egad. if they do have a neomagic driver for the neomagic chipsets, then that is good news indeed.
As for the nitpick... it's the SVGA Server running the Neomagic driver. My punishment for this offense is to use Windows 95 for five minutes (AHHHH!!!)
Way back when, when I was a 15-year-old BBS geek, the hot technologies were the C64, TRS-80 and the recently released Macintosh and Amiga computers (none of us kids gave a second look at the IBM PC.)
I was just wondering if you have taken any time to seriously consider what the future of Information Technology might be, and what, if anything, you are doing now to make sure that you will have the skill you need to get a good job once you get out of High School/College.
Nope. I am using X with a 2MB Neomagic graphics chipset. And no, since there isn't a Hardware Accelerated driver for Neomagic that works under 4.0, I am still using a 3.3.6 server.
And yes, I have run X on 386s and 486s myself, and sure, it wasn't all that bad. But when you step away from a high-end machine and sit down at a machine running X on a 386, you suddenly realize that you have been spoiled. I used to think that waiting 5 minutes for Summer Games to load on my Commodore 64 was pretty darn quick, but now I get impatient when Netscape take more than 20 seconds.
Five years ago, running Linux and X on a 486 was great, but now that I have a Celeron 366 with 96MB of RAM, I don't even have the patients to run X on my Pentium 100 with 48MB of RAM (both machines are laptops) the Pentium 100 now serves a my commandline only machine, and I do all my graphical tasks from the newer machine.
I am sure that once I upgrade to something better than I have now, I won't be patient with my current machine either. Let's face it, we get spoiled.
It is still my personal recommendation NOT to run X on a 386 or 486 laptop. And if you are going to run X, don't run it unless you absolutely need it for a particular application.
That is simply my personal recommendation. Take it or leave it. If you want to recommend running X on a 386, feel free to do so.
The version of X that is running on the Linux iPaq is nowhere near as bloated as the one that typically ships with a Linux distribution. And it is not necessarily X that eats away your resources... it's the programs that typically get run under X. Like Netscape.
Right now, I am running X and it is using 3.36% of my processor time on a Celeron 366. Imagine what that would be if you were running X on a 386 or a 486. I also have about 11.5 megs of RAM allocated just to X. That's fine on a machine with over 32 megs of RAM but we're talking machines with 4 or 8 megs and very little hard disk space to allocate to a swap partition.
Sure. You could run X if you wanted to on an old 386 or 486... many of us have done so. But I stick by my original post. If you want to run Linux on low-end hardware, I would recommend running it without X.
I have a Gateway Solo 2500 with a Celeron 366Mhz. I have never run Windows on the thing, so I really can't compare the battery life.
My laptop came with a CD that has a "battery learning tool" I usually run this about once a month as the battery life seems to drop from 4 hours to 30 minutes over the course of two months. Just a wierd quirky thing I guess.
What might be good would be for some of us Linux Laptop users to take some time and configure our laptops to run one or more of the BSDs and maybe even BEOS and then return our results to central repository where they could be made available online.
Linux works great on my Laptop, but I haven't take the time to check out FreeBSD.
Getting an inexpensive used/refurbished laptop is not very hard to do. There are plenty of places on the Internet and elsewhere to find your hardware needs.
Dollar Computer, a frequent advertiser in the back of Computer Shopper, has made finding a laptop in your price range rather simple. Just go to their site and input the price range that you are willing to pay. I did a search for models costing between $0 and $150 and came up with three (one 386 and two 486s).
The minimum requirement for running Linux is, of course, a 386. I would suggest, however, that if you are going to run Linux on these low-end machines, that you do so without X. X Windows is a big time resource hog that you can live without so long as you are willing to "go primitive" and use a command line. There a solitare games that can be played in text mode and SVGAlib, so you have alternatives to going with a full GUI environment.
Most of the old hardware will be supported under Linux, but you might want to look at the Linux Laptop pages before you buy.
Okay, so Intel is about to ship it's Itanium, and Microsoft doesn't have an OS to power the new architecture. But Linux is ready to support the new chip...
Xfree86 is quickly approaching the point where this will no longer be an issue.
Most modern and legacy cards now have decent support under XFree86. And with the recent addition of a VESA driver, we are getting to the point where you will hardly have to consider the video card issue when you install Linux.
My advice is to find a card that advertises itself to be capable of meeting your requirements, then check the XFree86 docs to see what kind of support that card has. If these two items are a close enough match for your needs, go for it!
Personally, I only use Laptops, so I am stuck using whatever graphics chipset the manufacturer included on the board. But since 1993, I have never had a problem getting at least 16bpp out of a laptop.
Please take a look at my post in the context of the thread to which I was replying.
The AC who posted the original comment said that he would not run a version of Linux distributed by the NSA.
Under this scenario, if the NSA were to distribute thier Linux "version", then they WOULD have to release the source, and that would essentially take care of the problem.
Whatever your opinion of the NSA might be, this is going to be a real boost to fighting the argument that "an open source operating system can't be secure."
What I am looking forward to, though, is the incorporation of some of the NSA's code into some of the existing major Linux Distributions. Most of us would have a problem running the NSA's software right out of the box because we are so well trained to mistrust authority.
Still... very cool.
The NSA would also be forced, under the GPL, to release all source code for their distribution. That makes planting a trojan very unlikely, as you could compile from source if you don't trust the NSA's binaries.
Great to see that one of the two Johns replied so quickly!
I have been fans of the band for many many years now (since 1991). When I was working at a military radio station in Iceland back in 1992, they sent me three of their CDs for absolutely NOTHING, so I know that these gentlemen are absolutely dedicated to giving back to the fans as much as they can.
I love being moderated for being "offtopic" by someone who hasn't read the thread that I am replying to. (especially when the original post in this thread was moderated up to a 4).
At least I have the Karma to spare.
Spend that Karma, spend that karma... yeah yeah yeah!
And... if they ever knock my Karma down below 20, I can always bring one of my other accounts back out of retirement... fphlyer lives!
And if I ever drop down below zero, I'll
Remember a few years ago some company came out with a game system called "MindDrive"?
You pugged a little device into your computer and put your index finger into it to control a game.
I tried it out in a Computer City in San Diego... it worked fairly well. It was a Downhill Skiing game, and with enough concentration I was able to play fairly well.
It look like this is a very similar system to that... only A LOT MORE EXPENSIVE.
I firmly believe that the Oddyssey and the Illiad are in fact, true. But it is a truth that takes some explanation.
Certainly all of the events in these great works of classical literature did NOT happen. They are greatly embelished and in placed completely fabricated. But what they do tell us is the point-of-view that the ancients had about the world and our place in it.
Some of the things in these works are likely to be completely true: Some of the names of various places in the world and some of the people. These things, of course, are over romantacised and sometimes bear little resemblence to their true origins.
Hector might have very well been killed by Achilles, but the true Achilles would probably not be recongnized by us because he was probably a very mortal and vulnerable man who simply had the luck and skill to survive in such a way that legends of his greatness grew to the point where he was considered to be god-like.
Our own legends in the USA have outgrown the truth about the men who those legends are about: George Washington most certainly told a few lies in his lifetime (some are little white-lies that he told to Martha Washington and are documented in how his letters to her don't always corrispond to historical fact.)
The Oddyssey and the Illiad provide us a rare glimpse into the culture of the time in which the work was first written. It simply take a discerning mind to seperate fantasy from reality.
Perhaps congress should pass a law that states that if a license agreement violates reason, that agreement becomes null and void, giving full rights to end user.
Hey, I'm not saying that MS has put anything remotely like the Excel Flight Sim into their version of XML. All I am saying is that MS has a proven track record of extending protocols and standards in such a way as to ensure that their Operating Systems have an edge over competitors.
Personally, I would rather have some other entity decide the final standard. And no, having Sun define that standard is not much different from having Microsoft do the job. Standards are often best left to open commitees (like IEEE.)
Microsoft has the ability to use it's market dominance to turn XML into their own proprietary tool, and I would hate to see that happen.
Personally, I use Windows, Linux, Unix, etc. depending on what makes the best sense to accomplish the task at hand. I would like to see all of these operating systems working together with the same standards wherever possible.
Lets see... what would I like to know? Hmm... how about whatever they DIDN'T document in that documentation of theirs?
Did they bloat the software with a flight sim like they did Excel?
Does it invite all the people in your address book to download the latest version like MSN Explorer?
Please MS is notorious for inserting undocumented "features" into just about everything. I wonder how much disk space that damn excel flight simulator takes up on your hard disk.
If you think that your MSXML SDK docs cover everything that MS has done to "extend" their XML standard beyond it's original specifications, then I feel for you buddy.
This yet another example of some upstart company, like Sun, daring to trample on Microsoft's benevolent attempts at creating appropriate industry standards. I remember a similar fight when Sun dared to challenge Microsoft's Java standard.
Won't these people ever realize that extending the standards and then not documenting most of the APIs is GOOD for EVERYONE?
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By the way, what kind of laptop are you using?
Gateway 2500 here.
egad. if they do have a neomagic driver for the neomagic chipsets, then that is good news indeed.
As for the nitpick... it's the SVGA Server running the Neomagic driver. My punishment for this offense is to use Windows 95 for five minutes (AHHHH!!!)
Here's my question:
Way back when, when I was a 15-year-old BBS geek, the hot technologies were the C64, TRS-80 and the recently released Macintosh and Amiga computers (none of us kids gave a second look at the IBM PC.)
I was just wondering if you have taken any time to seriously consider what the future of Information Technology might be, and what, if anything, you are doing now to make sure that you will have the skill you need to get a good job once you get out of High School/College.
Nope. I am using X with a 2MB Neomagic graphics chipset. And no, since there isn't a Hardware Accelerated driver for Neomagic that works under 4.0, I am still using a 3.3.6 server.
And yes, I have run X on 386s and 486s myself, and sure, it wasn't all that bad. But when you step away from a high-end machine and sit down at a machine running X on a 386, you suddenly realize that you have been spoiled. I used to think that waiting 5 minutes for Summer Games to load on my Commodore 64 was pretty darn quick, but now I get impatient when Netscape take more than 20 seconds.
Five years ago, running Linux and X on a 486 was great, but now that I have a Celeron 366 with 96MB of RAM, I don't even have the patients to run X on my Pentium 100 with 48MB of RAM (both machines are laptops) the Pentium 100 now serves a my commandline only machine, and I do all my graphical tasks from the newer machine.
I am sure that once I upgrade to something better than I have now, I won't be patient with my current machine either. Let's face it, we get spoiled.
It is still my personal recommendation NOT to run X on a 386 or 486 laptop. And if you are going to run X, don't run it unless you absolutely need it for a particular application.
That is simply my personal recommendation. Take it or leave it. If you want to recommend running X on a 386, feel free to do so.
Thanks.
The version of X that is running on the Linux iPaq is nowhere near as bloated as the one that typically ships with a Linux distribution. And it is not necessarily X that eats away your resources... it's the programs that typically get run under X. Like Netscape.
Right now, I am running X and it is using 3.36% of my processor time on a Celeron 366. Imagine what that would be if you were running X on a 386 or a 486. I also have about 11.5 megs of RAM allocated just to X. That's fine on a machine with over 32 megs of RAM but we're talking machines with 4 or 8 megs and very little hard disk space to allocate to a swap partition.
Sure. You could run X if you wanted to on an old 386 or 486... many of us have done so. But I stick by my original post. If you want to run Linux on low-end hardware, I would recommend running it without X.
I have a Gateway Solo 2500 with a Celeron 366Mhz. I have never run Windows on the thing, so I really can't compare the battery life.
My laptop came with a CD that has a "battery learning tool" I usually run this about once a month as the battery life seems to drop from 4 hours to 30 minutes over the course of two months. Just a wierd quirky thing I guess.
What might be good would be for some of us Linux Laptop users to take some time and configure our laptops to run one or more of the BSDs and maybe even BEOS and then return our results to central repository where they could be made available online.
Linux works great on my Laptop, but I haven't take the time to check out FreeBSD.
Getting an inexpensive used/refurbished laptop is not very hard to do. There are plenty of places on the Internet and elsewhere to find your hardware needs.
Dollar Computer, a frequent advertiser in the back of Computer Shopper, has made finding a laptop in your price range rather simple. Just go to their site and input the price range that you are willing to pay. I did a search for models costing between $0 and $150 and came up with three (one 386 and two 486s).
The minimum requirement for running Linux is, of course, a 386. I would suggest, however, that if you are going to run Linux on these low-end machines, that you do so without X. X Windows is a big time resource hog that you can live without so long as you are willing to "go primitive" and use a command line. There a solitare games that can be played in text mode and SVGAlib, so you have alternatives to going with a full GUI environment.
Most of the old hardware will be supported under Linux, but you might want to look at the Linux Laptop pages before you buy.
I hope this helps.
Okay, so Intel is about to ship it's Itanium, and Microsoft doesn't have an OS to power the new architecture. But Linux is ready to support the new chip...
...hmmm. I just don't see a problem here.
Xfree86 is quickly approaching the point where this will no longer be an issue.
Most modern and legacy cards now have decent support under XFree86. And with the recent addition of a VESA driver, we are getting to the point where you will hardly have to consider the video card issue when you install Linux.
My advice is to find a card that advertises itself to be capable of meeting your requirements, then check the XFree86 docs to see what kind of support that card has. If these two items are a close enough match for your needs, go for it!
Personally, I only use Laptops, so I am stuck using whatever graphics chipset the manufacturer included on the board. But since 1993, I have never had a problem getting at least 16bpp out of a laptop.
Please take a look at my post in the context of the thread to which I was replying.
The AC who posted the original comment said that he would not run a version of Linux distributed by the NSA.
Under this scenario, if the NSA were to distribute thier Linux "version", then they WOULD have to release the source, and that would essentially take care of the problem.
Thanks.
Whatever your opinion of the NSA might be, this is going to be a real boost to fighting the argument that "an open source operating system can't be secure." What I am looking forward to, though, is the incorporation of some of the NSA's code into some of the existing major Linux Distributions. Most of us would have a problem running the NSA's software right out of the box because we are so well trained to mistrust authority. Still... very cool.
The NSA would also be forced, under the GPL, to release all source code for their distribution. That makes planting a trojan very unlikely, as you could compile from source if you don't trust the NSA's binaries.
Sorry, I wills check to make sure me don't make same dumb mistake in the future. (No, I'm not trying to impersonate George W.)
...and call me the Big Duluth!
Great to see that one of the two Johns replied so quickly!
I have been fans of the band for many many years now (since 1991). When I was working at a military radio station in Iceland back in 1992, they sent me three of their CDs for absolutely NOTHING, so I know that these gentlemen are absolutely dedicated to giving back to the fans as much as they can.
Great answers. Great band.
I love being moderated for being "offtopic" by someone who hasn't read the thread that I am replying to. (especially when the original post in this thread was moderated up to a 4).
At least I have the Karma to spare.
Spend that Karma, spend that karma... yeah yeah yeah!
And... if they ever knock my Karma down below 20, I can always bring one of my other accounts back out of retirement... fphlyer lives!
And if I ever drop down below zero, I'll
Remember a few years ago some company came out with a game system called "MindDrive"? You pugged a little device into your computer and put your index finger into it to control a game. I tried it out in a Computer City in San Diego... it worked fairly well. It was a Downhill Skiing game, and with enough concentration I was able to play fairly well. It look like this is a very similar system to that... only A LOT MORE EXPENSIVE.
I'm sorry... where is that underrated?
Ah yes, the search for the elusive "truth."
I firmly believe that the Oddyssey and the Illiad are in fact, true. But it is a truth that takes some explanation.
Certainly all of the events in these great works of classical literature did NOT happen. They are greatly embelished and in placed completely fabricated. But what they do tell us is the point-of-view that the ancients had about the world and our place in it.
Some of the things in these works are likely to be completely true: Some of the names of various places in the world and some of the people. These things, of course, are over romantacised and sometimes bear little resemblence to their true origins.
Hector might have very well been killed by Achilles, but the true Achilles would probably not be recongnized by us because he was probably a very mortal and vulnerable man who simply had the luck and skill to survive in such a way that legends of his greatness grew to the point where he was considered to be god-like.
Our own legends in the USA have outgrown the truth about the men who those legends are about: George Washington most certainly told a few lies in his lifetime (some are little white-lies that he told to Martha Washington and are documented in how his letters to her don't always corrispond to historical fact.)
The Oddyssey and the Illiad provide us a rare glimpse into the culture of the time in which the work was first written. It simply take a discerning mind to seperate fantasy from reality.
Perhaps congress should pass a law that states that if a license agreement violates reason, that agreement becomes null and void, giving full rights to end user.
Maybe that would curb some of this sillyness.
Hey, I'm not saying that MS has put anything remotely like the Excel Flight Sim into their version of XML. All I am saying is that MS has a proven track record of extending protocols and standards in such a way as to ensure that their Operating Systems have an edge over competitors.
Personally, I would rather have some other entity decide the final standard. And no, having Sun define that standard is not much different from having Microsoft do the job. Standards are often best left to open commitees (like IEEE.)
Microsoft has the ability to use it's market dominance to turn XML into their own proprietary tool, and I would hate to see that happen.
Personally, I use Windows, Linux, Unix, etc. depending on what makes the best sense to accomplish the task at hand. I would like to see all of these operating systems working together with the same standards wherever possible.
Really? 4k, huh? Not bad...
As for Quake II's 140k, I am more willing to accept bloat in a game then in a business app.
Are these figures for disk usage or memory usage?
Lets see... what would I like to know? Hmm... how about whatever they DIDN'T document in that documentation of theirs?
Did they bloat the software with a flight sim like they did Excel?
Does it invite all the people in your address book to download the latest version like MSN Explorer?
Please MS is notorious for inserting undocumented "features" into just about everything. I wonder how much disk space that damn excel flight simulator takes up on your hard disk.
If you think that your MSXML SDK docs cover everything that MS has done to "extend" their XML standard beyond it's original specifications, then I feel for you buddy.
This yet another example of some upstart company, like Sun, daring to trample on Microsoft's benevolent attempts at creating appropriate industry standards. I remember a similar fight when Sun dared to challenge Microsoft's Java standard.
Won't these people ever realize that extending the standards and then not documenting most of the APIs is GOOD for EVERYONE?
Please forgive my sarcasm.
Sure. Fine. Spamming might bring down the whole e-mail system. Even if that were true, that would not be a reason to give somebody 7 years in prison.
You argue that since there are many people out there spamming, we should punish an individual based as if he were the whole group.
Ted Bundy was part of a pattern of murderers in the world, but he was not tried for crimes commited by Charles Manson.
The facts are, you are willing to condemn this man not because of what he did, but because you disagree with what he did.