I am curious if anyone has experience with these or any other open source middleware solutions...
Please help the rest of us and don't use the word "solutions". Of any word that marketing types can latch onto and overuse, "solutions" is the worst. I know I'm not alone in wondering what the world did before we had "solutions" to solve our problems.
If you can eradicate this scourge from our lives, please do. The public thanks you.
Besides, I don't want to support a company that sticks an ID on my processor... Call me paranoid.
Then you don't like Sun or any ethernet NIC manufacturer either. But it sure blows, because an awful lot of the world runs one (or likely both) of those. When you throw Pentium III's into the mix, you're going to be hard pressed to do anything digital in the modern world without at least passively supporting the concept of serialized computer hardware.
And when you go out and actually buy that 3com NIC, you're really feeling the pain. Because you just told 3com that you have no trouble whatsoever with a unique MAC address. Like McNealy said: "You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it."
Don't get me wrong: I agree with you. I think think PSNs suck (no, I'm not talking about packet switching). And I've been a long-time AMD user (I'm even an AMD stockholder). But you can't possibly try to use the argument that you'll buy AMD because you're in some way against serialized hardware. It just won't fly, man.
-B
Oh yeah, you can take a look at pictures of the K7 if you're curious. There's no mistaking what hardware you're running, that's for sure. I might have to actually put the case on...
I never got the F10 thing. That's why I went to the horse's mouth and grabbed the disks (and why I stored the disks' data, plus the "installer", on a CD-R).
I got the PC from a guy that had all Macs, and I think he did something funny with it like make it into an ersatz PPC. So I wiped the HDD, and went for the disk action. It was the only way to be sure.
But you have a good eye, I do have an XL. A 6150 XL. I was at work when I wrote that, so I couldn't remember exactly what it was.
I tried to update the BIOS, and got really odd results. Since I don't know what was done to the machine before I got it, I can't say what I did wrong. But I do know that fdisk makes a clean ext2 partition and the four disks get it right where I need to be.
However, the AP400 I "found" in a lab at work did not need the four disks to be reborn as a Linux box, and is a great development server. F10 wasn't needed there, though, because I didn't add any hardware or change any BIOS settings.
But I''ll keep F10 in mind, though. I know of a XL machine that is just begging to be an MP3 server...
Your friend's Compaq is completely useable as a Linux box, and you can add whatever hardware you want. Go to Compaq's support web site. I don't know where you are coming from, but the U.S. support site might be a good choice.
You need to download the SoftPaq for your machine. Then run it, and it will make four floppies for you (you probably ought to have four good, formatted floppies ready to go, because if one step fails, you get to do the whole thing over again). When you get the disks done, boot from the first one.
Now here is where my memory fails me slightly. At some point, you'll have to do an inventory-ish thing. The choice should be obvious, but if not, see Compaq's site for a FAQ (they have it somewhere, but I don't ahve the URL bookmarked). The deal will run, and you'll throw another of the disks in. When it's finished, you'll have what amounts to a complete, editable "snapshot" of the system. From this snapshot, you can change whatever setting you want. You just select the hardware and choose the resources you want. You also get to see a list of what's free, so it's pretty easy.
I have an old Compaq Deskpro PPro 150 that I figured would make a good gateway machine. The only problem is that I needed to put in an additional NIC (incidentally, Bay/Netgear makes a 10/100 card called the FA310TX which has the Dec Tulip chipset; it's a great card, low CPU utilization, lot's of status indicators, and only costs about $25.00). The machine already has an onboard AMD ethernet interface, but both cards wanted IRQ 5. So I ran the SoftPaq, told it where to stick its IRQ, and everything is happy behind my gateway/firewall now. If I want to add more hardware, I just run the disks again.
I agree that the floppies are a pain, and aren't as handy as a plain ROM BIOS in some cases (my battery goes dead and I'm covered). But that doesn't mean that the old Compaq sitting in the corner is useless.
Now, booting from a floppy I don't know about. I've never bothered with that before. I'm sure it's doable, but I don't recall the SoftPaq's screen menus/features that well. It's been a while.
-B
Slashdot never *had* the number 1 position...
on
SETI@home & RC5
·
· Score: 1
Unless you count the daily stats, which don't really count. Overall, Slashdot is still number two and has a while before it catches up.
I don't think people are losing sight of what Linux is all about. Linux is stable, free, robust, easy to use (well, getting easier -- thanks in part to companies like Red Hat), and a natural if you have any networking needs whatsoever. There's nothing wrong with Red Hat making money from Linux. The core of Linux is still the same: OSS and a worldwide cadre of developers doing what they love to do.
If you think that there is something inherently wrong with Red Hat selling (and therefore making money off of) Linux, consider my mother's situation. She owns a smallish clothing and furniture store in Phoenix, and she has a 20 user network, with print servers and the like, that currently runs Novell 3.something. A while ago, she was in Price Club and picked up a copy of Red Hat. Then she called me and asked me all sorts of questions about what Linux (she called it "Linux", not "Red Hat") could do for her and her looming network upgrade (what with Y2K coming up and all, it's time to ditch those old 486s).
To make a long story short, she's decided that Linux would make a great gateway/firewall machine, and is getting Cox's cable modem in her store. Now she'll be able to work from home. We're also toying with using Linux for a print server on one of the old clients. So now we have a new Linux convert, all because someone wanted to make money buy selling it (and justifiably put Linux in a box with a nice manual a person's mother can understand and sold a bunch to Price Club).
How can that be bad? Red Hat makes money, sure, but the entire Linux community gets another Linux user (instead of another NT user, which she was going to use). Do you think that my mom would have immediately thought of Linux for a gateway system and gone out and downloaded Debian? Not a chance. She saw it in the store (which makes it a "real" product in her mind), read the box and liked it. Plus, she knows she can get support from Red Hat (instead of just me or my brother). That support, probably more than anything else, put Linux right up there with Microsoft in her mind.
So I have no beef with Red Hat selling Linux, and I hope they sell a million more copies and get stinkin' rich in the process. It means that there will be more Linux users demanding (and writing) more Linux software. There'll be more hardware support (I, for one, long for the day when all hardware comes with Linux drivers and info -- kind of like Netgear cards do). It'll put the PC back in the hands of people instead of some stupid paper-clippish thing doing all the thinking for them. Someone's kid will play Quake 4 on a Linux machine and then get to toying around with the OS and might embark on a great new future. (Remember the C-64 and VIC-20? How many people do you think got their start because they got the "priviledge" of monkeying around with BASIC and writing new software for themselves? You think Windows 2000 will foster that same sense of power and curiosity?) These are all good things, and all of them are due in part to companies like Red Hat making money from Linux.
The more Linux the better, I say. And if people make money in the process, more power to them.
...because I have a sinking feeling that AOL is going to monkey with it privacy-wise. I just don't like AOL, and I don't trust them. The last thing they think about is the user. Which is why you'll probably start seeing ads in WinAmp, profiles of the user and use stored, etc.
But I could be wrong. They may just leave Justin and Co. alone to do what they do best. But somehow I don't think they will. I feel very sad.
The competition between Apache and Netscape is interesting because they so rarely compete. The best way to sum up this up is to quote a sysadmin friend of mine. He said, "If I was going to run a website myself, I'd pick Apache. It's powerful and fast and stable. But if I had to run a site for a company, I'd pick Netscape. Hiring people qualified with whatever flavor or Perl/Apache/UNIX/mod_perl I choose is too hard and too expensive."
Ogren hit the nail on the head with the first quote, and I can prove it. Take a look at eudora.com and then qualcomm.com .
And while I agree that hiring UNIX geeks with the right mix of skills can be a daunting task, the last statement really doesn't address the true root of the "problem" (the problem being that people don't get to use Apache): IT managers and bean counters are still scared about the supposed lack of support with OSS. Especially when it has to run their web site (even though their ftp site might be run by OSS, they couldn't care as long as "their Internet" doesn't go down). Using a possible lack of qualified talent as an excuse for Netscape Server's existence is really feeble.
I don't remember where I heard this, but it's been shown that people won't buy things if those things' selling price doesn't match or exceed what the buyer believes it ought to cost. If I was selling Mont Blanc pens for $10, would you buy one? If Mont Blanc itself sold them for $10, do you think they would be as popular as they are? Part of what makes $20 cigars so good is that they cost $20, and you can tell yourself and your friends that you're smoking really pricey cigars and that you're a big shot because of it. It doesn't make the cigars taste any better in the same way that Bic pens write just as well as the more expensive models.
When people buy Netscape servers, they want to feel the same way. Even if they are running it on Solaris (or Linux or whatever), and they already have the talent/hardware to run Apache, they won't. They'd rather pay for Netscape than use Apache for free. Because if Apache doesn't cost money, how can it be worth anything? (And usually after that thought, they trot out that "no support" thing as a final excuse they know they can use and get away with without looking like a clueless idiot.) The the only reason people run Netscape servers on any UNIX is because the decision makers/PHBs don't know any better.
You're right. Jackson is a bit typecast. What movies do you remember him from? Pulp Fiction? Probably. The Long Kiss Goodnight? It was a pretty memorable performanace. Jackie Brown? Some people might. Jurassic Park? Doubtful. Amos & Andrew? Uhhhh... You remember Jackson for the gangster roles.
Like Josh, I kept getting distracted by Jackson in TPM. Every time he had a line, I kept expecting him to say something like "Yeah, Chewbacca's got a hair problem; he's got a big motherf***ing hair problem. But what's the brother gonna do? He's a wookie." Maybe not that line exactly, but there's a cadence to Jackson's speech that makes his performances memorable. Admit it: Samuel L. Jackson is very good at swearing.
Ruling out DiCaprio (however nice a thought it might be) purely on the basis of typecast actors not being cast for a Star Wars movie is purely wishful thinking.
Doesn't look like they have any members yet. It would have been cool to see a list of entities they've signed up. I mean, I could start an organization with a high-brow mission statement, but that wouldn't mean that anyone should necessarily pay attention to it.
I wonder if they'll sign anyone. (I also wonder where the money goes, but don't have a pdf reader available...)
Well if you can't beat us, join us. Surely you can spare some partition space for linux and Q3test
I've got 6 gigs on two separate drives free on my dual boot machine. I've got over 5 gigs free on my dedicated Linux box. Yet I still can't play. Q3 won't run on the dedicated box (I use it as a gateway/ftp server; it's only a PPro 150), and I just bought a Voodoo3 card for the dual boot (an AMD K6-2/300).
So what should I do? Put the old Voodoo2 I took out and try to play on a PPro 150, or put the Voodoo2 and my old crappy 2d VGA card back into the fast machine so I can play Q3? It isn't a matter of disk space. There are lots of other ways Linux users can't play the newest Q3test. I have three times as much disk space formatted as ext2 partitions than I do FAT32 partitions, and I'm completely bummin'.
And while I got the rant all fired up: I don't mind saying that I feel a bit ripped off after buying the Voodoo3. Sure, it looks great in Windows (it's an amazing 2D card, way better than my three year old S3), but I'm still having trouble just getting 2D to work in Linux (much less 3D -- I'm coming to think it'll never be supported). I know you take your chances when you buy new hardware for Linux, but I figured 3Dfx would be different.
And I really hoped id software would stay different and at least attempt support for the Voodoo3. (I mean, how hard can it be? It's a friggin' overclocked Rush for cryin' out loud! The specs had to be out there somewhere...)
Q13: Will the Super-G be used as a workstation, or as a small server, or as a very high performance personal computer?
A13: Yes(!) The Super-G is a very high-performance uniprocessor computer system. KryoTech expects it will be used in many computing environments where a very fast uniprocessor system is needed.
Looks like not even Kryotech can get a hold of a dual K7 (and you know that if they could make a dual GHz machine, they would -- wouldn't you?). At least if they had a demo of a cooled SMP K7, we'd know if such a thing even exists. I personally can't wait to get a K7, and I'll probably get one the day they come out. But if AMD will have dual CPU setups coming out later, I'll have to wait. Does anyone have any info about a the dual K7 rumors? I haven't been able to find out anything.
Also, you might want to get Kryotech into the next century and tell them to ship with Linux pre-installed. I already mailed them about it and you can to. Kathy Hemby is the person you want to talk to. Maybe if we/. them, they'll wake up.
How would you get Linux on it though? It's got an Intel compatable chip and an Alpha motherboard.
I'm running a K6-2 right now with Linux, and have been for about a year now. I don't have a single Intel chip in the whole machine. Runs great.
The K7 won't be much different. You'll probably see a mainboard from FIC when the K7 comes out. FIC typically has mobos released right about when AMD has a new chip. Now if they could only fix their AGP implementation...
I'd love to see a/. poll on how many people actually use Office (and how often they use it). I don't think I've used Word once this year; Excel I've used maybe three times (I've never even installed the other apps). If all copies of MS Office were somehow magically removed from the face of the Earth, it wouldn't bother me a bit. I'd probably like to have the disk space back anyway.
So why does every stinkin' Linux story have to harp on that "But there's no Office apps yet, so Linux is still pretty immature..." theme? Is that the measure of an OS? Whether it has an Office suite or not?! Is this all people care about? (And if it is, what about ApplixWare, Koffice, StarOffice and Wordperfect?)
Maybe Linux doesn't have a place on the desktop after all. Anyone overly worried about Linux's "lack" of an Office suite shouldn't be using Linux anyway. It just disturbs me when what could have been an otherwise cool article (maybe with something about, say, future architectures or plans for linux.com, or reassureances about LHS) gets bogged down on that Office thing (it takes up 1/3 of the article fer cryin' out loud...).
BTW, who all here is planning on buying a K7 system?
You bet I am. The very first day they come out, my order is in with Ingram. Unless I can get a dual or quad mainboard later on, in which case I'm holding out until then.
Imagine having an dual or quad K7 Linux machine. Not one Intel chip, not one line of MS code. For cheap. That's a very nice thought.
Skinka said: Pentium II sucks in 4-way configurations, that is. AMD's offering suck even more.
AMD's quad CPU offerings would suck. Because they don't offer it. There aren't any AMD processors that can do SMP because Intel holds the necessary instructions pretty close to the vest.
However, the original poster was all wet and showed a significant lack of understanding. Send it to/dev/null my ass. I have Red Hat 5.2 running on an AMD K6-2/300 and on a Pentium II 300. You want to talk BogoMIPS? 599.65 for the AMD, 348.16 for the PII. Same amount of RAM, same HDD, same pretty much everything (except mainboards and CPUs).
Pricewatch say that the PII/300 costs $148. It also says a K6-2/300 costs $49. So there's a three-to-one ratio there. What would you rather have as a quad machine?
Even if the AMD supported SMP and even if the K6-2 had half the BogoMIPS, I'd still get an AMD quad machine. And I've read that the K6-3/450 will outperform a PIII/500 for some things. No cache. Right. How about a meg of L3 cache? Per CPU. At half the cost of a PentiumIII.
Yeah, right. Gore has proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he is a complete weenie. He's just pimping the open source concept for his own agenda. You think he's doing this for OS's good?
And the only thing he's responsible for, Internet-wise, is that incredibly stupid phrase "Information Superhighway". Anyone who actually takes credit for coining that phrase deserves to be laughed at.
And this would be bad exactly how? I just can't seem to figure out why the increased monetary committment to Red Hat would be a bad thing. More momentum for Red Hat means more momentum for Linux in general.
It occurs to me that when more money gets put into Red Hat (or Caldera, or Debian, etc.) it means that good things will happen. Like more people will be exposed to Linux, and more money will get put into development (like better PnP detection, additional drivers, etc.).
So it's Red hat getting the money, big deal. Someone has to get it, and all the companies spending on Linux are simply buying insurance. I'm sure Dell researched the Linux distros carefully, and came up with Red Hat because they are the market leader. (Honestly... when's the last time you saw Debian for sale at Price Club? Dell is a very mainstream company, and to them, Red Hat must look like it knows what it's doing.)
If the other distros want a piece of the CYA pie the "traditional" computer companies are dishing out, they had better get a little more mainstream. That sounds like a they have to sell out, but they don't. They and their business practices just have to appeal to a company Dell.
-B
PC Week said the same thing in the 3/29 issue
on
WSJ Says Linux Lags
·
· Score: 1
Go look at page 40 of the 3/29/99 issue of PC Week. It says the exact same thing. Kinda strange how MSNBC, WSJ, et al. all say the same thing. It's amazing how easy it is for a falsehood like this to get blindly written up as fact.
Looks like someone at the AP had better start doing some research lest they get accused of being FUD mongers...
All the things he mentions are limitations to gaining marketshare, but he missed one very big one: games.
Think about it for a minute. Do most people really need Pentium 3s with 128MB RAM? Or 8MB video cards? Or huge, fast HDDs? If they want to play games they do. But if all they want is MS Office and Net access, a Pentium 100 works just fine (and a Linux 486/66 box does that job even better).
But if you want to play games (and who doesn't? that's the only reason I keep a Win95 partition around), you have to go with Windows. Except for Quake, Q2, there's just no games for Linux. And games are really what drive hardware advances, and are probably responsible for most decisions to buy a new PC. If there were shrink-wrapped Linux games on the shelf at Fry's, the average guy would start noticing Linux. If you could only get Q3 Arena on Linux, you could bet that market share would increase.
I seriously don't think that Linux will ever be a choice for desktop users (and I'm talking about home PCs, now) until there are as many games for Linux as there are for Windows/MacOS.
There's no pattern, he's just right. He finally saw the light, and you can't really fault him for waking up to NT's shortcomings. And you really can't use that as an argument against Linux.
I'm not saying Be is any worse or better as far as uptime, but you have to admit it's hard to beat Linux as far as uptime (and if you think about the ratio of uptime vs. number of applications, Be -- much less NT -- doesn't even come close).
First off, I already have learned. My mother taught *me* about computers, way back in 1983. She bought a VIC-20 because she knew that I liked video games. Sure, I had to roll my own Asteroids and Space Wars knock-offs, but she knew computers were the way of the future. A few years later, she taught me how to make a boot disk on my 8088.
Second, my mom set up her own Novell 3 network (using Arcnet!) in the late 80's. On her own. She set up her own server and clients, and hired a guy to write RDBMS software for her. Then she made it work, and it still works -- absolutely perfectly -- for her to this day. The only reason she has to upgrade is because she's using 386s for terminals, and the non-flashable BIOSes on those MBs aren't Y2K compliant. So it's upgrade time.
She said that since she was going to upgrade, she might as well have a Net connection (so she could work at home and maybe get a web server in house and save some cash). That means she needs a gateway machine. I thought that it would be criminal not to tell her about Linux. So I showed her my Red Hat/KDE laptop, and she loved it. She felt like she could actually use it. Like Unix wasn't just about an arcane command line interface, but that it had some "modern improvements" that could make it more than compete with Win32 systems. She *liked* KDE a lot; it made Linux seem accessible.
That may sound frivilous, but that's *exactly* what it will take to make Linux ubiquitous. She looked at it, and realized that she could use it. It had a Tetris clone, and would run for years without a single reboot. What more could she ask for?
Of course, I'll be able to SSH in to the machine and maintain it, but I suspect that she'll want to as well (and from home even). I haven't foisted anythiing on her, I've merely shown her what Linux could do for her. She thought it was all about a command line interface, and I showed her that it wasn't.
Because of the ease of use of KDE, and because it's so easy for her to install Red Hat, it makes it possible for her to buy the Red Hat 6.0 box at CompUSA and then go put it on her network.
KDE and Red Hat will make it accessible to her, and to the masses as well. That's the Good Thing. KDE helps that transition from Win32 to Linux. I mean, she'll be using Linux because she liked KDE, and she knows that Linux will work well for her. Now she knows that she has a very stable platform which has a friendly interface. This is why I think all the hubbub about KDE and licenses being somehow bad is completely silly.
I didn't mean to write a dissertation, but I wanted to be clear in that Linux was made a choice because of Red Hat and KDE, and integrating the two can only make things better. Nothing is or was being forced upon anyone. She merely knows that she can have a better gateway platform that she can actually use without getting a degree.
Slashdot Mirror
Please help the rest of us and don't use the word "solutions". Of any word that marketing types can latch onto and overuse, "solutions" is the worst. I know I'm not alone in wondering what the world did before we had "solutions" to solve our problems.
If you can eradicate this scourge from our lives, please do. The public thanks you.
-B
Then you don't like Sun or any ethernet NIC manufacturer either. But it sure blows, because an awful lot of the world runs one (or likely both) of those. When you throw Pentium III's into the mix, you're going to be hard pressed to do anything digital in the modern world without at least passively supporting the concept of serialized computer hardware.
And when you go out and actually buy that 3com NIC, you're really feeling the pain. Because you just told 3com that you have no trouble whatsoever with a unique MAC address. Like McNealy said: "You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it."
Don't get me wrong: I agree with you. I think think PSNs suck (no, I'm not talking about packet switching). And I've been a long-time AMD user (I'm even an AMD stockholder). But you can't possibly try to use the argument that you'll buy AMD because you're in some way against serialized hardware. It just won't fly, man.
-B
Oh yeah, you can take a look at pictures of the K7 if you're curious. There's no mistaking what hardware you're running, that's for sure. I might have to actually put the case on...
I got the PC from a guy that had all Macs, and I think he did something funny with it like make it into an ersatz PPC. So I wiped the HDD, and went for the disk action. It was the only way to be sure.
But you have a good eye, I do have an XL. A 6150 XL. I was at work when I wrote that, so I couldn't remember exactly what it was.
I tried to update the BIOS, and got really odd results. Since I don't know what was done to the machine before I got it, I can't say what I did wrong. But I do know that fdisk makes a clean ext2 partition and the four disks get it right where I need to be.
However, the AP400 I "found" in a lab at work did not need the four disks to be reborn as a Linux box, and is a great development server. F10 wasn't needed there, though, because I didn't add any hardware or change any BIOS settings.
But I''ll keep F10 in mind, though. I know of a XL machine that is just begging to be an MP3 server...
-B
You need to download the SoftPaq for your machine. Then run it, and it will make four floppies for you (you probably ought to have four good, formatted floppies ready to go, because if one step fails, you get to do the whole thing over again). When you get the disks done, boot from the first one.
Now here is where my memory fails me slightly. At some point, you'll have to do an inventory-ish thing. The choice should be obvious, but if not, see Compaq's site for a FAQ (they have it somewhere, but I don't ahve the URL bookmarked). The deal will run, and you'll throw another of the disks in. When it's finished, you'll have what amounts to a complete, editable "snapshot" of the system. From this snapshot, you can change whatever setting you want. You just select the hardware and choose the resources you want. You also get to see a list of what's free, so it's pretty easy.
I have an old Compaq Deskpro PPro 150 that I figured would make a good gateway machine. The only problem is that I needed to put in an additional NIC (incidentally, Bay/Netgear makes a 10/100 card called the FA310TX which has the Dec Tulip chipset; it's a great card, low CPU utilization, lot's of status indicators, and only costs about $25.00). The machine already has an onboard AMD ethernet interface, but both cards wanted IRQ 5. So I ran the SoftPaq, told it where to stick its IRQ, and everything is happy behind my gateway/firewall now. If I want to add more hardware, I just run the disks again.
I agree that the floppies are a pain, and aren't as handy as a plain ROM BIOS in some cases (my battery goes dead and I'm covered). But that doesn't mean that the old Compaq sitting in the corner is useless.
Now, booting from a floppy I don't know about. I've never bothered with that before. I'm sure it's doable, but I don't recall the SoftPaq's screen menus/features that well. It's been a while.
-B
-B
If you think that there is something inherently wrong with Red Hat selling (and therefore making money off of) Linux, consider my mother's situation. She owns a smallish clothing and furniture store in Phoenix, and she has a 20 user network, with print servers and the like, that currently runs Novell 3.something. A while ago, she was in Price Club and picked up a copy of Red Hat. Then she called me and asked me all sorts of questions about what Linux (she called it "Linux", not "Red Hat") could do for her and her looming network upgrade (what with Y2K coming up and all, it's time to ditch those old 486s).
To make a long story short, she's decided that Linux would make a great gateway/firewall machine, and is getting Cox's cable modem in her store. Now she'll be able to work from home. We're also toying with using Linux for a print server on one of the old clients. So now we have a new Linux convert, all because someone wanted to make money buy selling it (and justifiably put Linux in a box with a nice manual a person's mother can understand and sold a bunch to Price Club).
How can that be bad? Red Hat makes money, sure, but the entire Linux community gets another Linux user (instead of another NT user, which she was going to use). Do you think that my mom would have immediately thought of Linux for a gateway system and gone out and downloaded Debian? Not a chance. She saw it in the store (which makes it a "real" product in her mind), read the box and liked it. Plus, she knows she can get support from Red Hat (instead of just me or my brother). That support, probably more than anything else, put Linux right up there with Microsoft in her mind.
So I have no beef with Red Hat selling Linux, and I hope they sell a million more copies and get stinkin' rich in the process. It means that there will be more Linux users demanding (and writing) more Linux software. There'll be more hardware support (I, for one, long for the day when all hardware comes with Linux drivers and info -- kind of like Netgear cards do). It'll put the PC back in the hands of people instead of some stupid paper-clippish thing doing all the thinking for them. Someone's kid will play Quake 4 on a Linux machine and then get to toying around with the OS and might embark on a great new future. (Remember the C-64 and VIC-20? How many people do you think got their start because they got the "priviledge" of monkeying around with BASIC and writing new software for themselves? You think Windows 2000 will foster that same sense of power and curiosity?) These are all good things, and all of them are due in part to companies like Red Hat making money from Linux.
The more Linux the better, I say. And if people make money in the process, more power to them.
-B
...because I have a sinking feeling that AOL is going to monkey with it privacy-wise. I just don't like AOL, and I don't trust them. The last thing they think about is the user. Which is why you'll probably start seeing ads in WinAmp, profiles of the user and use stored, etc.
But I could be wrong. They may just leave Justin and Co. alone to do what they do best. But somehow I don't think they will. I feel very sad.
BTW, did they get MacAmp as well?
-B
Ogren hit the nail on the head with the first quote, and I can prove it. Take a look at eudora.com and then qualcomm.com .
And while I agree that hiring UNIX geeks with the right mix of skills can be a daunting task, the last statement really doesn't address the true root of the "problem" (the problem being that people don't get to use Apache): IT managers and bean counters are still scared about the supposed lack of support with OSS. Especially when it has to run their web site (even though their ftp site might be run by OSS, they couldn't care as long as "their Internet" doesn't go down). Using a possible lack of qualified talent as an excuse for Netscape Server's existence is really feeble.
I don't remember where I heard this, but it's been shown that people won't buy things if those things' selling price doesn't match or exceed what the buyer believes it ought to cost. If I was selling Mont Blanc pens for $10, would you buy one? If Mont Blanc itself sold them for $10, do you think they would be as popular as they are? Part of what makes $20 cigars so good is that they cost $20, and you can tell yourself and your friends that you're smoking really pricey cigars and that you're a big shot because of it. It doesn't make the cigars taste any better in the same way that Bic pens write just as well as the more expensive models.
When people buy Netscape servers, they want to feel the same way. Even if they are running it on Solaris (or Linux or whatever), and they already have the talent/hardware to run Apache, they won't. They'd rather pay for Netscape than use Apache for free. Because if Apache doesn't cost money, how can it be worth anything? (And usually after that thought, they trot out that "no support" thing as a final excuse they know they can use and get away with without looking like a clueless idiot.) The the only reason people run Netscape servers on any UNIX is because the decision makers/PHBs don't know any better.
-B
Like Josh, I kept getting distracted by Jackson in TPM. Every time he had a line, I kept expecting him to say something like "Yeah, Chewbacca's got a hair problem; he's got a big motherf***ing hair problem. But what's the brother gonna do? He's a wookie." Maybe not that line exactly, but there's a cadence to Jackson's speech that makes his performances memorable. Admit it: Samuel L. Jackson is very good at swearing.
Ruling out DiCaprio (however nice a thought it might be) purely on the basis of typecast actors not being cast for a Star Wars movie is purely wishful thinking.
-B
I wonder if they'll sign anyone. (I also wonder where the money goes, but don't have a pdf reader available...)
-B
There's this Eudora website that I (occasionally get time to) work on that serves a few pages now and again...
-B
I've got 6 gigs on two separate drives free on my dual boot machine. I've got over 5 gigs free on my dedicated Linux box. Yet I still can't play. Q3 won't run on the dedicated box (I use it as a gateway/ftp server; it's only a PPro 150), and I just bought a Voodoo3 card for the dual boot (an AMD K6-2/300).
So what should I do? Put the old Voodoo2 I took out and try to play on a PPro 150, or put the Voodoo2 and my old crappy 2d VGA card back into the fast machine so I can play Q3? It isn't a matter of disk space. There are lots of other ways Linux users can't play the newest Q3test. I have three times as much disk space formatted as ext2 partitions than I do FAT32 partitions, and I'm completely bummin'.
And while I got the rant all fired up: I don't mind saying that I feel a bit ripped off after buying the Voodoo3. Sure, it looks great in Windows (it's an amazing 2D card, way better than my three year old S3), but I'm still having trouble just getting 2D to work in Linux (much less 3D -- I'm coming to think it'll never be supported). I know you take your chances when you buy new hardware for Linux, but I figured 3Dfx would be different.
And I really hoped id software would stay different and at least attempt support for the Voodoo3. (I mean, how hard can it be? It's a friggin' overclocked Rush for cryin' out loud! The specs had to be out there somewhere...)
-B
Looks like not even Kryotech can get a hold of a dual K7 (and you know that if they could make a dual GHz machine, they would -- wouldn't you?). At least if they had a demo of a cooled SMP K7, we'd know if such a thing even exists. I personally can't wait to get a K7, and I'll probably get one the day they come out. But if AMD will have dual CPU setups coming out later, I'll have to wait. Does anyone have any info about a the dual K7 rumors? I haven't been able to find out anything.
Also, you might want to get Kryotech into the next century and tell them to ship with Linux pre-installed. I already mailed them about it and you can to. Kathy Hemby is the person you want to talk to. Maybe if we /. them, they'll wake up.
-B
I'm running a K6-2 right now with Linux, and have been for about a year now. I don't have a single Intel chip in the whole machine. Runs great.
The K7 won't be much different. You'll probably see a mainboard from FIC when the K7 comes out. FIC typically has mobos released right about when AMD has a new chip. Now if they could only fix their AGP implementation...
-B
I'd love to see a /. poll on how many people actually use Office (and how often they use it). I don't think I've used Word once this year; Excel I've used maybe three times (I've never even installed the other apps). If all copies of MS Office were somehow magically removed from the face of the Earth, it wouldn't bother me a bit. I'd probably like to have the disk space back anyway.
So why does every stinkin' Linux story have to harp on that "But there's no Office apps yet, so Linux is still pretty immature..." theme? Is that the measure of an OS? Whether it has an Office suite or not?! Is this all people care about? (And if it is, what about ApplixWare, Koffice, StarOffice and Wordperfect?)
Maybe Linux doesn't have a place on the desktop after all. Anyone overly worried about Linux's "lack" of an Office suite shouldn't be using Linux anyway. It just disturbs me when what could have been an otherwise cool article (maybe with something about, say, future architectures or plans for linux.com, or reassureances about LHS) gets bogged down on that Office thing (it takes up 1/3 of the article fer cryin' out loud...).
-B
You bet I am. The very first day they come out, my order is in with Ingram. Unless I can get a dual or quad mainboard later on, in which case I'm holding out until then.
Imagine having an dual or quad K7 Linux machine. Not one Intel chip, not one line of MS code. For cheap. That's a very nice thought.
Do the poll, Rob.
-B
Pentium II sucks in 4-way configurations, that is. AMD's offering suck even more.
AMD's quad CPU offerings would suck. Because they don't offer it. There aren't any AMD processors that can do SMP because Intel holds the necessary instructions pretty close to the vest.
However, the original poster was all wet and showed a significant lack of understanding. Send it to /dev/null my ass. I have Red Hat 5.2 running on an AMD K6-2/300 and on a Pentium II 300. You want to talk BogoMIPS? 599.65 for the AMD, 348.16 for the PII. Same amount of RAM, same HDD, same pretty much everything (except mainboards and CPUs).
Pricewatch say that the PII/300 costs $148. It also says a K6-2/300 costs $49. So there's a three-to-one ratio there. What would you rather have as a quad machine?
Even if the AMD supported SMP and even if the K6-2 had half the BogoMIPS, I'd still get an AMD quad machine. And I've read that the K6-3/450 will outperform a PIII/500 for some things. No cache. Right. How about a meg of L3 cache? Per CPU. At half the cost of a PentiumIII.
I can't wait for the K7.
-B
Yeah, right. Gore has proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he is a complete weenie. He's just pimping the open source concept for his own agenda. You think he's doing this for OS's good?
And the only thing he's responsible for, Internet-wise, is that incredibly stupid phrase "Information Superhighway". Anyone who actually takes credit for coining that phrase deserves to be laughed at.
-B
And this would be bad exactly how? I just can't seem to figure out why the increased monetary committment to Red Hat would be a bad thing. More momentum for Red Hat means more momentum for Linux in general.
It occurs to me that when more money gets put into Red Hat (or Caldera, or Debian, etc.) it means that good things will happen. Like more people will be exposed to Linux, and more money will get put into development (like better PnP detection, additional drivers, etc.).
So it's Red hat getting the money, big deal. Someone has to get it, and all the companies spending on Linux are simply buying insurance. I'm sure Dell researched the Linux distros carefully, and came up with Red Hat because they are the market leader. (Honestly... when's the last time you saw Debian for sale at Price Club? Dell is a very mainstream company, and to them, Red Hat must look like it knows what it's doing.)
If the other distros want a piece of the CYA pie the "traditional" computer companies are dishing out, they had better get a little more mainstream. That sounds like a they have to sell out, but they don't. They and their business practices just have to appeal to a company Dell.
-B
Go look at page 40 of the 3/29/99 issue of PC Week. It says the exact same thing. Kinda strange how MSNBC, WSJ, et al. all say the same thing. It's amazing how easy it is for a falsehood like this to get blindly written up as fact.
Looks like someone at the AP had better start doing some research lest they get accused of being FUD mongers...
-B
All the things he mentions are limitations to gaining marketshare, but he missed one very big one: games.
Think about it for a minute. Do most people really need Pentium 3s with 128MB RAM? Or 8MB video cards? Or huge, fast HDDs? If they want to play games they do. But if all they want is MS Office and Net access, a Pentium 100 works just fine (and a Linux 486/66 box does that job even better).
But if you want to play games (and who doesn't? that's the only reason I keep a Win95 partition around), you have to go with Windows. Except for Quake, Q2, there's just no games for Linux. And games are really what drive hardware advances, and are probably responsible for most decisions to buy a new PC. If there were shrink-wrapped Linux games on the shelf at Fry's, the average guy would start noticing Linux. If you could only get Q3 Arena on Linux, you could bet that market share would increase.
I seriously don't think that Linux will ever be a choice for desktop users (and I'm talking about home PCs, now) until there are as many games for Linux as there are for Windows/MacOS.
-B
...because the geek guy has this to say about Linux's stability:
"On my machine I can claim only a week of running without restarting, but that is pretty darn good."
It must be very refreshing for him.
-B
There's no pattern, he's just right. He finally saw the light, and you can't really fault him for waking up to NT's shortcomings. And you really can't use that as an argument against Linux.
I'm not saying Be is any worse or better as far as uptime, but you have to admit it's hard to beat Linux as far as uptime (and if you think about the ratio of uptime vs. number of applications, Be -- much less NT -- doesn't even come close).
-B
We ought to go find the people that let the marketing bastards in on this and choke them. Enough is enough already.
Bloody useless...
-B
Second, my mom set up her own Novell 3 network (using Arcnet!) in the late 80's. On her own. She set up her own server and clients, and hired a guy to write RDBMS software for her. Then she made it work, and it still works -- absolutely perfectly -- for her to this day. The only reason she has to upgrade is because she's using 386s for terminals, and the non-flashable BIOSes on those MBs aren't Y2K compliant. So it's upgrade time.
She said that since she was going to upgrade, she might as well have a Net connection (so she could work at home and maybe get a web server in house and save some cash). That means she needs a gateway machine. I thought that it would be criminal not to tell her about Linux. So I showed her my Red Hat/KDE laptop, and she loved it. She felt like she could actually use it. Like Unix wasn't just about an arcane command line interface, but that it had some "modern improvements" that could make it more than compete with Win32 systems. She *liked* KDE a lot; it made Linux seem accessible.
That may sound frivilous, but that's *exactly* what it will take to make Linux ubiquitous. She looked at it, and realized that she could use it. It had a Tetris clone, and would run for years without a single reboot. What more could she ask for?
Of course, I'll be able to SSH in to the machine and maintain it, but I suspect that she'll want to as well (and from home even). I haven't foisted anythiing on her, I've merely shown her what Linux could do for her. She thought it was all about a command line interface, and I showed her that it wasn't.
Because of the ease of use of KDE, and because it's so easy for her to install Red Hat, it makes it possible for her to buy the Red Hat 6.0 box at CompUSA and then go put it on her network.
KDE and Red Hat will make it accessible to her, and to the masses as well. That's the Good Thing. KDE helps that transition from Win32 to Linux. I mean, she'll be using Linux because she liked KDE, and she knows that Linux will work well for her. Now she knows that she has a very stable platform which has a friendly interface. This is why I think all the hubbub about KDE and licenses being somehow bad is completely silly.
I didn't mean to write a dissertation, but I wanted to be clear in that Linux was made a choice because of Red Hat and KDE, and integrating the two can only make things better. Nothing is or was being forced upon anyone. She merely knows that she can have a better gateway platform that she can actually use without getting a degree.
-B