Big Deal. 9/9/99 wasn't going to be a problem.
on
9/9/99: News? Nein!
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· Score: 1
Even a Y2K non-compliant system was going to represent today, at worst, as 09/09/99. Date and Month fields need two digits, not one. I wish I could smack whoever tried to start the panic on this one...
So far we have two events. GPS rollover and "9/9/99". The total damage to date: A few Japanese cabbies got lost when the GPS rolled over to Week 0. December 31 is going to suck some, but I doubt it'll suck anyplace catastrophically.
The Good News: Athlon at warp speeds, with 8MB L2 cache - mmmm, tasty... Since the Athlon bus already runs at 200 MHz, it won't have the "kick in the teeth" impact that the same amount of cache on x86 would have, but it's still nice indeedy.
The Bad News: The Socket Wars show no sign of abating, as we now get YANDRMD (Yet Another Darned Reference Motherboard Design) to go with:
Socket 7 Slot 1 Slot 2 Socket 370 Slot A
The poor Taiwanese mobo makers must be going nuts! We need Intel to license the bus specs for the P2 architecture, pronto. Scratch that... I don't want to slow down the Athlons to _mere_ P2 speeds! Hah!
USB is improving, that's a Good Thing. It's got a lot of shortcomings today. But Firewire is better suited by it's very nature for higher-end tasks like digital video editing, hard drive connections, and _high-end_ scanners in the prepress range. It's likely that Firewire will never be the mass technology that USB is and will continue to be, but it's going to be perfectly safe - like SCSI is to IDE.
Remember, Apple includes it on all their high-end desktops (and supposedly on the Kihei iMacs), Sony has it on much of the Vaio series systems (including some laptops), and a lot of the newer digital camcorders use the interface as well. Firewire doesn't degrade under contention the way USB does (and legacy USB devices will probably have a negative impact on a USB 2.0 system), and that's another factor in Firewire's favor. Intel may not like it, but Microsoft supports it, Apple supports it, and consumer electronic companies support it. Firewire's not going anywhere. Unfortunately, InfoWorld has an Intel-centric view here (if it's not on the chipset, it's doomed).
I think we're going to have to invade and teach these darned Canadians exactly who's the boss here...
Oh, wait. That was the movie. Never mind.
Actually, the Canadian broadcasting folks are like an FCC with fewer lawsuits and more political correctness. Both institutions (ours and theirs) suck pretty much equally, though.
After the movie, though, I called my Mom and asked her why she didn't look like the Canadians in the movie (she was born there, and finds South Park rather funny). Her response was unprintable, except for the part about "you're not my son!"...;-)
The question has already been raised here of "where would we get the bodies"? We need to keep in mind how existing transplants (of which there is already a parts shortage) work.
1: Joe Dyingman has a bad heart. Sally Dyingwoman is going blind. And Bobby Dyingyouth has a failing liver. They lie in a hospital, close to death, blindness, and general Bad Things.
Meanwhile, Dennis Drunkdriver careens through the night, soused to the gills. Suddenly, Dennis loses control (big surprise) and hits the convenient telephone pole. Because he was in his hot new convertible and strapped int his seat, his body is not injured severely. However, Dennis' head is neatly skewered on the lineman's step sticking out of the pole (I know they're not that far down, but work with me here). Dennis' brain is turned into mush. The paramedics arrive almost instantly, but Dennis is brain-dead.
Since the rest of him is in good shape, and Dennis' drivers' license says he's an organ donor (as should we all), they race Dennis to the hospital, where he is determined to actually be brain-dead. At this point, a team of surgeons start working to remove the parts of Dennis that he doesn't need any more.
While this is happening, our three patients get "the word" that a donor has finally been found. They are rushed into surgery prep, and as Dennis' organs are removed, the organs are zipped away to each awaiting surgery, where they are placed into Joe, Sally, and Bobby. Three people have been given their lives (and in one case, their eyesight) back as the last act of a dying man.
So now we can but Dennis' whole body on one aging or paralyzed person, who will (at this point) remain paralyzed, but have healthier organs. No thanks. That is what I refer to as "a significant waste of resources". Maybe I'm selfish (or just cynical), but I'd rather save multiple people's lives with my body parts than give Christopher Reeve a slighly dumpy, thirtysomething new shell to live in.
I bet Dimensions account for most of Dell's sales - as Linux continues to be the "it girl of the '90's", it's smart for them to extend their support there, to the volume sector. That's where the money is.
Dimensions are the "value" line, built with fairly generic ATX mobos & mid-tower cases. They don't suck at all, but Dell changes components on short notice, depending on what's "hot" at any given time. I switched my company over from those to Optiplexes because, hey, they may cost more but I can call Dell this time next year and buy the exact same machine I buy today. When you need to maintain a fleet of PCs, it helps a lot when they're the same. Of course, right now I'm running NT on them (contrary to general belief, NT isn't bad as a desktop OS for the average joe user in a 'corporate' environment), but the day is coming when I can switch - even though NT isn't bad for a desktop Linux is much, much nicer. Official support is a Good Thing, and gives me that much more ammo to fire when the time for the revolution comes.
But offering Linux on Dimensions is even easier than offering it on their other configs for just that reason - generic hardware (BX motherboards with 3 DIMM slots and integrated sound), only IDE to worry about, standard NICs (3C905b), and a hotrod video card (probably the TNT2 right now). They can just build a kernel under Redhat 6 with support for the few options they offer as stock, and ship it in 1 or two configs to handle different video cards under X. Piece of cake. I'm surprised they waited this long. If you can get it on a Precision or an Optiplex, Dimensions are trivial.
It'll definitely be Red Hat, after all - Dell owns a piece of them.
Now what I'm waiting for from Dell is two things: 1: Official support for Linux on my Inspiron 7000 (it is sweet!), because running X with the built-in ATI Rage Pro LT is a kludge. 2: Dell to run Linux for their WebTalk support system so it won't crash all the time.
As much as I hate being a US-centric troll, we did invent the Internet itself here (though plenty of Europeans, working here, contributed - and the Web was invented overseas). It was originally built under a US government contract, by our rules and standards. Fortunately, we were smart enough to open up connectivity, but still we control the DNS standard, we control address assignments, and most of the major backbones and access points are on our soil.
Leading me to my point here: this AC has a valid point, though not terribly practical. If the US government decided to take their ball and go home, that would be stupid, but we built it - we make the rules. I have no problem at all with us running the show. That said, the nature of the Internet is to open up information and culture. Politicians need to know that, while we may run the Internet here in the US, it represents something bigger than all of us. We may run it, but we can't control it.
I saw "South Park" this Friday at my local Lowes googleplex - it was a riot. There were a few young'uns there, but it was mainly college-age kids and thirtysomethings with a sense of humor (I like to put myself in that category). It's outrageous how the fallout from Columbine has triggered such a knee-jerk reaction on the part of the Clinton administration ("You really _should_ ID kids - we wouldn't want to have to regulate you, would we?"). As if a potty-mouthed crude cartoon (and it's 'R' rated competition) is going to be the one influence that corrupts our "precious youth"!
The truly disgraceful thing here is that we're gradually giving up our freedom of speech, and we're doing it voluntarily. I guess if "adult" themes like sexuality and language now must be kept from our impressionable youth, we'll just have to send them to see good, clean violent PG-13 movies. I'm so glad that we're protecting our young ones...
When I was a teenager, I worked at an "alternative" cinema in Connecticut that showed all sorts of fare, mostly unrated. I remember 14-year old kids going to midnight Rocky Horror screenings (I didn't go to one of those until I was 16!) - underage kids seeing foreign films with extensive nudity, teenagers filling the place for the annual "splatterfest" (with movies like Basket Case, 10,000 Maniacs, and the original TCM), and all the classic John Waters films like Female Trouble and Pink Flamingos.
Interestingly enough, we had no age policies at all, yet somehow our patrons didn't emerge from the theater to rape and pillage downtown Norwalk on a nightly basis. Go figure.
Bottom line: people who are doomed to be the nutcases of society will find a trigger - regardless of our misguided efforts to protect them. If there are more of them nowadays I'd look first at the trend to absentee parenting and easy access to weaponry before I blame the media - though that's the "easy" answer. But this is a society that doesn't like to look any deeper than the surface.
Remember - those who would willingly exchange liberty for security deserve neither.
OK, so you don't want to pay $3600. I can't blame you at all for that. But you have 3 choices at 3 price points, with approximately $1000 between each one of them:
1: An iBook for $1600
2: A Lombard 333 for $2500
3: A Lombard 400 with DVD for $3600
I'd like to see a few more options in there, too, but that pretty much hits all the price points I can think of. The Lombards only have one PC Card slot, and the iBooks none, but both systems have USB, 10/100 Ethernet and 56k modems already on-board - so it's not that big an issue, I think. I would like to see a $2000 Lombard with, say, a 266 or 300 MHz processor and maybe a 13" screen, and a $4000 Lombard with a 15" screen, but I'm nitpicking. When my 3400 at home runs out of gas (I clocked it up to 270MHz, but it's starting to wheeze on stuff like Office 98), I'll probably snag an iBook by then. It'll have the same resolution as the 3400 (12" 800x600), with much better speed and battery life. Nice road machine.
The Lombard series PowerBooks aren't new (being introduced in May at WWDC), but they are pretty hard to come by... so maybe they're, in the words of used car dealers, "new to you!"
The P1 portable is the one that's supposed to be announced today isn't on the Apple site yet, and the Apple Store is offline while they load the pages for it and any other new goodies today.
Call me a heretic, but I kind of enjoyed it
on
All Hail Bloatware
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· Score: 1
He makes some valid points in the article. For the average user (not the ubergeeks who hang out here), that user is going to purchase their software, and unless they have a reason to get "morebetterfastershinier", they'll buy virtually all the software they will ever use in the first month or so of owning the computer. If that's the case, software manufacturers don't make very much money (not just billg). Now I'm not saying that the upgrade treadmill is a Good Thing, but under the current economic and development model, I understand why it happens. Heck, you can even take a wonderful free program like Emacs that can be extended and it will be.
That said, there's two ways off the treadmill I can think of:
Moore's law finally runs out of gas (not any time soon). More users get annoyed and just stop upgrading all the time.
Well, I suspect the second choice is the likeliest, but I'm afraid we're stuck for now. Ultimately I'd rather see small products rather than big products, but I'd be happy if they just could improve the quality of what does ship. And it's not just Microsoft - it's virtually all commercial developers who are guilty. How many people who use Windows and hate bloated office suites do their word processing with Yeah Write?
You deserve to be able to take some money out of the work you and Jeff have put into the site. Congratulations. Hopefully this will mean a better, faster/., and that you two can finally get a life.
I wasn't making a claim - I was making a generalization (without picking apart the QPL and LGPL - a lot of GNOME users use GNOME because of an early perception that KDE was "unfree" because of the old Qt license). Part of the original motivation behind Gtk was that the original Qt license was very restrictive - although Troll Tech has rectified the situation with the QPL the religious schism between the GNOME and KDE camps had already happened. That doesn't make KDE users anti-Free, it just means that strict Free Software people are more likely to have settled on GNOME early, and hey - why change horses in midstream? I like KDE myself, because it seems to be better polished for now. Personally, I'm a fan of licenses like LGPL - they give the developer the best kind of freedom of all: the freedom to decide for themselves whether or not Open Source is right for them.
My own view: Software should be Free whenever possible. When it's not completely free, it should be Open Source. And only if it can't be (for reasons of internal business security, perhaps), should it be closed. Then again, I run NT on my desktops at the office, the software I need to use to get the job done at my shop mainly does not exist in Open Source or Free form, unfortunately. I use Linux to serve my intranet, though (and I use it for everything at home)...
I think this is pretty simple to define (this from the man who gave the world the word "SCOGNUX", so use a grain of salt):
Free Software is in the best interests of many, if not most users. Ideally, Free means "free beer" AND "free speech", because the best tools should be given away for the good of the community. At the very minimum, the free speech form is a necessity to the Free Software community.
Then there's the Open Source group. They agree strongly with Free Software, but they'll settle for free speech (though they do enjoy their free beer), so long as the speech isn't too convoluted or restricted. If a company decides to treat their Open Source system as a market for unfree software, they can live with it, but they'd really like to see as much software Open Sourced as possible.
Open Sourcers will compromise on their ideals for the benefit of the larger goal: more Open Source (and Free) software. Free Software people won't.
An Open Source devotee will run Linux, and load KDE, WordPerfect, and Navigator on it, and consider that a win. A Free Software follower will run Linux, but call it GNU/Linux (regardless of the damage to their tongue it can cause...), GNOME, and use emacs for everything but web browsing (and maybe even that).
ESR (and probably a majority of the community) are Open Sourcers. ESR speaks for them frequently, but not exclusively. He's the visible one, though.
RMS (and a vocal, talented minority) are Free Software advocates. To most, RMS is Free Software, and he's done more than anyone else. But his preaching tends to turn off the masses (as do most prophets and idealists).
ESR and RMS are friends. ESR and RMS are friendly rivals. ESR and RMS are bitter rivals. It depends on the day, the cause, and the mood. They both have talent, and they both have egos. Unfortunately, because of that, they will never both pull quite in the same direction, and that's too bad for the community - because as much as they've both accomplished, if they could meet in the middle they'd probably accomplish even more.
It could be worse, though - in many societies they's have gone into the hills with weapons (of which ESR has many) and their followers (of which RMS' are truly devoted to the Cause) and waged a Guerrila war between the Nerds. Scary thought, huh?
...if BeOS is selling cheaply enough to be in a $199 computer, more power to them - I hope they can mak $ on it because BeOS is the shite. I'm sure the "hybrid" stuff came from some marketweenie who saw that a tool or two was ported or something and knew that "Linux is hot", so they found a way to get the buzzword in.
On the other hand, I WANT ONE OF THOSE DEATH RAYS!
I agree with you as far as work email goes - I was "painting with a broad brush" the concept of email itself. But within the context of a company, my email should remain within my company, and not be accessible to government or the outside world without my and/or especially my company's consent.
It's not just a police issue, it's a privacy and a commerce issue. I have no objection to the govenment's being stumped by the challenge of reading my mail - my mail is not their business, anyways. It's mine. And if I'm a company, it's realistic to expect that if the government can read it, so can my competitors. That's just unacceptable.
Ultimately, think of data as obeying laws of fluid dynamics. data will naturally flow to where it has the most protections - and if we don't protect it, it'll flow somewhere that does.
Ultimately, the only person empowered to make calls on your privacy should be you.
Unfortunately, the bulk of African governments are so backwards and corrupt that this will not make one whit of difference in the lives of most of the continent's people. Only a few bureaucrat/kleptocrat types and/or businessmen will be in a position to benefit from better connectivity.
What Africa needs is better governments first. Then fiber optics can be useful to the people.
Remember - half the world has never made a phone call.
My experiences have been decidedly mixed...
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Feature:Geek Jobs
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· Score: 1
I spoke to three recruiters in the six years I spent (pretty happily) at my old company. Names of the guilty will be withheld - Lynx was the good one (up in Lexington MA).
First of all, my old position was running the network at an ad agency south of Boston. I liked it there a lot, but it was a family business, so I had no real chance of moving into real management (that's been my goal for a long time) and, though it was fun, the hours were grinding (10-12 hour days and more were the norm) and the commute was horrible (I live on the North Shore of Boston - the commute was 1-2 hours each way on a good day). Anyhow, I supported Macs, NT servers, a few PCs, and about 100 users, and I had a support guy and a web/database guy working for me.
The first agency I spoke to was a specialist in Mac skills and "creative" types. They seemed like decent sorts who understood my desire to move into a more management-related permanent job that was closer to home. Well, all they ever called me for were hourly jobs as a NT Administrator. The insulting part, of course, was that they wanted me to move to contracting for less $$, when I explicitly told them I was only interested in a permanent position. But I guess that contracting is more lucrative for them so they try to push as many bodies as possible that way.
So I mentally killfiled them (Ironically, almost two years later, I just got an email from a person there. Guess what they wanted to know if I was interested in... At least this one was permanent!) and tried a different agency - one of the biggest ones up here in Boston who handles tech jobs in general along with contract and other office work jobs. They were marginally more helpful, and I went on two actual interviews that were reasonably close fits to my needs. One of them was even in my town, though a little farther off base than what I really wanted. The problem I saw is that they pigeonholed me as a "Mac Guy", where I saw my Mac skills as just a piece of the puzzle. I lost interest in them after about 4 months - they were losing interest in me, too by then.
Finally, in early 1998, I talked to one more recruiter Lynx, as I mentioned earlier). I felt very comfortable with the recruiter I was meeting with, and he promised up and down that he wouldn't bug me with junk. I told him about my previous experiences with recruiters, and was assured that this would be better.
Yeah right, I thought...
Well, about two months went by without a peep - so I figured they were useless, but at least they weren't bugging me with junk the way the other two had. Then, at the end of March, he finally called me with:
A job managing the network group at a decent-sized company (bigger than my old one, but not too big) in my town! After a busy Easter weekend of interviews and debate, the deal was done - a better job, more responsibility, a nice salary bump, and the commute I craved. And I'm there now and quite happy to boot.
Now that was a good experience with a recruiter. No B.S., and the only call I got from them was for the right job. The key, I think, is to try and find one who specializes in tech work and to interview them as much as they interview you. If you don't feel they know what they're doing, tell them not to bother with you, you'll take your business elsewhere. They don't have to know how to do CGI programming, but they do have to know what it is. Remember, the good ones want to make the right matches - they get paid for it if they're any good. And they need you a lot more than you need them.
Sony has a desktop that looks like this (it has a console unit, but the basic flat panel styling is close to the Packard Hell's style). And Apple, of course, already built this when they released the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh (Spartacus). And when, pray tell, did Spartacus ship? Oh, yeah - 1996.
SGI builds some cool looking stuff, but one thing about Apple - when it comes to design they tend to be _way_ ahead of the curve in the mainstream computer market. Wintel cloners (for good reason) are focused tightly on cost, and Apple doesn't need to obsess as much there - their main competition was the now defunct Mac cloners. And Apple's designs were probably at their most boring when they were squeezing the nickel until the buffalo shites against the cloners.
Think about some of their design "greatest hits", though:
The original Mac (and derivatives like the SE and Classic): Compact, friendly-looking, portable, quiet, and all-in one before the trend started (luggables like Compaq didn't count).
The Mac LC series chassis systems: About as small as a mainstream desktop has ever gotten.
The original Powerbooks (especially the 100): For the time, a much slicker looking system. The pivoting feet were pretty innovative then, and they still don't make many systems as small as the PowerBook 100 was almost 8 years ago.
The PowerBook Duo: The first of the Transformer notebooks and still (arguably) the best-executed. Motorized loading, VCR-style, of a very slick subnotebook that turned it into a conventional desktop.
Spartacus: Possibly the first desktop to have an integrated active matrix screen. And they're still serious eye candy.
The Wall Street G3 PowerBooks: Fast, great screens, and "wicked swoopy".
iMac: The first truly stylish consumer-level computer. Decent amount of stuff crammed into it, too, for the price - and to Apple's credit, they've been pretty aggressive about revving it upwards without raising the price at all.
The Blue&White G3s: The case pivots open - how can that not be cool?
I'd like to see Packard-Bell match _that_ track record...
I'm hoping that they include support LCDs attached to the ATI Rage Pro LT (the current server doesn't). Then I could finally use my Inspiron 7000 with the swank 15" screen. There's a bunch of kludges to get it working now, but they're broken under the most recent BIOS. And I need the most recent BIOS for good WinNT support and to test Win2K to see how much it sucks.
I just made a CD of Mandrake 6 yesterday, and my quick verdict is "It Rocks!". The best way I can describe it is as Red Hat done right - after install, the only thing I had to do was edit my X startup to run in 16-bit mode, and THAT WAS IT! That's far less fiddling that I've had to do with any distro to date - and I've tinkered with Red Hat 6, SuSE 6.1, and Caldera 2.2 - in order to get it working "right". On the one hand, it's great to be able to tune an install yourself to perfection, but I like the idea of a distro I can just install and _use_. Five pocket protectors up!
I'll call it GNU/Linux...
on
GNU Inside?
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· Score: 5
...just as soon as FreeBSD gets renamed GNU/BSD. I run emacs and the CygWin ports on my NT laptop - should I call it a GNUtop?
The whole debate is silly. Linux is Linux, BSD is BSD, HURD can be the GNU/OS or whatever they want to call it. The kernel and design should be sufficient to determine the name. Hey - SCO owns the SVR5 code from which (theoretically) all *NUXes spring (in design if not in code) - maybe we should call the GNU (when a HURD-derived version ships) SCOGNUX! Or POSIXGNUX! I hope I made a point here without making anyone's head explode from bad acronyms.
My bottom line: Linux is a great operating system, built by a group of brilliant people, using the terrific GNU tools and utilities. And no Unix would be complete without them. But RMS really needs to take his ball and go home on this one. Anybody who knows anything about Linux understands the magnitude of RMS's contribution to the software world and knows Linux would probably not have existed without him. Now please make all this go away!
What's in a name, anyway? A rose, by any other name, would still wither and die...
This was a pretty good review on balance
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NOS Crossroads
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· Score: 2
I read the dead tree edition of this article yesterday (with sidebars spotlighting a user of each NOS, and reasons why they went there), and it's a pretty solid review. On lower-end hardware, Linux blows the doors off NT, but at this point, NT runs faster on the king-size industrial hardware (like the boxes they tested on). Also, ZD tested a RedHat 5.2 distro upgraded to the 2.2 kernel - not a lot of stuff is optimized for the newer kernel. Off RedHat 6.0 or one of the other 2.2-based distros, the numbers would probably be somewhat better.
That said, it's obvious that the next step for Linux is better "enterprise" hardware support, and easier configuration/tuning for the non-wizard. The configuration issue has been at the top of people's lists for a while, but it's not solved yet (I suspect because so many of the developers can configure from a text file in their sleep). NT does nothing truly well (it's a decent desktop OS, but that's about it), but in a benchmark environment where stability isn't measured, it does nothing too badly. So it scores well, In my experience (YMMV), I've found that when running NT in a pretty vanilla software environment, on Compaq hardware, with only a task or two per box, it's pretty stable (no crashes in day-to day use, reboot to defrag memory every month or so). Of course that's not how Microsoft positions it, or they wouldn't sell the BackOffice suite as a single SKU. When you run all the BackOffice components at once, it's gonna crash, and crash hard & often.
NetWare, for pure file and print services, is still a really fast engine - NLM's suck hard and it'll be a while before you see NetWare services rewritten in Java, but their Java interpreter is pretty good. They've also worked hard on tuning their web server for performance, and it's integration with NDS is a pretty slick feature. The only thing I wasn't clear on from feading the benchmark specs was what file system they used - their older FAT system (which is real fast if you have the RAM, but pretty risky in a crash) or their new journalling file system, which I don't believe is quite as fast yet.
As for Sun, this is the first real bench I've seen on their Intel version - hopefully Sun doesn't keep ignoring it for the Sparc version. Solaris, with better hardware support, could be quite a nice NT killer in the server space
All in all, it was a pretty balanced review that did a good job of highlighting strengths and weaknesses both. It'll be interesting to see how the vendors react.
By the way, in the same issue PCWeek also reviews Win2K Beta 3. In a nutshell: The Workstation version is pretty close and pretty solid - the Server version sucks eggs.
Slashdot Mirror
Even a Y2K non-compliant system was going to represent today, at worst, as 09/09/99. Date and Month fields need two digits, not one. I wish I could smack whoever tried to start the panic on this one...
So far we have two events. GPS rollover and "9/9/99". The total damage to date: A few Japanese cabbies got lost when the GPS rolled over to Week 0. December 31 is going to suck some, but I doubt it'll suck anyplace catastrophically.
- -Josh Turiel
The Good News:
Athlon at warp speeds, with 8MB L2 cache - mmmm, tasty... Since the Athlon bus already runs at 200 MHz, it won't have the "kick in the teeth" impact that the same amount of cache on x86 would have, but it's still nice indeedy.
The Bad News:
The Socket Wars show no sign of abating, as we now get YANDRMD (Yet Another Darned Reference Motherboard Design) to go with:
Socket 7
Slot 1
Slot 2
Socket 370
Slot A
The poor Taiwanese mobo makers must be going nuts! We need Intel to license the bus specs for the P2 architecture, pronto. Scratch that... I don't want to slow down the Athlons to _mere_ P2 speeds! Hah!
- -Josh Turiel
USB is improving, that's a Good Thing. It's got a lot of shortcomings today. But Firewire is better suited by it's very nature for higher-end tasks like digital video editing, hard drive connections, and _high-end_ scanners in the prepress range. It's likely that Firewire will never be the mass technology that USB is and will continue to be, but it's going to be perfectly safe - like SCSI is to IDE.
Remember, Apple includes it on all their high-end desktops (and supposedly on the Kihei iMacs), Sony has it on much of the Vaio series systems (including some laptops), and a lot of the newer digital camcorders use the interface as well. Firewire doesn't degrade under contention the way USB does (and legacy USB devices will probably have a negative impact on a USB 2.0 system), and that's another factor in Firewire's favor. Intel may not like it, but Microsoft supports it, Apple supports it, and consumer electronic companies support it. Firewire's not going anywhere. Unfortunately, InfoWorld has an Intel-centric view here (if it's not on the chipset, it's doomed).
- -Josh Turiel
I think we're going to have to invade and teach these darned Canadians exactly who's the boss here...
;-)
Oh, wait. That was the movie. Never mind.
Actually, the Canadian broadcasting folks are like an FCC with fewer lawsuits and more political correctness. Both institutions (ours and theirs) suck pretty much equally, though.
After the movie, though, I called my Mom and asked her why she didn't look like the Canadians in the movie (she was born there, and finds South Park rather funny). Her response was unprintable, except for the part about "you're not my son!"...
- -Josh Turiel
No, no, no, you misunderstand. Dennis was skewered through the _side_ of his head... His retinas were unharmed and just peachy!
- -Josh Turiel
The question has already been raised here of "where would we get the bodies"? We need to keep in mind how existing transplants (of which there is already a parts shortage) work.
1: Joe Dyingman has a bad heart. Sally Dyingwoman is going blind. And Bobby Dyingyouth has a failing liver. They lie in a hospital, close to death, blindness, and general Bad Things.
Meanwhile, Dennis Drunkdriver careens through the night, soused to the gills. Suddenly, Dennis loses control (big surprise) and hits the convenient telephone pole. Because he was in his hot new convertible and strapped int his seat, his body is not injured severely. However, Dennis' head is neatly skewered on the lineman's step sticking out of the pole (I know they're not that far down, but work with me here). Dennis' brain is turned into mush. The paramedics arrive almost instantly, but Dennis is brain-dead.
Since the rest of him is in good shape, and Dennis' drivers' license says he's an organ donor (as should we all), they race Dennis to the hospital, where he is determined to actually be brain-dead. At this point, a team of surgeons start working to remove the parts of Dennis that he doesn't need any more.
While this is happening, our three patients get "the word" that a donor has finally been found. They are rushed into surgery prep, and as Dennis' organs are removed, the organs are zipped away to each awaiting surgery, where they are placed into Joe, Sally, and Bobby. Three people have been given their lives (and in one case, their eyesight) back as the last act of a dying man.
So now we can but Dennis' whole body on one aging or paralyzed person, who will (at this point) remain paralyzed, but have healthier organs. No thanks. That is what I refer to as "a significant waste of resources". Maybe I'm selfish (or just cynical), but I'd rather save multiple people's lives with my body parts than give Christopher Reeve a slighly dumpy, thirtysomething new shell to live in.
- -Josh Turiel
I bet Dimensions account for most of Dell's sales - as Linux continues to be the "it girl of the '90's", it's smart for them to extend their support there, to the volume sector. That's where the money is.
Dimensions are the "value" line, built with fairly generic ATX mobos & mid-tower cases. They don't suck at all, but Dell changes components on short notice, depending on what's "hot" at any given time. I switched my company over from those to Optiplexes because, hey, they may cost more but I can call Dell this time next year and buy the exact same machine I buy today. When you need to maintain a fleet of PCs, it helps a lot when they're the same. Of course, right now I'm running NT on them (contrary to general belief, NT isn't bad as a desktop OS for the average joe user in a 'corporate' environment), but the day is coming when I can switch - even though NT isn't bad for a desktop Linux is much, much nicer. Official support is a Good Thing, and gives me that much more ammo to fire when the time for the revolution comes.
But offering Linux on Dimensions is even easier than offering it on their other configs for just that reason - generic hardware (BX motherboards with 3 DIMM slots and integrated sound), only IDE to worry about, standard NICs (3C905b), and a hotrod video card (probably the TNT2 right now). They can just build a kernel under Redhat 6 with support for the few options they offer as stock, and ship it in 1 or two configs to handle different video cards under X. Piece of cake. I'm surprised they waited this long. If you can get it on a Precision or an Optiplex, Dimensions are trivial.
It'll definitely be Red Hat, after all - Dell owns a piece of them.
Now what I'm waiting for from Dell is two things:
1: Official support for Linux on my Inspiron 7000 (it is sweet!), because running X with the built-in ATI Rage Pro LT is a kludge.
2: Dell to run Linux for their WebTalk support system so it won't crash all the time.
- -Josh Turiel
As much as I hate being a US-centric troll, we did invent the Internet itself here (though plenty of Europeans, working here, contributed - and the Web was invented overseas). It was originally built under a US government contract, by our rules and standards. Fortunately, we were smart enough to open up connectivity, but still we control the DNS standard, we control address assignments, and most of the major backbones and access points are on our soil.
Leading me to my point here: this AC has a valid point, though not terribly practical. If the US government decided to take their ball and go home, that would be stupid, but we built it - we make the rules. I have no problem at all with us running the show. That said, the nature of the Internet is to open up information and culture. Politicians need to know that, while we may run the Internet here in the US, it represents something bigger than all of us. We may run it, but we can't control it.
- -Josh Turiel
I saw "South Park" this Friday at my local Lowes googleplex - it was a riot. There were a few young'uns there, but it was mainly college-age kids and thirtysomethings with a sense of humor (I like to put myself in that category). It's outrageous how the fallout from Columbine has triggered such a knee-jerk reaction on the part of the Clinton administration ("You really _should_ ID kids - we wouldn't want to have to regulate you, would we?"). As if a potty-mouthed crude cartoon (and it's 'R' rated competition) is going to be the one influence that corrupts our "precious youth"!
The truly disgraceful thing here is that we're gradually giving up our freedom of speech, and we're doing it voluntarily. I guess if "adult" themes like sexuality and language now must be kept from our impressionable youth, we'll just have to send them to see good, clean violent PG-13 movies. I'm so glad that we're protecting our young ones...
When I was a teenager, I worked at an "alternative" cinema in Connecticut that showed all sorts of fare, mostly unrated. I remember 14-year old kids going to midnight Rocky Horror screenings (I didn't go to one of those until I was 16!) - underage kids seeing foreign films with extensive nudity, teenagers filling the place for the annual "splatterfest" (with movies like Basket Case, 10,000 Maniacs, and the original TCM), and all the classic John Waters films like Female Trouble and Pink Flamingos.
Interestingly enough, we had no age policies at all, yet somehow our patrons didn't emerge from the theater to rape and pillage downtown Norwalk on a nightly basis. Go figure.
Bottom line: people who are doomed to be the nutcases of society will find a trigger - regardless of our misguided efforts to protect them. If there are more of them nowadays I'd look first at the trend to absentee parenting and easy access to weaponry before I blame the media - though that's the "easy" answer. But this is a society that doesn't like to look any deeper than
the surface.
Remember - those who would willingly exchange liberty for security deserve neither.
- -Josh Turiel
OK, so you don't want to pay $3600. I can't blame you at all for that. But you have 3 choices at 3 price points, with approximately $1000 between each one of them:
1: An iBook for $1600
2: A Lombard 333 for $2500
3: A Lombard 400 with DVD for $3600
I'd like to see a few more options in there, too, but that pretty much hits all the price points I can think of. The Lombards only have one PC Card slot, and the iBooks none, but both systems have USB, 10/100 Ethernet and 56k modems already on-board - so it's not that big an issue, I think. I would like to see a $2000 Lombard with, say, a 266 or 300 MHz processor and maybe a 13" screen, and a $4000 Lombard with a 15" screen, but I'm nitpicking. When my 3400 at home runs out of gas (I clocked it up to 270MHz, but it's starting to wheeze on stuff like Office 98), I'll probably snag an iBook by then. It'll have the same resolution as the 3400 (12" 800x600), with much better speed and battery life. Nice road machine.
The Lombard series PowerBooks aren't new (being introduced in May at WWDC), but they are pretty hard to come by... so maybe they're, in the words of used car dealers, "new to you!"
The P1 portable is the one that's supposed to be announced today isn't on the Apple site yet, and the Apple Store is offline while they load the pages for it and any other new goodies today.
He makes some valid points in the article. For the average user (not the ubergeeks who hang out here), that user is going to purchase their software, and unless they have a reason to get "morebetterfastershinier", they'll buy virtually all the software they will ever use in the first month or so of owning the computer. If that's the case, software manufacturers don't make very much money (not just billg). Now I'm not saying that the upgrade treadmill is a Good Thing, but under the current economic and development model, I understand why it happens. Heck, you can even take a wonderful free program like Emacs that can be extended and it will be.
That said, there's two ways off the treadmill I can think of:
Moore's law finally runs out of gas (not any time soon).
More users get annoyed and just stop upgrading all the time.
Well, I suspect the second choice is the likeliest, but I'm afraid we're stuck for now. Ultimately I'd rather see small products rather than big products, but I'd be happy if they just could improve the quality of what does ship. And it's not just Microsoft - it's virtually all commercial developers who are guilty. How many people who use Windows and hate bloated office suites do their word processing with Yeah Write?
You deserve to be able to take some money out of the work you and Jeff have put into the site. Congratulations. Hopefully this will mean a better, faster /., and that you two can finally get a life.
I wasn't making a claim - I was making a generalization (without picking apart the QPL and LGPL - a lot of GNOME users use GNOME because of an early perception that KDE was "unfree" because of the old Qt license). Part of the original motivation behind Gtk was that the original Qt license was very restrictive - although Troll Tech has rectified the situation with the QPL the religious schism between the GNOME and KDE camps had already happened. That doesn't make KDE users anti-Free, it just means that strict Free Software people are more likely to have settled on GNOME early, and hey - why change horses in midstream? I like KDE myself, because it seems to be better polished for now. Personally, I'm a fan of licenses like LGPL - they give the developer the best kind of freedom of all: the freedom to decide for themselves whether or not Open Source is right for them.
My own view:
Software should be Free whenever possible. When it's not completely free, it should be Open Source. And only if it can't be (for reasons of internal business security, perhaps), should it be closed. Then again, I run NT on my desktops at the office, the software I need to use to get the job done at my shop mainly does not exist in Open Source or Free form, unfortunately. I use Linux to serve my intranet, though (and I use it for everything at home)...
I think this is pretty simple to define (this from the man who gave the world the word "SCOGNUX", so use a grain of salt):
Free Software is in the best interests of many, if not most users. Ideally, Free means "free beer" AND "free speech", because the best tools should be given away for the good of the community. At the very minimum, the free speech form is a necessity to the Free Software community.
Then there's the Open Source group. They agree strongly with Free Software, but they'll settle for free speech (though they do enjoy their free beer), so long as the speech isn't too convoluted or restricted. If a company decides to treat their Open Source system as a market for unfree software, they can live with it, but they'd really like to see as much software Open Sourced as possible.
Open Sourcers will compromise on their ideals for the benefit of the larger goal: more Open Source (and Free) software. Free Software people won't.
An Open Source devotee will run Linux, and load KDE, WordPerfect, and Navigator on it, and consider that a win. A Free Software follower will run Linux, but call it GNU/Linux (regardless of the damage to their tongue it can cause...), GNOME, and use emacs for everything but web browsing (and maybe even that).
ESR (and probably a majority of the community) are Open Sourcers. ESR speaks for them frequently, but not exclusively. He's the visible one, though.
RMS (and a vocal, talented minority) are Free Software advocates. To most, RMS is Free Software, and he's done more than anyone else. But his preaching tends to turn off the masses (as do most prophets and idealists).
ESR and RMS are friends. ESR and RMS are friendly rivals. ESR and RMS are bitter rivals. It depends on the day, the cause, and the mood. They both have talent, and they both have egos. Unfortunately, because of that, they will never both pull quite in the same direction, and that's too bad for the community - because as much as they've both accomplished, if they could meet in the middle they'd probably accomplish even more.
It could be worse, though - in many societies they's have gone into the hills with weapons (of which ESR has many) and their followers (of which RMS' are truly devoted to the Cause) and waged a Guerrila war between the Nerds. Scary thought, huh?
...if BeOS is selling cheaply enough to be in a $199 computer, more power to them - I hope they can mak $ on it because BeOS is the shite. I'm sure the "hybrid" stuff came from some marketweenie who saw that a tool or two was ported or something and knew that "Linux is hot", so they found a way to get the buzzword in.
On the other hand, I WANT ONE OF THOSE DEATH RAYS!
I agree with you as far as work email goes - I was "painting with a broad brush" the concept of email itself. But within the context of a company, my email should remain within my company, and not be accessible to government or the outside world without my and/or especially my company's consent.
It's not just a police issue, it's a privacy and a commerce issue. I have no objection to the govenment's being stumped by the challenge of reading my mail - my mail is not their business, anyways. It's mine. And if I'm a company, it's realistic to expect that if the government can read it, so can my competitors. That's just unacceptable.
Ultimately, think of data as obeying laws of fluid dynamics. data will naturally flow to where it has the most protections - and if we don't protect it, it'll flow somewhere that does.
Ultimately, the only person empowered to make calls on your privacy should be you.
Unfortunately, the bulk of African governments are so backwards and corrupt that this will not make one whit of difference in the lives of most of the continent's people. Only a few bureaucrat/kleptocrat types and/or businessmen will be in a position to benefit from better connectivity.
What Africa needs is better governments first. Then fiber optics can be useful to the people.
Remember - half the world has never made a phone call.
I spoke to three recruiters in the six years I spent (pretty happily) at my old company. Names of the guilty will be withheld - Lynx was the good one (up in Lexington MA).
First of all, my old position was running the network at an ad agency south of Boston. I liked it there a lot, but it was a family business, so I had no real chance of moving into real management (that's been my goal for a long time) and, though it was fun, the hours were grinding (10-12 hour days and more were the norm) and the commute was horrible (I live on the North Shore of Boston - the commute was 1-2 hours each way on a good day). Anyhow, I supported Macs, NT servers, a few PCs, and about 100 users, and I had a support guy and a web/database guy working for me.
The first agency I spoke to was a specialist in Mac skills and "creative" types. They seemed like decent sorts who understood my desire to move into a more management-related permanent job that was closer to home. Well, all they ever called me for were hourly jobs as a NT Administrator. The insulting part, of course, was that they wanted me to move to contracting for less $$, when I explicitly told them I was only interested in a permanent position. But I guess that contracting is more lucrative for them so they try to push as many bodies as possible that way.
So I mentally killfiled them (Ironically, almost two years later, I just got an email from a person there. Guess what they wanted to know if I was interested in... At least this one was permanent!) and tried a different agency - one of the biggest ones up here in Boston who handles tech jobs in general along with contract and other office work jobs. They were marginally more helpful, and I went on two actual interviews that were reasonably close fits to my needs. One of them was even in my town, though a little farther off base than what I really wanted. The problem I saw is that they pigeonholed me as a "Mac Guy", where I saw my Mac skills as just a piece of the puzzle. I lost interest in them after about 4 months - they were losing interest in me, too by then.
Finally, in early 1998, I talked to one more recruiter Lynx, as I mentioned earlier). I felt very comfortable with the recruiter I was meeting with, and he promised up and down that he wouldn't bug me with junk. I told him about my previous experiences with recruiters, and was assured that this would be better.
Yeah right, I thought...
Well, about two months went by without a peep - so I figured they were useless, but at least they weren't bugging me with junk the way the other two had. Then, at the end of March, he finally called me with:
A job managing the network group at a decent-sized company (bigger than my old one, but not too big) in my town! After a busy Easter weekend of interviews and debate, the deal was done - a better job, more responsibility, a nice salary bump, and the commute I craved. And I'm there now and quite happy to boot.
Now that was a good experience with a recruiter. No B.S., and the only call I got from them was for the right job. The key, I think, is to try and find one who specializes in tech work and to interview them as much as they interview you. If you don't feel they know what they're doing, tell them not to bother with you, you'll take your business elsewhere. They don't have to know how to do CGI programming, but they do have to know what it is. Remember, the good ones want to make the right matches - they get paid for it if they're any good. And they need you a lot more than you need them.
Sony has a desktop that looks like this (it has a console unit, but the basic flat panel styling is close to the Packard Hell's style). And Apple, of course, already built this when they released the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh (Spartacus). And when, pray tell, did Spartacus ship? Oh, yeah - 1996.
SGI builds some cool looking stuff, but one thing about Apple - when it comes to design they tend to be _way_ ahead of the curve in the mainstream computer market. Wintel cloners (for good reason) are focused tightly on cost, and Apple doesn't need to obsess as much there - their main competition was the now defunct Mac cloners. And Apple's designs were probably at their most boring when they were squeezing the nickel until the buffalo shites against the cloners.
Think about some of their design "greatest hits", though:
The original Mac (and derivatives like the SE and Classic): Compact, friendly-looking, portable, quiet, and all-in one before the trend started (luggables like Compaq didn't count).
The Mac LC series chassis systems: About as small as a mainstream desktop has ever gotten.
The original Powerbooks (especially the 100): For the time, a much slicker looking system. The pivoting feet were pretty innovative then, and they still don't make many systems as small as the PowerBook 100 was almost 8 years ago.
The PowerBook Duo: The first of the Transformer notebooks and still (arguably) the best-executed. Motorized loading, VCR-style, of a very slick subnotebook that turned it into a conventional desktop.
Spartacus: Possibly the first desktop to have an integrated active matrix screen. And they're still serious eye candy.
The Wall Street G3 PowerBooks: Fast, great screens, and "wicked swoopy".
iMac: The first truly stylish consumer-level computer. Decent amount of stuff crammed into it, too, for the price - and to Apple's credit, they've been pretty aggressive about revving it upwards without raising the price at all.
The Blue&White G3s: The case pivots open - how can that not be cool?
I'd like to see Packard-Bell match _that_ track record...
I'm hoping that they include support LCDs attached to the ATI Rage Pro LT (the current server doesn't). Then I could finally use my Inspiron 7000 with the swank 15" screen. There's a bunch of kludges to get it working now, but they're broken under the most recent BIOS. And I need the most recent BIOS for good WinNT support and to test Win2K to see how much it sucks.
Waaah.
I just made a CD of Mandrake 6 yesterday, and my quick verdict is "It Rocks!". The best way I can describe it is as Red Hat done right - after install, the only thing I had to do was edit my X startup to run in 16-bit mode, and THAT WAS IT! That's far less fiddling that I've had to do with any distro to date - and I've tinkered with Red Hat 6, SuSE 6.1, and Caldera 2.2 - in order to get it working "right". On the one hand, it's great to be able to tune an install yourself to perfection, but I like the idea of a distro I can just install and _use_. Five pocket protectors up!
...just as soon as FreeBSD gets renamed GNU/BSD. I run emacs and the CygWin ports on my NT laptop - should I call it a GNUtop?
The whole debate is silly. Linux is Linux, BSD is BSD, HURD can be the GNU/OS or whatever they want to call it. The kernel and design should be sufficient to determine the name. Hey - SCO owns the SVR5 code from which (theoretically) all *NUXes spring (in design if not in code) - maybe we should call the GNU (when a HURD-derived version ships) SCOGNUX! Or POSIXGNUX! I hope I made a point here without making anyone's head explode from bad acronyms.
My bottom line: Linux is a great operating system, built by a group of brilliant people, using the terrific GNU tools and utilities. And no Unix would be complete without them. But RMS really needs to take his ball and go home on this one. Anybody who knows anything about Linux understands the magnitude of RMS's contribution to the software world and knows Linux would probably not have existed without him. Now please make all this go away!
What's in a name, anyway? A rose, by any other name, would still wither and die...
I read the dead tree edition of this article yesterday (with sidebars spotlighting a user of each NOS, and reasons why they went there), and it's a pretty solid review. On lower-end hardware, Linux blows the doors off NT, but at this point, NT runs faster on the king-size industrial hardware (like the boxes they tested on). Also, ZD tested a RedHat 5.2 distro upgraded to the 2.2 kernel - not a lot of stuff is optimized for the newer kernel. Off RedHat 6.0 or one of the other 2.2-based distros, the numbers would probably be somewhat better.
That said, it's obvious that the next step for Linux is better "enterprise" hardware support, and easier configuration/tuning for the non-wizard. The configuration issue has been at the top of people's lists for a while, but it's not solved yet (I suspect because so many of the developers can configure from a text file in their sleep). NT does nothing truly well (it's a decent desktop OS, but that's about it), but in a benchmark environment where stability isn't measured, it does nothing too badly. So it scores well, In my experience (YMMV), I've found that when running NT in a pretty vanilla software environment, on Compaq hardware, with only a task or two per box, it's pretty stable (no crashes in day-to day use, reboot to defrag memory every month or so). Of course that's not how Microsoft positions it, or they wouldn't sell the BackOffice suite as a single SKU. When you run all the BackOffice components at once, it's gonna crash, and crash hard & often.
NetWare, for pure file and print services, is still a really fast engine - NLM's suck hard and it'll be a while before you see NetWare services rewritten in Java, but their Java interpreter is pretty good. They've also worked hard on tuning their web server for performance, and it's integration with NDS is a pretty slick feature. The only thing I wasn't clear on from feading the benchmark specs was what file system they used - their older FAT system (which is real fast if you have the RAM, but pretty risky in a crash) or their new journalling file system, which I don't believe is quite as fast yet.
As for Sun, this is the first real bench I've seen on their Intel version - hopefully Sun doesn't keep ignoring it for the Sparc version. Solaris, with better hardware support, could be quite a nice NT killer in the server space
All in all, it was a pretty balanced review that did a good job of highlighting strengths and weaknesses both. It'll be interesting to see how the vendors react.
By the way, in the same issue PCWeek also reviews Win2K Beta 3. In a nutshell: The Workstation version is pretty close and pretty solid - the Server version sucks eggs.