There are two problems with the "computers need to be as easy to use as cars" analogy.
First and foremost, cars are *NOT* easy to use by any stretch of the imagination. If you believe they are, you obviously do NOT remember learning to driver, and you do not have teenage children currently learning to drive. It takes your typical teen quite some time to learn how to successfully operate even an automatic vehicle. It takes even long to learn to successfully use a standard.
Society as a whole has gotten used to this learning curve, and they have accepted that this skill is important enough that it is worth the time and effort to learn.
Second, computers are not nearly the same as cars. Cars are *single purpose* devices!!! Computer are very much multipurpose. A computer is necessarily more complex, because it *does* so much more. Even so, I believe that any new computer user who puts as much effort into learning thier computer as the average 15 year old does into learning to drive will have no problems learning how to use thier computer well.
All of the rules about.org and.net were abandoned years ago. From what I've heard (very non-authoritative...) it had something to do with the definition of non-profit being a bit different from one company to another.
Go to www.networksolutions.com and check it out for yourself. In fact, these days they are actually *encouraging* people to register their domain name in all three hierarchies at once!! (talk about your easy ways for Network Solutions to triple thier income!)
I'd love it if they had a model that included a built in DAT drive, or if they would put an external SCSI connector on the Qube like they do with the Raq.
I like the Raq for ISP's, but I won't install the Qube for small workgroups networks (their supposed target market) because of the lack of a sensible backup option. I do *not* think backing up to a workstation is acceptible.
Oh well, the Qube 2 has lots of improvements over the original Qube... hopefully an integrated tape drive, or some method of attaching a external tape drive will be available on the next generation Qube....
>I thought Slashdotters didn't believe in intellectual property rights.
An incorrect assumption. The free software movement is *based* on the *use* of intellectual property rights, and on the belief that most current intellectual property rights are abused to the detriment of the community, and society as a whole.
Far from being against intellectual property rights, the GPL (and ALL other free software licenses (excluding public domain software)) *require* intellectual property rights. It is intellectual property rights that allow the author of a work to stipulate conditions on the use, modification, and re-distribution of a work. (for example, the advertising clause that, until recently, was required by the BSD license, or the many well known requirements of the GPL)
Free software isn't about abolishing intellectual property rights. It's about reforming the use of intellectual property rights. Intellectual property rights are supposed to be about benefitting society, and (to a lesser degree) about protecting small authors/inventors/programmers. Unfortunately todays legal/corporate environment has corrupted those laws to benefit deep pocketed mega-corporations, often to the detriment of small authors/inventors/programmers and society as a whole.
My there are a lot of little babies on Slashdot these days. Arguing about whether someBSD or Linux is "superior" is just plain stupid. Each of them are good OS's, and more importantly FREE OS's. Although Linux and the BSD's may differ from each other in some respects, they are much closer to each other than to any proprietary OS. I'm a Linux user myself, but even though I don't use the BSD's, I'm glad to know that there *are* other free OS's out there.
It would be stupid for RedHat to buy Mandrake. If their smart, they do the same thing to Mandrake that Mandrake is doing to them. Just copy DiskDrake, etc into RedHat's own distro, and add their own new stuff on top!
PC Power and Cooling http://www.pcpowercooling.com/ has a whisper line of power supplies that are VERY quite. They are bit pricier that bargain basement power supplies, but not to expensive. Buy one of these and replace your existing power supply. You can also get large passive heat sinks for most CPU's.
It figures this post was from an anonymous coward......
O.k. I'll bite. Why buy the RedHat CD's when you can download it??
First off, I'll admit that the copy of RedHat on my personal system WAS downloaded of the net. I usually try to stay up to date with the latest Rawhide RPMS, so the CD is useless to me. And I don't use tech support, I use DejaNews.
However, I work for a small consulting company, and we've been setting up RedHat Linux file servers like crazy. With each one we deliver a $70 boxed Official RedHat cd set. Why? First off, $70 is peanuts on top of the price of any decent file server. (Much cheaper that Netware 5 or NT4.0!!) Second, our customers feel more comfortable having a nice, professional looking bootable CD they can re-install from. The tech support from RedHat is nice. And the books in the box give them a bit of a basic intro to what's on the server.
Basically, at $70 is to cheap NOT to buy!! $70 is a lot for me to spend on my home system.... It's piddly squat nothing to spend on any decent server!
I've dual booted NT 4 (and NT 2000) with Linux on several systems and never had corruption. So this is NOT normal behavior. Changing your boot loader (instead of using NT's boot loader or LILO) will probably not help. I usually use NT's boot loader for dual booting, because it's the easiest way to get both OS's set up.
On of the previous posters mentioned checking that both OS's are using the same address system on your HD. (LBA vers Cylinders, Heads, Sectors, etc) This is a fantastic recommendation, and I wish I know how to check for certain what each OS is doing.
Another possibility is that your hard drive is failing. I know this is not something you *wanted* to hear, but it is possible. I once had a hard drive start exhibiting behavior very much like you are describing shortly after I installed OS/2 2.0 on one of my partitions. For a while I was certain that dual booting with OS/2 was my problem. I deleted my OS/2 partition, and about a week later the HD died completely. The moral of the story.... Sometimes HD's die *very* slowly and start out by doing wierd things that corrupt your filesystems.
That'd be rather stupid if it could only enlarge and create ext2 and not shrink it. It'd be nice to shrink *or* enlarge ext2 partitions. For example, if you find out you have tons of space on your/usr partition, but your running out of space on/var.
We already have all the assurance we need that RedHat *cannot* become another Microsoft... even if they wanted to. All of RedHat's core ditrobution - everything on the main CD - is free/open source software. In fact, to my knowledge, RedHat and Debian are the ONLY distributions whose policy is to include only free/open source software in their main distribution. (admittedly, this is very recent with RedHat).
Because all of the RedHat distribution is free/open source, anyone can copy a RedHat CD and create their own "new" distribution. This is, in fact, exactly how the Mandrake distribution was created. They started with RedHat, then started adding and changing the things they didn't like. (I'm not certain, but I believe Caldera and TurboLinux also started in a similar manner)
Because RedHat has no proprietary tools/software in their distribution, they have *no* power over the Linux community. They *cannot* charge excessively high prices (because cheapbytes and other can sell the ENTIRE RedHat cd).
They cannot attempt to "control" the Linux community. If any portion of the community doesn't like RedHat's decisions on the direction of their distro, they can copy ALL of the RedHat distro... and use it as the starting point for their own distro!!! You sure as hell can't do that with Windows!!!
RedHat (or Debian for that matter) is definately NOT a binary only distro!!
First off, everything in RedHat has an associated "Source RPM" (SRPM). You can download that and use RPM to recompile..
Second, almost anytime you compile anything from a source tarball, it usually defaults to installing in/usr/local or/opt. In both RPM based(Redhat, etc) and Debian distros/usr/local and/opt are specifically reserved for stuff you compile yourself.
To me, packages give me the best of both worlds. I be lazy and download the latest RPM's to keep all the misc. stuff on my system up to date, or, for stuff I really like to mess around with (like perl), I can compile from source.
I still have yet to see a *valid* reason a distribution should NOT have a package manager.
Color is great in a handheld game machine, and sometimes I *have* wished my PalmPilot had some good games!:-) But I mainly use my PalmPilot for my business. It's light, it keeps all my important phone numbers and appointments, and I keep quick light notes and reminders it it. Why do I use a PalmPilot instead of a paper organizer? I can backup my PalmPilot to my PC. After having once lost my old paper organizer I consider that a BIG advantage! I can afford to replace my Pilot (it would hurt.. but I could afford it). The lost information and appointments would cost a *lot* more!!
Slashdot Mirror
There are two problems with the "computers need to be as easy to use as cars" analogy.
First and foremost, cars are *NOT* easy to use by any stretch of the imagination. If you believe they are, you obviously do NOT remember learning to driver, and you do not have teenage children currently learning to drive. It takes your typical teen quite some time to learn how to successfully operate even an automatic vehicle. It takes even long to learn to successfully use a standard.
Society as a whole has gotten used to this learning curve, and they have accepted that this skill is important enough that it is worth the time and effort to learn.
Second, computers are not nearly the same as cars. Cars are *single purpose* devices!!! Computer are very much multipurpose. A computer is necessarily more complex, because it *does* so much more. Even so, I believe that any new computer user who puts as much effort into learning thier computer as the average 15 year old does into learning to drive will have no problems learning how to use thier computer well.
All of the rules about .org and .net were abandoned years ago. From what I've heard (very non-authoritative...) it had something to do with the definition of non-profit being a bit different from one company to another.
Go to www.networksolutions.com and check it out for yourself. In fact, these days they are actually *encouraging* people to register their domain name in all three hierarchies at once!! (talk about your easy ways for Network Solutions to triple thier income!)
I'd love it if they had a model that included a built in DAT drive, or if they would put an external SCSI connector on the Qube like they do with the Raq.
I like the Raq for ISP's, but I won't install the Qube for small workgroups networks (their supposed target market) because of the lack of a sensible backup option. I do *not* think backing up to a workstation is acceptible.
Oh well, the Qube 2 has lots of improvements over the original Qube... hopefully an integrated tape drive, or some method of attaching a external tape drive will be available on the next generation Qube....
>I thought Slashdotters didn't believe in intellectual property rights.
An incorrect assumption. The free software movement is *based* on the *use* of intellectual property rights, and on the belief that most current intellectual property rights are abused to the detriment of the community, and society as a whole.
Far from being against intellectual property rights, the GPL (and ALL other free software licenses (excluding public domain software)) *require* intellectual property rights. It is intellectual property rights that allow the author of a work to stipulate conditions on the use, modification, and re-distribution of a work. (for example, the advertising clause that, until recently, was required by the BSD license, or the many well known requirements of the GPL)
Free software isn't about abolishing intellectual property rights. It's about reforming the use of intellectual property rights. Intellectual property rights are supposed to be about benefitting society, and (to a lesser degree) about protecting small authors/inventors/programmers. Unfortunately todays legal/corporate environment has corrupted those laws to benefit deep pocketed mega-corporations, often to the detriment of small authors/inventors/programmers and society as a whole.
My there are a lot of little babies on Slashdot these days. Arguing about whether someBSD or Linux is "superior" is just plain stupid. Each of them are good OS's, and more importantly FREE OS's. Although Linux and the BSD's may differ from each other in some respects, they are much closer to each other than to any proprietary OS. I'm a Linux user myself, but even though I don't use the BSD's, I'm glad to know that there *are* other free OS's out there.
It would be stupid for RedHat to buy Mandrake. If their smart, they do the same thing to Mandrake that Mandrake is doing to them. Just copy DiskDrake, etc into RedHat's own distro, and add their own new stuff on top!
PC Power and Cooling http://www.pcpowercooling.com/ has a whisper line of power supplies that are VERY quite. They are bit pricier that bargain basement power supplies, but not to expensive. Buy one of these and replace your existing power supply. You can also get large passive heat sinks for most CPU's.
It figures this post was from an anonymous coward......
O.k. I'll bite. Why buy the RedHat CD's when you can download it??
First off, I'll admit that the copy of RedHat on my personal system WAS downloaded of the net. I usually try to stay up to date with the latest Rawhide RPMS, so the CD is useless to me. And I don't use tech support, I use DejaNews.
However, I work for a small consulting company, and we've been setting up RedHat Linux file servers like crazy. With each one we deliver a $70 boxed Official RedHat cd set. Why? First off, $70 is peanuts on top of the price of any decent file server. (Much cheaper that Netware 5 or NT4.0!!) Second, our customers feel more comfortable having a nice, professional looking bootable CD they can re-install from. The tech support from RedHat is nice. And the books in the box give them a bit of a basic intro to what's on the server.
Basically, at $70 is to cheap NOT to buy!! $70 is a lot for me to spend on my home system.... It's piddly squat nothing to spend on any decent server!
I've dual booted NT 4 (and NT 2000) with Linux on several systems and never had corruption. So this is NOT normal behavior. Changing your boot loader (instead of using NT's boot loader or LILO) will probably not help. I usually use NT's boot loader for dual booting, because it's the easiest way to get both OS's set up.
On of the previous posters mentioned checking that both OS's are using the same address system on your HD. (LBA vers Cylinders, Heads, Sectors, etc)
This is a fantastic recommendation, and I wish I know how to check for certain what each OS is doing.
Another possibility is that your hard drive is failing. I know this is not something you *wanted* to hear, but it is possible. I once had a hard drive start exhibiting behavior very much like you are describing shortly after I installed OS/2 2.0 on one of my partitions. For a while I was certain that dual booting with OS/2 was my problem. I deleted my OS/2 partition, and about a week later the HD died completely. The moral of the story.... Sometimes HD's die *very* slowly and start out by doing wierd things that corrupt your filesystems.
The ISP should *NOT* be responsible for brain dead filtering software. Most filtering programs *CAN* block only certain parts of an ISP.
That'd be rather stupid if it could only enlarge and create ext2 and not shrink it. It'd be nice to shrink *or* enlarge ext2 partitions. For example, if you find out you have tons of space on your /usr partition, but your running out of space on /var.
We already have all the assurance we need that RedHat *cannot* become another Microsoft... even if they wanted to. All of RedHat's core ditrobution - everything on the main CD - is free/open source software. In fact, to my knowledge, RedHat and Debian are the ONLY distributions whose policy is to include only free/open source software in their main distribution. (admittedly, this is very recent with RedHat).
Because all of the RedHat distribution is free/open source, anyone can copy a RedHat CD and create their own "new" distribution. This is, in fact, exactly how the Mandrake distribution was created. They started with RedHat, then started adding and changing the things they didn't like.
(I'm not certain, but I believe Caldera and TurboLinux also started in a similar manner)
Because RedHat has no proprietary tools/software in their distribution, they have *no* power over the Linux community. They *cannot* charge excessively high prices (because cheapbytes and other can sell the ENTIRE RedHat cd).
They cannot attempt to "control" the Linux community. If any portion of the community doesn't like RedHat's decisions on the direction of their distro, they can copy ALL of the RedHat distro... and use it as the starting point for their own distro!!! You sure as hell can't do that with Windows!!!
First off, everything in RedHat has an associated "Source RPM" (SRPM). You can download that and use RPM to recompile..
Second, almost anytime you compile anything from a source tarball, it usually defaults to installing in /usr/local or /opt. In both RPM based(Redhat, etc) and Debian distros /usr/local and /opt are specifically reserved for stuff you compile yourself.
To me, packages give me the best of both worlds. I be lazy and download the latest RPM's to keep all the misc. stuff on my system up to date, or, for stuff I really like to mess around with (like perl), I can compile from source.
I still have yet to see a *valid* reason a distribution should NOT have a package manager.
> Something like this doesn't belong here,
I actually rather like the broader perspective that Katz brings. If you don't like him, set your profile to exclude him.
Color is great in a handheld game machine, and sometimes I *have* wished my PalmPilot had some good games! :-) But I mainly use my PalmPilot for my business. It's light, it keeps all my important phone numbers and appointments, and I keep quick light notes and reminders it it. Why do I use a PalmPilot instead of a paper organizer? I can backup my PalmPilot to my PC. After having once lost my old paper organizer I consider that a BIG advantage! I can afford to replace my Pilot (it would hurt.. but I could afford it). The lost information and appointments would cost a *lot* more!!