It was slow, but I got more GUI features and speed with those versions of windows then I have experimenting with X on similar hardware.
Linux can revitalize an old piece of hardware, with shell programs, but there are big limits to the GUI programs it can run on older hardware, limits that MS windows of the time did not have.
I think we're comparing apples and oranges here. If you want to compare Linux and X with MS OSes of circa 1995, you need to make the comparison with the window managers out there in 1995. Try FVWM or something similar, not the latest-and-greatest Gnome or KDE.
And I have to reiterate that that old 233MHz box does fine with the very recent Mozilla or Galeon browsers, as well as with The GIMP, Openoffice.org, and other GUI software. I would challenge you to run MS Office XP, IE6, or the latest Photoshop on that hardware and be satisfied with the results...
Yuck, yuck, yuck. Seriously, though, 2.6.2 is in Sid right now, and 2.6.0 is already in Sarge. Sure, it's not the default kernel, but it's sure as hell available -- four years early;)
M$ Windows runs better and is more feature rich on lower level machines ( PIIs, PIs )
Even if you strip down to just a window manager on such a machine you still get an intolerable resource drain.
I had to read this several times because I couldn't believe I was seeing it right. Current versions of the various Linux distros will run much better on older hardware than will current versions of MS Windows. I could not get acceptable performance out of the PIII/450 I'm sitting at now when I installed Win2k on it (briefly) in 2001; now, three years later, it's doing yeoman service -- with the same hardware -- under Debian. I also have a low-volume Web server-cum-workstation running on a PII/233 (128 MB RAM); don't laugh, it's a poor university department. With Apache running and a full GUI (X+IceWM) running on the console, I can provide X client apps to remote hosts over the network, and it all works acceptably. I seriously doubt you can provide an example of someone running WinXP or Server2003 on similar hardware, with IIS and serving GUI apps over the network, while running a full GUI desktop on the local console, and delivering acceptable performance.
And if you can, I'll resort to ``Yes, but can it do all that while simultaneously doing an OS upgrade to the next Windows version?'' Because I know the answer to that...;)
Probably best to give up on that thought, and find a new word to describe yourself.
Good advice. If you're in the U.S., the word liberal is pretty irreparably tainted. If you're elsewhere, of course, the word tends to retain its original meaning, which is probably not what you have in mind anyway: it often refers to pro-business, small-government positions, more like what Americans call `libertarian'. (The European Liberal, Democrat and Reform Party in the European Parliament, with the British LibDems and German Free Democrats as members, is a good example. The Germans, for example, describe themselves as the party of the well-to-do.)
I prefer `leftist', myself... Less PETA, more Trotsky;)
2. 20 fluid ounces = 1.25 pints = 591 mL (okay, I have a bottle next to me, I'm cheating)
That's a U.S. pint. An Imperial pint is, indeed, 20 UK fluid ounces. See Wikipedia, s.v. ``Pint''. This is an important distinction because where beer is customarily served in pints, they are pints of twenty ounces.
Seems to me that as it is feasible to make non-Linux based distros (BSD and maybe others) of similar functionality to a typical Linux distro, with and without GNU bits and/or X or Apache, there maybe should be a new overall brand name, emphasising the word "open" or "free" or similar. Under that general heading it would say on the box, in quite big letters: "Contains Linux, GNU/FSF, X, Apache..." so that the emphaiss was not entirely on the kernel, or indeed on any one other major component. Maybe the FSF need some marketing men to work out the branding.....
Such a thing has already been done: It's called Debian.
While the only mature kernel at the moment is Linux, you can also run Debian with HURD,
FreeBSD, and NetBSD
kernels. It's all Debian, though, regardless of what kernel you run or whether a particular system has X, Apache, or whatever.
It IS theft. It's theft of intellectual property. There are laws on this.
I don't think I've heard anyone on/. arguing that such copying isn't illegal. The argument is whether it is immoral. The two do not necessarily have anything to do with each other. You would have a very hard time convincing me that Rosa Parks committed an immoral act when she refused to give up her seat to a white person; it was, nonetheless, illegal.
where modern Greek's demotiki has one accent, ancient Greek (and the church's ye-olde form katharewousa) has three accents plus two spirits plus the iota subscriptum plus most combinations of the former three.
FWIW, the Katharevousa is not the form used in liturgy, but the `purified' version created by the nationalists in the modern revolutionary period. (When my father went to school, they still taught Katharevousa, and that's what all the newspapers etc. were written in.) It is, if you will, the old form of Modern Greek. The Demotiki is the normal spoken and written form today.
The Church uses more-or-less Biblical Greek, which, I guess you could say, is intermediate between Classical and Katharevousa.
Okay, test performed on Linux 2.6.1, XFree86 4.3.0 (NVIDIA binary drivers), with KDE CVS and Galeon. Machine is a P4 2.0 GHz.[...]
Test performed with a 2.4 kernel on a stock Debian Sarge box (XF86 4.2.1). Hardware is 1999-vintage PIII/450 with ATI video. Result: Some slight smearing (maybe 0.2- or 0.3-sec lag) dragging Galeon windows over each other.
The problems you mention are not the fault of X. Its the fault of the applications. Your test *does* show some trailing in Mozilla. But KDE doesn't exhibit these problems, mainly because Qt rocks.
There's sense in that: I can drag as many xterms, gvim windows, xmms, etc., over each other as I want without a hint of smearing. Only Galeon shows any smearing.
I'll refrain from commenting on the extent to which Qt `rocks', though;)
You make me ill. Microsoft posts numbers from independent research companies, and they tell you the name or names of the companies that do the research.
As a dated example, since it was the first one I Googled:
Microsoft Corp. today announced that Microsoft(R) SQL Server(TM) offers a solution whose total cost of ownership (TCO) is 3.7 times lower than that of Oracle, according to independent research done by the Boston-based Aberdeen Group Inc.
A comparison of MS and Oracle isn't really relevant to the proprietary-vs.-free debate: Oracle is just as unfree as MS-SQL, even if it runs on some free OSes. And nobody is claiming that Oracle is the cheap way to go anyway...
Also, an upgrade to an operating system is usually less painful than a new install. In general applications and settings will be maintained. The folks in Redmond do a decent job with this.
Like how easy the migration from 95 to NT4 was? That was fun... 3.1 to 95? That was loads of fun, too. About the only one that wasn't a complete PITA was MS-DOS 5 to MS-DOS 6...
Looky, I don't know how it works in the fatherland,...
Do us all a favor and leave your nationalist bigotry out of the discussion.
That is just a different kind of propaganda, namely that everything should yield to market forces. Money talks, but it doesn't always have the last word.
I take it you've not actually studied how government works in the States?;)
I just wonder if we can borrow the Munich municipal government for a while over my way...
One word: Compaq. Remember the IBM chip? Remember clones? Was that derivative work or reverse-engineering?
I don't think copyright can apply to devices, only to written, visual, or audio works. That's what patents are for. Copyright is the default -- that is, unless I waive it, you can't copy my book (or whatever). If I make a snazzy new cigarette lighter, though, I can't stop you from manufacturing the exact same thing on your own unless I go out and explicitly patent it.
This is why the whole concept of ``IP'' just muddies the water, because patents, copyright, and trademarks are all very different things.
I am under the impression that copyright laws do not prevent you from creating a work based on knowledge of another work. As long as you do not use the original work verbatim. I can go and create a movie called Planet Wars with a lead character named Duke SlyStalker based on a very similiar theme as Star Wars. I can write a book with a theme just like LOTR with trolls, hobbits, elves, dwarfs, etc. I can paint my own version of very famous paintings. I can make music that sounds like other popular music.
IANAL either, but I've had to deal with copyright issues in academe. You cannot create a derivative work -- that is part of the copyright-holder's monopoly. You needn't use a single line of text verbatim for it to be considered a derivative work; a movie adaptation which mangles the plot and doesn't use any of a book's dialogue is still a derivative work. So would a translation into Mandarin or a children's version.
There are exceptions, I believe, for parody -- various Star Wars knockoffs (e.g., the Death Star Clerks animation) are apparently legal as parody. Otherwise, you can get into hot water with the kind of things you're talking about. You have to be able to convince a jury that your work is not derivative of the earlier copyrighted work or you are infringing.
The painting one is an interesting example, because most of the `famous' paintings one would be inclined to make works derivative of are not in copyright any more. And when it comes to music, pop all sounds alike anyway, so it would be pretty hard to argue that anything is derivative of anything else, unless it copied bars on end of melody or something.
Now, academic plagiarism and copyright infringement are not the same thing, but the rule-of-thumb I tell students about plagiarism still applies: If I read your work and I think ``Hmm, I've read this somewhere before,'' there's already a problem. There doesn't have to be verbatim copying of text. It might not be enough to convict, so to speak, but unwelcome attention has been drawn and a legal fight is a possibility.
Actually the "an/en" suffix is much much older than Dutch, or German, or Indo-Germanic languages -- like I said, it's a very old Indo-European language feature. And since English isn't purely Indo-Germanic, or Romance, or anything, it has features from multiple families.
Getting even further OT;)... It's not too different from the Semitic masculine plurals -- `-in' in Arabic and `-im' in Hebrew.
"Unfortunately, the model breaks down as soon as the core group involved in a project or distribution decides to corrupt the source, because they simply won't make the corrupted version public."
And of course there just CAN'T be any guard against the actual program being implemented differing from the publicly available source...:P
Not to mention that the state or whomever is really concerned about security can simply compile from source (hell, if I, in all my ineptitude, call build a decent Linux-From-Scratch system, I'm pretty sure the feds can) and audit the updates' sources before they build and deploy those.
This is truly idiotic. (The article, that is, not yum's post.)
If it's not commercial you're relying on people with nothing better to do than write software for you.
This is a good example of why RMS doesn't like people to use ``commercial'' in distinction to ``free.'' Software can be commercial and free -- like the stuff IBM develops. The opposite of free is proprietary (or unfree).
Slashdot Mirror
scripsit nursedave:
I prefer to live in a state where there is no SS to take people ``out back''... But maybe I'm just biased after that whole Holocaust business...
scipsit beforewisdom:
I think we're comparing apples and oranges here. If you want to compare Linux and X with MS OSes of circa 1995, you need to make the comparison with the window managers out there in 1995. Try FVWM or something similar, not the latest-and-greatest Gnome or KDE.
And I have to reiterate that that old 233MHz box does fine with the very recent Mozilla or Galeon browsers, as well as with The GIMP, Openoffice.org, and other GUI software. I would challenge you to run MS Office XP, IE6, or the latest Photoshop on that hardware and be satisfied with the results...
scripsit lavalyn:
Yuck, yuck, yuck. Seriously, though, 2.6.2 is in Sid right now, and 2.6.0 is already in Sarge. Sure, it's not the default kernel, but it's sure as hell available -- four years early ;)
scripsit beforewisdom:
I had to read this several times because I couldn't believe I was seeing it right. Current versions of the various Linux distros will run much better on older hardware than will current versions of MS Windows. I could not get acceptable performance out of the PIII/450 I'm sitting at now when I installed Win2k on it (briefly) in 2001; now, three years later, it's doing yeoman service -- with the same hardware -- under Debian. I also have a low-volume Web server-cum-workstation running on a PII/233 (128 MB RAM); don't laugh, it's a poor university department. With Apache running and a full GUI (X+IceWM) running on the console, I can provide X client apps to remote hosts over the network, and it all works acceptably. I seriously doubt you can provide an example of someone running WinXP or Server2003 on similar hardware, with IIS and serving GUI apps over the network, while running a full GUI desktop on the local console, and delivering acceptable performance.
And if you can, I'll resort to ``Yes, but can it do all that while simultaneously doing an OS upgrade to the next Windows version?'' Because I know the answer to that... ;)
scripsit donutz:
Good advice. If you're in the U.S., the word liberal is pretty irreparably tainted. If you're elsewhere, of course, the word tends to retain its original meaning, which is probably not what you have in mind anyway: it often refers to pro-business, small-government positions, more like what Americans call `libertarian'. (The European Liberal, Democrat and Reform Party in the European Parliament, with the British LibDems and German Free Democrats as members, is a good example. The Germans, for example, describe themselves as the party of the well-to-do.)
I prefer `leftist', myself... Less PETA, more Trotsky ;)
scripsit Str8Dog:
Looks like someone's out to burn your karma, amigo. Check your freaks list recently?
scripsit Aero Leviathan:
That's a U.S. pint. An Imperial pint is, indeed, 20 UK fluid ounces. See Wikipedia, s.v. ``Pint''. This is an important distinction because where beer is customarily served in pints, they are pints of twenty ounces.
scripsit tiger99:
Such a thing has already been done: It's called Debian. While the only mature kernel at the moment is Linux, you can also run Debian with HURD, FreeBSD, and NetBSD kernels. It's all Debian, though, regardless of what kernel you run or whether a particular system has X, Apache, or whatever.
scripsit bonch:
I don't think I've heard anyone on /. arguing that such copying isn't illegal. The argument is whether it is immoral. The two do not necessarily have anything to do with each other. You would have a very hard time convincing me that Rosa Parks committed an immoral act when she refused to give up her seat to a white person; it was, nonetheless, illegal.
scripsit Bananenrepublik:
FWIW, the Katharevousa is not the form used in liturgy, but the `purified' version created by the nationalists in the modern revolutionary period. (When my father went to school, they still taught Katharevousa, and that's what all the newspapers etc. were written in.) It is, if you will, the old form of Modern Greek. The Demotiki is the normal spoken and written form today.
The Church uses more-or-less Biblical Greek, which, I guess you could say, is intermediate between Classical and Katharevousa.
scripsit walt-sjc:
That's to be expected. That's a more advanced system than my old desktop...
scripsit Be-Fan:
Test performed with a 2.4 kernel on a stock Debian Sarge box (XF86 4.2.1). Hardware is 1999-vintage PIII/450 with ATI video. Result: Some slight smearing (maybe 0.2- or 0.3-sec lag) dragging Galeon windows over each other.
There's sense in that: I can drag as many xterms, gvim windows, xmms, etc., over each other as I want without a hint of smearing. Only Galeon shows any smearing.
I'll refrain from commenting on the extent to which Qt `rocks', though ;)
scripsit SoTuA:
Actually it's not:
Note that Woody==Stable -- that's 2.2.2-14.7. Sarge (Testing) currently has 3.1.3-1, and Sid (Unstable) has 3.1.5-2.
scripsit Evil Adrian:
A comparison of MS and Oracle isn't really relevant to the proprietary-vs.-free debate: Oracle is just as unfree as MS-SQL, even if it runs on some free OSes. And nobody is claiming that Oracle is the cheap way to go anyway...
scripsit mingot:
Like how easy the migration from 95 to NT4 was? That was fun... 3.1 to 95? That was loads of fun, too. About the only one that wasn't a complete PITA was MS-DOS 5 to MS-DOS 6...
Do us all a favor and leave your nationalist bigotry out of the discussion.
scripsit groomed:
I take it you've not actually studied how government works in the States? ;)
I just wonder if we can borrow the Munich municipal government for a while over my way...
scripsit JoeZeppy:
You clearly have a different definition of `early 1990s' than most of us if you consider 1998 to be `early 1990s'...
scripsit Brendan Byrd:
I don't think copyright can apply to devices, only to written, visual, or audio works. That's what patents are for. Copyright is the default -- that is, unless I waive it, you can't copy my book (or whatever). If I make a snazzy new cigarette lighter, though, I can't stop you from manufacturing the exact same thing on your own unless I go out and explicitly patent it.
This is why the whole concept of ``IP'' just muddies the water, because patents, copyright, and trademarks are all very different things.
scripsit AstroDrabb:
IANAL either, but I've had to deal with copyright issues in academe. You cannot create a derivative work -- that is part of the copyright-holder's monopoly. You needn't use a single line of text verbatim for it to be considered a derivative work; a movie adaptation which mangles the plot and doesn't use any of a book's dialogue is still a derivative work. So would a translation into Mandarin or a children's version.
There are exceptions, I believe, for parody -- various Star Wars knockoffs (e.g., the Death Star Clerks animation) are apparently legal as parody. Otherwise, you can get into hot water with the kind of things you're talking about. You have to be able to convince a jury that your work is not derivative of the earlier copyrighted work or you are infringing.
The painting one is an interesting example, because most of the `famous' paintings one would be inclined to make works derivative of are not in copyright any more. And when it comes to music, pop all sounds alike anyway, so it would be pretty hard to argue that anything is derivative of anything else, unless it copied bars on end of melody or something.
Now, academic plagiarism and copyright infringement are not the same thing, but the rule-of-thumb I tell students about plagiarism still applies: If I read your work and I think ``Hmm, I've read this somewhere before,'' there's already a problem. There doesn't have to be verbatim copying of text. It might not be enough to convict, so to speak, but unwelcome attention has been drawn and a legal fight is a possibility.
scripsit Dr Caleb:
Um, dude, if you've got a /home directory, you don't have a MyDoom problem...
(And if you're proficient enough to be running Cygwin you probably don't click executable attachments.)
scripsit Moridineas:
Getting even further OT ;) ... It's not too different from the Semitic masculine plurals -- `-in' in Arabic and `-im' in Hebrew.
scripsit Tony-A:
Methinks that's why it's called a confidence game. ;)
scripsit BoomerSooner:
A financial transaction may not be required to get the binaries, no. But eventually, they pay.
scripsit yar:
Not to mention that the state or whomever is really concerned about security can simply compile from source (hell, if I, in all my ineptitude, call build a decent Linux-From-Scratch system, I'm pretty sure the feds can) and audit the updates' sources before they build and deploy those.
This is truly idiotic. (The article, that is, not yum's post.)
scripsit Rallion:
This is a good example of why RMS doesn't like people to use ``commercial'' in distinction to ``free.'' Software can be commercial and free -- like the stuff IBM develops. The opposite of free is proprietary (or unfree).