System Crashes, and other observations
on
Gaming on Linux
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· Score: 1
"Most of the time, it's Windows itself or some other program that crashes on my system."
I think thats what Petreley meant - Windows crashes. I suspect that buggy drivers for hardware are also often to blame. Considering how many hardware drivers are written by Microsoft under exclusive NDA, the blame falls back on MS.
I'm not really much of a game player myself, but I have some friends who are. And they constantly complain about system crashes while they are trying to play games. I've seen it myself, when I sometimes watch them play; sometimes they have to reboot/scandisk several times in just a few hours.
Let's face it - the DirectX API is, technically, a heap of doggy-doo. As you said, you have never used Direct3D. If you had, you would not have said what you did.
The features provided by the DirectX API are very useful, and there is a need for something like this in the industry. But let's face it, the DirectX API sucks. Only one company in the world could have gotten away with shoving something so bad down the throats of developers, hardware vendors and consumers. If anyone else had produced it and said "hey, here's an API please come use it", they would have been laughed out of the community.
I am saddened when I think about all the first-time programmers whose first introduction to gaming API's is DirectX. These people are likely to end up thinking "so, this is what gaming API's are like." The standards they expect will forever be lower. Developers should not just accept whatever crud industry giants serve onto their plates; they should be taught to be critical and to demand technical excellence.
If you think DirectX is fast, you have obviously never done any Direct3D programming. There is so much crud going on behind the scenes. Glide is about 8 times faster.
DirectX relies on fast hardware to appear fast. Nothing surprising, this is Microsoft's general strategy.
To summarize: "Katz Sucks", "Malda sucks", sprinkled liberally with complete unashamed nitpicking on minute details.
I disagree quite strongly, not only with the Katz-bashing (which was big on nitpicking but small on real arguments), but specifically with the Malda-bashing. My feeling is that Rob Malda is FREE TO DO WHATEVER HE WANTS with the site. If Rob Malda wanted to make money from/. then that would be HIS CHOICE. He has every right to do so, and quite frankly, I think he has earned it. Malda has no obligations to anyone but himself.
That is, that you do not need to use Qt at ALL to write a KDE application. There are many other decent libraries available, LGPL or otherwise (Fox, FLTK, gtk+, wxWindows, Notif, Motif, Lesstif, Xforms), many of which have additional benefits such as being cross-platform for Windows (big bonus for commercial developers.)
As you say, "history has shown that the quality of a GUI is less important for success than the number of apps available for it". Thus the choice of a widget library isn't as important as the fact that an application exists at all. Although there will be slight UI inconsistencies between applications, most of them are slight enough to bother only the most inexperienced of users.
Considering gtk+, do you really believe that C is better for this type of thing?
Throwing thousands of macros into your code to do typecasting is not only ugly and a waste of time, but also not nearly as safe as allowing the compiler to do type-checking.
Please back up your statement that C++ is somehow bloated. There is no theoretical reason (poor compilers notwithstanding), that applications would be somehow more bloated in C++ than in C.
In C, you would have something like this:
some_function_call_maybe_a_gtk_one( TYPECASTMACRO(some_struct_pointer), int parameter );
In C++, you would have, say:
some_class_pointer->some_function_call( int parameter );
These should compile to the exact same assembly (ie two parameters should be passed in both cases, the address of the struct/class, and the int.)
Dereferencing members of structs and of classes have the same overhead. The obvious exception to this would be virtual functions, which use a virtual method table. The vmt is constructed once, and function virtual function calls go through only one extra layer of indirection - almost negligible on today's computers, and by far worth the benefits it brings to the coder's ability to design code.
So only a bad compiler wouldn't generate efficient C++ code.
Sure if you start talking about exception handling your overhead increases quite a bit. But (a) nobody forces you to use it if you don't actually want that overhead, and (b) it isn't there at all in C, you gotta "do it yourself" there. You gotta weigh the pros and cons - if you're such an amazing C programmer that your programs will never need the extra layer of safety and/or ease-of-error-catching, then go with C. Most coders will admit, however, that no coder is perfect.
It is easy enough to produce inefficient code with C++ IF AND ONLY IF YOU HAVE A BAD DESIGN. Learning how to refine your OO designs properly can take years of practise (which can of course be counted against the language, or at least against OOP). And, of course, OOP in many ways forces you to do something that many C hackers aren't that interested in doing: PLANNING. I suspect this is one of the real reasons C advocates don't like OOP - you have to actually carefully think about your designs and plan them out BEFORE you start producing code. Shame.
Some things should also be kept out of "class wrapping", if for example repetition of calls amounts to too much overhead. (The use of QString in KDE's kmail program comes to mind - it is veeeery slow to show very long email attachments when it interprets the attachment as text, such as when getting the latest WINE update via email.) But once again this comes down to the design. The programmer should have thought "doing this will be too slow let's not use QString here". Note it is also easy enough to do a bad design here in C. Probably easier to fix it, though, in C.
I agree only with your first point, that C++ may be "overcomplicated". It has way too many little "fine points" and rules. It takes years to start truly nailing down and "mastering" C++, whereas C can be learnt in days, and "mastered" in a matter of months.
This is a weakness of C++, and in this way Java is a lot better. C++ becomes less accessible(sp?) to the masses because of this - fewer people know it well, and many people in a world where RAD is so popular don't have the time/energy to learn it all.
But I learnt C++ because I found it fun. And I really enjoy programming with it. I don't advocate it blindly - you should use whatevers best for each task. If you don't enjoy it, fine, don't use it. But please avoid spread of misinformation.
They're so dang expensive in my country, I stopped buying 'em a long time ago. It's typically between 400 and 500 rand for a computer book. Divide by +/- 6.2 to get US$. That's a crapload of money. Last computer book (not counting textbooks) I bought was about six years ago, a book on x86 assembly language.
I've been looking recently at FLTK ("fast light toolkit") - it looks pretty good from what I can see. It's quite small, it's efficient, and its cross-platform (Windows, X and OpenGL) and includes built-in OpenGL widget support.
I'm quite impressed with it (it's very easy to setup, install and compile on both Windows and Linux), although it is a little bit lacking in higher-level widgets (toolbars for example) and has a somewhat primitive looking file-chooser. Nothing a few weekends coding/contributing (it's LGPL) couldn't fix though. It also includes a GUI-builder.
Personally, I don't think gtk is quite as bad as you make it out to be here; but I do agree with you somewhat. It's not necessarily the cleanest most well-designed Toolkit on the planet. It sure as hell beats Win32, but that doesn't say much. (GTK was largely designed by an undergrad student in his spare time. Win32 was designed by a large team of professional full-time experienced programmers. Ack!)
But despite it's imperfections, it *is* a good toolkit.
But I wouldn't say we're "stuck with it". There are a number of fairly decent toolkits to choose from (Qt, FLTK, wxWindows, Notif (not Motif).) Some are C, some are C++, many have bindings for several languages. GTK+ has C++ wrapper classes as well.
I remember going on irc on #gimp once quite some time ago (before the release of gimp 1.0) and I somehow got involved in a debate with the gtk and gimp developers about C versus C++. I was the only guy rooting for C++. Those guys were so anti-C++ it wasn't funny. They made some good points, though; for example, about the portability issues of C++ at that time, the lack of decent/unbuggy compilers etc. There was not much evil to say about C++ (the language), but quite a bit about C++ in terms of the compilers available, etc. And some lame argument about C++ not having a signal-slot mechanism. As if C has one, duh.
Me I would have preferred to have it done in C++.
I don't really see how some of the things you mentioned (like operator overloading) can make for a much better widget toolkit though. Personally I think C++ classes should be kept lean. Overloading every operator just for the sake of it is a waste of time.
My ISP posted it on their website. So I tried to D/L it, but it just sent me a 500K executable called ie5setup.exe or something like that. Considering (a) I was in Linux and didn't see why I should be forced to be in Windows just to get IE5, and (b) considering MS's track record with privacy, I didn't want to be using some Microsoft executable just to download IE5; so I decided to just try get the plain installation files so that I could install offline.
So I headed for www.microsoft.com, in hopes of locating instructions for doing this, and a nearby mirror.
But I had so many problems... I had to press "Reload" about five times for each page I tried to view before I could view it, because I kept getting "network error"'s. It was incredibly slow and kept disconnecting. (All other websites I viewed were fine, so the problem wasn't on my side.)
Then there was the font issue. I could scarcely read what was written on their pages (and in many parts I couldn't read it at all.) (I use Navigator 4 on Linux.) Considering that almost every other website on the planet IS capable of creating web pages readable with all web client software, I thought it seemed incredibly strange that a company like Microsoft, which is supposed to be really clued-up and professional, can't even design web pages based on the most simple of web-design principles.
So then, amidst dozens of "network error"'s, I tried in vain to click on their "feedback" page, so that I could inform them that were many issues with their website preventing me from obtaining IE5 (and I'm sure they wouldn't want that now.) I was going to suggest that (a) they migrate their website from NT to one of the Unix'es, to make it faster and more stable, and (b) that they go on some basic html design courses, so that they can design readable web pages and not look so unprofessional.
But the feedback thing kept taking me to something that seemed to be labelled a "registration wizard" or something. Presumably I was going to have to give them personal information before being allowed to send feedback.
But this turned out to not be a problem when I had so much trouble just trying to get the dang feedback page to download without giving errors, that I gave up, deciding to try out IE5 "another day", when they put it on the network at work or something.
How is redhat reliant on X for config? I set up a Linux box last weekend as a router across two LANs AND as a dial-up ppp box with IP masqeurading, without X and without a mouse. I never had to touch rc.d (What the hell are you trying to do in rc.d, have you never heard of the "setup" program in RedHat?); and ALL configuration could be done in text mode. All setup programs (linuxconf, setup, netconf etc) work in textmode. You can even force linuxconf to use text mode when you're IN X (linuxconf --text).
Perhaps you should first learn how to do various things in RedHat --- complaining that something can't be done, simply because YOU don't know how to do it (after all it IS very different to Slackware), amounts to spreading FUD.
I used to much prefer Slackware; when I first moved to RedHat I couldn't stand it, everything seemed so cryptic and I didn't know how to get anything done. NOW THAT I'VE ACTUALLY LEARNT HOW, though, I prefer RedHat.
Now I'm confused as to what the real price difference is. I've seen close on a half-dozen different estimates, ranging from much less to much more than a Win system. So I'm not sure anymore.
/. says I'm logged in. Why did it label that post of mine Anonymous Coward? Hmmm... some bugs to be ironed out still perhaps...
What gives it away, really, is mainly the first line, which amounts to Standard-Lame-Argument #2548b, "all you people who diss Bill Gates, you are just jealous of all his money", and/or #2548a, which is the same except ".. just jealous because he is successful and you're not."
There are a number of easily-discredited lies in this troll, but on the surface they are not that easy to spot, which pushes the troll-rating a bit higher. For example, the claim of Microsoft actually "creating good products" (the "for a good price" should have been avoided, since it's complete bogusness makes it an obvious troll-indicator.) Most of the "good products" mentioned were purchased by Microsoft, showing not the value of creating good products, but the value of having deep pockets. (DirectX, Ages of Empires, Excel)
The association of "DirectX" and "good product" might seem like a dead giveaway that this is a troll. Anyone who knows anything about the DirectX API will be able to tell you it is one of the most poorly designed API's on the planet, and had anyone other than MS tried to push DirectX, they would have been laughed into the ground and told in no uncertain terms to take their crap API and shove it somewhere. However, it is feasible that the poster has no technical knowledge, thus this may not be a total giveaway based on those grounds.
The presumption that EVERYONE sees things through the eyes of an ultra-capitalist like Ayn Rand is a subtle point here. It skips past the obvious truth that NOT everyone is just interested in making money, that in fact the majority of Linux developers have greater more selfless ideals (technical excellence, and source-code freedom.) The argument amounts to a "how long have you been beating your wife" style argument, thus doesn't score many points.
The consumer-damaging Ayn Rand notion that overpricing by holding a monopoly is somehow a GOOD thing is an obvious crock, but we "won't go there".
"excellence and hard work is rewarded".. hmmm.. here, again, anyone with any technical knowledge does not consider MS products excellence. This may be another indicator that this troll is lacking in technical knowledge, or is simply a reasonably skilled troll.
Overall, this is a quality troll post, when compared to the "average" troll post. But it loses enough points to only give it a "7" on my troll-o-meter (which rates from 0 to 10.)
"He presents the media the way it is, and it shows how the entire power structure is so bent on money they will sacrifice every ideal to get there"
This happens to be a good summary of the main idea of many of Katz' previous postings. (For example, it sums up extremely well his opinions about the recording industry and mp3's.)
So I don't see how this is "preaching to the choir" just because it is specifically about Bill Gates. The ideals JK presents here are not new, they're identical to so many of Katz previous postings, yet those got flamed to the ground. And suddenly he is accused of playing to his audience, even though this article fits right in with everything he has written before. I'm surprised he laid off of Gates for so long, considering.
I couldn't quite put my finger on why it bugs me.. your post helps a bit.. it's just the whole "I'm Bill Gates and I'm so tech-savvy unlike everyone else and thats why I'm the richest person on the planet and you aren't" attitude it conveys.
.. that Microsoft has plain and outright told lies about what it is or is not working on.
It certainly would not surprise me at all if they were working on it.
My guess is they saw how positive the reaction to Corel WP for Linux was.. and were suddenly afraid that should Linux become dominant, then MS would not have "the standard proprietary Office Software suite" for Linux. They need *everyone* to be using their software.
Their solution? Develop MS Office for Linux "on the sly". Lie about it, to support your Linux FUD campaign. Should people catch onto Linux despite the FUD, release Office4Linux. "It's the standard" after all.
They don't seem to understand that proprietary Office Suites are most likely the way of the past.
It's possible that Office4Linux is just a rumor -- but think about --- would a company that has such deep pockets (can't cost that much to create LinuxOffice), and which is so paranoid about crushing competition, *not* spend the small bit of capital, just for "in case" Linux becomes big and they lose out to someone like Corel? MS can't lose if it does create LinuxOffice, on the sly.
I set up RedHat (5.2) last weekend on a box configured on two LAN subnets (two NIC's, it routes across the subnets, which are 10.0.3.x and 10.0.4.x) and at the same time to do dial-up to an ISP (dynamic IP), and do IP masquerading for the boxes on the LANs. No X. Box didn't even have a mouse. All for under 200 MB, and that included the Linux source code and c++ development stuff:)
Our lecturer for our compilers course was a member of the team who worked on the first version of the MS C++ compiler. I decided to ask him about it, mentioning what I read about MS purchasing Lattice C.
He told me that at the time, Micros~1 purchased "a whole bunch" of compilers, including Lattice C. Most of them, he said, were not used at all. A little bit of code was taken from here and there, but he said almost all of the code for the Visual C++ compiler (version 1) was written in-house, from scratch.
The interesting part in that is about MS purchasing "a whole bunch" of compilers. Typical. I suspect that every time they release any new product, they first purchase dozens of companies that would have been competitors for that product. Nice to have such deep pockets.
On a side note, I seem to remember hearing that Visual Basic was actually originally purchased, not written by MS.
Slashdot Mirror
"Most of the time, it's Windows itself or some other program that crashes on my system."
I think thats what Petreley meant - Windows crashes. I suspect that buggy drivers for hardware are also often to blame. Considering how many hardware drivers are written by Microsoft under exclusive NDA, the blame falls back on MS.
I'm not really much of a game player myself, but I have some friends who are. And they constantly complain about system crashes while they are trying to play games. I've seen it myself, when I sometimes watch them play; sometimes they have to reboot/scandisk several times in just a few hours.
Let's face it - the DirectX API is, technically, a heap of doggy-doo. As you said, you have never used Direct3D. If you had, you would not have said what you did.
The features provided by the DirectX API are very useful, and there is a need for something like this in the industry. But let's face it, the DirectX API sucks. Only one company in the world could have gotten away with shoving something so bad down the throats of developers, hardware vendors and consumers. If anyone else had produced it and said "hey, here's an API please come use it", they would have been laughed out of the community.
I am saddened when I think about all the first-time programmers whose first introduction to gaming API's is DirectX. These people are likely to end up thinking "so, this is what gaming API's are like." The standards they expect will forever be lower. Developers should not just accept whatever crud industry giants serve onto their plates; they should be taught to be critical and to demand technical excellence.
If you think DirectX is fast, you have obviously never done any Direct3D programming. There is so much crud going on behind the scenes. Glide is about 8 times faster.
DirectX relies on fast hardware to appear fast. Nothing surprising, this is Microsoft's general strategy.
To summarize: "Katz Sucks", "Malda sucks", sprinkled liberally with complete unashamed nitpicking on minute details.
/. then that would be HIS CHOICE. He has every right to do so, and quite frankly, I think he has earned it. Malda has no obligations to anyone but himself.
I disagree quite strongly, not only with the Katz-bashing (which was big on nitpicking but small on real arguments), but specifically with the Malda-bashing. My feeling is that Rob Malda is FREE TO DO WHATEVER HE WANTS with the site. If Rob Malda wanted to make money from
That is, that you do not need to use Qt at ALL to write a KDE application. There are many other decent libraries available, LGPL or otherwise (Fox, FLTK, gtk+, wxWindows, Notif, Motif, Lesstif, Xforms), many of which have additional benefits such as being cross-platform for Windows (big bonus for commercial developers.)
As you say, "history has shown that the quality of a GUI is less important for success than the number of apps available for it". Thus the choice of a widget library isn't as important as the fact that an application exists at all. Although there will be slight UI inconsistencies between applications, most of them are slight enough to bother only the most inexperienced of users.
Since you insist on making some stuff up; http://www.research.att.com/~bs/blast.ht ml.
Considering gtk+, do you really believe that C is better for this type of thing?
Throwing thousands of macros into your code to do typecasting is not only ugly and a waste of time, but also not nearly as safe as allowing the compiler to do type-checking.
Please back up your statement that C++ is somehow bloated. There is no theoretical reason (poor compilers notwithstanding), that applications would be somehow more bloated in C++ than in C.
In C, you would have something like this:
some_function_call_maybe_a_gtk_one( TYPECASTMACRO(some_struct_pointer), int parameter );
In C++, you would have, say:
some_class_pointer->some_function_call( int parameter );
These should compile to the exact same assembly (ie two parameters should be passed in both cases, the address of the struct/class, and the int.)
Dereferencing members of structs and of classes have the same overhead. The obvious exception to this would be virtual functions, which use a virtual method table. The vmt is constructed once, and function virtual function calls go through only one extra layer of indirection - almost negligible on today's computers, and by far worth the benefits it brings to the coder's ability to design code.
So only a bad compiler wouldn't generate efficient C++ code.
Sure if you start talking about exception handling your overhead increases quite a bit. But (a) nobody forces you to use it if you don't actually want that overhead, and (b) it isn't there at all in C, you gotta "do it yourself" there. You gotta weigh the pros and cons - if you're such an amazing C programmer that your programs will never need the extra layer of safety and/or ease-of-error-catching, then go with C. Most coders will admit, however, that no coder is perfect.
It is easy enough to produce inefficient code with C++ IF AND ONLY IF YOU HAVE A BAD DESIGN. Learning how to refine your OO designs properly can take years of practise (which can of course be counted against the language, or at least against OOP). And, of course, OOP in many ways forces you to do something that many C hackers aren't that interested in doing: PLANNING. I suspect this is one of the real reasons C advocates don't like OOP - you have to actually carefully think about your designs and plan them out BEFORE you start producing code. Shame.
Some things should also be kept out of "class wrapping", if for example repetition of calls amounts to too much overhead. (The use of QString in KDE's kmail program comes to mind - it is veeeery slow to show very long email attachments when it interprets the attachment as text, such as when getting the latest WINE update via email.) But once again this comes down to the design. The programmer should have thought "doing this will be too slow let's not use QString here". Note it is also easy enough to do a bad design here in C. Probably easier to fix it, though, in C.
I agree only with your first point, that C++ may be "overcomplicated". It has way too many little "fine points" and rules. It takes years to start truly nailing down and "mastering" C++, whereas C can be learnt in days, and "mastered" in a matter of months.
This is a weakness of C++, and in this way Java is a lot better. C++ becomes less accessible(sp?) to the masses because of this - fewer people know it well, and many people in a world where RAD is so popular don't have the time/energy to learn it all.
But I learnt C++ because I found it fun. And I really enjoy programming with it. I don't advocate it blindly - you should use whatevers best for each task. If you don't enjoy it, fine, don't use it. But please avoid spread of misinformation.
The kernel, I agree, should remain C.
They're so dang expensive in my country, I stopped buying 'em a long time ago. It's typically between 400 and 500 rand for a computer book. Divide by +/- 6.2 to get US$. That's a crapload of money. Last computer book (not counting textbooks) I bought was about six years ago, a book on x86 assembly language.
I've been looking recently at FLTK ("fast light toolkit") - it looks pretty good from what I can see. It's quite small, it's efficient, and its cross-platform (Windows, X and OpenGL) and includes built-in OpenGL widget support.
I'm quite impressed with it (it's very easy to setup, install and compile on both Windows and Linux), although it is a little bit lacking in higher-level widgets (toolbars for example) and has a somewhat primitive looking file-chooser. Nothing a few weekends coding/contributing (it's LGPL) couldn't fix though. It also includes a GUI-builder.
URL is http://www.fltk.org/.
Personally, I don't think gtk is quite as bad as you make it out to be here; but I do agree with you somewhat. It's not necessarily the cleanest most well-designed Toolkit on the planet. It sure as hell beats Win32, but that doesn't say much. (GTK was largely designed by an undergrad student in his spare time. Win32 was designed by a large team of professional full-time experienced programmers. Ack!)
But despite it's imperfections, it *is* a good toolkit.
But I wouldn't say we're "stuck with it". There are a number of fairly decent toolkits to choose from (Qt, FLTK, wxWindows, Notif (not Motif).) Some are C, some are C++, many have bindings for several languages. GTK+ has C++ wrapper classes as well.
I remember going on irc on #gimp once quite some time ago (before the release of gimp 1.0) and I somehow got involved in a debate with the gtk and gimp developers about C versus C++. I was the only guy rooting for C++. Those guys were so anti-C++ it wasn't funny. They made some good points, though; for example, about the portability issues of C++ at that time, the lack of decent/unbuggy compilers etc. There was not much evil to say about C++ (the language), but quite a bit about C++ in terms of the compilers available, etc. And some lame argument about C++ not having a signal-slot mechanism. As if C has one, duh.
Me I would have preferred to have it done in C++.
I don't really see how some of the things you mentioned (like operator overloading) can make for a much better widget toolkit though. Personally I think C++ classes should be kept lean. Overloading every operator just for the sake of it is a waste of time.
I still have a copy of the whole site, which I downloaded with wget. I'm very sorry it's not available anymore though.
It seems only the samples are still at the site. They're at http://www.bcpl.lib.md.us/~eharlow/book/
My ISP posted it on their website. So I tried to D/L it, but it just sent me a 500K executable called ie5setup.exe or something like that. Considering (a) I was in Linux and didn't see why I should be forced to be in Windows just to get IE5, and (b) considering MS's track record with privacy, I didn't want to be using some Microsoft executable just to download IE5; so I decided to just try get the plain installation files so that I could install offline.
... I had to press "Reload" about five times for each page I tried to view before I could view it, because I kept getting "network error"'s. It was incredibly slow and kept disconnecting. (All other websites I viewed were fine, so the problem wasn't on my side.)
So I headed for www.microsoft.com, in hopes of locating instructions for doing this, and a nearby mirror.
But I had so many problems
Then there was the font issue. I could scarcely read what was written on their pages (and in many parts I couldn't read it at all.) (I use Navigator 4 on Linux.) Considering that almost every other website on the planet IS capable of creating web pages readable with all web client software, I thought it seemed incredibly strange that a company like Microsoft, which is supposed to be really clued-up and professional, can't even design web pages based on the most simple of web-design principles.
So then, amidst dozens of "network error"'s, I tried in vain to click on their "feedback" page, so that I could inform them that were many issues with their website preventing me from obtaining IE5 (and I'm sure they wouldn't want that now.) I was going to suggest that (a) they migrate their website from NT to one of the Unix'es, to make it faster and more stable, and (b) that they go on some basic html design courses, so that they can design readable web pages and not look so unprofessional.
But the feedback thing kept taking me to something that seemed to be labelled a "registration wizard" or something. Presumably I was going to have to give them personal information before being allowed to send feedback.
But this turned out to not be a problem when I had so much trouble just trying to get the dang feedback page to download without giving errors, that I gave up, deciding to try out IE5 "another day", when they put it on the network at work or something.
How is redhat reliant on X for config? I set up a Linux box last weekend as a router across two LANs AND as a dial-up ppp box with IP masqeurading, without X and without a mouse. I never had to touch rc.d (What the hell are you trying to do in rc.d, have you never heard of the "setup" program in RedHat?); and ALL configuration could be done in text mode. All setup programs (linuxconf, setup, netconf etc) work in textmode. You can even force linuxconf to use text mode when you're IN X (linuxconf --text).
Perhaps you should first learn how to do various things in RedHat --- complaining that something can't be done, simply because YOU don't know how to do it (after all it IS very different to Slackware), amounts to spreading FUD.
I used to much prefer Slackware; when I first moved to RedHat I couldn't stand it, everything seemed so cryptic and I didn't know how to get anything done. NOW THAT I'VE ACTUALLY LEARNT HOW, though, I prefer RedHat.
There I went shooting my mouth off again.
... some bugs to be ironed out still perhaps ...
Now I'm confused as to what the real price difference is. I've seen close on a half-dozen different estimates, ranging from much less to much more than a Win system. So I'm not sure anymore.
/. says I'm logged in. Why did it label that post of mine Anonymous Coward? Hmmm
This rates quite high on the troll-o-meter.
.. hmmm .. here, again, anyone with any technical knowledge does not consider MS products excellence. This may be another indicator that this troll is lacking in technical knowledge, or is simply a reasonably skilled troll.
What gives it away, really, is mainly the first line, which amounts to Standard-Lame-Argument #2548b, "all you people who diss Bill Gates, you are just jealous of all his money", and/or #2548a, which is the same except ".. just jealous because he is successful and you're not."
There are a number of easily-discredited lies in this troll, but on the surface they are not that easy to spot, which pushes the troll-rating a bit higher. For example, the claim of Microsoft actually "creating good products" (the "for a good price" should have been avoided, since it's complete bogusness makes it an obvious troll-indicator.) Most of the "good products" mentioned were purchased by Microsoft, showing not the value of creating good products, but the value of having deep pockets. (DirectX, Ages of Empires, Excel)
The association of "DirectX" and "good product" might seem like a dead giveaway that this is a troll. Anyone who knows anything about the DirectX API will be able to tell you it is one of the most poorly designed API's on the planet, and had anyone other than MS tried to push DirectX, they would have been laughed into the ground and told in no uncertain terms to take their crap API and shove it somewhere. However, it is feasible that the poster has no technical knowledge, thus this may not be a total giveaway based on those grounds.
The presumption that EVERYONE sees things through the eyes of an ultra-capitalist like Ayn Rand is a subtle point here. It skips past the obvious truth that NOT everyone is just interested in making money, that in fact the majority of Linux developers have greater more selfless ideals (technical excellence, and source-code freedom.) The argument amounts to a "how long have you been beating your wife" style argument, thus doesn't score many points.
The consumer-damaging Ayn Rand notion that overpricing by holding a monopoly is somehow a GOOD thing is an obvious crock, but we "won't go there".
"excellence and hard work is rewarded"
Overall, this is a quality troll post, when compared to the "average" troll post. But it loses enough points to only give it a "7" on my troll-o-meter (which rates from 0 to 10.)
"He presents the media the way it is, and it shows how the entire power structure is so bent on money they will sacrifice every ideal to get there"
This happens to be a good summary of the main idea of many of Katz' previous postings. (For example, it sums up extremely well his opinions about the recording industry and mp3's.)
So I don't see how this is "preaching to the choir" just because it is specifically about Bill Gates. The ideals JK presents here are not new, they're identical to so many of Katz previous postings, yet those got flamed to the ground. And suddenly he is accused of playing to his audience, even though this article fits right in with everything he has written before. I'm surprised he laid off of Gates for so long, considering.
I couldn't quite put my finger on why it bugs me .. your post helps a bit .. it's just the whole "I'm Bill Gates and I'm so tech-savvy unlike everyone else and thats why I'm the richest person on the planet and you aren't" attitude it conveys.
Yeah I know, "me too" posts suck.
.. that Microsoft has plain and outright told lies about what it is or is not working on.
.. and were suddenly afraid that should Linux become dominant, then MS would not have "the standard proprietary Office Software suite" for Linux. They need *everyone* to be using their software.
It certainly would not surprise me at all if they were working on it.
My guess is they saw how positive the reaction to Corel WP for Linux was
Their solution? Develop MS Office for Linux "on the sly". Lie about it, to support your Linux FUD campaign. Should people catch onto Linux despite the FUD, release Office4Linux. "It's the standard" after all.
They don't seem to understand that proprietary Office Suites are most likely the way of the past.
It's possible that Office4Linux is just a rumor -- but think about --- would a company that has such deep pockets (can't cost that much to create LinuxOffice), and which is so paranoid about crushing competition, *not* spend the small bit of capital, just for "in case" Linux becomes big and they lose out to someone like Corel? MS can't lose if it does create LinuxOffice, on the sly.
I set up RedHat (5.2) last weekend on a box configured on two LAN subnets (two NIC's, it routes across the subnets, which are 10.0.3.x and 10.0.4.x) and at the same time to do dial-up to an ISP (dynamic IP), and do IP masquerading for the boxes on the LANs. No X. Box didn't even have a mouse. All for under 200 MB, and that included the Linux source code and c++ development stuff :)
Our lecturer for our compilers course was a member of the team who worked on the first version of the MS C++ compiler. I decided to ask him about it, mentioning what I read about MS purchasing Lattice C.
He told me that at the time, Micros~1 purchased "a whole bunch" of compilers, including Lattice C. Most of them, he said, were not used at all. A little bit of code was taken from here and there, but he said almost all of the code for the Visual C++ compiler (version 1) was written in-house, from scratch.
The interesting part in that is about MS purchasing "a whole bunch" of compilers. Typical. I suspect that every time they release any new product, they first purchase dozens of companies that would have been competitors for that product. Nice to have such deep pockets.
On a side note, I seem to remember hearing that Visual Basic was actually originally purchased, not written by MS.