Well I AM knocking people in technical school. I am so tired of dealing with closed-minded, unsophisticated people who say "Oh, I went to college, just not to university, I didn't need all that extra crap" and who really aren't qualified as anything other than being code robots.
These people have a lack of vision, a lack of social skills, a lack of education about the rest of the world (and, therefore, the implications of having to function in international business). They tend to be abrasive, conceited, misinformed about the world at large, and most of all, inept at nearly anything other than coding or networking or whatever their ticket label said. This (in a funny way) makes them worthless for coding as well, since code written as though it is in a vacuum is generally useless for real users (i.e. humans).
Let me state it more strongly, if that is even possible: anyone who has gone to the Metro College of Technology and acquired an associate's degree in information systems or visual basic programming is not a "college graduate" in any useful sense of the word, and yes, if this is you then there is a good chance that you may be quite ignorant. This didn't used to be a problem because trade school graduates (i.e. mechanics, television repairmen, etc.) served a limited and useful function in a small segment of society. Today, however, it seems like any occupation or project at all in any field requires the hiring of large numbers of tech workers. As a result, these people are everywhere and are beginning to think that mere artists, scientists and diplomats are old-fashioned and are no longer needed. If the trade school kids end up running the world because nobody bothers with university any longer, God help us all.
The world is made up of a great deal more than computers, American business and pop culture. Too many tech workers simply have no idea at all and would likely be embarrassed if they realized just how unsophisticated they often sound about life, the universe and everything.
I graduated from the University of Utah with two humanities degrees. As a part of my coursework, I also took three semesters of calculus, three semesters of physics, two semesters of computer science and a semester of human evolutionary history -- all of these are serious science classes, as far as I'm concerned.
I think a lot depends on the quality of the institution one attends and the degree to which the institution itself has "joined the modern world" so to speak. For example, my university was wireless-ready across the entire campus, and things like registration, tuition payments, grades, assignments, etc. were all handled primarily online. I have friends who have graduated from schools that are still basically paper-based and who often don't require much in the way of math, science, or computing skills.
I ran my BBS with RBBS-PC and was into it enough to have hacked up the source pretty good. I even shelled out for QuickBasic so that I could compile my modified versions.
By the late versions, RBBS-PC was so configurable and scriptable... add to that the available source code, and my BBS looked like no other, had a completely unique interface and did things like automatic virus scanning and conversion of uploads into multiple compression formats. Not like a lot of those WWIV systems which were all identical.
Come to think of it, RBBS-PC was really my first introduction to the fundamental concepts of open source. I don't even know if it was "open source" by modern standards, but having the source available allowed me to do my own thing and spend hours joyously hacking at little things I wanted to modify.
I haven't used AfterStep in a while, but if it's still more or less similar to the 1.0-era AfterStep, then it's not really all that similar to NextStep.
AfterStep began as a hack to FVWM 1.0 (originally, the dotfile format was almost identical) and thus is much more similar in terms of the way it behaves for the user to any other of the "old-school" window managers, with a dotfile to control behavior and little in the way of dynamic configuration or application management once you're in.
I run windowmaker on a 486/33 laptop with 16MB RAM and 8-bit color depth and it works great and is completely stable. Are you sure you know how to configure a Linux system? Are you running all six million services that Red Hat turns on by default? Do you have backing store or save-unders or something like that on?
Obviously you know knowthing about Communism or the philosophy behind it, choosing instead to listen to the powers that be explain it all to you.
Ignoring for a minute the fact that Soviet "Communism" and Maoism both have little or nothing to do with the true goals of communism as constructed by any of the great communist philosophers, you don't think that the large multinationals have equal amounts of blood on their hands over the last hundred years?
Union Carbide? Nike? Big energy interests? Study. Just because it isn't American blood doesn't mean it's not blood.
Oh, I forgot, to an American that is exactly what it means.
P.S. How the American people can believe that Soviet statism is somehow related to communism... it just goes to show that most people will believe anything they're told. And we academics will continue to be called bleeding-heart radical left-wingers because the last thing big money wants is the emergence of social consciousness among the consuming classes!
Here's where I will get modded down as well, but hopefully you will see this. Please visit:
http://www.cpusa.org and join in the cause. The American people (and the other peoples of the world, at the hands of America) will continue to be raped by the wealthy classes until the workers (we may be tech workers these days, but we are *still* workers) realize that the labor is OURS.
Those big fat guys at Enron (and their friends) are only on top because we are willing to let them stay there, in part because we've been brainwashed into thinking that beyond the borders of America, there be dragons, so we should be satisfied with whatever the hell the status quo is here now.
If you're really fed up, take the time to make a difference. Together we can build a better world.
AppleTalk over ethernet (i.e. EtherTalk) is supported. AppleTalk over LocalTalk (which is used by all beige-era Apple laser printers and by the printer port on Beige G3's) is not supported and I was told that it will not be.
3D support is not available for Beige G3 systems, which use different 3D hardware from B&W G3/G4 and iBook systems, and I was told that some operations (i.e. window resizing) are very slow on Beige G3 systems because 2D acceleration is only partially implemented for these systems. (Resizing is nearly impossible in some cases, it's so slow).
The SCSI in question is on the Beige G3 motherboard, the CD-ROM and SCSI drive were both Apple-branded and were original hardware. Apple says that some of their SCSI PCI cards are supported by OS X, but the support person couldn't give me a definite list "just then" for which ones were and which ones weren't and suggested that the onboard IDE port would be better supported anyway.
So yes, everything was stock on the G3 in question.
And yes, it's a couple of years old, but it's still a 300MHz G3 system with 256MB memory which should be enough just to run an operating system, IMHO, and Apple clearly says it's supported and the original poster's point (to which I was responding) was that since Apple controlled both the hardware and the software, OS X on Macs just works really well.
For me, it didn't. I'm sure if I ran out and bought a brand new iMac things would be great, but then in the end just how is Apple's own-the-OS-and-the-hardware paradigm better than any other operating system, if it's still only the OEM preloads on new hardware that work right?
No, the new DNS servers were "rigged" as well -- the first thing I did after the service came back online was pull across the new DHCP info and the new DNS servers.
They seem normal, *but* if you try to resolve any old home.net or home.com addresses, they take you to the attbi page instead of giving you a fail.
Problem is, the new DNS servers (at least the ones assigned for SLC, UT) would take you to attbi for *any failed lookup* and sometimes just for whatever reason -- you'd be looking at (for example) Slashdot, having loaded it fine the first time. You'd click refresh, and *boom*, you'd be at the attbi.com help page. You'd click refresh again, and Slashdot would come back.
My home system checks a POP server (not an AT&T pop server, my mail is elsewhere) about ever five minutes. Once ATTBI came back online, I was getting my mail, but I was also getting 15-20 "Welcome to AT&T Broadband" messages a day, obviously because some of the POP3 fetches were being directed to the ATTBI "transition" server.
The big problem were the absolutely shitty AT&T nameservers which were also rigged to hijack whatever name you were trying to resolve at random moments and direct you to the attbi.com help page.
Apple doesn't have to support a bunch of odd third-party hardware, so instead everything workks REALLY well on their one platform.
This is absolute bullshit... I have a beige G3 that is "supported" by OS X. Wanna know what happened when I bought OS X 10.1.1 to use with it?
The SCSI CD-ROM (Apple 12x) wouldn't boot the disc. I called Apple, they said use an Apple IDE CD-ROM, the old SCSI CD-ROMs didn't have the right firmware, so I bought an Apple IDE CD-ROM.
Then, I kept getting SCSI errors with my 2GB Apple SCSI hard drive. Yes, termination was correct. Apple responded that SCSI doesn't work very well under OS X on G3 systems due to driver issues with the built-in SCSI. They say try an IDE drive, so I go out and buy an IDE hard drive. Finally I get OS X installed.
Then, the graphics were slow and 3D acceleration didn't seem to work properly. Apple informs me that 2D acceleration is only partially implemented on beige G3 systems and 3D not at all, use classic for that since there are no plans to augment driver support for beige G3 systems.
So I was going to send off a letter to Apple to complain. I started up AppleWorks and typed in a nice letter, then went to try to use my Apple LaserWriter IIg, connected to my Beige G3's printer port.
OOPS! The built-in printer port on G3 systems is unsupported (it uses, you guessed it, AppleTalk). I call again, Apple says use classic if I need to print or get a new printer and a USB card since there are no plans to support AppleTalk/LocalTalk. I already bought a new CD-ROM drive, a new hard drive, and a new OS for this Mac. No way I was going to buy a USB card and a new printer just to print.
And unfortunately, the reason I switched away from Mac OS Classic on that machine is because the thing crashes any time you open more than four or five windows that are doing something. On my Linux box, I can open windows until the cows come home without bad effects.
So that's my story. I was all eager to try this wonderful new Linux-killing "perfect Unix" OS X. I shelled out for it, but turns out I got the shaft from Apple on THEIR hardware -- and RECENT, SUPPORTED hardware at that. Looks like OS X is only a bait-and-switch to get you to buy a brand new Mac with each release.
Slashdot readers are right. You can't afford OS X.
X isn't bloated, it's quite lean and can even run quickly on embedded devices. It's extensible enough to support everything that's occurred so far (touchscreen input, 2D and 3D acceleration, full-motion video, etc.) quite well and without losing backward compatibility with existing applications.
On another note, I am firmly convinced that the reason OSX is slow is Mach. Experience in my department has established that throughput on a loaded server with a microkernel-based OS (MkLinux with a Debian binary set) is a good 30-50% slower than with a non-microkernel OS (monolithic Linux kernel with the *same* binary set). That is not a performance loss to sneeze at, no matter how great microkernels are.
I personally think the reason Linux is the top competitor to Windows is simple: it's a Unix-like operating system and after 30+ years, no better paradigm for rapidly-deployable general-purpose computing (i.e. everything from office tasks to embedded systems to network serving) than Unix+X has yet been seen, regardless of BeOS, OS/2, Amiga Workbench, ad infinitum.
I used to use WindowMaker, but moved away when things I didn't like (removal of --enable-single-icon especially) started to happen and KDE got AA text and a working browser.
I could never go back to FVWM or FVWM2 (which I used when I was new to Linux) -- I used to spend entire weekends on this huge crazy.fvwm2rc files that I thought were really nifty... But now the thought of wasting an entire weekend to make my desktop behave the way I want just seems insane.
I run multiple sessions per user, one local and two remote. They all work fine.
You must have a configuration gremlin in your gears somewhere...
Use the Force, or Linux+Unix vs. BeOS/OSX
on
MacOSX Vs BeOS ShootOut
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I'm an old school Unix user, and I will forever believe [forever] that users who say "command line is great, but for normal work, you want an integrated experience" --
these users do not really know what the hell they're doing in front of a command line interface. They may think they've mastered the shell of Unix or Linux, but they haven't --
because once you have, you will never really have a use for anything else -- the beauty of the shell is that all things and all functions are subsumed below it in consistent fashion, in one magnificent world-view, and all things no matter how complex become possible with a single, well-constructed command, almost like magic.
Some of my fellow Linux or Unix users will understand what I am talking about here -- using the command-line interface is not, as this author says, like carrying around a heavy toolbelt all day when none is needed. Instead, once one has truly mastered the CLI, one is like a Jedi master -- all acts are balanced, rapid, skilled, both intricate and simple at the same time -- and all things are possible and as simple as one another. I can get more work done in ten minutes with my CLI -- including editing video streams and audio streams! -- than most users can get done in days using GUI-only tools.
Of course, OSX and BeOS both have a CLI -- but neither is very useful because much of the rest of the system and the set of standard tools is gutted or malformed in peculiar OSX and BeOS ways. Users of BeOS and OSX think they are getting a CLI, but it's as though they've been trained only by Obi-Wan and never by Yoda -- the real essence of the system is muddied and lost and the benefits are never realized -- or worse -- they are driven from the concept of a CLI unduly.
That is my belief: that users who claim to want a desktop in which CLI use is normally avoided really don't understand and haven't yet mastered the CLI -- because once you have, anything else feels like a straightjacket.
My friend was selling CD-R GPL Red Hat and Debian 2.2 CDs for $10.00 each in his little computing shop -- customers would just come in and ask for the latest Linux CD and he'd burn it for them on the spot. When his bank found out [apparently some nosy busybody didn't understand about Linux], his merchant account was frozen without notice for "investigative and evidentiary purposes" and he could no longer accept credit cards!
The bank would NOT compromise and insisted that he stop comitting software piracy. He got a lawyer and tried to explain to the bank that the CD-R Linux CDs he was selling were GPL and that he was fully legal to distribute this way.
The bank told him that it gave the *appearance* of software piracy and that if he was willing to copy Linux, there was no reason for them to think he wasn't copying other software. His account is still frozen, with over $12,000 in limbo -- and they are still trying to work it out months later.
It's a proprietary software world, in case you ever doubted it.
Backup has always been expensive. You have two choices:
1) Go cheap (i.e. Zip drive, MO drive, CD-RW, etc.) and only backup the files you NEED (i.e. home directory, "My Documents" folder, etc.)
2) Shell out for tape. This way you will be able to make multiple backups, keep them offsite, maintain them long-term, and back up most of your system. I find that the sweet-spot is usually to go 1-2 generations old (i.e. right now I'm using a DAT24 drive), that way you only have to pay about $400-600 instead of $1500+ for the mechanism.
Don't fall for the "just use hard drives" trick. Hard drives have a number of problems.
1) Mechanism + media in one unit. I've seen hard drives whose heads STUCK to the platters, rendering them useless, after only sitting around for a couple of months. Oops! Data gone! They are also sensitive to static and to environmental changes -- if your backup drive gets zapped accidentally, you can't just plug the media into a new mechanism! Data gone!
2) Backups limited. If you backup a 100GB system onto a 100GB hard drive, you're limited to one physical backup. This creates all kinds of problems... Many's the time I've had to go back four or five generations in backups to find an old file that I didn't realize I'd deleted months ago. Not to mention that you are limited to one backup stored in one location -- no redundancy.
3) Even RAID has problems -- I've had bad SCSI cables that filled a RAID filesystem with corruption before we were able to track down the problem and switch the cable. If that happens when you're just depending on RAID to preserve your important data... oops! There's a reason why many RAID-enabled datacenters also maintain backups of critical data in a second medium!
So that's my personal take. I think either tape, maintaining at least 5-10 backup generations at a time, or MO/CD-RW just for keeping your critical files. Or both, even.
No doubt. I just went and had a read at a whole bunch of posts from 10-15 years ago in which I was often a real prick [and strangely enough, in which I seem to have more technical/coding prowess than I have now!?!]. There's nothing like humble pie and complete red-eared embarrassment at three in the morning -- embarrassment first at how one was acting, and second at no longer being able to fully understand technical discussions from one's own teenagehood!
I'm in my late twenties now. I'm an author. My name is out there and is unique. Now, when people type my name into Google, they're going to pull up stuff I posted via free BBSs and tech bars when I was a prick of a teenaged punk-rocker in the '80s who [it would seem] really had a problem or two.
*cringe*
I'm going to go hide my head in the sand for a while, then quickly ink-jet myself a "live and learn" t-shirt.
[Then, as soon as the sun comes up, I'm heading downtown to change my name.]
Just bought some at a Rite-Aid chain for $4.99/strand. They flicker at 60 (30?) Hz and look much more... "saturated" than typical bulbs, kind of like Mike & Ikes gone Nuclear, but they're okay, especially after I spent the weekend learning just how flame-happy the "normal" little lights are...
Linux ATI Radeon Drivers:
Open Source, incomplete (no HW T&L), slower than Windows drivers, difficult to compile, unstable (prone to X hangs).
Linux NVIDIA GeForce Drivers:
Open-source kernel module, binary core identical to Windows drivers (Detonator UDM), complete hardware support (incl. HW T&L and FSAA), as fast as Windows drivers, available as RPM download, complete OpenGL support, and I have never once had an X hang.
I sold my Radeon because I just couldn't get it to work right with Linux even after months of trying. I bought a GeForce2 Pro card for cheap, downloaded the NVidia drivers, and have been sailing ever since without problems or crashes.
a) There is an open-source component which hooks the driver core into your kernel. As long as you have XFree86 4, you'll should be able to use the latest NVidia driver by issuing "make install" in the source directory. I have not had any problems with NVidia drivers yet, on any version of the kernel, and I'm now in the 2.5.x-prex series.
b) Which brings me to support of older cards... You haven't bothered to look at the list of hardware supported by the NVidia driver, have you? You might be surprised... driver support goes all the way back to the NVidia RivaTNT... which predates Linux DRI 3D support!
This anti-NVidia-Linux stuff is just a lot of GPL-fanatic FUD.
I've personally owned and tried a Voodoo5 5500, a Radeon (original) and my current hardware, a Geforce2Pro, under Linux. There is no comparison in driver support/how well the cards work... The NVidia card "just works" with Linux and is as fast or faster than under Windows. By comparison, the others feel half-supported by Linux at best.
I'm using the NVidia drivers on a GF2Pro. I've been tracking the 2.4 kernel series very closely (as in same day) as well as the latest NVidia driver releases, and they have yet to break when the two latest are used together. I don't know if this will hold up through 2.5... but I don't plan to track 2.5 closely until it starts to become 2.6-pre, so that worry is a long way off for me.
But in any case, the driver has been rock solid (other than the fact that DPMS is still not correctly supported) -- it does not crash, freeze, artifact, etc., and OpenGL support is fast and excellent both for gaming (including FSAA!) and for applications not related to gaming. I've had some OpenGL-based simulations running for 72+ hours without a crash or hiccup. That is impossible with any 3D hardware+driver combination under Windows.
The NVidia driver for Linux is a *real* piece of working, supported software which happens not to be open-source (just like their Windows drivers). Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
Surprising, this doesn't seem to be as big an issue with the dialup ISPs.
It happened to me with Qwest 56k dialup all the way back in 1998. I signed up online from a neighbor's house. My new account was activated immediately. The charge for the ISP service was supposed to appear on my monthly Qwest phone bill...
It never did, though the dialup ISP service continued to work.
Three months later (I originally thought maybe it was due to "bill lag"), I called them to see what was up. They asked for my login, and I gave it to them, and they said that no such login existed. Then they asked for my address and residential phone number, which I gave them, and they said that I had definitely not signed up for the service. I told them that I was using it every day, and the lady kindly explained to me that it "must be settings still left over from your old ISP" that were providing me net access...
I got nervous and didn't use service... I didn't want to suddenly recieve a balloon bill years later or get sued or something. I signed up with a local alternative instead, and later, with @home (grrrr).
However, I still used it as a kind of "test" account every now and then because it was so reliable and the phone number was easy to remember. Eventually, I moved from my apartment, my old phone bill and number became nonexistent. Qwest sold out their dialup ISP to a major national ISP. The account continued to work.
The account was *finally* closed about three months ago, with nary a word from Qwest or the ISP which took over their dialup in my area.
They hijacked the DNS stuff to take me to attbi.com every other minute, so I've set my forwarders to the DNS servers for the att.com domain instead of using the ones they're supplying. Ugh.
Next, my DHCP lease was renewing way too often, so I've assumed the IP that I was getting is mine (I'm not counting on it though) and am using it statically now. UGH.
And now, finally online without interruption, if uncomfortably, I learn that the connection is throttled downstream, so that instead of pulling down 7-8Mbits, I'm only getting 1.5 (and really a little less). UGH!
Kernel downloads are now >2min instead of just a few seconds.
I knew it was too good to last. From a working $40/mo. 8Mbit setup with my own IP to an unreliable 1.5Mbit setup, for the same price, with a half-week outage to boot.
The good old days are gone... Now it really feels like the tech boom is over.
Slashdot Mirror
THANK YOU for saying this.
I'm not knocking anyone in technical school...
Well I AM knocking people in technical school. I am so tired of dealing with closed-minded, unsophisticated people who say "Oh, I went to college, just not to university, I didn't need all that extra crap" and who really aren't qualified as anything other than being code robots.
These people have a lack of vision, a lack of social skills, a lack of education about the rest of the world (and, therefore, the implications of having to function in international business). They tend to be abrasive, conceited, misinformed about the world at large, and most of all, inept at nearly anything other than coding or networking or whatever their ticket label said. This (in a funny way) makes them worthless for coding as well, since code written as though it is in a vacuum is generally useless for real users (i.e. humans).
Let me state it more strongly, if that is even possible: anyone who has gone to the Metro College of Technology and acquired an associate's degree in information systems or visual basic programming is not a "college graduate" in any useful sense of the word, and yes, if this is you then there is a good chance that you may be quite ignorant. This didn't used to be a problem because trade school graduates (i.e. mechanics, television repairmen, etc.) served a limited and useful function in a small segment of society. Today, however, it seems like any occupation or project at all in any field requires the hiring of large numbers of tech workers. As a result, these people are everywhere and are beginning to think that mere artists, scientists and diplomats are old-fashioned and are no longer needed. If the trade school kids end up running the world because nobody bothers with university any longer, God help us all.
The world is made up of a great deal more than computers, American business and pop culture. Too many tech workers simply have no idea at all and would likely be embarrassed if they realized just how unsophisticated they often sound about life, the universe and everything.
I graduated from the University of Utah with two humanities degrees. As a part of my coursework, I also took three semesters of calculus, three semesters of physics, two semesters of computer science and a semester of human evolutionary history -- all of these are serious science classes, as far as I'm concerned.
I think a lot depends on the quality of the institution one attends and the degree to which the institution itself has "joined the modern world" so to speak. For example, my university was wireless-ready across the entire campus, and things like registration, tuition payments, grades, assignments, etc. were all handled primarily online. I have friends who have graduated from schools that are still basically paper-based and who often don't require much in the way of math, science, or computing skills.
I ran my BBS with RBBS-PC and was into it enough to have hacked up the source pretty good. I even shelled out for QuickBasic so that I could compile my modified versions.
By the late versions, RBBS-PC was so configurable and scriptable... add to that the available source code, and my BBS looked like no other, had a completely unique interface and did things like automatic virus scanning and conversion of uploads into multiple compression formats. Not like a lot of those WWIV systems which were all identical.
Come to think of it, RBBS-PC was really my first introduction to the fundamental concepts of open source. I don't even know if it was "open source" by modern standards, but having the source available allowed me to do my own thing and spend hours joyously hacking at little things I wanted to modify.
I haven't used AfterStep in a while, but if it's still more or less similar to the 1.0-era AfterStep, then it's not really all that similar to NextStep.
AfterStep began as a hack to FVWM 1.0 (originally, the dotfile format was almost identical) and thus is much more similar in terms of the way it behaves for the user to any other of the "old-school" window managers, with a dotfile to control behavior and little in the way of dynamic configuration or application management once you're in.
I run windowmaker on a 486/33 laptop with 16MB RAM and 8-bit color depth and it works great and is completely stable. Are you sure you know how to configure a Linux system? Are you running all six million services that Red Hat turns on by default? Do you have backing store or save-unders or something like that on?
Obviously you know knowthing about Communism or the philosophy behind it, choosing instead to listen to the powers that be explain it all to you.
Ignoring for a minute the fact that Soviet "Communism" and Maoism both have little or nothing to do with the true goals of communism as constructed by any of the great communist philosophers, you don't think that the large multinationals have equal amounts of blood on their hands over the last hundred years?
Union Carbide? Nike? Big energy interests? Study. Just because it isn't American blood doesn't mean it's not blood.
Oh, I forgot, to an American that is exactly what it means.
P.S. How the American people can believe that Soviet statism is somehow related to communism... it just goes to show that most people will believe anything they're told. And we academics will continue to be called bleeding-heart radical left-wingers because the last thing big money wants is the emergence of social consciousness among the consuming classes!
Here's where I will get modded down as well, but hopefully you will see this. Please visit:
http://www.cpusa.org and join in the cause. The American people (and the other peoples of the world, at the hands of America) will continue to be raped by the wealthy classes until the workers (we may be tech workers these days, but we are *still* workers) realize that the labor is OURS.
Those big fat guys at Enron (and their friends) are only on top because we are willing to let them stay there, in part because we've been brainwashed into thinking that beyond the borders of America, there be dragons, so we should be satisfied with whatever the hell the status quo is here now.
If you're really fed up, take the time to make a difference. Together we can build a better world.
Merry Christmas, everybody!
No, I'm not trolling.
AppleTalk over ethernet (i.e. EtherTalk) is supported. AppleTalk over LocalTalk (which is used by all beige-era Apple laser printers and by the printer port on Beige G3's) is not supported and I was told that it will not be.
3D support is not available for Beige G3 systems, which use different 3D hardware from B&W G3/G4 and iBook systems, and I was told that some operations (i.e. window resizing) are very slow on Beige G3 systems because 2D acceleration is only partially implemented for these systems. (Resizing is nearly impossible in some cases, it's so slow).
The SCSI in question is on the Beige G3 motherboard, the CD-ROM and SCSI drive were both Apple-branded and were original hardware. Apple says that some of their SCSI PCI cards are supported by OS X, but the support person couldn't give me a definite list "just then" for which ones were and which ones weren't and suggested that the onboard IDE port would be better supported anyway.
So yes, everything was stock on the G3 in question.
And yes, it's a couple of years old, but it's still a 300MHz G3 system with 256MB memory which should be enough just to run an operating system, IMHO, and Apple clearly says it's supported and the original poster's point (to which I was responding) was that since Apple controlled both the hardware and the software, OS X on Macs just works really well.
For me, it didn't. I'm sure if I ran out and bought a brand new iMac things would be great, but then in the end just how is Apple's own-the-OS-and-the-hardware paradigm better than any other operating system, if it's still only the OEM preloads on new hardware that work right?
No, the new DNS servers were "rigged" as well -- the first thing I did after the service came back online was pull across the new DHCP info and the new DNS servers.
They seem normal, *but* if you try to resolve any old home.net or home.com addresses, they take you to the attbi page instead of giving you a fail.
Problem is, the new DNS servers (at least the ones assigned for SLC, UT) would take you to attbi for *any failed lookup* and sometimes just for whatever reason -- you'd be looking at (for example) Slashdot, having loaded it fine the first time. You'd click refresh, and *boom*, you'd be at the attbi.com help page. You'd click refresh again, and Slashdot would come back.
My home system checks a POP server (not an AT&T pop server, my mail is elsewhere) about ever five minutes. Once ATTBI came back online, I was getting my mail, but I was also getting 15-20 "Welcome to AT&T Broadband" messages a day, obviously because some of the POP3 fetches were being directed to the ATTBI "transition" server.
The big problem were the absolutely shitty AT&T nameservers which were also rigged to hijack whatever name you were trying to resolve at random moments and direct you to the attbi.com help page.
Thank god for OpenNIC.
Other than that, service has been reliable, though it is true that downloads are now limited to 1.5Mbps instead of ~8Mbps I was getting before.
Yes, I looked at Apple literature to see if Beige G3 was a supported machine.
Silly me. I guess I should've hired someone.
Apple doesn't have to support a bunch of odd third-party hardware, so instead everything workks REALLY well on their one platform.
This is absolute bullshit... I have a beige G3 that is "supported" by OS X. Wanna know what happened when I bought OS X 10.1.1 to use with it?
The SCSI CD-ROM (Apple 12x) wouldn't boot the disc. I called Apple, they said use an Apple IDE CD-ROM, the old SCSI CD-ROMs didn't have the right firmware, so I bought an Apple IDE CD-ROM.
Then, I kept getting SCSI errors with my 2GB Apple SCSI hard drive. Yes, termination was correct. Apple responded that SCSI doesn't work very well under OS X on G3 systems due to driver issues with the built-in SCSI. They say try an IDE drive, so I go out and buy an IDE hard drive. Finally I get OS X installed.
Then, the graphics were slow and 3D acceleration didn't seem to work properly. Apple informs me that 2D acceleration is only partially implemented on beige G3 systems and 3D not at all, use classic for that since there are no plans to augment driver support for beige G3 systems.
So I was going to send off a letter to Apple to complain. I started up AppleWorks and typed in a nice letter, then went to try to use my Apple LaserWriter IIg, connected to my Beige G3's printer port.
OOPS! The built-in printer port on G3 systems is unsupported (it uses, you guessed it, AppleTalk). I call again, Apple says use classic if I need to print or get a new printer and a USB card since there are no plans to support AppleTalk/LocalTalk. I already bought a new CD-ROM drive, a new hard drive, and a new OS for this Mac. No way I was going to buy a USB card and a new printer just to print.
And unfortunately, the reason I switched away from Mac OS Classic on that machine is because the thing crashes any time you open more than four or five windows that are doing something. On my Linux box, I can open windows until the cows come home without bad effects.
So that's my story. I was all eager to try this wonderful new Linux-killing "perfect Unix" OS X. I shelled out for it, but turns out I got the shaft from Apple on THEIR hardware -- and RECENT, SUPPORTED hardware at that. Looks like OS X is only a bait-and-switch to get you to buy a brand new Mac with each release.
Slashdot readers are right. You can't afford OS X.
X isn't bloated, it's quite lean and can even run quickly on embedded devices. It's extensible enough to support everything that's occurred so far (touchscreen input, 2D and 3D acceleration, full-motion video, etc.) quite well and without losing backward compatibility with existing applications.
On another note, I am firmly convinced that the reason OSX is slow is Mach. Experience in my department has established that throughput on a loaded server with a microkernel-based OS (MkLinux with a Debian binary set) is a good 30-50% slower than with a non-microkernel OS (monolithic Linux kernel with the *same* binary set). That is not a performance loss to sneeze at, no matter how great microkernels are.
I personally think the reason Linux is the top competitor to Windows is simple: it's a Unix-like operating system and after 30+ years, no better paradigm for rapidly-deployable general-purpose computing (i.e. everything from office tasks to embedded systems to network serving) than Unix+X has yet been seen, regardless of BeOS, OS/2, Amiga Workbench, ad infinitum.
I used to use WindowMaker, but moved away when things I didn't like (removal of --enable-single-icon especially) started to happen and KDE got AA text and a working browser.
.fvwm2rc files that I thought were really nifty... But now the thought of wasting an entire weekend to make my desktop behave the way I want just seems insane.
I could never go back to FVWM or FVWM2 (which I used when I was new to Linux) -- I used to spend entire weekends on this huge crazy
I run multiple sessions per user, one local and two remote. They all work fine.
You must have a configuration gremlin in your gears somewhere...
I'm an old school Unix user, and I will forever believe [forever] that users who say "command line is great, but for normal work, you want an integrated experience" --
these users do not really know what the hell they're doing in front of a command line interface. They may think they've mastered the shell of Unix or Linux, but they haven't --
because once you have, you will never really have a use for anything else -- the beauty of the shell is that all things and all functions are subsumed below it in consistent fashion, in one magnificent world-view, and all things no matter how complex become possible with a single, well-constructed command, almost like magic.
Some of my fellow Linux or Unix users will understand what I am talking about here -- using the command-line interface is not, as this author says, like carrying around a heavy toolbelt all day when none is needed. Instead, once one has truly mastered the CLI, one is like a Jedi master -- all acts are balanced, rapid, skilled, both intricate and simple at the same time -- and all things are possible and as simple as one another. I can get more work done in ten minutes with my CLI -- including editing video streams and audio streams! -- than most users can get done in days using GUI-only tools.
Of course, OSX and BeOS both have a CLI -- but neither is very useful because much of the rest of the system and the set of standard tools is gutted or malformed in peculiar OSX and BeOS ways. Users of BeOS and OSX think they are getting a CLI, but it's as though they've been trained only by Obi-Wan and never by Yoda -- the real essence of the system is muddied and lost and the benefits are never realized -- or worse -- they are driven from the concept of a CLI unduly.
That is my belief: that users who claim to want a desktop in which CLI use is normally avoided really don't understand and haven't yet mastered the CLI -- because once you have, anything else feels like a straightjacket.
MHO
My friend was selling CD-R GPL Red Hat and Debian 2.2 CDs for $10.00 each in his little computing shop -- customers would just come in and ask for the latest Linux CD and he'd burn it for them on the spot. When his bank found out [apparently some nosy busybody didn't understand about Linux], his merchant account was frozen without notice for "investigative and evidentiary purposes" and he could no longer accept credit cards!
The bank would NOT compromise and insisted that he stop comitting software piracy. He got a lawyer and tried to explain to the bank that the CD-R Linux CDs he was selling were GPL and that he was fully legal to distribute this way.
The bank told him that it gave the *appearance* of software piracy and that if he was willing to copy Linux, there was no reason for them to think he wasn't copying other software. His account is still frozen, with over $12,000 in limbo -- and they are still trying to work it out months later.
It's a proprietary software world, in case you ever doubted it.
Backup has always been expensive. You have two choices:
1) Go cheap (i.e. Zip drive, MO drive, CD-RW, etc.) and only backup the files you NEED (i.e. home directory, "My Documents" folder, etc.)
2) Shell out for tape. This way you will be able to make multiple backups, keep them offsite, maintain them long-term, and back up most of your system. I find that the sweet-spot is usually to go 1-2 generations old (i.e. right now I'm using a DAT24 drive), that way you only have to pay about $400-600 instead of $1500+ for the mechanism.
Don't fall for the "just use hard drives" trick. Hard drives have a number of problems.
1) Mechanism + media in one unit. I've seen hard drives whose heads STUCK to the platters, rendering them useless, after only sitting around for a couple of months. Oops! Data gone! They are also sensitive to static and to environmental changes -- if your backup drive gets zapped accidentally, you can't just plug the media into a new mechanism! Data gone!
2) Backups limited. If you backup a 100GB system onto a 100GB hard drive, you're limited to one physical backup. This creates all kinds of problems... Many's the time I've had to go back four or five generations in backups to find an old file that I didn't realize I'd deleted months ago. Not to mention that you are limited to one backup stored in one location -- no redundancy.
3) Even RAID has problems -- I've had bad SCSI cables that filled a RAID filesystem with corruption before we were able to track down the problem and switch the cable. If that happens when you're just depending on RAID to preserve your important data... oops! There's a reason why many RAID-enabled datacenters also maintain backups of critical data in a second medium!
So that's my personal take. I think either tape, maintaining at least 5-10 backup generations at a time, or MO/CD-RW just for keeping your critical files. Or both, even.
*sucks in air*
No doubt. I just went and had a read at a whole bunch of posts from 10-15 years ago in which I was often a real prick [and strangely enough, in which I seem to have more technical/coding prowess than I have now!?!]. There's nothing like humble pie and complete red-eared embarrassment at three in the morning -- embarrassment first at how one was acting, and second at no longer being able to fully understand technical discussions from one's own teenagehood!
I'm in my late twenties now. I'm an author. My name is out there and is unique. Now, when people type my name into Google, they're going to pull up stuff I posted via free BBSs and tech bars when I was a prick of a teenaged punk-rocker in the '80s who [it would seem] really had a problem or two.
*cringe*
I'm going to go hide my head in the sand for a while, then quickly ink-jet myself a "live and learn" t-shirt.
[Then, as soon as the sun comes up, I'm heading downtown to change my name.]
Just bought some at a Rite-Aid chain for $4.99/strand. They flicker at 60 (30?) Hz and look much more... "saturated" than typical bulbs, kind of like Mike & Ikes gone Nuclear, but they're okay, especially after I spent the weekend learning just how flame-happy the "normal" little lights are...
You got it wrong. I've owned both. Truth:
Linux ATI Radeon Drivers:
Open Source, incomplete (no HW T&L), slower than Windows drivers, difficult to compile, unstable (prone to X hangs).
Linux NVIDIA GeForce Drivers:
Open-source kernel module, binary core identical to Windows drivers (Detonator UDM), complete hardware support (incl. HW T&L and FSAA), as fast as Windows drivers, available as RPM download, complete OpenGL support, and I have never once had an X hang.
I sold my Radeon because I just couldn't get it to work right with Linux even after months of trying. I bought a GeForce2 Pro card for cheap, downloaded the NVidia drivers, and have been sailing ever since without problems or crashes.
GPL fanatic FUDder, you are.
You're wrong about this.
a) There is an open-source component which hooks the driver core into your kernel. As long as you have XFree86 4, you'll should be able to use the latest NVidia driver by issuing "make install" in the source directory. I have not had any problems with NVidia drivers yet, on any version of the kernel, and I'm now in the 2.5.x-prex series.
b) Which brings me to support of older cards... You haven't bothered to look at the list of hardware supported by the NVidia driver, have you? You might be surprised... driver support goes all the way back to the NVidia RivaTNT... which predates Linux DRI 3D support!
This anti-NVidia-Linux stuff is just a lot of GPL-fanatic FUD.
I've personally owned and tried a Voodoo5 5500, a Radeon (original) and my current hardware, a Geforce2Pro, under Linux. There is no comparison in driver support/how well the cards work... The NVidia card "just works" with Linux and is as fast or faster than under Windows. By comparison, the others feel half-supported by Linux at best.
I'm using the NVidia drivers on a GF2Pro. I've been tracking the 2.4 kernel series very closely (as in same day) as well as the latest NVidia driver releases, and they have yet to break when the two latest are used together. I don't know if this will hold up through 2.5... but I don't plan to track 2.5 closely until it starts to become 2.6-pre, so that worry is a long way off for me.
But in any case, the driver has been rock solid (other than the fact that DPMS is still not correctly supported) -- it does not crash, freeze, artifact, etc., and OpenGL support is fast and excellent both for gaming (including FSAA!) and for applications not related to gaming. I've had some OpenGL-based simulations running for 72+ hours without a crash or hiccup. That is impossible with any 3D hardware+driver combination under Windows.
The NVidia driver for Linux is a *real* piece of working, supported software which happens not to be open-source (just like their Windows drivers). Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
Surprising, this doesn't seem to be as big an issue with the dialup ISPs.
It happened to me with Qwest 56k dialup all the way back in 1998. I signed up online from a neighbor's house. My new account was activated immediately. The charge for the ISP service was supposed to appear on my monthly Qwest phone bill...
It never did, though the dialup ISP service continued to work.
Three months later (I originally thought maybe it was due to "bill lag"), I called them to see what was up. They asked for my login, and I gave it to them, and they said that no such login existed. Then they asked for my address and residential phone number, which I gave them, and they said that I had definitely not signed up for the service. I told them that I was using it every day, and the lady kindly explained to me that it "must be settings still left over from your old ISP" that were providing me net access...
I got nervous and didn't use service... I didn't want to suddenly recieve a balloon bill years later or get sued or something. I signed up with a local alternative instead, and later, with @home (grrrr).
However, I still used it as a kind of "test" account every now and then because it was so reliable and the phone number was easy to remember. Eventually, I moved from my apartment, my old phone bill and number became nonexistent. Qwest sold out their dialup ISP to a major national ISP. The account continued to work.
The account was *finally* closed about three months ago, with nary a word from Qwest or the ISP which took over their dialup in my area.
*shrug* just a dialup free 'Net story.
AT&T in SLC is back online.
They hijacked the DNS stuff to take me to attbi.com every other minute, so I've set my forwarders to the DNS servers for the att.com domain instead of using the ones they're supplying. Ugh.
Next, my DHCP lease was renewing way too often, so I've assumed the IP that I was getting is mine (I'm not counting on it though) and am using it statically now. UGH.
And now, finally online without interruption, if uncomfortably, I learn that the connection is throttled downstream, so that instead of pulling down 7-8Mbits, I'm only getting 1.5 (and really a little less). UGH!
Kernel downloads are now >2min instead of just a few seconds.
I knew it was too good to last. From a working $40/mo. 8Mbit setup with my own IP to an unreliable 1.5Mbit setup, for the same price, with a half-week outage to boot.
The good old days are gone... Now it really feels like the tech boom is over.