Yes, you can install redhat 7 in 5 minutes without knowing much about your computer, but do you really think that Grandma wants to learn the directory structure, or that Joe will be awed by the power of the command line?
Does Grandma know what C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\IOSUBSYS\AIC78XX.MPD is for?
Does Joe know what DOS command and switches to use to copy a directory branch to another location while preserving file attributes but excluding empty directories?
Just because a product contains a feature that some people are not interested in does not mean the entire product is useless.
... they want to... have a bright and cheery GUI with nice big buttons staring back at them.
The USDoJ's current plan is to split M$ into two parts: an OS company and an applications company. As I have stated before, the OS company _will still have a monopoly_.
Monopolies are not illegal.
Abusing monopoly power is. Microsoft got in trouble because they used their OS monopoly to leverage their other products. (The case started with Internet Exploiter, but many other examples were uncovered.)
By splitting the OS division off into a separate company, they can no longer use each other to control the industry.
Buying from a company like Dell or Compaq gives the end-user the convenience of one central point for support.
On the other hand, buying from a company like Compaq gives them the ability to say, "F**k off, you didn't buy Officially Approved Equipment and thus you aren't supported. And since everything from the motherboard to the screws holding the case together won't work in any other computer on Earth, you'll have to buy a whole new machine just to install a f**king CD-ROM drive. Have a nice day, and thank you for choosing Compaq."
(Based on a real world story. The profanity I added.)
For one thing, if you really knew what you were talking about, you would know that the win98 SE upgrade from '98 is not $125. Actually, when it came out, IIRC, the cd was free except $5 s/h.
There were two upgrades available.
One contained just the bug fixes that SE also included. It did not include Internet Connection Sharing or other "New Features". That was the cheap one.
Upgrading from Win98 to Win98SE has always costed around $90 list.
Now, you also seem to pretend that everyone who buys a copy of windows will automatically upgrade to the next version, at a retail price.
That is what Microsoft's revenue model is based on.
They generally leverage their other products to ensure this, too. You have Windows X and Office Y. Your friend buys Windows X+1 and Office Y+1. Office Y+1 does not work well with Office Y, so you buy Office Y+1. Surprise, Office Y+1 doesn't work well with Windows X, so you also have to upgrade to Windows X+1. Gee, isn't that a surprise.
You also assume everyone started from windows 3.1 and upgraded.. nope.
But if you did have a computer since then, and you weren't running DOS all this time, what were you doing? Are you suggesting everyone switched from FreeBSD to WinME?:-)
Most of the legal copies of windows floating around are bundled with computers, where the suppliers (ala Dell) may pay a small price (for being MS buddies).
The "small price" is typically about what the Retail Upgrade version costs, or so Microsoft assures us. About $90 each.
If it was the Full Retail version, it would be about $200 each.
Disk drives do not work in 'bytes'. Low level software/hardware interpretes...
Actually, every disk drive made within the past twenty years that I know of works in units of bytes called "sectors" or "blocks". Typically something like 512 bytes at a time. Anything smaller then that cannot be addressed directly; you have to read/write the entire block.
A serial communications line is just that: Serial. A sequence of bits. Disk drives and related devices are block devices, and function that way at a fundamental level. That is the difference you are missing.
1 Kilobyte, that measn 1024 bytes if it's memory and 1000 bytes if it's communication.
Communication lines are almost always measured in bits per second, and not bytes per second, so you generally won't see anything-bytes for comm lines.
From a documentary movie ("From the Earth to the Moon"), a book (I forget the title), and various. I could be wrong, and apparently am. I stand corrected.
No single ignition source of the fire was conclusively identified.
This I knew, but I wasn't saying otherwise.
This atmosphere presents severe fire hazards if the amount and location of combustibles in the Command Module are not restricted and controlled.
And, in the case of a high-pressure, pure-oxygen environment, just about anything can be considered a combustible.:-(
The *only* place where 'storage' is measured constantly in powers of two is on-chip memory.
Ummm, right. And what do we have hard disks for? Why, to store data from on-chip memory. When you are storing units which are based on powers of two, it makes sense to use ratings based on powers of two. Gee, whodathunkit?
Communication lines are almost always (correctly) measured with powers of ten.
This is because communication lines do not work with bytes. A comm line is a bit stream. The only thing you care about is how many bits per second are comming down that wire. Things like bytes and frames and such occur at higher protocol levels and do not affect the bit rate of the line.
Deja's going to be 'out' if they don't straighten things up soon.
Deja is providing a service which is in demand, as is evidenced by the large number of lusers in this forum complaining about it.
Deja provides this service for free, so there is no legal avenue for any of their lusers to require improved service. Nor can their lusers threaten to withhold payment.
Deja is apparently the best provider in this market segment, so there will be no migration of customers to competing services.
Given those facts, please explain to me why they are going to be "out"?
Well, you could always argue that the demise of UUNET started with the cross posts from fidonet....
Hey! FidoNET was never as bad as Usenet was. Mainly because FidoNET retained the idea of personal responsibility, and if you acted like a flaming moron, you got kicked out. If a particular node was a constant source of flaming morons, that node's feed was cut. A far cry from the anarchy and anonymous posts of Usenet, but it kept things sane.
(And yes, I can still remember my FidoNET node number: 1:324/127.4)
So you're acting like they've done something to harm you somehow. You have paid precisely nothing for the service, and got more then that back out. Ever hear the phrase "Beggars can't be choosers?"
Don't like Deja? Fine, invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in processors, storage, and Usenet feeds, and run your very own Usenet archive. Don't want to pay? Then tough luck. Life is hard.
Google is free, too.
What does that have to do with anything?
I am complaining about the facts that a big part of their archive has been offline for over six months now...
Gee, I guess you had better demand your money back, huh?
The number of people in this forum bitching about Deja simply astounds me. It is a free service. You pay not one red cent for it. And yet, when they have to take stuff offline for awhile because it would cost to much otherwise, "it's gone to hell" and people start asking for "a good alternative". When they try to add some way to generate income to their service, so they can keep it online and continue to give it away for free, people give up in disgust. I'm willing to bet dollars to donuts that if that "good alternative" was also a paid service, they'd get precisely zero new subscribers from this forum.
AGP is just an extension of PCI, and as such, it adds very little to the cost of the system.
Actually, AGP bypasses the PCI bus. That was the whole point of AGP -- to bypass the (sometimes multiple) bus bridge chips and abstractions that the PCI design uses, and thus streamline the pipe between the graphics adapter and main system memory.
Unfortunately, every benchmark I've seen only gave about a 10% performance boost for AGP over PCI. It appears that system memory is always going to be dog slow when compared to local graphics card memory. The only design to actually try to offload graphics memory to AGP was the Intel i740, which was an abysmal failue. So there is some question as to whether AGP accomplished anything except generating patent revenues for Intel.
Hey! I just saw something I've been looking for (well, kinda) for some time now.
This screenshot includes an image (opened in a bitmap editor) of a chess board being tilted and a few chess pieces flying off of it.
I used to have this graphic as my background in PC/GEOS (AKA GeoWorks). In fact, I still have a copy of it, but it is in some propriatary image format that only PC/GEOS knows about.
Does anyone know where this image came from? Did it come with Windows, originally? And where can I get a copy of it in GIF or JPEG format?
I wonder if there are any futures plans of possibly branching cartoon network into a seperate anime network with 24 hour anime.
I find it somewhat amusing that "anime" is simply the Japanese word for "cartoon". So, to translate: I wonder if there are any plans for branching cartoon network into a separate cartoon network with 24 hour cartoons?
Having just quit my job as a defense contractor, the largest problem is getting the local DAA (Designated approval authority, or something like that...) to approve the use of the software.
Pretty much. Taking a look at the big picture, it pretty much comes down to one thing: The DoD loves paperwork. They thrive on it. Whether or not the product you're choosing actually works or not doesn't matter, as long as it has all its certification paperwork. This isn't likely to change any time soon.
This tends to conflict with the open, rapid, community-effort, bazaar style of development. The rapid revs and loose organization don't lend themselves to certification. Even if they did, most certs require you to retest for every change. Since many of Open Source's strengths stem from the rapid revs, this makes things difficult.
And, yes, I realize that you could "freeze" a particular distribution, certify it, and then rev less often. But again: Taking full advantage of Open Source means you have to accept rapid revs.
This isn't to say things are impossible, or that we should give up, or anything else. I'm just pointing out a source of conflict.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, you can install redhat 7 in 5 minutes without knowing much about your computer, but do you really think that Grandma wants to learn the directory structure, or that Joe will be awed by the power of the command line?
... they want to ... have a bright and cheery GUI with nice big buttons staring back at them.
Does Grandma know what C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\IOSUBSYS\AIC78XX.MPD is for?
Does Joe know what DOS command and switches to use to copy a directory branch to another location while preserving file attributes but excluding empty directories?
Just because a product contains a feature that some people are not interested in does not mean the entire product is useless.
GNOME. KDE.
The USDoJ's current plan is to split M$ into two parts: an OS company and an applications company. As I have stated before, the OS company _will still have a monopoly_.
Monopolies are not illegal.
Abusing monopoly power is. Microsoft got in trouble because they used their OS monopoly to leverage their other products. (The case started with Internet Exploiter, but many other examples were uncovered.)
By splitting the OS division off into a separate company, they can no longer use each other to control the industry.
Problem -- abuse of monopoly power -- solved.
Make sense now?
You have to realize that linux has a weak point ... it is NOT 100% POSIX compliant ...
Um, neither is Windows NT.
Next, please?
Buying from a company like Dell or Compaq gives the end-user the convenience of one central point for support.
On the other hand, buying from a company like Compaq gives them the ability to say, "F**k off, you didn't buy Officially Approved Equipment and thus you aren't supported. And since everything from the motherboard to the screws holding the case together won't work in any other computer on Earth, you'll have to buy a whole new machine just to install a f**king CD-ROM drive. Have a nice day, and thank you for choosing Compaq."
(Based on a real world story. The profanity I added.)
For one thing, if you really knew what you were talking about, you would know that the win98 SE upgrade from '98 is not $125. Actually, when it came out, IIRC, the cd was free except $5 s/h.
:-)
There were two upgrades available.
One contained just the bug fixes that SE also included. It did not include Internet Connection Sharing or other "New Features". That was the cheap one.
Upgrading from Win98 to Win98SE has always costed around $90 list.
Now, you also seem to pretend that everyone who buys a copy of windows will automatically upgrade to the next version, at a retail price.
That is what Microsoft's revenue model is based on.
They generally leverage their other products to ensure this, too. You have Windows X and Office Y. Your friend buys Windows X+1 and Office Y+1. Office Y+1 does not work well with Office Y, so you buy Office Y+1. Surprise, Office Y+1 doesn't work well with Windows X, so you also have to upgrade to Windows X+1. Gee, isn't that a surprise.
You also assume everyone started from windows 3.1 and upgraded.. nope.
But if you did have a computer since then, and you weren't running DOS all this time, what were you doing? Are you suggesting everyone switched from FreeBSD to WinME?
Most of the legal copies of windows floating around are bundled with computers, where the suppliers (ala Dell) may pay a small price (for being MS buddies).
The "small price" is typically about what the Retail Upgrade version costs, or so Microsoft assures us. About $90 each.
If it was the Full Retail version, it would be about $200 each.
If I can get to your box, I can open it. If I can open it, I can fuck off with your drives.
...
... or install a trojan in the system to intercept whatever the decrypt key is
For that matter, there's the old "rubber hose" method of decryption. You beat the user with a rubber hose until they cough up the decrypt key.
Anyone who thinks encryption is the solution to all problems is being silly.
Disk drives do not work in 'bytes'. Low level software/hardware interpretes...
Actually, every disk drive made within the past twenty years that I know of works in units of bytes called "sectors" or "blocks". Typically something like 512 bytes at a time. Anything smaller then that cannot be addressed directly; you have to read/write the entire block.
A serial communications line is just that: Serial. A sequence of bits. Disk drives and related devices are block devices, and function that way at a fundamental level. That is the difference you are missing.
1 Kilobyte, that measn 1024 bytes if it's memory and 1000 bytes if it's communication.
Communication lines are almost always measured in bits per second, and not bytes per second, so you generally won't see anything-bytes for comm lines.
Where do you get this idea?
:-(
From a documentary movie ("From the Earth to the Moon"), a book (I forget the title), and various. I could be wrong, and apparently am. I stand corrected.
No single ignition source of the fire was conclusively identified.
This I knew, but I wasn't saying otherwise.
This atmosphere presents severe fire hazards if the amount and location of combustibles in the Command Module are not restricted and controlled.
And, in the case of a high-pressure, pure-oxygen environment, just about anything can be considered a combustible.
Duct tape and velcro are holding our space program together?
Remember Apollo 13?
Remember Apollo 1? Velcro in a high-pressure, high-oxygen environment is what turned a small spark into a fire that killed three astronauts.
The *only* place where 'storage' is measured constantly in powers of two is on-chip memory.
Ummm, right. And what do we have hard disks for? Why, to store data from on-chip memory. When you are storing units which are based on powers of two, it makes sense to use ratings based on powers of two. Gee, whodathunkit?
Communication lines are almost always (correctly) measured with powers of ten.
This is because communication lines do not work with bytes. A comm line is a bit stream. The only thing you care about is how many bits per second are comming down that wire. Things like bytes and frames and such occur at higher protocol levels and do not affect the bit rate of the line.
Cringely columns usually get their info from unauthenticated emails, which makes them potentially as reliable as a an Emulex press release.
Gag! Emulex! I had to use some of their products while I was at Unnamed U. My God did they suck. I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought so.
it's viruses. it's been dicussed many times here on slashdot. should be in the faq if you ask me.
You mis-spelled "elitist".
:-)
I liked the phrase "certain application software" from a previous press release/story. Yeah, like Windows 98, Linux, NT... little things like that. :-)
The entry for "emoticon" in The Jargon File says:
It appears that the emoticon was invented by one Scott Fahlman on the CMU {bboard} systems sometime between early 1981 and mid-1982.
Deja's going to be 'out' if they don't straighten things up soon.
Deja is providing a service which is in demand, as is evidenced by the large number of lusers in this forum complaining about it.
Deja provides this service for free, so there is no legal avenue for any of their lusers to require improved service. Nor can their lusers threaten to withhold payment.
Deja is apparently the best provider in this market segment, so there will be no migration of customers to competing services.
Given those facts, please explain to me why they are going to be "out"?
Well, you could always argue that the demise of UUNET started with the cross posts from fidonet....
Hey! FidoNET was never as bad as Usenet was. Mainly because FidoNET retained the idea of personal responsibility, and if you acted like a flaming moron, you got kicked out. If a particular node was a constant source of flaming morons, that node's feed was cut. A far cry from the anarchy and anonymous posts of Usenet, but it kept things sane.
(And yes, I can still remember my FidoNET node number: 1:324/127.4)
:-)
utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!microsof!gordon
Geez, even back then, Micros~1 couldn't spell their complete name!
;-)
So what?
So you're acting like they've done something to harm you somehow. You have paid precisely nothing for the service, and got more then that back out. Ever hear the phrase "Beggars can't be choosers?"
Don't like Deja? Fine, invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in processors, storage, and Usenet feeds, and run your very own Usenet archive. Don't want to pay? Then tough luck. Life is hard.
Google is free, too.
What does that have to do with anything?
I am complaining about the facts that a big part of their archive has been offline for over six months now...
Gee, I guess you had better demand your money back, huh?
The number of people in this forum bitching about Deja simply astounds me. It is a free service. You pay not one red cent for it. And yet, when they have to take stuff offline for awhile because it would cost to much otherwise, "it's gone to hell" and people start asking for "a good alternative". When they try to add some way to generate income to their service, so they can keep it online and continue to give it away for free, people give up in disgust. I'm willing to bet dollars to donuts that if that "good alternative" was also a paid service, they'd get precisely zero new subscribers from this forum.
</RANT>
AGP is just an extension of PCI, and as such, it adds very little to the cost of the system.
Actually, AGP bypasses the PCI bus. That was the whole point of AGP -- to bypass the (sometimes multiple) bus bridge chips and abstractions that the PCI design uses, and thus streamline the pipe between the graphics adapter and main system memory.
Unfortunately, every benchmark I've seen only gave about a 10% performance boost for AGP over PCI. It appears that system memory is always going to be dog slow when compared to local graphics card memory. The only design to actually try to offload graphics memory to AGP was the Intel i740, which was an abysmal failue. So there is some question as to whether AGP accomplished anything except generating patent revenues for Intel.
After all, it is more secure, just what you need to deal with Cracks of Doom...
Why would I want cracks of Doom? It's already had the source released. Better would be cracks of Quake III, I think.
Hey! I just saw something I've been looking for (well, kinda) for some time now.
This screenshot includes an image (opened in a bitmap editor) of a chess board being tilted and a few chess pieces flying off of it.
I used to have this graphic as my background in PC/GEOS (AKA GeoWorks). In fact, I still have a copy of it, but it is in some propriatary image format that only PC/GEOS knows about.
Does anyone know where this image came from? Did it come with Windows, originally? And where can I get a copy of it in GIF or JPEG format?
What's interesting is, by this standard, microsoft has yet to make an operating system.
;-)
*snort* I'd say, by any standard, Microsoft has yet to make an operating system.
I wonder if there are any futures plans of possibly branching cartoon network into a seperate anime network with 24 hour anime.
I find it somewhat amusing that "anime" is simply the Japanese word for "cartoon". So, to translate: I wonder if there are any plans for branching cartoon network into a separate cartoon network with 24 hour cartoons?
:-)
Having just quit my job as a defense contractor, the largest problem is getting the local DAA (Designated approval authority, or something like that...) to approve the use of the software.
Pretty much. Taking a look at the big picture, it pretty much comes down to one thing: The DoD loves paperwork. They thrive on it. Whether or not the product you're choosing actually works or not doesn't matter, as long as it has all its certification paperwork. This isn't likely to change any time soon.
This tends to conflict with the open, rapid, community-effort, bazaar style of development. The rapid revs and loose organization don't lend themselves to certification. Even if they did, most certs require you to retest for every change. Since many of Open Source's strengths stem from the rapid revs, this makes things difficult.
And, yes, I realize that you could "freeze" a particular distribution, certify it, and then rev less often. But again: Taking full advantage of Open Source means you have to accept rapid revs.
This isn't to say things are impossible, or that we should give up, or anything else. I'm just pointing out a source of conflict.