Be nice and recrute more help for Malda :)
on
CNN Installs Linux
·
· Score: 2
Go easy on this writer. Ho or She made an honest go at doing an install and lets not forget how much fun we have had with all the other Linux newbies who did just that and got slashdoted with _ADVICE_ and very little if any pure flames.
I.e. RobLimo started this way and I was one of the people holding his hand from 4,000 miles away. He has graduated to Slashdot host now. As has Katz. An interesting tidbit is that RobLimo had pretty much this attitude when he did his 1st butched install and I thought he was a kid ( 19/20 ) and said as much ( in a nice way;).
I read somewhere that he actually did submit the Linux source code as his doctoral thesis.
I think he has a real Doctorate already. As far as I know Linus spent the better part of his youth at University. he left at 27, which means he was there for 8 or 9 years. Linus is a brilliant kid from a family that values education in a country the subsidizes it heavily.
What are the odds of him not completing a doctorate in all that time ?
MSOffice for Linux will ship if and when there are 5 million or more LinuxPPC or LinuxAlpha machines in use on the street.
MS will never release an MSOffice for any Intel based OS other than it's own except that they are told in no uncertain terms ( Falling stocks, slow sales etc... ) that the Windows dominance is over.
For evidence of this mindset look at the Release of IE for Unix. It generally costs very little to port running software from Solaria to Linux since they are so similar underneath. Many people ( including me ) believe there are probably more Linux X86 desktops out there than Solaria Spark desktops ( Not servers here ).
I did. I think it was the only Crazy Climber machine in Jamaica but We got the pose together to go "on strike" at the arcade.
They had just raised the cost of playing from 20c to 40c and the best players took each of the games and ran it into the ground all day. I played a total of 5 games of Crazy Climber in ~6 hours. I also ran a 4+ hour stint on a pinball machine with 3 other players. The Packman, Galaxian and Donkey Kong hackers each did amazing things too.
It was especially cool how Galaxian lets you earn spare flags and after 10 you get a large flag and after 10 of those you get a cup. That day I saw what 10 cups give you... but I don't recall. For Galaxian we used a tag team though. Switching between rounds.
PS : The protest was futile. The prices stayed. The Management bargained with us and a few concessions were won. Ohh to be young and carefree again.
This is a popular fallacy. The simple fact is that the Mac lost on 4 items from the beginning.
1 : Openness. The Mac had a single source for everything. The IBM compatible during the time of Apples decline had multiple sources for Machines ( IBM, Compaq, Dell etc... ). It also had or appeared to have multiple sources for the OS. ( IBM-Dos, MS-Dos, DR-Dos, ).
2 : Price. In terms of absolute Maximum performance when price is no object the fastest Mac was generally well ahead of the fastest PC. However, if like most people you have a set limited amount of money and a specific task to accomplish you could get a better $ 2,000 PC than a $ 2,000 Mac. This is still true today. Is the low end iMac any competitor to the $ 1,299 PC ? 17" Monitor, 450MHz CPU, 128 Megs RAM, 8 Gig HD, 8Meg AGP Video, Floppy, CD-ROM, Zip disk and room to grow. I didn't think so.
3 : Games. At one point Apple actively discouraged game development on it's platform.
4 : Software availability and cost. The factors above led to the Mac's shrinking Market share which caused most vendors to target the growing kid ( Dos/Windows ) and the vendors who remained felt obliged to charge a significant premium for any quality applications. ( 30% - 70% ).
The $700 NT Tax is giving Linux a substantial boost in just this way. The big question is weather when Linux is a viable desktop ( It isn't yet though strange people like me use it ) the $80 Win9x tax will make a big difference. $200 PCs suggest it might.
The fact that MS is not the least bit scared of Apple while it's plotting how to survive Linux suggests this even more.
I would dismiss most of the PR department if I ran @Home.
The decision to not encourage Web/FTP hosting from the subscriber link is smart. It should have been made when the service was initially created. Sure we would all Like to upload at a full Meg and this really sucks if you are building nightly RPMs/DEBs for an OSS project etc...
However the service is cheap because @home doesn't buy enough bandwidth to supply all users going full speed at the same time. All the people here who work at ISPs ( quite a few I would imagine ) know how that equation works. You goys don't even have as many phone lines as subscribers:).
Since it's @Home the assumption is you will be browsing and downloading most of the time and any web service will be for administering your home system from work or sending s few files to your box via FTP. If it was called @work then the revers would be true and serving would be more important than browsing.
The only problem is that the PR people went about announcing the thing in the wrong way. Show your clients sume respect. send out letters ( or Email ) to them and level with them that this is how it works and why you have to do this. point them to a URL on your site where they can read the breakdown of how much bandwidth is availeble/used. Power users will use this info to reschedule the debian FTP install to whatever you say are the low periods:)
Back when the S3 Virge was the hot Low end 3D chip I worked at a PC shop that sold Generic no name Virge based cards for $1,600 and Diamond Stealth 3D for $ 4,999 ( These are Jamaican Dollars so the numbers look funny:). The cards were technically identical except that the Generic board had more stable drivers and 4 megs of memory. ( vs the Diamond's 2 megs ).
Lot's of people asked for the Stealth and bought it even after seeing the boards running side by side in identical systems on our demo shelf ( The $1,600 price on the Generic board left us with more profit ).
Generally, the people who bought the Generic board installed it themselves. The ones who bought the diamond paid $950 to put it in. Want to guess where they got the impression that the name "Diamond" was worth a few extra Dollars ?
PS : We had no video cards returned while I was there. Modems, Hard Drives and Monitors came back all the time though.
Exactly the oposite of what you expect from the times. I shuld check if Jamaica is on that list. I wold realy be opset if we have to bring in Playstations the way we imported 128 bit Netscape.
I.e. A few at a time, boght retail and caried as logage on comersial airlines. -- "THINK" -: former IBM motto.
It's a strange kind of math but 10 desperate people fighting for survival can hold off a battalion that just hates them or was ordered to find and kill them ( assuming they are equally armed ). Denying the Jews the right to bear arms was a part of the oppression. It just wasn't noticed until too late.
For the record the Jews were not the only victims of the Holocaust. The Nazis were also careful to slaughter every Black person, Gipsy or person with a disability they could find. Even gays were targeted.
Unfortunately Jewish Germans outnumbered all these other groups combined. -- "THINK" -: former IBM motto.
You made a well reasoned Pro gun control statement so I feel I need to explain a few things which aren't apparent to many people.
Jamaica has some of the strictest Gun control Laws on the planet. Here it is a felony to have an unlicensed firearm. If you are found with one you can get as much as 10 years in Prison for it. The qualifications for getting a lisense are strict. The process is long and there is provision for subjective rejection.
Note : Using it is a separate crime.
Jamaica has a population of 2.7 Million and a 6,000 member police force. Our army ( only slightly smaller than the police force ) needs to provide additional manpower nonetheless.
We had 800+ Murders last year. and 760 The year before. Around 1/2 with Guns. ( A typical ratio )
How could this happen ?
Last year someone offered me a.38 Matic. A few months latter someone else asked me to keep a Tech 9 for him. In both cases I refused for the simple reason that I don't want to be a criminal.
A simple rule of thumb is that when guns are illegal only criminals will have them. It is impossible to close all the points at which a 10 lb mechanical device that can be dismantled into an unrecognizable pile of scrap can enter. Never mind that a bright High School kid can build one and any crack gang can manufacture bullets.
Another point to note is that the afluent comunities here have very few burgleries ( almost none ). If you ask a burgler ( I did ) he will tell you that "Dem man de a shata. Some a dem have biga gun dan mi". Also "Dog a nuh not'n fi deal wid and alarm only ketch you when yu nuh look out fi it".
Transelations. shata == person with gun. The rest is just of kilter spelling to reflect the way things are pronounced. -- "THINK" -: former IBM motto.
Isn't it cool how they can Maintain huge market share, Make great profit, Produce Innovative products and still not be in a position to Leverage anything ?
Seams you only need to twist arms and forcibly bundle stuff when you are producing crap:).
Apart from the license question I am not in favor of programs using a library that is almost exclusively used by one set of programs.
Since they will link the binary statically (I guess) against Qt they also could have chosen a widget set that is somewhat more widespread in use. If they've used a more common set, they could have used shared libraries. We all know the trouble with statically linked programs, don't we?
Actually Shared QT libs are available in every single Workstation or Desktop Linux distribution. Even RedHat and Debian.
Opera is closed source shrink-wrapped per user licensed software. I really don't think the GPL compatibility of QT keeps them awake at night.
Yes. This will be an article about Hackers, Crackers, Linux and GNU/Linux. First I nead to tell you of an aparently unrelated incident. "Carl Johnson" is a DJ with thew stage name "Profesor Nuts". He is quite good ( Think "Wierd Al" or Marty Robins with a strong base line ).
Back to the insident at hand. He walks into the bank with a cheque writen in the name of "Carl Nuts". There is of course no such person. However the bank accepted it. His drivers license and other ID say otherwise, but this didn't bother them much. Common Law ( A British Comonwelth concept ) is that a name is valid if most people use it, regardles of what official documents say.
This brings us back to Hackers and Crackers. Back when I was yung ( early teans ) and kept tabs on the script kiddy sean I learned that a Cracker is a person who modifys binary software ( to remove shareware limits forinstance ) and opens encripted files. A Hacker was the goy who breaks into computer systems. After I grew up and got involved with Linux and real work I found out a Hacker was originaly the solver of unique problems. A position of high esteam among the technicaly aware. Onfortunatly most of the media dosn't know this. The children don't know it either ( except for the few who are involved in real net building stoff ). In short we are outnumberd and only a tiny fraction of the world know of and accept the true meaning of "Hacker".
So what shuld we the hacker comunity do about this ? Shold we fight it at every step of the way ? Shuld we demand that the word Hacker only be used in an apropriate context ? In my opinion we shuld just give it up. Find another name for ourselvs and let life continue. An example of this is with the term "Gay". This once ment happy and cherfull. If I was around in the 50s I wold have been proud of the title. These days everyone thinks Gay means Homosexual so I am caling myself a Player:). How about if Hackers called themselvs "Techies", "Nerds", "Computer Geaks", "Internetworkers" or soch ?
With GNU/Linux There is another levle to the complication. RedHat and SuSE sell Linux distributions while Debian and Stampead sell GNU/Linux distributions. Technicaly they are all the same and RedHat eaven included more GNU software in the production base system than Debian at one point ( Gnome ). However they chuse to call the whole package "Linux". Is this an isue ? To some members of the GNU project it is. To others it isn't. Linus T dosn't eaven want to discus it these days ( Some excuse about a Kernel to work on:).
To make matters worse, Once Hurd is compleat there will be a full GNU OS out there. ( Yes Hurd will be finished... Eventualy... I think ). So what wold They sell it as if it became popular ?
I don't really need a laptop right now, but I can afford one and I am willing to buy one of these as soon as they are available just to help validate the demand and support IBM for doing the Right Thing. (hmm, now how to explain this to the wife:-)
Technically, MacOS is inferior ( Memory protection comes to mind ). However due to the responsible behavior of Mac ISVs and the alleged cleanness of the API ( Apple doesn't shift it to kill competitors ) Macs are surprisingly stable.
Not crash proof like Linux but I have seen Macs left on 24/7 and used most of the time ( 2x10 hour shifts ) that don't go down for weeks at least.
Also Mac device drivers tend to behave nicely.
No I didn't mention Linux or *nix since the question wasn't about them:)
This is SVN again. He is the only person at ZD that seams to do honest reporting. Some choice quotes ( not from the article but from the author; "I call things as I see them". "My reputation is very important to me". "If the benchmarks were compelling we would have run them".
This is a brilliant move. If they base on RedHat they will be forever playing catch-up. Even Mandrake is sean as a second rate distribution.
However with a Debian base and all corel developed modification GPLd they will get near 100% debian backing. The debian developers have always said they wanted someone to do an easy to use Linux based on Debian.
Best of all if they like anything from this Corel Linux thingy they will probably use it. The print system or the fax program come to mind. The back end is already solid and WordPerfect knows print drivers better than anyone ( Including printer makers ).
Expect a distribution that uses both Gnome and KDE too. Gnome for looks and KDE for work. No flames please it's just how they both work these days.
The only remaining question mark is RPM. Quake ships as a tarball and an RPM. Some other commercial software ships only as RPM. Has Alien been improved to the point where it's transparent on Debian?
For those people who already have Legacy cards from manufacturers that don't support users this could be very useful.
However if you are buying a new machine or a new video card remember to ask about support in XFree86 and Linux. This isn't just important for actual users of Linux and FreeBSD but also for those who have any kind of thought to upgrading the OS in the future. Weather to the new version of what you already use or to some other OS.
Remember that those cards which only worked in Windows 3.11 but not OS/2 did not get Win95 support and likewise all the NT-3.xx and Windows 95 only cards were left behind when NT-4 shipped.
Slashdot Mirror
Go easy on this writer. Ho or She made an honest go at doing an install and lets not forget how much fun we have had with all the other Linux newbies who did just that and got slashdoted with _ADVICE_ and very little if any pure flames.
;).
I.e. RobLimo started this way and I was one of the people holding his hand from 4,000 miles away. He has graduated to Slashdot host now. As has Katz. An interesting tidbit is that RobLimo had pretty much this attitude when he did his 1st butched install and I thought he was a kid ( 19/20 ) and said as much ( in a nice way
I read somewhere that he actually did submit the Linux source code as his doctoral thesis.
I think he has a real Doctorate already. As far as I know Linus spent the better part of his youth at University. he left at 27, which means he was there for 8 or 9 years. Linus is a brilliant kid from a family that values education in a country the subsidizes it heavily.
What are the odds of him not completing a doctorate in all that time ?
Check out The Thread and the rest of Food For Thoght
Actualy a cople of writers claim that no matter how you cook a Dodo it tasts bad.
It was discribed as a "Rank Meat".
MSOffice for Linux will ship if and when there are 5 million or
more LinuxPPC or LinuxAlpha machines in use on the street.
MS will never release an MSOffice for any Intel based OS other
than it's own except that they are told in no uncertain terms
( Falling stocks, slow sales etc... ) that the Windows dominance
is over.
For evidence of this mindset look at the Release of IE for Unix.
It generally costs very little to port running software from
Solaria to Linux since they are so similar underneath. Many
people ( including me ) believe there are probably more Linux
X86 desktops out there than Solaria Spark desktops ( Not servers
here ).
--
"THINK" -: former IBM motto.
I did. I think it was the only Crazy Climber machine in Jamaica but We got the pose together to go "on strike" at the arcade.
... but I don't recall. For Galaxian we used a tag team though. Switching between rounds.
They had just raised the cost of playing from 20c to 40c and the best players took each of the games and ran it into the ground all day. I played a total of 5 games of Crazy Climber in ~6 hours. I also ran a 4+ hour stint on a pinball machine with 3 other players. The Packman, Galaxian and Donkey Kong hackers each did amazing things too.
It was especially cool how Galaxian lets you earn spare flags and after 10 you get a large flag and after 10 of those you get a cup. That day I saw what 10 cups give you
PS : The protest was futile. The prices stayed. The Management bargained with us and a few concessions were won. Ohh to be young and carefree again.
This is a popular fallacy. The simple fact is that the Mac lost on 4 items
from the beginning.
1 : Openness. The Mac had a single source for everything. The IBM compatible during the time of Apples decline had multiple sources for Machines ( IBM, Compaq, Dell etc... ). It also had or appeared to have multiple sources for the OS. ( IBM-Dos, MS-Dos, DR-Dos, ).
2 : Price. In terms of absolute Maximum performance when price is no object the fastest Mac was generally well ahead of the fastest PC. However, if like most people you have a set limited amount of money and a specific task to accomplish you could get a better $ 2,000 PC than a $ 2,000 Mac. This is still true today. Is the low end iMac any competitor to the $ 1,299 PC ? 17" Monitor, 450MHz CPU, 128 Megs RAM, 8 Gig HD, 8Meg AGP Video, Floppy, CD-ROM, Zip disk and room to grow. I didn't think so.
3 : Games. At one point Apple actively discouraged game development on it's platform.
4 : Software availability and cost. The factors above led to the Mac's shrinking Market share which caused most vendors to target the growing kid ( Dos/Windows ) and the vendors who remained felt obliged to charge a significant premium for any quality applications. ( 30% - 70% ).
The $700 NT Tax is giving Linux a substantial boost in just this way. The big question is weather when Linux is a viable desktop ( It isn't yet though strange people like me use it ) the $80 Win9x tax will make a big difference. $200 PCs suggest it might.
The fact that MS is not the least bit scared of Apple while it's plotting how to survive Linux suggests this even more.
"Think" -:Former IBM motto.
I would dismiss most of the PR department if I ran @Home.
:).
:)
The decision to not encourage Web/FTP hosting from the subscriber link is smart. It should have been made when the service was initially created. Sure we would all Like to upload at a full Meg and this really sucks if you are building nightly RPMs/DEBs for an OSS project etc...
However the service is cheap because @home doesn't buy enough bandwidth to supply all users going full speed at the same time. All the people here who work at ISPs ( quite a few I would imagine ) know how that equation works. You goys don't even have as many phone lines as subscribers
Since it's @Home the assumption is you will be browsing and downloading most of the time and any web service will be for administering your home system from work or sending s few files to your box via FTP. If it was called @work then the revers would be true and serving would be more important than browsing.
The only problem is that the PR people went about announcing the thing in the wrong way. Show your clients sume respect. send out letters ( or Email ) to them and level with them that this is how it works and why you have to do this. point them to
a URL on your site where they can read the breakdown of how much bandwidth is availeble/used. Power users will use this info to reschedule the debian FTP install to whatever you say are the low periods
The reason I would do Buy Diamond if I ran S3.
:). The cards were technically identical except that the Generic board had more stable drivers and 4 megs of memory. ( vs the Diamond's 2 megs ).
Back when the S3 Virge was the hot Low end 3D chip I worked at a PC shop that sold Generic no name Virge based cards for $1,600 and Diamond Stealth 3D for $ 4,999 ( These are Jamaican Dollars so the numbers look funny
Lot's of people asked for the Stealth and bought it even after seeing the boards running side by side in identical systems on our demo shelf ( The $1,600 price on the Generic board left us with more profit ).
Generally, the people who bought the Generic board installed it themselves. The ones who bought the diamond paid $950 to put it in. Want to guess where they got the impression that the name "Diamond" was worth a few extra Dollars ?
PS : We had no video cards returned while I was there. Modems, Hard Drives and Monitors came back all the time though.
Maybe the people in Jamaica...well, I won't go there.
You won't so I will.
People in Jamaica can get away with murder. The number I called typical is the ratio of gun murders to other kinds of murder.
In places with armed citizens you think before you shoot. In Jamaica you get 4X the crime of New York City. ( Adjusted for population )
-- "THINK" -: former IBM motto.
You don't need to put a fast chip inside a bomb.
:)
It's pointless though since around 17 countries. ( Including china ) have the capability to wipe any single nation off the map ( including the US ).
The only effective defense is to make sure they don't want to
--
"THINK" -: former IBM motto.
I counted 4 comments that amount to "The playstation is made in Japan so US law doesn't apply".
The Actual article says that the CPU is made in the US."
Is there a law against reading the article before posting or do we just have a lot of morons around ?
--
"THINK" -: former IBM motto.
Exactly the oposite of what you expect from the times. I shuld check if Jamaica is on that list. I wold realy be opset if we have to bring in Playstations the way we imported 128 bit Netscape.
I.e. A few at a time, boght retail and caried as logage on comersial airlines.
--
"THINK" -: former IBM motto.
It's a strange kind of math but 10 desperate people fighting for survival can hold off a battalion that just hates them or was ordered to find and kill them ( assuming they are equally armed ). Denying the Jews the right to bear arms was a part of the oppression. It just wasn't noticed until too late.
For the record the Jews were not the only victims of the Holocaust. The Nazis were also careful to slaughter every Black person, Gipsy or person with a disability they could find. Even gays were targeted.
Unfortunately Jewish Germans outnumbered all these other groups combined.
--
"THINK" -: former IBM motto.
You made a well reasoned Pro gun control statement so I feel I need
.38 Matic. A few months latter someone
to explain a few things which aren't apparent to many people.
Jamaica has some of the strictest Gun control Laws on the planet.
Here it is a felony to have an unlicensed firearm. If you are found
with one you can get as much as 10 years in Prison for it. The
qualifications for getting a lisense are strict. The process is long and
there is provision for subjective rejection.
Note : Using it is a separate crime.
Jamaica has a population of 2.7 Million and a 6,000 member police
force. Our army ( only slightly smaller than the police force ) needs
to provide additional manpower nonetheless.
We had 800+ Murders last year. and 760 The year before. Around 1/2
with Guns. ( A typical ratio )
How could this happen ?
Last year someone offered me a
else asked me to keep a Tech 9 for him. In both cases I refused for
the simple reason that I don't want to be a criminal.
A simple rule of thumb is that when guns are illegal only criminals
will have them. It is impossible to close all the points at which a
10 lb mechanical device that can be dismantled into an unrecognizable
pile of scrap can enter. Never mind that a bright High School kid can
build one and any crack gang can manufacture bullets.
Another point to note is that the afluent comunities here have very
few burgleries ( almost none ). If you ask a burgler ( I did ) he
will tell you that "Dem man de a shata. Some a dem have biga gun dan
mi". Also "Dog a nuh not'n fi deal wid and alarm only ketch you when
yu nuh look out fi it".
Transelations. shata == person with gun.
The rest is just of kilter spelling to reflect the
way things are pronounced.
--
"THINK" -: former IBM motto.
Isn't it cool how they can Maintain huge market share, Make great profit, Produce Innovative products and still not be in a position to Leverage anything ?
:).
Seams you only need to twist arms and forcibly bundle stuff when you are producing crap
Since they will link the binary statically (I guess) against Qt they also could have chosen a widget set that is somewhat more widespread in use. If they've used a more common set, they could have used shared libraries. We all know the trouble with statically linked programs, don't we?
Actually Shared QT libs are available in every single Workstation or Desktop Linux distribution. Even RedHat and Debian.
Opera is closed source shrink-wrapped per user licensed software. I really don't think the GPL compatibility of QT keeps them awake at night.
Yes. This will be an article about Hackers, Crackers, Linux and GNU/Linux. First I nead to tell you of an aparently unrelated incident. "Carl Johnson" is a DJ with thew stage name "Profesor Nuts". He is quite good ( Think "Wierd Al" or Marty Robins with a strong base line ).
:). How about if Hackers called themselvs "Techies", "Nerds", "Computer Geaks", "Internetworkers" or soch ?
:).
Back to the insident at hand. He walks into the bank with a cheque writen in the name of "Carl Nuts". There is of course no such person. However the bank accepted it. His drivers license and other ID say otherwise, but this didn't bother them much. Common Law ( A British Comonwelth concept ) is that a name is valid if most people use it, regardles of what official documents say.
This brings us back to Hackers and Crackers. Back when I was yung ( early teans ) and kept tabs on the script kiddy sean I learned that a Cracker is a person who modifys binary software ( to remove shareware limits forinstance ) and opens encripted files. A Hacker was the goy who breaks into computer systems. After I grew up and got involved with Linux and real work I found out a Hacker was originaly the solver of unique problems. A position of high esteam among the technicaly aware. Onfortunatly most of the media dosn't know this. The children don't know it either ( except for the few who are involved in real net building stoff ). In short we are outnumberd and only a tiny fraction of the world know of and accept the true meaning of "Hacker".
So what shuld we the hacker comunity do about this ? Shold we fight it at every step of the way ? Shuld we demand that the word Hacker only be used in an apropriate context ? In my opinion we shuld just give it up. Find another name for ourselvs and let life continue. An example of this is with the term "Gay". This once ment happy and cherfull. If I was around in the 50s I wold have been proud of the title. These days everyone thinks Gay means Homosexual so I am caling myself a Player
With GNU/Linux There is another levle to the complication. RedHat and SuSE sell Linux distributions while Debian and Stampead sell GNU/Linux distributions. Technicaly they are all the same and RedHat eaven included more GNU software in the production base system than Debian at one point ( Gnome ). However they chuse to call the whole package "Linux". Is this an isue ? To some members of the GNU project it is. To others it isn't. Linus T dosn't eaven want to discus it these days ( Some excuse about a Kernel to work on
To make matters worse, Once Hurd is compleat there will be a full GNU OS out there. ( Yes Hurd will be finished... Eventualy... I think ). So what wold They sell it as if it became popular ?
SuSE Hurd V-9.1
:)
Only a dozen words that are too dirty to say ?
:)
Americans aparently lack creativity
HCC has been tosing money about.
$ 5,000,000 for www.reble.com
$ 100,000 per year for James Dean's visage.
Personaly I think they shuld have boght
Bob Marleys picture. Now there is a Reble.
That's easy. just give it to somebody who can't.
In fact I volunteer.
Technically, MacOS is inferior ( Memory protection comes to mind ). However due to the responsible behavior of Mac ISVs and the alleged cleanness of the API ( Apple doesn't shift it to kill competitors ) Macs are surprisingly stable.
:)
Not crash proof like Linux but I have seen Macs left on 24/7 and used most of the time ( 2x10 hour shifts ) that don't go down for weeks at least.
Also Mac device drivers tend to behave nicely.
No I didn't mention Linux or *nix since the question wasn't about them
This is SVN again. He is the only person at ZD that seams to do honest reporting. Some choice quotes ( not from the article but from the author; "I call things as I see them". "My reputation is very important to me". "If the benchmarks were compelling we would have run them".
This is a brilliant move. If they base on RedHat they will be forever playing catch-up. Even Mandrake is sean as a second rate distribution.
However with a Debian base and all corel developed modification GPLd they will get near 100% debian backing. The debian developers have always said they wanted someone to do an easy to use Linux based on Debian.
Best of all if they like anything from this Corel Linux thingy they will probably use it. The print system or the fax program come to mind. The back end is already solid and WordPerfect knows print drivers better than anyone ( Including printer makers ).
Expect a distribution that uses both Gnome and KDE too. Gnome for looks and KDE for work. No flames please it's just how they both work these days.
The only remaining question mark is RPM. Quake ships as a tarball and an RPM. Some other commercial software ships only as RPM. Has Alien been improved to the point where it's transparent on Debian?
For those people who already have Legacy cards from manufacturers that don't support users this could be very useful.
However if you are buying a new machine or a new video card remember to ask about support in XFree86 and Linux. This isn't just important for actual users of Linux and FreeBSD but also for those who have any kind of thought to upgrading the OS in the future. Weather to the new version of what you already use or to some other OS.
Remember that those cards which only worked in Windows 3.11 but not OS/2 did not get Win95 support and likewise all the NT-3.xx and Windows 95 only cards were left behind when NT-4 shipped.