I majored in Industrial Engineering (hated it). I worked menial jobs (fast food, retail, data entry) to pay my way through school. Meanwhile, I played with Coherent (anyone remember that? It was a U**X workalike, similar to Xenix, for 80286 PCs), and eventually bought a NeXTstation because it was just the coolest thing I'd ever seen! That's how I learned PC hardware and U**X.
After I graduated I knew I didn't want a job in IE -- I eventually found a job maintaining a network of PCs running Interactive Unix (later we migrated over to UnixWare, then Solaris and Windows NT because that was the direction our industry went).
It's a job in which you're generally unappreciated and overlooked. But a challenge every day.
I disagree -- Samba is arguably the single most often used piece of "middleware" (under the MS/DoJ settlement nomenclature) that would be affected by this settlement. I can't think of anything else even in the same category possessing the same level of usefulness as Samba. I've seen much speculation over the last couple of years that says Microsoft would be delighted to have a means to get rid of Samba; this might just be it.
Therefore I believe it's extremely important for any discussions to include Samba.
Why should I have to build a new kernel just to support my mouse? I don't expect the base install kernel to support for example a newly-released RAID controller, but USB has been on every motherboard shipped at least since 1998!
And before someone calls me an idiot for running my system on the install kernel, I'm not -- I understand the value of a tuned custom kernel; I just expected the USB support to be there, as USB input devices have been commonplace for a while.
I have a question though -- where can you buy a C3 processor? I have only seen them for sale at one or two websites. I've never seen any advertising of any type for one, nor have I seen any of the major motherboard manufacturers list it as a supported CPU (whether or not their boards do, in fact, support it).
> Actually Redhat 7.2 quality sometimes is more "beta" than Woody.
I believe you. Had I known that at the time, I would have pursued Woody more vigorously. But as it is now, I really don't want to invest any more time into getting this machine running -- it's been very stable so far (it *was* running Windows 2000!)
And yes, FreeBSD would have detected my hardware and worked right from the start; it was first choice over Linux, except I have to have Windows 2000 for a few things, so I'm running VMWare.
I don't intend to start a "my distribution can beat up your distribution" thread here.... That said, I had a very negative experience with Debian recently. While trying to choose a Linux distro, I narrowed down my choices to Debian and Redhat. I didn't want to run a beta release of anything, but it sounded like Debian (Potato) would suit my needs. So I installed it. The installation itself wasn't painful (though I don't understand why it required two floppies to do a network install), but I soon discovered it didn't support my usb mouse & keyboard or my Matrox G450 dualhead video card. I futzed around for a day or two trying to get XFree 4.1.0 running, without much success. So I bagged it and installed RedHat 7.2 with no hitches whatsoever.
I'm fairly new to Linux (I prefer BSD, however), but not at all new to Unix on PC hardware -- I've been working with that in various forms for 12 years.
What's my point? Well, I guess it's that if hardware continues to change so rapidly, then for any given Linux distribution to stay relevant and useable it needs to keep up.
No, no, no, no, no. Only someone who's never seen TiVo would think of it this way. Trying to get all these capabilities out of a PC today with the ease of use of TiVo would be impossible. I'm not a gamer, so I can't say anything about that.
when you have to use aol's software to log in to aol, you have to look at the ads and crap that they want you to look at. aol is just one large, happy advertisement. with the possibility of being able to log into your aol account without having to use their software, they'll lose some of that advertising exposure, which means that yes, they will have kittens over this. whee.
But all they have to do is release AOL for Linux, then they can make the Linux desktop one big happy advertisement too!
>/. readers and moderators are ~90% male, it's
> probably ~100% in this discussion thread.
You're probably right, but 100% of us aren't heterosexual! Of course, there are some mighty fine-looking cast members to suit my tastes as well! (Scott Bakula, mmmmmm)
"Basically, instead of saving your files to a drive..."
With that sentence, you've probably lost most users. People like to be able to copy their files to other drives, or to a Zip disk to take home, or whatever.
Yet another good product (can you say Visio?) Micro$oft purchased and ruined. My company tried SourceSafe a while back, and liked it, but once MS got through with it, it was no longer something usable. I don't remember all the details, but....
I'm going to sound like grandpa ("When I was your age, I had to walk 4 miles in the snow just to get to the bus stop..."), but I can easily recall paying $0.50 per 1.44MB floppy!
I live in Boucher's district (and have voted for him several times). You're right on both counts: he *is* more clueful than 90% of Washington, and he *is* a "horn-blower" (i.e. he takes every opportunity to tout his record and what he's doing). What do you expect, he's a politician.
I live about 3 miles from Blacksburg, VA, supposedly one of the most wired towns in the US (a few years ago anyway), and I can't get anything faster than a 28.8k modem connection (with a 56k modem). And it stinks.
(actually, I could get DirecPC, but I've been there, done that -- it isn't worth the price or the headaches. And it doesn't really count as broadband, IMHO.)
The DVD is supposed to be out in March 2001, with 30 minutes of cut scenes (mostly gratuitous nudity of people getting into and out of their stillsuits).
Slashdot Mirror
I majored in Industrial Engineering (hated it). I worked menial jobs (fast food, retail, data entry) to pay my way through school. Meanwhile, I played with Coherent (anyone remember that? It was a U**X workalike, similar to Xenix, for 80286 PCs), and eventually bought a NeXTstation because it was just the coolest thing I'd ever seen! That's how I learned PC hardware and U**X.
After I graduated I knew I didn't want a job in IE -- I eventually found a job maintaining a network of PCs running Interactive Unix (later we migrated over to UnixWare, then Solaris and Windows NT because that was the direction our industry went).
It's a job in which you're generally unappreciated and overlooked. But a challenge every day.
Here's a good description of IMAP vs. POP3:
IMAP vs. POP (www.imap.org)
I disagree -- Samba is arguably the single most often used piece of "middleware" (under the MS/DoJ settlement nomenclature) that would be affected by this settlement. I can't think of anything else even in the same category possessing the same level of usefulness as Samba. I've seen much speculation over the last couple of years that says Microsoft would be delighted to have a means to get rid of Samba; this might just be it.
Therefore I believe it's extremely important for any discussions to include Samba.
Why should I have to build a new kernel just to support my mouse? I don't expect the base install kernel to support for example a newly-released RAID controller, but USB has been on every motherboard shipped at least since 1998!
And before someone calls me an idiot for running my system on the install kernel, I'm not -- I understand the value of a tuned custom kernel; I just expected the USB support to be there, as USB input devices have been commonplace for a while.
I have a question though -- where can you buy a C3 processor? I have only seen them for sale at one or two websites. I've never seen any advertising of any type for one, nor have I seen any of the major motherboard manufacturers list it as a supported CPU (whether or not their boards do, in fact, support it).
> Actually Redhat 7.2 quality sometimes is more "beta" than Woody.
I believe you. Had I known that at the time, I would have pursued Woody more vigorously. But as it is now, I really don't want to invest any more time into getting this machine running -- it's been very stable so far (it *was* running Windows 2000!)
And yes, FreeBSD would have detected my hardware and worked right from the start; it was first choice over Linux, except I have to have Windows 2000 for a few things, so I'm running VMWare.
I don't intend to start a "my distribution can beat up your distribution" thread here.... That said, I had a very negative experience with Debian recently. While trying to choose a Linux distro, I narrowed down my choices to Debian and Redhat. I didn't want to run a beta release of anything, but it sounded like Debian (Potato) would suit my needs. So I installed it. The installation itself wasn't painful (though I don't understand why it required two floppies to do a network install), but I soon discovered it didn't support my usb mouse & keyboard or my Matrox G450 dualhead video card. I futzed around for a day or two trying to get XFree 4.1.0 running, without much success. So I bagged it and installed RedHat 7.2 with no hitches whatsoever.
I'm fairly new to Linux (I prefer BSD, however), but not at all new to Unix on PC hardware -- I've been working with that in various forms for 12 years.
What's my point? Well, I guess it's that if hardware continues to change so rapidly, then for any given Linux distribution to stay relevant and useable it needs to keep up.
Somebody mod this up -- it's a *very* good point!
No, no, no, no, no. Only someone who's never seen TiVo would think of it this way. Trying to get all these capabilities out of a PC today with the ease of use of TiVo would be impossible. I'm not a gamer, so I can't say anything about that.
If you don't mind an anal-retentive correction, it's a "notebook", not a "laptop".
>So, none of us are heterosexual? 100% aren't heterosexual = 0% are heterosexual.
;-)
Your logic is flawed.
> /. readers and moderators are ~90% male, it's
> probably ~100% in this discussion thread.
You're probably right, but 100% of us aren't heterosexual! Of course, there are some mighty fine-looking cast members to suit my tastes as well! (Scott Bakula, mmmmmm)
"Basically, instead of saving your files to a drive..." With that sentence, you've probably lost most users. People like to be able to copy their files to other drives, or to a Zip disk to take home, or whatever.
Yet another good product (can you say Visio?) Micro$oft purchased and ruined. My company tried SourceSafe a while back, and liked it, but once MS got through with it, it was no longer something usable. I don't remember all the details, but....
I can't pick up the "local" crapola UPN station, and there's still no UPN programming on DISH Network. Bummer.
I'm going to sound like grandpa ("When I was your age, I had to walk 4 miles in the snow just to get to the bus stop..."), but I can easily recall paying $0.50 per 1.44MB floppy!
I live in Boucher's district (and have voted for him several times). You're right on both counts: he *is* more clueful than 90% of Washington, and he *is* a "horn-blower" (i.e. he takes every opportunity to tout his record and what he's doing). What do you expect, he's a politician.
I live about 3 miles from Blacksburg, VA, supposedly one of the most wired towns in the US (a few years ago anyway), and I can't get anything faster than a 28.8k modem connection (with a 56k modem). And it stinks. (actually, I could get DirecPC, but I've been there, done that -- it isn't worth the price or the headaches. And it doesn't really count as broadband, IMHO.)
The DVD is supposed to be out in March 2001, with 30 minutes of cut scenes (mostly gratuitous nudity of people getting into and out of their stillsuits).