Amen brother. I don't use their distro on my personal boxen, but RedHat has been and continues to be very, very good to the community. They deserve mucho kudos from one and all.
Sheesh, if and when they finally dump that RPM crap I might actually use it some day.
Good article and it helps explain some Microsoft behavior as concerns Linux. MS knows it will eventually have to give away Windows for free, hence the push into Xbox and the online services, etc. They're wondering how they're gonna pay the bills five years from now.
The interesting question is this: Would you use MS product even if it's free vs. Free/OS developed software? Now we're talking about quality vs. cost. Draw your own conclusions.
May you live in interesting times.
Re:Important Information
on
IMSAI Series Two
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
Dude, find that person from your childhood who smacked you in the head with a mallet and sue 'em -- you'll be set for life!
Yes, I have to agree with you -- having my home directory trashed would be most nasty. I deal with this potential by:
1. Backing up my home directories (yes, directories, read on) regularly.
2. Browser and ftp are done as a separate users from my main account. Any files I pull down are checked in a temp directory in the phony user directories first, then moved to where they belong (use that su thingy -- works great:)
3. I don't run MS product on my machines unless I absolutely have too, which isn't very often (thank you Free/OSS programmers!)
4. I'm rather picky about what I pull down into my machines and it's extremely rare that I'll install and use a binary program; 99% of the time I just do the tarball thing (it's easier than doing RPM these days - autoconf, etc.)
[NOTE: Of course, as a newbie I must have trashed my first three systems within the first six months, but it didn't take a virus to do that -- newbies running as root are most dangerous!:) ]
Anyway, my condolences to all those syssy admins out there in RL who have to deal with MS product daily: You folks are the Bitches of the Beast, as I'm sure you know. *comf*
If I remember my ancient theology correctly, the ancient Hindus believed that the universe was a god which cycled through periods of consolidation and disintegration in order to explore the many ways it could manifest, thus learning more about itself.
With the projection capabilities of these, they might be useful in many ways. Two parallel lines of these, offset and calibrated, could make a good "in the air" screen. Add multiple rows and you could get a really nice holographic type of display.
I'm looking forward to following this technology, hot stuff!
desperation! What? MS can't sell their crap on merit? MS can't compete with the poor little commie hackers on the basis of quality and cost? MS has to FUD (woo, new verb!) to make the competition look worse in order to look better in comparison?
Yes, the end is in sight, boyos! In five years it won't be "MicroSoft" it'll be "MicroWho?"
WooHoo! Maybe Bill and Steve will be a gratious losers and buy the beer for a world-wide victory party and hand out "Micro Who?" t-shirts.
...would be to have a general agreement drafted by the populace (users/customers) which serves much as the GPL servers us, call it the GTOS. The users/customers (the populace) can say to the business community, "We want you to use the General Terms of Service and we won't be your customers unless/until you do."
Those businesses which give the customers/populace what they want get the customers, the others go out of business.
By using this type of mechanism the populace can determine the terms of service for information usage. We obviously need a way to cut the U.S. government out of the equasion since they only seem interested in serving up what their campaign donors want and the rest of us be damned.
...provided true game-enhancing functionality is included. Of course to get this, games would have to be initially designed with such products in mind to truely reach their potential. An example might be "universal characters" in a distributed MUD or MMORPG, where instead of the monolithic games we see today, users can move their character(s) between nodes (cities? nations?) of vast, distributed games, nodes built by individuals or small groups of individuals.
Where do the phones come in? Easy to move your character(s) at a moments notice, do some skill/spell botting whilst on the bus/toilet/meeting table, etc. Could also make it easy to take your character to your friends house/PS2 for a session. With net connected systems, the phones could allow for certain gaming aspects to be done remotely, in game chatting for example (MUDs beat the hell outta IRC for in-context chatting environments.)
Recently I was fortunate enough to be able to play with (test) some RAMdisk products from a company called Platypus Technologies (do a Google search for platypus linux) on Solaris workstations and servers. And of course I just had to try them out on the Slackware boxes too.
These Platypus drives are PCI cards and have dual power source ability; they plug into the wall as a secondary supply and get power off the PCI bus as primary. Very cool to be able to shut down the machine to do whatever and still have your RAMdrive ready to go upon boot. Feature wise, they use expensive RAM and the manufacturer strongly suggests you not just grab any ole ECC to stick in the card but order from them (probably has to do with the grade of RAM they use in their cards.)
Performance was absolutely unreal: more than twice the speed of SCSI, in fact, practically as fast as the PCI bus in the machine will allow. I used the cards briefly while doing a a small database conversion project and was totally bummed when I had to send the RAMdrives home. *sniff*
If you have to do anything requiring lots of I/O (like database,) you _really_ do want one of these things or something like it.
Cost-wise they are a little spendy up front (even when compared to a SCSI setup with controller and drives) but if you are at all measuring time, then everything else looses the comparison; if you are measuring lost data on dead drives, the time required to make many redundant backups to avoid lost data on dead drives, the time required to shut down and swap out dead drives, etc. -- RAM wins! Just be sure to factor in the cost of quality UPS units because they truely are part of the cost (read necessary.)
Hook up a Qikdrive2 with one GB RAM, plug it into your UPS, make sure it gets backed up to the hard drive regularly (plenty of tools to do that) and I promise you that you will not want to be without one. If you have the resources, get one of the big ones (6 or 8 GB RAM, I forget.) Look on CDW, search Platypus for prices. The Platypus site has links to purchasing sites.
As always, be sure drivers/modules are available which will work for you. Ack, I'm rambling.
2. You've never used a stable OS according to your reply, so you have no basis for comparison to anything other than the toy OSes from MS.
3. XP supports the soundcard (SB Live), it apparently just hiccuped and took down the entire system, which is my point. Does the same thing with video drivers for my Nvidia GeForce3: One little hiccup from one driver and the whole system crashes. This is horrible design work at a very fundamental level of the OS.
4. If you've ever used a stable OS, you know just how truly _bad_ MS product is in comparison. A stable OS will _not_ completely crash just because the sound driver and the kernel don't like what the other has to say.
5. Get yourself a real OS and I assure you within a short period of time you'll get used to quality: It's a good thing.
Sure I have! Why, just this past weekend I booted up by dual-boot box (Win XP Pro/Slackware 8.0) and within five minutes, XP bluescreened and shut itself down. Why? It apparently had an issue with the sound driver. The whole system shuts down (i.e., crashes) because of one problem driver? MS, have a free clue: THIS IS NOT ACCEPTABLE!
I've been using XP Pro since it came out (gaming) and I've come to the conclusion that MS XP is just the same old MS shit covered up with a face lift and the usual _huge_ pile of MS marketing bs. More stable? No it's not. More secure? No it's not. More value for the cost? Not even close, just a big, frustrating waste of time.
Having recently purchased a Sony PS2 and a Hauppauge TV card, I now play games in a window under Linux, either window size or full screen. Works great, Devil May Cry is a blast, no need to put up with crappy MS OS just to play a game.
Good bye MS, no more need for "MicroSlop" on my machines.
In the BBS heyday (1986-1990) abuses of the systems led to most of the sysops requiring positive identification of users _before_ they were allowed to have an account on the system. Persons wishing to have an account often had to talk voice with the sysop and sometimes provide a drivers license number or other such ID.
The point? Think about the above the next time you portscan some anonymous person's networked box. Government is under fantastic pressure from individuals, groups (business in particular) to provide for a secure environment (which is governments primary job, btw.)
The result? What better way to ensure the responsible behaviour of individuals and groups than to make them identify themselves.
is very, very good. Granted, watching it on your laptop whilst throwing weiners and rice at 30,000 feet is gonna get you kicked off the plane at the very next stop, but you'll have a good time all the same.
My personal research (impromptu focus group of one) suggests babes really like guys who throw rice and weiners at 30,000 feet, so give it a go dudes! Just be careful where you aim your water gun.
...using Slackware boxen with WindowMaker, CLI from aterm, wterm or other term -- all else is irrelevant in a GUI.
Those dependent upon desktop manglers (Gnome, KDE, etc.) just MS Windows Wienies pretending to be leet: May RPM wreck your box even sooner than it would otherwise! Then you learn value of knowing vs. pretending to know, glasshoppa.
I suspect the end result of this type of market control via repressive laws would actually harm the commercial software folks far more than it might annoy free programmers: The free programmer can simply say in his docs, "This software will do harm to your system" and be free of potential liability since the user has made the choice to use the software knowing it can/may do harm.
The commercial software folks would probably see their customers flock to free software whilst hoping to avoid such heavy-handed legal control of their businesses.
Personally, I doubt this type of legislation will get past the lawyers/legislators in any state.
I was one of those un-warned folks who picked it up on a fluke whilst in the bookstore. Walked out, caught my bus home (an hour-long ride) and started reading. Ten minutes later people are asking me if I need assistance: I'm laughing so hard I can't breathe!
The Deliverator and Y.T. gave me one of the best laughs of my life, but I do wish it weren't on the bus in front of all those people. *blush*
As a person who tests bleeding-edge hardware against the four major Linux commercial distros daily (and others as well, but mainly the big four - Caldera, SuSE, RedHat and TurboLinux) I strongly agree with the NYT article: Linux is fragging to the point of looking like a massive gibbing in a Quake fest.
No longer can the user be sure that any generic code will work on any one distribution. No longer can the user even be sure the basic functionality of the kernel will work consistently from one distribution to another.
The source of all this incompatibility? How do I loathe these commercial distros, so let me count the ways!
Lack of strong, pro-active support for the LSB by the commercial distros: Lip service spewed simply to avoid getting flamed doesn't quite serve the purpose of getting a solid LSB. The commercial vendors really don't want a LSB, at least their marketing folks don't: One very strong concept in marketing is DIFFERENTIATION! You need to make your product different enough and drone on about the "superior" aspects of the variety to get the consumer to buy the product.
Money counts more than quality. The commercial vendors have to be concerned with money first and their products show it. Redhat is buggy crap when running X; Caldera's install won't even let you make a boot floppy during install (hey, you know those newbies just gotta love that); SuSE has so much proprietary patching done to their kernels that I often can't get common drivers to work; and the list goes on and on and on....
The frickin' long-term libc vs. glibc6 mess. This has opened the door to all sorts of opportunities for the differentiators to make trouble. Any LSB should deal with this ASAP! Perhaps dual-library cross compilers as a standard feature? Make the effort to ensure glibc6 is fully inclusive of libc5?
To sum it up: The commercial distros are desktop manager happy and want the entire Linux world to look and act like Microsoft product, apparently to the point of being sloppy, unreliable crap just like their favored model. The commercial distros care far more about making money than they do providing a quality product. One commercial variety of Linux will not be consistent in the way it works and the programs the user can use with it when compared with another commercial variety of Linux.
What do I use? My control testing box is Slackware-based, I don't use either one of the slow, and unreliable desktop managers (both Gnome and Kde sucketh in a big, bad, buggy kinda way) except when I'm testing X/video related stuff. I've tried using both Gnome and Kde, they are both buggy, unreliable and offer very little functionality for the loss of speed and increase in instability that comes with them. IMHO, both are still beta-stage code.
A prediction? If there isn't a strong LSB in place soon, Microsoft will continue to dominate the Desktop, will make a turn-around in server space, and Linux will have been a flash-in-the-pan. Why? Because users won't abandon one buggy, unreliable mess for another: Better a known evil than an unknown evil, to paraphrase an old saying.
Be prepared Linux-folk, the commercial vendors will try every way possible to either sink the LSB or render it a toothless (i.e., worthless) tiger because it is not in their best interest, which is making money.
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Amen brother. I don't use their distro on my personal boxen, but RedHat has been and continues to be very, very good to the community. They deserve mucho kudos from one and all.
Sheesh, if and when they finally dump that RPM crap I might actually use it some day.
.
Good article and it helps explain some Microsoft behavior as concerns Linux. MS knows it will eventually have to give away Windows for free, hence the push into Xbox and the online services, etc. They're wondering how they're gonna pay the bills five years from now.
The interesting question is this: Would you use MS product even if it's free vs. Free/OS developed software? Now we're talking about quality vs. cost. Draw your own conclusions.
May you live in interesting times.
Dude, find that person from your childhood who
smacked you in the head with a mallet and sue
'em -- you'll be set for life!
Yes, I have to agree with you -- having my home directory trashed would be most nasty. I deal with this potential by:
:)
:) ]
1. Backing up my home directories (yes, directories, read on) regularly.
2. Browser and ftp are done as a separate users from my main account. Any files I pull down are checked in a temp directory in the phony user directories first, then moved to where they belong (use that su thingy -- works great
3. I don't run MS product on my machines unless I absolutely have too, which isn't very often (thank you Free/OSS programmers!)
4. I'm rather picky about what I pull down into my machines and it's extremely rare that I'll install and use a binary program; 99% of the time I just do the tarball thing (it's easier than doing RPM these days - autoconf, etc.)
[NOTE: Of course, as a newbie I must have trashed my first three systems within the first six months, but it didn't take a virus to do that -- newbies running as root are most dangerous!
Anyway, my condolences to all those syssy admins out there in RL who have to deal with MS product daily: You folks are the Bitches of the Beast, as I'm sure you know. *comf*
If I remember my ancient theology correctly, the ancient Hindus believed that the universe was a god which cycled through periods of consolidation and disintegration in order to explore the many ways it could manifest, thus learning more about itself.
An analog computer of sorts, I suppose.
With the projection capabilities of these, they might be useful in many ways. Two parallel lines of these, offset and calibrated, could make a good "in the air" screen. Add multiple rows and you could get a really nice holographic type of display.
I'm looking forward to following this technology, hot stuff!
...now I gotta move to France. Shit.
Thank the gods and Patrick V. for Slackware.
If you're feeling really evil, give her a list of MUDs.
:)
I've seen a fair amount of information over the past year concerning IBM and Autonomic computing and so I have a few questions:
/. community to pummel?
1. How much are the researchers involving the Linux OS?
2. What languages are being used to build these programs?
3. Is the modeling based on a human-type, multi-level consciousness?
4. Can you provide some related links for the
Thanks from a happy IBM customer.
In addition to the comments above, you might also consider doing a quick study on how languages develop over time, especially English.
desperation! What? MS can't sell their crap on merit? MS can't compete with the poor little commie hackers on the basis of quality and cost? MS has to FUD (woo, new verb!) to make the competition look worse in order to look better in comparison?
Yes, the end is in sight, boyos! In five years it won't be "MicroSoft" it'll be "MicroWho?"
WooHoo! Maybe Bill and Steve will be a gratious losers and buy the beer for a world-wide victory party and hand out "Micro Who?" t-shirts.
...would be to have a general agreement drafted by the populace (users/customers) which serves much as the GPL servers us, call it the GTOS. The users/customers (the populace) can say to the business community, "We want you to use the General Terms of Service and we won't be your customers unless/until you do."
Those businesses which give the customers/populace what they want get the customers, the others go out of business.
By using this type of mechanism the populace can determine the terms of service for information usage. We obviously need a way to cut the U.S. government out of the equasion since they only seem interested in serving up what their campaign donors want and the rest of us be damned.
Just a thought.
...provided true game-enhancing functionality is included. Of course to get this, games would have to be initially designed with such products in mind to truely reach their potential. An example might be "universal characters" in a distributed MUD or MMORPG, where instead of the monolithic games we see today, users can move their character(s) between nodes (cities? nations?) of vast, distributed games, nodes built by individuals or small groups of individuals.
Where do the phones come in? Easy to move your character(s) at a moments notice, do some skill/spell botting whilst on the bus/toilet/meeting table, etc. Could also make it easy to take your character to your friends house/PS2 for a session. With net connected systems, the phones could allow for certain gaming aspects to be done remotely, in game chatting for example (MUDs beat the hell outta IRC for in-context chatting environments.)
Just some thoughts.
...if you think people who run Win XP are going to either notice or even care. Truth is, sheep get shorn.
Recently I was fortunate enough to be able to play with (test) some RAMdisk products from a company called Platypus Technologies (do a Google search for platypus linux) on Solaris workstations and servers. And of course I just had to try them out on the Slackware boxes too.
These Platypus drives are PCI cards and have dual power source ability; they plug into the wall as a secondary supply and get power off the PCI bus as primary. Very cool to be able to shut down the machine to do whatever and still have your RAMdrive ready to go upon boot. Feature wise, they use expensive RAM and the manufacturer strongly suggests you not just grab any ole ECC to stick in the card but order from them (probably has to do with the grade of RAM they use in their cards.)
Performance was absolutely unreal: more than twice the speed of SCSI, in fact, practically as fast as the PCI bus in the machine will allow. I used the cards briefly while doing a a small database conversion project and was totally bummed when I had to send the RAMdrives home. *sniff*
If you have to do anything requiring lots of I/O (like database,) you _really_ do want one of these things or something like it.
Cost-wise they are a little spendy up front (even when compared to a SCSI setup with controller and drives) but if you are at all measuring time, then everything else looses the comparison; if you are measuring lost data on dead drives, the time required to make many redundant backups to avoid lost data on dead drives, the time required to shut down and swap out dead drives, etc. -- RAM wins! Just be sure to factor in the cost of quality UPS units because they truely are part of the cost (read necessary.)
Hook up a Qikdrive2 with one GB RAM, plug it into your UPS, make sure it gets backed up to the hard drive regularly (plenty of tools to do that) and I promise you that you will not want to be without one. If you have the resources, get one of the big ones (6 or 8 GB RAM, I forget.) Look on CDW, search Platypus for prices. The Platypus site has links to purchasing sites.
As always, be sure drivers/modules are available which will work for you. Ack, I'm rambling.
statehood?
:)
Just a suggestion.
1. I was/am speaking for myself.
2. You've never used a stable OS according to your reply, so you have no basis for comparison to anything other than the toy OSes from MS.
3. XP supports the soundcard (SB Live), it apparently just hiccuped and took down the entire system, which is my point. Does the same thing with video drivers for my Nvidia GeForce3: One little hiccup from one driver and the whole system crashes. This is horrible design work at a very fundamental level of the OS.
4. If you've ever used a stable OS, you know just how truly _bad_ MS product is in comparison. A stable OS will _not_ completely crash just because the sound driver and the kernel don't like what the other has to say.
5. Get yourself a real OS and I assure you within a short period of time you'll get used to quality: It's a good thing.
Sure I have! Why, just this past weekend I booted up by dual-boot box (Win XP Pro/Slackware 8.0) and within five minutes, XP bluescreened and shut itself down. Why? It apparently had an issue with the sound driver. The whole system shuts down (i.e., crashes) because of one problem driver? MS, have a free clue: THIS IS NOT ACCEPTABLE!
I've been using XP Pro since it came out (gaming) and I've come to the conclusion that MS XP is just the same old MS shit covered up with a face lift and the usual _huge_ pile of MS marketing bs. More stable? No it's not. More secure? No it's not. More value for the cost? Not even close, just a big, frustrating waste of time.
Having recently purchased a Sony PS2 and a Hauppauge TV card, I now play games in a window under Linux, either window size or full screen. Works great, Devil May Cry is a blast, no need to put up with crappy MS OS just to play a game.
Good bye MS, no more need for "MicroSlop" on my machines.
In the BBS heyday (1986-1990) abuses of the systems led to most of the sysops requiring positive identification of users _before_ they were allowed to have an account on the system. Persons wishing to have an account often had to talk voice with the sysop and sometimes provide a drivers license number or other such ID.
The point? Think about the above the next time you portscan some anonymous person's networked box. Government is under fantastic pressure from individuals, groups (business in particular) to provide for a secure environment (which is governments primary job, btw.)
The result? What better way to ensure the responsible behaviour of individuals and groups than to make them identify themselves.
is very, very good. Granted, watching it on your laptop whilst throwing weiners and rice at 30,000 feet is gonna get you kicked off the plane at the very next stop, but you'll have a good time all the same.
My personal research (impromptu focus group of one) suggests babes really like guys who throw rice and weiners at 30,000 feet, so give it a go dudes! Just be careful where you aim your water gun.
...using Slackware boxen with WindowMaker, CLI from aterm, wterm or other term -- all else is irrelevant in a GUI.
Those dependent upon desktop manglers (Gnome, KDE, etc.) just MS Windows Wienies pretending to be leet: May RPM wreck your box even sooner than it would otherwise! Then you learn value of knowing vs. pretending to know, glasshoppa.
I suspect the end result of this type of market
control via repressive laws would actually harm
the commercial software folks far more than it
might annoy free programmers: The free programmer
can simply say in his docs, "This software will
do harm to your system" and be free of potential
liability since the user has made the choice to
use the software knowing it can/may do harm.
The commercial software folks would probably see
their customers flock to free software whilst
hoping to avoid such heavy-handed legal control
of their businesses.
Personally, I doubt this type of legislation will
get past the lawyers/legislators in any state.
I was one of those un-warned folks who picked it up on a fluke whilst in the bookstore. Walked out, caught my bus home (an hour-long ride) and started reading. Ten minutes later people are asking me if I need assistance: I'm laughing so hard I can't breathe!
The Deliverator and Y.T. gave me one of the best laughs of my life, but I do wish it weren't on the bus in front of all those people. *blush*
I don't read Stephenson on the bus anymore.
As a person who tests bleeding-edge hardware against the four major Linux commercial distros daily (and others as well, but mainly the big four - Caldera, SuSE, RedHat and TurboLinux) I strongly agree with the NYT article: Linux is fragging to the point of looking like a massive gibbing in a Quake fest.
No longer can the user be sure that any generic code will work on any one distribution. No longer can the user even be sure the basic functionality of the kernel will work consistently from one distribution to another.
The source of all this incompatibility? How do I loathe these commercial distros, so let me count the ways!
Lack of strong, pro-active support for the LSB
by the commercial distros: Lip service spewed
simply to avoid getting flamed doesn't quite
serve the purpose of getting a solid LSB.
The commercial vendors really don't want a LSB,
at least their marketing folks don't: One very
strong concept in marketing is DIFFERENTIATION!
You need to make your product different enough
and drone on about the "superior" aspects of
the variety to get the consumer to buy the
product.
Money counts more than quality. The commercial
vendors have to be concerned with money first
and their products show it. Redhat is buggy
crap when running X; Caldera's install won't
even let you make a boot floppy during install
(hey, you know those newbies just gotta love
that); SuSE has so much proprietary patching
done to their kernels that I often can't get
common drivers to work; and the list goes on
and on and on....
The frickin' long-term libc vs. glibc6 mess.
This has opened the door to all sorts of
opportunities for the differentiators to make
trouble. Any LSB should deal with this ASAP!
Perhaps dual-library cross compilers as a
standard feature? Make the effort to ensure
glibc6 is fully inclusive of libc5?
To sum it up: The commercial distros are desktop manager happy and want the entire Linux world to look and act like Microsoft product, apparently to the point of being sloppy, unreliable crap just like their favored model. The commercial distros care far more about making money than they do providing a quality product. One commercial variety of Linux will not be consistent in the way it works and the programs the user can use with it when compared with another commercial variety of Linux.
What do I use? My control testing box is Slackware-based, I don't use either one of the slow, and unreliable desktop managers (both Gnome and Kde sucketh in a big, bad, buggy kinda way) except when I'm testing X/video related stuff. I've tried using both Gnome and Kde, they are both buggy, unreliable and offer very little functionality for the loss of speed and increase in instability that comes with them. IMHO, both are still beta-stage code.
A prediction? If there isn't a strong LSB in place
soon, Microsoft will continue to dominate the Desktop, will make a turn-around in server space, and Linux will have been a flash-in-the-pan. Why?
Because users won't abandon one buggy, unreliable mess for another: Better a known evil than an unknown evil, to paraphrase an old saying.
Be prepared Linux-folk, the commercial vendors will try every way possible to either sink the LSB or render it a toothless (i.e., worthless) tiger because it is not in their best interest, which is making money.