I found this at http://www.digitalcentury.com/encyclo/update/mits. html , a link off of the site poseted above.
Meanwhile, the MITS 4K boards being distributed to users weren't working. Bill Gates told Roberts that the boards were inadequate, but Roberts insisted that MITS keep sending them out. This created a great deal of frustration in the users, and eventually an out-of-work hobbyist named Bob Marsh decided to create his own boards. He started a company called Processor Technology in April, 1975, and began selling 4K boards that did work. To prevent erosion of 4K board sales, Roberts tied purchase of the popular BASIC program to his 4K boards. This ploy backfired when hobbyists began making their own copies of BASIC and distributing them for free.
This is a bit before my time(born in '78, saw my first computer in '82) but it seems that Microsoft's strategy really has been quite consistant over the years.
Nope, I've used at least one version of burn-in software and it's OS-less. Or rather, it is an OS. They just scan the hard drive for bad blocks, write and verify patterns in memory, test all of the instructions on the processor, and fool around with the video card for a while. Don't really need an OS for that, just a couple of drivers and some glue. I suppose the software they use could run under windows, but I don't see any reason why.
If someone actually presented a well-reasoned, accurate, and unbiased opinion as to why X is better than Linux, I really don't think it will be called FUD. Fact of the matter is though, X probably isn't going to be MS Windows and it probably isn't going to be anything from Apple either.
You really need to start reading the articles attached to the discussion. They, as a rule, have been based on lies or ignorance: linux doesn't have a GUI, linux is 70's technology, linux is a communist plot, linux threatens the purity of our precious bodily fluids, linux has cooties, et cetera. It's exactly them same as smear campaigns from bad politicians. You tear you opponent down so much that you are the only option left. It doesn't matter if you are just as bad or even worse. You got everyone to have fear, uncertainty, and doubt about your opponent. That is the nature of FUD.
I'll tell you why Linux, hell any UNIXish OS even VMS, wins over Windows for me. One word: telnet. Even before you consider ANY other issue, telnet puts Windows out of the running. The Reason: I'm not a sysadmin but I am working for my school's sysadmin this summer; we are doing the y2k updates for the whole school. We have a large number of Win NT machines(350+) that we have to go _on_site_ to fix. If we used ANY UNIX we wouldn't have to worry about y2k in the first place but even if it did I could just open a telnet sesson and run a shell script. Windows has NO remote administration capabilities. As to Windows remote management software like PC anywhere and MS SMS server, one is a security hazard and the other is incredibly expensive. I should never have to pay extra for such a simple feature anyway.
OK, disable my software remotely, if you can get through my firewall.
I have this feeling that whoever actually implemnts this would require a direct internet connection to run. Thet way they can disable the software by not giving you the key. Certain Winblows server shareware uses that scheme for "registered" users.
True; the other worry is about code written exclusively for personal use. I think an association such as this ought to only cover code written for money that is (ever) used by other people. (This is still vague, but you get the idea.) (And of course, there should be an ex post facto clause for legacy code like Linux.)
I don't think that would necessarily be the right route to take. A better system would associate different levels of certification required for different uses. Seperate them into a heirarchy, giving code running in nuclear power plants higher standards that a desktop OS like linux. It should be a non-profit organisation that at least for the lower levels of certification doesn't charge any money. It could even give members-in-good-standing an automatic approval for the lowest level.
Secondly, the training required for programming has a short half-life.
So does the law, lawyers have to take a certain number of credits a year of law-related education in order to stay current. Just think if _your_ lawyer missed the last couple of supreme court decisions.
Another less-publicized event happened recently when a well-known cracking group threatened to release a cracked client as leverage to force us to adopt their opensource philosophies.
Erp! I think those people need to take some hints from the Linux Advocacy HOWTO. Not that they are necessarily using Linux, but extortion isn't good PR for open-source in general.
Just to be picky, the Trojan Horse was left outside of Troy by the Greeks. The horse was a holy animal to the Trojans and so they took the wooden horse as a sign from the Greeks that the war was over. Unfortunatly for the Trojans, Odysseus(Ulysses to the Romans) and his men were hidden inside the statue and when night fell, they opened the city gates and that's what made the Trojans lose the Trojan war.
I don't think that E was ever mentioned in the article. They could have been meeting about Amiga using imlib. Also, since QNX offered Mandrake a job, it may have had something to do with that.
From what I understand pgcc is based on a hack Intel made to gcc back about when the pentium came out. Lots of pgcc has been merged into egcs and I hear that Intel is working on Merced patches to egcs.
a lot of the problems that people have with CLI's are that the language in which you communicate to the computer is not a natural language like English. I've found GUI's a difficult concept for a large number of people to grasp. I'm speaking from the expierience of working on my college's helpline. GUI's often try to incorporate new and very foriegn concepts to the uninitiated. Ever think about a windows shortcut? The icon is ideally supposed to represent the program/document or whatever. The windows shortcut completely destroys this notion by adding a extra abstract layer. The icon is no longer he program but a symbol of the program. How many people you know think that when youdelete a shortcut off of your desktop the program is gone? Well if the metaphor made sense, they'd be right! Anyway, I think the CLI _can_ be the best interface for the user, as long as it is properly designed. I think a good example of how you would want it designed is the.fetchmailrc file. take a look at it sometime. It get across everything you need to know and it is written in english sentence-like grammer.
For example, I think it's good for brevity's sake to write this:
cp foo bar/
but that isn't english like. The alternative would be something like:
copy foo into bar
Yes, that is more typing and is a bit more to implement but I think that it is much more easier to understand than either the current CLI interface or the GUI solution.(and you could always switch back to bash)
Really, I think there are two big attractions of GUI's. One is wallpaper, screensavers, and themes. I mean, name a windows user from the most technical power user to the newest novice that hasn't played around with them. The other is porn, every GUI known to man has a picture viewer.
I suppose the blind shouldn't use Linux because they can't see the screen
I don't know about you but I think support for the blind is a great reason for not going to a completely GUI system. There are programs that can speak what you see on a terminal screen, GUI's make that incredibly more difficult.
What an utterly stupid proposal! Besides it being just plain wrong, it would be nearly impossible to implement. I assume that they would only want each e-mail taxed one time so you couldn't implement this on the servers because the mail may have to pass through more than one to get to a destinaton address. Therefore, you would have to implement in on the client and I'll be damned if I'm going to use a mail client that charges me. The UN doesn't have any real power anyway, it's only when the big major countries in the Security Council decide to declare a war that anything happens.
See, MS just upped their hardwre requrements again
on
Microsoft Janus
·
· Score: 2
I can see it now...
MS Tech Support: Excel crashes alot? Hmm.. Have you considered upgrading to four machines for greater reliability?
I'm not exactly in the device driver writing business but I'd imagine that maintenence of drivers for old hardware cost a fair bit time and money. Once you make the device driver opensource and get it past the 1.0 stage, you can go on to bigger better things.
Companies like Matrox and Adaptec have, as far as I can remember, been very good about supporting even their oldest devices with drivers and jumper settings and such. As time goes on they accumulate more and more stuff that their customers expect them to support just as well as they ever did. Opensource fixes their growing legacy support problem. They don't have to worry about weather MS will include their driver in the next OS release, it will get ported to the next version of Linux almost automatically. The only way tht would not happen is if there doesn't exist anyone who is using that card anymore. If that happens, who cares if the driver dies?
I have a feeling that devices such as this will co-opted by the police and FBI very soon in the name of cathching criminals. I worry what might happen if a bug or data-entry error mistakes an honest person for a criminal. Heck I worry if a real criminal get caught with one of these things.
If a devious person had access to the actual database couldn't they construct a set of contacts to mimic the iris of a person?
As for the Son-going-to-get-money-for-mom, I would assume there would be a system implemented (Similar to authorized account users on credit cards) that would allow immediate family members to use the system.
Do you really want a teenaged kid to have compete access to their parents checking accounts? Sure, the parents would have logs from the bank as to who took out the money but by then it's already gone.
erp! no, it not quite that simple. Artists frequently also have o buy the physical media and the cover art out of their royalties. The exact deals are negotiated artist to artist though. I watched a VH1 special on Led Zeppelin and one of the big things that they said about them was that they were popular enough for the label to pay for the record sleeve and artwork.
Anyway who do you know that could live on $1000 for the time it takes to make a CD?
Suppose you have a super-strech limo; you let your friends and aquaintences drive around in it with you all the time. Unfortunately, you don't have any documentation to prove that it's yours. One day one of your so called friends claims that the limo was his the whole time and a lot of people believe him. This person has effectively stolen your limo.
Now suppose you have an idea, a song, a program or whaterver intellectual property you want. You tell all your friends and aquaintences about it and they all like and enjoy your ideas. Unfortunately you don't have any documentation to prove the idea was yours. One day one of your so called friends starts claiming that the idea was his all along and a lot of people believe him. This person has stolen your idea.
I think the big thing I'm trying to get across is that noone likes stealing on either side of the divide. The problem is that stealing intellectual property is fundamentally different than stealing physical goods. Ownership of an idea is usually based(both socially and in the law) on who thought of it first. To say that an idea that has already been thought of is "yours" is not stealing in the traditional sense but plagerism.
I think you can really see how this is true when you see how atrists get when someone is plagerizing their stuff. The same artists that that are thrilled that someone actually cares to bootleg their songs get pissed as hell when some one steals their songs.
I don't think that exploits like this have so much to do with tha fact that Win NT is a crappy operating system but with that fact that it is closed source. If NT was open-source underjust about any meaning of the term we wouldn't just see an exploit like back orifice published, we would see both the exploit and a fix published. Why? because no cracker wants his system to be cracked by another cracker using his own crack.
Slashdot Mirror
I got a summer job at my college so I could stay on the dual T3's. But can you blame me?
This is a bit before my time(born in '78, saw my first computer in '82) but it seems that Microsoft's strategy really has been quite consistant over the years.
"Drats, foiled again!" -Bill Gates
Nope, I've used at least one version of burn-in software and it's OS-less. Or rather, it is an OS. They just scan the hard drive for bad blocks, write and verify patterns in memory, test all of the instructions on the processor, and fool around with the video card for a while. Don't really need an OS for that, just a couple of drivers and some glue.
I suppose the software they use could run under windows, but I don't see any reason why.
If you actually read the article, the Republican Govenor of Kansas instructed the school board not to do that. Note: I'm not a Republican.
If someone actually presented a well-reasoned, accurate, and unbiased opinion as to why X is better than Linux, I really don't think it will be called FUD. Fact of the matter is though, X probably isn't going to be MS Windows and it probably isn't going to be anything from Apple either.
You really need to start reading the articles attached to the discussion. They, as a rule, have been based on lies or ignorance: linux doesn't have a GUI, linux is 70's technology, linux is a communist plot, linux threatens the purity of our precious bodily fluids, linux has cooties, et cetera. It's exactly them same as smear campaigns from bad politicians. You tear you opponent down so much that you are the only option left. It doesn't matter if you are just as bad or even worse. You got everyone to have fear, uncertainty, and doubt about your opponent. That is the nature of FUD.
I'll tell you why Linux, hell any UNIXish OS even VMS, wins over Windows for me. One word: telnet. Even before you consider ANY other issue, telnet puts Windows out of the running. The Reason: I'm not a sysadmin but I am working for my school's sysadmin this summer; we are doing the y2k updates for the whole school. We have a large number of Win NT machines(350+) that we have to go _on_site_ to fix. If we used ANY UNIX we wouldn't have to worry about y2k in the first place but even if it did I could just open a telnet sesson and run a shell script. Windows has NO remote administration capabilities. As to Windows remote management software like PC anywhere and MS SMS server, one is a security hazard and the other is incredibly expensive. I should never have to pay extra for such a simple feature anyway.
US Virgin Islands?
So does the law, lawyers have to take a certain number of credits a year of law-related education in order to stay current. Just think if _your_ lawyer missed the last couple of supreme court decisions.
If they don't, he'll tear them a GNU Back Orifice.
Just to be picky, the Trojan Horse was left outside of Troy by the Greeks. The horse was a holy animal to the Trojans and so they took the wooden horse as a sign from the Greeks that the war was over. Unfortunatly for the Trojans, Odysseus(Ulysses to the Romans) and his men were hidden inside the statue and when night fell, they opened the city gates and that's what made the Trojans lose the Trojan war.
I don't think that E was ever mentioned in the article. They could have been meeting about Amiga using imlib. Also, since QNX offered Mandrake a job, it may have had something to do with that.
> I think I'll patent thinking.
You might get it, there apparently isn't any prior art available at the patent office.
From what I understand pgcc is based on a hack Intel made to gcc back about when the pentium came out. Lots of pgcc has been merged into egcs and I hear that Intel is working on Merced patches to egcs.
a lot of the problems that people have with CLI's are that the language in which you communicate to the computer is not a natural language like English. .fetchmailrc file. take a look at it sometime. It get across everything you need to know and it is written in english sentence-like grammer.
I've found GUI's a difficult concept for a large number of people to grasp. I'm speaking from the expierience of working on my college's helpline. GUI's often try to incorporate new and very foriegn concepts to the uninitiated. Ever think about a windows shortcut? The icon is ideally supposed to represent the program/document or whatever. The windows shortcut completely destroys this notion by adding a extra abstract layer. The icon is no longer he program but a symbol of the program. How many people you know think that when youdelete a shortcut off of your desktop the program is gone? Well if the metaphor made sense, they'd be right!
Anyway, I think the CLI _can_ be the best interface for the user, as long as it is properly designed. I think a good example of how you would want it designed is the
For example, I think it's good for brevity's sake to write this:
cp foo bar/
but that isn't english like. The alternative would be something like:
copy foo into bar
Yes, that is more typing and is a bit more to implement but I think that it is much more easier to understand than either the current CLI interface or the GUI solution.(and you could always switch back to bash)
Really, I think there are two big attractions of GUI's. One is wallpaper, screensavers, and themes. I mean, name a windows user from the most technical power user to the newest novice that hasn't played around with them. The other is porn, every GUI known to man has a picture viewer.
I suppose the blind shouldn't use Linux because they can't see the screen
I don't know about you but I think support for the blind is a great reason for not going to a completely GUI system. There are programs that can speak what you see on a terminal screen, GUI's make that incredibly more difficult.
What an utterly stupid proposal! Besides it being just plain wrong, it would be nearly impossible to implement. I assume that they would only want each e-mail taxed one time so you couldn't implement this on the servers because the mail may have to pass through more than one to get to a destinaton address. Therefore, you would have to implement in on the client and I'll be damned if I'm going to use a mail client that charges me.
The UN doesn't have any real power anyway, it's only when the big major countries in the Security Council decide to declare a war that anything happens.
I can see it now...
MS Tech Support:
Excel crashes alot? Hmm.. Have you considered upgrading to four machines for greater reliability?
I'm not exactly in the device driver writing business but I'd imagine that maintenence of drivers for old hardware cost a fair bit time and money. Once you make the device driver opensource and get it past the 1.0 stage, you can go on to bigger better things.
Companies like Matrox and Adaptec have, as far as I can remember, been very good about supporting even their oldest devices with drivers and jumper settings and such. As time goes on they accumulate more and more stuff that their customers expect them to support just as well as they ever did. Opensource fixes their growing legacy support problem. They don't have to worry about weather MS will include their driver in the next OS release, it will get ported to the next version of Linux almost automatically. The only way tht would not happen is if there doesn't exist anyone who is using that card anymore. If that happens, who cares if the driver dies?
I have a feeling that devices such as this will co-opted by the police and FBI very soon in the name of cathching criminals. I worry what might happen if a bug or data-entry error mistakes an honest person for a criminal. Heck I worry if a real criminal get caught with one of these things.
If a devious person had access to the actual database couldn't they construct a set of contacts to mimic the iris of a person?
As for the Son-going-to-get-money-for-mom, I would assume there would be a system implemented (Similar to authorized account
users on credit cards) that would allow immediate family members to use the system.
Do you really want a teenaged kid to have compete access to their parents checking accounts? Sure, the parents would have logs from the bank as to who took out the money but by then it's already gone.
erp! no, it not quite that simple. Artists frequently also have o buy the physical media and the cover art out of their royalties. The exact deals are negotiated artist to artist though. I watched a VH1 special on Led Zeppelin and one of the big things that they said about them was that they were popular enough for the label to pay for the record sleeve and artwork.
Anyway who do you know that could live on $1000 for the time it takes to make a CD?
I think a better argument could be made still.
Suppose you have a super-strech limo; you let your friends and aquaintences drive around in it with you all the time. Unfortunately, you don't have any documentation to prove that it's yours. One day one of your so called friends claims that the limo was his the whole time and a lot of people believe him. This person has effectively stolen your limo.
Now suppose you have an idea, a song, a program or whaterver intellectual property you want. You tell all your friends and aquaintences about it and they all like and enjoy your ideas. Unfortunately you don't have any documentation to prove the idea was yours. One day one of your so called friends starts claiming that the idea was his all along and a lot of people believe him. This person has stolen your idea.
I think the big thing I'm trying to get across is that noone likes stealing on either side of the divide. The problem is that stealing intellectual property is fundamentally different than stealing physical goods. Ownership of an idea is usually based(both socially and in the law) on who thought of it first. To say that an idea that has already been thought of is "yours" is not stealing in the traditional sense but plagerism.
I think you can really see how this is true when you see how atrists get when someone is plagerizing their stuff. The same artists that that are thrilled that someone actually cares to bootleg their songs get pissed as hell when some one steals their songs.
I don't think that exploits like this have so much to do with tha fact that Win NT is a crappy operating system but with that fact that it is closed source. If NT was open-source underjust about any meaning of the term we wouldn't just see an exploit like back orifice published, we would see both the exploit and a fix published. Why? because no cracker wants his system to be cracked by another cracker using his own crack.