I second that. In the lab where I work, all of the dual-head systems run Matrox cards. The people doing atmospheric modeling don't give a rat's ass about 3D performance. (Yet almost every video card review seems to be written by a 13-year-old with the only emphasis being frame rates in silly games.)
Yep, that was my first thought, too. I found this:
UCSD p-System
The UCSD p-System or UCSD Pascal System was a portable highly machine independent operating system developed in 1978 by the Institute for Information Systems of the University of California, San Diego to provide all students with a common operating system that could run on any of the then available microcomputers as well as campus PDP-11 minicomputers.
p-System started around 1977 as an idea of Prof. Kenneth Bowles at UCSD, who felt that the number of new platforms coming out at the time would make it difficult for new languages to gain acceptance.
This is also very similiar to Z-code that Infocom used (invented in 1979). All of their games where compiled to Z-code and then they just had to write an interpreter for each new system.
One thing that your school could do that public schools could not: cherry picking -- only allowing the best of the best into the school while everyone else can go to that public school down the road. Then they can say "look how good we are, our students score 150-200 points higher on the SATs".
I have to speak up here. There is one area where Windows is consistent and Linux is a mess: keyboard shortcuts. In every one of those examples you cite, I could sit down and navigate through all of those without a mouse with no problem. I would know how they work. They would be consistent.
Ever try Linux apps without a mouse? Next to impossible. Whatever happened to alt+F4 to kill a window? alt+F3 to minimize -- or was that send-to-back, my memory fades as less and less use the old ways. Somewhere around the time Enlightenment became the default window manager in Red Hat, those old window control shortcuts went away. Why? I speculate that some brain trust thought it was too much like Windows and thus needed to be removed. In actuality, it was part of IBM's CUA (Common User Access). Notice the "C"? alt+F4, et al. worked in Windows 3.1, OS/2, Motif, IRIX, SunOS, etc., etc.
What do we have now? A huge mess. I don't even know what the keyboard shortcut is to close a window in my current system (Fedora Core 2). And when we get into the applications, it gets even worse. Part of the problem is figuring out just whose responsibility it is: the toolkit? X? the Window manager? the application? All of the above? None of the above?
Why do I want consistent keyboard shortcuts? Because I want to be productive and not have to rely on a point-and-drool interface. If I know what the shortcuts are, I can type much much faster than I can use a mouse. It seems that my only hope now is the accessibility people: they also want consistency.
Now, before some smartass replies that I could just customize my shortcuts, let me shoot that down. How would that be "Common"? I could set up my account to be just the way I like it. Then what happens on the next system? And the next? And the next? Am I supposed to spend half of my life customizing brain-damaged user interfaces? No thanks. I work on Windows, Linux, IRIX, and Solaris. Three of those do a pretty good job at consistency -- one of them is a failure (I leave it as an exercise to the reader as to which one it is).
I never walk out on or stop watching a film, no matter how bad it is -- with one exception: Liquid Sky. My brother had rented it and none of us could stand to watch the whole thing. He took it back and asked for a refund. The guy at the video store gave him the refund because he thought it was the worst ever, too.
The IMDB rating is 5.6 for this piece of trash. I just don't understand that.
Writing something off as a business expense doesn't mean that you get it for free -- you still have to pay for it. Then, if and only if, you meet the minimum amount, you can deduct it (which just means that you won't have to pay taxes on those expenses, but you are still out the money). What is the minimum amount? It has been a few years since I even bothered to look at that part of the tax form. Isn't it some percentage of your gross income? Thus, if your unreimbursed business expenses aren't high enough, you get nothing (except the satisfaction of knowing that when your manager said to bend over and grab your ankles -- you did it).
I fixed an accountant's piece of crap P-III 450 MHz. It took sooo long because it is slow and I had to keep all of the programs in tact (I could not do a scratch install). As payment, I got 27 six-packs of Samual Adams Boston Lager.
All that beer has taken the sting out of fixing an old junker.
I was able to install Fedora on an old laptop w/ a 266 MHz Cyrix MediaGX and 64 MB of RAM without a problem. It runs fine (albeit a tad slugish). SuSE 9 Pro doesn't even support anything less than i686 CPUs. I also put Fedora on an old Dell laptop w/ a 233 MHz PII and 128 MB of RAM. No problem. SuSE, on the other hand, would crash during the install and then reboot over and over.
I tried SuSE on a 500 MHz PIII. It installed but crashes when attempting to set up hardware. Guess what? Fedora works. The first machine I actually got a full SuSE install on was a 1.1 GHz IBM ThinkPad. It seemed nice, but I found the a lot of their setup GUIs to be unintiutive and frustrating. The final straw was when their DHCP client only set the IP addr, but not the domain nor the name servers. Kind of defeats the purpose of using DHCP. I installed Fedora and that is what I am using at this moment.
Overall, I found SuSE 9 Pro to be a steaming pile. A cow-orker who likes to install just about every operating system he can get his hands on installed and ran SuSE for about a week before coming to the same conslusion. He is now also using Fedora (actually Fedora Core 2 Test 3).
Exactly! And it is a legally licensed player that came with Windows software. You just choose not to use that software -- rather -- to use some do-it-yourself stuff that a bunch of hobbiests wrote.
The other side counters that you are stealing. JV said it several times. But you are not. It is only the DMCA that makes this illegal. For the first 200+ years of this country, DeCSS would not be illegal. As long as you are not distributing the movies, no crime has been commited. Under copyright law, you can make as many copies of your VHS tapes, CDs, etc. -- as long as they are for your personal use. Now, along comes DMCA and you are now a criminal for watching your legally purchased DVD on your legally purchased DVD drive using Linux.
And they wonder why so many of us are willing to commit civil disobedience. Not only that, but now the DMCA is being used to stifle competition (as is Lexmark sueing anyone selling ink cartridges for their printers) -- something that JV assured us would not happen due to safeguards in the law. Ha!
What you say about the car fees is true but I have to clarify one statement of yours: "Gray Davis's TRIPLING of the previous fee".
People who say this are really being disingenuous. California had a very high auto registration fee for years and years. Gray Davis lowered the registration fee -- something none of the Republican govenors before him ever did. It was only after the state got into such fiscal trouble that he repealed that lowering of the tax and put was back to the rates we had for as long as I can remember.
Anyone who dislikes Gray Davis overlooks that fact and makes statements about his tripling of the tax -- but refuses to give any credit for his lowering of the tax in the first place.
I will give you two examples of why I shop online:
1. I was looking for a 128 MB MMC card. I went to local business after local business. All I could find was a 64 MB card for TWICE the price that I eventually paid for the 128 MB card. Hardly shaving off a few pennies.
2. My wife was looking for a book. She said that she had been to every local store and could not find it. She wondered if I could find it online. Went to Amazon and found that it was their number 3 seller. I asked her about the book and my wife told me that it was this month's Oprah Reading Club selection. We ordered it and it was delivered the next day. Sorry, local bookstores, but you can go to hell.
I am sick and tired of poorly run businesses blaming everyone else for their problems.
You are an adult who can't write. I think you fall into the "mentally challenged" category. Consider that if they can teach someone with Downs Syndrome to write, they should be able to teach you.
I agree with you in theory. The problem is that for some reason, when most (some?) people put a cell phone to their ear, their volume increases by an order of magnitude. Thus, the couple talking at the table next to me does not bother me, but the idiot on the phone four tables over is annoying everyone in the whole restaurant. Not everyone does this, but enough people do have this annoying habit to the point where people now associate cell phones with obnoxious a-holes. Thus, the backlash we are now observing.
You obviously have never had to support any production servers or you would never make such a stupid statement. Let me guess: you are a 13-year-old with a computer in you bedroom. Yep, in your case, upgrade to Fedora. No problem. I have updated my home system and my laptop to Fedora -- works great, I like it.
There is no way in hell I am going to update my servers at work to Fedora. Production systems cannot be updated lightly. It was only 7 or 8 months ago that I updated our mail server from Red Hat 6.2 to Red Hat 8.0. Updating servers that people rely on 24/7 can be a traumatic experience (especially when you don't have the money to be able to have redundant servers).
Why do you assume that people are looking for a "free" solution? A lot of people pay for Red Hat Linux, then they pay for Red Hat Network. This is not a case of people looking for something for nothing. People are willing to pay but Red Hat is not interested. What really hurts is that Red Hat has stated that they were not losing money on Red Hat Linux, they just did not have enough "growth". *Gag* Business school crap!
So now we have to make a tough choice. What do we go for next?
Fedora Core is not for the enterprise.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux costs real money. This is not a problem for some businesses but is quite a burden for Education (where I am). We are in talks with Red Hat about pricing. But I feel like I would be buying a pig in a poke (a product sight-unseen). Why? Because I haven't ever seen it. I can't just download it and install it at home to evaluate it. The vast mass of developers out there have never touched it and can't tell you if there are any issues concerning their software or not.
SuSE Professional 9. I purchased a copy so that I could evaluate it. Well, let's just say that I hope Novell can put some money into it and maybe I will try it again in a year or two.
So where does that leave me? Between a rock and a hard place. To anyone that paid attention, Red Hat's EOLing was not a surprise -- but that doesn't make it any less painful.
Yep, while first learning Unix in the early 90's, I ran the same thing and was utterly shocked to find out that I was able to bring the *whole* system completely to its knees. I was used to working on Control Data CYBER mainframes (I was a true Cyber Punk) and on real computers, it just isn't possible for a mere user to bring the whole system down. I was so disgusted that I started wearing a "Unix Sux!" button.
To this day, I still think that NOS/VE is the closest thing to perfection that I have ever seen in an OS (or am likely to see in my lifetime).
Re:Expect their products to be leased not sold
on
EMC To Acquire VMware
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Does Win4Lin require binary-only kernel modules like VMware?
The HOBO Temp logger is a miniature, reusable data logger which continuously measures temperature in remote locations. Start the logger, readout, and plot the data with BoxCar or BoxCar Pro for Windows or BoxCar Pro for Macintosh software.
Features
Standard temperature range: -20C to +70C
One year battery life (user replaceable)
Small size: 2.4" tall x 1.9" wide x 0.8" thick and 1 oz.
Stores up to 1800 measurements
Nonvolatile EEPROM memory retains data even when the battery has been removed
Temperature sensor on 4" wire extends from case for external measurement
Fifteen minute response time in air (One minute response time with sensor outside of case)
Operating temperature range (logger) -20C to +70C, noncondensing
Operating temperature range (sensor) -40C to +120C
Blinking LED light confirms operation
Sampling intervals from 0.5 seconds to 9.0 hours
Optional submersible case rated to 400' depth
Data readout in less than thirty seconds
Data exportable to spreadsheet programs (Lotus, Excel, etc.)
What were you thinking when you posted this? Did you not take five minutes to look up the Fedora Project?
Seriously, the Fedora Project was started in December 2002. Quoted from their original site (http://www.fedora.us/):
Founded December 2002 by University of Hawaii Computer Science student
Warren Togami, the previous Fedora Linux Project is an international
team of volunteer software developers united for the development of high
quality 3rd party RPM packages for the Red Hat Linux platform.
I think Red Hat shot themselves in the foot -- it remains to be seen if this is a fatal injury or not.
Let me explain: I think an awful lot of people are going to have to abandon Red Hat once the current Red Hat Linus distros reach EOL. Why? Because they have three choices:
Pay for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This could be a good move for a lot of people, but you have to pay big bucks. Are the at-home developers going to do it? No -- too expensive. Are the struggling businesses, schools, churches, et al. going to do it? No -- too expensive. I don't know anyone who runs it. How many of the thousands of SourceForge projects are going to be tested on RHEL? Only the ones Red Hat does themselves?
Use Fedora Core. This may be great for home users. It is not an option for the 30 Linux servers I admin. We can't have such a bleeding-edge distro with no guarantee of support. There is no way I can be updating servers multiple times a year. We have the same concerns as Fortune 500 companies (just 1/1000000th of the budget -- otherwise RHEL would be our choice). All of the buzz I hear is of people flocking away from Red Hat.
Choose another distro. This is the one that makes the most sense for us. I just bought SuSE Professional 9.0 today. We are going to evaluate it as a replacement for Red Hat. I think this is going to be the choice for a lot of people. Of course, whatever I choose for work, I am going to want to run at home (that's 4 more machines that will be losing Red Hat).
This example is just one small section from one page. The person who created it was a web-novice, but a computer expert. Even he couldn't get Front Page to produce decent HTML (I don't think anyone can).
Yes, I noticed this, too. I am typing on a Natural Keyboard Pro now. I sure hope it lasts because I would never buy one of the new ones. Besides the horrible rearranging of the keys that you mentioned, the key-feel is awful. They are nothing but cheap crap.
Please, someone make an ergonomic keyboard with a good feel and the proper layout.
Slashdot Mirror
I second that. In the lab where I work, all of the dual-head systems run Matrox cards. The people doing atmospheric modeling don't give a rat's ass about 3D performance. (Yet almost every video card review seems to be written by a 13-year-old with the only emphasis being frame rates in silly games.)
This is also very similiar to Z-code that Infocom used (invented in 1979). All of their games where compiled to Z-code and then they just had to write an interpreter for each new system.
You have that the wrong way around -- since Slackware and Debian are not on the list, I have a hard time taking them seriously.
One thing that your school could do that public schools could not: cherry picking -- only allowing the best of the best into the school while everyone else can go to that public school down the road. Then they can say "look how good we are, our students score 150-200 points higher on the SATs".
Another good book on the same subject: Lies My Teacher Told Me : Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James W. Loewen.
Ever try Linux apps without a mouse? Next to impossible. Whatever happened to alt+F4 to kill a window? alt+F3 to minimize -- or was that send-to-back, my memory fades as less and less use the old ways. Somewhere around the time Enlightenment became the default window manager in Red Hat, those old window control shortcuts went away. Why? I speculate that some brain trust thought it was too much like Windows and thus needed to be removed. In actuality, it was part of IBM's CUA (Common User Access). Notice the "C"? alt+F4, et al. worked in Windows 3.1, OS/2, Motif, IRIX, SunOS, etc., etc.
What do we have now? A huge mess. I don't even know what the keyboard shortcut is to close a window in my current system (Fedora Core 2). And when we get into the applications, it gets even worse. Part of the problem is figuring out just whose responsibility it is: the toolkit? X? the Window manager? the application? All of the above? None of the above?
Why do I want consistent keyboard shortcuts? Because I want to be productive and not have to rely on a point-and-drool interface. If I know what the shortcuts are, I can type much much faster than I can use a mouse. It seems that my only hope now is the accessibility people: they also want consistency.Now, before some smartass replies that I could just customize my shortcuts, let me shoot that down. How would that be "Common"? I could set up my account to be just the way I like it. Then what happens on the next system? And the next? And the next? Am I supposed to spend half of my life customizing brain-damaged user interfaces? No thanks. I work on Windows, Linux, IRIX, and Solaris. Three of those do a pretty good job at consistency -- one of them is a failure (I leave it as an exercise to the reader as to which one it is).
The IMDB rating is 5.6 for this piece of trash. I just don't understand that.
Writing something off as a business expense doesn't mean that you get it for free -- you still have to pay for it. Then, if and only if, you meet the minimum amount, you can deduct it (which just means that you won't have to pay taxes on those expenses, but you are still out the money). What is the minimum amount? It has been a few years since I even bothered to look at that part of the tax form. Isn't it some percentage of your gross income? Thus, if your unreimbursed business expenses aren't high enough, you get nothing (except the satisfaction of knowing that when your manager said to bend over and grab your ankles -- you did it).
Personal Area Networks (PAN):
A Technology Demonstration by IBM Research
November 18-19, 1996
More info at IBM.
All that beer has taken the sting out of fixing an old junker.
He said cite it -- not recite it.
I tried SuSE on a 500 MHz PIII. It installed but crashes when attempting to set up hardware. Guess what? Fedora works. The first machine I actually got a full SuSE install on was a 1.1 GHz IBM ThinkPad. It seemed nice, but I found the a lot of their setup GUIs to be unintiutive and frustrating. The final straw was when their DHCP client only set the IP addr, but not the domain nor the name servers. Kind of defeats the purpose of using DHCP. I installed Fedora and that is what I am using at this moment.
Overall, I found SuSE 9 Pro to be a steaming pile. A cow-orker who likes to install just about every operating system he can get his hands on installed and ran SuSE for about a week before coming to the same conslusion. He is now also using Fedora (actually Fedora Core 2 Test 3).
The other side counters that you are stealing. JV said it several times. But you are not. It is only the DMCA that makes this illegal. For the first 200+ years of this country, DeCSS would not be illegal. As long as you are not distributing the movies, no crime has been commited. Under copyright law, you can make as many copies of your VHS tapes, CDs, etc. -- as long as they are for your personal use. Now, along comes DMCA and you are now a criminal for watching your legally purchased DVD on your legally purchased DVD drive using Linux.
And they wonder why so many of us are willing to commit civil disobedience. Not only that, but now the DMCA is being used to stifle competition (as is Lexmark sueing anyone selling ink cartridges for their printers) -- something that JV assured us would not happen due to safeguards in the law. Ha!
People who say this are really being disingenuous. California had a very high auto registration fee for years and years. Gray Davis lowered the registration fee -- something none of the Republican govenors before him ever did. It was only after the state got into such fiscal trouble that he repealed that lowering of the tax and put was back to the rates we had for as long as I can remember.
Anyone who dislikes Gray Davis overlooks that fact and makes statements about his tripling of the tax -- but refuses to give any credit for his lowering of the tax in the first place.
1. I was looking for a 128 MB MMC card. I went to local business after local business. All I could find was a 64 MB card for TWICE the price that I eventually paid for the 128 MB card. Hardly shaving off a few pennies.
2. My wife was looking for a book. She said that she had been to every local store and could not find it. She wondered if I could find it online. Went to Amazon and found that it was their number 3 seller. I asked her about the book and my wife told me that it was this month's Oprah Reading Club selection. We ordered it and it was delivered the next day. Sorry, local bookstores, but you can go to hell.
I am sick and tired of poorly run businesses blaming everyone else for their problems.
You are an adult who can't write. I think you fall into the "mentally challenged" category. Consider that if they can teach someone with Downs Syndrome to write, they should be able to teach you.
I agree with you in theory. The problem is that for some reason, when most (some?) people put a cell phone to their ear, their volume increases by an order of magnitude. Thus, the couple talking at the table next to me does not bother me, but the idiot on the phone four tables over is annoying everyone in the whole restaurant. Not everyone does this, but enough people do have this annoying habit to the point where people now associate cell phones with obnoxious a-holes. Thus, the backlash we are now observing.
There is no way in hell I am going to update my servers at work to Fedora. Production systems cannot be updated lightly. It was only 7 or 8 months ago that I updated our mail server from Red Hat 6.2 to Red Hat 8.0. Updating servers that people rely on 24/7 can be a traumatic experience (especially when you don't have the money to be able to have redundant servers).
Why do you assume that people are looking for a "free" solution? A lot of people pay for Red Hat Linux, then they pay for Red Hat Network. This is not a case of people looking for something for nothing. People are willing to pay but Red Hat is not interested. What really hurts is that Red Hat has stated that they were not losing money on Red Hat Linux, they just did not have enough "growth". *Gag* Business school crap!
So now we have to make a tough choice. What do we go for next?
So where does that leave me? Between a rock and a hard place. To anyone that paid attention, Red Hat's EOLing was not a surprise -- but that doesn't make it any less painful.
To this day, I still think that NOS/VE is the closest thing to perfection that I have ever seen in an OS (or am likely to see in my lifetime).
Does Win4Lin require binary-only kernel modules like VMware?
Here is the description from the web site:
Seriously, the Fedora Project was started in December 2002. Quoted from their original site (http://www.fedora.us/):
Let me explain: I think an awful lot of people are going to have to abandon Red Hat once the current Red Hat Linus distros reach EOL. Why? Because they have three choices:
So long Red Hat and thanks for all the fish!
http://pah.cert.ucr.edu/~bob/shameful.shtml
This example is just one small section from one page. The person who created it was a web-novice, but a computer expert. Even he couldn't get Front Page to produce decent HTML (I don't think anyone can).
Please, someone make an ergonomic keyboard with a good feel and the proper layout.