I think in general, your computer can only be AS RELIABLE as the electric grid, not MORE RELIABLE.
Mine have been considerably more reliable than the power grid since I got a UPS (and fixing the bad breaker in the fusebox helped, too), to the point where I'll say: "Fsck that, the availability of the power grid is inadequate. I want, and can do, considerably better. If the level of reliability typical of commercial power distribution systems is satisfactory for the monopolist, there's one more reason I'll stick to FREE software, thank you very much".
That is a very poor choice of analogy, especially in the PG&E service area.
Uh, not by me. I _deleted_ it, bastard illegal monopoly tool that it is.
Of course the Lose98 system now whines about missing it at every mouse click. TFB. I very seldom boot the WinBloze side anyway. It's useless, it doesn't even have a decent telnet client, much less an X server. You can't get it near the Internet without it becoming 0wn3d by script kiddes or spyware, or both. WTF is WinBloze supposed to _do_, anyway? About all it's good for is to backup the WinCE PDA, which of course can't talk to anything else. I shoulda bought a Palm Pilot.
Oh, it also is the only thing that the xirlink camera can talk to, unless some geek out there has hacked that protocol.
"Yes, they believe exactly that, and they're desperate to make sure that you're looking at advertizing constantly." 'They' will not be satisfied until the entire fscking planet is covered with their ads and is generating revenue for them. What gives them the belief that they own every square inch of everything? They have the money to buy the advertizing rights to it.
the crunchenticker. {That's a 'self-loading handgun', for you Brits.}
During the previous "presidential" "administration", I used to keep it handy on the coffee table, to shoot at the frequent liars that would appear on the news.
I put it away a while ago - admittedly prematurely.
It always made for a great conversation piece, especially when I would pick it up, point it at the TV, and yell stuff like: "Liar, LIAR, Pants On Fire!!" whilst clicking away. Of course, with the real ammunition safely tucked away in the safe, this made about the same noise as a kid's (unloaded) cap gun, but it was good clean fun, and decent trigger practice if you take the time to control your shots.
I haven't carried a watch since I started carrying a pager. Now I usually have on me a PCS phone which keeps its own clock. When I went flying, I had to turn it off. When we landed, I turned it back on and it hunted around for maybe five minutes, then came up with local digital service and set its clock - to the local time zone. I figure the actual time value comes from an NTP server somewhere in the Sprint communications network, probably "first tier". I set everything else by that. What's cool is to see the VCR (which sets itself from the TV airwaves) concur with the phone's time to within a few seconds....
I'm sure as I grow older my condiitions will change. I'll marry (I sure hope so at least), have children, and in general incur greater expenses in the course of living.
Yeah, have a couple of kids and see what that does to yer budget....
1600 x 1200 on a 13" monitor would be better than 1024 x 768 on 2 13" monitors?
If you're even considering _carrying_them_around_, certainly.
And I need glasses to focus on anything within a meter of my eyes, anymore, so the magnifying glass isn't an issue.
I recently bought an A22p with the 15" 1600x1200 UXGA screen. They're going to have to do _considerably_ better to get $5K outta me, or get me to carry around anything any heavier than its 8 lbs.
Sony and IIRC Dell recently released machines with 16" 1600x1200 and comparable weight, priced in the $2500 range. There's the bar. Aim to get _well_ over it, or don't bother.
I just spoke to my good friend who just happened to write all the video software for this laptop (in addition to many other company duties) and he told me that the resolution PER SCREEN is 1024 Vertically x 768 Across.
Then you _need_ to tell your friend that their website's spec matrix says "1024(H) x 768(V)", so that they can correct this error.
And while 1536x1024 is decent, it's still not worth 13lbs and $5000.
And can "Matthew" come up with drivers to run XFree86 on it? Inquiring minds want to know.
1024x768 for each screen. That's 1536x1024 for the whole "virtual screen".
I don't think so. They state 1024(H) x 768(V), which implies that that's _both_ screens, since it's wider than it is tall. That's about what you get from a 12" Sony VR-505, at 3.5 lbs.
That's pretty unspeakably lame for a 20" laptop weighing 12 lbs. You'd be better off with a pair of 13" 5lb 1280x1024x32 laptops turned on their sides and hooked together via ethernet into a dual-head rig. For $5e3 and 12lbs, you could prolly also afford a (lightweight, maybe fold-up) external keyboard to lay on the table in front of it, and ouf course you'd need a mouse, too. Not that that the whole rig would be something you'd want to plug and unplug and carry around, but it would weigh and co$t less.
Now, if they had gone for the whole enchilada with 1280x1024 for each screen, resulting in 2048x1280 in total screen estate, I would have been impressed.
Right. That's much more worthwhile. There's also the issue of the electronics behind it. 8M and 16-bit color depth ain't gonna command a $5K price tag, either.
it seems to me to be a solution to a problem that doesn't exist.
because my Novell experience is limited to about 3.12 or so (circa 1995). It's no doubt made some progress since then, hell DoS/WinBloze has even made progress, but so have I, and I no longer pay attention to either, except of course to laugh at the M$ vulnerability of the week.
In those days (1978-82) the Berkeley people were developing SystemIV on PDP-11s, which sucked compared to the 286 for hardware task separation, virtual memory support, memory address space (the PDP Maxxed out at 256K (yes, that's K NOT M!)) and even CPU performance at the low end. (A 16MHz 80286 easily dusted off anything in the LSI-11 family.)
The 286 ran Xenix, so the Empire bought it (Xenix, not the 286) and priced it at $1000 for a run-time license and another $1000 for software development tools, to keep it off the PC market.
Trying to add virtual memory, multitasking and all those other OS things onto a platform which originally had never thought of them is an excercise in futility, and that was called WinBloze (both 16- and 32-bit, AFAICT). Sure, it could use 32-bit pointers, but when it went to access the disk drive, the low-level driver switched the CPU out of virtual protected mode and back to real mode, because the disk access code was all real mode. This kind of silliness forced all the device drivers to live in the real mode memory space (the 1M addressable by an 8086), which resulted in a big fight over the low RAM. All my most frustrating fights with DoS were over the low RAM, which the Empire in its wisdom saw fit to further limit to 640K. 4M, then 8, then we had a 16M RAM, and everybody is still squabbling over the first 640K!
When I was studying computer Operating Systems, it quickly dawned on me that my PC _oughta_ be able to do lots of things - virtual memory, protected memory, asynchronous(interrupt-driven) I/O, multitasking, user/task seperation & protection - that M$-DoS was simply denying me. Hence the name, DoS == Denial of Service.
The deal is that you are free to say (or print) anything you please, but if you spread lies, and the subject of these lies can prove that his business or reputation or whatever was damaged by them, this is an actionable, possibly even criminal, offense. There's a commandment about not bearing _false_ witness against "thy neighbor", and this is reflected in the laws of most western nations.
OTOH, if you can prove that your statements are factual (as I'm confident the defendant in this case can do), you're off, and the "damaged" party can go pout, because the legal system (at least here in the states, but I would hope the commonwealth also) won't touch you.
Yelling "FIRE!" in a crowded theater is OK iff the theater is, in fact, on fire. Otherwise it's probably not a good idea.....
I guess I should say IANAL, and that this does not qualify as legal advice.
The address on the webpage probably goes to his editor. Perhaps they'll forward stuff to him. There's also his company, NetWeb.com, which has a contact address which is an obvious target for comments.
Like, say, _this_:
TO: letters@news.com
info@netweb.com
ATTN: Barry Dennis, and his Editor RE: http://news.com.com/2010-1076-915523.html?tag=fd_n c_1 [conveniently mangled by the lameness filter]
"Am I crazy or what? I love spam!"
You're crazy. As in "psychotic". As in: "Disassociated from reality, to the point of doing harm to yourself or others". You should be institutionalized, or, better yet, eliminated, for the good of the human race.
You're a long-standing "direct-marketer" (translation: tree-killer)? Now you're a spammer?
Here's an open letter to all spammers:
How many millions of unwanted emails have you sent out? How many seconds have you stolen from peoples' lives by forcing them to detect and dispose of it? I suspect these seconds add up to a span of stolen time that's many times longer than your natural life.
You need to go eat shit and die. Really. I openly advocate keelhauling as appropriate punishment for spammers. Under a powerboat, with a propeller, nevermind sailboats. Others would burn you at the stake. Lethal injection is regarded as too merciful for the likes of you.
When you kill trees to send paper to my local recycler, you at least pay for your "right" to stuff my wood-mailbox in terms of paper, printing, and postage, but you steal from me the time it takes me to pull it out of my mailbox, sort out the "real" mail, and pitch the trash into the recycling bin. When you send me email, you force _me_ to pay for the storage of it, the bandwidth to transmit it, and you again steal from me the time it takes me to dispose of it. Now I know you're going to reply: "How long does it take to press 'delete'?" Maybe a second, but when you multiply one second by the hundred pieces of spam I get everyday, then multiply that by every day, then multiply that by about 50 million email users, it starts to add up. This is time that you steal from others, I care not how you rationalize it.
I want to be crystal clear on this: NONE of it gets read! You're completely wasting paper, ink, postage, time, bandwidth, effort, everything it takes to send me that recycle bin filler or that spam email. I look at it long enough to determine its nature and it's gone. You're spinning your wheels. I know of NO ONE who responds favorably to email advertizement. The strongest reactions you're going to get are:
A) NEGATIVE RESPONSE. I've a growing list of companies I won't
patronize, simply because they've sent me spam. Netweb
has just been added to that list. Please send me a list
of your customers, so I can avoid them, too.
B) automated filtering and disposal of your messages, without the
victim even seeing them. netweb.com has just made that list,
I'll _never_ see any mail from you.
C) complaints to your ISP, which will get you unplugged from the
Internet. I'll see about that.
D) a reputation as a spammer. Once you get on the popular spammer
lists, everybody that uses these lists will also automatically
eliminate you from their email. You're probably already on
some of these.
Please go find yourself an honest occupation. Or just die. But GET OUT OF MY MAILBOXES!!!
The Mach Kernel announced in the article is just the "microkernel" core of the Hurd, it requires a herd of servers (drivers?) to do anything useful, and this collection is at 0.3 (maybe), NOT 1.3 working on 2.0?
The complete Hurd (or, at least, enough of it to provide the drivers and services you plan to use) would be required to comprise a "drop-in" replacement for Linux, so it isn't simply a matter of replacing the Linux Kernel with this Mach Kernel, calling it "GNU/Hurd 1.0", and starting work on 2.0?
For that matter, why not use the (I would hope perfectly good) BSD Mach kernel and focus on the drivers to make it useful? This was good enough for Apple...
I suppose there's that BSD license, but if BSD licensing lets the monopolist assimilate code, wouldn't it do the same for a GPL project?
even then I have to remember to say "O-S ten". Anyway.
OS-ten? Without actually owning a copy, I usually call it "OS-X", to emphasize its relation to UNIX, IRIX, POSIX, HP/UX, AUX, AIX, "LinuX", and all those other "X"-y OSen out there, as well as the break from the previously numbered Apple "OS"en such as OS/8 & OS/9.
Maybe technically Hurd isn't complete or even really functional. Why, then, call it 1.0? Look at how nearly fully functional Mozilla is at 0.98. Of course, I guess you can _call_ it "dogshit 1.0" and that doesn't make it functional.
The "Good Thing(tm)" I was talking about is that if you don't want to use BitKeeper ('cuz it ain't FREE) you're free to work on Hurd, which has no such taint. I suppose you'd also be free to borrow all the code you want from Linux, as the overwhelming majority of it is still GPL.
Slashdot Mirror
I think in general, your computer can only be AS RELIABLE as the electric grid, not MORE RELIABLE.
Mine have been considerably more reliable than the power grid since I got a UPS (and fixing the bad breaker in the fusebox helped, too), to the point where I'll say: "Fsck that, the availability of the power grid is inadequate. I want, and can do, considerably better. If the level of reliability typical of commercial power distribution systems is satisfactory for the monopolist, there's one more reason I'll stick to FREE software, thank you very much".
That is a very poor choice of analogy, especially in the PG&E service area.
Uh, not by me. I _deleted_ it, bastard illegal monopoly tool that it is.
Of course the Lose98 system now whines about missing it at every mouse click. TFB. I very seldom boot the WinBloze side anyway. It's useless, it doesn't even have a decent telnet client, much less an X server. You can't get it near the Internet without it becoming 0wn3d by script kiddes or spyware, or both. WTF is WinBloze supposed to _do_, anyway? About all it's good for is to backup the WinCE PDA, which of course can't talk to anything else. I shoulda bought a Palm Pilot.
Oh, it also is the only thing that the xirlink camera can talk to, unless some geek out there has hacked that protocol.
"Yes, they believe exactly that, and they're desperate to make sure that you're looking at advertizing constantly." 'They' will not be satisfied until the entire fscking planet is covered with their ads and is generating revenue for them. What gives them the belief that they own every square inch of everything? They have the money to buy the advertizing rights to it.
Do "They" think we just don't see enough advertising in a day?
The short answer is "no".
Executive summary: "No, they don't, and they're desperate to send you more".
the crunchenticker. {That's a 'self-loading handgun', for you Brits.}
During the previous "presidential" "administration", I used to keep it handy on the coffee table, to shoot at the frequent liars that would appear on the news.
I put it away a while ago - admittedly prematurely.
It always made for a great conversation piece, especially when I would pick it up, point it at the TV, and yell stuff like: "Liar, LIAR, Pants On Fire!!" whilst clicking away. Of course, with the real ammunition safely tucked away in the safe, this made about the same noise as a kid's (unloaded) cap gun, but it was good clean fun, and decent trigger practice if you take the time to control your shots.
I haven't carried a watch since I started carrying a pager. Now I usually have on me a PCS phone which keeps its own clock. When I went flying, I had to turn it off. When we landed, I turned it back on and it hunted around for maybe five minutes, then came up with local digital service and set its clock - to the local time zone. I figure the actual time value comes from an NTP server somewhere in the Sprint communications network, probably "first tier". I set everything else by that. What's cool is to see the VCR (which sets itself from the TV airwaves) concur with the phone's time to within a few seconds....
I'm sure as I grow older my condiitions will change. I'll marry (I sure hope so at least), have children, and in general incur greater expenses in the course of living.
Yeah, have a couple of kids and see what that does to yer budget....
1600 x 1200 on a 13" monitor would be better than 1024 x 768 on 2 13" monitors?
If you're even considering _carrying_them_around_, certainly.
And I need glasses to focus on anything within a meter of my eyes, anymore, so the magnifying glass isn't an issue.
I recently bought an A22p with the 15" 1600x1200 UXGA screen. They're going to have to do _considerably_ better to get $5K outta me, or get me to carry around anything any heavier than its 8 lbs.
Sony and IIRC Dell recently released machines with 16" 1600x1200 and comparable weight, priced in the $2500 range. There's the bar. Aim to get _well_ over it, or don't bother.
I just spoke to my good friend who just happened to write all the video software for this laptop (in addition to many other company duties) and he told me that the resolution PER SCREEN is 1024 Vertically x 768 Across.
Then you _need_ to tell your friend that their website's spec matrix says "1024(H) x 768(V)", so that they can correct this error.
And while 1536x1024 is decent, it's still not worth 13lbs and $5000.
And can "Matthew" come up with drivers to run XFree86 on it? Inquiring minds want to know.
1024x768 for each screen. That's 1536x1024 for the whole "virtual screen".
I don't think so. They state 1024(H) x 768(V), which implies that that's _both_ screens, since it's wider than it is tall. That's about what you get from a 12" Sony VR-505, at 3.5 lbs.
That's pretty unspeakably lame for a 20" laptop weighing 12 lbs. You'd be better off with a pair of 13" 5lb 1280x1024x32 laptops turned on their sides and hooked together via ethernet into a dual-head rig. For $5e3 and 12lbs, you could prolly also afford a (lightweight, maybe fold-up) external keyboard to lay on the table in front of it, and ouf course you'd need a mouse, too. Not that that the whole rig would be something you'd want to plug and unplug and carry around, but it would weigh and co$t less.
Now, if they had gone for the whole enchilada with 1280x1024 for each screen, resulting in 2048x1280 in total screen estate, I would have been impressed.
Right. That's much more worthwhile. There's also the issue of the electronics behind it. 8M and 16-bit color depth ain't gonna command a $5K price tag, either.
it seems to me to be a solution to a problem that doesn't exist.
Maybe if you have _really_ bad eyes...
I think I make my point.
Only if your point is that you like Jeri Ryan's tits (with which I can't argue). Otherwise you're on quite shaky ground....
From being used by you in ways of which the RIAA/MPAA does not approve.
Oh! You mean you want to protect a confidential email from prying eyes?
What are you, a terrorist or something? What are you trying to hide?
And I suppose those of us at /. are the enlightened elite?
Uh, yeah, basically.
Well, not you M$ lusers, even if you are in the majority that just goes to reinforce the elitism of those of us who've escaped the Empire.
We may be running, but at least we're not trying to run while wearing the shackles and chains of the monopolist!
because my Novell experience is limited to about 3.12 or so (circa 1995). It's no doubt made some progress since then, hell DoS/WinBloze has even made progress, but so have I, and I no longer pay attention to either, except of course to laugh at the M$ vulnerability of the week.
In those days (1978-82) the Berkeley people were developing SystemIV on PDP-11s, which sucked compared to the 286 for hardware task separation, virtual memory support, memory address space (the PDP Maxxed out at 256K (yes, that's K NOT M!)) and even CPU performance at the low end. (A 16MHz 80286 easily dusted off anything in the LSI-11 family.)
The 286 ran Xenix, so the Empire bought it (Xenix, not the 286) and priced it at $1000 for a run-time license and another $1000 for software development tools, to keep it off the PC market.
Trying to add virtual memory, multitasking and all those other OS things onto a platform which originally had never thought of them is an excercise in futility, and that was called WinBloze (both 16- and 32-bit, AFAICT). Sure, it could use 32-bit pointers, but when it went to access the disk drive, the low-level driver switched the CPU out of virtual protected mode and back to real mode, because the disk access code was all real mode. This kind of silliness forced all the device drivers to live in the real mode memory space (the 1M addressable by an 8086), which resulted in a big fight over the low RAM. All my most frustrating fights with DoS were over the low RAM, which the Empire in its wisdom saw fit to further limit to 640K. 4M, then 8, then we had a 16M RAM, and everybody is still squabbling over the first 640K!
or virtual or protected memory (on 486 so the hardware is no excuse), good user seperation in the file system, but still not really an OS.
Novell NetWare == DDoS (Distributed DoS) M$- or DR-, as the case may be, because it's _still_ denying you many services a computer OS provides.
When I was studying computer Operating Systems, it quickly dawned on me that my PC _oughta_ be able to do lots of things - virtual memory, protected memory, asynchronous(interrupt-driven) I/O, multitasking, user/task seperation & protection - that M$-DoS was simply denying me. Hence the name, DoS == Denial of Service.
Well, it certainly wasn't an Operating System!
I think that's what he was saying:
"Also, the longer you know one flavor of UNIX, the more likely you are to call any new flavor you encounter 'braindead'.
Except when it comes to SCO."
Should be followed by: "You'll call SCO 'braindead' no matter what."
I wonder if it will ever be as commonly used as "pulling a 'Homer'"?
and probably slander.
The deal is that you are free to say (or print) anything you please, but if you spread lies, and the subject of these lies can prove that his business or reputation or whatever was damaged by them, this is an actionable, possibly even criminal, offense. There's a commandment about not bearing _false_ witness against "thy neighbor", and this is reflected in the laws of most western nations.
OTOH, if you can prove that your statements are factual (as I'm confident the defendant in this case can do), you're off, and the "damaged" party can go pout, because the legal system (at least here in the states, but I would hope the commonwealth also) won't touch you.
Yelling "FIRE!" in a crowded theater is OK iff the theater is, in fact, on fire.
Otherwise it's probably not a good idea.....
I guess I should say IANAL, and that this does not qualify as legal advice.
with which I agree, totally.
n c_1 [conveniently mangled by the lameness filter]
The address on the webpage probably goes to his editor. Perhaps they'll forward stuff to him. There's also his company, NetWeb.com, which has a contact address which is an obvious target for comments.
Like, say, _this_:
TO: letters@news.com
info@netweb.com
ATTN: Barry Dennis, and his Editor
RE: http://news.com.com/2010-1076-915523.html?tag=fd_
"Am I crazy or what? I love spam!"
You're crazy. As in "psychotic". As in: "Disassociated from reality, to the point of doing harm to yourself or others". You should be institutionalized, or, better yet, eliminated, for the good of the human race.
You're a long-standing "direct-marketer" (translation: tree-killer)?
Now you're a spammer?
Here's an open letter to all spammers:
How many millions of unwanted emails have you sent out? How many seconds have you stolen from peoples' lives by forcing them to detect and dispose of it? I suspect these seconds add up to a span of stolen time that's many times longer than your natural life.
You need to go eat shit and die. Really. I openly advocate keelhauling as appropriate punishment for spammers. Under a powerboat, with a propeller, nevermind sailboats. Others would burn you at the stake. Lethal injection is regarded as too merciful for the likes of you.
When you kill trees to send paper to my local recycler, you at least pay for your "right" to stuff my wood-mailbox in terms of paper, printing, and postage, but you steal from me the time it takes me to pull it out of my mailbox, sort out the "real" mail, and pitch the trash into the recycling bin. When you send me email, you force _me_ to pay for the storage of it, the bandwidth to transmit it, and you again steal from me the time it takes me to dispose of it. Now I know you're going to reply: "How long does it take to press 'delete'?" Maybe a second, but when you multiply one second by the hundred pieces of spam I get everyday, then multiply that by every day, then multiply that by about 50 million email users, it starts to add up. This is time that you steal from others, I care not how you rationalize it.
I want to be crystal clear on this: NONE of it gets read! You're completely wasting paper, ink, postage, time, bandwidth, effort, everything it takes to send me that recycle bin filler or that spam email. I look at it long enough to determine its nature and it's gone. You're spinning your wheels. I know of NO ONE who responds favorably to email advertizement. The strongest reactions you're going to get are:
A) NEGATIVE RESPONSE. I've a growing list of companies I won't
patronize, simply because they've sent me spam. Netweb
has just been added to that list. Please send me a list
of your customers, so I can avoid them, too.
B) automated filtering and disposal of your messages, without the
victim even seeing them. netweb.com has just made that list,
I'll _never_ see any mail from you.
C) complaints to your ISP, which will get you unplugged from the
Internet. I'll see about that.
D) a reputation as a spammer. Once you get on the popular spammer
lists, everybody that uses these lists will also automatically
eliminate you from their email. You're probably already on
some of these.
Please go find yourself an honest occupation. Or just die. But GET OUT OF MY MAILBOXES!!!
Under a powerboat, though, no wussy _sail_boats....
since they sort of 0wn it.
But they _can_ seriously inhibit the development of that market, which they've already been doing for maybe 5 years now.....
The Mach Kernel announced in the article is just the "microkernel" core of the Hurd, it requires a herd of servers (drivers?) to do anything useful, and this collection is at 0.3 (maybe), NOT 1.3 working on 2.0?
The complete Hurd (or, at least, enough of it to provide the drivers and services you plan to use) would be required to comprise a "drop-in" replacement for Linux, so it isn't simply a matter of replacing the Linux Kernel with this Mach Kernel, calling it "GNU/Hurd 1.0", and starting work on 2.0?
For that matter, why not use the (I would hope perfectly good) BSD Mach kernel and focus on the drivers to make it useful? This was good enough for Apple...
I suppose there's that BSD license, but if BSD licensing lets the monopolist assimilate code, wouldn't it do the same for a GPL project?
even then I have to remember to say "O-S ten". Anyway.
OS-ten? Without actually owning a copy, I usually call it "OS-X", to emphasize its relation to UNIX, IRIX, POSIX, HP/UX, AUX, AIX, "LinuX", and all those other "X"-y OSen out there, as well as the break from the previously numbered Apple "OS"en such as OS/8 & OS/9.
Maybe technically Hurd isn't complete or even really functional. Why, then, call it 1.0? Look at how nearly fully functional Mozilla is at 0.98. Of course, I guess you can _call_ it "dogshit 1.0" and that doesn't make it functional.
The "Good Thing(tm)" I was talking about is that if you don't want to use BitKeeper ('cuz it ain't FREE) you're free to work on Hurd, which has no such taint. I suppose you'd also be free to borrow all the code you want from Linux, as the overwhelming majority of it is still GPL.