There's some truth to the article. ALSA still requires running a configuration program to get it to work with even major sound cards (and when the autoconfig doesn't work, it still requires tweaking IRQ's, yuck). And when I try to set up my sound card through KDE, KDE still insists on using the 'snd_' prefixes to the ALSA module settings, which ALSA stopped using quite a while back. And there are also lots of apps which use OSS instead of ALSA.
Windows 95 succeeds in other areas where Linux fails, too. One minor one is that Windows 95 boots with a pretty graphic splash screen while Linux spews ugly status messages too quickly to even read; what's the point of that? (There's a bootsplash patch for the Linux kernel, but it hasn't been updated for 2.6.5 yet, and it requires the ability to patch and reconfigure a kernel.)
But I'd say the biggest place where Win95 beats Linux is this: I could run Win95 quite comfortably on a PC with 8MB RAM and it would give me a somewhat friendly UI and a consistent interface across applications, with buttons and menus that would all look and work similarly. On Linux today I have two choices: use a desktop environment like KDE which requires more than 128MB RAM to run comfortably, or else use a bare-bones window manager like fvwm2 or icewm and put up with the fact that every app's buttons and menus are going to look completely different (xterm still has that weird scrollbar that requires a three-button mouse!).
Linux has every other operating system beat in terms of stability and robustness. But even Windows 95 still beats its pants off in terms of friendliness and usability in a desktop environment.
$613 million? Oooh, not. That's pocket change to Microsoft, who has a war chest of billions of dollars -- but of course this won't stop it from passing the cost along to its customers, and blaming the EU for increasing the price of Microsoft products.
In the end, this court decision isn't going to amount to anything. Competition has already been hurt. Customers aren't going to want to pay the same price for a version of Windows without WiMP. Competitors won't be given access to Microsoft's API's; MS will appeal and drag this out for a very long time. And in the end it will ignore the court orders, just like it did in the US, knowing that its punishment will be yet another lengthy court process which it can drag out and then ignore again, all the while telling its customers that government is trying to raise prices and stifle innovation. Maybe it'll even try to settle by again offering to install Microsoft software in schools for free (until the license has to be renewed in a few years, that is).
So SuSE 9.1 continues to use RPM's, and there's no word on whether apt-get will be included. Why does SuSE stick with RPM's instead of moving to Debian packages?
The real difference between RPM's and Debian packages, for me, is that 'deborphan' is only available in the Debian world, and so i can easily trim out libraries which were installed as dependencies for software I no longer have installed. I haven't yet found an easy way to find orphaned RPM's on my SuSE system.
I mean, I understand what it means to see 'passwd(1)' on a man page; that means the documentation for 'passwd' is in section 1 of the manual. But how can you say you have a vulnerability in 'passwd(1)'?
Isn't that like saying you like the TV show Angel(8pm) or that you want to go work for Sun(UltraSPARC)?
It'll change channels to record programs you've asked it to record (like, Season Passes), but if it thinks 'hey, there's a show I think he'll like on another network,' will it change channels to record that?
My Sony first-gen TiVo has only ever changed channels for stuff I've told it to record; it's never changed channels for a suggestion...
Agreed. The original Philips remote is terrible, for two reasons: one is that it's shaped like a peanut, so it's very difficult to tell which way is 'up' without looking at it; and the other is that it has no 'off' button for the TiVo to put it into standby mode so that the TiVo knows it can change channels on its own to autorecord suggestions. Without a standby button, the Philips TiVo has no way of knowing that you're not actually sitting there watching a live broadcast, so it's never going to leave, say, QVC so that it can record something on the SciFi channel.
No, it's because both are rich and broad tales of adventure and heroism, but one has become diluted over time while the other has become deeper.
George went for the quick buck over and over and over again, until there's no substance left. Peter Jackson could be talking about "The Lord of the Rings IV: What Happened Afterwards" or "The Hobbit: Episode 0", but he isn't.
If this news had come five years ago, I would have been right there with my credit card ready to pay whatever price George asked.
But since then, we've had Episode I and II with silly plots and terrible acting and Jar Jar Binks, and the Star Wars series has become WAY overmarketed. I didn't think it could become even *more* commercialized than it was in the eighties, but, it did. And on top of that, George keeps going back and messing with the original movies -- what's this I hear about new footage of Amidala being added into RotJ?
So, yawn. I used to really want the Episode IV-VI DVD's, but when they weren't available, I found my love in other series. I'm buying the extended DVD editions of all three Lord of the Rings movies. I couldn't care less about Star Wars.
Well, to start with, here's a free suggestion for Microsoft: stop letting any admin user's processes automatically have full run of the system. Mac OS X brings up a dialog asking me for my admin password and letting me know what executable wants it whenever a process wants to muck with system files or firmware; why can't Windows do the same?
So far, since this worm started yesterday afternoon, I have received over a thousand worm emails and erroneous bounce messages (from mail servers who think that just because my address is on the mail that means I sent it).
And I don't even use any Microsoft products.
When is somebody going to file a class-action lawsuit against Microsoft for continuing to fail to address the security holes in Windows? I mean, it's been thirteen years since Michelangelo, and still all it takes for a virus to rape Windows is for a user to double-click on an email attachment.
You'd think that people would learn from this that Windows isn't secure, isn't safe, is harmful not only to one's own work but also to the work of other people, and needs to be locked off behind a firewall and tightly guarded with antivirus software.
While everyone else has been creating fault-tolerant systems, Microsoft has been creating fault-tolerant users.
Meanwhile, what's happening to Bill Gates? Is he under scrutiny by federal investigators? Are his ability, his motives, or his priorities being questioned? Has his name become a dirty word? Nope, he's being knighted. He will be made a Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, a post which sounds like it was previously held by Theodore Logan and Bill S. Preston, Esq.
When is Microsoft going to be held accountable for the weaknesses of its software?
My office building was on a Superfund site in Silicon Valley: it was a field where toxic chemicals had been dumped back in the 1970's, and large amounts of money and effort were being spent on cleaning it up. In particular, a system of pipes ran water deep through the soil, then gathered it up again and brought it up into a tower where it was aerated to release the harmful chemicals.
I also have a IIfx in my collection, and I'd love the chance to try A/UX on it sometime, but I haven't stumbled across a CD of it yet.
If you lived anywhere near Orlando Florida, I'd be happy to trade you a spare Apple 13" display (the kind which is designed to 'go with' the IIfx) for a copy of A/UX.:)
A Sun Ultra 5, 333MHz, 256MB RAM, and it's news that somebody got this 'old' thing running again?
Yawn. Wake me up when somebody recycles some *truly* old hardware.
A while ago I ran Debian Linux on a Macintosh Quadra 700 (25MHz 68040) with 40MB RAM and used it as a gateway and a web server. I recently found some old Usenet posts I wrote ten years ago about trying to get NetBSD running on my Mac IIvx (33MHz 68030, 8MB RAM), and I still have the machine, so I'm thinking as a project I may pick up the work I started ten years ago and finish setting it up as a NetBSD file/web server, just to prove it can be done.
The biggest problem I've had with KDE is that EVERYTHING has to be on the Start menu (or whatever it is that KDE calls it -- the K menu?). If I remove an app from the Start menu, then I have no way of knowing it's still installed and available on the system, unless I happen to remember how to start it some other way or I go into a package tool to see that it's still there.
What KDE needs is an Applications directory like Mac OS X has -- show me a window with pretty icons and clear names for all the applications I have available on my computer, and let me customize the launcher (Mac OS X's Dock, Windows's Start menu, KDE's Startorwhateverit'scalled menu) to just list the apps I want to get at most often.
What I want to know is, who got the huge frosted lucite 'N', the one we all signed on a boat at our one-year anniversary, which used to be hanging in the customer briefing center?
And what ever happened to the huge styrofoam Mozilla, as seen in the photo where it's standing atop the remains of the big fallen IE logo? The Mozilla which was carefully reassembled by hand after it blew out of the back of a pickup truck and shattered on 101 on the way to Bay to Breakers one year?
I remember some news stories from '95 or so, back when the Web was really taking off. Bill Gates made an announcement that Microsoft would never have an Internet division, because "the Internet is like air, it permeates through all our divisions and products," or something like that.
Then, some months or a year later, Microsoft formed an Internet division. "Air is good," Gates announced, "we like air."
I don't recall the exact quote, and I can no longer find the articles, so if anyone else has a better recollection of this, please speak up!
"For me it's a question of values, it's not a question of science. I think selling genetically modified fish as pets is wrong.... At the end of the day, I just don't think it's right to produce a new organism just to be a pet. To me, this seems like an abuse of the power we have over life, and I'm not prepared to go there today."
Well, good for you. So you're not prepared to go there.
So why are you using a law to prevent anybody *else* from going there? What about the folks who *do* think it's okay to have a genetically-modified animal as a pet?
I think smoking is wrong. I think doing drugs is wrong. I think driving an SUV is wrong. But is "I think X is wrong" ever in itself a good enough reason to ban X? Should things be banned until there's a good reason to believe they're okay, or allowed until there's a good reason to believe they're not?
I collect and restore old Apple equipment for fun.
My web/mail/file server is a beige Power Mac G3 minitower from 1997, running Mac OS X 10.2.8. It hasn't been down for more than a total of a half hour over the past two years, only for reboots after OS patches.
I've set up a Mac Color Classic (1993), a Mac IIfx (1990), and a Mac IIci (1989) with Ethernet cards and the current version of the iCab 68k web browser. They can all surf the web -- extremely slowly, and the Color Classic's 512x384 display makes this an exercise in tedium, but it *can* be done.
I use an Apple IIGS (1986) as a television set. The CPU isn't powered; I just have a tuner (a VCR) hooked up to the computer's original composite color display, which still looks crisp and sharp.
If you're looking for an immediate way to cut costs in your IT department, you won't care about tangled wires or the quality of your mice and your keyboards, as long as the mice have two buttons and the keyboards have all the letters from A through Z on 'em.
Put another way: if you can buy fifteen eMacs with great keyboards and mice and cable management, or twenty Dells, most IT managers will opt to go with the Dells.
But if all you want is a cheap and easy box for a non-technical person to run Word and Excel and Internet Explorer on, you can get a workable Dell (Dimension 2400, Celeron 2.2GHz, 40GB HD, 128MB RAM) for $500 to $600, while the cheapest Mac is the eMac (800MHz G4, 40GB HD, 128MB RAM) at $800. Multiply that by even just a couple dozen people, and the price differential really adds up.
The problem is that high-end Macs are competitive to high-end PC's, and mid-range Macs are (somewhat) competitive to mid-range PC's, but there are no low-end Macs for businesses who want bare-bones end-user computers.
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There's some truth to the article. ALSA still requires running a configuration program to get it to work with even major sound cards (and when the autoconfig doesn't work, it still requires tweaking IRQ's, yuck). And when I try to set up my sound card through KDE, KDE still insists on using the 'snd_' prefixes to the ALSA module settings, which ALSA stopped using quite a while back. And there are also lots of apps which use OSS instead of ALSA.
Windows 95 succeeds in other areas where Linux fails, too. One minor one is that Windows 95 boots with a pretty graphic splash screen while Linux spews ugly status messages too quickly to even read; what's the point of that? (There's a bootsplash patch for the Linux kernel, but it hasn't been updated for 2.6.5 yet, and it requires the ability to patch and reconfigure a kernel.)
But I'd say the biggest place where Win95 beats Linux is this: I could run Win95 quite comfortably on a PC with 8MB RAM and it would give me a somewhat friendly UI and a consistent interface across applications, with buttons and menus that would all look and work similarly. On Linux today I have two choices: use a desktop environment like KDE which requires more than 128MB RAM to run comfortably, or else use a bare-bones window manager like fvwm2 or icewm and put up with the fact that every app's buttons and menus are going to look completely different (xterm still has that weird scrollbar that requires a three-button mouse!).
Linux has every other operating system beat in terms of stability and robustness. But even Windows 95 still beats its pants off in terms of friendliness and usability in a desktop environment.
The bandwidth might be good, but the latency stinks... just try playing networked Quake 3 over that!
$613 million? Oooh, not. That's pocket change to Microsoft, who has a war chest of billions of dollars -- but of course this won't stop it from passing the cost along to its customers, and blaming the EU for increasing the price of Microsoft products.
In the end, this court decision isn't going to amount to anything. Competition has already been hurt. Customers aren't going to want to pay the same price for a version of Windows without WiMP. Competitors won't be given access to Microsoft's API's; MS will appeal and drag this out for a very long time. And in the end it will ignore the court orders, just like it did in the US, knowing that its punishment will be yet another lengthy court process which it can drag out and then ignore again, all the while telling its customers that government is trying to raise prices and stifle innovation. Maybe it'll even try to settle by again offering to install Microsoft software in schools for free (until the license has to be renewed in a few years, that is).
Yes, but dpkg doesn't work with RPM's, so therefore deborphan won't work.
So SuSE 9.1 continues to use RPM's, and there's no word on whether apt-get will be included. Why does SuSE stick with RPM's instead of moving to Debian packages?
The real difference between RPM's and Debian packages, for me, is that 'deborphan' is only available in the Debian world, and so i can easily trim out libraries which were installed as dependencies for software I no longer have installed. I haven't yet found an easy way to find orphaned RPM's on my SuSE system.
What's 'passwd(1)'?
I mean, I understand what it means to see 'passwd(1)' on a man page; that means the documentation for 'passwd' is in section 1 of the manual. But how can you say you have a vulnerability in 'passwd(1)'?
Isn't that like saying you like the TV show Angel(8pm) or that you want to go work for Sun(UltraSPARC)?
It'll change channels to record programs you've asked it to record (like, Season Passes), but if it thinks 'hey, there's a show I think he'll like on another network,' will it change channels to record that?
My Sony first-gen TiVo has only ever changed channels for stuff I've told it to record; it's never changed channels for a suggestion...
Agreed. The original Philips remote is terrible, for two reasons: one is that it's shaped like a peanut, so it's very difficult to tell which way is 'up' without looking at it; and the other is that it has no 'off' button for the TiVo to put it into standby mode so that the TiVo knows it can change channels on its own to autorecord suggestions. Without a standby button, the Philips TiVo has no way of knowing that you're not actually sitting there watching a live broadcast, so it's never going to leave, say, QVC so that it can record something on the SciFi channel.
No, it's because both are rich and broad tales of adventure and heroism, but one has become diluted over time while the other has become deeper.
George went for the quick buck over and over and over again, until there's no substance left. Peter Jackson could be talking about "The Lord of the Rings IV: What Happened Afterwards" or "The Hobbit: Episode 0", but he isn't.
If this news had come five years ago, I would have been right there with my credit card ready to pay whatever price George asked.
But since then, we've had Episode I and II with silly plots and terrible acting and Jar Jar Binks, and the Star Wars series has become WAY overmarketed. I didn't think it could become even *more* commercialized than it was in the eighties, but, it did. And on top of that, George keeps going back and messing with the original movies -- what's this I hear about new footage of Amidala being added into RotJ?
So, yawn. I used to really want the Episode IV-VI DVD's, but when they weren't available, I found my love in other series. I'm buying the extended DVD editions of all three Lord of the Rings movies. I couldn't care less about Star Wars.
Well, to start with, here's a free suggestion for Microsoft: stop letting any admin user's processes automatically have full run of the system. Mac OS X brings up a dialog asking me for my admin password and letting me know what executable wants it whenever a process wants to muck with system files or firmware; why can't Windows do the same?
So far, since this worm started yesterday afternoon, I have received over a thousand worm emails and erroneous bounce messages (from mail servers who think that just because my address is on the mail that means I sent it).
And I don't even use any Microsoft products.
When is somebody going to file a class-action lawsuit against Microsoft for continuing to fail to address the security holes in Windows? I mean, it's been thirteen years since Michelangelo, and still all it takes for a virus to rape Windows is for a user to double-click on an email attachment.
You'd think that people would learn from this that Windows isn't secure, isn't safe, is harmful not only to one's own work but also to the work of other people, and needs to be locked off behind a firewall and tightly guarded with antivirus software.
You'd think that people would have learned this lesson when Blaster hit. Or SoBig. Or Melissa. Or ILOVEYOU. Or Klez. Or SirCam. Or Code Red. Or Nimda. Or Chernobyl. Or Anna Kournikova. Or Bugbear.
While everyone else has been creating fault-tolerant systems, Microsoft has been creating fault-tolerant users.
Meanwhile, what's happening to Bill Gates? Is he under scrutiny by federal investigators? Are his ability, his motives, or his priorities being questioned? Has his name become a dirty word? Nope, he's being knighted. He will be made a Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, a post which sounds like it was previously held by Theodore Logan and Bill S. Preston, Esq.
When is Microsoft going to be held accountable for the weaknesses of its software?
My office building was on a Superfund site in Silicon Valley: it was a field where toxic chemicals had been dumped back in the 1970's, and large amounts of money and effort were being spent on cleaning it up. In particular, a system of pipes ran water deep through the soil, then gathered it up again and brought it up into a tower where it was aerated to release the harmful chemicals.
My office window was right next to that tower.
*twitch* *twitch*
I also have a IIfx in my collection, and I'd love the chance to try A/UX on it sometime, but I haven't stumbled across a CD of it yet.
:)
If you lived anywhere near Orlando Florida, I'd be happy to trade you a spare Apple 13" display (the kind which is designed to 'go with' the IIfx) for a copy of A/UX.
A Sun Ultra 5, 333MHz, 256MB RAM, and it's news that somebody got this 'old' thing running again?
Yawn. Wake me up when somebody recycles some *truly* old hardware.
A while ago I ran Debian Linux on a Macintosh Quadra 700 (25MHz 68040) with 40MB RAM and used it as a gateway and a web server. I recently found some old Usenet posts I wrote ten years ago about trying to get NetBSD running on my Mac IIvx (33MHz 68030, 8MB RAM), and I still have the machine, so I'm thinking as a project I may pick up the work I started ten years ago and finish setting it up as a NetBSD file/web server, just to prove it can be done.
The biggest problem I've had with KDE is that EVERYTHING has to be on the Start menu (or whatever it is that KDE calls it -- the K menu?). If I remove an app from the Start menu, then I have no way of knowing it's still installed and available on the system, unless I happen to remember how to start it some other way or I go into a package tool to see that it's still there.
What KDE needs is an Applications directory like Mac OS X has -- show me a window with pretty icons and clear names for all the applications I have available on my computer, and let me customize the launcher (Mac OS X's Dock, Windows's Start menu, KDE's Startorwhateverit'scalled menu) to just list the apps I want to get at most often.
What I want to know is, who got the huge frosted lucite 'N', the one we all signed on a boat at our one-year anniversary, which used to be hanging in the customer briefing center?
And what ever happened to the huge styrofoam Mozilla, as seen in the photo where it's standing atop the remains of the big fallen IE logo? The Mozilla which was carefully reassembled by hand after it blew out of the back of a pickup truck and shattered on 101 on the way to Bay to Breakers one year?
Good point. This reminds me of the fact that California still hasn't legalized owning ferrets as pets... so much for being a progressive state! :-b
I remember some news stories from '95 or so, back when the Web was really taking off. Bill Gates made an announcement that Microsoft would never have an Internet division, because "the Internet is like air, it permeates through all our divisions and products," or something like that.
Then, some months or a year later, Microsoft formed an Internet division. "Air is good," Gates announced, "we like air."
I don't recall the exact quote, and I can no longer find the articles, so if anyone else has a better recollection of this, please speak up!
Look at the quotes in that article.
... At the end of the day, I just don't think it's right to produce a new organism just to be a pet. To me, this seems like an abuse of the power we have over life, and I'm not prepared to go there today."
"For me it's a question of values, it's not a question of science. I think selling genetically modified fish as pets is wrong.
Well, good for you. So you're not prepared to go there.
So why are you using a law to prevent anybody *else* from going there? What about the folks who *do* think it's okay to have a genetically-modified animal as a pet?
I think smoking is wrong. I think doing drugs is wrong. I think driving an SUV is wrong. But is "I think X is wrong" ever in itself a good enough reason to ban X? Should things be banned until there's a good reason to believe they're okay, or allowed until there's a good reason to believe they're not?
Relax, everyone - the risk of a gigantic asteroid colliding with Earth just got smaller!
Yay! Finally the Department of Homeland Security protects us from something!
I collect and restore old Apple equipment for fun.
My web/mail/file server is a beige Power Mac G3 minitower from 1997, running Mac OS X 10.2.8. It hasn't been down for more than a total of a half hour over the past two years, only for reboots after OS patches.
I've set up a Mac Color Classic (1993), a Mac IIfx (1990), and a Mac IIci (1989) with Ethernet cards and the current version of the iCab 68k web browser. They can all surf the web -- extremely slowly, and the Color Classic's 512x384 display makes this an exercise in tedium, but it *can* be done.
I use an Apple IIGS (1986) as a television set. The CPU isn't powered; I just have a tuner (a VCR) hooked up to the computer's original composite color display, which still looks crisp and sharp.
If you're looking for an immediate way to cut costs in your IT department, you won't care about tangled wires or the quality of your mice and your keyboards, as long as the mice have two buttons and the keyboards have all the letters from A through Z on 'em.
Put another way: if you can buy fifteen eMacs with great keyboards and mice and cable management, or twenty Dells, most IT managers will opt to go with the Dells.
But if all you want is a cheap and easy box for a non-technical person to run Word and Excel and Internet Explorer on, you can get a workable Dell (Dimension 2400, Celeron 2.2GHz, 40GB HD, 128MB RAM) for $500 to $600, while the cheapest Mac is the eMac (800MHz G4, 40GB HD, 128MB RAM) at $800. Multiply that by even just a couple dozen people, and the price differential really adds up.
The problem is that high-end Macs are competitive to high-end PC's, and mid-range Macs are (somewhat) competitive to mid-range PC's, but there are no low-end Macs for businesses who want bare-bones end-user computers.