Back then you had to install it yourself, there were no "real" distributions. You booted off a kernel floppy into a minimal system, formatted the drive, and copied the GCC source off another disk.
A month later you had a full Linux system ready, and a smart person backed it up to tape.
It was my only desktop OS for ten years. The only non-Linux systems I had were a couple of Sun or Dec systems, and once in a while a Windows laptop from work.
I'd bet you can find a lot of people on here who started using Linux back then, when that was how you had to install it. I bet there's a lot of people on here who remember how damn cool it was when you could a couple days downloading the Slackware A disks, and save SO much time installing it.
Actually, jackass, if you want to know the specifics:
iBook had its memory on the logic board go back with a month left of the warranty. The Apple store "repaired" it, which turned out to be "took the 128 meg SODIMM out and put a 256 meg in" -- not replacing the bad logic board. It was several months before I noticed that. A month or two later, out of warranty, the system finally died entirely.
Apple will NOT repair it out of warranty for $280. They specifically quoted me $680 (or something right around that) for the repair. You're not the first person to mention that, but like everyone else, clearly you've never actually tried to get them to do that.
And yes, out of six or seven laptops, I've had one hardware failure other than the iBook's logic board -- a floppy drive on a Sager-Midern laptop ten years ago. That laptop was still running fine before I finally recycled it last year, I just had to pull the harddrive if I needed to install a new OS on it. That one died four or five years out of warranty. In fact, I've never had any serious hardware failure in any of my personal systems -- that includes MFM and RLL drives going back 20 years. I take extremely good care of all of it.
My most recent dead iPod actually had almost never been used. The first 40 gig one I bought had its hard drive die at 11 months -- and it was only used sporadically, mostly on plane trips. So while I appreciate your sarcasm, your assumptions are quite incorrect. Apple replaced that one with a new one with a defective dock connector. I, unfortunately, didn't get a chance to use it more than once or twice in the following few months, and discovered with less than five or ten hours of use, that one was dead. It works, if I can get it charged, but with a bad dock connector, thats not too useful. I could buy a new iPod for the flat rate repare cost they quoted for that...
The 1st generation (or maybe it was 2nd generation, I don't recall) one before that had the harddrive die just out of warranty, again only ever used on plane trips. That one probably had less than 100 hours of total use on it.
My first Mighty Mouse stopped tracking movement to the left. Weird, considering its optical. The guy in the store happily exchanged it under warranty after seeing it (he was surprised, too) Its replacement died three months later when the scroll-wheel stopped working. Unfortunately that was out of the 60 or 90 days a warranty replacement is covered for.
Yes, Apple had an extended logic board program for the G3 -- and insists to this day that the problem did not exist with the G4 ibooks. Do some google searching, you'll see how common it was on the G4. In fact, the going theory is that its a flaw in the case design allowing too much flex in the logic board that caused both the G3 and G4 failures.
I'm not here to get modded up for anything. Believe me, my karma is quite high enough I don't need to shill for some imaginary anti-Apple contingent on here.
Go put your arrogent fan-boi head back in the sand about Apple's very real quality problems, or at a minimum find some other thread to cast accusations around in.
No but they're leading the pack, and Apple will miss the masses when they do the same. Only the masses will not be going to Linux, they'll be going back to Windows.
I know a LOT of people who have switched back, including myself. I'd run Linux for ten years as my desktop OS until I switched to OSX, and I've switched back. Why? Not the ease of use of Ubuntu, although its nice to run Linux and not have to worry about things working or not. I switched back because of the horrid quality of Apple hardware the last few years. I've wasted a large number of thousands of dollars on Apple hardware that died immediately out of warranty. (iBook, two iPods, two Mighty Mice, and my old 17" G4 iMac was flaky but still works most of the time).
Apple is riding a wave of popular hype, but popular trends can switch away from a company as fast as they can switch TO a company. And there's a LOT of people in the last year or two who will start learning about Apple hardware quality as their iPods die, or they talk to people like myself who will be happy to tell them how Apple has such a long history in the 2000's of having known common defects in their hardware and not supporting their owners. (My iBook is dead at 14 months from a failed logic board, a very common problem in all the post-Clamshell iBooks, but Apple has only chosen to support customers when threatened with class action lawsuits)
And unfortunately, we've demonstrated that we don't have 1% of the conviction that the "terrorists" have.
We can't even manage to vote a known corrupt government out of office, much less really do something about whats going on.
Its pathetic. We not only lost, we lost, and then locked ourselves up in a a prison of our own making, abused ourselves, then bowed down and asked for more.
If they can't get the developers, they can get the users.
Patent violation isn't a creation issue, its a use issue as well.
The best solution is for individual developers to get a patent on something stupid and use it as a form of nuclear detente. If they can't do it, grant the copyright to an organization like EFF that can handle patent cross licensing. Until the whole concept is thrown out, writing software and not being armed with something you can threaten back with is like walking into a minefield.
And the need for software developers to have a patent portfolio for defense just makes the situation worse.
Cars aren't as complicated as they look at the first glance. Engines aren't all that complicated, transmissions, etc Even with modern electronic controls, the basic way the engine works with its sensor feedback is very basic.
Keep in mind cars the average person are ever exposed to are designed to last a long time, be very quick to assemble, and easy to fix (they'd never sell a car if you needed a PhD to fix it -- imagine the ownership costs!).
Just spending some time really looking at the car is a good start. Its not hard to see how the suspension works. Its not hard to look at a diagram of a transmission to understand what its doing. Same with the engine. Everything else is just supporting those systems. The sort of things people generally do themselves (changing brake pads, changing fluids, maybe putting a new suspension on) is all very basic. There are lots of books and websites that explain the process, and its basically the same on every car.
90% of working on a car is reminding yourself when something seems complicated, you're probably missing some detail and you need to do some more research. Things may be time consuming to do, but very rarely are complicated. The other 10% is knowing when you don't have the right tool!
The two fields are not all that different. There are just as many people involved with auto repair who shouldn't be as there are "geeks" involved with computer repair who shouldn't be.
Case in point: my girlfriends father spent over $800 trying to fix a hesitation problem in their old car, before he gave it to my girlfriend. Coils replaced, wires, you name it, they did it. Three or four "techs" looked at it over the course of several months and never did solve it.
They dropped the car off at our house, I took it for a drive and saw the coolant needle drop like a brick as the car hesitated. Pulled over, had her hop in the drivers seat and tell me when it dropped again. Wiggled the wire going into the coolant sensor. *bam* dropped like a rock, and the engine hesitated.
Duh. Engines aren't that complicated these days. Anyone claiming to be an automotive technician should've known instantly what the problem was. $2 for a replacement connector, five minutes of soldering and heat shrinking and the car was fixed.
Cars are easy to use and easy to fix if you know a few basics. I don't trust the average dimwit in the "industry" to touch my cars and I don't trust them to touch my computers.
Both are good fields for everyone to know enough about to know when they're dealing with a moron, or worse are being lied to.
Thats the beauty of slashdot. Some people live the high-performance, cutting edge, gotta-be-connected, crackberry life, but as us older geeks age, its nice to have our news slowed down. It gives us time to think about it.
And for some of us, its very useful to remind us of the news again a day later. (Thanks Zonk!)...
Photoshop has two dimensions to deal with, a video scaler has three. There is a LOT of useful information in how frames change over time that can be used to figure out not just how to sharpen a scaled image, but how to restore detail that was lost.
Slashdot Mirror
I read Slashdot for the pictures.
I have no problem with Google not getting net neutrality.
But I damn well expect if Verizon is charging the sites I go to, that they're not charging me.
The problem is, they want to charge everyone.
And yet, it looks as good as the day I got it.
Find another thread to be wrong on. Buh-bye.
Thats only if you're going to try to get into orbit easily.
They're not trying to get into orbit.
Yeah.
July 1993.
Back then you had to install it yourself, there were no "real" distributions. You booted off a kernel floppy into a minimal system, formatted the drive, and copied the GCC source off another disk.
A month later you had a full Linux system ready, and a smart person backed it up to tape.
It was my only desktop OS for ten years. The only non-Linux systems I had were a couple of Sun or Dec systems, and once in a while a Windows laptop from work.
I'd bet you can find a lot of people on here who started using Linux back then, when that was how you had to install it. I bet there's a lot of people on here who remember how damn cool it was when you could a couple days downloading the Slackware A disks, and save SO much time installing it.
Actually, jackass, if you want to know the specifics:
iBook had its memory on the logic board go back with a month left of the warranty. The Apple store "repaired" it, which turned out to be "took the 128 meg SODIMM out and put a 256 meg in" -- not replacing the bad logic board. It was several months before I noticed that. A month or two later, out of warranty, the system finally died entirely.
Apple will NOT repair it out of warranty for $280. They specifically quoted me $680 (or something right around that) for the repair. You're not the first person to mention that, but like everyone else, clearly you've never actually tried to get them to do that.
And yes, out of six or seven laptops, I've had one hardware failure other than the iBook's logic board -- a floppy drive on a Sager-Midern laptop ten years ago. That laptop was still running fine before I finally recycled it last year, I just had to pull the harddrive if I needed to install a new OS on it. That one died four or five years out of warranty. In fact, I've never had any serious hardware failure in any of my personal systems -- that includes MFM and RLL drives going back 20 years. I take extremely good care of all of it.
My most recent dead iPod actually had almost never been used. The first 40 gig one I bought had its hard drive die at 11 months -- and it was only used sporadically, mostly on plane trips. So while I appreciate your sarcasm, your assumptions are quite incorrect. Apple replaced that one with a new one with a defective dock connector. I, unfortunately, didn't get a chance to use it more than once or twice in the following few months, and discovered with less than five or ten hours of use, that one was dead. It works, if I can get it charged, but with a bad dock connector, thats not too useful. I could buy a new iPod for the flat rate repare cost they quoted for that...
The 1st generation (or maybe it was 2nd generation, I don't recall) one before that had the harddrive die just out of warranty, again only ever used on plane trips. That one probably had less than 100 hours of total use on it.
My first Mighty Mouse stopped tracking movement to the left. Weird, considering its optical. The guy in the store happily exchanged it under warranty after seeing it (he was surprised, too) Its replacement died three months later when the scroll-wheel stopped working. Unfortunately that was out of the 60 or 90 days a warranty replacement is covered for.
Yes, Apple had an extended logic board program for the G3 -- and insists to this day that the problem did not exist with the G4 ibooks. Do some google searching, you'll see how common it was on the G4. In fact, the going theory is that its a flaw in the case design allowing too much flex in the logic board that caused both the G3 and G4 failures.
I'm not here to get modded up for anything. Believe me, my karma is quite high enough I don't need to shill for some imaginary anti-Apple contingent on here.
Go put your arrogent fan-boi head back in the sand about Apple's very real quality problems, or at a minimum find some other thread to cast accusations around in.
No but they're leading the pack, and Apple will miss the masses when they do the same. Only the masses will not be going to Linux, they'll be going back to Windows.
I know a LOT of people who have switched back, including myself. I'd run Linux for ten years as my desktop OS until I switched to OSX, and I've switched back. Why? Not the ease of use of Ubuntu, although its nice to run Linux and not have to worry about things working or not. I switched back because of the horrid quality of Apple hardware the last few years. I've wasted a large number of thousands of dollars on Apple hardware that died immediately out of warranty. (iBook, two iPods, two Mighty Mice, and my old 17" G4 iMac was flaky but still works most of the time).
Apple is riding a wave of popular hype, but popular trends can switch away from a company as fast as they can switch TO a company. And there's a LOT of people in the last year or two who will start learning about Apple hardware quality as their iPods die, or they talk to people like myself who will be happy to tell them how Apple has such a long history in the 2000's of having known common defects in their hardware and not supporting their owners. (My iBook is dead at 14 months from a failed logic board, a very common problem in all the post-Clamshell iBooks, but Apple has only chosen to support customers when threatened with class action lawsuits)
Centralize servers onto big iron using virtualization.
Centralize storage onto big iron.
Citrix will be next. Centralize desktops onto big iron.
EMC is not about disk drives and data storage, they're about central control of information technology.
Look at all their market moves and aquisitions with that understanding, and they all make sense.
They are focused as a laser beam right now.
And unfortunately, we've demonstrated that we don't have 1% of the conviction that the "terrorists" have.
We can't even manage to vote a known corrupt government out of office, much less really do something about whats going on.
Its pathetic. We not only lost, we lost, and then locked ourselves up in a a prison of our own making, abused ourselves, then bowed down and asked for more.
If they can't get the developers, they can get the users.
Patent violation isn't a creation issue, its a use issue as well.
The best solution is for individual developers to get a patent on something stupid and use it as a form of nuclear detente. If they can't do it, grant the copyright to an organization like EFF that can handle patent cross licensing. Until the whole concept is thrown out, writing software and not being armed with something you can threaten back with is like walking into a minefield.
And the need for software developers to have a patent portfolio for defense just makes the situation worse.
There were a lot of them.
Its a shame its going to cost RedHat a pile of money to prove it, though.
Cars aren't as complicated as they look at the first glance. Engines aren't all that complicated, transmissions, etc Even with modern electronic controls, the basic way the engine works with its sensor feedback is very basic.
Keep in mind cars the average person are ever exposed to are designed to last a long time, be very quick to assemble, and easy to fix (they'd never sell a car if you needed a PhD to fix it -- imagine the ownership costs!).
Just spending some time really looking at the car is a good start. Its not hard to see how the suspension works. Its not hard to look at a diagram of a transmission to understand what its doing. Same with the engine. Everything else is just supporting those systems. The sort of things people generally do themselves (changing brake pads, changing fluids, maybe putting a new suspension on) is all very basic. There are lots of books and websites that explain the process, and its basically the same on every car.
90% of working on a car is reminding yourself when something seems complicated, you're probably missing some detail and you need to do some more research. Things may be time consuming to do, but very rarely are complicated. The other 10% is knowing when you don't have the right tool!
The two fields are not all that different. There are just as many people involved with auto repair who shouldn't be as there are "geeks" involved with computer repair who shouldn't be.
Case in point: my girlfriends father spent over $800 trying to fix a hesitation problem in their old car, before he gave it to my girlfriend. Coils replaced, wires, you name it, they did it. Three or four "techs" looked at it over the course of several months and never did solve it.
They dropped the car off at our house, I took it for a drive and saw the coolant needle drop like a brick as the car hesitated. Pulled over, had her hop in the drivers seat and tell me when it dropped again. Wiggled the wire going into the coolant sensor. *bam* dropped like a rock, and the engine hesitated.
Duh. Engines aren't that complicated these days. Anyone claiming to be an automotive technician should've known instantly what the problem was. $2 for a replacement connector, five minutes of soldering and heat shrinking and the car was fixed.
Cars are easy to use and easy to fix if you know a few basics. I don't trust the average dimwit in the "industry" to touch my cars and I don't trust them to touch my computers.
Both are good fields for everyone to know enough about to know when they're dealing with a moron, or worse are being lied to.
*glances at dead ibook holding door open*
*sigh*
Thats not funny.
The reason it's not offered is that eBay is more dependent on bidders than sellers at the end of the day.
Actually automatic auction extensions are patented, and not by them.
Actually the problem is a lot more fundamental than that.
In the US, drivers tests and licensing is about ensuring you know how to handle interacting with other drivers.
The real difference as compared to most countries is that most countries focus on how to control a vehicle, not how to park and use your turn signals.
Thats the beauty of slashdot. Some people live the high-performance, cutting edge, gotta-be-connected, crackberry life, but as us older geeks age, its nice to have our news slowed down. It gives us time to think about it.
...
And for some of us, its very useful to remind us of the news again a day later. (Thanks Zonk!)
Now what was I just doing?
You've got your pants on sideways, the zipper goes forward.
And modern cell phones have so little metal, they barely count as tiny metal objects.
I've walked through airport metal detectors with my Sony T616 a dozen times because I forgot to take it out of my pocket.
I'm glad I still run Linux. No wireless support means I'm safe from these dirty hackers, and any sort of modern productivity.
(this isn't going to be pretty.... *ducks*)
Its talk like that which keeps Cheney from needing Viagra.
Fostbite can be cured. Eventually that sex is going to take half your stuff.
Photoshop has two dimensions to deal with, a video scaler has three. There is a LOT of useful information in how frames change over time that can be used to figure out not just how to sharpen a scaled image, but how to restore detail that was lost.
Hehehe
The funniest part of that is most people here who aren't running Vista probably think you're joking or overexagerating.
*clicks submit*
*clicks ok*