You never can count of the product to be around long term.
Or how support will just suddenly drop out from under it? Reguardless of who's telling it, it's true to some extent. My trust in commercial distro's just went down pretty far. I mean MS may do forced upgrades but at least they'll support Win2k until 2007. I was looking hard at SUSE, but there again, who knows what they'll do once they see greener pastures. If there is any Linux distro that I would use, it would probably be Debian - a very conservative distro in the hands of the community.
There was a time when you read books for entertainment, and that's about all you COULD do.
Well there are other things as well. In fact in the early 1900s, neighborhood blocks would fill up with people who just wanted to chat with their neighbors or whatever. Many families got together and played music and such. Then comes radio. Think of your typical image of a family listening to the radio. Dad reads the newspaper. Junior does his homework (yeah right) etc. Note that people DID things when they listened to the radio.
Then comes TV. As the years go by TV becomes a staple of American life (probably western society in general). Seriously, I tell people I haven't watched TV in 8 months and they look at me like I'm from another planet. As time goes by people start to forsake their general past times in favor of simply vegetating in front of the TV. Add onto that the fact that TV shows are getting worse overall. Add onto that the fact that the amount of commercials is disgusting. And is it any wonder why people want to get away from TV and DO SOMETHING again? I mean go online into porn chat, play counter strike, or trolling slashdot may not seem like much, but at least you are actively doing something in a sense.
I used to watch so much TV when I was in high school that it makes me ill thinking about it. Now I find better things to do with my time like reading, playing/writing music and tinkering with computer stuff. I think other people are going to start getting away from TV as well. Again Hollywood seems out of touch with everything but the MTV to 30 year old demographic. A disturbing amount of people I know over 30 watch the freaking cooking channel because "there's nothing else worth watching". It's like more and more people are feeling like they don't want to watch what's on TV, but are chained by the habit of watching it. Many people are probably wanting to do something else, but have forgotten what else there is to do with their free time. As people take to computers more and more, a migration only seems natural IMHO. Sad to say but it seems to me that computers are just a thin substitute for people craving what they used to have before TV and radio - entertainment, socializing, and human interaction.
Re:Much of this could be done in linux...
on
Microsoft's new CLI
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I think most people don't use modern language for the shell, because the shell is mainly meant for people to use. If I want to use a shell, I'll use bash which works quite well for crusing around the system. If I need to script anything complex I'll use Perl, or Ruby (or python or whatever).
In any event I think Microsoft will miss the power of scripting because of their mentality. Unix is a collection of small applications glued together by the shell. Microsoft will probably make a huge programming language that is accessable right from the command line. Then we can await lots of fun problems like what version we have and backwords compatibility nightmare. These are the sorts of problems we have with _programming_languages_ , we don't need them on the shell too! Unix is very fine tuned area as far as the CLI goes, and MS will either learn from it, or re-implement it badly. How is this all going to work with their new signed code junk anyway? I mean if anyone can slap together a shell script virus, it would seem that all the DRM protection went down the toilet.
Other things MS will probably need to re-invent:
* man pages */dev/null * mail (or similar) system to get output when automated
I got an LG cd burner (DVD read) and it's worked pretty well. I think I've burned 2 coasters out of a LOT of cds burned. I don't think I've ever had a problem with reading good cds. I actually specifically wanted this burner though because I knew that I could wack the DVD region relitively easy. To me resetting the DVD region was top priority, and most of the reviews said it was quite a capable drive and personally I have no complaints. Now being able to cripple a CDROM with software is rather pathetic, but I don't use Mandrake so I'm okay there =)
As long as I can smash all the bars up in one small line
Just so you know, Mozilla firebird can do this. The only thing you can't do as far as I know (without some themeing or UI hack) is remove the text from the top bar (file.. help). You could also just use fullscreen mode (F11) like in IE.
The three laws assume some form of true AI. Today, a robot has no concept of a "human" and therefore is ill equipped to obey such "laws". Arguably, until there is a form of real AI such laws are not really needed.
While the Japanese nuclear "industry" is one of the worst in the world in terms of safety
It's not the fault of the Japanese. Godzilla is responsible for 99% of nuclear related "problems" in Japan. If anything the Japanese are quite adept in dealing with these situations. I mean look at how many times they rebuilt Tokyo after being destroyed by a giant radioactive monster. Does any other country have as much experience dealing with nuclear catastrophy? I think not.
There's a solution for this, basically you firewall the laptops as well. Where I work all the office people are in the same area, so just set up a wireless network. Now everyone is all happy with the new gizmo technology, and you require VPN access through a firewall to get to the network. If there's a major bug going around, disallow users until they check in and re-authorize them.
It's interesting because I've had the same experience. I've lost count of how many times I've plugged and unplugged ps2 (and we're seriously talking thousands of times by now). Hell I've probably done that a thousand times on my P166 at home alone (although that's actually an AT connector). It's really odd that people can talk about having fried multiple boards doing this, while never having problems with it myself. If the PC loses the keyboard or mouse it's probably a function of both the OS and the keyboard/mouse. I never had a problem with regular mice, but my logitech optical stops working if disconnected. Reconnecting the keyboard sometimes stops NT4, but I've never had problems with any other OS's. The keyrate will reset however, so you have to go into the preferences and readjust them (just change them to what they were) and it works fine.
Well I think "poisoned" is a bit strong, but I agree that the core should be written by the BSD team (stuff in/bin/sbin etc). But in the end I just want to use the best programs for the job. I may be incorrect in my knowlege of the GPL, but I don't think it covers usage of programs. For instance if I do something like:
bash$ gnuls | proprietary-prog | gnutar
And I charge for this entire "system" being on BSD, there's nothing they can do about it as it is permissible under the GPL. I like BSD as a personal preference, not neccesarily because of political reasons. BSD and GNU are both free enough for me. But I agree that having a truly free OS is important. I think that as Linux gains acceptance, many vendors will realize that they could just as well use BSD and not worry about licencing issues (like Linksys). On the other hand I'm firmly against certain programs using the BSD licence - such as apache and samba. Each of them has their place, but it starts to get awkward when gnu programs are strewn all over the BSD userland.
I noticed the migration of utilities going from native to GNU and back to native. Is there any reason they're going back? I was finally happy that the BSD stuff (like df) were supporting some of the nicer GNU flags (like -h), but I wonder if they're going to end up diverging again. I'm still waiting for the native FreeBSD ls to support color for that matter (not that I mind using gnuls, but it's sort of odd using a replacement for something as fundamental as 'ls' IMHO).
patches for what though? Updates for the 10 different mail clients, the database applications, the zillion other programs that come with rh9? XP doesn't come with much, and it doesn't patch much either (ie it only patches the OS, not SQL server, or Office, etc). Besides which it's not the patches that bothers me, it's the warnings. A typical Linux advisory reads "may be able to cause a denial of service attack" - ie crash a daemon or lock up something. A typical MS advisory reads "could allow an attacker to gain total control of your computer" - ie own you.
That depends upon the machine. I was reading through the specs and it was something like 256Mb of RAM and a pretty quick processor (recommended that the machine is dedicated). If your machine is already lacking horsepower then putting SUS on a machine as well is not a good idea. It also seems rather insane that you would risk your domain controller falling over to add an SUS server out of it.
It's still the fastest desktop processor, because there is no desktop OS that runs on the Opteron until Microsoft releases the XP version in 2004. And no, Linux is not a desktop OS - ie something regular people can use (yet).
I don't know why Apple shoots them selves in the foot with this speed BS anyway. Seriously I like my iBook for many reasons, but speed isn't one of them (because it's slow - although seems as fast as many PC laptops for some reason), but I'm willing to put up with a little drag to have a cool computer. They just aren't going to win the speed race and they need to realize that. They need to focus on the value of the overall computer where Apple is indeed ahead in many respects.
I used to think the same thing until Mozilla 1.4 . Mozilla is generally stable but every now and then when I hit the mail icon mozilla dies. Mozilla also reverted to falling over when you view too many images in stand alone windows. Now I just want two separate apps so that one doesn't take out the other. Getting them to talk to each other should be pretty easy, and I doubt we'd even see much of a difference (aside from UI changes).
Apparently I'm missing something really obvious here. I mean you're going to have a P2P system to distribute college material? Maybe these people have never heard of file uploads through http. Are you going to trust the english department to properly share their files? Are the clients going to do md5 checksums on the files to make sure they haven't been tampered with? Are their servers really suffering that bad from "legitimate" academic traffic?
I mean you're telling me that you couldn't take like 2 Linux/BSD Guru's + around 5 CGI coders and come up with a simple web based solution? Now I have to wait for a client for MY OS of choice which may be a PDA which hasn't even been invented for all they know. I seriously can't see what this thing does at all! What you get with "decentralization" and "lessening the bourdon of administration" you're probably going to get screwed twice over with playing traffic cop and showing people over and over and over how to use the system. I also don't see how "logging every transaction" will help anything. We all know college students have worm ridden machines already, like I couldn't figure out how to hijack someone else machine and start injecting porn in place of the philosophy departments files.
Hell give me just 1 million (10% discount guys!!!) and I could do it myself - I'll even through in the hardware of a couple servers =P.
McDonands does not try to control the way I eat. Walmart does not try to control the way I buy products. Microsoft wants to control practically everything I do with a computer. I'd also argue that Walmart and McDonalds may not be aware of their weight and it's consequences, but Microsoft sure as hell is, and they abuse it regularly.
I'm not particularly a zealot either as I think pretty much everything sucks, but Microsoft is definatly a bad company that just can't stand ANY competition. I don't know why they couldn't be happy with what they have instead of trying to force their way into just about every market. The flip side of the coin is, why in the hell do Linux zealots think Linux is great for everything? Good for a lot of things, yes - good for EVERYTHING no.
The question is should the average user recompile the kernel? Maybe, but exactly what do users expect to get out of this? Three check boxes that say:
make my kernel run
[] slower [] faster [] really fast
There are a lot of odds and end options that you should really understand before you enable/disable them, and most end users don't want to do this, and those that do probably already read the documentation and do. Most people probably don't even know what sort of processor their using, so how would they know which one to select to optimize their kernel? Most kernel compile howto's are pretty clear. I mean even I can type what they tell me to. menuconfig is pretty clear about things, you have questions and they tell you if you should probably need something or not. I believe the kernel is probably one of the few things worth compiling yourself, but I really don't think it's for most people. I do however agree that the process could use some streamlining to make things a bit easier.
Building rpm's might be red hat centric (although other systems use rpm too now), but the idea is probably more important. Whatever packaging system you use, the only real differences are in the package system which you should have a fundamental understanding of anyway.
On my FreeBSD boxes I just use 'make package' off of the box that keeps the source tree in sync. Then uses rsync to push them to the other servers where cron picks up the updates and installs them. I could just as easily replace that with RPM on a Linux box. It's the juggling act that's the tricky part.
In that context perhaps it isn't that bad. Although now I feel like I'm waisting a quarter every time I download and will feel Obligated to download 40 a month reguardless of if I want them or not. Maybe I'll wait it out for a month or so and see if I have problems with the cap. The main issue for me is that I'm a binge downloader. I might download 100 songs in a month, then nothing for 3 months. Now I'm probably just going to end up pissed off that I can't download something. Is that worth flushing $100+ down the toilet per year? Hard to say.
40 downloads? That's a joke right? The main reason I even subscribed in the first place is so I could just browse around and FIND music I liked. And no, Kazaa dos not make music (ie music you've never heard) easy to find, it only finds things that you already want. At a mere 40 I doubt I'll find much of anything. Hell by the time I did find an artist I liked I'd probably be at my cap anyway. It's really sad considering how much I've been preaching about emusic.com and now it's been completely fucked up.
believe it or not it is - well for me anyway. If I move my pinky to the bottom row of the keyboard it's naturally over the win key already. You'd think the normal place where the cntrl key is would be easier to reach but you have to cramp your pinky in a sort of awkward way to get at it (which is why I always remap the caps lock to a ctrl).
Guess you could say I'm for simplicity when it comes to the mechanics of the keyboard (wanna guess if I use vi or emacs?). The F keys tend to be hard to hit. The only way I can really get at an alt key without looking at the keyboard is using my thumb, and then it becomes awkward to hit any OTHER key with the same hand.
Slashdot Mirror
You never can count of the product to be around long term.
Or how support will just suddenly drop out from under it? Reguardless of who's telling it, it's true to some extent. My trust in commercial distro's just went down pretty far. I mean MS may do forced upgrades but at least they'll support Win2k until 2007. I was looking hard at SUSE, but there again, who knows what they'll do once they see greener pastures. If there is any Linux distro that I would use, it would probably be Debian - a very conservative distro in the hands of the community.
As I used to say when the "real world" first appeared on MTV:
If I want reality where people are just bitching at each other all the time, I'll go talk to my mom.
There was a time when you read books for entertainment, and that's about all you COULD do.
Well there are other things as well. In fact in the early 1900s, neighborhood blocks would fill up with people who just wanted to chat with their neighbors or whatever. Many families got together and played music and such. Then comes radio. Think of your typical image of a family listening to the radio. Dad reads the newspaper. Junior does his homework (yeah right) etc. Note that people DID things when they listened to the radio.
Then comes TV. As the years go by TV becomes a staple of American life (probably western society in general). Seriously, I tell people I haven't watched TV in 8 months and they look at me like I'm from another planet. As time goes by people start to forsake their general past times in favor of simply vegetating in front of the TV. Add onto that the fact that TV shows are getting worse overall. Add onto that the fact that the amount of commercials is disgusting. And is it any wonder why people want to get away from TV and DO SOMETHING again? I mean go online into porn chat, play counter strike, or trolling slashdot may not seem like much, but at least you are actively doing something in a sense.
I used to watch so much TV when I was in high school that it makes me ill thinking about it. Now I find better things to do with my time like reading, playing/writing music and tinkering with computer stuff. I think other people are going to start getting away from TV as well. Again Hollywood seems out of touch with everything but the MTV to 30 year old demographic. A disturbing amount of people I know over 30 watch the freaking cooking channel because "there's nothing else worth watching". It's like more and more people are feeling like they don't want to watch what's on TV, but are chained by the habit of watching it. Many people are probably wanting to do something else, but have forgotten what else there is to do with their free time. As people take to computers more and more, a migration only seems natural IMHO. Sad to say but it seems to me that computers are just a thin substitute for people craving what they used to have before TV and radio - entertainment, socializing, and human interaction.
I think most people don't use modern language for the shell, because the shell is mainly meant for people to use. If I want to use a shell, I'll use bash which works quite well for crusing around the system. If I need to script anything complex I'll use Perl, or Ruby (or python or whatever).
/dev/null
In any event I think Microsoft will miss the power of scripting because of their mentality. Unix is a collection of small applications glued together by the shell. Microsoft will probably make a huge programming language that is accessable right from the command line. Then we can await lots of fun problems like what version we have and backwords compatibility nightmare. These are the sorts of problems we have with _programming_languages_ , we don't need them on the shell too! Unix is very fine tuned area as far as the CLI goes, and MS will either learn from it, or re-implement it badly. How is this all going to work with their new signed code junk anyway? I mean if anyone can slap together a shell script virus, it would seem that all the DRM protection went down the toilet.
Other things MS will probably need to re-invent:
* man pages
*
* mail (or similar) system to get output when automated
I got an LG cd burner (DVD read) and it's worked pretty well. I think I've burned 2 coasters out of a LOT of cds burned. I don't think I've ever had a problem with reading good cds. I actually specifically wanted this burner though because I knew that I could wack the DVD region relitively easy. To me resetting the DVD region was top priority, and most of the reviews said it was quite a capable drive and personally I have no complaints. Now being able to cripple a CDROM with software is rather pathetic, but I don't use Mandrake so I'm okay there =)
As long as I can smash all the bars up in one small line
.. help). You could also just use fullscreen mode (F11) like in IE.
Just so you know, Mozilla firebird can do this. The only thing you can't do as far as I know (without some themeing or UI hack) is remove the text from the top bar (file
I thought assholeware is what porn stars show after their 50th or so anal.
The three laws assume some form of true AI. Today, a robot has no concept of a "human" and therefore is ill equipped to obey such "laws". Arguably, until there is a form of real AI such laws are not really needed.
While the Japanese nuclear "industry" is one of the worst in the world in terms of safety
It's not the fault of the Japanese. Godzilla is responsible for 99% of nuclear related "problems" in Japan. If anything the Japanese are quite adept in dealing with these situations. I mean look at how many times they rebuilt Tokyo after being destroyed by a giant radioactive monster. Does any other country have as much experience dealing with nuclear catastrophy? I think not.
There's a solution for this, basically you firewall the laptops as well. Where I work all the office people are in the same area, so just set up a wireless network. Now everyone is all happy with the new gizmo technology, and you require VPN access through a firewall to get to the network. If there's a major bug going around, disallow users until they check in and re-authorize them.
It's interesting because I've had the same experience. I've lost count of how many times I've plugged and unplugged ps2 (and we're seriously talking thousands of times by now). Hell I've probably done that a thousand times on my P166 at home alone (although that's actually an AT connector). It's really odd that people can talk about having fried multiple boards doing this, while never having problems with it myself. If the PC loses the keyboard or mouse it's probably a function of both the OS and the keyboard/mouse. I never had a problem with regular mice, but my logitech optical stops working if disconnected. Reconnecting the keyboard sometimes stops NT4, but I've never had problems with any other OS's. The keyrate will reset however, so you have to go into the preferences and readjust them (just change them to what they were) and it works fine.
Well I think "poisoned" is a bit strong, but I agree that the core should be written by the BSD team (stuff in /bin /sbin etc). But in the end I just want to use the best programs for the job. I may be incorrect in my knowlege of the GPL, but I don't think it covers usage of programs. For instance if I do something like:
bash$ gnuls | proprietary-prog | gnutar
And I charge for this entire "system" being on BSD, there's nothing they can do about it as it is permissible under the GPL. I like BSD as a personal preference, not neccesarily because of political reasons. BSD and GNU are both free enough for me. But I agree that having a truly free OS is important. I think that as Linux gains acceptance, many vendors will realize that they could just as well use BSD and not worry about licencing issues (like Linksys). On the other hand I'm firmly against certain programs using the BSD licence - such as apache and samba. Each of them has their place, but it starts to get awkward when gnu programs are strewn all over the BSD userland.
I noticed the migration of utilities going from native to GNU and back to native. Is there any reason they're going back? I was finally happy that the BSD stuff (like df) were supporting some of the nicer GNU flags (like -h), but I wonder if they're going to end up diverging again. I'm still waiting for the native FreeBSD ls to support color for that matter (not that I mind using gnuls, but it's sort of odd using a replacement for something as fundamental as 'ls' IMHO).
patches for what though? Updates for the 10 different mail clients, the database applications, the zillion other programs that come with rh9? XP doesn't come with much, and it doesn't patch much either (ie it only patches the OS, not SQL server, or Office, etc). Besides which it's not the patches that bothers me, it's the warnings. A typical Linux advisory reads "may be able to cause a denial of service attack" - ie crash a daemon or lock up something. A typical MS advisory reads "could allow an attacker to gain total control of your computer" - ie own you.
That depends upon the machine. I was reading through the specs and it was something like 256Mb of RAM and a pretty quick processor (recommended that the machine is dedicated). If your machine is already lacking horsepower then putting SUS on a machine as well is not a good idea. It also seems rather insane that you would risk your domain controller falling over to add an SUS server out of it.
you never change the filter? I'll stick to paying someone thanks.
It's still the fastest desktop processor, because there is no desktop OS that runs on the Opteron until Microsoft releases the XP version in 2004. And no, Linux is not a desktop OS - ie something regular people can use (yet).
I don't know why Apple shoots them selves in the foot with this speed BS anyway. Seriously I like my iBook for many reasons, but speed isn't one of them (because it's slow - although seems as fast as many PC laptops for some reason), but I'm willing to put up with a little drag to have a cool computer. They just aren't going to win the speed race and they need to realize that. They need to focus on the value of the overall computer where Apple is indeed ahead in many respects.
I used to think the same thing until Mozilla 1.4 . Mozilla is generally stable but every now and then when I hit the mail icon mozilla dies. Mozilla also reverted to falling over when you view too many images in stand alone windows. Now I just want two separate apps so that one doesn't take out the other. Getting them to talk to each other should be pretty easy, and I doubt we'd even see much of a difference (aside from UI changes).
Apparently I'm missing something really obvious here. I mean you're going to have a P2P system to distribute college material? Maybe these people have never heard of file uploads through http. Are you going to trust the english department to properly share their files? Are the clients going to do md5 checksums on the files to make sure they haven't been tampered with? Are their servers really suffering that bad from "legitimate" academic traffic?
I mean you're telling me that you couldn't take like 2 Linux/BSD Guru's + around 5 CGI coders and come up with a simple web based solution? Now I have to wait for a client for MY OS of choice which may be a PDA which hasn't even been invented for all they know. I seriously can't see what this thing does at all! What you get with "decentralization" and "lessening the bourdon of administration" you're probably going to get screwed twice over with playing traffic cop and showing people over and over and over how to use the system. I also don't see how "logging every transaction" will help anything. We all know college students have worm ridden machines already, like I couldn't figure out how to hijack someone else machine and start injecting porn in place of the philosophy departments files.
Hell give me just 1 million (10% discount guys!!!) and I could do it myself - I'll even through in the hardware of a couple servers =P.
McDonands does not try to control the way I eat. Walmart does not try to control the way I buy products. Microsoft wants to control practically everything I do with a computer. I'd also argue that Walmart and McDonalds may not be aware of their weight and it's consequences, but Microsoft sure as hell is, and they abuse it regularly.
I'm not particularly a zealot either as I think pretty much everything sucks, but Microsoft is definatly a bad company that just can't stand ANY competition. I don't know why they couldn't be happy with what they have instead of trying to force their way into just about every market. The flip side of the coin is, why in the hell do Linux zealots think Linux is great for everything? Good for a lot of things, yes - good for EVERYTHING no.
The question is should the average user recompile the kernel? Maybe, but exactly what do users expect to get out of this? Three check boxes that say :
make my kernel run
[] slower
[] faster
[] really fast
There are a lot of odds and end options that you should really understand before you enable/disable them, and most end users don't want to do this, and those that do probably already read the documentation and do. Most people probably don't even know what sort of processor their using, so how would they know which one to select to optimize their kernel? Most kernel compile howto's are pretty clear. I mean even I can type what they tell me to. menuconfig is pretty clear about things, you have questions and they tell you if you should probably need something or not. I believe the kernel is probably one of the few things worth compiling yourself, but I really don't think it's for most people. I do however agree that the process could use some streamlining to make things a bit easier.
Building rpm's might be red hat centric (although other systems use rpm too now), but the idea is probably more important. Whatever packaging system you use, the only real differences are in the package system which you should have a fundamental understanding of anyway.
On my FreeBSD boxes I just use 'make package' off of the box that keeps the source tree in sync. Then uses rsync to push them to the other servers where cron picks up the updates and installs them. I could just as easily replace that with RPM on a Linux box. It's the juggling act that's the tricky part.
you're getting tracks for 25 cents
In that context perhaps it isn't that bad. Although now I feel like I'm waisting a quarter every time I download and will feel Obligated to download 40 a month reguardless of if I want them or not. Maybe I'll wait it out for a month or so and see if I have problems with the cap. The main issue for me is that I'm a binge downloader. I might download 100 songs in a month, then nothing for 3 months. Now I'm probably just going to end up pissed off that I can't download something. Is that worth flushing $100+ down the toilet per year? Hard to say.
40 downloads? That's a joke right? The main reason I even subscribed in the first place is so I could just browse around and FIND music I liked. And no, Kazaa dos not make music (ie music you've never heard) easy to find, it only finds things that you already want. At a mere 40 I doubt I'll find much of anything. Hell by the time I did find an artist I liked I'd probably be at my cap anyway. It's really sad considering how much I've been preaching about emusic.com and now it's been completely fucked up.
believe it or not it is - well for me anyway. If I move my pinky to the bottom row of the keyboard it's naturally over the win key already. You'd think the normal place where the cntrl key is would be easier to reach but you have to cramp your pinky in a sort of awkward way to get at it (which is why I always remap the caps lock to a ctrl).
Guess you could say I'm for simplicity when it comes to the mechanics of the keyboard (wanna guess if I use vi or emacs?). The F keys tend to be hard to hit. The only way I can really get at an alt key without looking at the keyboard is using my thumb, and then it becomes awkward to hit any OTHER key with the same hand.