It's not that it's politically incorrect to make fun of Microsoft. It's that it's stupid. It's too easy. It's the epitome of the old phrase 'shooting fish in a barrel.'
It's a profound waste of time and energy that could be better spent elsewhere, like fixing bugs in your favorite Open Source package, or spending time with your SO, or reading the panels on the side of a Rice Krispies box.
It's trying to show off how clever you can be, by doing something that anyone with a sixteenth of a clue can do just as cleverly.
ADSL is for the net.consumer who doesn't need much outbound speed because he's just sending out small HTTP requests, but does want lots of inbound speed to get the requested pr0n faster.
SDSL is symmetric -- at my house, we have 768K/768K, which is just plenty for fairly quick access in either direction.
There's also IDSL and a couple other obscure flavors, but "DSL" isn't necessarily slow on the outbound.
Godwin's Law states that as a Usenet discussion continues, the probability that Nazism will be mentioned approaches one.
This was intended as a good-natured way of saying that a conversation has probably lived out its useful life by that point, although people have twisted it around ever since to make it say that mentioning Nazism automatically ends a discussion.
As if such a thing were possible.... http://www.netmeg.net/jargon/terms/g/godwin_s_la w.html, among others.
Umn, friend, you have an off-by-one error in your orders of magnitude:
>If we attack it a different way, 30,000 times 8 light-minutes is 24,000 light-minutes, or 400 light-hours, or 16.7 light >days, which is only a bit over 1% of the way to Proxima Centauri, so this does not sound right either; it is hardly "a >significant fraction of the distance to the nearest star"
Umno. 30,000 times 8 light-minutes is 240,000 light-minutes, 4000 light-hours, 167 light-days, a bit over 10% of the way to PC. A significant fraction.
Now the Linux community has a nice, tidy 'to-do' list, thanks to Microsoft's time investment in finding all of the places where NT has on-paper advantages.
Give us another 6-12 months, and we'll render all of these points moot. Very friendly, almost selfless, of them to help focus the community's attention on areas that need development.
Why do so many Slashdotters feel the need to frame their choice of operating system in the language of war and conflict?
ESR's comment, read closely, is in the context of NOT fighting about things. It's about unity. And unity is not about being "united against an enemy." That's divisiveness and jingoism.
If you feel the need to have an I-win-you-lose scenario in your life, go sign up for a sports team. But stop telling me I'm enemies with Microsoft or Sun or Apple or whoever. I'm not. I'm united with the folks, even the ones at those 'big evil institutions,' that are using technology in interesting and exciting ways.
My affiliation is not "with Open-Source" or "against Microsoft," but "with hackers," be they CS majors, MCSE's, MacOS junkies, whatever.
I'm a citizen of the Internet, and I'm tired of you folks fighting in the streets of my home turf.
A little off-topic, but it's nice to see the _Slashdot_ editorial staff inserting a reality check about the difference between sponsorship and influence....
God knows that _I_, at least, am sick of seeing AC's posting 'yes, but M$ bought them off' as 50% of the commentary on ZDNET stories, for instance.
(*nod) You are correct -- 'difficult' not 'impossible.' I withdraw half of my point, but stand by the history that GNU bootstrapped itself up using proprietary tech, and so does owe its existance to it.
Of course, it's simpler to argue that GNU owes its existance to proprietary tech because it was developed as a response to it, but that's not the argument I'm trying to make. Although it makes an interesting corollary.
What I _am_ trying to point out is that using proprietary compilers to make free software does not make that software less free -- even if the code you release is bound to your proprietary compiler, anyone can come along and dwiddle it until it compiles under gcc or the like.
If we want to create a true 'freedom platform,' we'll need to go through the pain of bootstrapping from nothing -- CPU, BIOS, motherboard, bus architecture, everything that's not actually the sand and steel, and make sure everything's released under GPL or the like.
Eh. Sounds like a lot of work for a benefit that's mostly academic, although I am aware there's groups working on those things, OpenBIOS and all.
More power to'em. In the meantime, I'll exercise my freedom to partake of whatever software, hardware, and politics strike my fancy. And you please feel free to do the same.... (*grin)
The reason the GNU project exists is because there were proprietary compilers available. Without them, there would have been no way to develop gcc and binutils to the point of being self-hosting.
It's easy to snub proprietary compilers, but they played (and continue to play) an important part in the the history of free/Open Source software.
If this were going to be a big problem, there'd have been thousands of people complaining that their Pentium-90 and -100's were showing up on their FM dial, four and five years ago. Or people would still hear a harmonic from their 33MHz PCI busses at 99MHz, or a weaker one from their 66MHz PCI or memory busses.
The FCC keeps pretty good clamps on the kind of noise a computer can put out -- read the find print about 'Class B computing devices' -- essentially it can't cause any interference, and must accept any interference it gets.
Opcode is a company, not a product. They don't have any products of consequence for Windows, only MacOS, so I'm not sure what you meant by "running Opcode on NT." Check out their Vision DSP as compared to Digital Performer. You might still prefer the MOTU product, but you can't judge Opcode based on any of their very few failed Windows products.
Emerson, former product testing manager for Opcode... (*grin) --
Except that the context of this whole argument is 'usability tests.'
Meaning we're discussing 'easy to learn,' for the uneducated user. I'm completely on about the idea that command-line is easier to use, once it's mastered.
But _MY_ point is that once you know "Control Panel" you can find all the system settings you want by searching there.
But knowing 'ntsysv' doesn't get you any knowledge that isn't supplied by the ntsysv command itself. You have to find the next weird six-letter command, on your own, with no clues, to get any farther. In Windows, at least, you have a folder open, with all of the similar possibilities right there.
Or, to be clearer: command-line is easier, once you've taken all the time you need to know all the commands.
Until then, organized GUI's (and yes, Windows counts, like it or not) make it easier to narrow down to find what you're after, definitionally.
_I_ hope it's dry humor because it's exactly wrong.
For a first-time experience, for the 'usability tests' that we're talking about, if you're looking to change something in the way your computer behaves, Windows gives you some clues from the get-go that the command line simply doesn't: try the big friendly button with the bouncing arrow saying "Start Here."
Inside there, a clearly-marked "Settings" menu, and inside there, Control Panels, Printers, so forth. Clearly-labeled hierarchical menus that lead you to figuring out where you're going, even if you're not sure. Once you get "Control Panels" open, there's a mess of nicely labeled icons to poke at and try to figure things out. From context, you know that everything in there is going to change some setting on the computer, and can poke around inside that context for a while until you get what you want.
The original poster's 'easier' alternative, the command prompt, offers no such context. Finding out that 'ntsysv' can change around certain settings is nice to know, but offers no context in finding out how to change _other_ settings -- commands starting with 'nt'? command ending in 'sysv'? Nope. No rhyme or reason. Or clues. Or hints. Or help. You just scratch around until you stumble across what you're looking for, and slowly accumulate knowledge. Maybe you find 'man,' maybe you figure out how the GNU info viewer works, maybe you have Gnome or KDE installed and can use THEIR visual context.
But if you plunk down newbies to a Win32 desktop and to a command-line Unix environment and just say 'go' with no further instructions, I think you know where my money'd be.
Now, me, I'm a command-line junkie. I _love_ it. I live at the bash or tcsh prompt all day, even on Windows boxes I administer (Cygwin's getting pretty cool these days). But to say that command line is '_so_ much easier' is simply wrong, and so I, too, hope the original poster was being tongue-in-cheek.
Even if what you say is true (see other reply deeper in this thread regarding the validity of these claims), deciding the value of art based on the character of the artist is a completely invalid mode of thinking.
Clarke's works are, for the most part, very impressive pieces of futurism, and will continue to be, even if it's discovered that he's a pedophile crack addict Nazi war criminal. --
I know it might be hard to push anything resembling facts past that forcefield of bigotry you have up, but I'll try anyway....
"Christian" != "religious fanatic" for all values of "Christian." Judging people based on short, one-word labels is called 'prejudice.' It's ugly. If the name of the group were "Religious Fanatic Scientists," your point would make sense.
And, no, I'm no Christian either. But having an unthinking knee-jerk namecalling reaction to religion makes one just as much a mindless zombie as blindly following religious dogma does.
There's a huge, almost inassailable, mass of precedent that minors do not have full Constitutional rights under the law. Conversely, minors do not have full legal responsibility for their actions under the same mass of precedent.
That's why putting a minor on trial as an adult requires special permission from the court -- minors and adults simple have a different set of rights and responsibilities under US law.
Not that I'm making a statement as to whether that's a good or bad thing; I'm just answering your request to explain why adult parents have the right to make a decision that restricts their minor child's (non-)rights.
>And finally... I can't believe I'm the first person in this forum to even mention this. What has happened to/.? -sigh-
Well, all the folks that started with overclocking their Voodoo cards to get an extra 0.3 fps in classic Quake later graduated to spending that excess energy reading the minutae of software licenses and expounding endlessly about them on Slashdot, while blindly moderating up anything posted by Bruce Perens or Alan Cox.
Recently, most of those have also moved on again to being specialists in evolution theory and theology, although there is still a healthy population of Slashdotters who remain in the original two categories, some of which have made a sideways move into the exciting hobby of finding new ways to misspell "Windows" and "Microsoft."
That's about what's happened to Slashdot while _I've_ been around.... --
The problem is not that DNS itself is flawed; it's that people have chosen to try to use DNS both as a name-resolution system AND as a directory system.
Removing DNS and going to raw IP addresses would break many many things that people rely on:
-- Web sites routinely map a single name to a round-robin of IP addresses for load-balancing. It might be possible to do some kind of nasty reverse NAT to make this facility possible at the IP level, but we have things like DNS to facilitate not having to do nasty destination munging. -- Companies are currently able to reorganize their internal networks transparently; if your mail address was employee@xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx, and then the company wanted to move their primary mail server to a geographically different location, there's no way to point that IP address there without complicated tunneling wizardry. Easier just to re-point a DNS entry for mail.company.com. -- Companies change ISP's all the time, and IP addresses get reassigned from leaving customers to new customers. Imagine if you'd sent out thousands and thousands of advertisements, business cards, product boxes, and letterhead with your http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx address on it, and you went to a new ISP, and your competitor got hold of that address block from your old ISP.
DNS was devised as an abstraction layer above IP addresses to allow tricks like this to happen conveniently, and give some sense of permanence to network addressing, in what's definitionally a change-prone environment. The fact that people have been abusing this abstraction layer for commercial purposes is (a) not surprising, and (b) not at all an indictment of the scheme itself.
DNS is our friend; we just need to get some good rules in place as to how to resolve conflicts like this. --
Specific TLD's are an inherent part of the process; people being able to create random TLD's simply can not work with the existing system -- there'd be no easy and transparent way for resolvers to know where to go to find the zone info for subdomains of some arbitrarily-named TLD. Not without a major rewrite of every DNS stack in existance.
Not to say that a major rewrite to create such a system would be a bad thing; just that it couldn't be grafted on to the existing system in any sane way.
It's important not to confuse DirectX with Direct3D.
DirectX is a large set of API subsets, including DirectSound, DirectDraw, DirectInput, etc. There's already strong support for a lot of these API's in Wine, and there has been for some time. Starcraft, for instance, uses DirectDraw and DirectSound, both of which are emulated in Wine well enough to run it.
Direct3D is the 3D-specific subset of DirectX, and is almost completely unsupported in Wine at this time, although as you mention, there's a Direct3D->Mesa mapping effort underway.
So, lots of DirectX stuff works fine under Wine; Direct3D stuff doesn't really yet.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not that it's politically incorrect to make fun of Microsoft. It's that it's stupid. It's too easy. It's the epitome of the old phrase 'shooting fish in a barrel.'
It's a profound waste of time and energy that could be better spent elsewhere, like fixing bugs in your favorite Open Source package, or spending time with your SO, or reading the panels on the side of a Rice Krispies box.
It's trying to show off how clever you can be, by doing something that anyone with a sixteenth of a clue can do just as cleverly.
--
I don't recall saying anything about God.
If you think that all mystical experiences are religious, I continue to recommend getting out more.
--
DSL has many flavors.
ADSL is for the net.consumer who doesn't need much outbound speed because he's just sending out small HTTP requests, but does want lots of inbound speed to get the requested pr0n faster.
SDSL is symmetric -- at my house, we have 768K/768K, which is just plenty for fairly quick access in either direction.
There's also IDSL and a couple other obscure flavors, but "DSL" isn't necessarily slow on the outbound.
--
If your only mystical experiences were based in fear, I pity you, and recommend you get out more.
Might start by visiting the redwoods in the Pacific Northwest.
--
Godwin's Law states that as a Usenet discussion continues, the probability that Nazism will be mentioned approaches one.
a w.html, among others.
This was intended as a good-natured way of saying that a conversation has probably lived out its useful life by that point, although people have twisted it around ever since to make it say that mentioning Nazism automatically ends a discussion.
As if such a thing were possible....
http://www.netmeg.net/jargon/terms/g/godwin_s_l
--
Oh, MAN. That was scary.
For a second, I thought that was alluding to a ST:TNG / X-_FILES_ crossover. Yipes.
--
Umn, friend, you have an off-by-one error in your orders of magnitude:
>If we attack it a different way, 30,000 times 8 light-minutes is 24,000 light-minutes, or 400 light-hours, or 16.7 light
>days, which is only a bit over 1% of the way to Proxima Centauri, so this does not sound right either; it is hardly "a
>significant fraction of the distance to the nearest star"
Umno. 30,000 times 8 light-minutes is 240,000 light-minutes, 4000 light-hours, 167 light-days, a bit over 10% of the way to PC. A significant fraction.
--
Now the Linux community has a nice, tidy 'to-do' list, thanks to Microsoft's time investment in finding all of the places where NT has on-paper advantages.
Give us another 6-12 months, and we'll render all of these points moot. Very friendly, almost selfless, of them to help focus the community's attention on areas that need development.
(*grin)
--
Why do so many Slashdotters feel the need to frame their choice of operating system in the language of war and conflict?
ESR's comment, read closely, is in the context of NOT fighting about things. It's about unity. And unity is not about being "united against an enemy." That's divisiveness and jingoism.
If you feel the need to have an I-win-you-lose scenario in your life, go sign up for a sports team. But stop telling me I'm enemies with Microsoft or Sun or Apple or whoever. I'm not. I'm united with the folks, even the ones at those 'big evil institutions,' that are using technology in interesting and exciting ways.
My affiliation is not "with Open-Source" or "against Microsoft," but "with hackers," be they CS majors, MCSE's, MacOS junkies, whatever.
I'm a citizen of the Internet, and I'm tired of you folks fighting in the streets of my home turf.
--
Thank you for supporting my point so eloquently.
--
...wasn't that they were using two different systems.
The actual problem was that they were running their metric conversion software on an old Pentium with the FDIV bug....
(*grin)
--
A little off-topic, but it's nice to see the _Slashdot_ editorial staff inserting a reality check about the difference between sponsorship and influence....
God knows that _I_, at least, am sick of seeing AC's posting 'yes, but M$ bought them off' as 50% of the commentary on ZDNET stories, for instance.
--
(*nod) You are correct -- 'difficult' not 'impossible.' I withdraw half of my point, but stand by the history that GNU bootstrapped itself up using proprietary tech, and so does owe its existance to it.
Of course, it's simpler to argue that GNU owes its existance to proprietary tech because it was developed as a response to it, but that's not the argument I'm trying to make. Although it makes an interesting corollary.
What I _am_ trying to point out is that using proprietary compilers to make free software does not make that software less free -- even if the code you release is bound to your proprietary compiler, anyone can come along and dwiddle it until it compiles under gcc or the like.
If we want to create a true 'freedom platform,' we'll need to go through the pain of bootstrapping from nothing -- CPU, BIOS, motherboard, bus architecture, everything that's not actually the sand and steel, and make sure everything's released under GPL or the like.
Eh. Sounds like a lot of work for a benefit that's mostly academic, although I am aware there's groups working on those things, OpenBIOS and all.
More power to'em. In the meantime, I'll exercise my freedom to partake of whatever software, hardware, and politics strike my fancy. And you please feel free to do the same.... (*grin)
--
The reason the GNU project exists is because there were proprietary compilers available. Without them, there would have been no way to develop gcc and binutils to the point of being self-hosting.
It's easy to snub proprietary compilers, but they played (and continue to play) an important part in the the history of free/Open Source software.
--
If this were going to be a big problem, there'd have been thousands of people complaining that their Pentium-90 and -100's were showing up on their FM dial, four and five years ago. Or people would still hear a harmonic from their 33MHz PCI busses at 99MHz, or a weaker one from their 66MHz PCI or memory busses.
The FCC keeps pretty good clamps on the kind of noise a computer can put out -- read the find print about 'Class B computing devices' -- essentially it can't cause any interference, and must accept any interference it gets.
--
Emerson, former product testing manager for Opcode... (*grin)
--
Yup. And I agree.
Except that the context of this whole argument is 'usability tests.'
Meaning we're discussing 'easy to learn,' for the uneducated user. I'm completely on about the idea that command-line is easier to use, once it's mastered.
But _MY_ point is that once you know "Control Panel" you can find all the system settings you want by searching there.
But knowing 'ntsysv' doesn't get you any knowledge that isn't supplied by the ntsysv command itself. You have to find the next weird six-letter command, on your own, with no clues, to get any farther. In Windows, at least, you have a folder open, with all of the similar possibilities right there.
Or, to be clearer: command-line is easier, once you've taken all the time you need to know all the commands.
Until then, organized GUI's (and yes, Windows counts, like it or not) make it easier to narrow down to find what you're after, definitionally.
--
_I_ hope it's dry humor because it's exactly wrong.
For a first-time experience, for the 'usability tests' that we're talking about, if you're looking to change something in the way your computer behaves, Windows gives you some clues from the get-go that the command line simply doesn't: try the big friendly button with the bouncing arrow saying "Start Here."
Inside there, a clearly-marked "Settings" menu, and inside there, Control Panels, Printers, so forth. Clearly-labeled hierarchical menus that lead you to figuring out where you're going, even if you're not sure. Once you get "Control Panels" open, there's a mess of nicely labeled icons to poke at and try to figure things out. From context, you know that everything in there is going to change some setting on the computer, and can poke around inside that context for a while until you get what you want.
The original poster's 'easier' alternative, the command prompt, offers no such context. Finding out that 'ntsysv' can change around certain settings is nice to know, but offers no context in finding out how to change _other_ settings -- commands starting with 'nt'? command ending in 'sysv'? Nope. No rhyme or reason. Or clues. Or hints. Or help. You just scratch around until you stumble across what you're looking for, and slowly accumulate knowledge. Maybe you find 'man,' maybe you figure out how the GNU info viewer works, maybe you have Gnome or KDE installed and can use THEIR visual context.
But if you plunk down newbies to a Win32 desktop and to a command-line Unix environment and just say 'go' with no further instructions, I think you know where my money'd be.
Now, me, I'm a command-line junkie. I _love_ it. I live at the bash or tcsh prompt all day, even on Windows boxes I administer (Cygwin's getting pretty cool these days). But to say that command line is '_so_ much easier' is simply wrong, and so I, too, hope the original poster was being tongue-in-cheek.
--
Even if what you say is true (see other reply deeper in this thread regarding the validity of these claims), deciding the value of art based on the character of the artist is a completely invalid mode of thinking.
Clarke's works are, for the most part, very impressive pieces of futurism, and will continue to be, even if it's discovered that he's a pedophile crack addict Nazi war criminal.
--
I know it might be hard to push anything resembling facts past that forcefield of bigotry you have up, but I'll try anyway....
"Christian" != "religious fanatic" for all values of "Christian." Judging people based on short, one-word labels is called 'prejudice.' It's ugly. If the name of the group were "Religious Fanatic Scientists," your point would make sense.
And, no, I'm no Christian either. But having an unthinking knee-jerk namecalling reaction to religion makes one just as much a mindless zombie as blindly following religious dogma does.
Pot and kettle, my friend....
--
There's a huge, almost inassailable, mass of precedent that minors do not have full Constitutional rights under the law. Conversely, minors do not have full legal responsibility for their actions under the same mass of precedent.
That's why putting a minor on trial as an adult requires special permission from the court -- minors and adults simple have a different set of rights and responsibilities under US law.
Not that I'm making a statement as to whether that's a good or bad thing; I'm just answering your request to explain why adult parents have the right to make a decision that restricts their minor child's (non-)rights.
--
>And finally... I can't believe I'm the first person in this forum to even mention this. What has happened to /.? -sigh-
Well, all the folks that started with overclocking their Voodoo cards to get an extra 0.3 fps in classic Quake later graduated to spending that excess energy reading the minutae of software licenses and expounding endlessly about them on Slashdot, while blindly moderating up anything posted by Bruce Perens or Alan Cox.
Recently, most of those have also moved on again to being specialists in evolution theory and theology, although there is still a healthy population of Slashdotters who remain in the original two categories, some of which have made a sideways move into the exciting hobby of finding new ways to misspell "Windows" and "Microsoft."
That's about what's happened to Slashdot while _I've_ been around....
--
That would be an astoundingly bad idea.
The problem is not that DNS itself is flawed; it's that people have chosen to try to use DNS both as a name-resolution system AND as a directory system.
Removing DNS and going to raw IP addresses would break many many things that people rely on:
-- Web sites routinely map a single name to a round-robin of IP addresses for load-balancing. It might be possible to do some kind of nasty reverse NAT to make this facility possible at the IP level, but we have things like DNS to facilitate not having to do nasty destination munging.
-- Companies are currently able to reorganize their internal networks transparently; if your mail address was employee@xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx, and then the company wanted to move their primary mail server to a geographically different location, there's no way to point that IP address there without complicated tunneling wizardry. Easier just to re-point a DNS entry for mail.company.com.
-- Companies change ISP's all the time, and IP addresses get reassigned from leaving customers to new customers. Imagine if you'd sent out thousands and thousands of advertisements, business cards, product boxes, and letterhead with your http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx address on it, and you went to a new ISP, and your competitor got hold of that address block from your old ISP.
DNS was devised as an abstraction layer above IP addresses to allow tricks like this to happen conveniently, and give some sense of permanence to network addressing, in what's definitionally a change-prone environment. The fact that people have been abusing this abstraction layer for commercial purposes is (a) not surprising, and (b) not at all an indictment of the scheme itself.
DNS is our friend; we just need to get some good rules in place as to how to resolve conflicts like this.
--
I think you should read up on how DNS works.
Specific TLD's are an inherent part of the process; people being able to create random TLD's simply can not work with the existing system -- there'd be no easy and transparent way for resolvers to know where to go to find the zone info for subdomains of some arbitrarily-named TLD. Not without a major rewrite of every DNS stack in existance.
Not to say that a major rewrite to create such a system would be a bad thing; just that it couldn't be grafted on to the existing system in any sane way.
--
DirectX is a large set of API subsets, including DirectSound, DirectDraw, DirectInput, etc. There's already strong support for a lot of these API's in Wine, and there has been for some time. Starcraft, for instance, uses DirectDraw and DirectSound, both of which are emulated in Wine well enough to run it.
Direct3D is the 3D-specific subset of DirectX, and is almost completely unsupported in Wine at this time, although as you mention, there's a Direct3D->Mesa mapping effort underway.
So, lots of DirectX stuff works fine under Wine; Direct3D stuff doesn't really yet.
Check http://www.linuxgames.com/wine/ for more poop on Wine gaming success stories.
--