I'll admit I missed the point about using the machines simply as an x-terminal, but that brings up another interesting point.
What happens when the server goes down?
Admittedly it is a lot less likely to happen in a unix environment than a windows environment; but no software or hardware is perfect and it does happen. With our current model of computing, if our fileserver went down one morning, people can still get other work done. They can still edit local documents, do financial paperwork, compose and read email, etc. With a terminal model, if the server goes down, the office just halts. A single point of failure is never really a fun thing to have. Even though we do a level 0 on our fileserver every night, it would still take me a couple of hours to get a new os installed on the system and bring the fileserver back from tape. This is assuming the RAID controller didn't bite it or anything, in which case I'd have to get a new one brought in in a couple of hours or as late as the next day.
Yes, this is me just trying to save face, but it is something to think about. And yes, I realize that this is considering a fairly small office, but the point is still valid.
1)If you only have a few workstations for a lot of people, you are going to end up paying people to twiddle their thumbs while someone else types a memo. This negates any savings on having cheap/fewer workstations in the first couple of months.
2)Slower workstations are, well, slower. those small groups of 30 second waits add up. If you want an efficient office, you dont pay people to wait for their machines to load data/get email, etc. New hardware is dirt cheap right now. You can get a good 1ghz system for 700 dollars or so, so why not get one.
3)Older equipment breaks more and is harder to find parts for. Try to find 72 pin simms that are guaranteed to work for a decent price. didnt think so. How about bios issues with those old 2 dollar motherboards when you try to slap a newer hard drive on them. Digging up AT power supplies? Yes, they do still exist, but they are getting a little more difficult to find. and the pain of working with older machines when they break is hellacious. swapping the power supply in an ATX machine takes about 2 minutes. In an AT machine, it takes about half an hour since I have to pull the entire machine apart. And yes, I do do this regularly. I changed 2 AT power supplies last week. (I work at a Uni, not everyone has new machines).
4) Old networking sucks. One of the major points of having a network is having the ability to share files. This means you want switched 100mb everywhere. Again, it is cheap enough, why do you pay people to wait. Our main fileserver is on gigabit fiber, and we use it constantly. Copper gigabit network cards are coming way down in price right now, the switches are coming down soon, so you might as well be prepared to go gigabit when you need to.
5) No office is in a vacuum. Abiword and StarOffice may be great, but none of them read all Office file formats perfectly yet. You still need to use microsoft products to communicate with other offices, for better or worse. Not a troll, just the truth.
6) Outlook. omygod Outlook is neat. I never saw the utility of outlook and exchange until I worked in an office that used it efficiently. It is at the point where it is indespensible. The ability to share calendars, email, move files around, schedule meetings, etc is wonderful. Yes, this does mean you have to run NT and exchange on a sever, bt we have made this concession. With the exception of our exchange server and our pdc, we are all FreeBSD.
In an office of 20 people, a 1000-1200 bucks per every 2 years (our average upgrade cycle) for each person isn't a huge cost compared to the salary, electricity, water bills, etc. Why not spend that kind of cash to make sure that work can actually get done and you dont have a sysadmin running around saying "it almost works!" or here's a workaround.
I'm a unix admin, I hate administering NT, but I have no doubt as to its current utility in most work environments. The benefits it provides outweighs the costs of maintaining it, at least until the unix variants get up to speed on the capabilities.
My laptop began to lock up once it warmed up slightly, about 2 weeks after I got it. Dell sent someone out with a new motherboard and cooling unit (fan, heat sink, etc.). The laptop continued to lock up while the tech was there. Dell shipped a new one out as soon as they could build it. No questions asked.
The cool thing is that I told them where I would be when the laptop came in, at my parents' house, visiting. They shipped it to that address without any problems. I was working as a consultant at the time and the morning that the tech was supposed to come out and fix it, I had just changed workplaces. I gave him the new address, and he was there a couple of hours later.
Definately the best service I've ever had. I build my own machines, but I buy/recommend Dell whenever a friend needs one, and when I need to buy them for businesses.
Oh, and before you call me a moron for not using the libunicode on gnome's ftp server, well, um it was in unstable. You see, typically when software is released there is the release stuff, which should be reliable and build correctly, then there is the unstable.
In this case something required to build the *stable* Gnome was in unstable only, hence why I didn't look there before. Great thinking on their part.
I wouldnt argue with that, I would argue with the fact that when I want to build Gnome, I have to download about 30 or more files. I'd like to see one great whacking 20-40 meg package where I untar it, run./configure exactly once. then type make, and it actually makes everything. That is my idea of cool.
I dont want to have to track down 30 files across 5 ftp sites, sourceforge and everywhere else on the planet, find out what is out of date, look at dependencies, try to compile something, realize that gnome-applet requires gnome-vfs, which requires a header file that is in gnome-applet, that needs to be copied to/usr/local/lib to work, try to compile it, then watch it fail because some obscure dependency that the configure script doesnt even check for isnt there. find out what package contains that, track that package down everywhere, find out there are ABOUT 7 COMPETING LIBUNICODES, none of which are compatible with any others, and that I need a specific one, called libunicode (gee, how specific), that is buried on ftp.gnome.org after all.
Then try to compile sawfish, which has its own dependancies. Then try for evolution that again, has its own....
Screw that, give me a tarball. I want a make World, like XFree86. I dont want any griping about dependancies, etc. I just want it to work.
This is coming from someone that just spent all night downloading/compiling gnome, just so he could get Evolution to work. Poo on that.
Great, you use all 5, so everyone else must as well. Not true. I've moved into administration recently, from a background of tech support, corporate training, and being a college student.
In my experience, with the few thousand people I've helped use computers, VERY few of them use the other mouse button. The only things they have ever had to do is use programs, open files, and rename files. This applies to experienced business users, college students and your average web surfer alike.
Most(all?) consumer (mac and windows) programs are designed in such a way that you never have to use the right mouse button to do anything. For most people the menus on top of the windows provide a more standard interface than a mouse button ever could.
People don't want to have to try to figure out what is coming up next by clicking a right mouse button. In most applications, the right mouse button loses all context, in Word it allows you to format paragraphs, etc. in IE it allows you to navigate. These functions do not cross applications as well as the menu on top of the windows do.
It comes down to the fact that once you get outside of the standard functions of the left button, which everyone knows and loves, the middle and right buttons essentially hide the interface from the user. One can be reasonably certain that the file menu on a document allows you to save it, save it as something else, or quit the program. The same kind of assumptions cant be made about mouse buttons, hence people tend not to use them, because it is just inconvenient.
These aren't stupid users, they are just the common ones. Common users have no need for more than one mouse button, since all functions are accessible elsewhere more visibly.
While I'm happy that the linux drivers are decent, that is not the point. The point is that ATI does not have a worthy competitor to Nvidia's or 3dfx's fastest chips. The Radeon may be a contender, but ATI still has to prove its drivers dont suck. They also have to provide driver updates for the card, on a regular basis.
In the past, ATI has just released drivers, and considered them to be good enough. If they want to compete, they have to constantly get better performance out of the drivers themselves to stay viable.
This is not a windows versus linux issue, this is an Nvidia vs. ATI issue.
Could we please stop complaining about requiring a laptop limiting the poor? If a school requires a laptop, it should be considered part of the tuition, pure and simple.
Besides, when I got into Rose-Hulman, tuition was somewhere around 22k a year (one of the prime reasons why I'm not there right now). A one time expense of 2000 bucks for a laptop is not that much more.
These aren't state universities. Private schools can charge as much as they want. I'm not complaining because MIT costs more than the state funded uni I'm going to now.
So that would make this the 9999th story... Now that everyone has forgotten the entire "when does the millennium start" fiasco, I needed something to bitch about.
Seriously tho, congratulations.../. has gotten me through more than one seriously boring computer lab.
The beta release will be version 187.2. It should take quite awhile for the other browsers to catch up. Unfortunately support for tables won't be until version 212.8, I apologize for that. CSS support will be in version 1,984,232.8.
In related news, in order to keep up with Microsoft, the next release of the linux kernel will be version 2002.2.0, 2002.1.0 is just the developer release.
Andrew
What kind of future do they have...
on
Free Be
·
· Score: 1
if they go open source?
This is a company with exactly one product, their operating system. If they give that one product away for free, including their ability to sell it for that much of a profit, due to other companies selling it cheaper, (I'm waiting for the era of CheapBytes Be for a Buck here) where does their revenue come from?
You can say support, but it's not like BeOS is a server platform. As a desktop OS, I don't imagine that it would require nearly the amount of support that Linux requires. BE is made from the beginning to be somewhat user friendly, the only profits from support would be the applications themselves, which BE does not make.
BE's future is in application developers (where it is making inroads in getting some serious music applications ported), the music industry has been waiting for something to kill of their beloved Macintoshes for years now, and this could be the OS to do it, if marketed correctly. Most computers used in music and video editing are used only for that purpose, so there is a future in making an operating system to suit those needs very well.
Profit considerations aside, I still see opening the source as a mistake, because then we would have a few thousand developers pulling BeOS in random, sometimes contradictory directions, in order to get it to do things it was never intended to, which was work with media.. Right now it is a tight, fast, media operating system, and it should stay that way.
There are many talented open source developers, but I don't see many of them having that much of a background in making something optimized for media editing. A lot of them come from a UNIX background, so if they got involved with the development of BE, I don't see BE going in an area where it needs to go, although I'm sure it will end up as a killer webserver. The types of optimizations needed for this code are probably very different than the optimizations needed for something like a TCP/IP stack. Musicians could tell you what it needs to do, but most of them don't code. Before anyone goes off at me, yes, I know BE has a BSD kernel.
If people want to get Linux into the average consumer market's hands, there are quite a few things that need to be done.
1) Lock everything down. Any service running at all is theoretically vulnerable to some form of attack. While it is great the you can administer through telnet and everything else, the average person has no use for it. Open ports have no purpose on most consumer's machines. Uncle Bob isn't going to be telnetting into his box to read his mail. If someone's UNIX guru son decides to set up a box for his parents that he can take care of remotely, great.... but if you are doing that, it probably isn't too much trouble to go through the machine and open up the services you need. It is, however, a lot of trouble for the average newbie to go through and lock down unneeded services. Linux gets a bad name if a major exploit is discovered in sendmail and half the consumer market is vulnerable to it..... say goodbye to that security reputation. The average consumer we are marketing it to wont know how to apply the patch, they only know that their box was rooted and all the personal data they had on it was taken.
2) (Getting off the topic of your post, but I'm ranting) The user should never have to touch a CLI. Keep in mind this is a consumer we are talking about here... one who probably couldn't figure out DOS, let alone the intricacies of the mount command every damn time they wanted to put a cd in the drive (yes, I know supermount is coming). Screw make, screw RPM... For the consumer market, Linux needs something like Install Shield... a lesson should be taken from windows here... everything can be done from the GUI, adding programs to the Start Menu does not require editing a text file, installing and removing software does not require foreign command lines.
Before you start saying that Linux is viable for home users, look at who we are talking about here. Linux is not yet an alternative for: 1) The 16 year old girl with an AOL account who wants to talk to friends on ICQ.
2) An elderly person who is already having trouble seeing, the current font support in most UNIX web browsers is lacking, text just looks blocky and it is sometimes hard on my 21 year old eyes, I wonder what it looks like for those 60+.
3) The teenage boy who wants to play the latest game (support isn't quite there yet, plus the drivers for a lot of common video cards suck. I believe the TNT2 under Quake3 is an example)
4) Mom, who wants to do word processing and print stuff on her recent HP Printer (most of those printers coming with the computer deals at Best Buy are Win printers)
6) Dad, who wants to balance his checking account (are there any viable Linux alternatives to quicken out there)
7) Anyone who wants to browse the web on their brand spanking new computer from $MAJOR_MANUFACTURER. I have yet to see a new system for under 1000 bucks that comes without a winmodem. If your talking about Linux as a free OS, lets do some math here:
1 Copy of RedHat, about 50 bucks (its the one everyone buys because it's well known, right?) 1 Basic lousy hardware modem (probably won't connect any better that a win modem), 60 bucks
Total cost: about 110 plus tax.
1 copy of win98, about 99 bucks plus tax(ostensibly free because they bought it with their computer).
Looks like Windows is ahead on this one, especially since it does everything the average consumer needs right now. Yes, it is unstable, but for most applications, it doesn't matter. I personally have never lost any work due to a crash. BTW, I'm running win2k final right now, and am working on about a 2 week uptime. I have not had it crash yet, the only times I have had to reboot were after I added new hardware, which autodetected perfectly.
Linux is good for:
1) Sysadmins
2) Hobbiests who like to screw around with Unix for fun.
3) "Power Users" who tend to do a lot of work and need an OS that can keep up with them.
4) People who have it inflicted upon them by sysadmin family members, who want to lock it down so they don't get any 3am support calls. I personally would rather have my family running win98 that they could play with and install their own crap on. My family can install anything they want without having to call me about it, and it usually doesn't screw up, but when it does, a reinstall (of the program)gets everything back together in short order.
BTW, before anyone labels me a M$ supporter, the minority of my computers run windows. OS's I'm currently running on my personal machines:
Win2k (main box) Win95 (p100 laptop) Solaris 7 (Sparc2) Linux (suse) (p90, k5-133, 2 486's) BeOS (Cyrix MediaGX)
I use Windows as my main operating system because I can do nearly everything I need to on it. I switch among the unices when I want to do development or networking stuff.
Don't say Linux is viable for the average user, because it isn't... yet.
I'm currently a junior and I never lived in the dorms so I never experienced high bandwidth as a lifestyle, but I tend to spend a lot of time in the on campus computer labs for the speed.
I also actively seek out jobs that have high speed connections, I currently work for an ISP, and have turned down other, higher paying, jobs because they "only" had corporate DSL.
I was upset to find out that I couldn't get DSL in my current apartment complex, so when my lease is up in couple of months, I'm seriously considering moving to the complex across the street, which is DSL eligible.
Currently I'm not suffering from bandwidth withdrawal because I found ways to avoid it. I have a 15 gig hard drive mounted in a removeable rack so I can download what I want to it while I'm on a fat pipe. I also have SSH access to some dedicated linux boxen on the school network that I can use for getting whatever I need on a high speed connection so I can go in a get it at my leisure, either by overnight modem download or the previously mentioned removeable hard drive.
My current modem usage, 218 hours in 13 days, nobody even bothers to call me any more because they know they'll get a busy signal, they just page me and have me call them back.
And I submitted it 2 days ago...
on
Humpday Quickies
·
· Score: 1
as I'm sure several other people probably did. Win some, lose some.
Try digitalspace.net. One of my friends has had his site hosted there for about a year and has had no problems, tech support is supposedly very responsive. I just signed up for hosting from them for 5 bucks a month (15 megs disk space, 2.5 gigs bandwidth). Every account includes access to a shell account, they run linux and support just about every language you can imagine (PHP3, MySQL, Perl, C++, Python, etc.) Unlimited POP3 addresses for all your friends too. =)
I had the honor of learning assembly from him (I'm a student at UCR). The guy knows everything there is to know about almost everything. You may also want to check out RATC, a pretty neat set of macros for C.
He has been in the business for a long time and knows a lot about the history of the industry. His classes are a mixture of computing history and actual programming. It was the only CS class I attended constantly just because it was so damn interesting.
A lot of his students don't like him because he is so demanding, but you will definately learn a lot by reading anything he has written.
I heard that he is currently teaching his assembly language class using an assembler that he wrote himself.
Also, any budding assembly programmers probably want to check out the UCR Standard Library, also available from http://webster.cs.ucr.edu/ This makes programming assembly a lot easier.
All coders need this book, it is the most comprehensive book on assembly ever written. Even if you dont want to program an x86 architecture, the theory (optimization, memory alignment, etc.) still applies.
The problem is that the gravity on mars is approx. 1/3 that of earth, meaning that the atmosphere is incapable of sustaining oxygen. The atmospheric pressure is less than 1% of earth's and what is left of the atmosphere is escaping at 1 to 2 kg/sec.
All the lighter gases like oxygen and nitrogen evaporated off of the planet long ago. We would need to produce a lot of oxygen constantly in order for mars to sustain life.
Temperature gradients play hell there too, on the surface, the difference in temperature between your feet and chest would be 15 degrees C.
There is a possible scenario for the terraforming of Mars at:
http://personalwebs.myriad.net/tgunn/teraform.ht m
I haven't read through the entire thing yet, but it seems to be pretty interesting.
All things considered, I think it may be easer to try to convert the atmosphere of Venus to something more suitable to us, as its mass is much closer to ours, although I haven't actually done any research into it, and I am very far from being a chemist with the knowledge required to change the atmosphere of an entire freaking planet =).
Roblimo responded to this kind of question in another thread./. is choosing not to post anything yet because we don't really know anything other than the fact that we have failed to make contact with the lander.
They are waiting until they have more information before they post an article. This seems like a good idea to me, since a thread about it now would invariably involve flamewars and everyone bashing everyone else, when in actuality nobody knows anything about what happened yet and nobody has enough information to speculate as to what happened.
Napster is a company whose only source of revenue will probably be banner advertisements on their client (unless they choose to go ugh, portal). By creating an open source clone without banner ads the company is losing impressions and therefore money.
As much as we would like to see people in an altruistic light, Napster as a company needs to make money to stay in business (theoretically, although that is apparantly not the case with today's.com startups).
Napster is a neat toy and it would be great if they encouraged OS development, but don't be surprised that they don't. They would like to make some cash. Yes, OS software makes money, but the typical OS revenue model doesn't apply in this case (i.e. Napster won't be selling support).
Regardless of what they say about security, cash is what it all comes down to.
Before I get flamed, yes, I know that there is an "official" console based client out there, but I'd imagine that banner ads will be on that too once it goes GUI. And when he does in fact go OS with it, there will probably be some clause in the licence stating that banners will have to still be in there somewhere.
So, pretty much, you had a chance to dispel some of the rumors and criticism going on about you, but instead chose to go off on a diatribe.
This did nothing but prove that the most of the things being said about you personally, if not professionally (which I believe as well) were true.
How is it that those from hackernews and attrition come across more coherently in interviews and writing than you.
Who are you to say that nobody cares about the questions that were asked? Obviously those of us here do, since most of the questions were along the same topic lines.
Everything I've ever read of you has come across as a spoiled brat displaying behavior we wouldn't accept from a five year old.
Another couple of displays like this and not even eMpTy Vee will be contacting you for interviews.
Have a nice life, it wouldn't hurt to go back to school and take some journalism and PR classes.
So IE supports a small subset of standards, at least you know what it is going to support. Netscape supports much less than IE, badly I might add.
The point is that someone can make a completely compliant webpage, have it display fine in IE, but have Navigator display things offset from other things, have tables with the backgrounds all wrong, etc.
Argue all you want for the web being just a way to display information, it has become more than that. In a way, web design is now an artform, something that is fun to look at and functional. It has become a way for people to create sites with impact, see http://www.gaijin.com for an example. If the web were to remain waht it initially was, then the only tag we would need would be the anchor tag.
The web is moving and evolving, and the problem is that not only does Navigator not support standards, many of the ones it does support it supports badly.
Navigator is almost a 5th generation browser, there is no reason that it should not support tables correctly. There is no defense for that. These are bugs that have not been fixed in 4 years. If M$ were to do the exact same thing, we'd hang them by the balls, but because it is Navigator we have to deal with it and design web pages that make sure Navigator doesn't shit itself. They are singlehandedly keeping the web from becoming the medium it could become.
Ooooohhh, new shop button, that'll keep me coming back to Navigator.
I just thought I'd try to sum up the general feelings of users as far as Netscape goes. I work tech support for an ISP and I think this also adresses a lot of issues that regular users run into:
1) Support the damn standards.
I want to build compliant style sheets and tables and actually have them look decent in both browsers. I don't want some wacky bug screwing with table rendering or mucking about with javascript. I want JavaScript to work without specifying which browser I'm taking into account and writing an individual subroutine for each one.
2) Let me download just the browser again.
Dear Netscape Messenger development team; Messenger sucks.
As someone who works in tech support, I'm sick of explaining to people why there are user interface issues that crop up, why some things are displayed inline and others aren't. I honestly would rather use a 3rd party mail program than that bloated POS. On a wintel platform, follow Microsoft's lead and make the mail and new separate programs, it'll make everyone happier.
Also, nobody uses Collabra, Composer or any of the other crap that you shovel into every release. There are other programs which do the job much better. This goes for AOL IMmer too, I have ICQ thank you very much. If I want AOL IMmer, I know where to get it. A bit of an idea, take all the coders working on that crap and have them work on the main browser, finding bugs and whatnot.
A functional web browser that is under a 10 meg download wouldn't be bad.
3) Tone down the user interface.
Nobody needs a goddamned shop button. I found that I use a grand total of 4 buttons on my browser:
back, forward, stop, and refresh.
That is all, anything else is mostly useless. Nobody uses the Cool sites crap, or anything else for that matter. More features that take up room. People will invariably use the extra crap for stuff it wasn't intended to be used for, breaking the browser, leading to a call to tech support.
4) Keep bookmarks html.
This is the one thing that Navigator has done right. If I want to move bookmarks from one version to another, or one computer to another I just need to copy a file, unlike IE where I have to copy a whole directory.
5) Load time counts.
Yes, the new layout engine is fast, but that doesn't mean anything if the damn program takes 30 seconds to load. The computers that we use at work are pII-266's with 64 megs of RAM, and IE5 loads in 2 seconds, Navigator takes about 30 seconds to load. You can make all the excuses you want about IE5 being part of the OS and all that. That is beside the point, if IE can do it, so can Navigator, figure out a way. Nobody notices if a web page loads in 1.4 seconds in one browser and 1.7 in another, If the interface feels slow and clunky, that is enough to turn me off.
6) Make the interface decent.
See how smooth IE is, attempt to make Navigator look similar. Navigator is too industrial looking for most peoples tastes. This may be harder because M$ has hidden a lot of the API that IE uses (it is undocumented). Netscape can at least try to get Navigator to look close. This is a minor point, but it counts.
7) A bit controversial, but if IE has bugs, occasionally try to make the page look decent anyway.
People write bad html, tested in only IE. IE renders it the way they want it to render and that is enough. I'm not supporting bad HTML, but it is not the browser's job to become style police. There are a lot of bugs out there and a lot of sites taking advantage of those bugs. Navigator is now in a position of playing catch up. Emma in Nebraska doesn't care about HTML correctness, she cares about being able to read webpages, regardless of the platform they were designed on. Keep standards compliance, but don't be totally rigid on it. In situations where the standard is not clear, follow Microsoft's implementation of it.
I was a faithful Navigator user up until version 4. I continued to use Navigator for a while after it was released, but fewer and fewer sites looked correct and I had to switch to IE. I go over to the people working in web adesign where I work and they are constantly cussing out Navigator.
Anyone have anything else to add?
Andrew (patiently awaitng a version of Navigator that doesn't suck dead kittens through straws.)
This is the reason a lot of Christians drive me nuts. You don't believe that people can follow their own moral code without a divine creator.
Maybe I like to treat people nicely because I'm a nice person. I don't treat people like shit because it would be a bad thing to do, not because I feel a need to justify myself and go to heaven.
Honestly the thought of an eternal afterlife scares the shit out of me. Living forever being happy, with no emotion other than joy all the time sounds like one of the worst fates ever. I'd rather go to hell where I can feel pain, at least it would be more interesting.
Everyone has their right to their own beliefs, just don't try and throw it down others' throats. I'm sick of being accosted by Christians on campus trying to "save" me, regardless of the fact that I don't want to be saved. I know that you need to meet some form of quota to insure that God loves you and you can get into heaven, but understand that in most religions, there is another way to get into heaven.... be nice to people. I have a friend who became a Christian and I've gone to a few of the parties his friends were having. They were nothing but hate fests. It seemed like they had nothing better to do than talk about others behind their backs. They looked down upon gays, non-Christian music, unwed mothers, etc. Do they honestly think that this is a way to get into heaven. Rather than being nice to people, they take the easy way out and try to convert others and go to church. As long as you practice the faith, it does not matter if you have a cold heart inside.
I know not all Christians are like this, but could those of you who practice your faith the way it was intended please get the vocal minority of yourselves to shut the hell up and go back to reading the bible, and possibly get some meaning out of the message of it, instead of reading the letter of it to try and buy yourself an easy ticket to heaven.
My father was an altarboy, and he was driven away from the church by those who could see no other way to live their lives than their own way. You need to see that the death of religion is not being caused by evil, it is being caused by your own viewpoint not allowing differentiation. It may be different once you get inside the church, but from outside, you look like a bunch of hypocritical jerks.
Of course Slashdot is mostly athiest/agnostic, we have a bunch of computer geeks here who do logic for a living. When you come right down to it, logic is the opposite of faith, so of course most here will be against any form of religion, it goes with the territory. This is not the place to argue Christianity, you will invariably lose, if only because you are outnumbered.
Crap that was a long rant.
The Lord does not want you to blow up abortion clinics,
Andrew (considering himself a deist)
200 bucks and this thing is coming with a modem?
on
$200 Linux PCs
·
· Score: 1
This means one of two things if this box is running Linux:
1) This is a hardware modem (I doubt it)
2) They are writing drivers for a winmodem
If it means that a driver is being written for a winmodem (lets hope to god its not one of those pctel linmodems we were hearing about earlier) this could be interesting. Yes, winmodems suck, but they are cheap. I have a LTWin that I get connect at 48k on at home, it would be really neat if I could use it in Linux (assuming it was the modem they were planning on including)
Andrew (hoping that it isn't a Rockwell HCF (puke) either)
Slashdot Mirror
I'll admit I missed the point about using the machines simply as an x-terminal, but that brings up another interesting point.
What happens when the server goes down?
Admittedly it is a lot less likely to happen in a unix environment than a windows environment; but no software or hardware is perfect and it does happen. With our current model of computing, if our fileserver went down one morning, people can still get other work done. They can still edit local documents, do financial paperwork, compose and read email, etc. With a terminal model, if the server goes down, the office just halts. A single point of failure is never really a fun thing to have. Even though we do a level 0 on our fileserver every night, it would still take me a couple of hours to get a new os installed on the system and bring the fileserver back from tape. This is assuming the RAID controller didn't bite it or anything, in which case I'd have to get a new one brought in in a couple of hours or as late as the next day.
Yes, this is me just trying to save face, but it is something to think about. And yes, I realize that this is considering a fairly small office, but the point is still valid.
Here is why this doesn't work.
1)If you only have a few workstations for a lot of people, you are going to end up paying people to twiddle their thumbs while someone else types a memo. This negates any savings on having cheap/fewer workstations in the first couple of months.
2)Slower workstations are, well, slower. those small groups of 30 second waits add up. If you want an efficient office, you dont pay people to wait for their machines to load data/get email, etc. New hardware is dirt cheap right now. You can get a good 1ghz system for 700 dollars or so, so why not get one.
3)Older equipment breaks more and is harder to find parts for. Try to find 72 pin simms that are guaranteed to work for a decent price. didnt think so. How about bios issues with those old 2 dollar motherboards when you try to slap a newer hard drive on them. Digging up AT power supplies? Yes, they do still exist, but they are getting a little more difficult to find. and the pain of working with older machines when they break is hellacious. swapping the power supply in an ATX machine takes about 2 minutes. In an AT machine, it takes about half an hour since I have to pull the entire machine apart. And yes, I do do this regularly. I changed 2 AT power supplies last week. (I work at a Uni, not everyone has new machines).
4) Old networking sucks. One of the major points of having a network is having the ability to share files. This means you want switched 100mb everywhere. Again, it is cheap enough, why do you pay people to wait. Our main fileserver is on gigabit fiber, and we use it constantly. Copper gigabit network cards are coming way down in price right now, the switches are coming down soon, so you might as well be prepared to go gigabit when you need to.
5) No office is in a vacuum. Abiword and StarOffice may be great, but none of them read all Office file formats perfectly yet. You still need to use microsoft products to communicate with other offices, for better or worse. Not a troll, just the truth.
6) Outlook. omygod Outlook is neat. I never saw the utility of outlook and exchange until I worked in an office that used it efficiently. It is at the point where it is indespensible. The ability to share calendars, email, move files around, schedule meetings, etc is wonderful. Yes, this does mean you have to run NT and exchange on a sever, bt we have made this concession. With the exception of our exchange server and our pdc, we are all FreeBSD.
In an office of 20 people, a 1000-1200 bucks per every 2 years (our average upgrade cycle) for each person isn't a huge cost compared to the salary, electricity, water bills, etc. Why not spend that kind of cash to make sure that work can actually get done and you dont have a sysadmin running around saying "it almost works!" or here's a workaround.
I'm a unix admin, I hate administering NT, but I have no doubt as to its current utility in most work environments. The benefits it provides outweighs the costs of maintaining it, at least until the unix variants get up to speed on the capabilities.
My laptop began to lock up once it warmed up slightly, about 2 weeks after I got it. Dell sent someone out with a new motherboard and cooling unit (fan, heat sink, etc.). The laptop continued to lock up while the tech was there. Dell shipped a new one out as soon as they could build it. No questions asked.
The cool thing is that I told them where I would be when the laptop came in, at my parents' house, visiting. They shipped it to that address without any problems. I was working as a consultant at the time and the morning that the tech was supposed to come out and fix it, I had just changed workplaces. I gave him the new address, and he was there a couple of hours later.
Definately the best service I've ever had. I build my own machines, but I buy/recommend Dell whenever a friend needs one, and when I need to buy them for businesses.
Oh, and before you call me a moron for not using the libunicode on gnome's ftp server, well, um it was in unstable. You see, typically when software is released there is the release stuff, which should be reliable and build correctly, then there is the unstable.
In this case something required to build the *stable* Gnome was in unstable only, hence why I didn't look there before. Great thinking on their part.
Andrew
I wouldnt argue with that, I would argue with the fact that when I want to build Gnome, I have to download about 30 or more files. I'd like to see one great whacking 20-40 meg package where I untar it, run ./configure exactly once. then type make, and it actually makes everything. That is my idea of cool.
/usr/local/lib to work, try to compile it, then watch it fail because some obscure dependency that the configure script doesnt even check for isnt there. find out what package contains that, track that package down everywhere, find out there are ABOUT 7 COMPETING LIBUNICODES, none of which are compatible with any others, and that I need a specific one, called libunicode (gee, how specific), that is buried on ftp.gnome.org after all.
I dont want to have to track down 30 files across 5 ftp sites, sourceforge and everywhere else on the planet, find out what is out of date, look at dependencies, try to compile something, realize that gnome-applet requires gnome-vfs, which requires a header file that is in gnome-applet, that needs to be copied to
Then try to compile sawfish, which has its own dependancies. Then try for evolution that again, has its own....
Screw that, give me a tarball. I want a make World, like XFree86. I dont want any griping about dependancies, etc. I just want it to work.
This is coming from someone that just spent all night downloading/compiling gnome, just so he could get Evolution to work. Poo on that.
dammit!
Andrew
Great, you use all 5, so everyone else must as well. Not true. I've moved into administration recently, from a background of tech support, corporate training, and being a college student.
In my experience, with the few thousand people I've helped use computers, VERY few of them use the other mouse button. The only things they have ever had to do is use programs, open files, and rename files. This applies to experienced business users, college students and your average web surfer alike.
Most(all?) consumer (mac and windows) programs are designed in such a way that you never have to use the right mouse button to do anything. For most people the menus on top of the windows provide a more standard interface than a mouse button ever could.
People don't want to have to try to figure out what is coming up next by clicking a right mouse button. In most applications, the right mouse button loses all context, in Word it allows you to format paragraphs, etc. in IE it allows you to navigate. These functions do not cross applications as well as the menu on top of the windows do.
It comes down to the fact that once you get outside of the standard functions of the left button, which everyone knows and loves, the middle and right buttons essentially hide the interface from the user. One can be reasonably certain that the file menu on a document allows you to save it, save it as something else, or quit the program. The same kind of assumptions cant be made about mouse buttons, hence people tend not to use them, because it is just inconvenient.
These aren't stupid users, they are just the common ones. Common users have no need for more than one mouse button, since all functions are accessible elsewhere more visibly.
While I'm happy that the linux drivers are decent, that is not the point. The point is that ATI does not have a worthy competitor to Nvidia's or 3dfx's fastest chips. The Radeon may be a contender, but ATI still has to prove its drivers dont suck. They also have to provide driver updates for the card, on a regular basis.
In the past, ATI has just released drivers, and considered them to be good enough. If they want to compete, they have to constantly get better performance out of the drivers themselves to stay viable.
This is not a windows versus linux issue, this is an Nvidia vs. ATI issue.
Could we please stop complaining about requiring a laptop limiting the poor? If a school requires a laptop, it should be considered part of the tuition, pure and simple.
Besides, when I got into Rose-Hulman, tuition was somewhere around 22k a year (one of the prime reasons why I'm not there right now). A one time expense of 2000 bucks for a laptop is not that much more.
These aren't state universities. Private schools can charge as much as they want. I'm not complaining because MIT costs more than the state funded uni I'm going to now.
So that would make this the 9999th story...
Now that everyone has forgotten the entire "when does the millennium start" fiasco, I needed something to bitch about.
Seriously tho, congratulations.../. has gotten me through more than one seriously boring computer lab.
Andrew
The beta release will be version 187.2. It should take quite awhile for the other browsers to catch up. Unfortunately support for tables won't be until version 212.8, I apologize for that. CSS support will be in version 1,984,232.8.
In related news, in order to keep up with Microsoft, the next release of the linux kernel will be version 2002.2.0, 2002.1.0 is just the developer release.
Andrew
if they go open source?
This is a company with exactly one product, their operating system. If they give that one product away for free, including their ability to sell it for that much of a profit, due to other companies selling it cheaper, (I'm waiting for the era of CheapBytes Be for a Buck here) where does their revenue come from?
You can say support, but it's not like BeOS is a server platform. As a desktop OS, I don't imagine that it would require nearly the amount of support that Linux requires. BE is made from the beginning to be somewhat user friendly, the only profits from support would be the applications themselves, which BE does not make.
BE's future is in application developers (where it is making inroads in getting some serious music applications ported), the music industry has been waiting for something to kill of their beloved Macintoshes for years now, and this could be the OS to do it, if marketed correctly. Most computers used in music and video editing are used only for that purpose, so there is a future in making an operating system to suit those needs very well.
Profit considerations aside, I still see opening the source as a mistake, because then we would have a few thousand developers pulling BeOS in random, sometimes contradictory directions, in order to get it to do things it was never intended to, which was work with media.. Right now it is a tight, fast, media operating system, and it should stay that way.
There are many talented open source developers, but I don't see many of them having that much of a background in making something optimized for media editing. A lot of them come from a UNIX background, so if they got involved with the development of BE, I don't see BE going in an area where it needs to go, although I'm sure it will end up as a killer webserver. The types of optimizations needed for this code are probably very different than the optimizations needed for something like a TCP/IP stack. Musicians could tell you what it needs to do, but most of them don't code. Before anyone goes off at me, yes, I know BE has a BSD kernel.
If people want to get Linux into the average consumer market's hands, there are quite a few things that need to be done.
1) Lock everything down. Any service running at all is theoretically vulnerable to some form of attack. While it is great the you can administer through telnet and everything else, the average person has no use for it. Open ports have no purpose on most consumer's machines. Uncle Bob isn't going to be telnetting into his box to read his mail. If someone's UNIX guru son decides to set up a box for his parents that he can take care of remotely, great.... but if you are doing that, it probably isn't too much trouble to go through the machine and open up the services you need. It is, however, a lot of trouble for the average newbie to go through and lock down unneeded services. Linux gets a bad name if a major exploit is discovered in sendmail and half the consumer market is vulnerable to it..... say goodbye to that security reputation. The average consumer we are marketing it to wont know how to apply the patch, they only know that their box was rooted and all the personal data they had on it was taken.
2) (Getting off the topic of your post, but I'm ranting) The user should never have to touch a CLI. Keep in mind this is a consumer we are talking about here... one who probably couldn't figure out DOS, let alone the intricacies of the mount command every damn time they wanted to put a cd in the drive (yes, I know supermount is coming). Screw make, screw RPM... For the consumer market, Linux needs something like Install Shield... a lesson should be taken from windows here... everything can be done from the GUI, adding programs to the Start Menu does not require editing a text file, installing and removing software does not require foreign command lines.
Before you start saying that Linux is viable for home users, look at who we are talking about here. Linux is not yet an alternative for:
1) The 16 year old girl with an AOL account who wants to talk to friends on ICQ.
2) An elderly person who is already having trouble seeing, the current font support in most UNIX web browsers is lacking, text just looks blocky and it is sometimes hard on my 21 year old eyes, I wonder what it looks like for those 60+.
3) The teenage boy who wants to play the latest game (support isn't quite there yet, plus the drivers for a lot of common video cards suck. I believe the TNT2 under Quake3 is an example)
4) Mom, who wants to do word processing and print stuff on her recent HP Printer (most of those printers coming with the computer deals at Best Buy are Win printers)
6) Dad, who wants to balance his checking account (are there any viable Linux alternatives to quicken out there)
7) Anyone who wants to browse the web on their brand spanking new computer from $MAJOR_MANUFACTURER. I have yet to see a new system for under 1000 bucks that comes without a winmodem. If your talking about Linux as a free OS, lets do some math here:
1 Copy of RedHat, about 50 bucks (its the one everyone buys because it's well known, right?)
1 Basic lousy hardware modem (probably won't connect any better that a win modem), 60 bucks
Total cost: about 110 plus tax.
1 copy of win98, about 99 bucks plus tax(ostensibly free because they bought it with their computer).
Looks like Windows is ahead on this one, especially since it does everything the average consumer needs right now. Yes, it is unstable, but for most applications, it doesn't matter. I personally have never lost any work due to a crash. BTW, I'm running win2k final right now, and am working on about a 2 week uptime. I have not had it crash yet, the only times I have had to reboot were after I added new hardware, which autodetected perfectly.
Linux is good for:
1) Sysadmins
2) Hobbiests who like to screw around with Unix for fun.
3) "Power Users" who tend to do a lot of work and need an OS that can keep up with them.
4) People who have it inflicted upon them by sysadmin family members, who want to lock it down so they don't get any 3am support calls. I personally would rather have my family running win98 that they could play with and install their own crap on. My family can install anything they want without having to call me about it, and it usually doesn't screw up, but when it does, a reinstall (of the program)gets everything back together in short order.
BTW, before anyone labels me a M$ supporter, the minority of my computers run windows. OS's I'm currently running on my personal machines:
Win2k (main box)
Win95 (p100 laptop)
Solaris 7 (Sparc2)
Linux (suse) (p90, k5-133, 2 486's)
BeOS (Cyrix MediaGX)
I use Windows as my main operating system because I can do nearly everything I need to on it. I switch among the unices when I want to do development or networking stuff.
Don't say Linux is viable for the average user, because it isn't... yet.
I'm currently a junior and I never lived in the dorms so I never experienced high bandwidth as a lifestyle, but I tend to spend a lot of time in the on campus computer labs for the speed.
I also actively seek out jobs that have high speed connections, I currently work for an ISP, and have turned down other, higher paying, jobs because they "only" had corporate DSL.
I was upset to find out that I couldn't get DSL in my current apartment complex, so when my lease is up in couple of months, I'm seriously considering moving to the complex across the street, which is DSL eligible.
Currently I'm not suffering from bandwidth withdrawal because I found ways to avoid it. I have a 15 gig hard drive mounted in a removeable rack so I can download what I want to it while I'm on a fat pipe. I also have SSH access to some dedicated linux boxen on the school network that I can use for getting whatever I need on a high speed connection so I can go in a get it at my leisure, either by overnight modem download or the previously mentioned removeable hard drive.
My current modem usage, 218 hours in 13 days, nobody even bothers to call me any more because they know they'll get a busy signal, they just page me and have me call them back.
as I'm sure several other people probably did. Win some, lose some.
sigh...
Try digitalspace.net. One of my friends has had his site hosted there for about a year and has had no problems, tech support is supposedly very responsive. I just signed up for hosting from them for 5 bucks a month (15 megs disk space, 2.5 gigs bandwidth). Every account includes access to a shell account, they run linux and support just about every language you can imagine (PHP3, MySQL, Perl, C++, Python, etc.) Unlimited POP3 addresses for all your friends too. =)
HTH,
Andrew
Eric is really a nice guy. He is a regular in rec.arts.bodyart, and he even has a homepage with pictures and tons more info at:
http://members.aol.com/spidergod5/
I had the honor of learning assembly from him (I'm a student at UCR). The guy knows everything there is to know about almost everything. You may also want to check out RATC, a pretty neat set of macros for C.
He has been in the business for a long time and knows a lot about the history of the industry.
His classes are a mixture of computing history and actual programming. It was the only CS class I attended constantly just because it was so damn interesting.
A lot of his students don't like him because he is so demanding, but you will definately learn a lot by reading anything he has written.
I heard that he is currently teaching his assembly language class using an assembler that he wrote himself.
Also, any budding assembly programmers probably want to check out the UCR Standard Library, also available from http://webster.cs.ucr.edu/
This makes programming assembly a lot easier.
All coders need this book, it is the most comprehensive book on assembly ever written. Even if you dont want to program an x86 architecture, the theory (optimization, memory alignment, etc.) still applies.
The problem is that the gravity on mars is approx. 1/3 that of earth, meaning that the atmosphere is incapable of sustaining oxygen. The atmospheric pressure is less than 1% of earth's and what is left of the atmosphere is escaping at 1 to 2 kg/sec.
t m
All the lighter gases like oxygen and nitrogen evaporated off of the planet long ago. We would need to produce a lot of oxygen constantly in order for mars to sustain life.
Temperature gradients play hell there too, on the surface, the difference in temperature between your feet and chest would be 15 degrees C.
There is a possible scenario for the terraforming of Mars at:
http://personalwebs.myriad.net/tgunn/teraform.h
I haven't read through the entire thing yet, but it seems to be pretty interesting.
All things considered, I think it may be easer to try to convert the atmosphere of Venus to something more suitable to us, as its mass is much closer to ours, although I haven't actually done any research into it, and I am very far from being a chemist with the knowledge required to change the atmosphere of an entire freaking planet =).
Roblimo responded to this kind of question in another thread. /. is choosing not to post anything yet because we don't really know anything other than the fact that we have failed to make contact with the lander.
They are waiting until they have more information before they post an article. This seems like a good idea to me, since a thread about it now would invariably involve flamewars and everyone bashing everyone else, when in actuality nobody knows anything about what happened yet and nobody has enough information to speculate as to what happened.
Napster is a company whose only source of revenue will probably be banner advertisements on their client (unless they choose to go ugh, portal). By creating an open source clone without banner ads the company is losing impressions and therefore money.
.com startups).
As much as we would like to see people in an altruistic light, Napster as a company needs to make money to stay in business (theoretically, although that is apparantly not the case with today's
Napster is a neat toy and it would be great if they encouraged OS development, but don't be surprised that they don't. They would like to make some cash. Yes, OS software makes money, but the typical OS revenue model doesn't apply in this case (i.e. Napster won't be selling support).
Regardless of what they say about security, cash is what it all comes down to.
Before I get flamed, yes, I know that there is an "official" console based client out there, but I'd imagine that banner ads will be on that too once it goes GUI. And when he does in fact go OS with it, there will probably be some clause in the licence stating that banners will have to still be in there somewhere.
So, pretty much, you had a chance to dispel some of the rumors and criticism going on about you, but instead chose to go off on a diatribe.
This did nothing but prove that the most of the things being said about you personally, if not professionally (which I believe as well) were true.
How is it that those from hackernews and attrition come across more coherently in interviews and writing than you.
Who are you to say that nobody cares about the questions that were asked? Obviously those of us here do, since most of the questions were along the same topic lines.
Everything I've ever read of you has come across as a spoiled brat displaying behavior we wouldn't accept from a five year old.
Another couple of displays like this and not even eMpTy Vee will be contacting you for interviews.
Have a nice life, it wouldn't hurt to go back to school and take some journalism and PR classes.
So IE supports a small subset of standards, at least you know what it is going to support. Netscape supports much less than IE, badly I might add.
The point is that someone can make a completely compliant webpage, have it display fine in IE, but have Navigator display things offset from other things, have tables with the backgrounds all wrong, etc.
Argue all you want for the web being just a way to display information, it has become more than that. In a way, web design is now an artform, something that is fun to look at and functional. It has become a way for people to create sites with impact, see http://www.gaijin.com for an example. If the web were to remain waht it initially was, then the only tag we would need would be the anchor tag.
The web is moving and evolving, and the problem is that not only does Navigator not support standards, many of the ones it does support it supports badly.
Navigator is almost a 5th generation browser, there is no reason that it should not support tables correctly. There is no defense for that. These are bugs that have not been fixed in 4 years. If M$ were to do the exact same thing, we'd hang them by the balls, but because it is Navigator we have to deal with it and design web pages that make sure Navigator doesn't shit itself. They are singlehandedly keeping the web from becoming the medium it could become.
Ooooohhh, new shop button, that'll keep me coming back to Navigator.
I just thought I'd try to sum up the general feelings of users as far as Netscape goes. I work tech support for an ISP and I think this also adresses a lot of issues that regular users run into:
1) Support the damn standards.
I want to build compliant style sheets and tables and actually have them look decent in both browsers. I don't want some wacky bug screwing with table rendering or mucking about with javascript. I want JavaScript to work without specifying which browser I'm taking into account and writing an individual subroutine for each one.
2) Let me download just the browser again.
Dear Netscape Messenger development team;
Messenger sucks.
As someone who works in tech support, I'm sick of explaining to people why there are user interface issues that crop up, why some things are displayed inline and others aren't. I honestly would rather use a 3rd party mail program than that bloated POS. On a wintel platform, follow Microsoft's lead and make the mail and new separate programs, it'll make everyone happier.
Also, nobody uses Collabra, Composer or any of the other crap that you shovel into every release. There are other programs which do the job much better. This goes for AOL IMmer too, I have ICQ thank you very much. If I want AOL IMmer, I know where to get it. A bit of an idea, take all the coders working on that crap and have them work on the main browser, finding bugs and whatnot.
A functional web browser that is under a 10 meg download wouldn't be bad.
3) Tone down the user interface.
Nobody needs a goddamned shop button. I found that I use a grand total of 4 buttons on my browser:
back, forward, stop, and refresh.
That is all, anything else is mostly useless. Nobody uses the Cool sites crap, or anything else for that matter. More features that take up room. People will invariably use the extra crap for stuff it wasn't intended to be used for, breaking the browser, leading to a call to tech support.
4) Keep bookmarks html.
This is the one thing that Navigator has done right. If I want to move bookmarks from one version to another, or one computer to another I just need to copy a file, unlike IE where I have to copy a whole directory.
5) Load time counts.
Yes, the new layout engine is fast, but that doesn't mean anything if the damn program takes 30 seconds to load. The computers that we use at work are pII-266's with 64 megs of RAM, and IE5 loads in 2 seconds, Navigator takes about 30 seconds to load. You can make all the excuses you want about IE5 being part of the OS and all that. That is beside the point, if IE can do it, so can Navigator, figure out a way. Nobody notices if a web page loads in 1.4 seconds in one browser and 1.7 in another, If the interface feels slow and clunky, that is enough to turn me off.
6) Make the interface decent.
See how smooth IE is, attempt to make Navigator look similar. Navigator is too industrial looking for most peoples tastes. This may be harder because M$ has hidden a lot of the API that IE uses (it is undocumented). Netscape can at least try to get Navigator to look close. This is a minor point, but it counts.
7) A bit controversial, but if IE has bugs, occasionally try to make the page look decent anyway.
People write bad html, tested in only IE. IE renders it the way they want it to render and that is enough. I'm not supporting bad HTML, but it is not the browser's job to become style police. There are a lot of bugs out there and a lot of sites taking advantage of those bugs. Navigator is now in a position of playing catch up. Emma in Nebraska doesn't care about HTML correctness, she cares about being able to read webpages, regardless of the platform they were designed on. Keep standards compliance, but don't be totally rigid on it. In situations where the standard is not clear, follow Microsoft's implementation of it.
I was a faithful Navigator user up until version 4. I continued to use Navigator for a while after it was released, but fewer and fewer sites looked correct and I had to switch to IE. I go over to the people working in web adesign where I work and they are constantly cussing out Navigator.
Anyone have anything else to add?
Andrew (patiently awaitng a version of Navigator that doesn't suck dead kittens through straws.)
This is the reason a lot of Christians drive me nuts. You don't believe that people can follow their own moral code without a divine creator.
Maybe I like to treat people nicely because I'm a nice person. I don't treat people like shit because it would be a bad thing to do, not because I feel a need to justify myself and go to heaven.
Honestly the thought of an eternal afterlife scares the shit out of me. Living forever being happy, with no emotion other than joy all the time sounds like one of the worst fates ever. I'd rather go to hell where I can feel pain, at least it would be more interesting.
Everyone has their right to their own beliefs, just don't try and throw it down others' throats. I'm sick of being accosted by Christians on campus trying to "save" me, regardless of the fact that I don't want to be saved. I know that you need to meet some form of quota to insure that God loves you and you can get into heaven, but understand that in most religions, there is another way to get into heaven.... be nice to people. I have a friend who became a Christian and I've gone to a few of the parties his friends were having. They were nothing but hate fests. It seemed like they had nothing better to do than talk about others behind their backs. They looked down upon gays, non-Christian music, unwed mothers, etc. Do they honestly think that this is a way to get into heaven. Rather than being nice to people, they take the easy way out and try to convert others and go to church. As long as you practice the faith, it does not matter if you have a cold heart inside.
I know not all Christians are like this, but could those of you who practice your faith the way it was intended please get the vocal minority of yourselves to shut the hell up and go back to reading the bible, and possibly get some meaning out of the message of it, instead of reading the letter of it to try and buy yourself an easy ticket to heaven.
My father was an altarboy, and he was driven away from the church by those who could see no other way to live their lives than their own way. You need to see that the death of religion is not being caused by evil, it is being caused by your own viewpoint not allowing differentiation. It may be different once you get inside the church, but from outside, you look like a bunch of hypocritical jerks.
Of course Slashdot is mostly athiest/agnostic, we have a bunch of computer geeks here who do logic for a living. When you come right down to it, logic is the opposite of faith, so of course most here will be against any form of religion, it goes with the territory. This is not the place to argue Christianity, you will invariably lose, if only because you are outnumbered.
Crap that was a long rant.
The Lord does not want you to blow up abortion clinics,
Andrew (considering himself a deist)
This means one of two things if this box is running Linux:
1) This is a hardware modem (I doubt it)
2) They are writing drivers for a winmodem
If it means that a driver is being written for a winmodem (lets hope to god its not one of those pctel linmodems we were hearing about earlier) this could be interesting. Yes, winmodems suck, but they are cheap. I have a LTWin that I get connect at 48k on at home, it would be really neat if I could use it in Linux (assuming it was the modem they were planning on including)
Andrew (hoping that it isn't a Rockwell HCF (puke) either)