This is another thing that bothers me about Linux; most older apps simply do not work on newer distributions. I have a few disks of little "cool" apps from my Windows 3.11 days (circa '94 and 95) that still work with WindowsXP. Hell, I even have DOS apps that still work with XP. The same cannot be said for Linux. It's very true that there are some apps that were built for Dos/3.11/win95 that don't work with XP, but those numbers are NOTHING compared to the numbers of older apps that refuse to run on newer Linux distros. Backwards compatibility is probably going to be the biggest hurdle Linux will have.
Here's what I see being the real show-stoppers for desktop Linux adaptation:
1. Reliance on the CLI: Yes, in a perfect world, everyone would be comfortable with using the CLI to accomplish tasks from installing a driver to reading email to whatever. REALITY, however, is different. The vast majority of Win32 and MacOS users NEVER touch the CLI. No one wants to be bothered with it. The Linux elite's insistance that everything be centered around CLI apps and whatnot is going to prevent Linux uptake. Yes, we should all learn it before diving into Linux, but think about it this way; Apple, with it's BSD powered OSX, does NOT require it's users to know a damned thing about the command line in order to use their OS. It simply works well without it. Of course, power users can get at it and run as many shell scripts as they wish to, but those that don't know about command line stuff are not forced to learn it.
2. Installing new hardware in your PC should not be harder than plugging it in and installing a driver. In all of the years I've been using Linux, I've rarely ever been able to simply install a new card and not have to install something other than a driver. There have been too many times where I have to fish out my install CD's or search the net for some obscure dependancy package, or worse, have the dep already installed, but the driver's installation script not detect it properly. I've pulled out my hair trying to get my little USB webcam (Cool-I-Cam Stylus 1000) to work with GPhoto/Gphoto2 only to give up after weeks of trying (it took less than 5 minutes to get it up and running under Windows 2000). My IOGear USB2 card STILL doesn't work with Linux (the driver is included with Win2000 SP4 and is also available as a tiny download from the IOGear site). Stuff like this annoys the hell out of me. Honestly, I shouldn't have to deal with it and neither should anyone trying to use Linux for the first time. Until hardware installation is fixed, desktop linux will never happen.
3. Apps. I cannot stress how important having GOOD applications is to the average user. Star/Open Office is good, I'll admit that and it's an excellent start in the direction that things should be heading. However, there's simply not enough applications of this caliber. There are no pro-quality audio applications, no Macromedia authoring apps, games are hard to come by IF they're ported to Linux, and nothing that's truely like EZ CD Creator or Nero for CD burning. Until commercial applications start coming over to Linux, we're not going to see many people moving to Linux.
Think of it this way; The Amiga is/was one of the greatest machines ever built and it had the BEST OS of it's day. It's lack of applications (and lack of marketing push) killed it's desktop uptake. In 1990, I knew more people that had inferior PC's than had Amigas and the sole reason was that the apps they needed were not available for the Amiga. Same for the Atari ST, Same for the BeBox. Apps drive adoption, not just the GUI.
4. Elitism. Linux elitism is rampant. If I ask a question in an IRC channel on how to do something in windows, I get a dozen good responses. If I ask a question in #linux on Efnet or a similar channel, I get a bunch of "did you read the man pages?" "RTFM", "Linux is obviously to difficult for you, go back to Windows" or similar responses. Oddly, I don't encounter the level of elitism when looking for help with any other flavor of unix or MacOS (The guys in #SGI/Efnet were particularly helpful when I had a problem reinstalling Irix on my Indy). The attitude that a lot of Linux users display towards newbies will turn off just about anyone to Linux. Kill the attitude, learn some manners, and lend a hand.
Now, before I get flamed, I must let you know that I AM well versed in Linux. I'm currently working as a Unix admin, overseeing a mission-critical, money making production server farm for a Fortune 1000 company. I make my living using Linux, but cannot see having my wife use it for her business (She's a mortgage broker)
Re:Stuck with Windows?
on
PC Annoyances
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· Score: 1
Let's see... There are those of us who use a PC for specific tasks (in my case, music composition) that relies on hardware that will not work with any OS other than 9x. Case in point: Any musician using any of the following audio interfaces: Korg 1212 I/O, Korg Oasys, Emagic Audiowerk 8 or Audiowerk 2, or a Pinnacle Multisound Pro. You can't use NT/2000/XP if you happen to use ProTools Free as it only works on 98 and ME. There's a lot more out there that will not run with XP/2000 (Cubase 3.7 for instance) that works just fine with 9x.
The company I work for now has a number of apps that we keep 9x and NT boxes around for. Custom apps may or may not run on XP, it's a crapshoot.
Sometimes it's not a matter of being scared, it's about what works with what.
The Atari Stacy predates the PowerBook 100's 1991 release by 2 years and it had a built-in trackball as it's pointer. The STBook had a "disc" type pointer and was released in 1990. So... not only was Atari first in giving us a laptop with a built-in pointer, it inadvertently gave us the first REAL Mac laptop since there was a Mac emulator cart for the ST that would also work on the STacy (I know the mac portable was introduced in 89 like the Stacy, but the Stacy is just better).
You've been able to make "pro" quality recordings with a PC/Mac for a number of years now. ProTools, Cubase VST, Logic Audio, and Cakewalk Pro Audio have been around for a while now and so has pro-quality audio cards. I sold this stuff from 1996 to 1998, and while the quality and capabilities have dramatically improved over the years, the basic functionality has always been there.
Personally, I use a PC for my music. I have a custom built PC (Duron 1.1GHz, 768MB RAM, 4 ATA100 drives, CDRW, etc...) with all of my software installed for music (Cubase VST5.1, Reason 2, Rebirth 2, etc...) and a Dell Inspiron 5000 (P3-700, 384MB RAM, 12GB drive, internal CDRW) for mobile music work. I have the same applications installed on the laptop as I do on the desktop so that work I start on the laptop can always be finished on the desktop.
Witte said "Like any other company, Ford Motor is looking at Linux, primarily in the application space. We presently have an enterprise-wide agreement with Microsoft to handle our collaborative solutions. We aren't contemplating using Linux in this area, and don't contemplate doing that in the foreseeable future."
According to the job offers I had to be a part of the team to switch Ford over to Red Hat, I say that someone is either lying to protect the few M$ contracts that will remain, or is completely clueless to what's going on in the IT dept.
Back in January and early Feb., I responded to half a dozen ads looking for Red Hat administrators for the project. 4Serve, HotLinuxJobs (Where it's still posted!), and a few other contract companies had this listed. Alas, I'm not of the caliber of admin they were seeking, so I didn't get the job, but I tried.
Back in the 80's, the indie coders released their games either on their own or in a magazine. Anyone old enough should remember walking into Inacomp or something like that and seeing the latest indie release hanging on a rack with a Dot Matrix printed manual, hand drawn art, a single 5 1/4" floppy all neatly sealed in a ziplock bag. Anyone like me should remember typing in the latest game from your favorite computing platform magazine (for me, that was Antic, Analog, and Compute!).
I remember coding my own little games back in my Atari 800XL days. Most of my games were written in TurboBasic with little ML routines I picked up from various games published in magazines of the day (or larger engines like PM Magic published in Compute!). I've only had the courage to submit 2 games of mine to the large companies from back then, and (of course) my games weren't "polished" enough to get picked up.
I've since left coding to pursue sys administration, but have always had a little something in the back of my head that wants to finish one of my old games, but updated for todays machines. I think that's what drew me to Linux. The community reminded me of the indie gamer developers comunity of the 80's. Going to small "conventions" or local users groups, meeting the guy that coded your favorite indie game, and sharing code and tricks with others is a lot like what happens in the Linux community today. I've already decided that if I ever get back into developing, the games I write will be for Linux and done entirely by myself (I'm also a musican as well as an artist) and will most likely be freeware or shareware.
Most of the movies on my list I saw in excess of 50 times each on HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, TMC, or (when it was around) Spotlight. Me and my younger sister had loads of time to watch flicks when we were young, as a result, we can shamelessly recite entire movie scripts with few errors.
Red Dawn - I still watch this whenever it comes on
Strange Brew - I own this one.
The Sure Thing - was just on a couple of months ago, I stopped working on a server build to watch it. Introduced me to "shotgunning".
Wierd Science - "He don't even got a license leeeeeesaaaaa"
Body Double - my sister, my brother, and myself found this movie one night at about 3am on Skinemax. It's not a bad flick... Honestly.
Conan the Barbarian - I still love this movie.
Buckaroo Bonzai in the 5th Dimension - We watched this movie over and over until we couldn't watch it any more.
Howard the Duck - we were all fans of the comic. Then this came along. We liked it back then, but no longer.
The Manhattan Project - Still a good flick, if a bit unrealistic.
Dreamscape - the first PG-13 movie ever. We used to daydream about stuff like this.
There's more than that, but these were the flicks that stick out.
What this article forgets (and this is actually kinda major) is that the artist usually don't see anything until all of the costs involved in making the album are paid for. What this means is that the band gets 15% of the NET profit not gross sales. Everyone has to get paid before they see a dime.
I bought a magnavox VCR 8 years ago, had it not been for my kids knocking it off of the tv, it would still be in use now.
Sony used the term "MegaBass" back in the late 80's and early 90's and it meant something. I bought a sony boom box in 1991 that had a full range speaker on it, but also had a tiny subwoofer on each speaker (CFD 750? I can't remember the model number now). That radio could shake things in my dorm room and could get complaints from down the hall, everyone on my floor wanted one. This from a $300 radio. Nowadays, "MegaBass" means an EQ bump. nothing more.
In the late 80's early 90's, Sony and a few other manufacturers began making bookshelf systems. They all had impeccable build quality, great sound and little in the way of "flashy" features. Yamaha had a bookshelf system that was unbelieveable, it was the first time I had seen Active Servo Technology, the thing had gorgeous bass from a tiny system. Bookshelf systems these days are full of garbage. Dancing lights, 200Wx2 I.L.S. rated power (If Lightning Strikes) that's about as gutless as it comes, a million speakers, but they still manage to sound awful, and terrible build quality.
These days, the manufacturers are interested in the bottom line, not quality. Move more units and make more money.
MacOS was designed to allow the computer illiterate to use computers. People that couldn't register in theire brains "don't take the floppy out before the red light goes off" were the types that MacOS was designed for. Hardly a sign of the intellectual elite here.
I work with hundreds of mac users on a daily basis. They're all a bunch of artsy fartsy types, but none appear "smarter". Matter of fact, a good number of the appear to suffer from a personality disorder of some type or need to be tested for signs of brain activity.
I'd love to see you mix 24-48 tracks of audio, add/tweak fx in realtime, and mix it all down with a CLI based app.
It's impossible. Period. Don't even attempt to argue with it. Then too, a cli app to do such a thing doesn't even exist. They're all GUI.
An OS with a command line in addition to a GUI is good, That's how I administer my winNT/2000 servers (rcmd and SMS) on the job. You need a command line for OS admin duties, but not for the bulk of your regular apps.
Like I said... The apps our designers use have not been ported. They rely heavily on Quark. No Quark, no OSX on our Macs. Photoshop is a different story though, osx native is great, but we have hundreds of PS6 licenses for OS9.x.
At least I don't have to switch to a totally new version with Windows or Linux (to a degree). I have Photoshop 4 for the pc, it works just as well with 2000 as it did with Win95. Photoshop 6 works the same way. Same with Cakewalk Pro Audio 5, worked good with 95, it's excellent with 2000.
I'd try OSX if it ran on my Macs, but it doesn't. I'm not about to trick it into running on a 7600/132 or 9600/300. The whole OSX experience will be blown on a slower machine.
"If you use it, the apps will come."
Yeah, they said that about Linux and BeOS... I still haven't given up on Linux though.
"Wasn't meant to, but that still doesn't mean it can't be done"
Yeah, yeah... We've all heard of running OSX on an old Mac. You get zero support from Apple for doing that though.
BTW, the majority of useful apps still won't run natively under OSX. I simply pointed out music apps since I'm a musician and lots of my fellow musicians use Macs. That's supposedly one of the mac's strong points, but this is not the case as of today. Same goes for graphic design software. No Quark, Photoshop etc. We won't deploy OSX on our designers and art director's macs 'cause the bulk of their apps either don't work or don't run natively.
But hey, iTunes runs natively. and that's all any mac user could ever need... Right?
Lack of Hardware Support: I have 3 Macs, 7600/132, a 9600/300, and a PowerBook 1400c/166. OSX doesn't support these, or -ANY- pre G3 macs.
Period.
To contrast this, for my low end pc's I have an IBM Thinkpad 760XD (p166mmx), an IBM PC330 (p133), and an IBM PC365 (PPro 180). While they'll never run WinXP, they ARE fully capable of running Win2000 (odd, don't you think?). The pc330 has 128MB of ram on it now and Win2000 runs just fine.
Lack of software support - OSX has next to nothing in the way of native professional audio packages (they're coming though). You need to boot into OS9.x to get anything to run properly.
I totally agree with this guy... Here's why.
on
A Linux User Goes Back
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I gave Linux a chance. I gave Linux a lot of my time. I'm all but giving up Linux as a desktop solution.
When I hear of guys using linux everyday, they always talk of doing "real work" with it. I can't do MY "real work" with Linux. I can learn to program C/C++ with it, I can throw up a web site with it, I can protect myself from the outside world with it (my gateway/firewall runs linux), BUT I cannot do what amounts to "real work" in my world.
For me, "real work" consists of the following: Music Sequencing/Audio recording, 2D/3D graphic design, and a bit of Flash animation from time to time. I cannot do any of these with efficiancy under Linux. There is nothing available for sequencing and multi-track audio recording on the level of Cubase VST. There are no audio editing apps that have the sheer expandability that Wavelab and SoundForge have. There is nothing like Bryce5, 3D Studio Max, and TrueSpace. Blender doesn't cut it. PhotoShop rules in my world. The Gimp is nice, but it's a pain to use. Oh, Flash simply doesn't exist under Linux.
That's what "real work" is to lots of computer users. It seems that the Linux Elite forgot that many that use computers could care less about programming. They could care less about shell scripts, perl, and whatnot. They would like ease of use over everything else. They want a GUI, not a CLI for their apps. They want something to install without compiling.
They want an OS they don't have to fight with to use.
Before you even begin to write your elitist rant of a reply, understand this: I'm a systems administrator by day. I've worked for companies where I had to administer over 400 Sun boxes running Sybase by remote and I currently work in an environment with Sun servers, WinNT/2000 servers, and an AS/400. I CAN write shell scripts, I CAN compile apps without a problem, I CAN use Linux for what you may consider "real" work (except C programming, I'm using Linux to learn that), and my gateway is configured to act as a samba fileserver, ftp server, AND webserver. At the end of the day, though, I want to record a new dance tune (check my website for more info on that), I might want to whip up a new picture or whatever I want and I can't use Linux for these things.
Don't get me wrong here, I do like Linux and I'll always keep a hard drive in my machines dedicated to it. But for someone like me, Win2000 is the way to go (I hate Mac OS and I own 3 Macs... anyone wanna buy one?). I love the linux desktops/window managers, especially BlackBox and WindowMaker. I can setup a Linux gateway/router far faster than I can with Win2000. I like the ability to pick and choose what goes onto my machine with nearly unlimited flexibility (can't do that with Windows or MacOS). I like what Linux represents. I just can't use it for my "real work".
It's actually quite simple - the "chip" on the key is nothing more than a resistor. In order to bypass it, you need to find it's value with a simple multi-meter. Once you have that, you need to add a few resistors, to approximate that resistance as closely as possible, to the VATS sensor wire in the ignition column.
Most remote start kits should come with several resistors for just this reason.
BTW, car audio/security/sales was my profession for 6 years. Back in those days, we cursed the big 3 daily for their "new innovations" that made our jobs harder.
ATI did something like this years ago. They had optimized their Rage/Rage Pro drivers for a specific benchmark (can't remember which one at the moment) and all of the magazines that relied on this benchmark had the ATI cards running faster than just about everything out at the time. It wasn't until they started running Quake, Turok, and other games that they started to see the Rage/Rage Pro chips as crap.
Ok... I think it started with the Savage3D and continued through to the Savage2000 chipset. S3(now Sonic Blue) had a reputation for making claims for their products, but never releasing drivers that supported those claims. I, personally, had a Diamond Stealth III with a Savage4 Pro+ chip on board. S3 released drivers pretty much when they felt like it, and never enabled quite a few features that were announced and were on the box for the card. The Savage2000 promised hardware T&L, but shipped with it disabled in the drivers. When they finally enabled it, it proved to be similar to the S3Virge (decelerates 3D!!!). S3 never fixed any of their products and has stopped supporting all of 'em.
He's probably got that same thing against macs as I do - I simply loathe MacOS.
Anyways...
For truely professional software (ie - Cakewalk/Sonar, Cubase, Logic, SoundForge, etc...) you need to stick to win98/ME (since some apps won't run under NT/2000/XP). Cakewalk will run under NT/2000, but many pro audio cards won't work. It was rumored that Cubase and Cakewalk would be ported to Linux, but apparently Steinberg and 12 Tone dropped the projects. I've been able to run Sound Forge 4.5(minus Direct X plugins) with Wine, but it's slower than just running it in Win98. There is also a shortage of Linux drivers for the better audio cards, without them, having good sw is useless.
If any of you wish to check out my recording setup, check out my site @ http://www.geocities.com/labwerx
(oh, BTW, all of the above mentioned sw is available for the mac, I'm not saying that pro stuff isn't available for the mac, but comparing the currently available linux sw to Win98 stuff. )
Slashdot Mirror
This is another thing that bothers me about Linux; most older apps simply do not work on newer distributions. I have a few disks of little "cool" apps from my Windows 3.11 days (circa '94 and 95) that still work with WindowsXP. Hell, I even have DOS apps that still work with XP. The same cannot be said for Linux. It's very true that there are some apps that were built for Dos/3.11/win95 that don't work with XP, but those numbers are NOTHING compared to the numbers of older apps that refuse to run on newer Linux distros. Backwards compatibility is probably going to be the biggest hurdle Linux will have.
Here's what I see being the real show-stoppers for desktop Linux adaptation:
1. Reliance on the CLI: Yes, in a perfect world, everyone would be comfortable with using the CLI to accomplish tasks from installing a driver to reading email to whatever. REALITY, however, is different. The vast majority of Win32 and MacOS users NEVER touch the CLI. No one wants to be bothered with it. The Linux elite's insistance that everything be centered around CLI apps and whatnot is going to prevent Linux uptake. Yes, we should all learn it before diving into Linux, but think about it this way; Apple, with it's BSD powered OSX, does NOT require it's users to know a damned thing about the command line in order to use their OS. It simply works well without it. Of course, power users can get at it and run as many shell scripts as they wish to, but those that don't know about command line stuff are not forced to learn it.
2. Installing new hardware in your PC should not be harder than plugging it in and installing a driver. In all of the years I've been using Linux, I've rarely ever been able to simply install a new card and not have to install something other than a driver. There have been too many times where I have to fish out my install CD's or search the net for some obscure dependancy package, or worse, have the dep already installed, but the driver's installation script not detect it properly. I've pulled out my hair trying to get my little USB webcam (Cool-I-Cam Stylus 1000) to work with GPhoto/Gphoto2 only to give up after weeks of trying (it took less than 5 minutes to get it up and running under Windows 2000). My IOGear USB2 card STILL doesn't work with Linux (the driver is included with Win2000 SP4 and is also available as a tiny download from the IOGear site). Stuff like this annoys the hell out of me. Honestly, I shouldn't have to deal with it and neither should anyone trying to use Linux for the first time. Until hardware installation is fixed, desktop linux will never happen.
3. Apps. I cannot stress how important having GOOD applications is to the average user. Star/Open Office is good, I'll admit that and it's an excellent start in the direction that things should be heading. However, there's simply not enough applications of this caliber. There are no pro-quality audio applications, no Macromedia authoring apps, games are hard to come by IF they're ported to Linux, and nothing that's truely like EZ CD Creator or Nero for CD burning. Until commercial applications start coming over to Linux, we're not going to see many people moving to Linux.
Think of it this way; The Amiga is/was one of the greatest machines ever built and it had the BEST OS of it's day. It's lack of applications (and lack of marketing push) killed it's desktop uptake. In 1990, I knew more people that had inferior PC's than had Amigas and the sole reason was that the apps they needed were not available for the Amiga. Same for the Atari ST, Same for the BeBox. Apps drive adoption, not just the GUI.
4. Elitism. Linux elitism is rampant. If I ask a question in an IRC channel on how to do something in windows, I get a dozen good responses. If I ask a question in #linux on Efnet or a similar channel, I get a bunch of "did you read the man pages?" "RTFM", "Linux is obviously to difficult for you, go back to Windows" or similar responses. Oddly, I don't encounter the level of elitism when looking for help with any other flavor of unix or MacOS (The guys in #SGI/Efnet were particularly helpful when I had a problem reinstalling Irix on my Indy). The attitude that a lot of Linux users display towards newbies will turn off just about anyone to Linux. Kill the attitude, learn some manners, and lend a hand.
Now, before I get flamed, I must let you know that I AM well versed in Linux. I'm currently working as a Unix admin, overseeing a mission-critical, money making production server farm for a Fortune 1000 company. I make my living using Linux, but cannot see having my wife use it for her business (She's a mortgage broker)
Let's see... There are those of us who use a PC for specific tasks (in my case, music composition) that relies on hardware that will not work with any OS other than 9x. Case in point: Any musician using any of the following audio interfaces: Korg 1212 I/O, Korg Oasys, Emagic Audiowerk 8 or Audiowerk 2, or a Pinnacle Multisound Pro. You can't use NT/2000/XP if you happen to use ProTools Free as it only works on 98 and ME. There's a lot more out there that will not run with XP/2000 (Cubase 3.7 for instance) that works just fine with 9x.
The company I work for now has a number of apps that we keep 9x and NT boxes around for. Custom apps may or may not run on XP, it's a crapshoot.
Sometimes it's not a matter of being scared, it's about what works with what.
The Atari Stacy predates the PowerBook 100's 1991 release by 2 years and it had a built-in trackball as it's pointer. The STBook had a "disc" type pointer and was released in 1990. So... not only was Atari first in giving us a laptop with a built-in pointer, it inadvertently gave us the first REAL Mac laptop since there was a Mac emulator cart for the ST that would also work on the STacy (I know the mac portable was introduced in 89 like the Stacy, but the Stacy is just better).
"...but 5 years from now
everyone will be running free GNU on their 200 MIPS, 64M SPARCstation-5."
Andy Tanenbaum, Creator of Minix
30 Jan 92 13:44:34 GMT
Andy wrote this during the "Linux is Obsolete" debate between Linus Torvalds and himself back in '92.
You've been able to make "pro" quality recordings with a PC/Mac for a number of years now. ProTools, Cubase VST, Logic Audio, and Cakewalk Pro Audio have been around for a while now and so has pro-quality audio cards. I sold this stuff from 1996 to 1998, and while the quality and capabilities have dramatically improved over the years, the basic functionality has always been there.
Personally, I use a PC for my music. I have a custom built PC (Duron 1.1GHz, 768MB RAM, 4 ATA100 drives, CDRW, etc...) with all of my software installed for music (Cubase VST5.1, Reason 2, Rebirth 2, etc...) and a Dell Inspiron 5000 (P3-700, 384MB RAM, 12GB drive, internal CDRW) for mobile music work. I have the same applications installed on the laptop as I do on the desktop so that work I start on the laptop can always be finished on the desktop.
Witte said "Like any other company, Ford Motor is looking at Linux, primarily in the application space. We presently have an enterprise-wide agreement with Microsoft to handle our collaborative solutions. We aren't contemplating using Linux in this area, and don't contemplate doing that in the foreseeable future."
According to the job offers I had to be a part of the team to switch Ford over to Red Hat, I say that someone is either lying to protect the few M$ contracts that will remain, or is completely clueless to what's going on in the IT dept.
Back in January and early Feb., I responded to half a dozen ads looking for Red Hat administrators for the project. 4Serve, HotLinuxJobs (Where it's still posted!), and a few other contract companies had this listed. Alas, I'm not of the caliber of admin they were seeking, so I didn't get the job, but I tried.
Back in the 80's, the indie coders released their games either on their own or in a magazine. Anyone old enough should remember walking into Inacomp or something like that and seeing the latest indie release hanging on a rack with a Dot Matrix printed manual, hand drawn art, a single 5 1/4" floppy all neatly sealed in a ziplock bag. Anyone like me should remember typing in the latest game from your favorite computing platform magazine (for me, that was Antic, Analog, and Compute!).
I remember coding my own little games back in my Atari 800XL days. Most of my games were written in TurboBasic with little ML routines I picked up from various games published in magazines of the day (or larger engines like PM Magic published in Compute!). I've only had the courage to submit 2 games of mine to the large companies from back then, and (of course) my games weren't "polished" enough to get picked up.
I've since left coding to pursue sys administration, but have always had a little something in the back of my head that wants to finish one of my old games, but updated for todays machines. I think that's what drew me to Linux. The community reminded me of the indie gamer developers comunity of the 80's. Going to small "conventions" or local users groups, meeting the guy that coded your favorite indie game, and sharing code and tricks with others is a lot like what happens in the Linux community today. I've already decided that if I ever get back into developing, the games I write will be for Linux and done entirely by myself (I'm also a musican as well as an artist) and will most likely be freeware or shareware.
BAH!!! Forgot Big Trouble in Little China!!!! I swear, me and my little sis have watched this movie well over 100 times.
Blinker's Spy Spotter - British movie from the early 70's that ran on Spotlight in the early 80's. Good flick back then.
Most of the movies on my list I saw in excess of 50 times each on HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, TMC, or (when it was around) Spotlight. Me and my younger sister had loads of time to watch flicks when we were young, as a result, we can shamelessly recite entire movie scripts with few errors.
Red Dawn - I still watch this whenever it comes on
Strange Brew - I own this one.
The Sure Thing - was just on a couple of months ago, I stopped working on a server build to watch it. Introduced me to "shotgunning".
Wierd Science - "He don't even got a license leeeeeesaaaaa"
Body Double - my sister, my brother, and myself found this movie one night at about 3am on Skinemax. It's not a bad flick... Honestly.
Conan the Barbarian - I still love this movie.
Buckaroo Bonzai in the 5th Dimension - We watched this movie over and over until we couldn't watch it any more.
Howard the Duck - we were all fans of the comic. Then this came along. We liked it back then, but no longer.
The Manhattan Project - Still a good flick, if a bit unrealistic.
Dreamscape - the first PG-13 movie ever. We used to daydream about stuff like this.
There's more than that, but these were the flicks that stick out.
What this article forgets (and this is actually kinda major) is that the artist usually don't see anything until all of the costs involved in making the album are paid for. What this means is that the band gets 15% of the NET profit not gross sales. Everyone has to get paid before they see a dime.
I bought a magnavox VCR 8 years ago, had it not been for my kids knocking it off of the tv, it would still be in use now.
Sony used the term "MegaBass" back in the late 80's and early 90's and it meant something. I bought a sony boom box in 1991 that had a full range speaker on it, but also had a tiny subwoofer on each speaker (CFD 750? I can't remember the model number now). That radio could shake things in my dorm room and could get complaints from down the hall, everyone on my floor wanted one. This from a $300 radio. Nowadays, "MegaBass" means an EQ bump. nothing more.
In the late 80's early 90's, Sony and a few other manufacturers began making bookshelf systems. They all had impeccable build quality, great sound and little in the way of "flashy" features. Yamaha had a bookshelf system that was unbelieveable, it was the first time I had seen Active Servo Technology, the thing had gorgeous bass from a tiny system. Bookshelf systems these days are full of garbage. Dancing lights, 200Wx2 I.L.S. rated power (If Lightning Strikes) that's about as gutless as it comes, a million speakers, but they still manage to sound awful, and terrible build quality.
These days, the manufacturers are interested in the bottom line, not quality. Move more units and make more money.
MacOS was designed to allow the computer illiterate to use computers. People that couldn't register in theire brains "don't take the floppy out before the red light goes off" were the types that MacOS was designed for. Hardly a sign of the intellectual elite here.
I work with hundreds of mac users on a daily basis. They're all a bunch of artsy fartsy types, but none appear "smarter". Matter of fact, a good number of the appear to suffer from a personality disorder of some type or need to be tested for signs of brain activity.
I'd love to see you mix 24-48 tracks of audio, add/tweak fx in realtime, and mix it all down with a CLI based app.
It's impossible. Period. Don't even attempt to argue with it. Then too, a cli app to do such a thing doesn't even exist. They're all GUI.
An OS with a command line in addition to a GUI is good, That's how I administer my winNT/2000 servers (rcmd and SMS) on the job. You need a command line for OS admin duties, but not for the bulk of your regular apps.
Like I said... The apps our designers use have not been ported. They rely heavily on Quark. No Quark, no OSX on our Macs. Photoshop is a different story though, osx native is great, but we have hundreds of PS6 licenses for OS9.x.
At least I don't have to switch to a totally new version with Windows or Linux (to a degree). I have Photoshop 4 for the pc, it works just as well with 2000 as it did with Win95. Photoshop 6 works the same way. Same with Cakewalk Pro Audio 5, worked good with 95, it's excellent with 2000.
I'd try OSX if it ran on my Macs, but it doesn't. I'm not about to trick it into running on a 7600/132 or 9600/300. The whole OSX experience will be blown on a slower machine.
"If you use it, the apps will come."
Yeah, they said that about Linux and BeOS... I still haven't given up on Linux though.
"Wasn't meant to, but that still doesn't mean it
can't be done"
Yeah, yeah... We've all heard of running OSX on an old Mac. You get zero support from Apple for doing that though.
BTW, the majority of useful apps still won't run natively under OSX. I simply pointed out music apps since I'm a musician and lots of my fellow musicians use Macs. That's supposedly one of the mac's strong points, but this is not the case as of today. Same goes for graphic design software. No Quark, Photoshop etc. We won't deploy OSX on our designers and art director's macs 'cause the bulk of their apps either don't work or don't run natively.
But hey, iTunes runs natively. and that's all any mac user could ever need... Right?
Lack of Hardware Support: I have 3 Macs, 7600/132, a 9600/300, and a PowerBook 1400c/166. OSX doesn't support these, or -ANY- pre G3 macs.
Period.
To contrast this, for my low end pc's I have an IBM Thinkpad 760XD (p166mmx), an IBM PC330 (p133), and an IBM PC365 (PPro 180). While they'll never run WinXP, they ARE fully capable of running Win2000 (odd, don't you think?). The pc330 has 128MB of ram on it now and Win2000 runs just fine.
Lack of software support - OSX has next to nothing in the way of native professional audio packages (they're coming though). You need to boot into OS9.x to get anything to run properly.
I gave Linux a chance. I gave Linux a lot of my time. I'm all but giving up Linux as a desktop solution.
When I hear of guys using linux everyday, they always talk of doing "real work" with it. I can't do MY "real work" with Linux. I can learn to program C/C++ with it, I can throw up a web site with it, I can protect myself from the outside world with it (my gateway/firewall runs linux), BUT I cannot do what amounts to "real work" in my world.
For me, "real work" consists of the following: Music Sequencing/Audio recording, 2D/3D graphic design, and a bit of Flash animation from time to time. I cannot do any of these with efficiancy under Linux. There is nothing available for sequencing and multi-track audio recording on the level of Cubase VST. There are no audio editing apps that have the sheer expandability that Wavelab and SoundForge have. There is nothing like Bryce5, 3D Studio Max, and TrueSpace. Blender doesn't cut it. PhotoShop rules in my world. The Gimp is nice, but it's a pain to use. Oh, Flash simply doesn't exist under Linux.
That's what "real work" is to lots of computer users. It seems that the Linux Elite forgot that many that use computers could care less about programming. They could care less about shell scripts, perl, and whatnot. They would like ease of use over everything else. They want a GUI, not a CLI for their apps. They want something to install without compiling.
They want an OS they don't have to fight with to use.
Before you even begin to write your elitist rant of a reply, understand this: I'm a systems administrator by day. I've worked for companies where I had to administer over 400 Sun boxes running Sybase by remote and I currently work in an environment with Sun servers, WinNT/2000 servers, and an AS/400. I CAN write shell scripts, I CAN compile apps without a problem, I CAN use Linux for what you may consider "real" work (except C programming, I'm using Linux to learn that), and my gateway is configured to act as a samba fileserver, ftp server, AND webserver. At the end of the day, though, I want to record a new dance tune (check my website for more info on that), I might want to whip up a new picture or whatever I want and I can't use Linux for these things.
Don't get me wrong here, I do like Linux and I'll always keep a hard drive in my machines dedicated to it. But for someone like me, Win2000 is the way to go (I hate Mac OS and I own 3 Macs... anyone wanna buy one?). I love the linux desktops/window managers, especially BlackBox and WindowMaker. I can setup a Linux gateway/router far faster than I can with Win2000. I like the ability to pick and choose what goes onto my machine with nearly unlimited flexibility (can't do that with Windows or MacOS). I like what Linux represents. I just can't use it for my "real work".
Back in the mid 80's Edmond Scientific catalogs had Metric wall clocks listed for sale. Didn't catch on then, prolly won't now.
nuff said.
It's actually quite simple - the "chip" on the key is nothing more than a resistor. In order to bypass it, you need to find it's value with a simple multi-meter. Once you have that, you need to add a few resistors, to approximate that resistance as closely as possible, to the VATS sensor wire in the ignition column.
Most remote start kits should come with several resistors for just this reason.
BTW, car audio/security/sales was my profession for 6 years. Back in those days, we cursed the big 3 daily for their "new innovations" that made our jobs harder.
ATI did something like this years ago. They had optimized their Rage/Rage Pro drivers for a specific benchmark (can't remember which one at the moment) and all of the magazines that relied on this benchmark had the ATI cards running faster than just about everything out at the time. It wasn't until they started running Quake, Turok, and other games that they started to see the Rage/Rage Pro chips as crap.
Ok... I think it started with the Savage3D and continued through to the Savage2000 chipset. S3(now Sonic Blue) had a reputation for making claims for their products, but never releasing drivers that supported those claims. I, personally, had a Diamond Stealth III with a Savage4 Pro+ chip on board. S3 released drivers pretty much when they felt like it, and never enabled quite a few features that were announced and were on the box for the card. The Savage2000 promised hardware T&L, but shipped with it disabled in the drivers. When they finally enabled it, it proved to be similar to the S3Virge (decelerates 3D!!!). S3 never fixed any of their products and has stopped supporting all of 'em.
He's probably got that same thing against macs as I do - I simply loathe MacOS.
Anyways...
For truely professional software (ie - Cakewalk/Sonar, Cubase, Logic, SoundForge, etc...) you need to stick to win98/ME (since some apps won't run under NT/2000/XP). Cakewalk will run under NT/2000, but many pro audio cards won't work. It was rumored that Cubase and Cakewalk would be ported to Linux, but apparently Steinberg and 12 Tone dropped the projects. I've been able to run Sound Forge 4.5(minus Direct X plugins) with Wine, but it's slower than just running it in Win98. There is also a shortage of Linux drivers for the better audio cards, without them, having good sw is useless.
If any of you wish to check out my recording setup, check out my site @ http://www.geocities.com/labwerx
(oh, BTW, all of the above mentioned sw is available for the mac, I'm not saying that pro stuff isn't available for the mac, but comparing the currently available linux sw to Win98 stuff. )