And just what software would that be? The only "application" I have run into that needs admin rights is the Adobe Gamma tool (comes with Photoshop) and it might need those rights. FYI, I'm in the Power Users group.
Here's a good one, for example. Asus Probe, which does hardware monitoring, just opens a blank window if it's not run as Admin. Nor will it detect and warn with fan stalls. Obviously, it was preferable to run myself as a regular user. When it didn't work, I moved up to Power User, then Admin.
Another one which has given me problems was Nero 5, can't remember the sub-version, I'd check but I dual-booted into Solaris. It wouldn't burn without Admin, though it's designed for 2000.
And finally, as if ATI could ever actually make any software work anyway, MultiMedia Center 7 (my All-in-Blunder TV program) won't display the TV window. I know several TV stations in my area which use these cards for on-air monitors for their news producers and executives, and Windows 2000 as their desktops. It's self-defeating for them all to run as Admin.
While the problems seem to primarily affect those applications which are pretty hardware intensive, there's no intelligent reason why, for example, Asus' hardware monitoring can't pass the data from an administrative service to a user-level display service.
Whether it's defective design on the part of the software developers or Microsoft user-level security which defaults to *too restrictive* (unlikely, given their many previous security blunders), the net effect is the same: to be useful, I have to run my computer as Admin.
With my Linux, BSD or Solaris boxes, however, I rarely have to log in as root.
Here in Brazil the default is Manual Transmitons, and it's getting hard to find new cars without it. Probably cultural, but most people here preffer manual transmission, most people preffer to have control over the machine.
So do I. An automatic transmission is good for towing (fluid coupling prevents clutch burnouts) and drag racing (adjust the transmission's shift points to just below your redline for consistency, and it shifts faster than any human can).
A manual transmission, with a skilled driver, is good for gas mileage, power, circle-track or ralley racing, getting unstuck when you're in three-foot-deep snow, preventing wanna-bes from stealing your car (most drivers in North America no longer know how to drive stickshifts), and keeping you awake when you're tired...
My favorite manual transmission is the Chrysler A-833 4-speed synchromesh box from the 1960s. One of those with an overdrive ratio fourth gear is great for cruising along at 65MPH with your big V8 idling. And my favorite automatic transmission is the equally bullet-proof Chrysler TorqueFlite 727 three-speed automatic, though it lacks overdrive.
Ahh... if only Chrysler still made transmissions like those. They were built to survive behind the legendary Chrysler 426 Hemi V8 at the height of the musclecar era.
You can't get a new Chrysler Neon with a manual transmission, and Chrysler's recent automatic transmissions have been relatively unreliable. Not to mention that the Neon lacks an overdrive gear.
Maybe then the MS fanatics will laugh and say: didn't we always tell you Open Source is insecure (too?)
I once had an MCSE ask me, in all seriousness, why he couldn't type a fully-qualified hostname to choose a DNS server. It's a paper qualification; it implies no real skill or insight into the system's operation, or any sort of reasoning into consequences of limited design. Pass the test, get the certificate. Therefore, I consider MS fanatics to be, for the most part, a self-limiting reaction. They go away on their own. They kinda drop off the 'Net (maybe because of all the "Server Not Found" errors...). But with all the community colleges and business schools, they breed like bunnies.
As for worms, yeah, of course, any operating system has vulnerabilities. And if they're common and documented well enough, a worm or virus would be trivial for the right person to develop.
I think the more relevent question is with regards to the operating system's track record. With the exception of the recent blight of Red Hat 7.0, Linux has probably had far less documented bugs, and because of the UNIX user permissions model, the damages are minimum.
Compare this to Windows. Bugs all over the place, some more serious than those in Linux, some less serious. Where most machines are running 9x/Me with *no* user/process security whatsoever, malicious code can run rampant. NT/2000 is an improvement, but it's not designed into every aspect of the operating system's historical architecture. Windows has been one patch to DOS 1.0 after another, and the final result is such a kludge and so many processes are running with full administrative priviledges that the task of exploiting a bug remains trivial. Running Windows 2000 on my desktop is farcical - half my software won't work properly if I don't give my user account admin priviledges. It amazes me how many allegedly Windows 2000 compatible programs decide that they're going to attempt to store temporary information in the system registry instead of the roving user registries.
The single system registry is dangerous, too. Imagine, in your *NIX/etc/ directory, the file everything.conf, with the permissions -rw-rw-r--. What if you decide that you don't want Joe User to see your firewall configuration? Make everything.conf readable only to sys admins? Then, all of a sudden, all of the daemons have to have admin priviledges just to see their configuration. Urk. Kludge. Messy, dangerous kludge.
It makes me wonder what Microsoft was planning back when they designed the registry scheme. Sure, a centralized configuration database is a great idea, but not one if you're planning on building an operating system for the security risks of running it on the broader Internet. Yet, forgive me if I'm wrong here, but Windows NT 3.51 was the first M$ operating system to get away from/etc/-style distinct text configuration files (WIN.INI, SYS.INI, etc.), and they did that in 1994 with a badly flawed vision of the registry.
Contrast this to Linux or any other UNIX variant, the whole model and concept of which was designed with user and process security and isolation from the ground up.
As a bonus, the added complexity of administering multiple accounts to the average user is a pain in the butt. They want point-and-drool, everything clean and simple and familiar.
The beauty of the complexity of Linux/UNIX versus Windows is that it weeds out the chaff who aren't capable of managing a box.
I'm sure the programmers and architects at M$ see the problems and comparisons I'm drawing. To be designing an operating system, you must love computers and a sense of a job well done, so I'm sure it pains them that they have to deal with such kludges day in and day out. I'm sure they'd dump the whole thing and fix it if they could, but the marketing guys won't let them implement it.
A friend of mine recommended going to a 4.10 gear, but I think it would be too low - Im thinking maybe a 4.30 gear would be better. Narrowing or tubbing is not an option, and we've fitted the biggest tires possible. What is your opinion?
First off, it must be a lot of fun when you get a silly little Honda pull up beside you and think it's gonna race you - or is it strip only? (Ignoring slicks, because I've driven on the street with them, that setup is a little wild for Saturday night cruising!)
Okay. Let's do the math. TH-400, as far as I know, is a 1:1 ratio in top gear. If your rev limiter is kicking in at 7,000 RPM, and your torque converter stalls at 4,800 RPM, there's something wrong if your driveshaft isn't spinning at the same speed as the engine.
Okay. Take your engine speed (redline, 7,000 RPM) and divide it by your rear gears (4.56).
I'm coming up with 1,535 RPM. That's the speed at which your rear wheels will be spinning.
Now, once you know the circumference of your tires (you gave me the width, which is good for establishing that you're getting traction), you can calculate your speed. Remember also that your tires will be pulled larger by centrifugal force at high speeds, this will affect your calculations.
Compare this speed with the terminal velocity on your timeslips.
Experiment with the differential numbers and recalculate the speeds (fire up the spreadsheet in StarOffice) until you come up with a number bigger than the terminal velocity on your timeslip. I wouldn't go much higher than whatever rear gear gives you a small rise over your current terminal speed, going too far will eat your 60-foot times - but so will a bad day at the strip, you should be more concerned with wasting power on the rev limiter.
Since they're likely to be the tallest tires you can fit into the factory wheel wells, I'd take a guess that 4.30 gears will put you into range. Consider, though, where your engine's horsepower curve starts to come down - probably before the rev limiter kicks in. Maybe 4.10, but just by gut, I still think that 4.30 would be better.
I blame the pointy haired bosses for sacking their Apache admins, and installing NT+IIS over their UNIX partition, and trying to bring their site up on this new platform.
Right now, PHB is in a panic and their site is still down, because NT+IIS really isn't easier then UN*X+Apache , despite what MS says in Pointed Haired Boss Weekly
Oh yes.
When I resigned my job, my former boss, within a week, grew a hardware budget, bought a new machine, bought and installed Windows 2000 Server, went through a week of downtime and finally got IIS and the company's LAN back up.
According to Netcraft, they have yet to break that elusive 7-day uptime barrier. And, I know for a fact that they got hit by Code Red I, because their webserver appeared in my logfile (see sig below, they've been rotated out now).
All this to replace a Pentium 100 Linux box which had been running for 178 days, handling several hundred website hits a day, providing DNS, DHCP, NAT services, and handling about 500 megabytes of AutoCAD attachments in the outgoing mail spool every day. Without a hitch.
Hell, the guy was so tight, he wouldn't let me at least buy a big hard disk to throw into an old 486 we had kicking around so that we could get the rather sensitive data that Sendmail was handling onto another host. But Windows 2000 and IIS were money well spent. [Nelson: "Ha-ha."]
The ISP goes down, the Linux machine's nameserver can't find the top-level servers, and everyone gets Server Not Found errors from Internet Exploiter. His solution? Windows reflex: Reboot the Linux machine. I had to physically remove the power and reset switches so that he wouldn't fsck up the filesystem.
He tried to log in because he'd decided he had to administer it, too. From the depths of nearly 20 years of DOS/Windows experience but absolutely no other operating systems whatsoever, he came to me shouting that the machine had a virus, because typing "SCANDISK C:" gave him back an error message with the ominous word "bash".
I calmly told him that the machine didn't even have a C: drive, and referred him back to the Linux book I'd bought him when he decided he wanted to have root access, too.
"What?! No C drive? What did you do with it, I saw you putting it in when you built that machine with spare parts!"
Yes. But it's not actually called a C drive in Linux or any other UNIX variant...
"That's preposterous! Just where the hell am I supposed to save my files then? Hmmm?"
Uhh.../home/$USERNAME comes to mind... (almost told him to save his things to/dev/null but figured it would only cause me more work in the long run)
So, he went with IIS after I left, because it seemed more intelligent to him.
Catastrophic failure is usually idiocy's best reward.
Re:New Hardware Found! PCI Display Adapter
on
ATi Radeon 8500
·
· Score: 2
Heh, you wouldn't happen to be responsible for this error on the Arrivals monitor in Philadelphia airport
Nope, and Philadelphia isn't running the same software that I know of.
And then, there's London Gatwick. Notice the script that was supposed to relaunch the program if it failed; in this case a memory leak probably ate all the machine's resouces. I discovered a bug in this FIDS software that ate a 64k page of memory every second. Of course, Windows diligently swapped that out to the hard drive, so it took a few hours before the hard disk was full and the system crashed.
Now, you have to understand that the guy who wrote this software is the company's *only* programmer, and is responsible for the servers and all the clients, and customizing displays, configuration and stuff for each of several very large airports. I think he's a gifted programmer under tremendous pressure from his company. (If you're looking for a C++ programmer in a Windows environment who has over ten years of experience with designing and building custom database and display software, e-mail me and I'll forward it to him. He's in England, but might be persuaded to relocate.)
Disclaimer: These photos were e-mailed to me by friends and I don't mean to violate any copyrights which may be in force. Further, neither one of these photos identifies the software company involved.
Looks almost like they had the cute autologin setup when the box crashed, but it looks like the server did too! One of my more humorous photos;) I couldn't believe they used 95 instead of NT or 2000 for this.
Well, a lot of the problem is as follows. Airports are very conservative. Their equipment is usually old, tried and true, serial interfacing everywhere. And when you're trying to integrate serial data streams from about 14 different machines - which is what they seem to feed flight information display servers - you need a heck of a lot of serial ports - a multi-IO serial card. And you usually need to be able to manually control the DTR/DSR and other serial handshaking lines, because Arinc, Infax, airports and airlines all seem to do different things with them. We've had more success with some serial cards than others. The solution was basically to write specific drivers for each one, and using the 16 bit subsystem (available in Windows 95/98 only) allowed more precise hardware-level control. Toggle an address, and the DTR light comes on. You know the drill.
You're also often interfacing the computer to bizarre display devices, which often take the data in their own ways - LED pixelboards, flip down clapperboards, etc. Generally, the old-fashioned way - poking data into a memory location - has been the simplest way for a small company to control them.
In a closed, trusted LAN, with good hardware and stable software, there's no problem with Windows 95. I've had Windows 95 machines crash out with the 49.7 day memory leak problem, and with that fixed (M$ patch), I've had them die out like UNIX machines: hardware or power failures are the limiting factors. The biggest warning with this, though, is once the machine is starting up and reading data off the network properly, you *don't touch it*. A card house can stand indefinitely if there's no wind.
i had 183 confirmed kills in korea and i'm proud of every one of them
Oh, you're running the script which shuts down Code Red / IIS-infected machines, huh? Sounds like fun. Judging from my log files, the Koreans don't seem to be really keen on patching their servers.
Quoting from article:
Note that the Recording Industry Association of Korea reports local companies lost $154 million in sales in 2000 due to use of the program, even though sales increased to $31.5 million in total sales in 2000 from $29.2 million in 1999.
To paraphrase the ever-illustrious American National Drinkin' Buddy, George Dubya Bush, that sounds like some fuzzy math.
Ever have someone give you a CD that you'd have never bought, and you threw out or gave away because you didn't want it occupying the real estate on your CD rack?
Then, there's music that you keep for the sole purpose of mockery. Emimem. Madonna singing American Pie. Name your boy-band or rap "artist" du jour.
Why can't the RIAA, etc. understand that the MP3 simply liberates music that they'd have *never* sold anyway? Of course, they'll count every file transferred as another dollar/yen/peso/lira/mark/franc/whatever lost, even when it probably falls into either one of the above categories or is a duplicate download to find a specific version of a song.
I've boycotted all forms of purchased music until the recording industries start to recognize that this isn't the end, it's the beginning. And that Napster was only the first.
One of the reviews mentioned tearing textures though in DirectX applications, and this was one of the worst problems with the old ATI Rage Pro series as well as several other ATI cards....if it happens with this new card, I am seriously done with ATI for good, the NVIDIA products are rock-solid these days.
Yeah, I'm not a gamer. To ATI's credit, the quality of the components they use seems to be excellent, and I'd assume that the hardware within ATI's chips is also excellent. Certainly, I've never had one fail, and they've always seemed zippy enough as video cards for my needs.
My argument is entirely with their software. Ugh. See my reply to the other guy, about another project that I've worked on.
I can't deal with ATI anymore. I really want to have a video card barbecue in their parking lot. I'm sure their bug rate per 1000 lines of code is far more than even such notoriously bad software as Windows Me.
New Hardware Found! PCI Display Adapter
on
ATi Radeon 8500
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I'm not buying ATI until I start hearing good word-of-mouth stories about their drivers. I've been burnt a few times by their products and absolutely refuse to try them anymore.
Imagine having several hundred flight information displays around a major international airport. These are just the computers that drive the monitors all over the place.
Bone-head decision number one: All the machines are running Windows 95. They won't run under NT or 2000. And the programmer won't port it to Linux or BSD - I tried to convince him, but he didn't have the time, and he thought the airports would balk at it.
Bone-headed decision number two: My fault. ATI Xpert@Play 98 video cards because they have an NTSC video output which can be fed to each of the old displays in the building. Boss really liked the choice - they're a hometown company, and the scan conversion is in hardware; the drivers don't need to load to enable the NTSC video output.
Problem:
All the machines are identical. All the drives were mirror images of each other - same software and ATI drivers, same hardware, same BIOS settings. Windows 95.
Approximately 25% of the machines, upon rebooting, stop at the "New Hardware Found! PCI Display Adapter" message, even though the Xpert@Play 98 drivers are properly installed.
Imagine the fun one can have with a ladder, a keyboard, and suspended ceiling panels after engineering does any electrical work in the building...
Now, do I make a voodoo doll of the guys who designed M$'s crappy Plug and Pray, or do I make a voodoo doll of ATI's incredibly bad programmers?
Outside of a few audiophile applications, transistors do the exact same job as a tube while using less power, taking up less space and costing less.
Not true. Lots of places made huge investments in tube-based equipment when it was current, and they drive a lot of the market for vacuum tubes now. Take a 2D21. They're a timer tube, easily replaced by a single transistor, a resistor and a capacitor. Yet the 2D21 is still being made, because there's enough of a market for them in old industrial control equipment.
Lots of people may now be collecting and restoring old tube equipment, audiophiles and musicians may well lust after their even order harmonics, smooth cut off and microphonic properties. But the fact of the matter is that tubes are still all over the place. You won't see them in your local Radio Shack, or in your cubicle (except the tube you're staring at right now), but go to a nuclear power plant sometime. Check out the industrial process control at a steel mill. A radio station's transmitter. An X-ray machine. Radar equipment. They're far from gone.
Comparing modern CPUs to the older ones doesn't give quite the same comparison; while newer CPUs provide orders of magnitude more computing power they are larger, more expensive, generate more heat and use more power to run.
Yes. And despite all the disadvantages of the 2D21 and the fact that an enterprising individual could modify the equipment to replace the tube with a transistor and have all the benefits thereof, they don't. They buy a new tube. There's a market for them.
Given the unique nature of each CPU family from days gone by, you'll see someone step up to the plate and start making them as soon as AMD gives it up. Just watch.
No, but many are still in production, and available at your local music store or audiophile shop.
The oldest tube still is mass production is the 6SN7, which is an octal-base dual triode first introduced in 1939. It's often used in old TV sets as a horizontal oscillator, but it was originally designed as an audio tube - a more primitive version of the venerable 12AX7.
In contrast, try to find me a new production 6BK6. Good luck. (Though I have several dozen new old stock 6BK6s, they've been in their original boxes since the 1950s.)
Old parts are easier to buy than many newer ones. Last year's IC is hard to find, but something that has been in production for 10 years often has enough usage to keep it going.
Uhh... Unijunction transistors, like the 2N1671, were in *very* popular production 40 years ago. They were discontinued about 20 years ago. At this point, while they're not easy to find, I know of at least 4 places that will sell me a NOS 2N1671 UJT in mass-production quantities. But they're expensive.
By contrast, even Radio Shack sells 2N2222s, which originated about the same time as the 2N1671.
Specialized parts have short lives, general purpose parts stay around.
I think Intel saturated the IC market well enough with their processors. I'm sure that new 486s will be available for some time to come. Maybe you'll have to rework the board or design an adapter that will let you put a BGA chip into a ZIF socket; who knows. But I'm sure you'll be able to do it one way or another.
Whenever ATI manages to get the beta drivers cut to CD.
Does a faster video card mean that their terrible Windows drivers will bring a faster BSoD?
After buying 180 All-In-Wonder Pros for a client (TV network), upgrading the systems a couple of years later and then not being able to get Windows 2000 support for them that actually works (their "MultiMedia Center" hangs the machine or causes BSoDs, and is in perputal beta), I've sworn off ATI.
Anyone else who is tired of ATI's always broken Windows software want to join me at ATI's lovely Markham, Ontario headquarters? I'll bring the barbecue, and we'll have a video card roast in their parking lot. I know at least one reputable TV network who will cover the protest.
Crotchety Old Man: What's that? I can't buy radio tubes at this drugstore anymore? What'd you do with the tester? This is preposterous, let me speak to the manager!
Sorry, guys. It's the inevitable march of progress.
(Note that, in this case, I turned to the old man, asked him what kind of tube he needed for his old radio, and gave him one from my collection of over 20,000 old radio, TV and industrial tubes.)
You guys in embedded systems have it tough trying to predict the long-term availability of parts for a system that may have cost millions to develop. But you've always predicted pretty well in the past: There's a Z80 in my microwave, which is two years old.
New 486s will always be available somewhere, whether as more clones like AMD, or as new old stock collecting in warehouses.
That's how I started out.
My first attempt at linux was Debian, then in a rather immature state. I tried to put it on my auxiliary box (a 486) from about 6 floppies.:)
I ended up at that point with a bash prompt, after a successful install, reboot, and login... and I had no clue what to do.
Move the computer into the bathroom, download and install an IRC client, and you've got something more interesting than a rack of magazines.:)
But seriously, I'd love to get an old distro, one which will run on a 386SX with 2 megs of RAM and a 30 meg hard disk drive. It's time to put my old Compaq notebook to good use. World's Slowest SETI@Home Client?
The solution? "You heat it up really hot and beat on it really hard," Verhoeven said.
This works for computers too!
So, like, this guy in a Honda Accord misses his exit, and stops dead on the freeway. Now, in most big cities, if you maintain a proper following distance while driving, you get cut off by people who see it as an opening into the lane. So I was closer to Accord than I should have been - a one second following distance.
I sullied my *perfect* driving record by using my 1976 Dodge Ram pickup truck to push his taillights into his back seat. As a result, I got to spend all of Sunday panel beating.
Rule number one in metallurgy: They don't make 'em like they used to.
Rule number two: 1/4" thick plate steel frame rails, with sufficient velocity and inertia, will cut through the rear end of a modern car like a hot knife through warm butter.
Rule number three: When you've dented a piece of steel, you've stretched the metal around it. In order to be able to beat it back into submission, the panel's affected area should be rested on a canvas bag filled with sand. A blowtorch should be used to heat the dented area, and a shrinking hammer (which looks like an iron version of a meat tenderizer) gets used on the hidden side of the panel.
Rule number four: While it looks and sounds easy, you quickly gain an appreciation for the artisanship of an old-school auto body man or a blacksmith and after you've managed to make the fender look like it's got the mumps, you realize it's about time to stop wasting blowtorch propane and knuckleskin and buy the $72.99 new reproduction fender you find online. Because it isn't easy. In fact, it's about as difficult as locking down a Windows 2000 box well enough to make it suitable for a production environment.
My kudos to anyone who is a blacksmith. It's an art.
Wouldn't sex with John Lennon count as necrophilia now? Dead people aren't really "a different race", are they? I guess brain-eating zombies are, though.
Good one!
Actually, I was thinking of John and Yoko.
Someone seems to have been offended by it. I can't understand why anyone would be offended by xenodubroticism; it's merely a description, not a condemnation or endorsement of the interest.
It was probably the fact that the word musicians was in quotation marks, thus demonstrating my denegration of the genre of alleged music. Jeez, you'd think I'd insulted Sailor Moon or something like that.
Where's my bulk tape eraser? [click-HMMMMMMMM] Problem solved.
Speaking of Windows XP, I was wondering the other night: What does "XP" stand for? I could only think of three possibilities:
1) eXtra Pricey
2) eXtinguish Piracy
3) eXterminate Privacy
I submit another, kinda clunky, but it really gets to the heart of the hard-drive-overheated-by-fragmented-swapfile Microsoft eXPerience:
A little off topic, how do you know if the infected computer is version 1 or 2?
Follow the link in my.sig. NNNN = Code Red I. XXXX = Code Red II. Most of them now seem to be CR2 because it's a much more active hunter. When my log files rotate, you're gonna be out of luck until I get hit again.:)
I know you're joking, but define "real". If by "real" you mean "hardcore by means of text-based shell", then sure. If Windows isn't real, what is it? A fake operating system? A virus maybe?
Windows is a real operating system in the same way that a Hyundai is a real car. And Windows 2000 is like a Hyundai Excel with leather seats and air conditioning.
Unsophisticated, unrefined, but solid as nails and powerful like my 1976 Dodge Ram, I like a base install, text-only, of a mature UNIX. It's the raw unbridled power of a 400 cubic inch (6.6L) V8 bolted to a couple of frame rails while some joker in a Hyundai with tinted windows pulls up beside you and revs his oil-burning 1.6L chainsaw engine. Running FreeBSD is great for that, it gives me exactly the same feeling of unrefined raw no-bullspit power.
In comparison, I see most Linux distros as being like a Jeep Grand Cherokee. Solid, reliable, comfortable and versatile. It's a great first step when you're learning how to drive something other than an oil-burning Excel.
For refinement, I like the Mac all the way along. Macs through the years have been like Jaguars. Pretty, refined, sexy but frequently broken or unstable. Until recently - now they apparently work quite well.
And then there's Windows. Maybe with XP, Microsoft will upgrade it to the operating system equivalent of a Hyundai Accent. Of course, it will have air conditioning, leather seats, plush carpets and S-rated tires, but it's still a Hyundai.
That's what I meant.
That aside, I know exactly what you mean. There's always WinVi, which IMO is an excellent Vi clone for Windows (acts like Vi and NotePad).
Doesn't have the 32k Notepad filesize limit either.:)
But you're right, Windows does seem chunky... Makes me wonder how much time M$ spent on optimization...
Intel does that for Microsoft.
I still swear that there's a conspiracy between those two.
Funny, every out-of-the-box installation of Sol/8 I've ever done had/bin/bash sitting right there. It's definitely on the CDs; what sort of oddball install are you doing?
Basic workstation install, Solaris 8 x86. I installed Solaris to get to know it - I had no previous Solaris experience. I clicked okay to all the defaults during the install. It's not there as a default part of the installation, I have sh, csh and ksh available to me. And I think bash is an important part of a user-friendly Linux/UNIX newbie experience.
I wasn't trolling, I've used RedHat Linux (albeit 6.2) and I had a lot of problems with it.
About the worst thing I find is the dependencies to install new RPMs are always lacking, especially with the actual package manager being outdated. (I usually compile from source now, haven't bothered to upgrade RPM.). Otherwise, stable and reliable.
On the other hand, Hedwig (RH 6.0) was my first Linux. That profoundly sucked. It really profoundly sucked. Even coming from a long time UNIX user (with no root access before, mind you) it almost made me give up. Then I tried Cartman (6.1); it was okay. 6.2 is great.
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And just what software would that be? The only "application" I have run into that needs admin rights is the Adobe Gamma tool (comes with Photoshop) and it might need those rights. FYI, I'm in the Power Users group.
Here's a good one, for example. Asus Probe, which does hardware monitoring, just opens a blank window if it's not run as Admin. Nor will it detect and warn with fan stalls. Obviously, it was preferable to run myself as a regular user. When it didn't work, I moved up to Power User, then Admin.
Another one which has given me problems was Nero 5, can't remember the sub-version, I'd check but I dual-booted into Solaris. It wouldn't burn without Admin, though it's designed for 2000.
And finally, as if ATI could ever actually make any software work anyway, MultiMedia Center 7 (my All-in-Blunder TV program) won't display the TV window. I know several TV stations in my area which use these cards for on-air monitors for their news producers and executives, and Windows 2000 as their desktops. It's self-defeating for them all to run as Admin.
While the problems seem to primarily affect those applications which are pretty hardware intensive, there's no intelligent reason why, for example, Asus' hardware monitoring can't pass the data from an administrative service to a user-level display service.
Whether it's defective design on the part of the software developers or Microsoft user-level security which defaults to *too restrictive* (unlikely, given their many previous security blunders), the net effect is the same: to be useful, I have to run my computer as Admin.
With my Linux, BSD or Solaris boxes, however, I rarely have to log in as root.
Here in Brazil the default is Manual Transmitons, and it's getting hard to find new cars without it. Probably cultural, but most people here preffer manual transmission, most people preffer to have control over the machine.
So do I. An automatic transmission is good for towing (fluid coupling prevents clutch burnouts) and drag racing (adjust the transmission's shift points to just below your redline for consistency, and it shifts faster than any human can).
A manual transmission, with a skilled driver, is good for gas mileage, power, circle-track or ralley racing, getting unstuck when you're in three-foot-deep snow, preventing wanna-bes from stealing your car (most drivers in North America no longer know how to drive stickshifts), and keeping you awake when you're tired...
My favorite manual transmission is the Chrysler A-833 4-speed synchromesh box from the 1960s. One of those with an overdrive ratio fourth gear is great for cruising along at 65MPH with your big V8 idling. And my favorite automatic transmission is the equally bullet-proof Chrysler TorqueFlite 727 three-speed automatic, though it lacks overdrive.
Ahh... if only Chrysler still made transmissions like those. They were built to survive behind the legendary Chrysler 426 Hemi V8 at the height of the musclecar era.
You can't get a new Chrysler Neon with a manual transmission, and Chrysler's recent automatic transmissions have been relatively unreliable. Not to mention that the Neon lacks an overdrive gear.
It makes me so sad. So very sad.
that [certain physical constants] may have been different in the far past
Here's proof that constants aren't really constant:
I'm all for having write access to constants if it means that we can change the speed of light, though.
Maybe then the MS fanatics will laugh and say: didn't we always tell you Open Source is insecure (too?)
I once had an MCSE ask me, in all seriousness, why he couldn't type a fully-qualified hostname to choose a DNS server. It's a paper qualification; it implies no real skill or insight into the system's operation, or any sort of reasoning into consequences of limited design. Pass the test, get the certificate. Therefore, I consider MS fanatics to be, for the most part, a self-limiting reaction. They go away on their own. They kinda drop off the 'Net (maybe because of all the "Server Not Found" errors...). But with all the community colleges and business schools, they breed like bunnies.
As for worms, yeah, of course, any operating system has vulnerabilities. And if they're common and documented well enough, a worm or virus would be trivial for the right person to develop.
I think the more relevent question is with regards to the operating system's track record. With the exception of the recent blight of Red Hat 7.0, Linux has probably had far less documented bugs, and because of the UNIX user permissions model, the damages are minimum.
Compare this to Windows. Bugs all over the place, some more serious than those in Linux, some less serious. Where most machines are running 9x/Me with *no* user/process security whatsoever, malicious code can run rampant. NT/2000 is an improvement, but it's not designed into every aspect of the operating system's historical architecture. Windows has been one patch to DOS 1.0 after another, and the final result is such a kludge and so many processes are running with full administrative priviledges that the task of exploiting a bug remains trivial. Running Windows 2000 on my desktop is farcical - half my software won't work properly if I don't give my user account admin priviledges. It amazes me how many allegedly Windows 2000 compatible programs decide that they're going to attempt to store temporary information in the system registry instead of the roving user registries.
The single system registry is dangerous, too. Imagine, in your *NIX /etc/ directory, the file everything.conf, with the permissions -rw-rw-r--. What if you decide that you don't want Joe User to see your firewall configuration? Make everything.conf readable only to sys admins? Then, all of a sudden, all of the daemons have to have admin priviledges just to see their configuration. Urk. Kludge. Messy, dangerous kludge.
It makes me wonder what Microsoft was planning back when they designed the registry scheme. Sure, a centralized configuration database is a great idea, but not one if you're planning on building an operating system for the security risks of running it on the broader Internet. Yet, forgive me if I'm wrong here, but Windows NT 3.51 was the first M$ operating system to get away from /etc/-style distinct text configuration files (WIN.INI, SYS.INI, etc.), and they did that in 1994 with a badly flawed vision of the registry.
Contrast this to Linux or any other UNIX variant, the whole model and concept of which was designed with user and process security and isolation from the ground up.
As a bonus, the added complexity of administering multiple accounts to the average user is a pain in the butt. They want point-and-drool, everything clean and simple and familiar.
The beauty of the complexity of Linux/UNIX versus Windows is that it weeds out the chaff who aren't capable of managing a box.
I'm sure the programmers and architects at M$ see the problems and comparisons I'm drawing. To be designing an operating system, you must love computers and a sense of a job well done, so I'm sure it pains them that they have to deal with such kludges day in and day out. I'm sure they'd dump the whole thing and fix it if they could, but the marketing guys won't let them implement it.
A friend of mine recommended going to a 4.10 gear, but I think it would be too low - Im thinking maybe a 4.30 gear would be better. Narrowing or tubbing is not an option, and we've fitted the biggest tires possible. What is your opinion?
First off, it must be a lot of fun when you get a silly little Honda pull up beside you and think it's gonna race you - or is it strip only? (Ignoring slicks, because I've driven on the street with them, that setup is a little wild for Saturday night cruising!)
Okay. Let's do the math. TH-400, as far as I know, is a 1:1 ratio in top gear. If your rev limiter is kicking in at 7,000 RPM, and your torque converter stalls at 4,800 RPM, there's something wrong if your driveshaft isn't spinning at the same speed as the engine.
Okay. Take your engine speed (redline, 7,000 RPM) and divide it by your rear gears (4.56).
I'm coming up with 1,535 RPM. That's the speed at which your rear wheels will be spinning.
Now, once you know the circumference of your tires (you gave me the width, which is good for establishing that you're getting traction), you can calculate your speed. Remember also that your tires will be pulled larger by centrifugal force at high speeds, this will affect your calculations.
Compare this speed with the terminal velocity on your timeslips.
Experiment with the differential numbers and recalculate the speeds (fire up the spreadsheet in StarOffice) until you come up with a number bigger than the terminal velocity on your timeslip. I wouldn't go much higher than whatever rear gear gives you a small rise over your current terminal speed, going too far will eat your 60-foot times - but so will a bad day at the strip, you should be more concerned with wasting power on the rev limiter.
Since they're likely to be the tallest tires you can fit into the factory wheel wells, I'd take a guess that 4.30 gears will put you into range. Consider, though, where your engine's horsepower curve starts to come down - probably before the rev limiter kicks in. Maybe 4.10, but just by gut, I still think that 4.30 would be better.
That's a really cool car. :)
Right now, PHB is in a panic and their site is still down, because NT+IIS really isn't easier then UN*X+Apache , despite what MS says in Pointed Haired Boss Weekly
Oh yes.
When I resigned my job, my former boss, within a week, grew a hardware budget, bought a new machine, bought and installed Windows 2000 Server, went through a week of downtime and finally got IIS and the company's LAN back up.
According to Netcraft, they have yet to break that elusive 7-day uptime barrier. And, I know for a fact that they got hit by Code Red I, because their webserver appeared in my logfile (see sig below, they've been rotated out now).
All this to replace a Pentium 100 Linux box which had been running for 178 days, handling several hundred website hits a day, providing DNS, DHCP, NAT services, and handling about 500 megabytes of AutoCAD attachments in the outgoing mail spool every day. Without a hitch.
Hell, the guy was so tight, he wouldn't let me at least buy a big hard disk to throw into an old 486 we had kicking around so that we could get the rather sensitive data that Sendmail was handling onto another host. But Windows 2000 and IIS were money well spent. [Nelson: "Ha-ha."]
The ISP goes down, the Linux machine's nameserver can't find the top-level servers, and everyone gets Server Not Found errors from Internet Exploiter. His solution? Windows reflex: Reboot the Linux machine. I had to physically remove the power and reset switches so that he wouldn't fsck up the filesystem.
He tried to log in because he'd decided he had to administer it, too. From the depths of nearly 20 years of DOS/Windows experience but absolutely no other operating systems whatsoever, he came to me shouting that the machine had a virus, because typing "SCANDISK C:" gave him back an error message with the ominous word "bash".
I calmly told him that the machine didn't even have a C: drive, and referred him back to the Linux book I'd bought him when he decided he wanted to have root access, too.
"What?! No C drive? What did you do with it, I saw you putting it in when you built that machine with spare parts!"
Yes. But it's not actually called a C drive in Linux or any other UNIX variant...
"That's preposterous! Just where the hell am I supposed to save my files then? Hmmm?"
Uhh... /home/$USERNAME comes to mind... (almost told him to save his things to /dev/null but figured it would only cause me more work in the long run)
So, he went with IIS after I left, because it seemed more intelligent to him.
Catastrophic failure is usually idiocy's best reward.
Nope, and Philadelphia isn't running the same software that I know of.
But, the same software was running on these:
A Windows 95 blue screen that we got to see fairly often when the fans in the machine failed and it overheated. Looks like Heathrow.
And then, there's London Gatwick. Notice the script that was supposed to relaunch the program if it failed; in this case a memory leak probably ate all the machine's resouces. I discovered a bug in this FIDS software that ate a 64k page of memory every second. Of course, Windows diligently swapped that out to the hard drive, so it took a few hours before the hard disk was full and the system crashed.
Now, you have to understand that the guy who wrote this software is the company's *only* programmer, and is responsible for the servers and all the clients, and customizing displays, configuration and stuff for each of several very large airports. I think he's a gifted programmer under tremendous pressure from his company. (If you're looking for a C++ programmer in a Windows environment who has over ten years of experience with designing and building custom database and display software, e-mail me and I'll forward it to him. He's in England, but might be persuaded to relocate.)
Disclaimer: These photos were e-mailed to me by friends and I don't mean to violate any copyrights which may be in force. Further, neither one of these photos identifies the software company involved.
Looks almost like they had the cute autologin setup when the box crashed, but it looks like the server did too! One of my more humorous photos ;)
I couldn't believe they used 95 instead of NT or 2000 for this.
Well, a lot of the problem is as follows. Airports are very conservative. Their equipment is usually old, tried and true, serial interfacing everywhere. And when you're trying to integrate serial data streams from about 14 different machines - which is what they seem to feed flight information display servers - you need a heck of a lot of serial ports - a multi-IO serial card. And you usually need to be able to manually control the DTR/DSR and other serial handshaking lines, because Arinc, Infax, airports and airlines all seem to do different things with them. We've had more success with some serial cards than others. The solution was basically to write specific drivers for each one, and using the 16 bit subsystem (available in Windows 95/98 only) allowed more precise hardware-level control. Toggle an address, and the DTR light comes on. You know the drill.
You're also often interfacing the computer to bizarre display devices, which often take the data in their own ways - LED pixelboards, flip down clapperboards, etc. Generally, the old-fashioned way - poking data into a memory location - has been the simplest way for a small company to control them.
In a closed, trusted LAN, with good hardware and stable software, there's no problem with Windows 95. I've had Windows 95 machines crash out with the 49.7 day memory leak problem, and with that fixed (M$ patch), I've had them die out like UNIX machines: hardware or power failures are the limiting factors. The biggest warning with this, though, is once the machine is starting up and reading data off the network properly, you *don't touch it*. A card house can stand indefinitely if there's no wind.
we'll know whether it was built robustly, or whether they just jacked up the MHz and left the rest built real shoddily.
If Paul Nixon comes from the TI school of design, it will be built to last.
Remember, TI makes more chips than Frito-Lay.
Quoting from reply:
i had 183 confirmed kills in korea and i'm proud of every one of themOh, you're running the script which shuts down Code Red / IIS-infected machines, huh? Sounds like fun. Judging from my log files, the Koreans don't seem to be really keen on patching their servers.
Quoting from article:
Note that the Recording Industry Association of Korea reports local companies lost $154 million in sales in 2000 due to use of the program, even though sales increased to $31.5 million in total sales in 2000 from $29.2 million in 1999.To paraphrase the ever-illustrious American National Drinkin' Buddy, George Dubya Bush, that sounds like some fuzzy math.
Ever have someone give you a CD that you'd have never bought, and you threw out or gave away because you didn't want it occupying the real estate on your CD rack?
Then, there's music that you keep for the sole purpose of mockery. Emimem. Madonna singing American Pie. Name your boy-band or rap "artist" du jour.
Why can't the RIAA, etc. understand that the MP3 simply liberates music that they'd have *never* sold anyway? Of course, they'll count every file transferred as another dollar/yen/peso/lira/mark/franc/whatever lost, even when it probably falls into either one of the above categories or is a duplicate download to find a specific version of a song.
I've boycotted all forms of purchased music until the recording industries start to recognize that this isn't the end, it's the beginning. And that Napster was only the first.
One of the reviews mentioned tearing textures though in DirectX applications, and this was one of the worst problems with the old ATI Rage Pro series as well as several other ATI cards....if it happens with this new card, I am seriously done with ATI for good, the NVIDIA products are rock-solid these days.
Yeah, I'm not a gamer. To ATI's credit, the quality of the components they use seems to be excellent, and I'd assume that the hardware within ATI's chips is also excellent. Certainly, I've never had one fail, and they've always seemed zippy enough as video cards for my needs.
My argument is entirely with their software. Ugh. See my reply to the other guy, about another project that I've worked on.
I can't deal with ATI anymore. I really want to have a video card barbecue in their parking lot. I'm sure their bug rate per 1000 lines of code is far more than even such notoriously bad software as Windows Me.
I'm not buying ATI until I start hearing good word-of-mouth stories about their drivers. I've been burnt a few times by their products and absolutely refuse to try them anymore.
Imagine having several hundred flight information displays around a major international airport. These are just the computers that drive the monitors all over the place.
Bone-head decision number one: All the machines are running Windows 95. They won't run under NT or 2000. And the programmer won't port it to Linux or BSD - I tried to convince him, but he didn't have the time, and he thought the airports would balk at it.
Bone-headed decision number two: My fault. ATI Xpert@Play 98 video cards because they have an NTSC video output which can be fed to each of the old displays in the building. Boss really liked the choice - they're a hometown company, and the scan conversion is in hardware; the drivers don't need to load to enable the NTSC video output.
Problem:
All the machines are identical. All the drives were mirror images of each other - same software and ATI drivers, same hardware, same BIOS settings. Windows 95.
Approximately 25% of the machines, upon rebooting, stop at the "New Hardware Found! PCI Display Adapter" message, even though the Xpert@Play 98 drivers are properly installed.
Imagine the fun one can have with a ladder, a keyboard, and suspended ceiling panels after engineering does any electrical work in the building...
Now, do I make a voodoo doll of the guys who designed M$'s crappy Plug and Pray, or do I make a voodoo doll of ATI's incredibly bad programmers?
Whichever, the voodoo doll will take a ride through Bobo.
Outside of a few audiophile applications, transistors do the exact same job as a tube while using less power, taking up less space and costing less.
Not true. Lots of places made huge investments in tube-based equipment when it was current, and they drive a lot of the market for vacuum tubes now. Take a 2D21. They're a timer tube, easily replaced by a single transistor, a resistor and a capacitor. Yet the 2D21 is still being made, because there's enough of a market for them in old industrial control equipment.
Lots of people may now be collecting and restoring old tube equipment, audiophiles and musicians may well lust after their even order harmonics, smooth cut off and microphonic properties. But the fact of the matter is that tubes are still all over the place. You won't see them in your local Radio Shack, or in your cubicle (except the tube you're staring at right now), but go to a nuclear power plant sometime. Check out the industrial process control at a steel mill. A radio station's transmitter. An X-ray machine. Radar equipment. They're far from gone.
Comparing modern CPUs to the older ones doesn't give quite the same comparison; while newer CPUs provide orders of magnitude more computing power they are larger, more expensive, generate more heat and use more power to run.Yes. And despite all the disadvantages of the 2D21 and the fact that an enterprising individual could modify the equipment to replace the tube with a transistor and have all the benefits thereof, they don't. They buy a new tube. There's a market for them.
Given the unique nature of each CPU family from days gone by, you'll see someone step up to the plate and start making them as soon as AMD gives it up. Just watch.
No, but many are still in production, and available at your local music store or audiophile shop.
The oldest tube still is mass production is the 6SN7, which is an octal-base dual triode first introduced in 1939. It's often used in old TV sets as a horizontal oscillator, but it was originally designed as an audio tube - a more primitive version of the venerable 12AX7.
In contrast, try to find me a new production 6BK6. Good luck. (Though I have several dozen new old stock 6BK6s, they've been in their original boxes since the 1950s.)
Old parts are easier to buy than many newer ones. Last year's IC is hard to find, but something that has been in production for 10 years often has enough usage to keep it going.Uhh... Unijunction transistors, like the 2N1671, were in *very* popular production 40 years ago. They were discontinued about 20 years ago. At this point, while they're not easy to find, I know of at least 4 places that will sell me a NOS 2N1671 UJT in mass-production quantities. But they're expensive.
By contrast, even Radio Shack sells 2N2222s, which originated about the same time as the 2N1671.
Specialized parts have short lives, general purpose parts stay around.I think Intel saturated the IC market well enough with their processors. I'm sure that new 486s will be available for some time to come. Maybe you'll have to rework the board or design an adapter that will let you put a BGA chip into a ZIF socket; who knows. But I'm sure you'll be able to do it one way or another.
When will it hit the stores?
Whenever ATI manages to get the beta drivers cut to CD.
Does a faster video card mean that their terrible Windows drivers will bring a faster BSoD?
After buying 180 All-In-Wonder Pros for a client (TV network), upgrading the systems a couple of years later and then not being able to get Windows 2000 support for them that actually works (their "MultiMedia Center" hangs the machine or causes BSoDs, and is in perputal beta), I've sworn off ATI.
Anyone else who is tired of ATI's always broken Windows software want to join me at ATI's lovely Markham, Ontario headquarters? I'll bring the barbecue, and we'll have a video card roast in their parking lot. I know at least one reputable TV network who will cover the protest.
Crotchety Old Man: What's that? I can't buy radio tubes at this drugstore anymore? What'd you do with the tester? This is preposterous, let me speak to the manager!
Sorry, guys. It's the inevitable march of progress.
(Note that, in this case, I turned to the old man, asked him what kind of tube he needed for his old radio, and gave him one from my collection of over 20,000 old radio, TV and industrial tubes.)
You guys in embedded systems have it tough trying to predict the long-term availability of parts for a system that may have cost millions to develop. But you've always predicted pretty well in the past: There's a Z80 in my microwave, which is two years old.
New 486s will always be available somewhere, whether as more clones like AMD, or as new old stock collecting in warehouses.
That's how I started out.
My first attempt at linux was Debian, then in a rather immature state. I tried to put it on my auxiliary box (a 486) from about 6 floppies.
I ended up at that point with a bash prompt, after a successful install, reboot, and login... and I had no clue what to do.
Move the computer into the bathroom, download and install an IRC client, and you've got something more interesting than a rack of magazines. :)
But seriously, I'd love to get an old distro, one which will run on a 386SX with 2 megs of RAM and a 30 meg hard disk drive. It's time to put my old Compaq notebook to good use. World's Slowest SETI@Home Client?
The solution? "You heat it up really hot and beat on it really hard," Verhoeven said.
This works for computers too!
So, like, this guy in a Honda Accord misses his exit, and stops dead on the freeway. Now, in most big cities, if you maintain a proper following distance while driving, you get cut off by people who see it as an opening into the lane. So I was closer to Accord than I should have been - a one second following distance.
I sullied my *perfect* driving record by using my 1976 Dodge Ram pickup truck to push his taillights into his back seat. As a result, I got to spend all of Sunday panel beating.
Rule number one in metallurgy: They don't make 'em like they used to.
Rule number two: 1/4" thick plate steel frame rails, with sufficient velocity and inertia, will cut through the rear end of a modern car like a hot knife through warm butter.
Rule number three: When you've dented a piece of steel, you've stretched the metal around it. In order to be able to beat it back into submission, the panel's affected area should be rested on a canvas bag filled with sand. A blowtorch should be used to heat the dented area, and a shrinking hammer (which looks like an iron version of a meat tenderizer) gets used on the hidden side of the panel.
Rule number four: While it looks and sounds easy, you quickly gain an appreciation for the artisanship of an old-school auto body man or a blacksmith and after you've managed to make the fender look like it's got the mumps, you realize it's about time to stop wasting blowtorch propane and knuckleskin and buy the $72.99 new reproduction fender you find online. Because it isn't easy. In fact, it's about as difficult as locking down a Windows 2000 box well enough to make it suitable for a production environment.
My kudos to anyone who is a blacksmith. It's an art.
Wouldn't sex with John Lennon count as necrophilia now? Dead people aren't really "a different race", are they? I guess brain-eating zombies are, though.
Good one!
Actually, I was thinking of John and Yoko.
Someone seems to have been offended by it. I can't understand why anyone would be offended by xenodubroticism; it's merely a description, not a condemnation or endorsement of the interest.
It was probably the fact that the word musicians was in quotation marks, thus demonstrating my denegration of the genre of alleged music. Jeez, you'd think I'd insulted Sailor Moon or something like that.
Where's my bulk tape eraser? [click-HMMMMMMMM] Problem solved.
I'll have to add this to my top ten words to use when talking over somebody's head.
Oh, and another good one:
xenodubrotic: (n,adj.) One who enjoys sexual relations with people of different races. Ie. Woody Allen, John Lennon, all rap "musicians".
It's a legitimate word, but it's obscure enough that you probably won't find it anywhere except scientific books on human sexuality.
Speaking of Windows XP, I was wondering the other night: What does "XP" stand for? I could only think of three possibilities:
1) eXtra Pricey
2) eXtinguish Piracy
3) eXterminate Privacy
I submit another, kinda clunky, but it really gets to the heart of the hard-drive-overheated-by-fragmented-swapfile Microsoft eXPerience:
4) eXtinguisher a Prerequisite.
A little off topic, how do you know if the infected computer is version 1 or 2?
Follow the link in my .sig. NNNN = Code Red I. XXXX = Code Red II. Most of them now seem to be CR2 because it's a much more active hunter. When my log files rotate, you're gonna be out of luck until I get hit again. :)
So you're still using Windows 95?
No. I just thought it was amusing. Though Windows 95 is still more stable with my old ATI All-in-Blunder video card than Windows 2000.
I know you're joking, but define "real". If by "real" you mean "hardcore by means of text-based shell", then sure. If Windows isn't real, what is it? A fake operating system? A virus maybe?
Windows is a real operating system in the same way that a Hyundai is a real car. And Windows 2000 is like a Hyundai Excel with leather seats and air conditioning.
Unsophisticated, unrefined, but solid as nails and powerful like my 1976 Dodge Ram, I like a base install, text-only, of a mature UNIX. It's the raw unbridled power of a 400 cubic inch (6.6L) V8 bolted to a couple of frame rails while some joker in a Hyundai with tinted windows pulls up beside you and revs his oil-burning 1.6L chainsaw engine. Running FreeBSD is great for that, it gives me exactly the same feeling of unrefined raw no-bullspit power.
In comparison, I see most Linux distros as being like a Jeep Grand Cherokee. Solid, reliable, comfortable and versatile. It's a great first step when you're learning how to drive something other than an oil-burning Excel.
For refinement, I like the Mac all the way along. Macs through the years have been like Jaguars. Pretty, refined, sexy but frequently broken or unstable. Until recently - now they apparently work quite well.
And then there's Windows. Maybe with XP, Microsoft will upgrade it to the operating system equivalent of a Hyundai Accent. Of course, it will have air conditioning, leather seats, plush carpets and S-rated tires, but it's still a Hyundai.
That's what I meant.
That aside, I know exactly what you mean. There's always WinVi, which IMO is an excellent Vi clone for Windows (acts like Vi and NotePad).Doesn't have the 32k Notepad filesize limit either. :)
But you're right, Windows does seem chunky... Makes me wonder how much time M$ spent on optimization...Intel does that for Microsoft.
I still swear that there's a conspiracy between those two.
Funny, every out-of-the-box installation of Sol/8 I've ever done had
Basic workstation install, Solaris 8 x86. I installed Solaris to get to know it - I had no previous Solaris experience. I clicked okay to all the defaults during the install. It's not there as a default part of the installation, I have sh, csh and ksh available to me. And I think bash is an important part of a user-friendly Linux/UNIX newbie experience.
I wasn't trolling, I've used RedHat Linux (albeit 6.2) and I had a lot of problems with it.
About the worst thing I find is the dependencies to install new RPMs are always lacking, especially with the actual package manager being outdated. (I usually compile from source now, haven't bothered to upgrade RPM.). Otherwise, stable and reliable.
On the other hand, Hedwig (RH 6.0) was my first Linux. That profoundly sucked. It really profoundly sucked. Even coming from a long time UNIX user (with no root access before, mind you) it almost made me give up. Then I tried Cartman (6.1); it was okay. 6.2 is great.