I'm an RHCE. I was down at SSC (the Linux Journal guys) filling out some paperwork, and I needed to pull an IRS form off the web (I had forgotten my copy). So I'm telling the secretary the website, and we get the form, and Netscape cranks up Adobe Acrobat Reaer, and now we go to print, and... oh, RIGHT, of COURSE it's a Linux box, this is SSC!
I had made the mistake of thinking "secretary == Windows box" and had not twigged to the "K" on her toolbar until the print box said "lpr".
Now, remember, I've been running Linux since 1995, I'm supposed to know what an X desktop looks like. I couldn't tell the difference until it hit me in the face.
Linux not ready for the desktop. Feh. My wife has run Linux on her desktop for three years now. Word Perfect, Netscape, Solitare, Free Cell, Minesweeper, now Hearts is out, Quake, Civ, Gnucash, GIMP, and Samba if you must talk to the EE... she demanded Linux after Windows 95 ate the registry twice in as many weeks. She hasn't missed a thing.
The ONLY thing Linux needs is shelf space at Comp*USA for preinstalled machines. Other than that, we are SO ready for the desktop. Anyone who says otherwise is a liar or a wuss. I count Microsoft marketroids in the former category.
-- Software is like sex.
It's better when it's free.
-- Linus
Re:What other MS-compatable alternatives are there
on
Mozilla 0.9 Out
·
· Score: 4
Fast, light, solid. Not free, but worth the bucks. A fine example of what Windows software ought to be. Cheap, good, AND fast.
Yeah, yeah, call me a heretic for recommending something that ain't free, much less not berating her for not running Linux.... fsck it, I yearn for the old days when you had to know a few things to get on the 'net. But I'm not gonna be a sourpuss about it. If they figure out the Linux guys are helpful, just maybe we'll get a few converts.:)
There may well be a predisposition to CTS, but anyone can get it if they don't take care of themselves. I know. I have CTS. A very mild case, which was diagnosed by the Workers' Comp specialist I was sent to. Yes, it cost the State of Georgia a couple three hundred. But we caught it early. I use an ergo keyboard (bought myself, didn't trust the state), a gel mouse rest (ditto), and Alleve occasionally. MUCH cheaper than surgery or even acupuncture, and I got to keep the ergo goodies when I left.
Point is, it behooves the employers to take care of its people, instead of sorting them like so many sheep, lest the good ones vote with their feet, and the trains not run on time. Your best workers are grown, not picked up off the street like a new ethernet card.
...it takes more energy than you'd think to fertilize, irrigate and harvest crops.
Er, uh, Good Honest Hemp does not NEED fertilizer (it fixes its own nitrogen, like soybeans), nor does it need much in the way of water. Now we only have to harvest. If it's cost-effective at all, you harvest the second years' crops with a small percentage of the oil you've produced the first year.
And before anyone accuses me of being a pothead, 1) the hemp you grow to smoke is "sinsemilla"... that's Spanish for NO SEEDS. No seeds, no oil. No oil, no use growing the stuff; and 2) I'm allergic to cannibis smoke. Makes me hurl my toes up. Ironic, given its usual medicinal value, but there it is.
No need to kneel before the altar every month and make offerings of gold. No need to present your machine to the monks when you want it upgraded. Most of all, no need to trust the Cathedral with your private data.
Indeed, you are allowed to commune with the gods of software themselves, who know little of MarketSpeak, but are honest, direct, and often very funny. Moreover, should one be so inclined, one can become one of them (what heresy!), without shaving one's head nor wearing a badge, without even leaving the comfy confines of one's own lair. But if one doesn't want to, one doesn't have to do that, either. Yea, verily, there is even now being made a
version of the Penguin specifically for those seeking escape from the Cathedral.
Of course, with this freedom comes responsibility.... but even that can be made easy. But no longer do you have to be dependent on the Cathedral to get your computing fix.
It comes to mind that the last time somebody said you could talk to G-d directly without having to part with your gold at the door of the cathedral they fought several bloody wars over it...
Really, for basic desktop use, you need a few things.
A brower. (Netscape, Mozilla, Konqueror, Galeon, Lynx.)
An office suite. (Applixware)
A financials package. (Moneydance)
A graphics package (GIMP)
Gamage (the FreeBSD games ports page is huge)
The fact that things are a little slow to trickle into the tree is no handicap to most folk, unless somebody insists that RTF or straight text isn't good enough, they must be running the One True Microsoft Office Three Million (insert banishing pentagram here), at which point it's just time to shake your head and walk away. But I digress....
A lot of people go off whining about the install. Yeah, yeah. How many people actually install their own WINDOWS? That's what an installfest is for. Get somebody professional or semi-pro to set it up the way you like it, get their business card, and go home happy. No, you can't buy it off the shelf. But then that's kinda the point of the exercize, no?
And as for this server v. desktop bovine scatology.... has Gnome or KDE suffered because they're doing things like Beowulf and Pirhana? Hell no, it's probably gotten MORE support. You need a (n+1)th machine with a fancy-ass console to support that cluster, no? As for NVidia having their heads where the sun don't shine, well, so do a lot of companies. Vote with your feet.
Besides, this won't be the first operating system I've personally as both a desktop and a server. Way back in 1991 I had Word Perfect running on the Motif desktop on my AIX 300-series machines in the professors' offices, while down the hall in the machine room the 500 series minicomps were grinding away at FORTRAN, and the 900-series mainframe class boxen were pulling router duty over in the next building feeding a T-3 line.
They ALL ran AIX 3.x. We just changed what processes ran on each box. So THERE.
--
If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it must be a real damn good decoy.
Could we force them to remove the CD label from the disc because it doesn't meet the standard?
Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the Compact Disc logotrademark belong to Sony and Phillips? They didn't happen to set up an independent standards body, did they? (I know that High Sierra (ISO 9660) is an independent standard, but from what I can tell Digital Audio still belongs to Sony and Phillips).
If I'm right, they can use that mark for whatever the hell they want to. Only if I'm wrong (and frankly I hope I am) would someone have a case... and they would have to have the budget to sue whoever was abusing the trademark.
Fortunately, if they can sue, the case is open and shut, thanks to Sun v. Microsoft (the case over Java licensing).
If I'm wrong about the trademark, please take the time to decipher the email address and send me separate notice; I'm chewing up enough time as it is sending this:)
Personally, I think they will look at the letter of the law, which clearly states the requirement that the offender must be using the name for commercial purposes. Last I saw, the OpenBSD and OpenSSH projects were not commercial. While the courts do have and are not afraid to exercise their liberty to "interpret" written law, they do so only when the language of the law is not clear. Here, trademark law clearly states "commercial."
Furthermore, a trademark (under US law) must be promptly and vigorously defended against all comers. ftp.openbsd.org shows an OpenSSH patch dated October 26, 1999. Slashdot posted the story about Tatu crying foul on February 14, 2001. That's over a year.
Maybe if he had said something when things were first staring, it might have been different. But whining now that OpenSSH has been out over a year, time enough to become (IMHO) the superior product.... well, it smacks of the follies we've seen Rambus commit of late. Letting someone else develop a product that's better than yours and then attempting to co-opt its IP is, frankly, childish. Certainly Tatu's case has a lot less grounding in law and reality than Rambus v. JEDEC... I hope for Theo's sake Tatu's lawyers are smart enough to tell Tatu to stick it. It will be much more expensive for everybody if Theo's have to.... and if I know Theo, he's liable to serve up Tatu au brochette.
-- "[Linux is really cool - not for the technology, but because]
none of those open source guys stick hot needles under my
fingernails during negotiations."
-- Michael Dell, LinuxWorld show, August, 2000
It's called Two Kernel Monte. It's a module that
loads a new kernel into memory, does a little
do-si-do dance to get it where it needs to be in
the mode it needs to be in, then simply jumps to
it. (Yes, you need to do
umount -a;mount -o ro,remount/
before doing this, since it doesn't do any of
that...) No, it's not an in situ change,
since all your processes die, but for systems with
multiple SCSI or RAID cards, it can mean the
difference in a few seconds for reboot and a few
long minutes....
On a side note, make sure and grab my link; the one on Google is wrong (until they fix it), and it took me a while to find the right thing...
--
Never assume TFM is right.
Re:Optimizing the source build
on
KDE 2.1 Is Out
·
· Score: 2
set the folowing options for all qt and kde:
-O3
-mpentiumpro (or -march=pentiumpro for ppro only objs)
OK, we now have what I call the Mandrake Problem. Some of us still use perfectly good 486en. So, are we now shipping two versions? Or are we rendering several tons of perfectly good hardware useless?
One wonders what an -O3 by itself would do. Is this a good compromise? One of the things that makes Linux so popular is the fact that it runs on darn near anything. I think being architecture-exclusionary like this is a Big Mistake. (No, I don't expect something as big as KDE to run on some 286 boatanchor. But once we start down that path, the next thing you know, I'll have to run out and buy an Athlon board, or sully my network with Intel snoopware. No, thankee.)
Yes, it's a flame. But it's a mild flame, complete with a solution, and G-rated. I've seen worse.
--
I'm altering the bargain. Pray I do not alter it further.
If it were possible to kill off old, bad standards then we would have shot FTP in the head and left it to rot in a ditch long ago.
I dunno, most modern FTP clients and servers I'm familiar with seem to do OK.... they support passive mode, resume, recursive directory get, and such like... seems to have aged gracefully to me.
Now, if you want to password protect something, it's a Bad Idea, but for general purpose anonymous file distribution and retrieval, I don't think it's so bad. Keep It Simple, Stupid, I always say.
--
I remember when we had 300 baud, dummy terminals, and UUCP, and LIKED it.
You could do the same with these tags, either at the store, or once you got it home (if the stores won't do it for you). Enough power down the antenna will burn out the circuit, and render it useless.
I was gonna say, wouldn't an old-fashioned degaussing tool (remember reel-to-reel audio tape, folks?) do about as good a job of this as anything? Is verra simple to make. A few hundred turns of wire capable of handling 120/240 VAC, and an ordinary miniature light bulb to tell you when the thing is on (and prevent causing a short). Power cord, pushbutton switch, ta daaaa!
Less than $20 at Radio Slack. (If anybody still frequents that place after they conspired with the Borg, that is.)
Somebody moderate up the parent article some more; s/he's making sense. Rare these days.
Go ahead. Laugh. Was watching Space: Above & Beyond today. The Chigs had shot up 58th's ship so bad it was barely functional. Minimal power left. And you know what they were using? A sextant... and a spiral-bound PAPER manual. Everybody knows that science fiction predicts things far better than the marketroids do... (No, we're not counting Star Trek... I believe the term is "technobabble"?)
Naah, I'm not going to haul my entire collection up there; if the e-books go out, I've more important things to do than read Hitchhiker's. But I'm not shaving a damn thing; haven't for over a decade, and I'm not starting now. Besides, I *intended* for Mission Control to need a toothpick. Make them think twice about fscking with the guys with their furry little butts on the cold, unforgiving line of space. And I will have my manuals.
-- Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes.
-- Robbie Honerkamp
I can't imagine a future where geeks go to Mars carrying 500+ kg of paper manuals. Mission Control won't allow it.
Then I, for one, am not going. When the main computer with all the e-manuals goes tango uniform and all the light we have left is chemsticks, I'm not going to be stuck without my treeware manuals. No books, no Buck Rogers. And if Mission Control doesn't like it, they can kiss my furry little butt.
-- There could perhaps be a window... [and] a hatch with explosive bolts on the spacecraft... and pitch and yaw thrusters so that the astronaut occc... pilot could have some... could have control of the re-entry procedure.
-- "The Right Stuff"
how the separation of Church and State in schools has led to a vacuum where once children were taught the proper ways to behave.
Children have always been taught proper behavior at home. I'm sorry if you choose to abdicate that ethical responsibility to the Imperial Federal Government. Sorry for your kids, that is.
Morals are just words in a book somebody has elevated to the status of an idol. Ethics are real-world ways to solve real-world problems with a minimum of pain.
That said, anytime someone uses the square-headed girlfriend as an escape from a relationship, it means there are problems in the relationship, whether the escape is XXX chat rooms, Doom, or hacking the demon code. (See how this ends up covering MORE than mere malicious intent?)
The poster and I do agree on a few things, though. One, get a life outside the box. (I actually use the box to help create life outside it.... I have a standing date every week with a bunch of folk I keep up with on line the rest of the time. Some of them are even closer than that.) And I also agree that if you're in a bad relationship, and the other person isn't talking, get the hell out!! It's never too late to start over, as long as you're still breathing.
I have to wonder, though, why the guy used a Decepticon's name for a handle....
--
"It takes a lot of courage to stand up and get what you need...
Oh, more of us are happy in a different kind of Family." --
Gaia Consort
Someone needs to write a perl script to take this story, and s/x/y/g the names and technologies, and then feed every company and technology into it. Then create an archive of every possible violation lawsuit. Then patent the idea, and sue anyone who violates it.
The sad part about it is, with the current state of the USPTO, Taco could probably get away with this. Although it sure would make a good case of fighting fire with fire....
--
See, you not only have to be a good coder to create a system like Linux,
you have to be a sneaky bastard too;-)
[Linus Torvalds in < 4rikft$7g5@linux.cs.Helsinki.FI > ]
With two network ports, I'm sure these machines would have a real niche market to sell to. As it is, I just can't see who's going to buy them...
Whaddyamean, it doesn't have two network ports. It's got a pair of USB ports, no? Yeah, yeah, it's not 100BT, but who here has more than a T1 outbound? Not this ubergeek... 100BT on the LAN and USB out via DSL or frame relay makes a _great_ compact SOHO router.
Now, if you've got more bandwidth than G-d, sure, then you're going to want something better, but I daresay you'd not be trying to do it on the cheap, either. Just plunk down the five grand for a Watchguard Firebox and be done with it. (although some of you purists out there will want to wait until they come out with a Linux front end....:)
--
See, you not only have to be a good coder to create a system like Linux,
you have to be a sneaky bastard too;-)
[Linus Torvalds in < 4rikft$7g5@linux.cs.Helsinki.FI > ]
While the Espresso/Cappucino line is cute, it still lacks monitor/keyboard/mouse. I think the best alternative right now is the Sony Vaio line.
My Emperor BlackPerl Z (a Vaio 505TR with a custom install of Red Hat 6.2) is slightly smaller than the US-standard letter paper my resume is printed on, and about an inch thick. Weighs about five pounds with the battery on it. Six or seven when you add power supply, port replicator, minimouse (I *hate* glidepads), and floppy drive.
No CD, but with 100bT ethernet in the PCMCIA port,
and a 6GB HDD (the new ones come with 12), who needs a CD? If you really want one, you can get either a PC-card one (the preferable solution) or a parallel port backpacker (if you HAVE to use 'net and CD at the same time).
Sony is also selling a palmtop Vaio with a 400MhZ Pentium III or (coming RSN) a 600 MhZ Crusoe... it's about the size of a Disney videotape case, similarly light, with a 1024x480 display and full-size keyboard. Surely that will fit in the tailbag of your Hawg or rice burner. Yeah, they're a little pricey, but they're damn nice boxen. I recommend them if lightness or size takes precedent over Dell's vaunted customer service... which it often does, like our friend the motorcyclist.
http://www.emperorlinux.com/ [shameless plug from a very satisfied user] if you're a penguinhead... if not, check your local CompUniverse...
-- Intelligence is the ability to avoid doing work, yet get the work done.
-- Linus Torvalds
In case you haven't been reading, in the last two weeks there have been posted right here in this hallowed blog methods on recording both audio and video on your PC, using Free Software, no less. Now, someone familiar with the process has explained to me the difference between recording and mastering... so a friend who knows some DSP and I have got the bright idea to replicate all those neatokeen bits of hardware the mastering studios use in Free Software.... thus reducing the cost of truly great sound quality to about $2500.
(The speakers alone in a mastering studio are $30,000... sheesh.)
Of course, the RIAA/MPAA crowd want to impose Big Brother digital controls on all this... but guess what, guys, those "old" CD players are still going to work for a long time. Besides, we're still selling cassettes.... and those have been around since the 8-track era.
Bottom line: We're taking over the world.... and setting it free.
(Oh, just to address the point about no impact here.... 45% of all households have a computer now. We're almost to critical mass... so if we don't jump on this thing now, we'll be late to market.)
--
Open Source, Open Minds.
The command line is the front line.
Speakeasy started out as an internet cafe in Seattle's Belltown district. You could pop in, grab a latte, sit down at a refurbished Wyse 50, and get your email and read news. An account is still $10 a month. They got big. Really big. They partnered with Covad and some dialup providers, and went nationwide. The service is still great (yeah, I have DSL, but I keep seeing things go by about how they're constantly working at improving the dialup pool, and while I was waiting for Qwest to get off their butts and get me a dry line, I used Speakeasy's dialups, which always connected at 43.3 with only a few minor hiccups... ), and you can still go down to Belltown and grab a latte and a terminal (or a PC or a Mac, for that matter).
No, I'm just another satisfied customer. I sure hope they don't ever sell... hopefully they're big enough in their own right now that they can keep going without getting swallowed.
Oh, one more thing: Their infrastructure... is all LINUX. Right here in the backyard of the Beast. (yes, they'll let you run Windows on their network... but they're very Linux-friendly. They have all the HOWTO's and magic numbers on their support pages, and they love it if you run NAT. They'll even secondary your DNS if you put up a primary on their network.)
Try not to slashdot'em too bad, folks, I'd rather not see them buried by enthusiasm...:)
Pfui. The pop and pop (not gay, they were just both male... not that there's anything wrong with that) store I used to frequent in Atlanta would ORDER anything you wanted... most of the megastores, if it wasn't on Ingram's list, fuggeddabowdit. I could get some pretty esoteric stuff there.... yes, it's a speciality shop, but you geeks would like it anyway.
[shameless plug]
It's the Science Fiction and Mystery Bookshop, 2000-F Cheshire Bridge Rd, Atlanta. There's a Titan Comics next door, so you can spend both halves of your paycheck in one stop...:)
No, I'm just a satisfied customer; I live in Seattle now, so I can't even go there anymore. Dangit.
I remember just how irritated I was when the Mandrake 7.2 update started downloading thirty four meg worth of KDE internationalizations, 46 packages in all, from Afrikaans to Welsh, including not only Hebrew but three versions of Chinese... things which, sadly enough, are of little use to this American.
So don't tell me Linux isn't internationalized from here to Mars and back. I had to go fscking clean up my hard drive. At least RPM made it reasonably easy...
Yeah, I know, I'm committing heresy again, blasting Linux. But hey, at least the packages are the, for free, for those that need them... and, as has been pointed out, Konqueror even goes so far as to grok MSFT's version of Hebrew.
Actually, if the stability of the running code is any indication (and I know my priestess is going to make me do a thousand Hail Venuses for this blasphemy) Win2K can't be that bad. It's just BIG.
I thought the most telling thing, though, was what Linus said two years ago at a documents show in Atlanta. He was in a panel discussion with a Microsoft Marketroid (and maddog and a Wall Street analyst) and the 'droid was going on about Microsoft's huge labs where they could replicate any problem known to man. Then Linus in a quiet voice told the story of how the U.S. Post Office (that's right, boys and girls, Uncle Sam runs LINUX) had a problem with the computers that run the bar code sprayers. They called Red Hat, Red Hat emailed Linus, who thought about it, vi'ed the appropriate source file, discovered the race condition, fixed it, sent it back, USPS recompiled, and it worked. Total time, 48 hours. Then he said something which caused complete silence in the room:
We didn't have to replicate it, we understood it.
No oneunderstandsNT.
This poster is proof of the easy understandability of Linux.
--
Software is like SEX: it's better when it's free. -- Linus Torvalds
I don't think you should tell a man he's a complete and total jerk in the business world; it tends to make him do desparate things, like go out and cut shady deals with their downline. Besides, it makes you look unprofessional to resort to such ad hominem.
Furthermore, he's also liable to come back with "Oh, yeah? It takes one to know one!" At which point the truly wise consumer takes his business elsewhere, ignoring the schoolyard squabbling.
Don't get me wrong, I think if you ignore all the FUD and mudslinging, Sun makes some good products. I mean, if you want to run a honkin' huge Oracle farm, ye olde E10000 is the way to go. But their PR department needs to grow up just a little, and not descend to the level of the big ape up in Redmond they so loathe.
--
Hacking the Penguin in the Backyard of the Beast
Renton, WA
Slashdot Mirror
I'm an RHCE. I was down at SSC (the Linux Journal guys) filling out some paperwork, and I needed to pull an IRS form off the web (I had forgotten my copy). So I'm telling the secretary the website, and we get the form, and Netscape cranks up Adobe Acrobat Reaer, and now we go to print, and... oh, RIGHT, of COURSE it's a Linux box, this is SSC!
I had made the mistake of thinking "secretary == Windows box" and had not twigged to the "K" on her toolbar until the print box said "lpr".
Now, remember, I've been running Linux since 1995, I'm supposed to know what an X desktop looks like. I couldn't tell the difference until it hit me in the face.
Linux not ready for the desktop. Feh. My wife has run Linux on her desktop for three years now. Word Perfect, Netscape, Solitare, Free Cell, Minesweeper, now Hearts is out, Quake, Civ, Gnucash, GIMP, and Samba if you must talk to the EE... she demanded Linux after Windows 95 ate the registry twice in as many weeks. She hasn't missed a thing.
The ONLY thing Linux needs is shelf space at Comp*USA for preinstalled machines. Other than that, we are SO ready for the desktop. Anyone who says otherwise is a liar or a wuss. I count Microsoft marketroids in the former category.
--
Software is like sex.
It's better when it's free.
-- Linus
Opera.
Fast, light, solid. Not free, but worth the bucks. A fine example of what Windows software ought to be. Cheap, good, AND fast.
Yeah, yeah, call me a heretic for recommending something that ain't free, much less not berating her for not running Linux.... fsck it, I yearn for the old days when you had to know a few things to get on the 'net. But I'm not gonna be a sourpuss about it. If they figure out the Linux guys are helpful, just maybe we'll get a few converts. :)
There may well be a predisposition to CTS, but anyone can get it if they don't take care of themselves. I know. I have CTS. A very mild case, which was diagnosed by the Workers' Comp specialist I was sent to. Yes, it cost the State of Georgia a couple three hundred. But we caught it early. I use an ergo keyboard (bought myself, didn't trust the state), a gel mouse rest (ditto), and Alleve occasionally. MUCH cheaper than surgery or even acupuncture, and I got to keep the ergo goodies when I left.
Point is, it behooves the employers to take care of its people, instead of sorting them like so many sheep, lest the good ones vote with their feet, and the trains not run on time. Your best workers are grown, not picked up off the street like a new ethernet card.
-- Read the Cluetrain Manifesto
768kb DSL link: $79.95/mo plus tax.
Login to slashdot: $free
Seeing big companies like Microsoft and Mastercard (and the Church of Scientology) get their asses kicked by the likes of Taco and Templeton:
PRICELESS
There's some news money can't buy. For everything else, there's Slashdot. :)
And before anyone accuses me of being a pothead, 1) the hemp you grow to smoke is "sinsemilla"... that's Spanish for NO SEEDS. No seeds, no oil. No oil, no use growing the stuff; and 2) I'm allergic to cannibis smoke. Makes me hurl my toes up. Ironic, given its usual medicinal value, but there it is.
--
Good, Honest HEMP!
-- Robert Anton Wilson
Not bizarre. Bazaar.
No need to kneel before the altar every month and make offerings of gold. No need to present your machine to the monks when you want it upgraded. Most of all, no need to trust the Cathedral with your private data.
Indeed, you are allowed to commune with the gods of software themselves, who know little of MarketSpeak, but are honest, direct, and often very funny. Moreover, should one be so inclined, one can become one of them (what heresy!), without shaving one's head nor wearing a badge, without even leaving the comfy confines of one's own lair. But if one doesn't want to, one doesn't have to do that, either. Yea, verily, there is even now being made a version of the Penguin specifically for those seeking escape from the Cathedral.
Of course, with this freedom comes responsibility.... but even that can be made easy. But no longer do you have to be dependent on the Cathedral to get your computing fix.
It comes to mind that the last time somebody said you could talk to G-d directly without having to part with your gold at the door of the cathedral they fought several bloody wars over it...
- A brower. (Netscape, Mozilla, Konqueror, Galeon, Lynx.)
- An office suite. (Applixware)
- A financials package. (Moneydance)
- A graphics package (GIMP)
- Gamage (the FreeBSD games ports page is huge)
The fact that things are a little slow to trickle into the tree is no handicap to most folk, unless somebody insists that RTF or straight text isn't good enough, they must be running the One True Microsoft Office Three Million (insert banishing pentagram here), at which point it's just time to shake your head and walk away. But I digress....A lot of people go off whining about the install. Yeah, yeah. How many people actually install their own WINDOWS? That's what an installfest is for. Get somebody professional or semi-pro to set it up the way you like it, get their business card, and go home happy. No, you can't buy it off the shelf. But then that's kinda the point of the exercize, no?
And as for this server v. desktop bovine scatology.... has Gnome or KDE suffered because they're doing things like Beowulf and Pirhana? Hell no, it's probably gotten MORE support. You need a (n+1)th machine with a fancy-ass console to support that cluster, no? As for NVidia having their heads where the sun don't shine, well, so do a lot of companies. Vote with your feet.
Besides, this won't be the first operating system I've personally as both a desktop and a server. Way back in 1991 I had Word Perfect running on the Motif desktop on my AIX 300-series machines in the professors' offices, while down the hall in the machine room the 500 series minicomps were grinding away at FORTRAN, and the 900-series mainframe class boxen were pulling router duty over in the next building feeding a T-3 line. They ALL ran AIX 3.x. We just changed what processes ran on each box. So THERE.
--
If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it must be a real damn good decoy.
If I'm right, they can use that mark for whatever the hell they want to. Only if I'm wrong (and frankly I hope I am) would someone have a case... and they would have to have the budget to sue whoever was abusing the trademark.
Fortunately, if they can sue, the case is open and shut, thanks to Sun v. Microsoft (the case over Java licensing).
If I'm wrong about the trademark, please take the time to decipher the email address and send me separate notice; I'm chewing up enough time as it is sending this :)
Maybe if he had said something when things were first staring, it might have been different. But whining now that OpenSSH has been out over a year, time enough to become (IMHO) the superior product.... well, it smacks of the follies we've seen Rambus commit of late. Letting someone else develop a product that's better than yours and then attempting to co-opt its IP is, frankly, childish. Certainly Tatu's case has a lot less grounding in law and reality than Rambus v. JEDEC... I hope for Theo's sake Tatu's lawyers are smart enough to tell Tatu to stick it. It will be much more expensive for everybody if Theo's have to.... and if I know Theo, he's liable to serve up Tatu au brochette.
--
"[Linux is really cool - not for the technology, but because] none of those open source guys stick hot needles under my fingernails during negotiations."
-- Michael Dell, LinuxWorld show, August, 2000
http://www.scyld.com/products/beowulf/software/mon te.html
It's called Two Kernel Monte. It's a module that loads a new kernel into memory, does a little do-si-do dance to get it where it needs to be in the mode it needs to be in, then simply jumps to it. (Yes, you need to do
umount -a;mount -o ro,remount /
before doing this, since it doesn't do any of that...) No, it's not an in situ change, since all your processes die, but for systems with multiple SCSI or RAID cards, it can mean the difference in a few seconds for reboot and a few long minutes....
On a side note, make sure and grab my link; the one on Google is wrong (until they fix it), and it took me a while to find the right thing...
--
Never assume TFM is right.
One wonders what an -O3 by itself would do. Is this a good compromise? One of the things that makes Linux so popular is the fact that it runs on darn near anything. I think being architecture-exclusionary like this is a Big Mistake. (No, I don't expect something as big as KDE to run on some 286 boatanchor. But once we start down that path, the next thing you know, I'll have to run out and buy an Athlon board, or sully my network with Intel snoopware. No, thankee.)
Yes, it's a flame. But it's a mild flame, complete with a solution, and G-rated. I've seen worse.
--
I'm altering the bargain. Pray I do not alter it further.
Now, if you want to password protect something, it's a Bad Idea, but for general purpose anonymous file distribution and retrieval, I don't think it's so bad. Keep It Simple, Stupid, I always say.
--
I remember when we had 300 baud, dummy terminals, and UUCP, and LIKED it.
Somebody moderate up the parent article some more; s/he's making sense. Rare these days.
Naah, I'm not going to haul my entire collection up there; if the e-books go out, I've more important things to do than read Hitchhiker's. But I'm not shaving a damn thing; haven't for over a decade, and I'm not starting now. Besides, I *intended* for Mission Control to need a toothpick. Make them think twice about fscking with the guys with their furry little butts on the cold, unforgiving line of space. And I will have my manuals.
--
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes.
-- Robbie Honerkamp
--
There could perhaps be a window... [and] a hatch with explosive bolts on the spacecraft... and pitch and yaw thrusters so that the astronaut occc... pilot could have some... could have control of the re-entry procedure.
-- "The Right Stuff"
Morals are just words in a book somebody has elevated to the status of an idol. Ethics are real-world ways to solve real-world problems with a minimum of pain.
That said, anytime someone uses the square-headed girlfriend as an escape from a relationship, it means there are problems in the relationship, whether the escape is XXX chat rooms, Doom, or hacking the demon code. (See how this ends up covering MORE than mere malicious intent?)
The poster and I do agree on a few things, though. One, get a life outside the box. (I actually use the box to help create life outside it.... I have a standing date every week with a bunch of folk I keep up with on line the rest of the time. Some of them are even closer than that.) And I also agree that if you're in a bad relationship, and the other person isn't talking, get the hell out!! It's never too late to start over, as long as you're still breathing.
I have to wonder, though, why the guy used a Decepticon's name for a handle....
--
"It takes a lot of courage to stand up and get what you need...
Oh, more of us are happy in a different kind of Family."
-- Gaia Consort
-- ;-)
See, you not only have to be a good coder to create a system like Linux,
you have to be a sneaky bastard too
[Linus Torvalds in < 4rikft$7g5@linux.cs.Helsinki.FI > ]
Now, if you've got more bandwidth than G-d, sure, then you're going to want something better, but I daresay you'd not be trying to do it on the cheap, either. Just plunk down the five grand for a Watchguard Firebox and be done with it. (although some of you purists out there will want to wait until they come out with a Linux front end.... :)
-- ;-)
See, you not only have to be a good coder to create a system like Linux,
you have to be a sneaky bastard too
[Linus Torvalds in < 4rikft$7g5@linux.cs.Helsinki.FI > ]
My Emperor BlackPerl Z (a Vaio 505TR with a custom install of Red Hat 6.2) is slightly smaller than the US-standard letter paper my resume is printed on, and about an inch thick. Weighs about five pounds with the battery on it. Six or seven when you add power supply, port replicator, minimouse (I *hate* glidepads), and floppy drive. No CD, but with 100bT ethernet in the PCMCIA port, and a 6GB HDD (the new ones come with 12), who needs a CD? If you really want one, you can get either a PC-card one (the preferable solution) or a parallel port backpacker (if you HAVE to use 'net and CD at the same time).
Sony is also selling a palmtop Vaio with a 400MhZ Pentium III or (coming RSN) a 600 MhZ Crusoe... it's about the size of a Disney videotape case, similarly light, with a 1024x480 display and full-size keyboard. Surely that will fit in the tailbag of your Hawg or rice burner. Yeah, they're a little pricey, but they're damn nice boxen. I recommend them if lightness or size takes precedent over Dell's vaunted customer service... which it often does, like our friend the motorcyclist.
http://www.emperorlinux.com/ [shameless plug from a very satisfied user] if you're a penguinhead... if not, check your local CompUniverse...
--
Intelligence is the ability to avoid doing work, yet get the work done.
-- Linus Torvalds
Parrot poop.
In case you haven't been reading, in the last two weeks there have been posted right here in this hallowed blog methods on recording both audio and video on your PC, using Free Software, no less. Now, someone familiar with the process has explained to me the difference between recording and mastering... so a friend who knows some DSP and I have got the bright idea to replicate all those neatokeen bits of hardware the mastering studios use in Free Software.... thus reducing the cost of truly great sound quality to about $2500. (The speakers alone in a mastering studio are $30,000... sheesh.)
Of course, the RIAA/MPAA crowd want to impose Big Brother digital controls on all this... but guess what, guys, those "old" CD players are still going to work for a long time. Besides, we're still selling cassettes.... and those have been around since the 8-track era.
Bottom line: We're taking over the world.... and setting it free.
(Oh, just to address the point about no impact here.... 45% of all households have a computer now. We're almost to critical mass... so if we don't jump on this thing now, we'll be late to market.)
--
Open Source, Open Minds.
The command line is the front line.
Speakeasy started out as an internet cafe in Seattle's Belltown district. You could pop in, grab a latte, sit down at a refurbished Wyse 50, and get your email and read news. An account is still $10 a month. They got big. Really big. They partnered with Covad and some dialup providers, and went nationwide. The service is still great (yeah, I have DSL, but I keep seeing things go by about how they're constantly working at improving the dialup pool, and while I was waiting for Qwest to get off their butts and get me a dry line, I used Speakeasy's dialups, which always connected at 43.3 with only a few minor hiccups... ), and you can still go down to Belltown and grab a latte and a terminal (or a PC or a Mac, for that matter).
No, I'm just another satisfied customer. I sure hope they don't ever sell... hopefully they're big enough in their own right now that they can keep going without getting swallowed.
Oh, one more thing: Their infrastructure... is all LINUX. Right here in the backyard of the Beast. (yes, they'll let you run Windows on their network... but they're very Linux-friendly. They have all the HOWTO's and magic numbers on their support pages, and they love it if you run NAT. They'll even secondary your DNS if you put up a primary on their network.)
Try not to slashdot'em too bad, folks, I'd rather not see them buried by enthusiasm... :)
[shameless plug]
It's the Science Fiction and Mystery Bookshop, 2000-F Cheshire Bridge Rd, Atlanta. There's a Titan Comics next door, so you can spend both halves of your paycheck in one stop... :)
No, I'm just a satisfied customer; I live in Seattle now, so I can't even go there anymore. Dangit.
[/shameless plug]
--
Support your local business establishment.
I remember just how irritated I was when the Mandrake 7.2 update started downloading thirty four meg worth of KDE internationalizations, 46 packages in all, from Afrikaans to Welsh, including not only Hebrew but three versions of Chinese... things which, sadly enough, are of little use to this American.
So don't tell me Linux isn't internationalized from here to Mars and back. I had to go fscking clean up my hard drive. At least RPM made it reasonably easy...
Yeah, I know, I'm committing heresy again, blasting Linux. But hey, at least the packages are the, for free, for those that need them... and, as has been pointed out, Konqueror even goes so far as to grok MSFT's version of Hebrew.
--
We're here, we're free,
get used to it.
I thought the most telling thing, though, was what Linus said two years ago at a documents show in Atlanta. He was in a panel discussion with a Microsoft Marketroid (and maddog and a Wall Street analyst) and the 'droid was going on about Microsoft's huge labs where they could replicate any problem known to man. Then Linus in a quiet voice told the story of how the U.S. Post Office (that's right, boys and girls, Uncle Sam runs LINUX) had a problem with the computers that run the bar code sprayers. They called Red Hat, Red Hat emailed Linus, who thought about it, vi'ed the appropriate source file, discovered the race condition, fixed it, sent it back, USPS recompiled, and it worked. Total time, 48 hours. Then he said something which caused complete silence in the room:
This poster is proof of the easy understandability of Linux.--
Software is like SEX: it's better when it's free.
-- Linus Torvalds
Furthermore, he's also liable to come back with "Oh, yeah? It takes one to know one!" At which point the truly wise consumer takes his business elsewhere, ignoring the schoolyard squabbling.
Don't get me wrong, I think if you ignore all the FUD and mudslinging, Sun makes some good products. I mean, if you want to run a honkin' huge Oracle farm, ye olde E10000 is the way to go. But their PR department needs to grow up just a little, and not descend to the level of the big ape up in Redmond they so loathe.
--
Hacking the Penguin in the Backyard of the Beast
Renton, WA