Heh, I'd like to see the budget allocation for that.
"Sir we need $200,000 to upgrade the clusterfuck or we don't know what's going to happen. Actually we don't know what's going to happen when we upgrade it either."
The biggest advantage IMHO is incramental upgrades. I've been using Linux on and off for a while, but when I got into FreeBSD and the ports collection I wondered why Linux hadn't attempted something similar. Now Gentoo is similar but not the same as ports. Basically when you do a sync and an update, you have the latest gentoo. That never changes - although occasionally you may need to update your profile. With other Linux distros it is Version X.X with minor maintenance on each package. Then comes version X.Y and shit goes haywire with the changes. I got burned with SuSE and been burned with Redhat (multiple times), and I'm sick of those kinds of cycles.
Using portage is just maintanence to me. I just review the updates in about 15 seconds then let it compile everything in the background and that's it. Use flags are nice, some optimizations are nice, flexibility is real nice but none of them are areally deal breakers. The depth of portage is actually pretty nice as well. It's not very often that I find software that I want that isn't already in portage. Portage also installs "unmolested" versions of software which was another annoyance of mine with some other distros.
I'll stand with Microsoft on this one. I don't want all this shit strewn all over the place with different pannels who knows where just to see if I'm protected and up to date. I am seriously NOT impressed with Microsoft's abuse of their market position, but this is completely vendor agnostic. I'd also be happy if MS actually grew a spine and started enforcing other crap on their system like what is allowed to drop junk on the task bar without warning, or clutter the start menu/desktop. Or perhaps notify vendors that provide driver configuration utilities that they must conform to some sort of UI standard and not looking like some freaking space ship.
And the data that is surpringly absent is the actual number of visits. Maybe 10 times more people visited in the same period where apple didn't grow as much. Does that mean apple has no growth? No it means that the "marketshare" went down despite the fact that Apple still sold more computers. I am sort of a Mac person, but I'm seriously not going to get worked up over marketshare. As long as Apple continues to grow in sales, be profitable, and make good products I'm okay with whatever they're up to.
He tried to compile everything as one blob and then is distressed one package broke (in programming: write whole app, test later).
Well I can sympathize with not getting a Gentoo install right. It took me a while to get it up and running correctly, but I was doing it more as a learning experience to see if it was really my sort of thing (I'm a big fan of FreeBSD ports). But I agree that it seems insane to shoot strait for gnome - 300+ packages. The biggest pain is always Xorg so I would at least get that running. After Xorg is up you can at least multitask easier and emerge Firefox and browse the web or whatever. The other nice thing about firefox is it lets you read the documentation on the same machine making copy and paste operations slightly easier.
What I find interesting is that every language I've worked with has a manual (or many manuals) on how to do an sql query, and just about every manual talks about how much better performance you get by binding (and doing a prepare). Do these people just not read manuals fully or what? It makes me leary of applications that have SQL injection problems just because I can only imagine the quagmire of code that must go in there if they're to lazy to get the SQL portion (which must be quite small) correct.
This is one instance I hope that both sides go to each others throats and strangle each other with no clear winner. However it works this must be pretty damn expensive so hopefully this will keep itself out of the regular price range for the forseeable future.
They control the software running on their hardware and they can modify it as they see fit.
This isn't meant to be flamebait or anything - just an honest question. Could "trusted computing" fix this? I mean if you have this trust system end to end and the code from the bios up is all verified to be untainted then that sould put an end to modding assuming you can get a secure network connection right?
We are teaching our kids that the only way to have fun is to win,
Which is funny considering the modern child rearing mentality of not leaving anyone out. Not having any winners or losers just everyone participating. Well that's what I tend to see now days. But in all honesty I wonder if it isn't that we are teaching kids that the only way to have fun is to win, it is that we are not teaching them how to lose. Taking a defeat is a part of life. When you play a game it should be a blast if you win OR lose. But with not having been confronted with losing situations, I wonder if this doesn't breed the sort of personality that compulsivly cheats when faced with problems that have a clear winner.
DirectX is another nail in the coffin for why I gave up on PC gaming. The vast majority of games I bought don't work on my newer PCs. I bought the "updated" version of Tie Fighter but never got around playing it until 2 months ago - but couldn't get it to work because it DEMANDS DirectX6 and no other version. Strangely enough the Dos version still works fine...
I guess with the modern buy and toss in 2 months game cycle that's popular now it isn't much of a concern to most people, but I often like to revisit my favorite games. At least with a console I can keep it and play it if I REALLY want to, but keeping around a special PC?...
Although you cannot remove IE you can secure your system then choose not to use IE. If you turn on content advisor then only allow windowsupdate.com you can block pretty much all IE internet access (in theory). You can then remove IE in add-remove programs which just deletes all the icons to IE - can still be launched through iexplore though. Lastly if you want to manually use windows update, create an mmc snap in pointing there.
And not just cyclists, but anyone not in a car in general. I had to walk to work after my car was in the shop for a week and took the bus. After getting off the bus I was actually sort of surprised to find that there were no sidewalks in one section of town - a newer part I might add. Fun stuff walking on the street waiting for someone to wheel around the corner in an SUV and kill you...
1) I've never heard anyone claim the Wii could play DVDs in the first place. 2) You can play DVDs with some sort of add on. If playing DVD's is that important to you, then by all means go and buy the add on. I'd just as soon have the console cheaper since I already have 6 systems capable of playing DVDs in my living room.
I think that some of these tech companies might find it in their best interest to "cool it". If they keep pushing out all this fringe technology all the time for something that has traditionally been stable over decades they're likely to see consumer burn out, where the consumer no longer cares about the latest technology and may be loath to ever upgrade since none of their current equipment works well with the newer stuff.
Actually when you think about it by that measure, its BETTER for dell to keep to windows. I build computers for those who request it and my prices (assuming I give the machine away at cost) is actually pretty good for the quality of machine built. But then there's the cost of Windows. Suddenly the price goes up around $100 which is a huge percentage of the machine cost. Dell can undercut just about anyone by leveraging windows volume licencing. When anyone can get Linux for free they lose that compeditive advantage.
MS made their bed they can sleep in it. Windows is too complex because MS MAKES it too complex. When you strip everything down to the (very stable) NT kernel, the design is pretty good. Then come on the layers for the GUI and things get muddled quickly. But even that isn't a big deal. Now lets consider the other crap that really has nothing to do with an "operating system", but is simply bundled in. You have junk like Media Player, Internet Explorer, notepad.. The list of apps that is just bolted on top goes on and on, but these things should be completely modular. MS is unwilling to decouple these things and is now mired in overcomplexity which is compounded by attempting to manage a team size needed to complete these tasks.
I'm starting to get the idea that MS doesn't even LIKE their OS anymore. It's just too much to maintain, while other programs like Office provide lots of money with less than half of the development costs.
I wholeheartedly agree with you that it really is a good thing for MS to help with such a project. Some may say it just showcases MS tech, but if it is better for the kids then who cares. But I think many of us also realize that this money could perhaps be better spent on things we know work, and that schools readily need. I mean this is a lot of money to lay down on "testing" technology, when I can assure you that many schools in Philly are f'ed up beyond all reason.
I honestly hope this works out for the school, but I have the suspicion that after the shiny-new effect wears off, that this school is going to be torn up and much of the tech rendered useless. See the above post about the guy who set up computers where the RAM was stolen out - that sort of thing is actually pretty common. And at least those machines were left in a repairable state.
Keep in mind that MICE didn't live any longer. Mice live around 2 years, and I believe that one mouse developed cancer and died a year later so it probably wasn't even a year old. This might be a cool option if humans only lived say, 10 years or so - but I am willing to bet that this would be a huge problem for humans since we tend to live around 65 years. Not to meantion the viruses we accumulate over our life, arteries clogging, etc., being major contributors to death.
Well if you're going for a sort of academic career, then the next "level" I would think would be this sort of apprenticeship. Which would be pretty cool considering there are many people capable of getting a doctorate, but only one such opportunity to work for Stephen Hawking. I imagine that if you could land that job then your resume would only need one sentence. "Stephen Hawking picked ME to work for him".
I'm not sure where the logic for something like this comes from. Like there is an infinite ammount of people who will work on every project ever abandoned. If IRIX was so wildly popular, I doubt SGI would stop working on it. I'm sure there's lots of useful code in there, but I'm also sure it's littered with stuff that has a patent on it as well. SGI is still a company that seeks to survive (I would assume), and isn't doing so well. They are in no position to work on figuring out licence issues to put IRIX under the GPL.
Well this is the first of the old school Unix's to fall that I can think of. AIX and Solaris will probably be last. The ones maintained by Hewlet-Compaqard will be next in line after the death of SCO derivatives.
Depending upon your laptop you can probably already do this. I have a dell laptop that eats hard drives, so when I went through my last hard drive, I got a PMCIA CF card adapter to boot the system from. You could then plug in the USB drive for more storage. These days maybe you can boot strait from USB on a laptop.
Really all you have to do is remove the hard drive yourself.
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Heh, I'd like to see the budget allocation for that.
"Sir we need $200,000 to upgrade the clusterfuck or we don't know what's going to happen. Actually we don't know what's going to happen when we upgrade it either."
CxO: "Uhhh... okay"
The biggest advantage IMHO is incramental upgrades. I've been using Linux on and off for a while, but when I got into FreeBSD and the ports collection I wondered why Linux hadn't attempted something similar. Now Gentoo is similar but not the same as ports. Basically when you do a sync and an update, you have the latest gentoo. That never changes - although occasionally you may need to update your profile. With other Linux distros it is Version X.X with minor maintenance on each package. Then comes version X.Y and shit goes haywire with the changes. I got burned with SuSE and been burned with Redhat (multiple times), and I'm sick of those kinds of cycles.
Using portage is just maintanence to me. I just review the updates in about 15 seconds then let it compile everything in the background and that's it. Use flags are nice, some optimizations are nice, flexibility is real nice but none of them are areally deal breakers. The depth of portage is actually pretty nice as well. It's not very often that I find software that I want that isn't already in portage. Portage also installs "unmolested" versions of software which was another annoyance of mine with some other distros.
I'll stand with Microsoft on this one. I don't want all this shit strewn all over the place with different pannels who knows where just to see if I'm protected and up to date. I am seriously NOT impressed with Microsoft's abuse of their market position, but this is completely vendor agnostic. I'd also be happy if MS actually grew a spine and started enforcing other crap on their system like what is allowed to drop junk on the task bar without warning, or clutter the start menu/desktop. Or perhaps notify vendors that provide driver configuration utilities that they must conform to some sort of UI standard and not looking like some freaking space ship.
And the data that is surpringly absent is the actual number of visits. Maybe 10 times more people visited in the same period where apple didn't grow as much. Does that mean apple has no growth? No it means that the "marketshare" went down despite the fact that Apple still sold more computers. I am sort of a Mac person, but I'm seriously not going to get worked up over marketshare. As long as Apple continues to grow in sales, be profitable, and make good products I'm okay with whatever they're up to.
He tried to compile everything as one blob and then is distressed one package broke (in programming: write whole app, test later).
Well I can sympathize with not getting a Gentoo install right. It took me a while to get it up and running correctly, but I was doing it more as a learning experience to see if it was really my sort of thing (I'm a big fan of FreeBSD ports). But I agree that it seems insane to shoot strait for gnome - 300+ packages. The biggest pain is always Xorg so I would at least get that running. After Xorg is up you can at least multitask easier and emerge Firefox and browse the web or whatever. The other nice thing about firefox is it lets you read the documentation on the same machine making copy and paste operations slightly easier.
For #1 you can also use ctrl-c, or ctrl-[ (which is the escape sequence). If you're going to remap the capslock key you should remap it to ctrl IMHO.
What I find interesting is that every language I've worked with has a manual (or many manuals) on how to do an sql query, and just about every manual talks about how much better performance you get by binding (and doing a prepare). Do these people just not read manuals fully or what? It makes me leary of applications that have SQL injection problems just because I can only imagine the quagmire of code that must go in there if they're to lazy to get the SQL portion (which must be quite small) correct.
This is one instance I hope that both sides go to each others throats and strangle each other with no clear winner. However it works this must be pretty damn expensive so hopefully this will keep itself out of the regular price range for the forseeable future.
They control the software running on their hardware and they can modify it as they see fit.
This isn't meant to be flamebait or anything - just an honest question. Could "trusted computing" fix this? I mean if you have this trust system end to end and the code from the bios up is all verified to be untainted then that sould put an end to modding assuming you can get a secure network connection right?
Just an interesting thought I had.
We are teaching our kids that the only way to have fun is to win,
Which is funny considering the modern child rearing mentality of not leaving anyone out. Not having any winners or losers just everyone participating. Well that's what I tend to see now days. But in all honesty I wonder if it isn't that we are teaching kids that the only way to have fun is to win, it is that we are not teaching them how to lose. Taking a defeat is a part of life. When you play a game it should be a blast if you win OR lose. But with not having been confronted with losing situations, I wonder if this doesn't breed the sort of personality that compulsivly cheats when faced with problems that have a clear winner.
DirectX is another nail in the coffin for why I gave up on PC gaming. The vast majority of games I bought don't work on my newer PCs. I bought the "updated" version of Tie Fighter but never got around playing it until 2 months ago - but couldn't get it to work because it DEMANDS DirectX6 and no other version. Strangely enough the Dos version still works fine...
...
I guess with the modern buy and toss in 2 months game cycle that's popular now it isn't much of a concern to most people, but I often like to revisit my favorite games. At least with a console I can keep it and play it if I REALLY want to, but keeping around a special PC?
You sure? I heard that game was the shit.
Although you cannot remove IE you can secure your system then choose not to use IE. If you turn on content advisor then only allow windowsupdate.com you can block pretty much all IE internet access (in theory). You can then remove IE in add-remove programs which just deletes all the icons to IE - can still be launched through iexplore though. Lastly if you want to manually use windows update, create an mmc snap in pointing there.
And not just cyclists, but anyone not in a car in general. I had to walk to work after my car was in the shop for a week and took the bus. After getting off the bus I was actually sort of surprised to find that there were no sidewalks in one section of town - a newer part I might add. Fun stuff walking on the street waiting for someone to wheel around the corner in an SUV and kill you...
My mistake about the addon. Guess if you want a DVD addon, you can buy a DVD player for $60 =P
1) I've never heard anyone claim the Wii could play DVDs in the first place.
2) You can play DVDs with some sort of add on. If playing DVD's is that important to you, then by all means go and buy the add on. I'd just as soon have the console cheaper since I already have 6 systems capable of playing DVDs in my living room.
I think that some of these tech companies might find it in their best interest to "cool it". If they keep pushing out all this fringe technology all the time for something that has traditionally been stable over decades they're likely to see consumer burn out, where the consumer no longer cares about the latest technology and may be loath to ever upgrade since none of their current equipment works well with the newer stuff.
Actually when you think about it by that measure, its BETTER for dell to keep to windows. I build computers for those who request it and my prices (assuming I give the machine away at cost) is actually pretty good for the quality of machine built. But then there's the cost of Windows. Suddenly the price goes up around $100 which is a huge percentage of the machine cost. Dell can undercut just about anyone by leveraging windows volume licencing. When anyone can get Linux for free they lose that compeditive advantage.
MS made their bed they can sleep in it. Windows is too complex because MS MAKES it too complex. When you strip everything down to the (very stable) NT kernel, the design is pretty good. Then come on the layers for the GUI and things get muddled quickly. But even that isn't a big deal. Now lets consider the other crap that really has nothing to do with an "operating system", but is simply bundled in. You have junk like Media Player, Internet Explorer, notepad.. The list of apps that is just bolted on top goes on and on, but these things should be completely modular. MS is unwilling to decouple these things and is now mired in overcomplexity which is compounded by attempting to manage a team size needed to complete these tasks.
I'm starting to get the idea that MS doesn't even LIKE their OS anymore. It's just too much to maintain, while other programs like Office provide lots of money with less than half of the development costs.
I wholeheartedly agree with you that it really is a good thing for MS to help with such a project. Some may say it just showcases MS tech, but if it is better for the kids then who cares. But I think many of us also realize that this money could perhaps be better spent on things we know work, and that schools readily need. I mean this is a lot of money to lay down on "testing" technology, when I can assure you that many schools in Philly are f'ed up beyond all reason.
I honestly hope this works out for the school, but I have the suspicion that after the shiny-new effect wears off, that this school is going to be torn up and much of the tech rendered useless. See the above post about the guy who set up computers where the RAM was stolen out - that sort of thing is actually pretty common. And at least those machines were left in a repairable state.
Simpsons quote:
Dr. Nick: Inflammable means flammable? What a country!
Keep in mind that MICE didn't live any longer. Mice live around 2 years, and I believe that one mouse developed cancer and died a year later so it probably wasn't even a year old. This might be a cool option if humans only lived say, 10 years or so - but I am willing to bet that this would be a huge problem for humans since we tend to live around 65 years. Not to meantion the viruses we accumulate over our life, arteries clogging, etc., being major contributors to death.
Well if you're going for a sort of academic career, then the next "level" I would think would be this sort of apprenticeship. Which would be pretty cool considering there are many people capable of getting a doctorate, but only one such opportunity to work for Stephen Hawking. I imagine that if you could land that job then your resume would only need one sentence. "Stephen Hawking picked ME to work for him".
I'm not sure where the logic for something like this comes from. Like there is an infinite ammount of people who will work on every project ever abandoned. If IRIX was so wildly popular, I doubt SGI would stop working on it. I'm sure there's lots of useful code in there, but I'm also sure it's littered with stuff that has a patent on it as well. SGI is still a company that seeks to survive (I would assume), and isn't doing so well. They are in no position to work on figuring out licence issues to put IRIX under the GPL.
Well this is the first of the old school Unix's to fall that I can think of. AIX and Solaris will probably be last. The ones maintained by Hewlet-Compaqard will be next in line after the death of SCO derivatives.
Depending upon your laptop you can probably already do this. I have a dell laptop that eats hard drives, so when I went through my last hard drive, I got a PMCIA CF card adapter to boot the system from. You could then plug in the USB drive for more storage. These days maybe you can boot strait from USB on a laptop.
Really all you have to do is remove the hard drive yourself.