This could be trouble....for someone
on
The Cat Cam
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· Score: 5
I think every place I've ever worked has had a large stray cat population. Somehow, they always seem to be able to get into the fenced-off areas of the premises. And there's always something requiring one type of clearance or another going on (that's what happens in the defense world....).
Anyway, I'm sure that just about any place w/ enough people has some population of stray animals. Imagine if Boris & Natasha happen to collect up the animals one day, and implant the next generation of these electrodes in the cats, along with transmitters. Suddenly, you've got a large roving population of cameras around places you really don't want pictures taken.
Even if they weren't able to get into any type of restricted area, you'd still likely get several shots of the employees, so you'd know who to target when trying to "turn" someone.
They could even go so far as to train animals from birth to perform certain tasks, such as getting into rooms with doors slightly ajar, knocking over file folders with papers in them and looking at the papers for X seconds, etc. Who would suspect a stray of spying?
Alternately, this could be the ultimate voyeur tool. "Hi, I got you this pet kitten."
Well, just got done watching The Matrix. Either I don't remember as much of the movie as I thought, or there weren't any playback problems. Hell, I couldn't even tell where the layer switch took place. The *only* complaint I have is that the closing credits were noticably distorted, and I think that's mostly due to the crappy, cheap-ass, coax-only TV I have (so the Panny A120 is coming in through the VCR). I suspect that if I got something decent, it'd display w/o many problems.
Hopefully others with the A120 have been having similar experiences despite the reports to the contrary.
Unfortunately, I haven't had the time to actually watch The Matrix yet. Luckily it's within the 30 days (been a week today since I got the DVD, a week tomorrow for the player), so I might have to take it back. I'll be watching this weekend to verify the (hopefully nonexistent) problems with my copy.
I'm really disappointed that there have been reported problems with this player, since it seems like it only came out a short time ago, and the reviews I read made it sound like it compared very favorably against higher-end DVD players.
It's even more distressing to hear that Enemy of the State is showing problems to. Is every DVD I want to get going to do this?
I guess I've just always been of the belief that it's a Really Bad Idea to have your firewall hit unnecessarily. IOW, put the web server outside the firewall, probably on its own subnet off the incoming connection. That way, if the machine IS cracked, you don't suddenly have to worry about all your non-hardened hosts being hit from a supposedly trusted machine.
After all, once you're through the firewall, you're through the firewall, and it won't protect you anymore. If you happen to be running bad CGI, or ColdFusion, or somesuch which just screams "Crack me!", you're probably in for a much larger world of hurt if you think everything is already protected.
I know I didn't come up with that idea myself, so I must have read it someplace and it made sense. Of course, I tried proposing this at the last place I worked, and ran into a lot of resistance. They didn't want to use an old Pentium/MMX 166 for that, even though they were replacing all the secretaries' machines with PII/400s. So this probably WAS a real-world scenario.
I still contend though that the best security policy is to trust nothing, not even the firewall.
Try going to the server configs page at www.hackpcweek.com. Note that there are configs solely for securent, none at all for securelinux. Far be it from me to be paranoid, but this lack of information leads me to suspect that the configuration of the linux server was far from optimal (even if it was hacked via a faulty closed-source CGI script). After all, if the linux box had been secured, the maintainers would know which config files had been modified, what patches needed to be applied, etc. Instead we get "reinforcement" of how "well-documented" everything in NT is, and how "poorly documented" linux is.
Also, if anyone happened to nmap the two boxen, they probably found the same thing I did...both are behind a firewall and return *identical* scans (aside from hostname):
Starting nmap V. 2.3BETA6 by Fyodor (fyodor@dhp.com, www.insecure.org/nmap/) Interesting ports on securelinux.hackpcweek.com (208.184.64.170): Port State Protocol Service 21 open tcp ftp 23 open tcp telnet 25 open tcp smtp 70 open tcp gopher 80 open tcp http 119 open tcp nntp 139 open tcp netbios-ssn 420 filtered tcp smpte 443 open tcp https 1080 filtered tcp socks TCP Sequence Prediction: Class=truly random Difficulty=9999999 (Good luck!) Remote operating system guess: AXCENT Raptor Firewall running on Windows NT 4.0/SP3 Nmap run completed -- 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 9 seconds
What's this? These machines are so secure that they need to be protected by a firewall? Why? Are there possibly ports on one of them that can't be disabled any other way? This is mere speculation, but if you're running a contest to show the security of a specific box, do you add external security on top of it?
And here's another for those who think that dragging a floppy to the trash is confusing: How about right-clicking on the
desktop to shut down? In this context a 'Start' menu starts to make sense.
I have to disagree with you here. I feel that right-clicking on the desktop is the correct thing to do. After all, for everything else, you right-click to pull up a menu of things to do to/with that object. When you have your desktop, IOW your "computer", the proper OO manner to select an action to perform on it (such as shutting down) is to right click, just like every other object in the system.
I guess to me it just made sense to think of the desktop itself as "just another object" which behaved like everything else on the desktop. It's the consistent approach to everything (well, most things) that made PM & WPS such a joy to use.
Granted, there were quirks in some of the performable actions, and the improvements between 2.x and 3.0 (and 3.0 and 4.0) are definitely nothing to sneeze at.
[1] It seems to use the same type of shell as NT..i.e. a command shell.
OS/2 used a CMD.EXE shell, which was a little closer to a typical unix shell. True, it didn't have filename completion (though 4OS/2 did), but it had a nice history feature completely unlike DOS/WinDOS. And it had a nifty F1 help feature in its shells.
[2] It seems to have a DOS-like command set.
Its command set was similar, but not quite the same. And HPFS had true long filename support, and you could always use the long filenames (unlike 95, which half the time balks when I try to use the readable name). Plus it had an extensive help system that was fairly well crossreferenced.
Of course, it had ReXX as its scripting language which, even though I still can't write a script without taking a lot of time to look up syntax and the like, really tied everything together. It could manipulate anything in the system (including the GUI) through built-in extensions to the language. Want something to do foo? You could write some code, compile it to a dll, and rexx could use it like it was built-in. Try doing that with daim-bramaged batchfiles.:-)
[3] It has a windows like GUI..more Win95/NT like than 98 but nothing like X.
...
[5] Its interface leaves much to be desired (kludgy win/dos hack were the first impression i got..followed by...what the heck do these weird buttons do?)
If by "windows like" you mean "square windows, some borders, standardized buttons", then yes. Presentation Manager is still THE best OOUI that I've ever used. Everything I found about it was consistent.
Left-click to open something, right-click to drag it and pop up a menu.
The ability to specify multiple programs to open up an object.
Ever tried to click-open something in 95 with a program OTHER than the one associated with it? Just right-click, select the program from the open menu.
It kept track of original object locations, so its shadows (shortcuts done properly) always referenced what you thought they did instead of incorrect paths.
The LaunchPad was a nice feature, since you could arrange all of your programs into widely-used groups and have everything available 1 or 2 clicks away. The 4.0 um, dock? (don't remember the term), is what the Start bar should have been....allow you to have different categories of icons, arranged hierarchically, edittable via true Drag-n-Drop, instead of just filling up with icons of running programs.
Want to see everything that's running? Ctrl-Esc pops up a useful, non-blocking process list.
Everything was multithreaded (except for a certain queue that caused problems with nasty programs...), so things would slow down when running a lot of apps, but wouldn't often crash.
Drivers to print things were associated with the printers, not with programs. I remember being shocked when using 95 that I needed to specify a program so that I could print a.ps on a postscript printer...under OS/2, I installed a postscript printer object, and then just dragged the.ps onto it, no need to has a.ps reader.
[4] does it even have remote administration ? I saw no such thing.
It had some type of support, IIRC, but I was always the only OS/2 user around, so I never really found out. There WAS the ability to telnet and FTP to it (especially in 3.0 on, when they included TCP/IP), so you could do a lot that way.
Sure, there were a lot of problems, namely hardware support, and available software apps. But the hobbes archives made a lot of the difficulty go away. And a lot of GNU stuff had been ported to OS/2.
Comparing the PM with X is like comparing apples and oranges. PM was fairly well tied to the underlying OS, but in a good way (there were replacements, even text mode ones, which came out rather quickly). Under X, the WM mostly just handles window placements, iconifying, etc. The PM WAS your system. And everything about it was stored in a registry or in the filesystem. I don't quite know how to explain the difference, it's really something that you need to experience.
I've been running an OS/2 machine since 1993 when OS/2 2.0 came out. Since then, I've upgraded to 2.1, 3.0, and 4.0. In fact, I'm STILL using it for my Quicken & TurboTax stuff. Three of my boxen are linux, but I'm still keeping that spunky little 486 with OS/2 around. This is really a depressing day.
Presentation Manager still has (IMHO) the best OOUI out there. None of this foo.lnk B$ from Micros~1 that breaks every time you move the item you supposedly have a shortcut to. Instead, PM shadows were managed such that they *always* knew where the original was.
Not to mention being a better Windows than Windows. I remember as an undergrad...running a WinDOS circuit design package that kept crashing on the Pentium Win3.1 machines in the labs. Running it under OS/2 on my 486 was a little slower, but it knew how to actually use a swap file and not run out of memory halfway through loading the final 32-bit RISC processor (designed from basic components) and crash.
It's a real shame that OS/2 is/has died. IBM probably should have spun it off into its own entity a la Lexmark. Maybe then someone would have had an incentive to push it a little harder, market it a little better, and actually care if it succeeded.
Not only Philadelphia Experiment II used tattooed barcodes on people, but also an episode of the Swamp Thing TV series did the same. Both were definitely before 1996...
I've wanted to build one of these things for at least 8 years now, but have never had a) the time, b) the knowledge, c) the motivation. Especially after reading (parts of) Winn Schwarau's "Information Warfare" doorstop, I could just see the potential uses for this.
Imagine one of these scenarios:
You're driving down the highway, blissfully ignorant of the speed limit. Suddenly, you see those blue and red lights flashing behind you. Panic? You? Nah. You hit that extra button below the rear defroster, and suddenly you're in the clear. Or better yet, you let yourself get pulled over, and then while waiting to ask if there's a problem, the other car starts acting funny...
From the book: Someone in a van drives around the computing center of a bank. Hits a button. Computers start to drool. Wait a random amount of time, do it again.
Your (former) employer doesn't believe that they need to worry about information warfare because "the firewall will protect us." Wait for the night before a drop, or the day of a demo, and suddenly the development machines, not to mention the firewall, are dead.
As much as I'd love to have plans for one of these HERF guns, I think that it would probably make it too easy for "hardware script kiddies" to then go out and wreak havoc. What I'd really like is a reading list (preferably with difficulty ratings) on what to study to be able to design your own.
This is good. I use google for everything. Well, everything that isn't too new, like the last several months. I hope Netscape actually reindexes & updates their databases more often than google does.
Not to start any flame wars (yes, multiple vi's in xterms works too), but emacs is my preferred IDE. I started off programming with the Borland TurboC IDE. It was OK, but when I got to college and had my first exposure to emacs, it was a marriage made in heaven. I can have multiple windows, compile my code, debug, have lots of hilighting (in X), jump to the lines that have compilation errors, etc. I've even gotten a lot of my coworkers using emacs (well, XEmacs), and they seem to like it a lot.
Yes, there ARE other ways to do it, but this works best for *me*. Everyone has a choice.
Re:The new LinuxHQ violating GPL of kernelnotes?
on
The Two LinuxHQs?
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· Score: 1
I hadn't visited LinuxHQ from the "before time". Of course, an AC has pointed out the that changes to the 2.0 and 2.2 files were "obviously" derived from the change lists distributed w/ the kernels (and GPLed), yet they have the ECS copyright. Again, w/ the site/.'ed, I can't get in to verify this.:-(
The new LinuxHQ violating GPL of kernelnotes?
on
The Two LinuxHQs?
·
· Score: 3
It seems to me, from quickly looking over the new LinuxHQ site that a LOT of it is similar, if not identical to, kernelnotes. Since kernelnotes is GPLed, LinuxHQ has some other copyright & distribution limitations, and it can probably be argued that kernelnotes existed with the content and layout (especially the identical content and layout of pages like "linux distributions"), and therefore linuxhq, by re-releasing GPLed material under another, more restrictive licenes, is now violating the GPL.
I suspect there could be something like a trekkie/trekker war if pushed far enough. At first BSDies didn't sound right (it's still kinda "raw" in my mouth). Has anyone ever thought of BSDeities?:-)
Well, I had a 1 in N shot. I guessed @ vxWorks since it's what I'm most familiar with. I've never worked w/ LynxOS, but it's still an RTOS in exactly the way NT isn't...
I'm willing to hazard a guess that the "UNIX-compatible" software they're talking about is WindRiver Systems' vxWorks, which would make sense. After all, in a copier or printer, you're going to want an RTOS there to handle things in a reasonable amount of time.
It's a shame they feel the need to move to an inherently non-RTOS. It reminds me of something I heard in a class a few weeks ago... The prof was talking about how M$ was coming out with a real-time NT, and when it hit the market, everyone would start using it since "there's nothing else out there." Too bad I wanted to pass the class.
"I don't want people taking action based on Microsoft thinking about doing something," said Don Jones, year 2000 product manager at Microsoft.... "...and the last thing I want to do is spread fear, uncertainty and doubt in their minds."
Amazing how this is 180 degrees opposite the usual MS strategy of pre-announcing products years in advance, or even just making announcements about non-existent products to keep out the competition.
Even if I don't take off work to watch Star Wars, I could always take off for another reason. See, they obviously like me, since they're releasing Star Wars on my birthday. What a hell of a present!
An even more telling experience would be to sit your mom down in front of a computer w/ no operating system at all installed, give her a shrink-wrapped (or equivalent) Linux distribution, and a shrink-wrapped Windows distribution.
Don't give her any help.
Have her install Windows, from scratch, without help.
Have her install Linux, from scratch, without help.
Of course, most folks won't ever install their own operating systems. They'll just use whatever comes with their computers, without stopping to think if there might be an alternative. This is why linux should come pre-installed on PCs. After all, if you never have to install the OS to begin with, then OF COURSE it's easier to use.
I still refer to the RH manual from time to time. In fact, I installed 5.2 last night on another machine, and due to lack of sleep couldn't think of a good partition layout, so I flip to the manual for RH 5.1, and voila, there's a whole several pages on suggested partitions. No where have I seen something like that in a Win95 manual (not that I've really looked) or even an NT manual (again, haven't put in effort).
I would say that from a scratch installation, (certain flavors of) linux is probably a better contender.
Why do all of these "cool" cases only come in mid-tower arrangements? Some of us need more than 5-6 drive bays, and prefer the room in a full tower. I guess I'll just have to design my own.
In Maryland as well, Hell Atlantic has everyone dialing 10-digit numbers for all numbers. This is thanks to multiple area codes overlying the same areas (410/443 in the Baltimore area & east, and 301/240 DC area & west).
And just when I start to seriously look at laptops too. Guess I'll just look @ everyone but Toshiba. Any recommendations on other laptop vendors?
They're probably annoyed at all the Linux users who demanded their EULA-given rights to refunds for obscure and buggy software they were forced to buy...
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I think every place I've ever worked has had a large stray cat population. Somehow, they always seem to be able to get into the fenced-off areas of the premises. And there's always something requiring one type of clearance or another going on (that's what happens in the defense world....).
Anyway, I'm sure that just about any place w/ enough people has some population of stray animals. Imagine if Boris & Natasha happen to collect up the animals one day, and implant the next generation of these electrodes in the cats, along with transmitters. Suddenly, you've got a large roving population of cameras around places you really don't want pictures taken.
Even if they weren't able to get into any type of restricted area, you'd still likely get several shots of the employees, so you'd know who to target when trying to "turn" someone.
They could even go so far as to train animals from birth to perform certain tasks, such as getting into rooms with doors slightly ajar, knocking over file folders with papers in them and looking at the papers for X seconds, etc. Who would suspect a stray of spying?
Alternately, this could be the ultimate voyeur tool. "Hi, I got you this pet kitten."
Well, just got done watching The Matrix. Either I don't remember as much of the movie as I thought, or there weren't any playback problems. Hell, I couldn't even tell where the layer switch took place. The *only* complaint I have is that the closing credits were noticably distorted, and I think that's mostly due to the crappy, cheap-ass, coax-only TV I have (so the Panny A120 is coming in through the VCR). I suspect that if I got something decent, it'd display w/o many problems.
Hopefully others with the A120 have been having similar experiences despite the reports to the contrary.
Unfortunately, I haven't had the time to actually watch The Matrix yet. Luckily it's within the 30 days (been a week today since I got the DVD, a week tomorrow for the player), so I might have to take it back. I'll be watching this weekend to verify the (hopefully nonexistent) problems with my copy.
I'm really disappointed that there have been reported problems with this player, since it seems like it only came out a short time ago, and the reviews I read made it sound like it compared very favorably against higher-end DVD players.
It's even more distressing to hear that Enemy of the State is showing problems to. Is every DVD I want to get going to do this?
I don't know.
I guess I've just always been of the belief that it's a Really Bad Idea to have your firewall hit unnecessarily. IOW, put the web server outside the firewall, probably on its own subnet off the incoming connection. That way, if the machine IS cracked, you don't suddenly have to worry about all your non-hardened hosts being hit from a supposedly trusted machine.
After all, once you're through the firewall, you're through the firewall, and it won't protect you anymore. If you happen to be running bad CGI, or ColdFusion, or somesuch which just screams "Crack me!", you're probably in for a much larger world of hurt if you think everything is already protected.
I know I didn't come up with that idea myself, so I must have read it someplace and it made sense. Of course, I tried proposing this at the last place I worked, and ran into a lot of resistance. They didn't want to use an old Pentium/MMX 166 for that, even though they were replacing all the secretaries' machines with PII/400s. So this probably WAS a real-world scenario.
I still contend though that the best security policy is to trust nothing, not even the firewall.
Try going to the server configs page at www.hackpcweek.com. Note that there are configs solely for securent, none at all for securelinux. Far be it from me to be paranoid, but this lack of information leads me to suspect that the configuration of the linux server was far from optimal (even if it was hacked via a faulty closed-source CGI script). After all, if the linux box had been secured, the maintainers would know which config files had been modified, what patches needed to be applied, etc. Instead we get "reinforcement" of how "well-documented" everything in NT is, and how "poorly documented" linux is.
Also, if anyone happened to nmap the two boxen, they probably found the same thing I did...both are behind a firewall and return *identical* scans (aside from hostname):
Starting nmap V. 2.3BETA6 by Fyodor (fyodor@dhp.com, www.insecure.org/nmap/)
Interesting ports on securelinux.hackpcweek.com (208.184.64.170):
Port State Protocol Service
21 open tcp ftp
23 open tcp telnet
25 open tcp smtp
70 open tcp gopher
80 open tcp http
119 open tcp nntp
139 open tcp netbios-ssn
420 filtered tcp smpte
443 open tcp https
1080 filtered tcp socks
TCP Sequence Prediction: Class=truly random
Difficulty=9999999 (Good luck!)
Remote operating system guess: AXCENT Raptor Firewall running on Windows NT 4.0/SP3
Nmap run completed -- 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 9 seconds
What's this? These machines are so secure that they need to be protected by a firewall? Why? Are there possibly ports on one of them that can't be disabled any other way? This is mere speculation, but if you're running a contest to show the security of a specific box, do you add external security on top of it?
I have to disagree with you here. I feel that right-clicking on the desktop is the correct thing to do. After all, for everything else, you right-click to pull up a menu of things to do to/with that object. When you have your desktop, IOW your "computer", the proper OO manner to select an action to perform on it (such as shutting down) is to right click, just like every other object in the system.
I guess to me it just made sense to think of the desktop itself as "just another object" which behaved like everything else on the desktop. It's the consistent approach to everything (well, most things) that made PM & WPS such a joy to use.
Granted, there were quirks in some of the performable actions, and the improvements between 2.x and 3.0 (and 3.0 and 4.0) are definitely nothing to sneeze at.
OS/2 used a CMD.EXE shell, which was a little closer to a typical unix shell. True, it didn't have filename completion (though 4OS/2 did), but it had a nice history feature completely unlike DOS/WinDOS. And it had a nifty F1 help feature in its shells.
Its command set was similar, but not quite the same. And HPFS had true long filename support, and you could always use the long filenames (unlike 95, which half the time balks when I try to use the readable name). Plus it had an extensive help system that was fairly well crossreferenced.
Of course, it had ReXX as its scripting language which, even though I still can't write a script without taking a lot of time to look up syntax and the like, really tied everything together. It could manipulate anything in the system (including the GUI) through built-in extensions to the language. Want something to do foo? You could write some code, compile it to a dll, and rexx could use it like it was built-in. Try doing that with daim-bramaged batchfiles. :-)
If by "windows like" you mean "square windows, some borders, standardized buttons", then yes. Presentation Manager is still THE best OOUI that I've ever used. Everything I found about it was consistent.
It had some type of support, IIRC, but I was always the only OS/2 user around, so I never really found out. There WAS the ability to telnet and FTP to it (especially in 3.0 on, when they included TCP/IP), so you could do a lot that way.
Sure, there were a lot of problems, namely hardware support, and available software apps. But the hobbes archives made a lot of the difficulty go away. And a lot of GNU stuff had been ported to OS/2.
Comparing the PM with X is like comparing apples and oranges. PM was fairly well tied to the underlying OS, but in a good way (there were replacements, even text mode ones, which came out rather quickly). Under X, the WM mostly just handles window placements, iconifying, etc. The PM WAS your system. And everything about it was stored in a registry or in the filesystem. I don't quite know how to explain the difference, it's really something that you need to experience.
I've been running an OS/2 machine since 1993 when OS/2 2.0 came out. Since then, I've upgraded to 2.1, 3.0, and 4.0. In fact, I'm STILL using it for my Quicken & TurboTax stuff. Three of my boxen are linux, but I'm still keeping that spunky little 486 with OS/2 around. This is really a depressing day.
Presentation Manager still has (IMHO) the best OOUI out there. None of this foo.lnk B$ from Micros~1 that breaks every time you move the item you supposedly have a shortcut to. Instead, PM shadows were managed such that they *always* knew where the original was.
Not to mention being a better Windows than Windows. I remember as an undergrad...running a WinDOS circuit design package that kept crashing on the Pentium Win3.1 machines in the labs. Running it under OS/2 on my 486 was a little slower, but it knew how to actually use a swap file and not run out of memory halfway through loading the final 32-bit RISC processor (designed from basic components) and crash.
It's a real shame that OS/2 is/has died. IBM probably should have spun it off into its own entity a la Lexmark. Maybe then someone would have had an incentive to push it a little harder, market it a little better, and actually care if it succeeded.
OS/2, you WILL be missed.
Not only Philadelphia Experiment II used tattooed barcodes on people, but also an episode of the Swamp Thing TV series did the same. Both were definitely before 1996...
That would be Philadelphia Experiment II that you're thinking of. I'm thinking movie from 1993 is just a leetle bit before a 1996 patent filing.
That would be Philadelphia Experiment II that you're thinking of.
Imagine one of these scenarios:
As much as I'd love to have plans for one of these HERF guns, I think that it would probably make it too easy for "hardware script kiddies" to then go out and wreak havoc. What I'd really like is a reading list (preferably with difficulty ratings) on what to study to be able to design your own.
This is good. I use google for everything. Well, everything that isn't too new, like the last several months. I hope Netscape actually reindexes & updates their databases more often than google does.
Not to start any flame wars (yes, multiple vi's in xterms works too), but emacs is my preferred IDE. I started off programming with the Borland TurboC IDE. It was OK, but when I got to college and had my first exposure to emacs, it was a marriage made in heaven. I can have multiple windows, compile my code, debug, have lots of hilighting (in X), jump to the lines that have compilation errors, etc. I've even gotten a lot of my coworkers using emacs (well, XEmacs), and they seem to like it a lot.
Yes, there ARE other ways to do it, but this works best for *me*. Everyone has a choice.
I hadn't visited LinuxHQ from the "before time". Of course, an AC has pointed out the that changes to the 2.0 and 2.2 files were "obviously" derived from the change lists distributed w/ the kernels (and GPLed), yet they have the ECS copyright. /.'ed, I can't get in to verify this. :-(
Again, w/ the site
It seems to me, from quickly looking over the new LinuxHQ site that a LOT of it is similar, if not identical to, kernelnotes. Since kernelnotes is GPLed, LinuxHQ has some other copyright & distribution limitations, and it can probably be argued that kernelnotes existed with the content and layout (especially the identical content and layout of pages like "linux distributions"), and therefore linuxhq, by re-releasing GPLed material under another, more restrictive licenes, is now violating the GPL.
IANAL, and I don't even pretend to play one.
I suspect there could be something like a trekkie/trekker war if pushed far enough. At first BSDies didn't sound right (it's still kinda "raw" in my mouth). Has anyone ever thought of BSDeities? :-)
Well, I had a 1 in N shot. I guessed @ vxWorks since it's what I'm most familiar with. I've never worked w/ LynxOS, but it's still an RTOS in exactly the way NT isn't...
I'm willing to hazard a guess that the "UNIX-compatible" software they're talking about is WindRiver Systems' vxWorks, which would make sense. After all, in a copier or printer, you're going to want an RTOS there to handle things in a reasonable amount of time.
It's a shame they feel the need to move to an inherently non-RTOS. It reminds me of something I heard in a class a few weeks ago... The prof was talking about how M$ was coming out with a real-time NT, and when it hit the market, everyone would start using it since "there's nothing else out there." Too bad I wanted to pass the class.
Amazing how this is 180 degrees opposite the usual MS strategy of pre-announcing products years in advance, or even just making announcements about non-existent products to keep out the competition.
Even if I don't take off work to watch Star Wars, I could always take off for another reason. See, they obviously like me, since they're releasing Star Wars on my birthday. What a hell of a present!
An even more telling experience would be to sit your mom down in front of a computer w/ no operating system at all installed, give her a shrink-wrapped (or equivalent) Linux distribution, and a shrink-wrapped Windows distribution.
Don't give her any help.
Have her install Windows, from scratch, without help.
Have her install Linux, from scratch, without help.
Of course, most folks won't ever install their own operating systems. They'll just use whatever comes with their computers, without stopping to think if there might be an alternative. This is why linux should come pre-installed on PCs. After all, if you never have to install the OS to begin with, then OF COURSE it's easier to use.
I still refer to the RH manual from time to time. In fact, I installed 5.2 last night on another machine, and due to lack of sleep couldn't think of a good partition layout, so I flip to the manual for RH 5.1, and voila, there's a whole several pages on suggested partitions. No where have I seen something like that in a Win95 manual (not that I've really looked) or even an NT manual (again, haven't put in effort).
I would say that from a scratch installation, (certain flavors of) linux is probably a better contender.
Why do all of these "cool" cases only come in mid-tower arrangements? Some of us need more than 5-6 drive bays, and prefer the room in a full tower. I guess I'll just have to design my own.
In Maryland as well, Hell Atlantic has everyone dialing 10-digit numbers for all numbers. This is thanks to multiple area codes overlying the same areas (410/443 in the Baltimore area & east, and 301/240 DC area & west).
And just when I start to seriously look at laptops too. Guess I'll just look @ everyone but Toshiba. Any recommendations on other laptop vendors?
They're probably annoyed at all the Linux users who demanded their EULA-given rights to refunds for obscure and buggy software they were forced to buy...