From what I've read, the Lombard is supposed to replace the current line of Powerbooks and will be in the same price range. Like most new laptops that are for the professional market, they would still cost too much for me. I think I will wait until they start producing the Consumer Portable, which is rumored to be about the same price as the iMac. I might get one of those. More likely my wife will want one and I'll get to use her toshiba as a Linux laptop.
You must have had one of the early ones without the Mitsubishi engine. I love mine. It's a great little MOT with that still can haul a lot with the back seat folded down (whenever my wife wants to get a small SUV, the benchmark is: Can it carry more than the Hyundai?. Most of the time the answer is no). I even towed a loaded UHaul trailer over the Rockies in 90F temps and across Kansas in 100F temps without a problem. Sure going up the incline to get to Eisenhower Tunnel was a little slow, but it kept on chugging. =)
Wouldn't you know it. I ordered a SCSI travan tape drive about a 1 1/2 weeks ago and finally got it installed today. The media cost for these new tape drives is about the same for the TR-4s. Damn. On the bright side, the drive I got is about $400 cheaper than the cost of their internal SCSI drive.
It could also be expanded by adding extra sidecars on one end of it. Before it's death due to a flooded basement, it had 768K of RAM, a 360K 5.25" floppy, a 720K 3.5" floppy, a 80M SCSI HD and was painted black. It looked like a mutant NeXT cube. =)
It appears that Bochs has been around for quite some time, so I don't think this is a "This is a neat idea, so I'll clone it" situation. It also works on several different platforms, which is good for those people who don't have intel machines, but who do want to run intel software.
With OSS, people spend time coding on stuff that they want to. If this guy wants to take his existing shareware project and move it to open source, I don't care. Strategically, Gnome/KDE might be more important things to work on, but I don't have any interest in them. I have other projects that I will work on because they are interesting to me.
When I get more disk space, I might even try both products out. If VMware is better I'll buy it (or when my wife goes back to school, get her to use the student discount). If I like Bochs/freemware, I'll use it. It's called competition in the marketplace. If VMware is a good product, they there will be people to buy it. People that I've talked to say it's a kick-ass product. Others on/. have said that Bochs is slow and from reading the docs on the web page for it, it isn't as straight forward to install. Given a choice between a good commercial product and a free product that might not be as good or is hard to install, there are many who will fork over the cash to get the commercial product.
Your argument sounds similiar to how people describe the Windows world: if you create a successful product, MS will clone it and use their marketing muscle to crush you. Why develop for any platform then? Someone might come along and think you have a good idea and create a different implementation of it. There may have been some bruised egos and spite involved in the motivation for the release, but I don't see how that is going to hurt VMware. It might even help in that they will implement features that will make their product better.
It certainly wasn't any harder than Calc I or the Physics class that were prerequisites. I think what most people objected to where the daily assignments, which they weren't used to. I actually thought the class was easy, which was why I decided to add EE as a second major. The biggest problem with doing that was trying to fit the required classes for both majors into a schedule, especially when they were offered at the same time and junior year of EE was 34 credits of required classes.
If I remember correctly, the point of the article that I had read (I wish I would have saved it now) was how some of the admission exceptions that some colleges have are letting people in who are totally unqualified to be there in the first place. As a result, they end up taking a lot of remedial courses. This becomes an issue for state funded schools, where they spend money teaching classes that should have been covered by the high schools.
Besides, if a 500 on the SAT is the best that a person from the class can do, then the school is doing a pretty piss poor job. In this metro area, the illiteracy rate has been estimated between 20-25% and many of those people have high school diplomas!
I wish I knew when & where I read it. I should have clipped it out. The sad thing is she's in a college someplace wondering why she's failing classes right and left.
That sounds about like the comedian that jokes about product warnings (ie. Preparation H: do not take orally...hmm you know someone wrote them a letter...=)
IMHO, The C Programming Language by K & R is the best book on the subject. I've recommended it to people who were looking into learning the language. Much better than the Unleashed or Learn X in 21 Days type books.
When I was in college, all the CS majors had to take a intro to Electrical Engineering course. It was perceived to be a hard class and the instructor gave assignments everyday that had to be turned in by the next class. This was a shock to many of the CS students who where used to having assignments only once every two weeks or so. Of course they bitched to the CS department head and unfortunately after a year or so the requirement was dropped.
When I took psychology, there was a section in the text that was about measuring human characteristics. According to this, everything (height, weight, intelligence, shoe size, etc.) that can be measured for a population of humans, when graphed forms the shape of a bell. Normally, 2/3 of the population is within on standard deviation (+/-) of the mean. The remaining 1/3 are split with 1/6 below (mean - stddev) and 1/6 above (mean + stddev).
This prof may have been taking that along with experience teaching the course into account when grading:
A - people with scores greater than (mean + stddev)
B - people with grades between the mean and (stddev + mean)
C - people with grades between (mean - stddev) and the mean
If I remember correctly they give 200 points now for each section. What is pitiful is that many colleges also allow people in who are in the top 25-10% of their high school graduating class. I read in the paper a few months back about a girl who was #1 in her high school class getting a 500 on her SAT (scores combined).
This is all a result of years of just trying to teach for the lowest common denominator. No wonder so many people try to get their kids in private school or teach them at home.
No kidding. In fact, it's almost as if our society is encouraging the production of stupid people.
In general, school is portrayed as dull and boring by the media/entertainment industry. People that do well are portrayed as outcasts. It's more cool to be the class idiot than the brain.
Everything is being dumbed down to the lowest common denominator. Feel-good phrases like "We want all children to succeed" is just another way of saying we are lowering standards so any idiot can pass and feel good about themselves.
Academics get no where near the attention that sports do. We idolize and pay sports stars millions for just playing a game. The country is pissed off if the Olymipic BB team loses, but doesn't blink if we are at the bottom of the list for achievement in HS math and science. Athletics has it's place, but our priorities are way out of line here.
Day-time talk shows and pro wrestling -- 'nuf said
Most of our social programs subsidize stupid people to have more stupid people. These programs are then used by politicians to keep a dependant block of people voting for them. I've seen people who couldn't read and were dumb as posts take their sample ballot that incumbent Joe Schmoe gave them and fill the real ballot out just like the sample.
This list could go on and on. While I probably agree that stupid people (IQ of 85-90 or less) should be sterilized to prevent the breeding of even more idiots, someone somewhere would label it as racist and illegal. Which is also why one cannot use intelligence tests as a basis of employment.
My first install of Linux was similar to yours: I read the HOWTOs, downloaded the slackware disks, and followed the directions. The only problem that I had was determining the video timings for X.
Installing Linux has gotten easier, but it still takes extra time upfront reading the documentation and knowing what you have. I've never used anything but the online docs and haven't had any problems. In fact, the last install that I did was easier than installing win95 on my wife's laptop. I'm sure some of the Linux is hard to install stories come from some people that just want to pop the CD in the drive and have it take over. Anything worthwhile takes some effort. Installing Linux is well worth the effort.
What these two articles were designed to do is to reinforce Microsoft's FUD:
It's hard to install, even for a professional computer person. I don't think that's the case if one does the proper amount of research into Linux and ones own hardware.
No applications. That all depends on what the machine is going to do. My machine had all the software that I needed just from the install CDs. If I need something else, I get it from the Net. It wouldn't matter if there were only 100 apps for it if I only needed 20 of them. I told this to my brother who was contemplating getting a PC or a Mac. A person just needs to figure out what they are going to use the computer for, determine what applications they will probably need, and buy the machine they like best. Other than kids educational CDs (which run on either platform), I can probably count on one hand the number of commercial apps that I've bought. Everything else came with the machine or I've downloaded it from the net.
No support. The email from RedHat was supposed to be an example of that. I've asked questions on the newsgroups and I usually get an answer in at least a couple days if not sooner. Better yet is a local users group where someone can actually step you through the process.
The apps that do exist are shoddy. That may be true, but only because many apps are still only at alpha or beta stages. If the developers actually use what they produce, there is incentive to make it better. Of course, as a user, I also have the source and can fix it to my liking. Which is exactly what I'm going to do with a temp monitoring application that I have.
Is the method for setting the OpenFirmware varaibles in a HOWTO someplace? I guess the iMac Linux page assumed that most people would be dual booting. If it was mentioned, I must have skipped over it. It's unfortunate that something like BootX or Lilo doesn't exist for the M68K macs. If I'm wrong, I'd love to have it.
Where did you get that idea? The first form of Unix that I ever used was on a M68K Sun workstation. I don't think the pdp-8 that unix was first booted on would be considered a RISC machine either. It doesn't really matter if it's a CISC or RISC cpu.
I know if I was just going to run linux, I could build a PC or buy one from an online dealer for less (BTW, I was surprised that Gateway is bundling Corel WP Office 8 with some of their machines). That's a given. However, my wife and kids don't want to run linux. I don't blame them. The stuff that they want to run doesn't run under Wine yet. It should with VMware, but I haven't acquired that software. I don't want to run Windows if I can get away with it, even on a VM.
Enter the iMac. The kids love it (the 4yr old takes to it like a duck to water) and the wife thinks a red one would be cute. It runs all their software, doesn't take up a lot of space, and I don't have to pay the M$ tax.
Now that a form of linux is available for it, I would be happy with it too. It would join my SE/30 dual booting MacOS & Linux.
I am going to buy one sometime this year. I was disappointed that Apple decided to not include the Irda and the Mezianne(sp) ports/slot on the newer ones, especially since one can get scsi cards for the internal slot.
The topical index in the Bible is great, but all of it can be kinda hard to carry/use if you don't have it in an all-in-one book (still using the boxed set). Which is why I want to get a Palm IIIx and the version being distributed by infobases. I don't know if the 4M is enough or if I have to get an upgrade to 8M.
I remember one part in the BOM where a prophet referred to or likened some people to 'dumb asses'. Somehow it immediately reminded me of the scene in the Beavis and Butthead movie when they were on the bus full of nuns. I also liked the chapter where instead of killing his attackers, Ammon(?)chops their arms off with his sword -- sounds like a Swartzenegger movie.:)
I've compiled it on a RH 4.1 machine, and it seems to work ok. The only thing that I've seen that was flaky was midnight commander -- just as you have. I wonder if that is what everyone is griping about. Although it might be a difference between compiling it yourself and just installing the rpms.
The rest of the apps seem to work just fine. In fact, I was surprised as hell when gnumeric was able to read in an Excel 97 worksheet. It mangled a column, but other than that everything was ok.
Didn't Microsoft get in a lawsuit because they were abusing the temporary labor concept (ie. they were using temps to do jobs that obviously should be 'company' jobs to avoid paying benefits)? One of my wife's friends says she has a brother that works for MS. Her view is that they pay lousy wages, but give away lots of stock options. Given how much cash that company has on hand, that sounds really shitty. No wonder they try to make sure the stock stays up.
Now the company I work for contracts a lot of stuff out to overseas consulting companies because they can't hire enough programmers in this area (another national company in the area is also constantly griping they can't lure enough people here). Unfortunately, it seems that a lot of what I do is fix what the contractors screw up.
Slashdot Mirror
From what I've read, the Lombard is supposed to replace the current line of Powerbooks and will be in the same price range. Like most new laptops that are for the professional market, they would still cost too much for me. I think I will wait until they start producing the Consumer Portable, which is rumored to be about the same price as the iMac. I might get one of those. More likely my wife will want one and I'll get to use her toshiba as a Linux laptop.
You must have had one of the early ones without the Mitsubishi engine. I love mine. It's a great little MOT with that still can haul a lot with the back seat folded down (whenever my wife wants to get a small SUV, the benchmark is: Can it carry more than the Hyundai?. Most of the time the answer is no). I even towed a loaded UHaul trailer over the Rockies in 90F temps and across Kansas in 100F temps without a problem. Sure going up the incline to get to Eisenhower Tunnel was a little slow, but it kept on chugging. =)
I don't think they are referring to what is at www.netlib.org. It's the networking libraries that netscape has been using for Navigator/Communicator.
Wouldn't you know it. I ordered a SCSI travan tape drive about a 1 1/2 weeks ago and finally got it installed today. The media cost for these new tape drives is about the same for the TR-4s. Damn. On the bright side, the drive I got is about $400 cheaper than the cost of their internal SCSI drive.
It could be expanded in a similar manner:
It could also be expanded by adding extra sidecars on one end of it. Before it's death due to a flooded basement, it had 768K of RAM, a 360K 5.25" floppy, a 720K 3.5" floppy, a 80M SCSI HD and was painted black. It looked like a mutant NeXT cube. =)
It appears that Bochs has been around for quite some time, so I don't think this is a "This is a neat idea, so I'll clone it" situation. It also works on several different platforms, which is good for those people who don't have intel machines, but who do want to run intel software.
With OSS, people spend time coding on stuff that they want to. If this guy wants to take his existing shareware project and move it to open source, I don't care. Strategically, Gnome/KDE might be more important things to work on, but I don't have any interest in them. I have other projects that I will work on because they are interesting to me.
When I get more disk space, I might even try both products out. If VMware is better I'll buy it (or when my wife goes back to school, get her to use the student discount). If I like Bochs/freemware, I'll use it. It's called competition in the marketplace. If VMware is a good product, they there will be people to buy it. People that I've talked to say it's a kick-ass product. Others on /. have said that Bochs is slow and from reading the docs on the web page for it, it isn't as straight forward to install. Given a choice between a good commercial product and a free product that might not be as good or is hard to install, there are many who will fork over the cash to get the commercial product.
Your argument sounds similiar to how people describe the Windows world: if you create a successful product, MS will clone it and use their marketing muscle to crush you. Why develop for any platform then? Someone might come along and think you have a good idea and create a different implementation of it. There may have been some bruised egos and spite involved in the motivation for the release, but I don't see how that is going to hurt VMware. It might even help in that they will implement features that will make their product better.
It certainly wasn't any harder than Calc I or the Physics class that were prerequisites. I think what most people objected to where the daily assignments, which they weren't used to. I actually thought the class was easy, which was why I decided to add EE as a second major. The biggest problem with doing that was trying to fit the required classes for both majors into a schedule, especially when they were offered at the same time and junior year of EE was 34 credits of required classes.
If I remember correctly, the point of the article that I had read (I wish I would have saved it now) was how some of the admission exceptions that some colleges have are letting people in who are totally unqualified to be there in the first place. As a result, they end up taking a lot of remedial courses. This becomes an issue for state funded schools, where they spend money teaching classes that should have been covered by the high schools.
Besides, if a 500 on the SAT is the best that a person from the class can do, then the school is doing a pretty piss poor job. In this metro area, the illiteracy rate has been estimated between 20-25% and many of those people have high school diplomas!
Just showing up and putting your name on the test sheet will get you 400.
I wish I knew when & where I read it. I should have clipped it out. The sad thing is she's in a college someplace wondering why she's failing classes right and left.
That sounds about like the comedian that jokes about product warnings (ie. Preparation H: do not take orally...hmm you know someone wrote them a letter...=)
IMHO, The C Programming Language by K & R is the best book on the subject. I've recommended it to people who were looking into learning the language. Much better than the Unleashed or Learn X in 21 Days type books.
When I was in college, all the CS majors had to take a intro to Electrical Engineering course. It was perceived to be a hard class and the instructor gave assignments everyday that had to be turned in by the next class. This was a shock to many of the CS students who where used to having assignments only once every two weeks or so. Of course they bitched to the CS department head and unfortunately after a year or so the requirement was dropped.
When I took psychology, there was a section in the text that was about measuring human characteristics. According to this, everything (height, weight, intelligence, shoe size, etc.) that can be measured for a population of humans, when graphed forms the shape of a bell. Normally, 2/3 of the population is within on standard deviation (+/-) of the mean. The remaining 1/3 are split with 1/6 below (mean - stddev) and 1/6 above (mean + stddev).
This prof may have been taking that along with experience teaching the course into account when grading:
If I remember correctly they give 200 points now for each section. What is pitiful is that many colleges also allow people in who are in the top 25-10% of their high school graduating class. I read in the paper a few months back about a girl who was #1 in her high school class getting a 500 on her SAT (scores combined).
This is all a result of years of just trying to teach for the lowest common denominator. No wonder so many people try to get their kids in private school or teach them at home.
No kidding. In fact, it's almost as if our society is encouraging the production of stupid people.
This list could go on and on. While I probably agree that stupid people (IQ of 85-90 or less) should be sterilized to prevent the breeding of even more idiots, someone somewhere would label it as racist and illegal. Which is also why one cannot use intelligence tests as a basis of employment.
My first install of Linux was similar to yours: I read the HOWTOs, downloaded the slackware disks, and followed the directions. The only problem that I had was determining the video timings for X.
Installing Linux has gotten easier, but it still takes extra time upfront reading the documentation and knowing what you have. I've never used anything but the online docs and haven't had any problems. In fact, the last install that I did was easier than installing win95 on my wife's laptop. I'm sure some of the Linux is hard to install stories come from some people that just want to pop the CD in the drive and have it take over. Anything worthwhile takes some effort. Installing Linux is well worth the effort.
What these two articles were designed to do is to reinforce Microsoft's FUD:
Is the method for setting the OpenFirmware varaibles in a HOWTO someplace? I guess the iMac Linux page assumed that most people would be dual booting. If it was mentioned, I must have skipped over it. It's unfortunate that something like BootX or Lilo doesn't exist for the M68K macs. If I'm wrong, I'd love to have it.
Where did you get that idea? The first form of Unix that I ever used was on a M68K Sun workstation. I don't think the pdp-8 that unix was first booted on would be considered a RISC machine either. It doesn't really matter if it's a CISC or RISC cpu.
If it's anything like the mac68K version of linux (and from the web page it sounds like it), you will still need MacOS to boot into linux.
I know if I was just going to run linux, I could build a PC or buy one from an online dealer for less (BTW, I was surprised that Gateway is bundling Corel WP Office 8 with some of their machines). That's a given. However, my wife and kids don't want to run linux. I don't blame them. The stuff that they want to run doesn't run under Wine yet. It should with VMware, but I haven't acquired that software. I don't want to run Windows if I can get away with it, even on a VM.
Enter the iMac. The kids love it (the 4yr old takes to it like a duck to water) and the wife thinks a red one would be cute. It runs all their software, doesn't take up a lot of space, and I don't have to pay the M$ tax.
Now that a form of linux is available for it, I would be happy with it too. It would join my SE/30 dual booting MacOS & Linux.
I am going to buy one sometime this year. I was disappointed that Apple decided to not include the Irda and the Mezianne(sp) ports/slot on the newer ones, especially since one can get scsi cards for the internal slot.
The topical index in the Bible is great, but all of it can be kinda hard to carry/use if you don't have it in an all-in-one book (still using the boxed set). Which is why I want to get a Palm IIIx and the version being distributed by infobases. I don't know if the 4M is enough or if I have to get an upgrade to 8M.
I remember one part in the BOM where a prophet referred to or likened some people to 'dumb asses'. Somehow it immediately reminded me of the scene in the Beavis and Butthead movie when they were on the bus full of nuns. I also liked the chapter where instead of killing his attackers, Ammon(?)chops their arms off with his sword -- sounds like a Swartzenegger movie. :)
I've compiled it on a RH 4.1 machine, and it seems to work ok. The only thing that I've seen that was flaky was midnight commander -- just as you have. I wonder if that is what everyone is griping about. Although it might be a difference between compiling it yourself and just installing the rpms.
The rest of the apps seem to work just fine. In fact, I was surprised as hell when gnumeric was able to read in an Excel 97 worksheet. It mangled a column, but other than that everything was ok.
Didn't Microsoft get in a lawsuit because they were abusing the temporary labor concept (ie. they were using temps to do jobs that obviously should be 'company' jobs to avoid paying benefits)? One of my wife's friends says she has a brother that works for MS. Her view is that they pay lousy wages, but give away lots of stock options. Given how much cash that company has on hand, that sounds really shitty. No wonder they try to make sure the stock stays up.
Now the company I work for contracts a lot of stuff out to overseas consulting companies because they can't hire enough programmers in this area (another national company in the area is also constantly griping they can't lure enough people here). Unfortunately, it seems that a lot of what I do is fix what the contractors screw up.