To me the installer is fine, it's the programs that are to be installed that are the problem. I mean to a regular person its heap after heap of programs named after random strings of characters. For those familiar with Unix, this isn't so much a problem. But to someone new to an install that would like to look through everything, it's a huge headache and very time consuming. You can get information on each package, but wouldn't it be nice if you could tell what a program did by looking at the name for at least some of these programs?
Grub? Lilo? Are we even speaking English here? How about we call it "The Freaking Operating System Boot Loader" - which of course gets abbreviated as 'fosbl'...
Re:MS doesn't actually turn a profit.
on
Microsoft's Future
·
· Score: 1
"Sony doing the kind of radical things they'll need to do in order to combat MS either."
Well that's where the console market is a bit different. What it all comes down to are the games. I mean you can take the most unoriginal game ever seen, that has been done many many times over, but if people still love it, think it's extremely fun, and have a blast playing it - it will still sell the system. Whether the Xbox will have good enough games I can't say. Having a better system doesn't mean it will sell better either - Atari Jaguar for instance. I'm not sure I know what you would even expect Sony to do... once you have a console out, you're stuck with it - at which point it's all about the games (and trying to get certain games on your system). All in all I think Microsoft might start to see the fruits of their bad PR.
If anything I think this shows that it's not a good thing for everyone to be on one OS. Having a mix of *BSD, Linux, and some OSes you pay for can certainly minimize the damage for any OS specific exploit; and every OS has one somewhere...
"In cases such as this, corporations are making open source software the product"
An initial take of this, is that it does seem bad, but you can think of it another way too. Mozilla is cross platform. See AOL making money off of Linux or *BSD? I certainly don't, but Mozilla still works fine on them. Netscape (AOL) has given Linux the browser it has needed for a long time (okay, there's konquer now too...) Unlike other browsers though, it looks like AOL will back Mozilla - and backing of this kind is the only hope of keeping the internet out of the grip of MS. Keep in mind that although Linux is also an OSS product, there are more than a few businesses that capitalize on it. I think in essence AOL is footing the bill, and giving open source a chance as well as giving a cross platform browser - it's only reasonable to expect that they would use the end result of this work. And it's not like they're going to take Mozilla away from us, or start charging money for it.
Seems to me M$ is trying to put the blame elsewhere for IIS. M$ products have been insecure for years, we all know this - but usually this has been an excuse for M$ to push upgrades (such as Internet Explorer). This time people aren't upgrading IIS, they're jumping ship entirely. Only now after all these years when insecurity hasn't been in their best interests is MS in a panic trying to stop it (defections, not insecurity).
"I wonder how long until they have their own, seperate internet".
Well if things keep going at the rate they are, they very well might get something very similar:
1) can't access pop3 account without MS Outlook
2) can't view certain pages without MS IE
3) can't view certain media content without MS media player
4) can't chat with people unless you use MSN Messenger
Now we have a choice in all of the above, not to use them, and use something else. But if MS continues to gain marketshare, and put a stranglehold on their closed technologies - we could very well see a fair portion of the Internet locking out non MS users.
Just because the 75GXP has had some very noticeable reliability problems, that does NOT mean that IBM does not make a good drive!
Um, I'll argue against this point. Sure we all want good performance, but reliability MUST come first in hard drives. No matter what happens to the rest of your computer, it can be replaced. Hard drives can be replaced too, but the information on them cannot. Sure you're supposed to back them up, but how many people actually do? How many people are just like me and only back stuff up every week or so? It can be the best performing drive ever, but once you hear that click of death it's 'game over'. Any work, configurations, programs and saved files just went down the toilet. Even with a good backup scheme, restoration is typically a huge pain in the ass to say the least. I would quite honestly pay a fair amount more for a slower drive that I was SURE would be stable, then most of the drives out now days. The big problem is that it's hard to trust any drive manufacturer as drives are getting lower and lower in quality pretty much across the board.
Try This. Before the fork of the project, Macamp and Winamp were very similar, but when Nullsoft gave over the Macamp section to another company, the two diverged considerably.
In all of this I'm starting to wonder where AOL comes in. I don't see Linux or Mac as big markets that they'll make any money in, but perhaps this is another stepping stone to get an AOL package that works for other OS's. If you look at what Netscape Communicator (4x) came with you see:
Netscape - became Mozilla, is cross platform
Winamp - being ported to Mac and Linux
Realplayer - Mac and Win32 versions
With these 3 components (and Macromedia flash) you could participate in just about everything the web has to offer. I could see these comming together in some sort of cross platform package in the future (with some sort of chat client).
The whole player thing is getting a bit weird. Xmms started off as X11 amp, which was basically a copy of Winamp, but later grew into a player with it's own flavor. Winamp then gets ported to Linux, which sort of makes for a weird situation. Mac amp was the Macintosh version of Winamp and used to be owned by Nullsoft, before the guys sold off the division to some other company. Now Winamp is available for the Mac again, but now under it's own name. And yes, Mac amp is now also available for windows. (So we have Winamp for Macs, and Macamp for Windows)...
I'll agree that I think most of this crap is bull, but biological and chemical attacks could be a threat in the right hands. It's apperent to me that this is more a scare tactic than anything. Anthrax is very effective IF you get it, but it's actually pretty hard to spread. Whoever is doing this isn't really intent on killing people so much as spreading paranoia and fear. But biological weapons could be effective. Impractical? Mass mail 1000 letters with small pox. Do the math on that one and it's pretty scary.
Re:AOL, Winamp, ICQ, Intergrated.
on
Mozilla 0.9.5
·
· Score: 1
If AOL believes their users want this, AOL will do it for them. AOL owns Netscape, and although are way behind the scenes they also are a driving force in Mozilla. An AOL browser (Mozilla edition) would be the place to do this stuff, not in Mozilla itself.
Re:Only people like us appreciate that.
on
Mozilla 0.9.5
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Average users dont see the internal, they see the features THEY can use.
And what "features" do most people use? Hardly any. Most people just use the basic functionality that has been provided by browsers for years. You want to see something cool, then use the 'tab' feature that was recently added. It lets you do things Opera style, or you can just use Mozilla as usuall like IE. Will regular people use this? No, because most people don't even use most of the features of IE.
"SO-5.2 is absolutely comparable and better in parts than MS Office 2000."
I find this to be rather untrue. SO 5.2 is very bloated, and in many ways lacking compared to MS Office 2k. And lets not even get started on the dreaded desktop... So in a nutshell, SO 5.2 is a oversized gorilla with the punch of a spider monkey.
But on the other hand, SO 6 is a totally different story. I haven't used SO 6 beta yet, but I am using the latest Open Office build. I am very impressed. It seems to load as fast (or faster) than MS Office, and has imported every office document (flawlessly) I've thrown at it so far. At the place I work I've silently switched to Open Office while everyone else is still using MS Office 2k. This is about the best scenario I can think of, to see how well Open Office can survive - and it's looking very promising. I have this feeling that down the road when the upgrade issue comes up I'm going to end up recommending what many companies are finding:
Go with Star Office / Open Office
I'm not talking immediately, I'm talking a year or so down the road. People will eventually find that MS is up to their old game of trying to force upgrades. With the perpetual upgrade license of MS companies will have to pay 33% MORE per year IF they play by Microsoft's rules and get the upgrade every year. If they don't they will be penalized by paying over twice as much as they do now. For many businesses we're easily talking thousands of dollars or more - for software that their employees might only be using the simplest functionality of. If the economy doesn't turn around, businesses will probably have to watch their costs/budget closer than ever, and M$ is going to charge us MORE for this software? What are 15 features that make Office XP better than Office 2k? Does anyone even know? If you (the typical Slashdot reader) knows, then do regular not so computer literate people know? Are these features worth it? What guarantee do we even have that MS will even try to improve MS Office in the future? They could just up the version number, change some tool bar icons, and of course change the document formats to be incompatible. If Star/Open Office can maintain reasonable compatibility, I really can't see any reason to continue using M$ Office.
You are aware of the difficulties of writing on computers in Chinese aren't you? Japanese manages to avoid this as you can break any kanji down to it's sound components (hirogana), which can be spelled via the keyboard (romanji), and then select from a small list. From my understanding, Chinese is far more complex, due to how the same english equivalent spelling can be pronounced a few different ways in Chinese. The alternative is to start changing every keyboard on the planet and redo every programming language (that's in english anyway) so that it can be easily done in Chinese. Either way it would be a mess.
"but we also have vastly more and better trained people"
I'm not sure I would say "vastly". Remember these people have been training for a long time. Many of them fought against the Soviets for years and are combat hardened with considerable combat experience. We have many well trained people, but as many in the military will tell you - all the training in the world doesn't add up to much against actual combat experience. Not to meantion, we're playing on their home turf.
I almost dread computers going that fast. Just another excuse to make bloated code. But that might not be a bad thing. Mozilla might even be considered "lean and mean". Seriously though, this isn't addressing the other computer problems. Oh, like say the BUS SPEED. RAM isn't really making leaps and bounds compaired to speed either. And if hard drives only manage to improve at the rate they have been, virtual memory will be a gigantic disaster in terms of performance loss.
The other good news is that AMD processors will keep your computer clean as they will combust small particles that enter your computer case. Although hardware people will be very displeased at not being able to look directly at the CPU unless the computer has been shut off for 15 minutes to allow for cooling.
Actually DES is sort of weak by todays standards. I once read somewhere that it's speculated that the U.S. goverment has a dedicated piece of hardware for cracking DES encryption, and can probably do it in about 15 minutes.
But they may just be sufficiently small that they never reach bright blue. They may be just big enough to for the reactions to catch, without blowing them apart. and wind up being red.
To some extent that makes sense, but on the other hand it's rather rare for us to see most red dwarves. It's been theorized that the majority of the stars in the universe are probably red dwarves, but we just can't see them because they're so faint. Also, due to the fact that the larger a star is, the brighter it is and the faster it burns. Comparatively regular stars burn like a flash in the pan compared to red dwarves which burn (relatively) cool and many times longer than their larger counterparts (thus the number of red dwarves tends to accumulate over time). Well in any case I find it unlikely that light could travel that far, for that long, and actually be from a cluster of red dwarves - which I'm sure would be far to faint for us to detect. It is however possible that some of the very first red dwarves are still burning if I remember correctly.
Slashdot Mirror
To me the installer is fine, it's the programs that are to be installed that are the problem. I mean to a regular person its heap after heap of programs named after random strings of characters. For those familiar with Unix, this isn't so much a problem. But to someone new to an install that would like to look through everything, it's a huge headache and very time consuming. You can get information on each package, but wouldn't it be nice if you could tell what a program did by looking at the name for at least some of these programs?
Grub? Lilo? Are we even speaking English here? How about we call it "The Freaking Operating System Boot Loader" - which of course gets abbreviated as 'fosbl'...
"Sony doing the kind of radical things they'll need to do in order to combat MS either."
Well that's where the console market is a bit different. What it all comes down to are the games. I mean you can take the most unoriginal game ever seen, that has been done many many times over, but if people still love it, think it's extremely fun, and have a blast playing it - it will still sell the system. Whether the Xbox will have good enough games I can't say. Having a better system doesn't mean it will sell better either - Atari Jaguar for instance. I'm not sure I know what you would even expect Sony to do... once you have a console out, you're stuck with it - at which point it's all about the games (and trying to get certain games on your system). All in all I think Microsoft might start to see the fruits of their bad PR.
If anything I think this shows that it's not a good thing for everyone to be on one OS. Having a mix of *BSD, Linux, and some OSes you pay for can certainly minimize the damage for any OS specific exploit; and every OS has one somewhere...
"In cases such as this, corporations are making open source software the product"
An initial take of this, is that it does seem bad, but you can think of it another way too. Mozilla is cross platform. See AOL making money off of Linux or *BSD? I certainly don't, but Mozilla still works fine on them. Netscape (AOL) has given Linux the browser it has needed for a long time (okay, there's konquer now too...) Unlike other browsers though, it looks like AOL will back Mozilla - and backing of this kind is the only hope of keeping the internet out of the grip of MS. Keep in mind that although Linux is also an OSS product, there are more than a few businesses that capitalize on it. I think in essence AOL is footing the bill, and giving open source a chance as well as giving a cross platform browser - it's only reasonable to expect that they would use the end result of this work. And it's not like they're going to take Mozilla away from us, or start charging money for it.
besides which, because Mozilla is completely customizable, it can be made into whatever AOL wants it to be. Which is pretty scary...
Microsoft knows they want a subscription buisiness model, but they don't know yet what customers will pay for
Okay then, I'll save M$ the trouble of thinking it up themselves.
M$ p0rn
[insert horrifying imaginary image of Bill Gates here]
Seems to me M$ is trying to put the blame elsewhere for IIS. M$ products have been insecure for years, we all know this - but usually this has been an excuse for M$ to push upgrades (such as Internet Explorer). This time people aren't upgrading IIS, they're jumping ship entirely. Only now after all these years when insecurity hasn't been in their best interests is MS in a panic trying to stop it (defections, not insecurity).
"I wonder how long until they have their own, seperate internet".
Well if things keep going at the rate they are, they very well might get something very similar:
1) can't access pop3 account without MS Outlook
2) can't view certain pages without MS IE
3) can't view certain media content without MS media player
4) can't chat with people unless you use MSN Messenger
Now we have a choice in all of the above, not to use them, and use something else. But if MS continues to gain marketshare, and put a stranglehold on their closed technologies - we could very well see a fair portion of the Internet locking out non MS users.
when does the hacked by chinese game come out?
Just because the 75GXP has had some very noticeable reliability problems, that does NOT mean that IBM does not make a good drive!
Um, I'll argue against this point. Sure we all want good performance, but reliability MUST come first in hard drives. No matter what happens to the rest of your computer, it can be replaced. Hard drives can be replaced too, but the information on them cannot. Sure you're supposed to back them up, but how many people actually do? How many people are just like me and only back stuff up every week or so? It can be the best performing drive ever, but once you hear that click of death it's 'game over'. Any work, configurations, programs and saved files just went down the toilet. Even with a good backup scheme, restoration is typically a huge pain in the ass to say the least. I would quite honestly pay a fair amount more for a slower drive that I was SURE would be stable, then most of the drives out now days. The big problem is that it's hard to trust any drive manufacturer as drives are getting lower and lower in quality pretty much across the board.
Try This. Before the fork of the project, Macamp and Winamp were very similar, but when Nullsoft gave over the Macamp section to another company, the two diverged considerably.
In all of this I'm starting to wonder where AOL comes in. I don't see Linux or Mac as big markets that they'll make any money in, but perhaps this is another stepping stone to get an AOL package that works for other OS's. If you look at what Netscape Communicator (4x) came with you see:
Netscape - became Mozilla, is cross platform
Winamp - being ported to Mac and Linux
Realplayer - Mac and Win32 versions
With these 3 components (and Macromedia flash) you could participate in just about everything the web has to offer. I could see these comming together in some sort of cross platform package in the future (with some sort of chat client).
The whole player thing is getting a bit weird. Xmms started off as X11 amp, which was basically a copy of Winamp, but later grew into a player with it's own flavor. Winamp then gets ported to Linux, which sort of makes for a weird situation. Mac amp was the Macintosh version of Winamp and used to be owned by Nullsoft, before the guys sold off the division to some other company. Now Winamp is available for the Mac again, but now under it's own name. And yes, Mac amp is now also available for windows. (So we have Winamp for Macs, and Macamp for Windows)...
I'll agree that I think most of this crap is bull, but biological and chemical attacks could be a threat in the right hands. It's apperent to me that this is more a scare tactic than anything. Anthrax is very effective IF you get it, but it's actually pretty hard to spread. Whoever is doing this isn't really intent on killing people so much as spreading paranoia and fear. But biological weapons could be effective. Impractical? Mass mail 1000 letters with small pox. Do the math on that one and it's pretty scary.
If AOL believes their users want this, AOL will do it for them. AOL owns Netscape, and although are way behind the scenes they also are a driving force in Mozilla. An AOL browser (Mozilla edition) would be the place to do this stuff, not in Mozilla itself.
Average users dont see the internal, they see the features THEY can use.
And what "features" do most people use? Hardly any. Most people just use the basic functionality that has been provided by browsers for years. You want to see something cool, then use the 'tab' feature that was recently added. It lets you do things Opera style, or you can just use Mozilla as usuall like IE. Will regular people use this? No, because most people don't even use most of the features of IE.
"SO-5.2 is absolutely comparable and better in parts than MS Office 2000."
I find this to be rather untrue. SO 5.2 is very bloated, and in many ways lacking compared to MS Office 2k. And lets not even get started on the dreaded desktop... So in a nutshell, SO 5.2 is a oversized gorilla with the punch of a spider monkey.
But on the other hand, SO 6 is a totally different story. I haven't used SO 6 beta yet, but I am using the latest Open Office build. I am very impressed. It seems to load as fast (or faster) than MS Office, and has imported every office document (flawlessly) I've thrown at it so far. At the place I work I've silently switched to Open Office while everyone else is still using MS Office 2k. This is about the best scenario I can think of, to see how well Open Office can survive - and it's looking very promising. I have this feeling that down the road when the upgrade issue comes up I'm going to end up recommending what many companies are finding:
Go with Star Office / Open Office
I'm not talking immediately, I'm talking a year or so down the road. People will eventually find that MS is up to their old game of trying to force upgrades. With the perpetual upgrade license of MS companies will have to pay 33% MORE per year IF they play by Microsoft's rules and get the upgrade every year. If they don't they will be penalized by paying over twice as much as they do now. For many businesses we're easily talking thousands of dollars or more - for software that their employees might only be using the simplest functionality of. If the economy doesn't turn around, businesses will probably have to watch their costs/budget closer than ever, and M$ is going to charge us MORE for this software? What are 15 features that make Office XP better than Office 2k? Does anyone even know? If you (the typical Slashdot reader) knows, then do regular not so computer literate people know? Are these features worth it? What guarantee do we even have that MS will even try to improve MS Office in the future? They could just up the version number, change some tool bar icons, and of course change the document formats to be incompatible. If Star/Open Office can maintain reasonable compatibility, I really can't see any reason to continue using M$ Office.
You are aware of the difficulties of writing on computers in Chinese aren't you? Japanese manages to avoid this as you can break any kanji down to it's sound components (hirogana), which can be spelled via the keyboard (romanji), and then select from a small list. From my understanding, Chinese is far more complex, due to how the same english equivalent spelling can be pronounced a few different ways in Chinese. The alternative is to start changing every keyboard on the planet and redo every programming language (that's in english anyway) so that it can be easily done in Chinese. Either way it would be a mess.
"but we also have vastly more and better trained people"
I'm not sure I would say "vastly". Remember these people have been training for a long time. Many of them fought against the Soviets for years and are combat hardened with considerable combat experience. We have many well trained people, but as many in the military will tell you - all the training in the world doesn't add up to much against actual combat experience. Not to meantion, we're playing on their home turf.
greater civilian losses than in any war in U.S. history
Uh huh... ever hear of the Civil War?
I almost dread computers going that fast. Just another excuse to make bloated code. But that might not be a bad thing. Mozilla might even be considered "lean and mean". Seriously though, this isn't addressing the other computer problems. Oh, like say the BUS SPEED. RAM isn't really making leaps and bounds compaired to speed either. And if hard drives only manage to improve at the rate they have been, virtual memory will be a gigantic disaster in terms of performance loss.
The other good news is that AMD processors will keep your computer clean as they will combust small particles that enter your computer case. Although hardware people will be very displeased at not being able to look directly at the CPU unless the computer has been shut off for 15 minutes to allow for cooling.
Actually DES is sort of weak by todays standards. I once read somewhere that it's speculated that the U.S. goverment has a dedicated piece of hardware for cracking DES encryption, and can probably do it in about 15 minutes.
I'll wait for "Schwartzian Transformers for dummies" before I get into Perl tutorials that use them, thank you very much =P
you mean like this keyboard?
Yeah, I'm pretty leary of any operator that can't be made by a key on my keyboard (or at least with a shift+key).
Well I'm also sort of leary about any Perl article that goes into talking about "Schwartzian Transformers". Say what?!
I think Perl 6 is starting to make me paranoid.
But they may just be sufficiently small that they never reach bright blue. They may be just big enough to for the reactions to catch, without blowing them apart. and wind up being red.
To some extent that makes sense, but on the other hand it's rather rare for us to see most red dwarves. It's been theorized that the majority of the stars in the universe are probably red dwarves, but we just can't see them because they're so faint. Also, due to the fact that the larger a star is, the brighter it is and the faster it burns. Comparatively regular stars burn like a flash in the pan compared to red dwarves which burn (relatively) cool and many times longer than their larger counterparts (thus the number of red dwarves tends to accumulate over time). Well in any case I find it unlikely that light could travel that far, for that long, and actually be from a cluster of red dwarves - which I'm sure would be far to faint for us to detect. It is however possible that some of the very first red dwarves are still burning if I remember correctly.