoly into other areas, causing things to stagnate. Arnett says Micrsoft does not own the internet. True, it doesn't now. That's the point. We shouldn' let them own the Internet. Breaking the division of Microsoft that deals with OSes from the part that deals with the Internet would help (look back to Arnett's argument about momentum; without the OS division behind it, MS-Internet would not have the unfair momentum)
The use of the chaos example is particularly interesting. Arnett claims that we can find simple things from the general in a chaotic system. Ok, I'll buy that. But the reverse in a chaotic system is that you can't understand what the whole will look like from some of the pieces. This is not what a computer should be like, and that's part of Stephenson's arguments. I should be bottom-up, not top-down. We should be understanding computers from the simple parts and then extrapolating the big picture (with the help of a GUI if necessary). Arnett says that we should be understing the big picture (through the GUI) and from that inferring the underlying system. Me, I'll take the former system. It gives me more information. It's my computer, and I don't want to have to guess what's going on. True, dragging an icon may represent mounds of complexity, but I prefer the GNOME/KDE dragging, where I can know what the dragging means, to the Microsoft/Apple dragging, where it's all abstracted behind recognition.
There, I'm sure I have lots of holes. I like this. Arnett wrote a good piece in response to (what I believe to be) a better piece. Now I've written a worse piece than Arnett. Now someone reply to me. I like this.
The CS department here is offering a class that revolves around Mindstorm next semester ("Programming with Uncertainty" or something.) I so wish my schedule worked out that I could take it.
I know he's not a real hacker (I'm not either, for that matter), but he seems a WHOLE lot more hackerish than any other sci-fi writer or tech-reporter I've ever read. From the back of Snow Crash (which I bought because of In the Beginning):
[Stephenson] began his higher education as a physics major, then switched to geography when it appeared that this would enable him to scam more free time on his university's mainframe computer.
If that's not an old-school hacker, what is?
I'm lefthanded, and I've always used a mouse with my right hand. I started using them with a Apple IIGS, so it's not like I was using a teardrop shaped one or anything. I think I do it because I type better with my left hand. It's really only the great unwashed who control their computers mostly through the mouse. Punching hotkeys with my left hand and moving the mouse with my right seems like a good combination. I guess I can see your argument, but I don't know anybody who uses a mouse with their lefthand, even when the mouse they use is symmetric.
I bought a 3M "Precise Mousing Surface" which is basically a 1mm thick mousepad that is about as floppy as newspaper and feels like it's made out of some magic material 3M came up with. It cost $12. In addition to being better for control, it has tiny, tiny grooves in it to collect gunk. I use it with my Logitech Cordless Desktop's mouse, which I've been using for about a year now. I open the mouse up and try to clean it about once a month, but there has never been any nasty stuff on it like I get with normal mouspads. Well worth the $12, and it looks pretty cool too.
Did you guys read Microsoft's press release for this mouse? This is the only time I've ever heard anyone brag about the MIPS in a mouse.
But then why give IE for Windows (and Solaris?) away for free, too? I know why, and I know you have a point (I did mention the gobs of strings attached to their "giving away"). It just doesn't look like they're living up to their word. (big surprise there).
Check back "Ask-slashdot"s. There was one of ergo keyboards about a month ago. It was very informative. Bottom line was, if you don't know Dvorak, learn it; if you do, get a--darn, I can't remember the name.
This is at least somewhat on topic, and it's been on my mind, so I'll mention it.
Ever notice how one of the standard anti-free software arguments is that no one will be willing to work for something that's going to be given away. When Microsoft makes this argument, they usually include some statement such as, "And even though OSS may work for little things like pong (or something), it can't work for something big, like a web browser" (I know they've said web browser before.)
But Micrsoft effectively killed anyone's chance of making serious money selling a web browser when they released IE for free (I know--Opera--but I doubt they're raking it in). And yet, Microsoft and Netscape continue to make software that they give away (ok, IE has a whole lot of strings attached to their version of "give away").
It just seems a little contradictory. On the one hand, they keep saying no one will work for something that they'e no going to get money for. On the other hand, they say that OSS doesn't work for big projects, like web browsers. But there's an example of an OSS web browser right under their nose and another example of software that people don't get paid for right in their own company.
I may not have thought this out right, and maybe it should make sense. I just chalk it up to MS tending to be hypocritical.
I got it from my Computer Science book, "A Computer Science Tapestry" by Owen Astrachan. I sure hope Prof. Astrachan didn't make it up! It's in the context of Bill Gates describing going through the trash of the CS building at Harvard, reading the source to their operating systems (if Bill Gats rooting for OS source in a trash-pile is not a perfect image, I don't know what is).
This reminds me of a question that I've had but haven't gotten answered. If I have a 300W power supply, does that mean the coputer will be drawing 300W constantly or will it just draw what it needs? I ask because, when building a server or some other type of computer that would be up 24-7 but not necessarily saturated, it would be a pretty serious concern if you could maybe get by with 250W, saving about 50MW/yr (I've got to be doing that math wrong, but still a lot). So, who knows?
And no matter how much I think I know about medicine, the AMA won't let me cut people up! It's an exaggeration, but there are still two sides to it.
You don't seem to understand antitrust law, or you do and don't agree with it's purpose.
The general purpose of antitrust law is not to punish wrongdoing. It's, in effect, to punish success. This sounds stupid, I know, but let me explain.
Most (certainly not all) of America's laws are based on a balance of personal liberty and promoting capitalism. Most of the laws we have work well doing both at the same time, since in a competetive market (which is most of them), the best way to promote capitalism is to do nothing at all.
But sometimes monopolies form, and we have to have special rules in this case. When mopolies form, everyone is worse off except for the person who owns the monopoly. With a normal business, the business doing better is good for everyone, consumer and producer alike. But monopolies are bad for consumers, because they result in under-production and over-pricing.
That's why we have antitrust laws. Really, the first anti-trust laws were sponsored by big business to stamp out labor unions, but now they're supposed to serve a good pupose. I like the example of AT&T. People say Microsoft has made computers easier to use, so we should leave them alone. Well, AT&T made telephones much more common than they were before AT&T. But after a while, they were broken up, and we're better off now (except for that slamming stuff). AT&T didn't really do anything wrong, but they were a monopoly, and thus bad for society. So they were broken up.
Now Microsoft. Yes, Microsoft should be "disintegrated" (for lack of a better word) because they are a monopoly. But they should be punished because of the illegal and immoral things they have done in addition to being a monopoly.
I take it back, there's no bebugging info. But it definitely seems faster than NS Com 4.5 to me. I would be posting with it, but it's form handling is not so good.
Well, to be fair, your run-of-the-mill Netscape Communicator and IE aren't spouting debugging info. Isn't M4? I don't know, I haven't gotten it yet, but I think M3 did spout a lot, which would slow it down.
It was hardly all pro-Linux. He acknowledged that support is hard to find. He also said that Linux might not be able to beat the NT machine even in a fair test with Linux tuned. It was mostly Mindcraft-bashing, not Linux-loving.
Sometime in the middle of the next decade, broadcasters will stop using non-digital formats and will go all HDTV (at least that's the FCC requirement; they're doing pretty slow, so no telling what the requirement will actually end up as). After that, you'll have to buy a converter to see broadcast tv on your non-digital set.
Yes, but the cost of retraining people for gnome-minesweeper and kmine or xmine would be astronomical!
Yes, but the flip side of that is, if the market does not like these restrictions, the movie will fail because no one will be willing to show it. I don't think that will happen, do you?