Re:Netscape 4.78 and nothing else after that
on
Netscape 7.1 Released
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Any ssl-equipped website? No. I browse several websites with SSL, and I rarely, if ever see a specific browser version as bing "required". If they do need a specific browser, I just move on, and mentally place said company on my bastard list, that is, companies I won't do business with.
Though if your bank is bitching about needing a specific version of netscape, why not call them up, and ask them what's up, or file an evangelism bug on mozilla's bugzilla site? Lack of support for Mozilla-derived browsers is just plain stupid, as more and more people are dumping NS 4.x as the later versions of NS get better and better, or they discover other browsers, such as Mozilla.
More realistically, before the SQL server went down, you wisely arranged a support contract with your server provider; you'd have to be pretty ignorant to think that Linux had no available enterprise-level support. You get the call that the server's gone down, you call the vendor, and resolve the problem. You've got a chain of blame, plus you've saved money in the implementation. No panic, no reaching for the firearm.
Oh, and Mr. Partridge, you can off yourself just fine with a shotgun. Handguns aren't the only thing with triggers, ya know.
Re:Hard at work, or hardly working?
on
Working Hard?
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· Score: 1
Uh, pretty much anywhere. Obviously, you aren't trying very hard if you can't find a place for under $1000/month. Hell, I can find places in LA that are big enough for me for about $500/month. Yeah, they're not in great neighborhoods, but the people are much nicer than those found in the more exclusive enclaves. Give me bohemia over suburbia any day if the week.
Of course, anyone in the US can afford education as well. You've just got to work hard, and exercise the opportunities given to you. Nearly everyone qualifies for very low interest loans and grants; hell, I've got a friend who's paying $5000/year to go to one of the top schools in the US. Yes, she worked her ass off to get there, but she did it all on her own.
Before you try to say that she's lucky, think again. Her mother immigrated to the US from Poland, she lives in a low-income part of town. She's not a child of opportunity, or luck, just someone who works her ass off to get what she wants.
I'd much rather have the US system, where one can have a good university system that doesn't cost much -- some schools are pretty damn good, and don't cost much at all. The health care issue is pretty much bullshit -- insurance only costs about $50-$100 per person over here for good coverage. The higher wages I earn over here more than pay for that. Retirement is an issue where investing yourself is more worth it, especially when you consider the fact that most public retirement systems are a pyramid scheme anyways. I'd much rather have the money to invest in stocks and real estate than have someone else decide how I should invest my money. I'm not an idiot, and socialism is simply an insult to my intelligence.
How about going one step farther and creating a PDA with one of these chipsets in there so that your PDA is your printer? Load your PDA with contracts and the like, and whenever you need some doc work, just print out the forms you need. Yeah, for real important stuff, you'd probably want a full-sized printer, but this seems like it would be perfect for one-off paperwork.
And your implication of a beowulf of printers isn't far off how large print jobs are handled by some companies. Get a shitload of printers together, and have them go to town. It's usually cheaper than one insanely huge printer.
I got a buddy who's using a SparcStation 5 as a bathroom MP3 server. It's cheap (I gave it to her), and it works pretty damn well. It also makes a pretty good x-terminal setup -- I've got other boxes to do my mp3 serving -- though I wouldn't recommend doing both functions simultaneously. The Sparc architecture is nice, but at the same time, SS5s only run at most at 170Mhz, with most clocking in at 85 or 110. If you want a damn nice workstation, that's 64 bits even, I say head up and get an Ultra 2. It'll do anything you throw at it, it only costs about $100-$150, and can even handle dual processors. Just make sure that you get one with memory and a hard disk already installed, as those items are both pretty expensive and/or rare by themselves.
Obviously, they didn't solve the problem well enough if this article is true and the "closing" of the system can be circumvented with a minimal amount of effort. And no, just stating a system is closed doesn't make it closed. Creating a closed system involves diligence in every step of the manufacturing process to ensure that security is of the utmost importance. MS failed in this task, and if they really want a closed system, should learn from Nintendo, who managed to create a platform based on near-commodity parts, such as the PowerPC, and create a system that is much more difficlult to hack.
As far as your assertion that every platform is financed by game sales, that's true. At the same time, your implication that every platform is totall closed isn't; they see the benefit of allowing hobbyists to create noncommercial works using their hardware. For example, Sony seems to have a minor hit with their PS2 Linux kit; I don't hear stories of how much money Sony's hemorraging because they created a hobbyist platform for their hardware. I doubt that creating a linux bootloader ruin the xbox platform like you say it will.
If a not-insignificant amount of Xboxes sell without any of those game purchases following, the price point would be hard to maintain.
Tough shit. It's called capitalism and it cuts both ways. Everyone can attempt to make a profit, but no one's entitled to a profit, even Microsoft. Thus, if they didn't think out their entry into the console market well enough and have to fold, then that's the way the cookie crumbles.
Who said you need to remove the cover? These machines support PXE, so all you do to recover your box to pull a kernel off the network and a minimal root filesystem, and *bam* you're in business, no drives of any sort needed. It's a bit tougher in Windows, but still very possible.
The source is still on the server, only its location is obfuscated a bit. It seems to me that the move to remove the kernel is just an issue of trying to appear that they've been irreparably damaged. I'd offer to diff from the mainstream kernel myself, but I'm on my laptop which has a tiny, tiny amount of storage space.
Your first point ignores the fact that most of the packaging systems now have a pretty decent front-end wrapper that'll let you everything that you just talked about. Hell, there are things possible with the Linux packaging system that are pretty close to impossible in the mac or PC world if software vendors properly used the tools available to them. Both apt and urpmi allow for one to choose the sources of updates; imagine the user using one of the gui-based frontends to either program to automatically pull updates, and browse add-on packages. Compiling from source is rarely needed, unless you like staying on the bleeding edge, and gentoo seems to be working on that end pretty decently.
Of course, even that being said, software package makers need to be more willing to package their products for more than one format, and be able to gracefully handle dependency problems. That's probably the most daunting task, one that doesn't provide an easy answer; many of the easiest solutions, such as including copies of needed libraries, also eat up disk space. Though drives are cheap, they're still not free.
I think the cost of Linux is less of an issue than you make it out to be, especially in the high-end media creation market. The movie industry has already moved a lot of backend software to Linux, and seems to be showing no signs of turning back. Rendering programs that cost thousands of dollars per seat are available, and the users don't balk at paying it. They see Linux as a pretty good platform, and would probably use it even if it were commercial software.
Don't discount Linux's hardware advantages. Linux runs on pretty much everything. Leveraged correctly, this can mean that you'll be able to run the same exact environment on all your computing hardware, from your PDA to your desktop at home, and workstation at the office. Operating environments such as KDE on the Desktop end, and its portable counterpart, OPIE, are pretty similar from a user interface perspective, which offers great usability advantages, even factoring in the UI inconsistencies in KDE. Jobs' ego rush to kill the newton is going to come back to bite him on the ass, as Linux's capabilities as a digital hub are used to their fullest potential.
Seriously, name one server task you can perform with Linux which you can't with OS X
Encrypted swapfiles. Interface natively with SGI and IBM disks. Seamless clustering through technologies such as OpenMosix. Run on more than one fairly narrowly defined platform. Need any more?
To continue the auto analogy, I'd say that Linux is actually closer to Chrysler's K-chassis. Not the absolute end-all, but at the same time, it's extremely flexible to whatever problem you throw at it, and works for a good percentage of the population. Just like Chrysler used the k chassis in everything from small sedans, to minivans, to even limosines, Linux works in everything from PDAs, to desktops, to mainframes. Of course, even using your analogy, Linux may be like the used station wagon in that it lacks grace, but it makes up for it in spades with what it's capable of doing.
Of course, this is with you ignoring the Opteron, which has been available for months and will run Office and shrinkwrap games, and costs less thatn $2000
As far as lies goes, I wouldn't call what apple is claiming with the G5 to be lies, but they are certainly coming close on a few points. From their site about the G5:
32-bit PCs can only use 4GB of memory. Any more than that requires the use of virtual memory on the hard drive, which is 40 times slower than using RAM. The new Power Mac G5 can offer up to 8GB of RAM thanks to the 64-bit G5. So you can store entire 3D worlds, huge scientific data sets and oversized 2D images all in main memory, which lets you manipulate them faster.
This statement, of course, hinges on 32 bit addressing, something PC processors haven't had since the PPro. The PPro introduced the 36-bit memory extension known as Physical Addressing Extensions (PAE), which allows an x86 processor to access up to 64GB of RAM. So stating that a 32 bit processor has to resort to swapping to access more than 4GB of data is only true on very old Pentiums and 32 bit PowerPCs.
I've got the same card, and it uses the Realtek RTL 8139 chipset. I get pretty decent performance with it. It should be autodetected by most distros.
As far as upgrading to 2.5 goes, I can't point you to any hard and fast guide, but I can give a few pointers and gotchas I've run across. First is that you're going to need a new modutils. The old one has died, a memorial service is planned. As far as any truly hard and fast rules go, I can't give many. Lowlatency is very nice on the desktop, acl support is now in the stock kernel, as is greater security options in general. The moving around of options got me too; my first attempt at building a kernel resulted in me building unix socket support as a module, which was bad, but was repairable. Also, encrypted loopback filesystems don't currently work, so if you need them, stick with 2.4. All in all, though, 2.5 kicks the llama's ass with much enthusiasm, and I'm looking forward to 2.6, as it looks to provide awesome performance and some great features that are hard to find in other OS's offerings.
Usually by taking them out of their chassis and converting them to open frame monitors. with this type of setup, it'll be a bit of a challenge getting the requisite framework to hold all the monitors, but it's definnitely possible.
Nice is essentially a way of manually controlling a process's scheduling. Thus, you can set your seti@home or dnetc job to run at a nice level of 20, and have it use fewer cycles than a job running at a nicelevel of 0, which is the default.
if nothing else, it's going to be 64 bit. OF COURSE you're going to have to pay for it.
Considering that other OS platforms, such as Linux and FreeBSD have been 64 bit clean for several years, why should the bump up to 64 bits be different for Apple? As it's been known for some time that the future of desktop/workstation computing is in 64 bit procs, I think programming in portability should be something that Apple should have been doing for years, so that introducing a 64 bit proc just means compiling resource-intensive portions of the operating environment, such as the kernel and the GUI.
unless of course you want to buy some shiny new hardware. (you know you want to)
Yeah, I want some shiny new hardware, but I'd much rather get my 64 bits elsewhere. Yeah, the desktop version isn't available yet, but I'd take a workstation over a desktop any day of the week.
But there's a big difference. The home car building hobby has a lot greater barriers to entry than the home computer building hobby. The first one is time. I can assemble a computer in less than an hour, whereas putting a car together is a process that can take a shadetree mechanic several times longer. Second is the space constraint. A PC's small. I can assemble it in a 3x4 foot space and be comfortable. Finally, a lot more people know a computer savvy friend who'd be willing to sit down and fix the system for beer money or the like, which is something you probably won't find with a car builder.
You're not going to pay any more than $100 for windows. If you byo, you're going to be able to get the OEM version of windows, which only runs ~$100. As far as the office suite goes, I've installed Star/OpenOffice on a systems that didn't need MS Office, as its a much cheaper alternative to MS Works, which is at the $100 price point.
Besides, what's wrong with Linux for a word processing/web browsing box? Linux even has much nicer font rendering than windows now. I'm typing this on my windows-based laptop and am wishing that I hadn't put my Linux box in storage due to the very nice font rendering that has been integrated into Linux in the past few months that some have said is even nicer than Apple's rendering. Freetype and Xft provide a pretty damn good font backend that provides smooth fonts without creating blurriness, something that many mac users have complained about.
Additionally, that e-mac is an all-in one design, which means when I need to get a replacement system a few years down the line as the current system is obsolete, I'm going to have to replace everything. With the PC, I just have to replace those components that do need replacing, and leave the same case, removable media drives and possibly the memory.
But these are made cheap enough that breakage is not a major issue. They seem to be a great replacement for paper goods, like maps road maps and travel guides, things that you're not going to be using for more than a few weeks at most in all likelihood.
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Though if your bank is bitching about needing a specific version of netscape, why not call them up, and ask them what's up, or file an evangelism bug on mozilla's bugzilla site? Lack of support for Mozilla-derived browsers is just plain stupid, as more and more people are dumping NS 4.x as the later versions of NS get better and better, or they discover other browsers, such as Mozilla.
Oh, and Mr. Partridge, you can off yourself just fine with a shotgun. Handguns aren't the only thing with triggers, ya know.
Uh, pretty much anywhere. Obviously, you aren't trying very hard if you can't find a place for under $1000/month. Hell, I can find places in LA that are big enough for me for about $500/month. Yeah, they're not in great neighborhoods, but the people are much nicer than those found in the more exclusive enclaves. Give me bohemia over suburbia any day if the week.
Before you try to say that she's lucky, think again. Her mother immigrated to the US from Poland, she lives in a low-income part of town. She's not a child of opportunity, or luck, just someone who works her ass off to get what she wants.
I'd much rather have the US system, where one can have a good university system that doesn't cost much -- some schools are pretty damn good, and don't cost much at all. The health care issue is pretty much bullshit -- insurance only costs about $50-$100 per person over here for good coverage. The higher wages I earn over here more than pay for that. Retirement is an issue where investing yourself is more worth it, especially when you consider the fact that most public retirement systems are a pyramid scheme anyways. I'd much rather have the money to invest in stocks and real estate than have someone else decide how I should invest my money. I'm not an idiot, and socialism is simply an insult to my intelligence.
And your implication of a beowulf of printers isn't far off how large print jobs are handled by some companies. Get a shitload of printers together, and have them go to town. It's usually cheaper than one insanely huge printer.
I got a buddy who's using a SparcStation 5 as a bathroom MP3 server. It's cheap (I gave it to her), and it works pretty damn well. It also makes a pretty good x-terminal setup -- I've got other boxes to do my mp3 serving -- though I wouldn't recommend doing both functions simultaneously. The Sparc architecture is nice, but at the same time, SS5s only run at most at 170Mhz, with most clocking in at 85 or 110. If you want a damn nice workstation, that's 64 bits even, I say head up and get an Ultra 2. It'll do anything you throw at it, it only costs about $100-$150, and can even handle dual processors. Just make sure that you get one with memory and a hard disk already installed, as those items are both pretty expensive and/or rare by themselves.
Obviously, they didn't solve the problem well enough if this article is true and the "closing" of the system can be circumvented with a minimal amount of effort. And no, just stating a system is closed doesn't make it closed. Creating a closed system involves diligence in every step of the manufacturing process to ensure that security is of the utmost importance. MS failed in this task, and if they really want a closed system, should learn from Nintendo, who managed to create a platform based on near-commodity parts, such as the PowerPC, and create a system that is much more difficlult to hack.
As far as your assertion that every platform is financed by game sales, that's true. At the same time, your implication that every platform is totall closed isn't; they see the benefit of allowing hobbyists to create noncommercial works using their hardware. For example, Sony seems to have a minor hit with their PS2 Linux kit; I don't hear stories of how much money Sony's hemorraging because they created a hobbyist platform for their hardware. I doubt that creating a linux bootloader ruin the xbox platform like you say it will.
Tough shit. It's called capitalism and it cuts both ways. Everyone can attempt to make a profit, but no one's entitled to a profit, even Microsoft. Thus, if they didn't think out their entry into the console market well enough and have to fold, then that's the way the cookie crumbles.
Who said you need to remove the cover? These machines support PXE, so all you do to recover your box to pull a kernel off the network and a minimal root filesystem, and *bam* you're in business, no drives of any sort needed. It's a bit tougher in Windows, but still very possible.
The source is still on the server, only its location is obfuscated a bit. It seems to me that the move to remove the kernel is just an issue of trying to appear that they've been irreparably damaged. I'd offer to diff from the mainstream kernel myself, but I'm on my laptop which has a tiny, tiny amount of storage space.
Of course, even that being said, software package makers need to be more willing to package their products for more than one format, and be able to gracefully handle dependency problems. That's probably the most daunting task, one that doesn't provide an easy answer; many of the easiest solutions, such as including copies of needed libraries, also eat up disk space. Though drives are cheap, they're still not free.
I think the cost of Linux is less of an issue than you make it out to be, especially in the high-end media creation market. The movie industry has already moved a lot of backend software to Linux, and seems to be showing no signs of turning back. Rendering programs that cost thousands of dollars per seat are available, and the users don't balk at paying it. They see Linux as a pretty good platform, and would probably use it even if it were commercial software.
Don't discount Linux's hardware advantages. Linux runs on pretty much everything. Leveraged correctly, this can mean that you'll be able to run the same exact environment on all your computing hardware, from your PDA to your desktop at home, and workstation at the office. Operating environments such as KDE on the Desktop end, and its portable counterpart, OPIE, are pretty similar from a user interface perspective, which offers great usability advantages, even factoring in the UI inconsistencies in KDE. Jobs' ego rush to kill the newton is going to come back to bite him on the ass, as Linux's capabilities as a digital hub are used to their fullest potential.
To continue the auto analogy, I'd say that Linux is actually closer to Chrysler's K-chassis. Not the absolute end-all, but at the same time, it's extremely flexible to whatever problem you throw at it, and works for a good percentage of the population. Just like Chrysler used the k chassis in everything from small sedans, to minivans, to even limosines, Linux works in everything from PDAs, to desktops, to mainframes. Of course, even using your analogy, Linux may be like the used station wagon in that it lacks grace, but it makes up for it in spades with what it's capable of doing.
As far as lies goes, I wouldn't call what apple is claiming with the G5 to be lies, but they are certainly coming close on a few points. From their site about the G5:
This statement, of course, hinges on 32 bit addressing, something PC processors haven't had since the PPro. The PPro introduced the 36-bit memory extension known as Physical Addressing Extensions (PAE), which allows an x86 processor to access up to 64GB of RAM. So stating that a 32 bit processor has to resort to swapping to access more than 4GB of data is only true on very old Pentiums and 32 bit PowerPCs.
As far as upgrading to 2.5 goes, I can't point you to any hard and fast guide, but I can give a few pointers and gotchas I've run across. First is that you're going to need a new modutils. The old one has died, a memorial service is planned. As far as any truly hard and fast rules go, I can't give many. Lowlatency is very nice on the desktop, acl support is now in the stock kernel, as is greater security options in general. The moving around of options got me too; my first attempt at building a kernel resulted in me building unix socket support as a module, which was bad, but was repairable. Also, encrypted loopback filesystems don't currently work, so if you need them, stick with 2.4. All in all, though, 2.5 kicks the llama's ass with much enthusiasm, and I'm looking forward to 2.6, as it looks to provide awesome performance and some great features that are hard to find in other OS's offerings.
Usually by taking them out of their chassis and converting them to open frame monitors. with this type of setup, it'll be a bit of a challenge getting the requisite framework to hold all the monitors, but it's definnitely possible.
Nice is essentially a way of manually controlling a process's scheduling. Thus, you can set your seti@home or dnetc job to run at a nice level of 20, and have it use fewer cycles than a job running at a nicelevel of 0, which is the default.
The nimble is also half the price, and price differences are important for someone looking for a machine to use as a living room media box.
Considering that other OS platforms, such as Linux and FreeBSD have been 64 bit clean for several years, why should the bump up to 64 bits be different for Apple? As it's been known for some time that the future of desktop/workstation computing is in 64 bit procs, I think programming in portability should be something that Apple should have been doing for years, so that introducing a 64 bit proc just means compiling resource-intensive portions of the operating environment, such as the kernel and the GUI.
Yeah, I want some shiny new hardware, but I'd much rather get my 64 bits elsewhere. Yeah, the desktop version isn't available yet, but I'd take a workstation over a desktop any day of the week.I don't think so. WalMart's a very strong company. KMart on the other hand, has been in financial trouble for some time, and has filed for bankruptcy.
But there's a big difference. The home car building hobby has a lot greater barriers to entry than the home computer building hobby. The first one is time. I can assemble a computer in less than an hour, whereas putting a car together is a process that can take a shadetree mechanic several times longer. Second is the space constraint. A PC's small. I can assemble it in a 3x4 foot space and be comfortable. Finally, a lot more people know a computer savvy friend who'd be willing to sit down and fix the system for beer money or the like, which is something you probably won't find with a car builder.
You're not going to pay any more than $100 for windows. If you byo, you're going to be able to get the OEM version of windows, which only runs ~$100. As far as the office suite goes, I've installed Star/OpenOffice on a systems that didn't need MS Office, as its a much cheaper alternative to MS Works, which is at the $100 price point.
Besides, what's wrong with Linux for a word processing/web browsing box? Linux even has much nicer font rendering than windows now. I'm typing this on my windows-based laptop and am wishing that I hadn't put my Linux box in storage due to the very nice font rendering that has been integrated into Linux in the past few months that some have said is even nicer than Apple's rendering. Freetype and Xft provide a pretty damn good font backend that provides smooth fonts without creating blurriness, something that many mac users have complained about.
Additionally, that e-mac is an all-in one design, which means when I need to get a replacement system a few years down the line as the current system is obsolete, I'm going to have to replace everything. With the PC, I just have to replace those components that do need replacing, and leave the same case, removable media drives and possibly the memory.
But these are made cheap enough that breakage is not a major issue. They seem to be a great replacement for paper goods, like maps road maps and travel guides, things that you're not going to be using for more than a few weeks at most in all likelihood.