Which reminds me, when is Linus going to leave the 2.6x tree alone so we don't have to worry about so much broken shit all the time? Imagine if Windows changed it's kernel a couple times a year and broke the video drivers each time. People would bitch endlessly, but I guess as Linux users, we just have to put up with it.
Here's a gentle heads-up. Linux distros include a kernel, and it doesn't change by itself. Who told you to change it? It's purely your decision to go around trying every new kernel version that comes out. If you don't want your kernel to change, stop changing it, and don't try to pin the blame for it on anybody but yourself.
As an IS professional and consultant, the answer for me is linux - currently suse 9.2 professional. I can get by in microsoft windoze (w95/98/me/2k/expee) for limited periods, using it essentially as a dumb terminal to get to my internet resources, but to have to use microsoft windoze regularly would quickly become annoying as hell.
I suspect I could also be fairly happy and productive with OSX, and I like what I've seen of it so far, but I haven't spend enough time with it to say for sure.
Eventually I switched over to Suse, which is IMHO a much better distribution than RedHat ever thought about being. Now, my money goes to Suse (well, I guess to novell now), when people ask about a distribution, I recommend Suse, and whenever I'm working with a company trying to decide what to run on their servers, I recommend Suse. (Of course, I've heard some nasty things about 9.2, so I'm going to wait around with 9.1 and see if things get better with 9.3, or switch to another distro, probably gentoo).
That's pretty much my story, except for the part about wanting to switch from suse to some other distro - I haven't the foggiest idea what you might mean by "heard some nasty things about 9.2", as it is in every way a refinement of 9.1, in fact it fixed some really nasty problems in 9.1 e.g. openldap - I've been running 9.2 on dekstops, and on production servers, and it's all blue skies AFAICT. I am looking at the first pre-beta release of of 9.3, and it looks good - 2.6.11-ish kernel, kde 3.4, gnome 2.10 and more. I expect I'll buy that release, just as I've bought every suse release since 8.0, even though I can get it for free from our local novell guy.
Hmm, maybe the variety in the gaming titles that you used as examples was what put him to sleep in the first place.
LOL, he'd be really really bored, plus I'd get writer's cramp, if I tried to list any appreciable fraction of the games that run on linux. I just mentioned of few of the genre that I tend to play, i.e. networked multiplayer 3D FPS, beginning with doom for linux, back in 1994/1995.
I see lots of posts saying "games" are the magic ticket to Linux getting popular. Stop dreaming... it's not gonna happen for a long time. Linux on the desktop is not even remotely near even 10% market share... no sane company is going to put lots of resources into developing games for Linux. Yes there were some flukes where a couple popular games got made but they were hardly profitable. Most of what Linux has for games are done by hobbyist... which is fine for the nostalgic type who like 80's style gaming but will never fail to succeed an impressing most of the gaming public. END OF RANT.
Since your credibility was shot to hell with your rant, there is not really much point in reading your later statements, but I did anyway and saw some tired old ideas that have been trotted out before. Other than the point about "good installation binaries, up to date" (? that problem was solved years ago by all vendors I'm familiar with) the ideas aren't likely to happen, but that doesn't matter since none of those things you mentioned is holding linux back.
Its somewhat difficult to envisage what the exact purpose of these innovations are.
LOL, it certainly seems to be difficult for the likes of you, but that's probably par for the course;)
introducing methods even the most basic of PC's from decades ago possessed (ie. Video Gaming).
Wake up rip van winkle - we've been gaming on linux for years, and sad to say, you were asleep and missed it all. For a gentle heads-up, see doom 1/2/3, quake 1/2/3, ut 2000/2003/2004, RtCW, etc etc...
Now maybe some of the "Linux fonts are awful" trolls will stop.
No, they will never stop. Even though linux fonts have been totally sweet for some time now, the fudsters will forever gripe about the 1993-era slackware distro that they once saw, as if it were still relevant.
When reporting benchmarks, you should report in excruciating detail
meh. not intended to be a report, just a data point. But I did run a number of sql benchmarks, including the wisconsin benchmark. On the wisconsin benchmark, for instance, postgresql took about 5 times as long as mysql to finish.
It's not really practical for me to answer every heckler, but to the guy who mentioned a 2 GB file size limit, oracle had that limitation for years, but somehow managed to handle bigger size databases than 2 GB. ask yourself how oracle did it. apply the answer to mysql.
In short, I would love to see a benchmark that would show postgresql in a positve light! If any of you postgres fans knows of such a benchmark, bring it on, I'd love to run it on both pg and mysql to see for myself.
I first compared mysql and postgres in the 1999 era, and found mysql to be like a stripped down hot rod, fast and without frills, though fun to use. Postgres was like a classic cadillac in comparison. Large, ponderous, full of features and amenities. But when it came to performance, mysql just blew postgres out of the water. I ran a number of benchmark tests, and in some cases postgres and mysql were fairly close, while in other tests, postgres took 10 times as long as mysql. In a number of the tests, postgres couldn't finish in a reasonable time, so the results were interpolated.
Postgres fans pointed out that what with all the features and sophistication of postgres, it wasn't fair to benchmark it against mysql.
Fast forward to January 2005. Postgres has gotten faster, while mysql has gained features such as subselects, row-level locking, transactions and more. I ran the sql-bench test suite against mysql 4.0.22, and postgres 7.4, both completely stock, with default configurations as shipped with suse 9.2.
As it turns out, mysql was still an order of magnitude faster on some tests, while mysql and postgres were close on only a few of the tests.
I find mysql extremely easy to work with, as well as being lightweight. There's a reason that Mysql is the M in LAMP, after all.
Yes, active x has been a msie thing, it's salient salient characteristics being that it uses ms-windows-specific methods, and has serious fundamental security problems. The microsoft-specific nature of active x flies in the face of the platform-neutral web.
Thus, if a site is using and depending on active x, they have been rejecting business from customers using browsers other than msie, and even if netscape starts using active x, these sites would still be basically telling all non-microsoft-using customers to go fsck off - Not a very bright business strategy.
For the record, I use Gentoo on my home computer, and Debian on my server (as well as a Windows XP box for gaming).
Interesting. For the record, I use suse pro 9.2 on my desktop, and suse 9.2 pro on my servers. (and a suse 9.2 pro box for gaming - personally, I don't see the point of bothering with microsoft issues just to play ut2004, doom3 or quake 3 arena when those games run quite nicely on linux)
But more to point of the original discussion, my employer's requirements are different from mine, and so they are running suse enterprise linux, aka SLES 9. They need the extra support and feel-good indemnification clauses that come with the enterprise version, but otherwise, it's actually pretty hard to tell the difference between suse pro and suse enterprise.
When it comes to smaller businesses, I've set up linux servers (yes, suse pro) for several of them. They all seem quite happy with it, since it tends to be a set-up and forget it proposition. It's cheaper, but no indemnification. Then again, they just want something that works, and there's usually no money lying around for sco extortion insurance anyway.
Only with an Open Source zealot can he look a gift horse in the mouth, and after inspecting each and every gold cap, yell at the giver for not putting in platinum with extra dental service for life like he wanted.
Let's break it down for you. To use your analogy, Sun gives itself a gift horse, and shows it to the open source community.
Sun: "see all these gold teeth?"
Open Source Community: (shrugs) "They're OK I guess..."
Sun: "I'll let you take a closer look at these teeth, study them, and improve upon them by redesigning/refactoring them, and improving the manufacturing process if you sign up for our special license!"
Open source community: "Oh, so we can look at the design of the teeth, think about how we've managed our own horse's teeth, and contribute our best ideas and work hard to improve your horses, is that it?"
Sun: "Of course, won't that be fun?"
Open Source Community: "So, does it work both ways? I mean, we can then think about how you've implemented your horse's gold teeth, and maybe use some of the ideas to improve our own horse's teeth, right?"
Sun: (confers with lawyers, who violently signal a negative response) "Let's not worry about that for now, the main thing is, you can all work hard to make our horse healthy, strong and more popular than ever, and won't that be fun?"
Open Source Community: "So, we are supposed to take up a new hobby, improving your horse's teeth, right? That's cool, we like programming... But just to be clear, are you saying you won't sue us if we use some of the ideas to improve our own horses teeth?"
Sun: (glances at lawyers, who give him dirty looks and pantomime a slicing motion across their throats) "I'm not sure what you're getting at here, and I really don't know what you expect from us. Come on, this is offered in good faith, so just trust me, OK?"
Open Source Community: "Well, that is certainly a great offer, but I think I'll pass for now. I mean, it sounds like a blast and all, but I've got my hands full taking care of my own horses. But hey dude, listen, take care and good luck with it, aight?"
If american jews are non-violent then why is US supporting the theocratic Israel?
Because they want to live, and believe Israel should also be allowed to exist?
Your calling Israel a theocracy reveals a lack of knowledge, as the modern Israeli is an agnostic, and the state of Israel is what is known as a democracy. Everybody gets a voice, every faction, the militant right, the peace activists, israeli arabs, orthodox religious, even the communists get a say, and the ones with the most votes get to lead.
For a gentle heads-up on what a theocracy is, please refer to Iran, Saudi Arabia, etc.
Let me make sure that my understanding is aligned with the Slashbot collective.
When a clueless admin doesn't secure Windows, it's Windows' fault. But when a clueless admin doesn't secure an OSS application, it's the admin's fault.
Yes, you've got the drill down pat:
Whenever another windows security crisis arises, immediately try to make light of it with sarcasm like what you've written above. The whole idea is to start a flamewar, and divert attention away from the real issues. Extra points if you can manage to insult linux, and linux users in the process.
Did you not read yesterday's article on IBM's Linux migration? They're pretty much stuck because they need IE for so many things.
Yes, I read the IBM progress report, and their internal active X issues are not the issue here. That was a discussion of an internal legacy environment where they could dictate and control the browser, so as to make their application work. The internal captive audience really has no choice of browser in that case.
Also, IBM are not "stuck" as you say. It's something IBM can and will fix, but it will take time, and thus in this sort of environment your proposal might make sense.
A public internet website, however, is a different matter entirely. The website management can not (and should not try to) dictate the choice of browser on the remote customer's desktop. For them to deploy ms-windows specific things like active x is basically to tell all non-msie customers to go take a flying leap. Those customers have every right to find another firm to do business with, and they will take their business elsewhere. Those types of sites should perhaps simply be allowed to come to their natural conclusion, not to be propped up artifically with all sorts of elaborate client side hacks.
What we need is sort of what AOL was rumored to be doing with the next version of Netscape - IE integration. Before the flames start, hear me out.
Some websites require IE right now.
The absolute worst option would be to continue to enable those disfunctional websites which either through incompetence or collusion with microsoft are rejecting customers who choose to use web browsers and/or operating systems other than the common microsoft variety.
They need to be brought into the limelight, and complaints directed to the management, so that the process of fixing them can begin, and if the management persists in rejecting business from non-msie customers, then perhaps those businesses really ought to go the way of the dodo bird.
Isn't it interesting, that merely providing a link to a microsoft-produced advertisment brings all the local slashdot microsoft fanatics out of the woodwork to complain of microsoft-bashing?
So, you microsoft-fanboys are basically saying, we all need to be 110% respectful of microsoft, and speak of the company only in hushed, reverent tones, right? Never refer to anything that might show the convicted monopolist in a bad light, or $DEITY forbid, suggest that microsoft's antics might actually be comical!
To compare and contrast the demands of the microsoft fanatics to the good natured, self-deprecating humor of open source leaders like Linus Torvalds is very instructive, and shows how different the two cultures really are.
Do not know why MS discontinued IE for Unix. I can see thay can expand there.
As one who has tried out msie for solaris, I can assure you that it gave new meaning to the terms buggy, bloated, and crash-prone. It was such a disaster that noboy would ever use it. OTOH, netscape ran fairly well, and stable, on all the major flavors of unix, so there was simply no contest. It's fairly certain that microsoft did the "port" as a political stunt, and an attempted propoganda coup, for 2 reasons:
#1, the blaring hype in ms ads saying "microsoft brings the internet to unix" (yeah right, the internet was pretty much a unix thing until microsoft woke up and came late to the party)
#2, the fact that they ported to an obscure platform like hpux, rather than linux, despite the fact that there were several hundred thousand linux desktop users for every hpux desktop user.
Then they backpedaled, saying "we didn't realize how difficult it was to program for unix". tee hee, a comparison to netscape and it's solid cross platform support puts the talents of microsofts programmers in a fairly bad light here.
Don't use it? What about when it's my freaking bank?
I agree that's hella frustrating, and it may be damned hard to charge banks in a given situation.
While it may be that some of the "interweb developers" who do msie-only sites are card-carrying microsoft careerists whose mission in life to create problems for non-ie users, it is also often the case that they actually didn't intend for it to be ie-only, and just need a gentle heads-up.
My own credit union revamped their website a year or so back, and the result was that neither I (mozilla/Linux) nor my wife (netscape/windows) could access key areas of the site. I wrote the webmaster a little note, mentioning that we could no longer access the site, and providing our platform/browser info.
I got back an email fairly quickly saying that they would look into it immediately, that they simply hadn't tested it on anything other than msie. A few days later, I got another email saying they believed it to be fixed, and asking me to test it. It has been fine ever since.
I guess the moral of the story is, maybe they're not all complete jerks.
Re:Soft Technology Offerings
on
Linux, Inc.
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
BSD probably wouldn't exist if not for linux (correct me if I'm wrong but it uses the linux kernel right?)
No, BSD predates linux - and Linux does borrow some things from the BSDs...
Solaris, Aix, HPuX? Tighly bound to [insert name] hardware
Solaris is available in SPARC and x86 versions, but the others you mentioned are pretty much tied to their vendor hardware. HPUX? way too retro IMHO, and damned expensive.
What other OS would have become the MS competitor in the server market?
It could well be that most of the current linux developers would have been BSD developers, and perhaps FreeBSD would be the dominant force in the server room today.
As much as I'd love to see mainstream laptops built for Linux with full vendor support, the sad fact is that there *is* no real market for it.
Thank you for your opinion. Opinions, however, are no substitute for actual knowledge. It's my pleasure to inform you that Hewlett-packard disagrees with you, and has been shipping laptops with SuSE Linux preinstalled for sme months now. HP is the first major vendor to get it right, as everything just works, out of the box: the wireless networking, suspend to disk, DVD watching (HP ships a licensed linux DVD player).
Smaller vendors have been shipping linux laptops for some years. Dell has been cautiously offering linux on servers, but not workstations or laptops, and IBM has promoted linux in the server room but has never offered the option of a linux laptop. HP is the company that has actually followed through, and they deserve kudos.
I've used vmware, but find it to be just a bit on the pricey side, and not a perfect solution. I've also run win4lin, and while it was pretty nice, it was dependent on a kernel patch, and IIRC was limited to win98...
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a gentle heads-up. Linux distros include a kernel, and it doesn't change by itself. Who told you to change it? It's purely your decision to go around trying every new kernel version that comes out. If you don't want your kernel to change, stop changing it, and don't try to pin the blame for it on anybody but yourself.
As an IS professional and consultant, the answer for me is linux - currently suse 9.2 professional. I can get by in microsoft windoze (w95/98/me/2k/expee) for limited periods, using it essentially as a dumb terminal to get to my internet resources, but to have to use microsoft windoze regularly would quickly become annoying as hell.
I suspect I could also be fairly happy and productive with OSX, and I like what I've seen of it so far, but I haven't spend enough time with it to say for sure.
Eventually I switched over to Suse, which is IMHO a much better distribution than RedHat ever thought about being. Now, my money goes to Suse (well, I guess to novell now), when people ask about a distribution, I recommend Suse, and whenever I'm working with a company trying to decide what to run on their servers, I recommend Suse. (Of course, I've heard some nasty things about 9.2, so I'm going to wait around with 9.1 and see if things get better with 9.3, or switch to another distro, probably gentoo).
That's pretty much my story, except for the part about wanting to switch from suse to some other distro - I haven't the foggiest idea what you might mean by "heard some nasty things about 9.2", as it is in every way a refinement of 9.1, in fact it fixed some really nasty problems in 9.1 e.g. openldap - I've been running 9.2 on dekstops, and on production servers, and it's all blue skies AFAICT. I am looking at the first pre-beta release of of 9.3, and it looks good - 2.6.11-ish kernel, kde 3.4, gnome 2.10 and more. I expect I'll buy that release, just as I've bought every suse release since 8.0, even though I can get it for free from our local novell guy.
Hmm, maybe the variety in the gaming titles that you used as examples was what put him to sleep in the first place.
LOL, he'd be really really bored, plus I'd get writer's cramp, if I tried to list any appreciable fraction of the games that run on linux. I just mentioned of few of the genre that I tend to play, i.e. networked multiplayer 3D FPS, beginning with doom for linux, back in 1994/1995.
I see lots of posts saying "games" are the magic ticket to Linux getting popular. Stop dreaming... it's not gonna happen for a long time. Linux on the desktop is not even remotely near even 10% market share... no sane company is going to put lots of resources into developing games for Linux. Yes there were some flukes where a couple popular games got made but they were hardly profitable. Most of what Linux has for games are done by hobbyist... which is fine for the nostalgic type who like 80's style gaming but will never fail to succeed an impressing most of the gaming public. END OF RANT.
Since your credibility was shot to hell with your rant, there is not really much point in reading your later statements, but I did anyway and saw some tired old ideas that have been trotted out before. Other than the point about "good installation binaries, up to date" (? that problem was solved years ago by all vendors I'm familiar with) the ideas aren't likely to happen, but that doesn't matter since none of those things you mentioned is holding linux back.
Its somewhat difficult to envisage what the exact purpose of these innovations are.
;)
LOL, it certainly seems to be difficult for the likes of you, but that's probably par for the course
introducing methods even the most basic of PC's from decades ago possessed (ie. Video Gaming).
Wake up rip van winkle - we've been gaming on linux for years, and sad to say, you were asleep and missed it all. For a gentle heads-up, see doom 1/2/3, quake 1/2/3, ut 2000/2003/2004, RtCW, etc etc...
No, they will never stop. Even though linux fonts have been totally sweet for some time now, the fudsters will forever gripe about the 1993-era slackware distro that they once saw, as if it were still relevant.
When reporting benchmarks, you should report in excruciating detail
meh. not intended to be a report, just a data point. But I did run a number of sql benchmarks, including the wisconsin benchmark. On the wisconsin benchmark, for instance, postgresql took about 5 times as long as mysql to finish.
It's not really practical for me to answer every heckler, but to the guy who mentioned a 2 GB file size limit, oracle had that limitation for years, but somehow managed to handle bigger size databases than 2 GB. ask yourself how oracle did it. apply the answer to mysql.
In short, I would love to see a benchmark that would show postgresql in a positve light! If any of you postgres fans knows of such a benchmark, bring it on, I'd love to run it on both pg and mysql to see for myself.
Which table type was used in the the default MySql setup?
The default MyISAM tables were used.
I'll test again using the more capable innodb tables when I get a chance...
Now I'm curious about why MySQL is so popular
Two words: blazing fast.
I first compared mysql and postgres in the 1999 era, and found mysql to be like a stripped down hot rod, fast and without frills, though fun to use. Postgres was like a classic cadillac in comparison. Large, ponderous, full of features and amenities. But when it came to performance, mysql just blew postgres out of the water. I ran a number of benchmark tests, and in some cases postgres and mysql were fairly close, while in other tests, postgres took 10 times as long as mysql. In a number of the tests, postgres couldn't finish in a reasonable time, so the results were interpolated.
Postgres fans pointed out that what with all the features and sophistication of postgres, it wasn't fair to benchmark it against mysql.
Fast forward to January 2005. Postgres has gotten faster, while mysql has gained features such as subselects, row-level locking, transactions and more. I ran the sql-bench test suite against mysql 4.0.22, and postgres 7.4, both completely stock, with default configurations as shipped with suse 9.2.
As it turns out, mysql was still an order of magnitude faster on some tests, while mysql and postgres were close on only a few of the tests.
I find mysql extremely easy to work with, as well as being lightweight. There's a reason that Mysql is the M in LAMP, after all.
Yes, active x has been a msie thing, it's salient salient characteristics being that it uses ms-windows-specific methods, and has serious fundamental security problems. The microsoft-specific nature of active x flies in the face of the platform-neutral web.
Thus, if a site is using and depending on active x, they have been rejecting business from customers using browsers other than msie, and even if netscape starts using active x, these sites would still be basically telling all non-microsoft-using customers to go fsck off - Not a very bright business strategy.
For the record, I use Gentoo on my home computer, and Debian on my server (as well as a Windows XP box for gaming).
Interesting. For the record, I use suse pro 9.2 on my desktop, and suse 9.2 pro on my servers. (and a suse 9.2 pro box for gaming - personally, I don't see the point of bothering with microsoft issues just to play ut2004, doom3 or quake 3 arena when those games run quite nicely on linux)
But more to point of the original discussion, my employer's requirements are different from mine, and so they are running suse enterprise linux, aka SLES 9. They need the extra support and feel-good indemnification clauses that come with the enterprise version, but otherwise, it's actually pretty hard to tell the difference between suse pro and suse enterprise.
When it comes to smaller businesses, I've set up linux servers (yes, suse pro) for several of them. They all seem quite happy with it, since it tends to be a set-up and forget it proposition. It's cheaper, but no indemnification. Then again, they just want something that works, and there's usually no money lying around for sco extortion insurance anyway.
Only with an Open Source zealot can he look a gift horse in the mouth, and after inspecting each and every gold cap, yell at the giver for not putting in platinum with extra dental service for life like he wanted.
Let's break it down for you. To use your analogy, Sun gives itself a gift horse, and shows it to the open source community.
Sun: "see all these gold teeth?"
Open Source Community: (shrugs) "They're OK I guess..."
Sun: "I'll let you take a closer look at these teeth, study them, and improve upon them by redesigning/refactoring them, and improving the manufacturing process if you sign up for our special license!"
Open source community: "Oh, so we can look at the design of the teeth, think about how we've managed our own horse's teeth, and contribute our best ideas and work hard to improve your horses, is that it?"
Sun: "Of course, won't that be fun?"
Open Source Community: "So, does it work both ways? I mean, we can then think about how you've implemented your horse's gold teeth, and maybe use some of the ideas to improve our own horse's teeth, right?"
Sun: (confers with lawyers, who violently signal a negative response) "Let's not worry about that for now, the main thing is, you can all work hard to make our horse healthy, strong and more popular than ever, and won't that be fun?"
Open Source Community: "So, we are supposed to take up a new hobby, improving your horse's teeth, right? That's cool, we like programming... But just to be clear, are you saying you won't sue us if we use some of the ideas to improve our own horses teeth?"
Sun: (glances at lawyers, who give him dirty looks and pantomime a slicing motion across their throats) "I'm not sure what you're getting at here, and I really don't know what you expect from us. Come on, this is offered in good faith, so just trust me, OK?"
Open Source Community: "Well, that is certainly a great offer, but I think I'll pass for now. I mean, it sounds like a blast and all, but I've got my hands full taking care of my own horses. But hey dude, listen, take care and good luck with it, aight?"
If american jews are non-violent then why is US supporting the theocratic Israel?
Because they want to live, and believe Israel should also be allowed to exist?
Your calling Israel a theocracy reveals a lack of knowledge, as the modern Israeli is an agnostic, and the state of Israel is what is known as a democracy. Everybody gets a voice, every faction, the militant right, the peace activists, israeli arabs, orthodox religious, even the communists get a say, and the ones with the most votes get to lead.
For a gentle heads-up on what a theocracy is, please refer to Iran, Saudi Arabia, etc.
Google's a search engine company, I don't want to see any other product from them.
Feel free to keep your eyes closed then.
I for one welcome our new google browser overlords.
Let me make sure that my understanding is aligned with the Slashbot collective.
When a clueless admin doesn't secure Windows, it's Windows' fault. But when a clueless admin doesn't secure an OSS application, it's the admin's fault.
Yes, you've got the drill down pat:
Whenever another windows security crisis arises, immediately try to make light of it with sarcasm like what you've written above. The whole idea is to start a flamewar, and divert attention away from the real issues. Extra points if you can manage to insult linux, and linux users in the process.
You have done well.
Did you not read yesterday's article on IBM's Linux migration? They're pretty much stuck because they need IE for so many things.
Yes, I read the IBM progress report, and their internal active X issues are not the issue here. That was a discussion of an internal legacy environment where they could dictate and control the browser, so as to make their application work. The internal captive audience really has no choice of browser in that case.
Also, IBM are not "stuck" as you say. It's something IBM can and will fix, but it will take time, and thus in this sort of environment your proposal might make sense.
A public internet website, however, is a different matter entirely. The website management can not (and should not try to) dictate the choice of browser on the remote customer's desktop. For them to deploy ms-windows specific things like active x is basically to tell all non-msie customers to go take a flying leap. Those customers have every right to find another firm to do business with, and they will take their business elsewhere. Those types of sites should perhaps simply be allowed to come to their natural conclusion, not to be propped up artifically with all sorts of elaborate client side hacks.
What we need is sort of what AOL was rumored to be doing with the next version of Netscape - IE integration. Before the flames start, hear me out.
Some websites require IE right now.
The absolute worst option would be to continue to enable those disfunctional websites which either through incompetence or collusion with microsoft are rejecting customers who choose to use web browsers and/or operating systems other than the common microsoft variety.
They need to be brought into the limelight, and complaints directed to the management, so that the process of fixing them can begin, and if the management persists in rejecting business from non-msie customers, then perhaps those businesses really ought to go the way of the dodo bird.
Isn't it interesting, that merely providing a link to a microsoft-produced advertisment brings all the local slashdot microsoft fanatics out of the woodwork to complain of microsoft-bashing?
So, you microsoft-fanboys are basically saying, we all need to be 110% respectful of microsoft, and speak of the company only in hushed, reverent tones, right? Never refer to anything that might show the convicted monopolist in a bad light, or $DEITY forbid, suggest that microsoft's antics might actually be comical!
To compare and contrast the demands of the microsoft fanatics to the good natured, self-deprecating humor of open source leaders like Linus Torvalds is very instructive, and shows how different the two cultures really are.
Do not know why MS discontinued IE for Unix. I can see thay can expand there.
As one who has tried out msie for solaris, I can assure you that it gave new meaning to the terms buggy, bloated, and crash-prone. It was such a disaster that noboy would ever use it. OTOH, netscape ran fairly well, and stable, on all the major flavors of unix, so there was simply no contest. It's fairly certain that microsoft did the "port" as a political stunt, and an attempted propoganda coup, for 2 reasons:
#1, the blaring hype in ms ads saying "microsoft brings the internet to unix" (yeah right, the internet was pretty much a unix thing until microsoft woke up and came late to the party)
#2, the fact that they ported to an obscure platform like hpux, rather than linux, despite the fact that there were several hundred thousand linux desktop users for every hpux desktop user.
Then they backpedaled, saying "we didn't realize how difficult it was to program for unix". tee hee, a comparison to netscape and it's solid cross platform support puts the talents of microsofts programmers in a fairly bad light here.
Don't use it? What about when it's my freaking bank?
I agree that's hella frustrating, and it may be damned hard to charge banks in a given situation.
While it may be that some of the "interweb developers" who do msie-only sites are card-carrying microsoft careerists whose mission in life to create problems for non-ie users, it is also often the case that they actually didn't intend for it to be ie-only, and just need a gentle heads-up.
My own credit union revamped their website a year or so back, and the result was that neither I (mozilla/Linux) nor my wife (netscape/windows) could access key areas of the site. I wrote the webmaster a little note, mentioning that we could no longer access the site, and providing our platform/browser info.
I got back an email fairly quickly saying that they would look into it immediately, that they simply hadn't tested it on anything other than msie. A few days later, I got another email saying they believed it to be fixed, and asking me to test it. It has been fine ever since.
I guess the moral of the story is, maybe they're not all complete jerks.
BSD probably wouldn't exist if not for linux (correct me if I'm wrong but it uses the linux kernel right?)
No, BSD predates linux - and Linux does borrow some things from the BSDs...
Solaris, Aix, HPuX? Tighly bound to [insert name] hardware
Solaris is available in SPARC and x86 versions, but the others you mentioned are pretty much tied to their vendor hardware. HPUX? way too retro IMHO, and damned expensive.
What other OS would have become the MS competitor in the server market?
It could well be that most of the current linux developers would have been BSD developers, and perhaps FreeBSD would be the dominant force in the server room today.
As much as I'd love to see mainstream laptops built for Linux with full vendor support, the sad fact is that there *is* no real market for it.
Thank you for your opinion. Opinions, however, are no substitute for actual knowledge. It's my pleasure to inform you that Hewlett-packard disagrees with you, and has been shipping laptops with SuSE Linux preinstalled for sme months now. HP is the first major vendor to get it right, as everything just works, out of the box: the wireless networking, suspend to disk, DVD watching (HP ships a licensed linux DVD player).
Smaller vendors have been shipping linux laptops for some years. Dell has been cautiously offering linux on servers, but not workstations or laptops, and IBM has promoted linux in the server room but has never offered the option of a linux laptop. HP is the company that has actually followed through, and they deserve kudos.
It's called VMWare
I've used vmware, but find it to be just a bit on the pricey side, and not a perfect solution. I've also run win4lin, and while it was pretty nice, it was dependent on a kernel patch, and IIRC was limited to win98...