But if you don't like something about Red Hat Linux you don't have to use that feature or function.
Hi Bob. My name is Lawrence Wade, and I have root on four Red Hat Linux boxes.
I'm still a relative Linux newbie. Though I was on the Internet (Arpanet) in 1988 and am therefore very familiar with UNIX heirarchy and commands, my first Red Hat Linux system was my first attempt at administering a UNIX(-like) box.
So, looking around, everyone told me how wonderful Linux is, and how light and easy on resources it is.
At the time, Red Hat 6.0 was current, and I installed it on a 486DX2-66 that I had kicking around. (Linux doesn't need much hardware, right? One would expect that the geniuses at Red Hat wouldn't expect that knowledgeable computer users are going to give a new OS a spin on their main computer, right? One would *think* then that a 486 would be a reasonable place to try out Linux.)
My first problem came when the installer detected that I had a monochrome VGA monitor, and set my text to the same color as my background. I plugged in a color monitor, and still couldn't read it. A reboot with a color monitor on, then a swap back to the monochrome monitor after booting, and the installer was still legible.
Next thing was, RedHat 6.0's installer asked me if I had PCMCIA card slots. This was a VESA-bus 486. I indicated NO.
The installation continued, and then finished. I restarted the machine:
"LI"
Stuck in the rescue disk, booted off that. Eventually found out about the LILO >1024 cylinder BIOS issue. Oops. Not Red Hat's fault, sure, but new users don't understand enough to distinguish that.
After I finally got the machine to start up, the machine hung at "Bringing up PCMCIA services". Still being a complete neophyte at the time, I had no idea how to go and kill that from the machine's startup. You'll note again that when the installer asked me if I wanted to install support for PCMCIA services, the response was probably sent to/dev/null; the installer apparently did what it wanted to, independent of my input. It took instructions about as well as my cat. With a cat, that's cute. With a computer, it's not.
Frustrated to all hell by this point, having wasted a weekend farting around, I took my RH6 disk and threw it across my home office. It landed behind a desk. Windows 95B went back onto that old, occasionally-used 486.
A few months later, I decided to get DSL internet service, and there was no way that I was going to use Windows for my gateway/firewall. So, I hit the Linux websites and got a list of supported network cards.
I rooted around under the desk, and found my RH6 disk under a dustbunny and an empty coffee cup. This time I knew that the LILO bug really only affected 486-vintage machines. I had a Pentium 133 ready to go. With 2 identical and supported ISA ethernet cards installed.
I'm not an idiot. First off, these network cards were set properly so that they didn't have any conflicts. Even Windows 95 was happy with them. Yet, every time RH6 tried to use the second card (eth1), a kernel panic happened. This continued until, in frustration, I replaced eth1 with a PCI NE-2000 card. Immediately, things worked.
After RH6.2 came out, I put it onto that machine, and then swapped back to my original matched-pair of ethernet cards. The machine worked like a million bucks, and has ever since.
So, Bob, what is this, a rant without a purpose? No.
I run Red Hat because, from the perspective of a newbie, Red Hat makes the most sense. Information is readily available. And 6.2 has been very good to me.
And while I realize that you have shareholders who will lose interest if you don't frequently bring out new releases, I'm afraid that most people, upon going through what I went through with RH6, would decide that Linux wasn't worth the trouble.
All the advocacy in the world isn't worth squat if the impressionable Windows user goes out to the local software store and buy a copy of Red Hat 7 to discover that nothing works as it should.
It undermines the Linux movement as an alternative to the scourge of Windows. And while I'm very sensitive to the fact that you have to keep your shareholders happy, discouraging new users by releasing buggy software in colorful boxes only serves to hurt Linux.
We simply are not pursing a business model that bears any resemblance to Microsoft's, so just quit it.
New users don't distinguish between distributions - they don't know the difference between SuSE, Caldera, Debian, Slackware and Red Hat. To them, Linux is Linux. If Red Hat is flaky ("and golly, they're a big name!"), then *all* Linux must be flaky.
So, don't be surprised when someone falls asleep at the switch or buckles to shareholder pressure, releases a shitty version of your operating system, and Linux users all around the world start to compare you to Microsoft.
No one asks for perfection. That's simply impossible. But even Windows 95 Upgrade was more stable, reliable and functional than RH6. If RH7 is anywhere near as bad as I'm led to believe it is from here, let the comparisons begin.
I run RH 6.2. I like RH 6.2. I look forward to when your firm releases 7.2; until then, I won't be upgrading any systems. And I'll keep on burning CD copies of 6.2 for my friends, with the explanation that Red Hat bowed to shareholder pressure and released 7.0 before getting it to work properly. <sigh> Sounds just like any product Microsoft has ever released.
Toasted 486 cpu's (from overclocking just a bit too much!)... it's really cool, 'cause somewhere out there is someone who really wants or needs this stuff!
Yeah. The toasted 486 processors are wonderful. You can leave them upside down on your bedroom floor if you're really paranoid about your roommate coming in and suffocating you with a pillow in the middle of the night.
Of course, if you want to be really vicious, try a 68000. I've stepped on a 64-pin DIP. (It wasn't a Motorola 68000, it was a TMS9900, just for interests' sake.) That hurt more than stepping on the 486. I think the lesser number of pins causes more of them to pierce the skin.
Shortly after stepping on the IC, BTW, I decided that while genius is seldom tidy, it simply wasn't worth a repeat of that pain. Only papers and dirty laundry are piled on my floor now.
DialPad sends a nearly bewildering apology to be-spammed e-mail recipients
Oh, thank God! I was so afraid that they'd leaked my e-mail address through a misconfigured webserver or something... now, if only I could get their damn app to run full-duplex through my Linux firewall...
The system, called Izek, includes a sewing machine, Game Boy, connection wire and special cartridge that contains stitch pattern designs.
What's next? The Vic-20 powered washing machine?
Oops. Too late; I already did that when the washing machine blew its timer. Now, a bank of relays and a machine language program in ROM controls all the washing machine's functions.
For Singer, this is a great idea: integrate technology into their products, and using mostly off-the-shelf items.
Can it embroider game screens into T-shirts, though? Immortalize that high score into cotton? That's the *real* question.
I love cars. Old muscle cars, big-assed V8 engines sucking back huge amounts of gas. I love the mechanism, and I love the elegance of them.
I've always been someone who has put down the electric car. Not for loss of that romance - oil is evil, but until now, there's been no practical replacement for it.
I look forward to the improvements and things that will definately come of this NEC innovation. I think we're finally at a stage where the electric car is going to become practical.
Now, we've gotta start building nuclear power plants so that when people start plugging in their cars to charge them, it won't kill the country's electrical grid.
As long as you didn't drain it, A furby-sized battery could jump start a car (but you'd still need 2-gauge jumper cables to connect it!). If you shorted it out with 12Gauge (extension cord) wire, you could probably burn off the insulation in under 10 seconds. Now think what would happen to your thigh if you stuck one of these batteries in your pocket and shorted it out on your keys -- We're talking instant branding here (not to mention the hole burnt in your pants).
I once saw a friend of mine fix a car without taking off his wedding ring.
It was a Ford, with an external starter solenoid. He shorted the positive terminal on that to ground and lost the finger.
If you heat it fast enough, gold will glow red before it drips away and breaks the circuit.
They never introduced a fix... the sheer idea of running win95 for 43 days was silly, even to MS.
Why was that? I personally like to leave my computer on it's better for the electrical connections within the machine and parts due to thermal expansion/contraction.
Better for the "electrical connections within the machine"... Uhhh, okay.
Actually, it's just an expansion-contraction issue within the ICs, in particular. And the hard disk drive, landing the heads every time you shut down (but this is the same as if you leave the power management on). Cheap power supplies can sometimes make issues with voltage spikes as they turn on; if you buy a good one, the voltages all come up to their regulated levels and then the Power_Good line is pulled high and the motherboard is reset.
So, if you have a good quality system, you probably won't have any problems with the wear of turning your machine on and off in reasonable useage until after the machine is obsolete.
Compare this to the higher power bills, risks of fans dying and overheating that conservatively overclocked processor, as well as more potential uptime for a thunderstorm to kill it, and I feel it's probably wise to shut off the computer when you're not using it. Of course, that's discretion. Do you turn off the computer when you leave the office for lunch? Nah. For the weekend? For sure. Overnight? I do.
I do speak with some authority here; while I'm not an electrical engineer, I have several years of experience design engineering critical radar systems for Litton. I also used to write electronics design and construction columns for Popular Electronics magazine.
As for Windows 9x/ME, it's only under controlled laboratory conditions that you can make a Windows box run long enough to see that bug. I've managed to see the 49.7 day bug once; and with the M$ fix, I've seen a record uptime of 103 days with Windows 95B OSR2. Windows 3.1/DOS, I've managed to keep running for months at a time.
Any management that thinks auditing is an effective way of encouraging good work ethics is insane and grossly inept and should be fireed immediately. Any manager that sees low productivity or low morale and thinks the solution is to start snooping on employee activities should give up and become a basket weaver. I am not kidding.
While this is all true, there are many situations in smaller companies where this doesn't work.
My workplace is a case in point.
We used to be a division of Litton, but were sold off because we weren't part of the "core business".
The guy who bought the company, our old GM under Litton, is paranoid.
The boss knows enough about computers to have mirrored his Windows 95 installation up through every machine he's had since his 486DX-33, but still doesn't know why it's dangerous (or why he can't make a partition bigger than 512 megs).
The boss is paranoid enough that while he wants me to administer the mail server, he also doesn't want me to have access to the mail. Same with the fileserver.
The boss wants to be able to watch *everything* going across the LAN at all times and is willing to sit in front of the server in my office to do it.
That's the mentality you might have to deal with. If you can't, get another job. Things were great while we were a Litton company - the philosophy in our division allowed everything but XXX sites and *excessive* non-profitable useage - but since our old GM became our owner, the paranoia has increased and things have gone downhill. I'm looking, as are most of the rest of our staff.
My main point is: clock speed is the easiest and most effective sell for marketing.
I agree 100%. As much as they may irk and irritate us, the marketing department isn't stupid. They know enough about the technology to sell it, but more importantly, they know enough about the lowest common denominator, the consumer, to know what they're simply not smart enough to grasp.
It's alot more fun than it sounds. Sometimes you get some downright surreal stuff. Sometimes you get a whole conversation, because the machine didn't stop recording when someone picked up the phone. I have one where some old guy is talking to his buddy about how his wife and her friends are eating all the damn food. The next message was from his doctor about his colon operation apointment. Nutty, Man....
I have an old Compaq 386SX notebook. Believe it or not, it runs Windows 3.1 and Thought Communications FaxTalk Messenger and an external voice modem really nicely. Connected to my home LAN through a parallel port LAN adapter, it's been a great answering machine for a couple of years now.
So, of course, you always get the collection of dumbass telephone messages. I save them in a folder on my hard drive and play them every now and then for fun.
I'm seriously considering putting them up on the 'Net as a shrine to stupidity. Do the same, with yours, it'd be a fun site to go to!
For legal reason, tho, I suggest that you get a Tripod free page or something and don't give them any real info about you - that way, if the old owner of the machine happens to find them, they'll have a hard time sending lawyers after you.
In addition you have to realize that RedHat is FAR more than a Windows release - it includes hundreds of packages utilities applications and so on tha would cost you many thousands of dollars to duplicate (if you could) on a Windows box. This additional functionality on will of course increase the complexity of delivering a bug pree integrartion.
Indeed. While I'll admit, I haven't tried out RH7, I'm familiar with RH6.
A little too familiar.
When I first tried out Linux a few months ago, I'd been told that it was stable and easy to get running. It would install as easily as Windows 95, it would never crash, and I figured with my previous UNIX user experience, it'd be no big deal. I've never been scared by a shell prompt.
I was given a copy of RH6 by a friend. Now, you'll note, I'm a little more savvy than the balding accountant grabbing the impulse-buy at Fry's. I knew 6.0 wouldn't be as stable as the then-current 6.1, but I also didn't have a CD burner at the time, nor did I have high-speed Internet access with which to download RH6.1.
I'm glad it was Red Hat. Its apparent popularity makes it easy to find information and support; it seems every Linux usr knows RH. And since this machine was my first root prompt, it was nice to have friendly and helpful people to help me out through the newsgroups and stuff.
But I can't believe the absolute crap I went through making RH6 work! The worst part of it had to be getting two Allied Telesyn AT-1500 ISA cards to work in the same machine. I did everything that the How-tos told me to do; everything worked great when I tossed a HD with Windows onto the system. Nothing worked under RH6. I finally gave up and got two PCI adapters which worked first shot.
Interestingly enough, when I upgraded that machine to RH6.2, I tossed in my old Allied Telesyns. They worked instantly.
How about having PCMCIA slot services crash your VESA bus 486 desktop (even though the installer specifically asked if you wanted PCMCIA services installed, and you said NO)? How about the damned LILO >1,024 cylinder bug? How about an installer that figures out that you've got a monochrome VGA monitor and accordingly changes the color scheme such that the text and the background are the same color?
I recognize that Red Hat has to please investors. But all the Linux advocacy in the world isn't going to help users, less persistent than I am, who pick up Linux, give it a whirl, and discover that it's as flaky as a Microsoft product. (Remember, a new user knows only "Linux", and probably won't much grasp the concept of the different distributions.)
While I remain satisfied with their product (from the perspective of a relatively new Linux user who still needs spoon-feeding occasionally), Red Hat simply *has* to be more careful.
If 7.0 sucks as badly as Hedwig, they could alienate a lot of people and literally undermine the whole Linux community.
I can play MP3s on my 486/66, in the background while I code. Sure, Windows is inefficient, but I don't think that it slows down the hardware so much that you need a gigahertz processor for normal use.
No, You won't need the GHz for playing MP3s. You'll need it as speech recognition gets mainstreamed, or as video compression codecs become ever-more sophisticated. Or the next big thing, that no one right now can imagine.
(I'm sure, however, that the next version of Office will include enough delay loops to make it look like you need that newest processor.)
Or paperclips that annoy us but make Office seem more human to the 55-year-old secretary in my office.
I'm not saying that a 486 is good enough, of course (I'll buy a newer computer when I manage to scrape together a few pennies.) But the fact is that nobody really needs the latest chip; they just want it for bragging rights.
If there's no bleeding edge, there's no perspective to make leading edge seem reasonable.
Me, I'm happy to stay a couple years behind and a few hundred dollars richer.
My old Pentium 166MMX is on its last legs, but it's done me very well: soon I'll hand its old XT-fliptop cased glory down to my roommate and pick up a PIII-600 or so. I'll use the money instead to fuel up something that I really enjoy: my 1976 big-block V8 Dodge Ram. But I'll never question that the bleeding edge has its place.
I basically agree with you - most people have no real need for a 1 Ghz processor, DDR/RDR RAM, or awesome graphics cards.
Sure. That sounds great.
Remember the first Pentium 60 you saw? Or Pentium 100? Remember how lightning fast that was, and how it was the pride of your desktop?
Then, the MP3 came along, and you wanted to listen to tunes in the background as you worked.
The MP3 is on the verge of becoming the next "killer app" (if it isn't already). And yet a P100 with 24 megs of RAM and Windows 95 will barely play them.
Sure, Windows is inefficient, but's it's also about as close to a standard OS as we've got right now. The point remains, the P100 is obsolete: it won't do what I want it to do.
How long until the next big thing comes along and forces you to move up to the 1GHz box that you just shunned?
Your stance is pretty naive, especially given someone with your history in the field:
there was an IBM 1401 in the computer center. It took Fortran punch-cards.
I mean, I'm sure a 4.77MHz XT could do a lot of things that, for a variety of reasons, your FORTRAN-punchcard system couldn't do. I know my old DEC PDP-8 couldn't keep up with one.
But, thankfully, the XT wasn't the be-all and end-all. It was a great machine in its time, but I'm really happy that I'm not limited to them. If we'd been limited to XTs, the World Wide Web, MP3s and emerging technologies like practical video streaming just wouldn't have been possible.
So, which comes first, the intensive apps, or the hardware to run them?
(And no, I'm not as old as I sound; when I was in high school, I scored a junked PDP-8 from the Canadian Federal Government. I still have parts of it.)
Well, looks like Intel's just started another nail in their own coffin. Now, Moore himself is standing there over the fine oak with inlays of pure silicon, holding the nail for me...
Do I reach for the framing hammer sitting on the workbench?
Pondering this situation, I consider their market dominance despite more techologically advanced peers. I wonder about the costs to computer users everywhere of the forced compatibility with an ever-more obsolete core ALU as Motorola's 68000 is pushed to relative obscurity, used only by a fringe of purists that doesn't even include me anymore.
I question the sustainability of a processor design style that adds transistors without calling upon those gates to do more, to be more efficient.
And as I hit Ingram Micro's website and buy 17 new computers for the office, I pick up the framing hammer and give it a good swing. Right on the mark.
The new machines have Athlons under the hood.
It's not a perfect swing, mind you. It's not a Motorola or a Transmeta. But it's what I need.
But it wasn't the same hassle as I've heard about from people using Bell Sympatico HSE - mail server brownouts, dropped connections and stuff.
It's cheaper than @Home - especially if you don't watch TV.
Installation happened when promised, and worked first shot.
And if you spend an extra $5/mo, they'll happily give you a static IP.
Only problem is that they seem to have a lot of downtime when one of their wholesale providers (www.reptiles.org) goes down. (Claimed to be smurf attacks.) Oh, and access to their mailserver is an option or a do-it-yourself thing. (Good thing static IPs are available.)
$34.95 CDN/mo, +$5/mo modem rental, +$5/mo static IP. 1.2 megabits down less PPPoE overhead, 120 kbits up less PPPoE overhead.
I really wish napster would stop this "no clones" non-sense, it would make it easier for everyone.
So do I. But you have to look at it from the business perspective. After all, all Napster's legal counsel, server farm and staff are paid for by investors that one day expect to reap some money out of this thing.
I was on Napster in August of 1999, with a V1.0 beta client. It had a little banner at the top, "Would you like to advertise here?"
This still strikes me as a good model to support their service. But even if Napster becomes a subscription-based service, the same thing applies:
Do you want clone clients available that maybe give the advertising you've sold a lesser prominance than the advertisers are expecting?
Do you want clone clients that might not be able to me managed from a subscription basis?
It's a pain in the ass, but I can fully understand their position on this matter.
What I *don't* understand is why the later clients (V2.0 Beta 6 and 7) weed out Wrapster files. Admittedly, they facilitate piracy of things other than music, but the Wrapster user is just exchanging MP3s, after all...
Can't you just see CD-burner manufacturers chasing after each other just to be able to advertise on Napster? <grin> The RIAA would pop them faster than a frog on a hotplate.
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Quoted from Bob's article:
But if you don't like something about Red Hat Linux you don't have to use that feature or function.Hi Bob. My name is Lawrence Wade, and I have root on four Red Hat Linux boxes.
I'm still a relative Linux newbie. Though I was on the Internet (Arpanet) in 1988 and am therefore very familiar with UNIX heirarchy and commands, my first Red Hat Linux system was my first attempt at administering a UNIX(-like) box.
So, looking around, everyone told me how wonderful Linux is, and how light and easy on resources it is.
At the time, Red Hat 6.0 was current, and I installed it on a 486DX2-66 that I had kicking around. (Linux doesn't need much hardware, right? One would expect that the geniuses at Red Hat wouldn't expect that knowledgeable computer users are going to give a new OS a spin on their main computer, right? One would *think* then that a 486 would be a reasonable place to try out Linux.)
My first problem came when the installer detected that I had a monochrome VGA monitor, and set my text to the same color as my background. I plugged in a color monitor, and still couldn't read it. A reboot with a color monitor on, then a swap back to the monochrome monitor after booting, and the installer was still legible.
Next thing was, RedHat 6.0's installer asked me if I had PCMCIA card slots. This was a VESA-bus 486. I indicated NO.
The installation continued, and then finished. I restarted the machine:
"LI"
Stuck in the rescue disk, booted off that. Eventually found out about the LILO >1024 cylinder BIOS issue. Oops. Not Red Hat's fault, sure, but new users don't understand enough to distinguish that.
After I finally got the machine to start up, the machine hung at "Bringing up PCMCIA services". Still being a complete neophyte at the time, I had no idea how to go and kill that from the machine's startup. You'll note again that when the installer asked me if I wanted to install support for PCMCIA services, the response was probably sent to /dev/null; the installer apparently did what it wanted to, independent of my input. It took instructions about as well as my cat. With a cat, that's cute. With a computer, it's not.
Frustrated to all hell by this point, having wasted a weekend farting around, I took my RH6 disk and threw it across my home office. It landed behind a desk. Windows 95B went back onto that old, occasionally-used 486.
A few months later, I decided to get DSL internet service, and there was no way that I was going to use Windows for my gateway/firewall. So, I hit the Linux websites and got a list of supported network cards.
I rooted around under the desk, and found my RH6 disk under a dustbunny and an empty coffee cup. This time I knew that the LILO bug really only affected 486-vintage machines. I had a Pentium 133 ready to go. With 2 identical and supported ISA ethernet cards installed.
I'm not an idiot. First off, these network cards were set properly so that they didn't have any conflicts. Even Windows 95 was happy with them. Yet, every time RH6 tried to use the second card (eth1), a kernel panic happened. This continued until, in frustration, I replaced eth1 with a PCI NE-2000 card. Immediately, things worked.
After RH6.2 came out, I put it onto that machine, and then swapped back to my original matched-pair of ethernet cards. The machine worked like a million bucks, and has ever since.
So, Bob, what is this, a rant without a purpose? No.
I run Red Hat because, from the perspective of a newbie, Red Hat makes the most sense. Information is readily available. And 6.2 has been very good to me.
And while I realize that you have shareholders who will lose interest if you don't frequently bring out new releases, I'm afraid that most people, upon going through what I went through with RH6, would decide that Linux wasn't worth the trouble.
All the advocacy in the world isn't worth squat if the impressionable Windows user goes out to the local software store and buy a copy of Red Hat 7 to discover that nothing works as it should.
It undermines the Linux movement as an alternative to the scourge of Windows. And while I'm very sensitive to the fact that you have to keep your shareholders happy, discouraging new users by releasing buggy software in colorful boxes only serves to hurt Linux.
We simply are not pursing a business model that bears any resemblance to Microsoft's, so just quit it.New users don't distinguish between distributions - they don't know the difference between SuSE, Caldera, Debian, Slackware and Red Hat. To them, Linux is Linux. If Red Hat is flaky ("and golly, they're a big name!"), then *all* Linux must be flaky.
So, don't be surprised when someone falls asleep at the switch or buckles to shareholder pressure, releases a shitty version of your operating system, and Linux users all around the world start to compare you to Microsoft.
No one asks for perfection. That's simply impossible. But even Windows 95 Upgrade was more stable, reliable and functional than RH6. If RH7 is anywhere near as bad as I'm led to believe it is from here, let the comparisons begin.
I run RH 6.2. I like RH 6.2. I look forward to when your firm releases 7.2; until then, I won't be upgrading any systems. And I'll keep on burning CD copies of 6.2 for my friends, with the explanation that Red Hat bowed to shareholder pressure and released 7.0 before getting it to work properly. <sigh> Sounds just like any product Microsoft has ever released.
Toasted 486 cpu's (from overclocking just a bit too much!)
Yeah. The toasted 486 processors are wonderful. You can leave them upside down on your bedroom floor if you're really paranoid about your roommate coming in and suffocating you with a pillow in the middle of the night.
Of course, if you want to be really vicious, try a 68000. I've stepped on a 64-pin DIP. (It wasn't a Motorola 68000, it was a TMS9900, just for interests' sake.) That hurt more than stepping on the 486. I think the lesser number of pins causes more of them to pierce the skin.
Shortly after stepping on the IC, BTW, I decided that while genius is seldom tidy, it simply wasn't worth a repeat of that pain. Only papers and dirty laundry are piled on my floor now.
Quoted from index page:
DialPad sends a nearly bewildering apology to be-spammed e-mail recipientsOh, thank God! I was so afraid that they'd leaked my e-mail address through a misconfigured webserver or something... now, if only I could get their damn app to run full-duplex through my Linux firewall...
(Yes, it is a full-duplex sound card.)
I'm building a Beowulf cluster using a bunch of 486 motherboards installed in the toilet tanks around the office.
Helps to keep the (overclocked) processors cool, and it saves water!
The system, called Izek, includes a sewing machine, Game Boy, connection wire and special cartridge that contains stitch pattern designs.
What's next? The Vic-20 powered washing machine?
Oops. Too late; I already did that when the washing machine blew its timer. Now, a bank of relays and a machine language program in ROM controls all the washing machine's functions.
For Singer, this is a great idea: integrate technology into their products, and using mostly off-the-shelf items.
Can it embroider game screens into T-shirts, though? Immortalize that high score into cotton? That's the *real* question.
I love cars. Old muscle cars, big-assed V8 engines sucking back huge amounts of gas. I love the mechanism, and I love the elegance of them.
I've always been someone who has put down the electric car. Not for loss of that romance - oil is evil, but until now, there's been no practical replacement for it.
I look forward to the improvements and things that will definately come of this NEC innovation. I think we're finally at a stage where the electric car is going to become practical.
Now, we've gotta start building nuclear power plants so that when people start plugging in their cars to charge them, it won't kill the country's electrical grid.
As long as you didn't drain it, A furby-sized battery could jump start a car (but you'd still need 2-gauge jumper cables to connect it!). If you shorted it out with 12Gauge (extension cord) wire, you could probably burn off the insulation in under 10 seconds. Now think what would happen to your thigh if you stuck one of these batteries in your pocket and shorted it out on your keys -- We're talking instant branding here (not to mention the hole burnt in your pants).
I once saw a friend of mine fix a car without taking off his wedding ring.
It was a Ford, with an external starter solenoid. He shorted the positive terminal on that to ground and lost the finger.
If you heat it fast enough, gold will glow red before it drips away and breaks the circuit.
They never introduced a fix... the sheer idea of running win95 for 43 days was silly, even to MS.
Why was that? I personally like to leave my computer on it's better for the electrical connections within the machine and parts due to thermal expansion/contraction.
Better for the "electrical connections within the machine"... Uhhh, okay.
Actually, it's just an expansion-contraction issue within the ICs, in particular. And the hard disk drive, landing the heads every time you shut down (but this is the same as if you leave the power management on). Cheap power supplies can sometimes make issues with voltage spikes as they turn on; if you buy a good one, the voltages all come up to their regulated levels and then the Power_Good line is pulled high and the motherboard is reset.
So, if you have a good quality system, you probably won't have any problems with the wear of turning your machine on and off in reasonable useage until after the machine is obsolete.
Compare this to the higher power bills, risks of fans dying and overheating that conservatively overclocked processor, as well as more potential uptime for a thunderstorm to kill it, and I feel it's probably wise to shut off the computer when you're not using it. Of course, that's discretion. Do you turn off the computer when you leave the office for lunch? Nah. For the weekend? For sure. Overnight? I do.
I do speak with some authority here; while I'm not an electrical engineer, I have several years of experience design engineering critical radar systems for Litton. I also used to write electronics design and construction columns for Popular Electronics magazine.
As for Windows 9x/ME, it's only under controlled laboratory conditions that you can make a Windows box run long enough to see that bug. I've managed to see the 49.7 day bug once; and with the M$ fix, I've seen a record uptime of 103 days with Windows 95B OSR2. Windows 3.1/DOS, I've managed to keep running for months at a time.
Any management that thinks auditing is an effective way of encouraging good work ethics is insane and grossly inept and should be fireed immediately. Any manager that sees low productivity or low morale and thinks the solution is to start snooping on employee activities should give up and become a basket weaver. I am not kidding.
While this is all true, there are many situations in smaller companies where this doesn't work.
My workplace is a case in point.
We used to be a division of Litton, but were sold off because we weren't part of the "core business".
The guy who bought the company, our old GM under Litton, is paranoid.
The boss knows enough about computers to have mirrored his Windows 95 installation up through every machine he's had since his 486DX-33, but still doesn't know why it's dangerous (or why he can't make a partition bigger than 512 megs).
The boss is paranoid enough that while he wants me to administer the mail server, he also doesn't want me to have access to the mail. Same with the fileserver.
The boss wants to be able to watch *everything* going across the LAN at all times and is willing to sit in front of the server in my office to do it.
That's the mentality you might have to deal with. If you can't, get another job. Things were great while we were a Litton company - the philosophy in our division allowed everything but XXX sites and *excessive* non-profitable useage - but since our old GM became our owner, the paranoia has increased and things have gone downhill. I'm looking, as are most of the rest of our staff.
Ya know, I love computer history. I've always thought it would be fun to have a punchcard reader connected to my notebook computer.
That way, I'll be able to read the cards and save the data to the 8" floppy drive I've already hacked on.
(Old 486SX notebook, don't worry.)
My main point is: clock speed is the easiest and most effective sell for marketing.
I agree 100%. As much as they may irk and irritate us, the marketing department isn't stupid. They know enough about the technology to sell it, but more importantly, they know enough about the lowest common denominator, the consumer, to know what they're simply not smart enough to grasp.
Don't believe me? Click here. I rest my case.
It's alot more fun than it sounds. Sometimes you get some downright surreal stuff. Sometimes you get a whole conversation, because the machine didn't stop recording when someone picked up the phone. I have one where some old guy is talking to his buddy about how his wife and her friends are eating all the damn food. The next message was from his doctor about his colon operation apointment. Nutty, Man....
I have an old Compaq 386SX notebook. Believe it or not, it runs Windows 3.1 and Thought Communications FaxTalk Messenger and an external voice modem really nicely. Connected to my home LAN through a parallel port LAN adapter, it's been a great answering machine for a couple of years now.
So, of course, you always get the collection of dumbass telephone messages. I save them in a folder on my hard drive and play them every now and then for fun.
I'm seriously considering putting them up on the 'Net as a shrine to stupidity. Do the same, with yours, it'd be a fun site to go to!
For legal reason, tho, I suggest that you get a Tripod free page or something and don't give them any real info about you - that way, if the old owner of the machine happens to find them, they'll have a hard time sending lawyers after you.
<grin>
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You still have the chance to purchase that Timex Sinclair ZX81 computer... Now let's see if we can load Linux on them!I wanna buy a couple of hundred and make the world's slowest Beowulf cluster!
I wonder if it's possible to underclock 'em, or if that would completely screw up all of the IO timing.
Anyone wanna port the SETI@home client to a Z80?
Uhhh... How do you mount a cassette recorder onto a Linux filesystem?
Indeed. While I'll admit, I haven't tried out RH7, I'm familiar with RH6.
A little too familiar.
When I first tried out Linux a few months ago, I'd been told that it was stable and easy to get running. It would install as easily as Windows 95, it would never crash, and I figured with my previous UNIX user experience, it'd be no big deal. I've never been scared by a shell prompt.
I was given a copy of RH6 by a friend. Now, you'll note, I'm a little more savvy than the balding accountant grabbing the impulse-buy at Fry's. I knew 6.0 wouldn't be as stable as the then-current 6.1, but I also didn't have a CD burner at the time, nor did I have high-speed Internet access with which to download RH6.1.
I'm glad it was Red Hat. Its apparent popularity makes it easy to find information and support; it seems every Linux usr knows RH. And since this machine was my first root prompt, it was nice to have friendly and helpful people to help me out through the newsgroups and stuff.
But I can't believe the absolute crap I went through making RH6 work! The worst part of it had to be getting two Allied Telesyn AT-1500 ISA cards to work in the same machine. I did everything that the How-tos told me to do; everything worked great when I tossed a HD with Windows onto the system. Nothing worked under RH6. I finally gave up and got two PCI adapters which worked first shot.
Interestingly enough, when I upgraded that machine to RH6.2, I tossed in my old Allied Telesyns. They worked instantly.
How about having PCMCIA slot services crash your VESA bus 486 desktop (even though the installer specifically asked if you wanted PCMCIA services installed, and you said NO)? How about the damned LILO >1,024 cylinder bug? How about an installer that figures out that you've got a monochrome VGA monitor and accordingly changes the color scheme such that the text and the background are the same color?
I recognize that Red Hat has to please investors. But all the Linux advocacy in the world isn't going to help users, less persistent than I am, who pick up Linux, give it a whirl, and discover that it's as flaky as a Microsoft product. (Remember, a new user knows only "Linux", and probably won't much grasp the concept of the different distributions.)
While I remain satisfied with their product (from the perspective of a relatively new Linux user who still needs spoon-feeding occasionally), Red Hat simply *has* to be more careful.
If 7.0 sucks as badly as Hedwig, they could alienate a lot of people and literally undermine the whole Linux community.
And yes, I know that site was a prank. And one that's worthy of checking out; it can't be long until M$ shuts it down...
No, You won't need the GHz for playing MP3s. You'll need it as speech recognition gets mainstreamed, or as video compression codecs become ever-more sophisticated. Or the next big thing, that no one right now can imagine.
(I'm sure, however, that the next version of Office will include enough delay loops to make it look like you need that newest processor.)Or paperclips that annoy us but make Office seem more human to the 55-year-old secretary in my office.
I'm not saying that a 486 is good enough, of course (I'll buy a newer computer when I manage to scrape together a few pennies.) But the fact is that nobody really needs the latest chip; they just want it for bragging rights.If there's no bleeding edge, there's no perspective to make leading edge seem reasonable.
Me, I'm happy to stay a couple years behind and a few hundred dollars richer.My old Pentium 166MMX is on its last legs, but it's done me very well: soon I'll hand its old XT-fliptop cased glory down to my roommate and pick up a PIII-600 or so. I'll use the money instead to fuel up something that I really enjoy: my 1976 big-block V8 Dodge Ram. But I'll never question that the bleeding edge has its place.
It's gonna happen, i'm scared. MSlinux.org
Oh goody. Finally a distribution of Linux that's pre-destined to be more pissed on than Red Hat.
It's good not to run the underdog anymore.
I basically agree with you - most people have no real need for a 1 Ghz processor, DDR/RDR RAM, or awesome graphics cards.
Sure. That sounds great.
Remember the first Pentium 60 you saw? Or Pentium 100? Remember how lightning fast that was, and how it was the pride of your desktop?
Then, the MP3 came along, and you wanted to listen to tunes in the background as you worked.
The MP3 is on the verge of becoming the next "killer app" (if it isn't already). And yet a P100 with 24 megs of RAM and Windows 95 will barely play them.
Sure, Windows is inefficient, but's it's also about as close to a standard OS as we've got right now. The point remains, the P100 is obsolete: it won't do what I want it to do.
How long until the next big thing comes along and forces you to move up to the 1GHz box that you just shunned?
Your stance is pretty naive, especially given someone with your history in the field:
there was an IBM 1401 in the computer center. It took Fortran punch-cards.I mean, I'm sure a 4.77MHz XT could do a lot of things that, for a variety of reasons, your FORTRAN-punchcard system couldn't do. I know my old DEC PDP-8 couldn't keep up with one.
But, thankfully, the XT wasn't the be-all and end-all. It was a great machine in its time, but I'm really happy that I'm not limited to them. If we'd been limited to XTs, the World Wide Web, MP3s and emerging technologies like practical video streaming just wouldn't have been possible.
So, which comes first, the intensive apps, or the hardware to run them?
(And no, I'm not as old as I sound; when I was in high school, I scored a junked PDP-8 from the Canadian Federal Government. I still have parts of it.)
Well, looks like Intel's just started another nail in their own coffin. Now, Moore himself is standing there over the fine oak with inlays of pure silicon, holding the nail for me...
Do I reach for the framing hammer sitting on the workbench?
Pondering this situation, I consider their market dominance despite more techologically advanced peers. I wonder about the costs to computer users everywhere of the forced compatibility with an ever-more obsolete core ALU as Motorola's 68000 is pushed to relative obscurity, used only by a fringe of purists that doesn't even include me anymore.
I question the sustainability of a processor design style that adds transistors without calling upon those gates to do more, to be more efficient.
And as I hit Ingram Micro's website and buy 17 new computers for the office, I pick up the framing hammer and give it a good swing. Right on the mark.
The new machines have Athlons under the hood.
It's not a perfect swing, mind you. It's not a Motorola or a Transmeta. But it's what I need.
Um, dude, Microsoft doesn't run on alpha any more.
Oh yeah, just another way that Microsoft products suck.
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Oh, and it compiles the kernel VERY fastGood. Maybe it'll be fast enough to start up Windows 2000 in a reasonable time frame.
<grin> Think of how much *ass* you could kick running SETI@home on that!
Comment from the founder of the Surrogate Father's Association, in regards to another kind of equal work for equal pay issue:
"There is no way we are going to provide our service for 8 cents."
(Dave Broadfoot, Royal Canadian Air Farce.)
Okay, they're far from perfect.
But it wasn't the same hassle as I've heard about from people using Bell Sympatico HSE - mail server brownouts, dropped connections and stuff.
It's cheaper than @Home - especially if you don't watch TV.
Installation happened when promised, and worked first shot.
And if you spend an extra $5/mo, they'll happily give you a static IP.
Only problem is that they seem to have a lot of downtime when one of their wholesale providers (www.reptiles.org) goes down. (Claimed to be smurf attacks.) Oh, and access to their mailserver is an option or a do-it-yourself thing. (Good thing static IPs are available.)
$34.95 CDN/mo, +$5/mo modem rental, +$5/mo static IP. 1.2 megabits down less PPPoE overhead, 120 kbits up less PPPoE overhead.
www.dsl.ca
They're not perfect, but I'm still very happy with them.
Speaking of DoS, was Yahoo down again all of yesterday (Sunday)?
I could get the home page up, but I couldn't check my Yahoo mail accounts, read the news or do a search.
At the same time, however, I could browse other websites freely from my Winbloze 95 machine and from my two Linux boxes.
I haven't heard anything in the news about Yahoo being down this weekend, tho, so I'm wondering if my ISP just screwed up again.
I really wish napster would stop this "no clones" non-sense, it would make it easier for everyone.
So do I. But you have to look at it from the business perspective. After all, all Napster's legal counsel, server farm and staff are paid for by investors that one day expect to reap some money out of this thing.
I was on Napster in August of 1999, with a V1.0 beta client. It had a little banner at the top, "Would you like to advertise here?"
This still strikes me as a good model to support their service. But even if Napster becomes a subscription-based service, the same thing applies:
Do you want clone clients available that maybe give the advertising you've sold a lesser prominance than the advertisers are expecting?
Do you want clone clients that might not be able to me managed from a subscription basis?
It's a pain in the ass, but I can fully understand their position on this matter.
What I *don't* understand is why the later clients (V2.0 Beta 6 and 7) weed out Wrapster files. Admittedly, they facilitate piracy of things other than music, but the Wrapster user is just exchanging MP3s, after all...
Can't you just see CD-burner manufacturers chasing after each other just to be able to advertise on Napster? <grin> The RIAA would pop them faster than a frog on a hotplate.