I will not repeat the many valid resons already sited as to why SCSI is better than EIDE, but I will mention some new points.
Credentials: 2.5 years as a test engineer at Seagate Technology in Scotts Valley, CA.
Many of the EIDE drives I worked on claiming to be EIDE 16MB/s capable were indeed capable of delivering data at that rate, but could only sustain the rate for ~ 20 to 24 bytes! After 20 bytes the drive would raise the IOCHRDY signal, indicating it could not deliver any more data. But a logic analyzer confirmed that those 20 bytes WERE delivered at 16MB/s! I'll bet many other EIDE drives on the market have the same limitations.
SCSI has all of those expensive terminators because at those data rates the SCSI interface cable has significant impedance and transmission line effects can no longer be ignored if data integrity is desired. EIDE is facing the same problemsat the current rates, and drive manufacturers have reccommending limits on cable length to 16 inches. UDMA (a.k.a. is simply a hack to double the data rate without doubling the clock rate. In UDMA the IOR and IOW strobes run at the same rate as EIDE, but words are strobed into/out of the disk interface on both the rising and falling edges instead of just the falling edge as in standard ATA. The EIDE drives are NOT going to get another performance boost without increasing the clock rate, and that will require terminators. Oh, my!
I've been looking at LinuxOne for as long as anyone who reads/. and I've never been able to figure out the angle. These guys are going to tank. But what if the company is a shill intended to make Linux companies look bad, and by extension, help Linux fail?
The idea goes something like this: LinuxOne gets as much PR as it can. Does an IPO, which shoots up to rediculously high values. But the company decalares bankruptcy when it cannot generate sales, and the Linux sector as a whole is discredited.
While I am not, as a rule, a perveyor of conspiracy theories, the above scenario seems more plausible to me than the idea that the founder of LinuxOne is so stupid to believe he is going to make money off this non-strategy.
It is not clear to me what the purpose of the network described in the posting is intended to be. Is it possible that wireless is not even needed to do the job? Is it also possible that the nodes described do not really need to be external?
In this type of application where high availability is desired and the cost of servicing is high, the first thing you could do to reduce the risk of failure is to get rid of the disk drive in the system.
They are prone to mechanical failures, data errors induced by electromagnetic fields, data errors induced by extremes of temperature and humidity.
Disk drives are too fragile for application in a hostile environment like the top of a utility pole.
If you have a large metal box around something.. and you ground th ebox...then lightning can strike the box and ground out...and never have any effect on the inside of the box.
Not so! While a well made enclosure *may* prevent a lightning strike from physically damaging to the electronics, there may be a system failure from the electromagnetic field induced inside the system from all that current flowing through the enclosure. Such fields can cause the system to lock up in such a way as to require a power cycle to recover.
I myself have cause PCs to crash by applying electrostatic discharges to a PC enclosure a small as 10kV. And you can be sure that lightning is easily 10000 times (more even?) that voltage.
It is very hard to describe to people what it is like to use Domino/Notes in an actual business setting if they have not seen it in action.
In my opinion, confirmed by several postings here, there is nothing else in the market that provides the infrastructure for groupware applications that Note does. Note how many of the posts say things like "just snip here and patch this there" and you'll have groupware.
The develi is in the details, and with Notes you will get a integrated platform that can:
1. Replicate databases across servers. This is very important if you have distributed offices.
2. Databases can have levels of user access: administrators, read only users, user that can create top level items, other which can only respond to top level items.
3. Clients which run on many platforms.
4. I'll endorse the other user post about Notes looking the same across all platforms - it does. Training costs for users are minimized.
5. A wealth of 3rd party applications - Notes has been araound for a long time.
6. Since the servers are monolithic, they are robust. No integration problems to test against as you would encounter with some of the home grown approaches suggested in other posts.
7. Proven software. Many large organizations run their entire groupware on Notes. Seagate Technology, the disk drive manufacturer, uses Notes to diseminate design and test specifications across a world wide organization.
In short, think very carefully about giving up Domino/Notes, especaily factoring in hidden development costs, scalability, and reliability. Domino may be expensive, but it is very good at what is does.
I agree that not everything on Slashdot should be Open Source or Linux specific. Many interesting topics concerning MacOS, BeOS, Solaris, BSD, as well as Mac, Sun, and Alpha hardware have been and should continue to be presented on Slashdot.
some of the posts in this thread declare the final death of Amiga. Well, the Amiga has been effectively dead for some years now, and there is zero chance of any Amiga products coming out. If there was a viable market ( not to be confused by a demand from legacy Amiga users ) those products would have been introduced already.
Since, in my opinion, we're never going to see anything come from the people owning Amiga, it is a waste of time to continue to cover the issue.
In what way is news about Amiga related to the purpose of Slashdot? Is anything about Amiga related to Open Source? Is anything happening on the Amiga platform important or topical in regards to computer software or hardware? Does the Amiga today do anything better, unique, or noteworthy that other systems (esp. Linux) cannot do equally well, or better?
In short, does anyone give a damn about the Amiga? I don't. Even IF they were available for purchase, I would not buy one. But they are not available, and they are not going to become available. The reason the business strategy of the Amiga-owning companies have been changing so much is, IMHO, that they cannot come up with a business case for selling products based on the technology.
I'll bet money against a box of rocks that Gateway would like to sell Amiga technology, but that they cannot find another rube dumb enough to buy it.
So let's ban further coverage of technical non-events like Amiga announcements. There is nothing there to be concerned about.
Microsoft does not try to keep teir document formats consistent or compatible across versions of Word because they use this a club to force users, especially corporate users, to upgrade.
I would not be surprised to learn that Microsoft breaks even, or takes a loss on slaes of Windows simply to ensure the dominance of Office in the market. This perpetuates productivity of their largest cash cow, which they will continue milking until forced to change.
I think Mr. Wu is absolutely correct, and that Microsoft cannot be effectively harmed by the current DOJ anti-trust suit.
I thought about investing in Red Hat. After, I have used their distribution both at home and at work for about 3 years, so I believe in their product.
But I thought better of it.
Any of the distribution makers are really just selling a "feel good" attitude about using their distribution. Anyone, at any time could change to another distribution. I did. I am trying out SuSE Linux just because I wanted to see how another company packaged Linux.
Also, I never bought Official Red Hat Linux (tm). I have always bought the $1.89 cheapie CD's at LinuxMall. Being an old Slackware man, installing without a net does not scare me.
Red Hat's greatest potential for profits is in the services business, and I am not convinced that they can be successful. To the extent IBM is serious about using Linux in their business, Rad Hat will have a tough time competing against the Big Blue army of field application engineers and technicians.
If I invest in any company making money with Linux I would put my money on VA Linux Systems. They are a company with a much more tangible product: selling the service of assembling a PC whose components have been verified to work well with Linux, pre-intalling Linux, and then supporting the system after the sale. To the extent that Linux itself become successful, VA will reaps a fraction of the reward.
No, there is nothing anyone can do, because of the nature of the distributed development of OSS. How can any country prevent another of getting Linux, Beowulf, FreeBSD, or any other OSS application when it is available from dozens of CD-ROm vendors and hundreds of Internet servers?
You bring up an interesting point, one I had not thought of before, but when RMS says "free as in speech, not free as in beer", I am afraid it also means free to be applied to evil purposes.
First, Beowulf clusters do not provide high availability to standard data networks. They cannot be used to imporive Linux performance in this application.
Second, they probably chose multi-processor systems to run the benchmark because multi-processor systems are typically used by IT shops in this role.
It is no use complaining that they should not use a particular platform configuration just because Linux does not run well on it. Linux must instead be improved so that it can work well on the platform of choice.
Oh yes, the Declaration of Independence is a positively radical document, cunningly calculated to strike fear into defenders of the status quo everywhere, even inside the Beltway. I'll bet we could find a Congressman or two who has never read the thing, and would try to repeal it if they did.
It is no less than a philosophical justification of revolution, and call to action of the average citizen, of all nations and of all times, to throw off their oppressors. A person not only has the right to "throw da bums out", but the obligation to do so, if the government has broken faith with the governed.
The great part about the U.S. is that our revolutions do not have to be violent, a thought I take with me into the voting booth each November.:-)
I agree with you're position, but I have an observation.
Many parents think "parenting" means teaching their children to have exactly the same opinions, prejudices, and stereotypes that they have. Other ideas, from whatever source, are a threat to this goal, so they seek to "protect" their children from "dangerous" ideas.
The problem is that one person's protection may indeed come at the expense of censorship of another.
Parents must talk to their children, true, but they must also listen to them, and prepare them intellectually to face new, different, strange, exotic, radical, unconventional ideas. And parents must also accept that their children may make different choices than the parents may wish.
This is truly one hard task of parenting, but one which must be accomplished. The old saw "Never believe what you read" has never been more true than in this Internet Age. Anyone can now publish anything, and make it look pretty darn authoritative. Only thinking people are safe from the charlatans on the 'net.
Customer lock-in is only half of the story. The other half is developer lock-in. Anyone who has written Win32 applications will attest to the fact that any non-trivial Win32 application is not portable to a UNIX. Win32 actually discourages the use on ANSI C standard library calls. Win32 greatly encourages a Win32-specific program architectures centered around callback functions with particular prototypes. Take daemons (called "services" in NT), for example. WinNT services must have a callback entry point ( know as ServiceMain(), but may be alled anything) and a callback status handler. How many UNIX deamons have these functions?
Nope, we're not going to see MS Office. Microsoft would have to develop some kind of Win32-for-Linux libaray, IHMO, which would allow every other Win32 app to run on Linux. It would be the mother of all WABIs and WINEs. It would free other ISVs from being locked-in to Windows, and diminish the business case for Windows.
Among/. readers I would think a high proportion have ethernet at home. I do, and I think the price of 10BaseT equipment is such that it is quite affordable for anyone who can afford a computer in the first place.
If you have more than one computer, I think is is useful to network them, even at home. Do you want to sneaker-net print files to your printer when every OS you buy these days can share printers? Why wait for 'net access when there are ways to let every client on a LAN use a dialup link simultaneously?
Of course, Jane and Joe Sixpack may not have ethernet at home, but they are probably not/. readers either. We're a self-filtering, self-referential group.
Every time I see another test drive article where the author tried to install Linux on a laptop, I cringe.
The sad fact is that laptops are actually semi-custom Intel boxes. Many have hardware that is so different than standards that the OEMs must provide semi-custom versions of Win95 to install on them. Anyone trying to install an off-the-shelf copy of Win95 on these laptops will have a similar experiance to the author of this story did with Linux.
The real problem is one of expectation. People think that the laptops are "just another intel system" when they are not. The only solution I can see in pre-installed Linux.
Even though Linux has a reputation of being hard to install, most of the people writing these articles probably could not install Windows either, so they buy systems pre-installed and hopw the hard disk does not crash.
Apple is not doing anything because, in the ned, Apple does not care. All they want to do is sell every Mac user a new box every three years or so. They did not make the iMac non-expandable for kicks.
I think there are always grounds for appeal, but mistakes made in your own defense are not one of them. Also, is not an appeal actually a review of the trial proceeding, its fairness and the legal logic used for the various rulings?
Perhaps a lawyer can comment on what recourse defendants have to deal with their own inept presentation of their case.
If you consider Slashdot to be an analog of the Linux user base as a whole, as I do, whose prime interest is to further the acceptance of Linux, then we have to decide whether we are a geek's club or a community.
I believe that becomming a community is a key to ensuring Linux's success. A community where all people of whatever talents and abilities are welcomed, a commnunity where their voices are heard. If we truly are a community, then we need have no fear of Microsoft, which becomes, in fact, irrelevent.
If we are to become a community, we must take RMS's motto more directly to heart (which I paraphrase here): "Free, as in speech, not as in beer."
Katz, and any other visitor to this site, and by extension all members of the Linux using community, must be free to speak. And we should respect that freedom, even if we don't agree with the content, or we will become a club, and will deserve the obscurity into which we will descend.
Sure, the article is full dumb stuff. Here is my favorite sample:
"At which point, I spotted a CompUSA employee in a red shirt moving rapidly down one of the aisles, a middle-aged geek with a beard and glasses. (I don't know how, but I have some metaphysical chemistry with geeks. They know me; I know them.) "
But we do ourselves no favors flaming the eyebrows off the guy. Although I agree that he has shown such a weakness for digging into Linux that the above quote is ludicrous, I always thought that the Linux community was very good at helping newbies find their way. So far I don't think we have done a good jobs of this.
Jon is still struggling with a whole bunch of new stuff, and he does not see a coherent picture of what Linux is and might do for him. Some people are not good at configuring hardware, even though they are experts at using computers for the work they do. Jon is approaching the entire Linux exploration, I believe, as an application user who wishes to tap the considerable power of Linux to perform jobs that are important to him. He is an example of a mainstream user, and his story is important to teach us the problems they might have in converting to Linux. That makes his success important for the Linux community if we are truly interested in increasing the Linux user base. Jon needs a per-configured system so he can begin to explore Linux in ways he is capable of now. At this point all he has is confusion, without a vision of the potential. Once he has a running system, there will come a time where he will see the power of the OS, and he will be converted.
Jon still needs to experience his Linux epiphany.
What's that, you ask? Let ma answer by describing mine.
My first Linux box was Slackware running kernel 1.8.13. Not really old, not really recent. I was trying Linux to learn more about all this UNIX stuff, having gotten tried of DOS, OS/2, and Windows.
After getting everything installed, I was trying to get ethernet working with a card that the HOWTOS said was supported, but did not work. (Needed to use the ether= directive at the boot prompt, but I didn't know that then!) Somehow I got my console in a mode where the text on the screen was blinking: on-off-on-off. The console would only accept keystrokes during the "on" half of the period, which was about 1 second long.
What to do?
DOS/Windows thinking: reboot the system, and all will be well. Kind of hard to type the "shutdown" command while synchronizing keystrokes with the on-interval of command line, but I got it done. After the system came back up, the login prompt itself was blinking.
Ever try to type a password, which is not echoed to the console, when you have this blinking thing going on? I gave up after 20 attempts.
What to do now?
Window Thinking: re-install everything, and all will be well. Ugh!
Inklings of Linux thinking: "Multi-user, Network OS". "UNIX supports serial termianls." What if I hooked up another PC with a null modem cable, and then ran Procomm? Could I log in this way?
So I tried it. Ran Procomm, guessed st the serial port settings, hit return a couple times, and there it was ( Hot Damn! ) a no-fooling login prompt.
Epiphany - Linux can accept many login types because it is multi-user. Not like DOS/Windows/OS/2, which are single-user at a time systems. This means that Linux has to keep on truckin'. Cool, seriously cool! I never looked at computing the same way again.
I think Jon will have his moment like this, and he'll be converted, and he'll never look at computing the same way again. We need to lighten up, help him out if we can, and let him discover it for himself.
I try never to shop at Fry's. Selection is lousy and they sell broken stuff that has been returned who knows how many times as new.
There is no way that they check the motherboards, cards, software, etc. that they place back on the shelves with those blue and white stickers showing the return date.
Shopping the Web gives infinite selection, often comparable or better price (even with shipping) and BETTER customer service. I built my wife's current computer entirely with mail order components, and it's a screaming machine!
It's really cool to be married to a woman who appreciates raw computer power.
Slashdot Mirror
I will not repeat the many valid resons already sited as to why SCSI is better than EIDE, but I will mention some new points.
Credentials: 2.5 years as a test engineer at Seagate Technology in Scotts Valley, CA.
Many of the EIDE drives I worked on claiming to be EIDE 16MB/s capable were indeed capable of delivering data at that rate, but could only sustain the rate for ~ 20 to 24 bytes! After 20 bytes the drive would raise the IOCHRDY signal, indicating it could not deliver any more data. But a logic analyzer confirmed that those 20 bytes WERE delivered at 16MB/s! I'll bet many other EIDE drives on the market have the same limitations.
SCSI has all of those expensive terminators because at those data rates the SCSI interface cable has significant impedance and transmission line effects can no longer be ignored if data integrity is desired. EIDE is facing the same problemsat the current rates, and drive manufacturers have reccommending limits on cable length to 16 inches. UDMA (a.k.a. is simply a hack to double the data rate without doubling the clock rate. In UDMA the IOR and IOW strobes run at the same rate as EIDE, but words are strobed into/out of the disk interface on both the rising and falling edges instead of just the falling edge as in standard ATA. The EIDE drives are NOT going to get another performance boost without increasing the clock rate, and that will require terminators. Oh, my!
I've been looking at LinuxOne for as long as anyone who reads /. and I've never been able to figure out the angle. These guys are going to tank. But what if the company is a shill intended to make Linux companies look bad, and by extension, help Linux fail?
The idea goes something like this: LinuxOne gets as much PR as it can. Does an IPO, which shoots up to rediculously high values. But the company decalares bankruptcy when it cannot generate sales, and the Linux sector as a whole is discredited.
While I am not, as a rule, a perveyor of conspiracy theories, the above scenario seems more plausible to me than the idea that the founder of LinuxOne is so stupid to believe he is going to make money off this non-strategy.
It is not clear to me what the purpose of the network described in the posting is intended to be. Is it possible that wireless is not even needed to do the job? Is it also possible that the nodes described do not really need to be external?
In this type of application where high availability is desired and the cost of servicing is high, the first thing you could do to reduce the risk of failure is to get rid of the disk drive in the system.
They are prone to mechanical failures, data errors induced by electromagnetic fields, data errors induced by extremes of temperature and humidity.
Disk drives are too fragile for application in a hostile environment like the top of a utility pole.
If you have a large metal box around something..
and you ground th ebox...then lightning can strike
the box and ground out...and never have any effect
on the inside of the box.
Not so! While a well made enclosure *may* prevent a lightning strike from physically damaging to the electronics, there may be a system failure from the electromagnetic field induced inside the system from all that current flowing through the enclosure. Such fields can cause the system to lock up in such a way as to require a power cycle to recover.
I myself have cause PCs to crash by applying electrostatic discharges to a PC enclosure a small as 10kV. And you can be sure that lightning is easily 10000 times (more even?) that voltage.
It is very hard to describe to people what it is like to use Domino/Notes in an actual business setting if they have not seen it in action.
In my opinion, confirmed by several postings here, there is nothing else in the market that provides the infrastructure for groupware applications that Note does. Note how many of the posts say things like "just snip here and patch this there" and you'll have groupware.
The develi is in the details, and with Notes you will get a integrated platform that can:
1. Replicate databases across servers. This is very important if you have distributed offices.
2. Databases can have levels of user access: administrators, read only users, user that can create top level items, other which can only respond to top level items.
3. Clients which run on many platforms.
4. I'll endorse the other user post about Notes looking the same across all platforms - it does. Training costs for users are minimized.
5. A wealth of 3rd party applications - Notes has been araound for a long time.
6. Since the servers are monolithic, they are robust. No integration problems to test against as you would encounter with some of the home grown approaches suggested in other posts.
7. Proven software. Many large organizations run their entire groupware on Notes. Seagate Technology, the disk drive manufacturer, uses Notes to diseminate design and test specifications across a world wide organization.
In short, think very carefully about giving up Domino/Notes, especaily factoring in hidden development costs, scalability, and reliability. Domino may be expensive, but it is very good at what is does.
I agree that not everything on Slashdot should be Open Source or Linux specific. Many interesting topics concerning MacOS, BeOS, Solaris, BSD, as well as Mac, Sun, and Alpha hardware have been and should continue to be presented on Slashdot.
some of the posts in this thread declare the final death of Amiga. Well, the Amiga has been effectively dead for some years now, and there is zero chance of any Amiga products coming out. If there was a viable market ( not to be confused by a demand from legacy Amiga users ) those products would have been introduced already.
Since, in my opinion, we're never going to see anything come from the people owning Amiga, it is a waste of time to continue to cover the issue.
I am asking this seriously.
In what way is news about Amiga related to the purpose of Slashdot? Is anything about Amiga related to Open Source? Is anything happening on the Amiga platform important or topical in regards to computer software or hardware? Does the Amiga today do anything better, unique, or noteworthy that other systems (esp. Linux) cannot do equally well, or better?
In short, does anyone give a damn about the Amiga? I don't. Even IF they were available for purchase, I would not buy one. But they are not available, and they are not going to become available. The reason the business strategy of the Amiga-owning companies have been changing so much is, IMHO, that they cannot come up with a business case for selling products based on the technology.
I'll bet money against a box of rocks that Gateway would like to sell Amiga technology, but that they cannot find another rube dumb enough to buy it.
So let's ban further coverage of technical non-events like Amiga announcements. There is nothing there to be concerned about.
Microsoft does not try to keep teir document formats consistent or compatible across versions of Word because they use this a club to force users, especially corporate users, to upgrade.
I would not be surprised to learn that Microsoft breaks even, or takes a loss on slaes of Windows simply to ensure the dominance of Office in the market. This perpetuates productivity of their largest cash cow, which they will continue milking until forced to change.
I think Mr. Wu is absolutely correct, and that Microsoft cannot be effectively harmed by the current DOJ anti-trust suit.
I thought about investing in Red Hat. After, I have used their distribution both at home and at work for about 3 years, so I believe in their product.
But I thought better of it.
Any of the distribution makers are really just selling a "feel good" attitude about using their distribution. Anyone, at any time could change to another distribution. I did. I am trying out SuSE Linux just because I wanted to see how another company packaged Linux.
Also, I never bought Official Red Hat Linux (tm). I have always bought the $1.89 cheapie CD's at LinuxMall. Being an old Slackware man, installing without a net does not scare me.
Red Hat's greatest potential for profits is in the services business, and I am not convinced that they can be successful. To the extent IBM is serious about using Linux in their business, Rad Hat will have a tough time competing against the Big Blue army of field application engineers and technicians.
If I invest in any company making money with Linux I would put my money on VA Linux Systems. They are a company with a much more tangible product: selling the service of assembling a PC whose components have been verified to work well with Linux, pre-intalling Linux, and then supporting the system after the sale. To the extent that Linux itself become successful, VA will reaps a fraction of the reward.
No, there is nothing anyone can do, because of the nature of the distributed development of OSS. How can any country prevent another of getting Linux, Beowulf, FreeBSD, or any other OSS application when it is available from dozens of CD-ROm vendors and hundreds of Internet servers?
You bring up an interesting point, one I had not thought of before, but when RMS says "free as in speech, not free as in beer", I am afraid it also means free to be applied to evil purposes.
First, Beowulf clusters do not provide high availability to standard data networks. They cannot be used to imporive Linux performance in this application.
Second, they probably chose multi-processor systems to run the benchmark because multi-processor systems are typically used by IT shops in this role.
It is no use complaining that they should not use a particular platform configuration just because Linux does not run well on it. Linux must instead be improved so that it can work well on the platform of choice.
Oh yes, the Declaration of Independence is a positively radical document, cunningly calculated to strike fear into defenders of the status quo everywhere, even inside the Beltway. I'll bet we could find a Congressman or two who has never read the thing, and would try to repeal it if they did.
:-)
It is no less than a philosophical justification of revolution, and call to action of the average citizen, of all nations and of all times, to throw off their oppressors. A person not only has the right to "throw da bums out", but the obligation to do so, if the government has broken faith with the governed.
The great part about the U.S. is that our revolutions do not have to be violent, a thought I take with me into the voting booth each November.
I agree with you're position, but I have an observation.
Many parents think "parenting" means teaching their children to have exactly the same opinions, prejudices, and stereotypes that they have. Other ideas, from whatever source, are a threat to this goal, so they seek to "protect" their children from "dangerous" ideas.
The problem is that one person's protection may indeed come at the expense of censorship of another.
Parents must talk to their children, true, but they must also listen to them, and prepare them intellectually to face new, different, strange, exotic, radical, unconventional ideas. And parents must also accept that their children may make different choices than the parents may wish.
This is truly one hard task of parenting, but one which must be accomplished. The old saw "Never believe what you read" has never been more true than in this Internet Age. Anyone can now publish anything, and make it look pretty darn authoritative. Only thinking people are safe from the charlatans on the 'net.
Customer lock-in is only half of the story. The other half is developer lock-in. Anyone who has written Win32 applications will attest to the fact that any non-trivial Win32 application is not portable to a UNIX. Win32 actually discourages the use on ANSI C standard library calls. Win32 greatly encourages a Win32-specific program architectures centered around callback functions with particular prototypes. Take daemons (called "services" in NT), for example. WinNT services must have a callback entry point ( know as ServiceMain(), but may be alled anything) and a callback status handler. How many UNIX deamons have these functions?
Nope, we're not going to see MS Office. Microsoft would have to develop some kind of Win32-for-Linux libaray, IHMO, which would allow every other Win32 app to run on Linux. It would be the mother of all WABIs and WINEs. It would free other ISVs from being locked-in to Windows, and diminish the business case for Windows.
Among /. readers I would think a high proportion have ethernet at home. I do, and I think the price of 10BaseT equipment is such that it is quite affordable for anyone who can afford a computer in the first place.
/. readers either. We're a self-filtering, self-referential group.
If you have more than one computer, I think is is useful to network them, even at home. Do you want to sneaker-net print files to your printer when every OS you buy these days can share printers? Why wait for 'net access when there are ways to let every client on a LAN use a dialup link simultaneously?
Of course, Jane and Joe Sixpack may not have ethernet at home, but they are probably not
Every time I see another test drive article where the author tried to install Linux on a laptop, I cringe.
The sad fact is that laptops are actually semi-custom Intel boxes. Many have hardware that is so different than standards that the OEMs must provide semi-custom versions of Win95 to install on them. Anyone trying to install an off-the-shelf copy of Win95 on these laptops will have a similar experiance to the author of this story did with Linux.
The real problem is one of expectation. People think that the laptops are "just another intel system" when they are not. The only solution I can see in pre-installed Linux.
Even though Linux has a reputation of being hard to install, most of the people writing these articles probably could not install Windows either, so they buy systems pre-installed and hopw the hard disk does not crash.
Apple is not doing anything because, in the ned, Apple does not care. All they want to do is sell every Mac user a new box every three years or so. They did not make the iMac non-expandable for kicks.
I think there are always grounds for appeal, but mistakes made in your own defense are not one of them. Also, is not an appeal actually a review of the trial proceeding, its fairness and the legal logic used for the various rulings?
Perhaps a lawyer can comment on what recourse defendants have to deal with their own inept presentation of their case.
Jon,
How about posting before and after pictures of the box? I'd love to see the carnage wrought by UPS.
I completely disagree.
If you consider Slashdot to be an analog of the Linux user base as a whole, as I do, whose prime interest is to further the acceptance of Linux, then we have to decide whether we are a geek's club or a community.
I believe that becomming a community is a key to ensuring Linux's success. A community where all people of whatever talents and abilities are welcomed, a commnunity where their voices are heard. If we truly are a community, then we need have no fear of Microsoft, which becomes, in fact, irrelevent.
If we are to become a community, we must take RMS's motto more directly to heart (which I paraphrase here): "Free, as in speech, not as in beer."
Katz, and any other visitor to this site, and by extension all members of the Linux using community, must be free to speak. And we should respect that freedom, even if we don't agree with the content, or we will become a club, and will deserve the obscurity into which we will descend.
Sure, the article is full dumb stuff. Here is my favorite sample:
But we do ourselves no favors flaming the eyebrows off the guy. Although I agree that he has shown such a weakness for digging into Linux that the above quote is ludicrous, I always thought that the Linux community was very good at helping newbies find their way. So far I don't think we have done a good jobs of this.
Jon is still struggling with a whole bunch of new stuff, and he does not see a coherent picture of what Linux is and might do for him. Some people are not good at configuring hardware, even though they are experts at using computers for the work they do. Jon is approaching the entire Linux exploration, I believe, as an application user who wishes to tap the considerable power of Linux to perform jobs that are important to him. He is an example of a mainstream user, and his story is important to teach us the problems they might have in converting to Linux. That makes his success important for the Linux community if we are truly interested in increasing the Linux user base. Jon needs a per-configured system so he can begin to explore Linux in ways he is capable of now. At this point all he has is confusion, without a vision of the potential. Once he has a running system, there will come a time where he will see the power of the OS, and he will be converted.
Jon still needs to experience his Linux epiphany.
What's that, you ask? Let ma answer by describing mine.
My first Linux box was Slackware running kernel 1.8.13. Not really old, not really recent. I was trying Linux to learn more about all this UNIX stuff, having gotten tried of DOS, OS/2, and Windows.
After getting everything installed, I was trying to get ethernet working with a card that the HOWTOS said was supported, but did not work. (Needed to use the ether= directive at the boot prompt, but I didn't know that then!) Somehow I got my console in a mode where the text on the screen was blinking: on-off-on-off. The console would only accept keystrokes during the "on" half of the period, which was about 1 second long.
What to do?
DOS/Windows thinking: reboot the system, and all will be well. Kind of hard to type the "shutdown" command while synchronizing keystrokes with the on-interval of command line, but I got it done. After the system came back up, the login prompt itself was blinking.
Ever try to type a password, which is not echoed to the console, when you have this blinking thing going on? I gave up after 20 attempts.
What to do now?
Window Thinking: re-install everything, and all will be well. Ugh!
Inklings of Linux thinking: "Multi-user, Network OS". "UNIX supports serial termianls." What if I hooked up another PC with a null modem cable, and then ran Procomm? Could I log in this way?
So I tried it. Ran Procomm, guessed st the serial port settings, hit return a couple times, and there it was ( Hot Damn! ) a no-fooling login prompt.
Epiphany - Linux can accept many login types because it is multi-user. Not like DOS/Windows/OS/2, which are single-user at a time systems. This means that Linux has to keep on truckin'. Cool, seriously cool! I never looked at computing the same way again.
I think Jon will have his moment like this, and he'll be converted, and he'll never look at computing the same way again. We need to lighten up, help him out if we can, and let him discover it for himself.
I try never to shop at Fry's. Selection is lousy and they sell broken stuff that has been returned who knows how many times as new.
There is no way that they check the motherboards, cards, software, etc. that they place back on the shelves with those blue and white stickers showing the return date.
Shopping the Web gives infinite selection, often comparable or better price (even with shipping) and BETTER customer service. I built my wife's current computer entirely with mail order components, and it's a screaming machine!
It's really cool to be married to a woman who appreciates raw computer power.
Anyone care the translate the rest of that famous poem into the O.S.S. analog? I don't think I could.