No no, the keyboard: try to read the article, and it quickly becomes obvious it was written by someone normally writing on a qwerty keyboard, with a dvorak keyboard, while looking away at the cute secretary down the hall...
It's quite possible that this boost will lead to more exploits which will lead to a decline...
More likely, the open-source approach, meaning the pride developers take in making good (or at least decent) code, the peer review of said code, and quick fixing when a bug is found, will prevent a decline.
Microsoft bought Spyglass and started flinging shit at Mosaic until they got a working browser in a short time to kill Netscape. Then they flung more shit at it to corner the browser market, then they kept on flinging shit at random, to add this and that feature and eye candy. Since nobody really checks the code outside of Microsoft, and since they don't (didn't?) really care about security as long as nobody finds the flaws, there you have it: IE pisses people off and people switch to the first decent alternative.
That's why I think IE will keep on declining, and Firefox won't.
Hopefully someone will convince people how stupid Fox is,
Rupert Murdock is *far* from stupid, and Fox isn't either. That's what makes them dangerous. They achieve their ultra-right propaganda by cunning punditry, subtle underdogging of (what they consider) "leftists", fast-paced bullshitting and a heavy usage of Goebbels motto: "repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth" (the "fair and balanced" crap).
People who don't know better believe Fox. The same people who think Saddam Hussein somehow was involved in 9/11. That's what makes them dangerous. If they were stupid, it'd be easy to expose them.
and get people to stop using MySpace. Oh, can you imagine it? A world without MySpace?
Uuh, I think the question on many people's minds is: wtf is MySpace? 'nuff said.
it's designed to be low latency rather than to have a network-aware window system and multi-user capabilities. It was designed from the start to be a desktop OS - when everyone else was going multi-user, Be stayed single user and concentrated on its multimedia specialisation.
If that's all it has to offer, I'll just hack together a distro with low-lat Linux kernel packed with all kinds of A/V drivers and software, with login taken out. Gee...
My point is, existing software already does that, be it Linux, Windows (urgh), QNX or whatever. BeOS (or Zeta or whatever it's called) won't work because it has nothing significantly new to offer, and it's not compatible with anything.
Look, a faint dim spark that still lights the way toward the wondrous land of OSes that are not encumbered with the baggage of Unix and Windows.
An OS that's not encumbered by the baggage of Unix or Windows is an OS that:
1 - does not take advantage of decades of POSIX normalisation, made by hundreds of thousands of high-level developers and designers.
2 - does not take advantage of the huge existing base of developers who know the POSIX and Windows API inside and out the world over.
3 - can't run any of the good, and not-so-good software written on any OS for the last 30 years.
4 - Re-implements design flaws that have been already been purged out of Unix or Windows (well, just Unix)
Personally, I wish they didn't waste their time reinventing the wheel. Other designers have already been there, and while there's a lot to say about the heavy legacy of various existing designs, they work and have billions of man/hours put into them.
Either the FP idiots are all asleep at the moment, or it is "rigged" (as if it mattered or something...). Whatever the cause, I welcome interesting first posts for a change.
Remember MS-DOS 5.0 - 6.22? Well, how many times did you crash it while you used it??? Myself? Perhaps 3 times in 5 years... talk about solid/stable
So you turned on your DOS computer 3 times in 5 years then, did you? or did you just stay at the prompt for 5 years?
Also, remember that MSDOS wasn't on the internet. So it could bloody well be stable, since as long as you didn't put an infected floppy in the drive, no malware could get into it.
But anyway, that's comparing apples and oranges here, since MSDOS was just a collection of I/O routines, a boot/init procedure and a shell. Once a program was run, control of the entire machine was basically given to it, and DOS was only called by the program to perform menial tasks. So DOS was stable, yes, as stable as whatever program you ran on it...
Users doing the occassional word-processing, checking email, and web surfing will be perfectly happy with an 8 year old PC.
Actually, you know what's funny? I keep a win98 box around for a ham radio program I want to use occasionally, and for casual browsing in the shed: it's connected to the net, and it's almost never impacted by viruses and winnukes anymore. I have a feeling that, now that win95/98/ME aren't the most common Windows revisions anymore, virus and worm writers focus their attention on more modern Windows and as a result, my silly old Windows box is left alone now:-)
A slashdot article that praises the durability of a microsoft product? Is the world coming to an end?
Well, you know, Unix folks are used to being able to recompile/reuse almost anything that was produced for the past 30+ years, but they take that for granted, so nobody talks about it.
And while I do appreciate that the Windows developers have been able to maintain binary compatibility with a majority of old software, nobody seems to be discussing (1) the speed impact those legacy portions of Windows OS on modern programs, (2) the poor speed of old programs run on modern Windows and (3) the security problems those legacy routines impose on modern Windows.
This said, kudos to the Windows developers who manage to maintain compatibility throughout the years, even with programs that do dirty tricks with the win32 API and, well, DOS programs. It's quite a feat, and it's probably a major reason for Windows users not ditching the hateful OS, since they don't want to lose their investment.
The beauty of this phrase is that it means absolutely nothing. Just like the old sales pitch "it's cheaper than the best from and better than the cheapest from ": it doesn't mean it's either good or cheap.
So, my mobile phone cost me $100 and it's perfectly good for me: will the keyboard cost less than $100? like hell. And a "good mobile phone" may well be one of these $1000 things from Nokia in the eyes of Lebedev, so I'm not holding my breath...
Xorg is fine. It must be your install that was odd.
X.org is indeed fine. The NVidia driver isn't. I'm not putting the blame on X.org, I'm just saying that, sometimes, I have to put up with shit under Linux that I wouldn't necessarily have to put up with under Windows, courtesy of NVidia.
Now, most of the time I'm happier with Linux, but just right now I'm pissed off;-)
despite the growing maturity of Linux as a desktop operating system
I would have agreed if I hadn't seen that Slashdot article about X.org being available on Debian. Now that I've "upgraded" and messed up my X config, I'm not so sure about that...
Perhaps, but as long as they exist we have to waste our time resolving them over and over and over again.
The question is more like: how much time do you spend working on installing/configuring/repairing the Linux (or BSD or whatever *nix) box of your choice, versus how much time you spend installing/configuring/repairing Windows?
For me, it's easy:
1 - Installing Linux: maybe twice as much time as Windows, due mainly to the lack of prepackaged drivers for this or that
2 - Configuring Unix: 10 times as much time as Windows, because I want to have everything neat and well installed, and KDE can be non-obvious at times.
3 - Maintaining Unix: 0. Maintaining Windows: it's an endless pain in the butt (patching, running Norton, de-spyware-ing, de-virusing, renewing licenses, etc etc...)
So, in terms of time, I spend a lot more time installing and configuring Unix, but then after that I'm done for good.
So even with the minor differences in distros as they are, I'm winning over using Windows anyway. And I'm not even talking about the hard-dollar price of Windows and Windows software, so that's why I'm saying that, for moderately technically-savvy people, Linux is already a better choice than Windows, even with its flaws.
Are there too many Linux distributions currently available? Can there be too many?
As long as there are "professional" distros out there (Redhat^H^H^H^H^H^HFedora, Debian, and the other big names), how can there be too many distros? If you don't like a distro, chose another one.
The argument would be different if there was no good distro, but a multitude of not-so-good ones, but it isn't the case, so more doesn't hurt.
As for unifying Linux, this is an old issue that resolved a long time ago: all distros use one or another variant of the BSD init, they all more or less follow the standard way of putting things on the filesystem (/usr,/lib,/bin,/usr/bin,...), they all more or less agree on what should go where, etc... Minor differences between distros are easily resolved, as distros where.deb and.rpm coexist prove.
My suggestion is: buy 24 $400 computers and switch every 20 minutes. That way, you can get a solid 8 hour day of work. When you're done, return them to the place you got them from and ask replacements, so you're good to go for another day:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Coming from a guy whose lastname seems to bare more resemblance with a Klingon name than human, I guess we can take this with a grain of salt.
He supplies the Klingon name, you supply the Klingon grammar.
Dvorak? The composer?
No no, the keyboard: try to read the article, and it quickly becomes obvious it was written by someone normally writing on a qwerty keyboard, with a dvorak keyboard, while looking away at the cute secretary down the hall...
Firstly: John Dvorak is a pompous ass. Secondly: what was the topic again?
It's quite possible that this boost will lead to more exploits which will lead to a decline...
More likely, the open-source approach, meaning the pride developers take in making good (or at least decent) code, the peer review of said code, and quick fixing when a bug is found, will prevent a decline.
Microsoft bought Spyglass and started flinging shit at Mosaic until they got a working browser in a short time to kill Netscape. Then they flung more shit at it to corner the browser market, then they kept on flinging shit at random, to add this and that feature and eye candy. Since nobody really checks the code outside of Microsoft, and since they don't (didn't?) really care about security as long as nobody finds the flaws, there you have it: IE pisses people off and people switch to the first decent alternative.
That's why I think IE will keep on declining, and Firefox won't.
Hopefully someone will convince people how stupid Fox is,
Rupert Murdock is *far* from stupid, and Fox isn't either. That's what makes them dangerous. They achieve their ultra-right propaganda by cunning punditry, subtle underdogging of (what they consider) "leftists", fast-paced bullshitting and a heavy usage of Goebbels motto: "repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth" (the "fair and balanced" crap).
People who don't know better believe Fox. The same people who think Saddam Hussein somehow was involved in 9/11. That's what makes them dangerous. If they were stupid, it'd be easy to expose them.
and get people to stop using MySpace. Oh, can you imagine it? A world without MySpace?
Uuh, I think the question on many people's minds is: wtf is MySpace? 'nuff said.
this operating system fails it and is dying
Does Netcraft comfirm it?
it's designed to be low latency rather than to have a network-aware window system and multi-user capabilities. It was designed from the start to be a desktop OS - when everyone else was going multi-user, Be stayed single user and concentrated on its multimedia specialisation.
If that's all it has to offer, I'll just hack together a distro with low-lat Linux kernel packed with all kinds of A/V drivers and software, with login taken out. Gee...
My point is, existing software already does that, be it Linux, Windows (urgh), QNX or whatever. BeOS (or Zeta or whatever it's called) won't work because it has nothing significantly new to offer, and it's not compatible with anything.
Look, a faint dim spark that still lights the way toward the wondrous land of OSes that are not encumbered with the baggage of Unix and Windows.
An OS that's not encumbered by the baggage of Unix or Windows is an OS that:
1 - does not take advantage of decades of POSIX normalisation, made by hundreds of thousands of high-level developers and designers.
2 - does not take advantage of the huge existing base of developers who know the POSIX and Windows API inside and out the world over.
3 - can't run any of the good, and not-so-good software written on any OS for the last 30 years.
4 - Re-implements design flaws that have been already been purged out of Unix or Windows (well, just Unix)
Personally, I wish they didn't waste their time reinventing the wheel. Other designers have already been there, and while there's a lot to say about the heavy legacy of various existing designs, they work and have billions of man/hours put into them.
1970 called, they want Linux back
Given that Linus Torvalds was born on December 28, 1969, I'd say he was precocious...
Either the FP idiots are all asleep at the moment, or it is "rigged" (as if it mattered or something...). Whatever the cause, I welcome interesting first posts for a change.
Now /. readers will be able to /. not just one website with a single click, but many websites also with a single click.
I believe the Slashdot way of handling multilinks is to repost the same story (called "dupes") and changing link targets in each "dupe"...
Remember MS-DOS 5.0 - 6.22? Well, how many times did you crash it while you used it??? Myself? Perhaps 3 times in 5 years... talk about solid/stable
So you turned on your DOS computer 3 times in 5 years then, did you? or did you just stay at the prompt for 5 years?
Also, remember that MSDOS wasn't on the internet. So it could bloody well be stable, since as long as you didn't put an infected floppy in the drive, no malware could get into it.
But anyway, that's comparing apples and oranges here, since MSDOS was just a collection of I/O routines, a boot/init procedure and a shell. Once a program was run, control of the entire machine was basically given to it, and DOS was only called by the program to perform menial tasks. So DOS was stable, yes, as stable as whatever program you ran on it...
Whenever I need a little extra juice for a new fangled Win2k app I just hit my turbo button. I should get a few more good years out of this old PC...
Bleh... If you want a truly speedy computer, all you have to do is rice it up. S00per f4st racing stripes and stickers make all the difference dude!
Users doing the occassional word-processing, checking email, and web surfing will be perfectly happy with an 8 year old PC.
:-)
Actually, you know what's funny? I keep a win98 box around for a ham radio program I want to use occasionally, and for casual browsing in the shed: it's connected to the net, and it's almost never impacted by viruses and winnukes anymore. I have a feeling that, now that win95/98/ME aren't the most common Windows revisions anymore, virus and worm writers focus their attention on more modern Windows and as a result, my silly old Windows box is left alone now
A slashdot article that praises the durability of a microsoft product? Is the world coming to an end?
Well, you know, Unix folks are used to being able to recompile/reuse almost anything that was produced for the past 30+ years, but they take that for granted, so nobody talks about it.
And while I do appreciate that the Windows developers have been able to maintain binary compatibility with a majority of old software, nobody seems to be discussing (1) the speed impact those legacy portions of Windows OS on modern programs, (2) the poor speed of old programs run on modern Windows and (3) the security problems those legacy routines impose on modern Windows.
This said, kudos to the Windows developers who manage to maintain compatibility throughout the years, even with programs that do dirty tricks with the win32 API and, well, DOS programs. It's quite a feat, and it's probably a major reason for Windows users not ditching the hateful OS, since they don't want to lose their investment.
It will cost less than a good mobile phone
Ah, the magic of flawed logic...
The beauty of this phrase is that it means absolutely nothing. Just like the old sales pitch "it's cheaper than the best from and better than the cheapest from ": it doesn't mean it's either good or cheap.
So, my mobile phone cost me $100 and it's perfectly good for me: will the keyboard cost less than $100? like hell. And a "good mobile phone" may well be one of these $1000 things from Nokia in the eyes of Lebedev, so I'm not holding my breath...
Xorg is fine. It must be your install that was odd.
;-)
X.org is indeed fine. The NVidia driver isn't. I'm not putting the blame on X.org, I'm just saying that, sometimes, I have to put up with shit under Linux that I wouldn't necessarily have to put up with under Windows, courtesy of NVidia.
Now, most of the time I'm happier with Linux, but just right now I'm pissed off
despite the growing maturity of Linux as a desktop operating system
I would have agreed if I hadn't seen that Slashdot article about X.org being available on Debian. Now that I've "upgraded" and messed up my X config, I'm not so sure about that...
Most distros use some variation of sysv init, claiming that "all distros" use a BSD init system is completely absurd.
;)
Yes indeed, you're right, I mistyped. Serves me right for not using the preview button
Perhaps, but as long as they exist we have to waste our time resolving them over and over and over again.
The question is more like: how much time do you spend working on installing/configuring/repairing the Linux (or BSD or whatever *nix) box of your choice, versus how much time you spend installing/configuring/repairing Windows?
For me, it's easy:
1 - Installing Linux: maybe twice as much time as Windows, due mainly to the lack of prepackaged drivers for this or that
2 - Configuring Unix: 10 times as much time as Windows, because I want to have everything neat and well installed, and KDE can be non-obvious at times.
3 - Maintaining Unix: 0. Maintaining Windows: it's an endless pain in the butt (patching, running Norton, de-spyware-ing, de-virusing, renewing licenses, etc etc...)
So, in terms of time, I spend a lot more time installing and configuring Unix, but then after that I'm done for good.
So even with the minor differences in distros as they are, I'm winning over using Windows anyway. And I'm not even talking about the hard-dollar price of Windows and Windows software, so that's why I'm saying that, for moderately technically-savvy people, Linux is already a better choice than Windows, even with its flaws.
I am a windows apologist - look at my history and you will see I entirely willing to point out the failings of Linux to the Zealots as the next guy.
"I am a Ford apologist - I'm willing to point out the failings of Toyota".
Are there too many Linux distributions currently available? Can there be too many?
/lib, /bin, /usr/bin, ...), they all more or less agree on what should go where, etc... Minor differences between distros are easily resolved, as distros where .deb and .rpm coexist prove.
As long as there are "professional" distros out there (Redhat^H^H^H^H^H^HFedora, Debian, and the other big names), how can there be too many distros? If you don't like a distro, chose another one.
The argument would be different if there was no good distro, but a multitude of not-so-good ones, but it isn't the case, so more doesn't hurt.
As for unifying Linux, this is an old issue that resolved a long time ago: all distros use one or another variant of the BSD init, they all more or less follow the standard way of putting things on the filesystem (/usr,
Average lifespan of a windows computer - 4 minutes
:-)
Average lifespan of a BSD computer 10 years.
So the choice is between a computer that turns into a zombie in 4 minutes, or a one that keeps on dying for 10 years is it?
Yeah... then your $400 new computer is going to get infected, are you going to throw it out and buy yet another?
:-)
It does get your 20 minutes per PC though.
My suggestion is: buy 24 $400 computers and switch every 20 minutes. That way, you can get a solid 8 hour day of work. When you're done, return them to the place you got them from and ask replacements, so you're good to go for another day
The vegan version consists mostly in thick algae that they cram into the bullet wound, until it's plugged.