Some of us have had the royal order of the Mettalica slapdown, and can't STAND their songs, and would never waste perfectly good diskspace and bandwidth shuttling them around napster.
"Are you now, or have you ever been..." springs to mind. This little rats-in-suits startup gives me an uneasy feeling. The laywer-happy media juggernauts will get a warm feeling paying for the illusion of security. However, the service they are getting will, in some cases be other than they paid for.
In any case, there are some serious issues with a commercial big brother shovelware outfit like this- what redress will people have when they screw up, and falsely accuse people of all sorts of things? food for thought.
I don't like them, and I certainly do not trust them further than I can spit them.
Ah, the Amiga crazies. Bless. They really are a lot of fun.
Those of us who still have working Amiga 4000s with enough tricked-out hardware to run a reasonable mini non-linear video edit setup are generally rather ashamed to admit the fact, lest we be tarred with the same brush.
With the exception of a few tinkerers like Matt (Neko) S (who reminds me of vintage car enthusiasts and the like; up to the elbows in oil, and utterly cheerful), they are mostly borderline nutballs. They have a lot of problems with fact that machines from different eras have different orders of magnitude of performance.
The mantra "it will be faster on the amiga, the programmers are better" ignores the fact that you can (for an example) encode a 15 minute mp3 on an 800mhz athlon in 1 minute, or overnight on a deeply tricked out Amiga. Another example would be putting 3ds max on a very average PC up against a maxed out amiga running the 3d package of choice (t3d?). What about an old beige g3 mac with an Echo Gina and logic audio silver, against any Amiga setup you care to mention?
If you think that you know otherwise, the people who design both FPUs and DSPs would probably love to know your secrets. The advocacy loons have no grasp of why vintage computers are cool.
Yes, I love my PET 8032 as well, but I don't expect a conversion of Unreal Tournament for it:)
Vintage computers are to be enjoyed for what they are, and nostalgia is never what it used to be. They aren't coming back, any more than powdered eggs, Vera Lynn or the Home Service.
It should be possible to point this out, without screaming teenies hurling abuse at you, casting aspersions on your sexuality and parentage, and ranting at you in distinctly broken english.
Ah well, I suppose that not all eccentrics are harmless and charming. Still, 2 troll points need to be awarded to anyone who uses 3 or more exclamation marks in a row, I feel...:)
Face it guys, the Amiga died years ago, it isn't about to be reborn; it's irrelevant, capiche? Enjoy your old machines, but give up trying to persuade others of its inherent superiority.
Mine all ran out of slots and CPU power years ago. It's getting hard finding drives smaller than 4 gig for them, too!
Let it rest in peace, and remember it as the machine which brought Quantel-stylee painting to the desktop, along with video, affordable digital audio and 3d.
It was a great machine, which did what it did despite the series of bungling company owners, not because of them. The flashes of brilliance came from Jay Miner (may he rest in peace) and the original dev guys, and some of the battlers like Dave Haynie.
The survivors of this mad period have moved on, isn't it time you did?
Those that care can find my lame mp3s at www.mp3.com/tib - those that can't should seek the word of BOB. Amazing!
Oddly, there IS an installshield decompiler. I found it by accident one day, while looking for some general crypto tools (bottled frequency analysis and the like).
Works well. Were I at home, I'd boot into billyware, and tell you what it's called.
Well, if you knew the algorithim, and an alledged plaintext, wouldn't that make an a search through keyspace very easy to do, and thus verify with most common algorithims (esp weak ones like DES)?
Pardon if I am being naive, I'm not really a proper cypherpunk, just a bit of a newbie:)
If you care, you can listen to my lame mp3 at http://www.mp3.com/tib
Of course, the reverse of that would be some embittered Erisian free software people trying to kill the hype, so all the money goes away, and they can go back to hacking in relative obscurity.
It does still ask for a login. Try on a machine which doesn't allow cookies at all, or when you have no account. I think your testing was a little less comprehensive that might have been hoped.:)
Oh well, the parochial nature of the NYT stories, and the marginal and decreasing journalistic standards mean that I'm not going to sign up to yet another lame web "account", and remember yet another fricken password. It's only a matter of time before I accidentally use one of my root passwords for a core server to register for one of these lame sites.. and that would be BAD:)
Bah, while a lot of that makes sense, sometimes a scrap of UF amuses my users. By pointing out the eccentricities and excesses of us sysadmin types, they're afforded a chance to laugh just as heartily as they would the lunacy of Dilbert's pointy-haired boss.
It's an ice-breaker. However, the strip itself is a poorly-drawn and clumsily written affair, and only funny due to the very fact that it's a cliquey affair... HOWEVER, people feel included. It's very lonely, some days, being (in my case) a solo sysadmin in a small company.
People ask "what do you do all day?". This is soul-crushing. After the first few blank looks, you learn not to say "I audited the firewall, recompiled sendmail, and discovered a nasty buffer overrun in {insert name of software here}". They don't want to actually know; they want to be sent away with re-assuring generalities laced with current buzzwords.
Yes, people can be rude, people can be stupid. People don't treat their pet geeks with respect. They take the piss mercilessly (well, they do at first.. they learn, muahahahahahahaah!). I don't think it's so bad if techies want to have a harmless laugh at a lumpy and slightly slipshod cartoon.
Gallows humour is far from uncommon; try spending some time with doctors in a busy general hospital. Their humour is amongst the blackest, most obscene and twisted you'll encounter, but it keeps them sane (well, for some values of "sane").
Moreover, I don't take particularly kindly when people tell me what to think. I don't accept it from the "great and the good", and I certainly don't intend to take it from forth rate cartoonist who has trouble counting to ten without removing his shoes.:-)
End of rant/flame off.
Listen to my crappy techno- The Inedible Buddhas- if swallowed, seek immediate medical assistance.
"It's up to you to decide what you need. Furthermore, Linux gives you power, but it takes some time to learn how to harness it. Thus, if you mostly need commercial sw, or if you don't feel like learning new commands and concepts, you had better look elsewhere. Be aware that many newcomers give up because of initial difficulties."
It's not a windows replacement; it shouldn't be taken as one. What with all the little kiddos jumping on the IPO bandwagon etc, they certainly have a financial interest to make linux in the round seem like an everyman operating system. It isn't. Most people aren't suited to making friends with it- they don't have the time to invest.
This doesn't make them bad people- maybe they just have other priorities... In which case, linux based appliances, or things like the BeOS Stinger webpad, EPOC boxen, or even, yes, Wintendo and Macs might suit them better.
It might not be fashionable right now (in the middle of all the American goldrush hype:) to simply put all of this down to technological darwinism, but it's the truth. To learn a *nix, you really have to be willing to tinker, and play detective.
The most promising new linuxer I know is a part time musician and a pig farmer... He told me that he installed RatHed 6 the other day, and was wrestling with it cheerfully.. All he wanted was pointers to good collections of docs, software etc. I pointed him at the HOWTOs and the excellent O'Reilly "Running Linux" book (something of a godsend when faced with linux for the first time- wish I had a copy when I was struggling:-).
He seemed very pleased with that, and went back to configuring X, promising "I'll fiddle with it until it works". That just about made my day.
Linux was a minority OS for a reason. Few people have the sheer bloodymindedness needed to get the best out of a *nix..
There's nothing wrong with being a newbie, not at all- it shows that you're willing to try something new. What is bad is expecting others to carry you.
When the area isn't an easy one, you have to be prepared to put some effort in.. After all, people don't complain when they buy a burette that they instantly know the chemistry behind titration, do they? You don't buy a car and scream at Ford because you don't know how to drive...
Anyway, end of rant. Remember that for all the frustration caused by people who refuse to RTFM, there are many people quietly tinkering, and learning. How many people could resist taking a clock apart to see how it works, when they were little?:)
Why not boost my flagging chart position, by downloading a copy of "mindless thumping techno" from my mp3.com page?:)
For your info, you might like to have a look at stand.org.uk's website. They are a campaigning organisation raising the awareness of privacy and crypto issues in the UK... Interesting reading.
Umm, it's not a case of hard up- MS funds a lot of politicians- sometimes inderectly, by sending judges to use their "spare" holiday homes, sometimes by paying congressment some campaign funds through shell companies.
There's a reason why it took someone with the resolve of the estimable Janet Reno so long to get them nailed up in court- they have a LOT of political friends.
Of course, now MS are openly lobbying to get antitrust fiunding cut back- as the SNL church lady would say, "how conveeeeeeeinient".
I suspect that even people in the open src movement don't have a problem with companies making good per se, especially by dint of superior products.
However, the tactics used by MS to saddle the world with their forth-rate software (strangely, their non-monopolistic hardware is very good- go figure) are distinctly beyond the pale.
From this side of the pond (ie Europe), it all looks very unsavory.
Actually, Turing was excluded because of his homosexuality. It was tolerated in an academic env., but not in a military. He wasn't allowed to work on the top-secret postwar research into computing devices- something which arguably set the emerging science back years.
One day, he had cause to report a burglary to the police, and told them that his partner was male, by the by, and they charged him with indecency-related offences.
This tragic and brilliant figure eventually took his own life, years before the world was allowed to know how many lives, both allied and german/japanese/italian etc he saved by hastening the end of the second world war.
Of course, his idealised computing devices (partly an attempt on the fortress of Goedel's theorem) helped define a lot of the grounds of Formal Systems, and computation theory. Although the concept of the Universal Turing Machine was more or less an abstraction of Babbage's unbuilt second Difference Engine, he was the father of the modern computer (iterative models being much more practical for most purposes than Church's functional approach).
So his brilliance in breaking the more secure version of enigma (the first one was broken by a brilliant Polish crypanalyst, exploiting repeated day keys, and turing took a lot of inspiration from his approach) wasn't his only huge contribution. It's what most people know him for, but ultimately, hundreds of years hence, his achievements in the field of computation should be seen as more important.
I still think it's a tragedy that we lost such a brilliant mind to homophobia, though.
Just my two pennorth...
http://www.mp3.com/tib for my crappy amatuerish noises...:)
What about dear old Apple, with their "Desktop supercomputer" (at a screaming 450mhz, heh).
They've been resonsible for the odd bit of.. well, FUD.
Also, as much as I hate to say it, some of the more linux advopuppies have, too, on occasions. This is a shame, since it just erodes the credibility of those honest folks who have something valid to say.
Vint Cerf unbiased? Since when? Did he quit MCI/Worldcom without telling anyone? He has as much of an agenda as say, Bill Gates or Linus, despite all the good work he did in the past.
Let's try and focus, and see beyond the oh-so-short term, people...
Psion already has a perfectly good multitasking OS which is a damned sight more stable than AmigaDOS.
As someone with three (count 'em) Amigas on my home LAN, I really think it's a dead end technology, and of historical insterest only.
Without memory protection, and indeed support for modern devices (ie, things which aren't made of wood and flint!), it's really just a cumbersome beige white elephant.
This is indeed a problem. Linux could, at least, do with something like OMS..
Since Gibson bought opcode a while back, you know who to whine at:)
Seriously though, audio is the main reason I keep my windows install working.. Until I can get a copy of Rebirth for linux, a decent sequencer, patch librarian, audio and MIDI control etc, I can't ditch it alltogether...
What's worse that that drivers for soundcards of a higher quality than a basic SB16 are virtually impossible to find. Sure, there's an amazingly glitchy and unreliable sblive driver.. but what to do, if you want to drive a creamware pulsar, SW1000XG or an Event Gina?
One size truly does not fit all- in this case, linux is a lousy fit. I'll use it for what it's good at, for now...
You know, I didn't chose linux because it was a jumped-up playstation. I chose it because it's a relatively stable general computing platform, with the ability to run a lot of geniunely useful software.
I'm guessing that quite a few folks feel like me, that is to say, if it becomes reduced to a toy for the lowest common denominator, then I will seek a new platform. I always liked FreeBSD:)
Linux didn't get to be even this grown up by pandering to every trivial fashion to come along.. Frankly, if I wanted a brain-damaged box, hobbed by trying to be overly friendly, I would have bought another Mac...
Isn't it possible that there's a standard form like that sent out to normal beta testers,and that the admin people who turn out paperwork weren't warned about a product being subject to the GPL, or indeed what it is?
I am sure a few folk are going to jump up and down, and cry "foul", but IMHO, I just think it was a simple snafu due to lousy organisational communications... Forgiveable, for a traditional software company dipping a toe into the wild and wacky world of Open software, maybe?
Isn't it possible that there's a standard form like that sent out to normal beta testers,and that the admin people who turn out paperwork weren't warned about a product being subject to the GPL, or indeed what it is?
I am sure a few folk are going to jump up and down, and cry "foul", but IMHO, I just think it was a simple snafu due to lousy organisational communications... Forgiveable, for a traditional software company dipping a toe into the wild and wacky world of Open software, maybe?
Would this be "flamebait" on the part of the previous poster?:)
Still, I think it's wee bit mendacious on the part of IBM. The curse of winmodems (or HSP modems, in Newspeak). Wasn't someone writing an driver layer for these crappy things? Someone care to remind me about this one?
Right now, the best linux laptop seems to be the Sony Vaio machines.. I have a little Vaio C1 picturebook.. It has a mobile PII/266, a 1024x480 tft screen, and shock, horror, the modem works!
XFree is more than acceptably nippy on it- unlike accelerated X. Xig cliamed that the machine was "lab tested", yet were unable to provide a demo version which worked with the machine, giving the excuse that "someone else must have configured it when testing, and we don't know what they did":)
I had a few problems installing, due to the USB floppy drive being visible to the BIOS, so the boot disk worked, but not to the installer at a later stage to load stuff from the second floppy disk.. The trick seemed to be to install from HD in a totally minimal way, and fix it up afterwards...
With those caveats, and bearing in mind the very reasonable price tag, I'd have no problem suggesting one of these great little boxen to a potential mobile linuxer. They even look nice, and so have enough of a "wow factor" to annoy ordinary cloneslingers:)
This weekend, I'm doing some freelance work, to replace an Apple "server" with a penguin box, at my partner's office..
Spoilsport that she is, she seems to think that a system with no real security measures, memory protection or multitasking is a pretty poor choice for a server platform.
Of course, being a design company, macs are the perfect client machine, since they are painfully easy to use, and fairly easy to untrash. However, as a server? The expression "dumber than a box of rocks" springs to mind...
Slashdot Mirror
"Are you now, or have you ever been..." springs to mind. This little rats-in-suits startup gives me an uneasy feeling. The laywer-happy media juggernauts will get a warm feeling paying for the illusion of security. However, the service they are getting will, in some cases be other than they paid for.
In any case, there are some serious issues with a commercial big brother shovelware outfit like this- what redress will people have when they screw up, and falsely accuse people of all sorts of things? food for thought.
I don't like them, and I certainly do not trust them further than I can spit them.
Just my 5 cents...
If you care, my lame mp3s live at http://www.mp3.com/tib...
Those of us who still have working Amiga 4000s with enough tricked-out hardware to run a reasonable mini non-linear video edit setup are generally rather ashamed to admit the fact, lest we be tarred with the same brush.
With the exception of a few tinkerers like Matt (Neko) S (who reminds me of vintage car enthusiasts and the like; up to the elbows in oil, and utterly cheerful), they are mostly borderline nutballs. They have a lot of problems with fact that machines from different eras have different orders of magnitude of performance.
The mantra "it will be faster on the amiga, the programmers are better" ignores the fact that you can (for an example) encode a 15 minute mp3 on an 800mhz athlon in 1 minute, or overnight on a deeply tricked out Amiga. Another example would be putting 3ds max on a very average PC up against a maxed out amiga running the 3d package of choice (t3d?). What about an old beige g3 mac with an Echo Gina and logic audio silver, against any Amiga setup you care to mention?
If you think that you know otherwise, the people who design both FPUs and DSPs would probably love to know your secrets. The advocacy loons have no grasp of why vintage computers are cool.
Yes, I love my PET 8032 as well, but I don't expect a conversion of Unreal Tournament for it
Vintage computers are to be enjoyed for what they are, and nostalgia is never what it used to be. They aren't coming back, any more than powdered eggs, Vera Lynn or the Home Service.
It should be possible to point this out, without screaming teenies hurling abuse at you, casting aspersions on your sexuality and parentage, and ranting at you in distinctly broken english.
Ah well, I suppose that not all eccentrics are harmless and charming. Still, 2 troll points need to be awarded to anyone who uses 3 or more exclamation marks in a row, I feel...
Face it guys, the Amiga died years ago, it isn't about to be reborn; it's irrelevant, capiche? Enjoy your old machines, but give up trying to persuade others of its inherent superiority.
Mine all ran out of slots and CPU power years ago. It's getting hard finding drives smaller than 4 gig for them, too!
Let it rest in peace, and remember it as the machine which brought Quantel-stylee painting to the desktop, along with video, affordable digital audio and 3d.
It was a great machine, which did what it did despite the series of bungling company owners, not because of them. The flashes of brilliance came from Jay Miner (may he rest in peace) and the original dev guys, and some of the battlers like Dave Haynie.
The survivors of this mad period have moved on, isn't it time you did?
Those that care can find my lame mp3s at www.mp3.com/tib - those that can't should seek the word of BOB. Amazing!
Works well. Were I at home, I'd boot into billyware, and tell you what it's called.
Pardon if I am being naive, I'm not really a proper cypherpunk, just a bit of a newbie :)
If you care, you can listen to my lame mp3 at http://www.mp3.com/tib
Or something.
Apologies to the rest of you, nothing worse than an inside joke.
However, you'll be ok, if you remember that
NOTHING IS TRUE
and
ALL GENERALISATIONS ARE FALSE.
Big up Kallisti, aaaye.
Bill D and Jimmy C are much underrated.. any idea what the K foundation is up to these days?
Hail Eris..
Oh well, the parochial nature of the NYT stories, and the marginal and decreasing journalistic standards mean that I'm not going to sign up to yet another lame web "account", and remember yet another fricken password. It's only a matter of time before I accidentally use one of my root passwords for a core server to register for one of these lame sites.. and that would be BAD :)
It's an ice-breaker. However, the strip itself is a poorly-drawn and clumsily written affair, and only funny due to the very fact that it's a cliquey affair... HOWEVER, people feel included. It's very lonely, some days, being (in my case) a solo sysadmin in a small company.
People ask "what do you do all day?". This is soul-crushing. After the first few blank looks, you learn not to say "I audited the firewall, recompiled sendmail, and discovered a nasty buffer overrun in {insert name of software here}". They don't want to actually know; they want to be sent away with re-assuring generalities laced with current buzzwords.
Yes, people can be rude, people can be stupid. People don't treat their pet geeks with respect. They take the piss mercilessly (well, they do at first.. they learn, muahahahahahahaah!). I don't think it's so bad if techies want to have a harmless laugh at a lumpy and slightly slipshod cartoon.
Gallows humour is far from uncommon; try spending some time with doctors in a busy general hospital. Their humour is amongst the blackest, most obscene and twisted you'll encounter, but it keeps them sane (well, for some values of "sane").
Moreover, I don't take particularly kindly when people tell me what to think. I don't accept it from the "great and the good", and I certainly don't intend to take it from forth rate cartoonist who has trouble counting to ten without removing his shoes. :-)
End of rant/flame off.
Listen to my crappy techno- The Inedible Buddhas- if swallowed, seek immediate medical assistance.
It's not a windows replacement; it shouldn't be taken as one. What with all the little kiddos jumping on the IPO bandwagon etc, they certainly have a financial interest to make linux in the round seem like an everyman operating system. It isn't. Most people aren't suited to making friends with it- they don't have the time to invest.
This doesn't make them bad people- maybe they just have other priorities... In which case, linux based appliances, or things like the BeOS Stinger webpad, EPOC boxen, or even, yes, Wintendo and Macs might suit them better.
It might not be fashionable right now (in the middle of all the American goldrush hype :) to simply put all of this down to technological darwinism, but it's the truth. To learn a *nix, you really have to be willing to tinker, and play detective.
The most promising new linuxer I know is a part time musician and a pig farmer... He told me that he installed RatHed 6 the other day, and was wrestling with it cheerfully.. All he wanted was pointers to good collections of docs, software etc. I pointed him at the HOWTOs and the excellent O'Reilly "Running Linux" book (something of a godsend when faced with linux for the first time- wish I had a copy when I was struggling :-).
He seemed very pleased with that, and went back to configuring X, promising "I'll fiddle with it until it works". That just about made my day.
Linux was a minority OS for a reason. Few people have the sheer bloodymindedness needed to get the best out of a *nix..
There's nothing wrong with being a newbie, not at all- it shows that you're willing to try something new. What is bad is expecting others to carry you.
When the area isn't an easy one, you have to be prepared to put some effort in.. After all, people don't complain when they buy a burette that they instantly know the chemistry behind titration, do they? You don't buy a car and scream at Ford because you don't know how to drive...
Anyway, end of rant. Remember that for all the frustration caused by people who refuse to RTFM, there are many people quietly tinkering, and learning. How many people could resist taking a clock apart to see how it works, when they were little? :)
Why not boost my flagging chart position, by downloading a copy of "mindless thumping techno" from my mp3.com page? :)
For your info, you might like to have a look at stand.org.uk's website. They are a campaigning organisation raising the awareness of privacy and crypto issues in the UK... Interesting reading.
Umm, it's not a case of hard up- MS funds a lot of politicians- sometimes inderectly, by sending judges to use their "spare" holiday homes, sometimes by paying congressment some campaign funds through shell companies.
There's a reason why it took someone with the resolve of the estimable Janet Reno so long to get them nailed up in court- they have a LOT of political friends.
Of course, now MS are openly lobbying to get antitrust fiunding cut back- as the SNL church lady would say, "how conveeeeeeeinient".
I suspect that even people in the open src movement don't have a problem with companies making good per se, especially by dint of superior products.
However, the tactics used by MS to saddle the world with their forth-rate software (strangely, their non-monopolistic hardware is very good- go figure) are distinctly beyond the pale.
From this side of the pond (ie Europe), it all looks very unsavory.
Actually, Turing was excluded because of his homosexuality. It was tolerated in an academic env., but not in a military. He wasn't allowed to work on the top-secret postwar research into computing devices- something which arguably set the emerging science back years.
:)
One day, he had cause to report a burglary to the police, and told them that his partner was male, by the by, and they charged him with indecency-related offences.
This tragic and brilliant figure eventually took his own life, years before the world was allowed to know how many lives, both allied and german/japanese/italian etc he saved by hastening the end of the second world war.
Of course, his idealised computing devices (partly an attempt on the fortress of Goedel's theorem) helped define a lot of the grounds of Formal Systems, and computation theory. Although the concept of the Universal Turing Machine was more or less an abstraction of Babbage's unbuilt second Difference Engine, he was the father of the modern computer (iterative models being much more practical for most purposes than Church's functional approach).
So his brilliance in breaking the more secure version of enigma (the first one was broken by a brilliant Polish crypanalyst, exploiting repeated day keys, and turing took a lot of inspiration from his approach) wasn't his only huge contribution. It's what most people know him for, but ultimately, hundreds of years hence, his achievements in the field of computation should be seen as more important.
I still think it's a tragedy that we lost such a brilliant mind to homophobia, though.
Just my two pennorth...
http://www.mp3.com/tib for my crappy amatuerish noises...
What about dear old Apple, with their "Desktop supercomputer" (at a screaming 450mhz, heh).
They've been resonsible for the odd bit of.. well, FUD.
Also, as much as I hate to say it, some of the more linux advopuppies have, too, on occasions. This is a shame, since it just erodes the credibility of those honest folks who have something valid to say.
Let's not sink to their level, eh?
Vint Cerf unbiased? Since when? Did he quit MCI/Worldcom without telling anyone? He has as much of an agenda as say, Bill Gates or Linus, despite all the good work he did in the past.
Let's try and focus, and see beyond the oh-so-short term, people...
Oh, and the other thing to remember is that the current psions are more powerful than the average Amiga, anyway :-)
A Psion netbook could leave my A4000/060 for dead...
Psion already has a perfectly good multitasking OS which is a damned sight more stable than AmigaDOS.
As someone with three (count 'em) Amigas on my home LAN, I really think it's a dead end technology, and of historical insterest only.
Without memory protection, and indeed support for modern devices (ie, things which aren't made of wood and flint!), it's really just a cumbersome beige white elephant.
This is indeed a problem. Linux could, at least, do with something like OMS..
:)
Since Gibson bought opcode a while back, you know who to whine at
Seriously though, audio is the main reason I keep my windows install working.. Until I can get a copy of Rebirth for linux, a decent sequencer, patch librarian, audio and MIDI control etc, I can't ditch it alltogether...
What's worse that that drivers for soundcards of a higher quality than a basic SB16 are virtually impossible to find. Sure, there's an amazingly glitchy and unreliable sblive driver.. but what to do, if you want to drive a creamware pulsar, SW1000XG or an Event Gina?
One size truly does not fit all- in this case, linux is a lousy fit. I'll use it for what it's good at, for now...
You know, I didn't chose linux because it was a jumped-up playstation. I chose it because it's a relatively stable general computing platform, with the ability to run a lot of geniunely useful software.
:)
I'm guessing that quite a few folks feel like me, that is to say, if it becomes reduced to a toy for the lowest common denominator, then I will seek a new platform. I always liked FreeBSD
Linux didn't get to be even this grown up by pandering to every trivial fashion to come along.. Frankly, if I wanted a brain-damaged box, hobbed by trying to be overly friendly, I would have bought another Mac...
Isn't it possible that there's a standard form like that sent out to normal beta testers,and that the admin people who turn out paperwork weren't warned about a product being subject to the GPL, or indeed what it is?
I am sure a few folk are going to jump up and down, and cry "foul", but IMHO, I just think it was a simple snafu due to lousy organisational communications... Forgiveable, for a traditional software company dipping a toe into the wild and wacky world of Open software, maybe?
Your mileage may vary...
>
Isn't it possible that there's a standard form like that sent out to normal beta testers,and that the admin people who turn out paperwork weren't warned about a product being subject to the GPL, or indeed what it is?
I am sure a few folk are going to jump up and down, and cry "foul", but IMHO, I just think it was a simple snafu due to lousy organisational communications... Forgiveable, for a traditional software company dipping a toe into the wild and wacky world of Open software, maybe?
Your mileage may vary...
>
Would this be "flamebait" on the part of the previous poster? :)
:)
:)
Still, I think it's wee bit mendacious on the part of IBM. The curse of winmodems (or HSP modems, in Newspeak). Wasn't someone writing an driver layer for these crappy things? Someone care to remind me about this one?
Right now, the best linux laptop seems to be the Sony Vaio machines.. I have a little Vaio C1 picturebook.. It has a mobile PII/266, a 1024x480 tft screen, and shock, horror, the modem works!
XFree is more than acceptably nippy on it- unlike accelerated X. Xig cliamed that the machine was "lab tested", yet were unable to provide a demo version which worked with the machine, giving the excuse that "someone else must have configured it when testing, and we don't know what they did"
I had a few problems installing, due to the USB floppy drive being visible to the BIOS, so the boot disk worked, but not to the installer at a later stage to load stuff from the second floppy disk.. The trick seemed to be to install from HD in a totally minimal way, and fix it up afterwards...
With those caveats, and bearing in mind the very reasonable price tag, I'd have no problem suggesting one of these great little boxen to a potential mobile linuxer. They even look nice, and so have enough of a "wow factor" to annoy ordinary cloneslingers
Ah, I was rambling again.. sorry.
This weekend, I'm doing some freelance work, to replace an Apple "server" with a penguin box, at my partner's office..
Spoilsport that she is, she seems to think that a system with no real security measures, memory protection or multitasking is a pretty poor choice for a server platform.
Of course, being a design company, macs are the perfect client machine, since they are painfully easy to use, and fairly easy to untrash. However, as a server? The expression "dumber than a box of rocks" springs to mind...
Hah, they can't even manage the minor eyecandy of 3.5 (the "let's hack some crappy old shareware and call it a new OS release" version).
Let's just be thankful that no-one asked them to arrange a piss-up in a brewery.