You can't design a decent control panel, when you're batshit crazy trying to hide control panel applets from people. Asylum lunatics wouldn't be as gleeful, at concealing things that shouldn't be hidden, as Billy's crew seems to be.
Ever try to talk a retard into clicking on XP's "Switch to classic view" at 11:45pm, over the phone?
You guys do all realize that programs are loaded into ram, and executed from there? Only the most minimalistic embedded systems execute from storage, and even then it's usually a chip.
When you delete the executable off the drive (assuming it lets you), the copy in ram can still run (at least until it needs to look at a config file again).
For bigger executables this may not be completely true, the system may only load chunks of exe at a time, choosing to load others later to save ram or whatever. And on windows, there are always dll files that may be loaded long after the program has started.
I do alot of rollouts. Barely IT work at all, the guy who mops the control center floor at NASA doesn't get to claim to be an astronaut or rocket scientist either. But the worst rollout ever, was for a public school system.
This public school system was more ghetto than most, by rollout, I mean maybe replacing 3-5 of the PCs in labs that had 20 (so there was always a mix of crap systems), maybe only half the computer lab rooms in any one building. And often, things would never be scheduled right, so we were told to go in the rooms even during class, and just be quiet, teachers knew we'd be there, wasn't a problem.
Being ghetto, the kids weren't expected to do real schoolwork, and would goof off. Porn sites, gambling, all the stupidest shit you've ever seen. Well, 20 minutes into this, almost done setting it all up, this black girl screams, "Oh my god, it say I won a million dollar, is it fo real!?!". A stupid spammy popup of course, but she had no critical thinking skills, nor had anyone ever bothered to tell her how much spam like this was out there. No big deal right, she's a kid?
So, me being the fool that I am, I try to explain to her what it is, not sarcastic or anything. Really. Can't remember how I worded it, but the tone of my voice was such that I was trying my best not to sound like I was patronizing, nor like I was making fun of her. Before I had even finished the one sentence, the cow-like teacher was "How do you know, she might have won something, you jus don want her to win." As the teacher waddled over to the computer screen, I shut up, she didn't bother to follow up with a tirade, and I finished up as soon as possible. Got the hell out of there.
Why are we keeping source code and comments in the same file? What would be nice, would be a editor that keeps them in 2 different files, say, file.c and file.cmt or such such, but when you want, with a single keystroke toggle, superimposes the comments in your source. The comment file format would need some metadata, to show where it should appear, I'd think.
but i think whatever OS has most (clueless) users will be targeted most
You'd think that, wouldn't you? But no, the OSX users are targeted not often at all, maybe never. Why? Decent OS architecture going on there. Decent may not even be generous enough.
(Note to OSX users: This is *not* intended as a flame. I'm only pointing out that you don't have to become a computer engineer, when the OS designer doesn't sell you garbage.)
Most gated community residents are clueless when it comes to hand-to-hand combat, but murders still happen more frequently in a Sao Paulo shantytown. Why? Why indeed. Go live in the Microsoft ghetto if you want, but don't say we didn't invite you to your own mansion.
The homework where we know, time and time again, Microsoft neither gets the eye candy nor the backend right? Where we can neither call it good, nor pretty? Are you talking about that homework.
There has to come a point, mind you, it might not be the same point for everyone so I have to be a little tolerant, where you say "too little, too late". With me, that point has come and gone, and I cant believe that it's that far off for other people. But what do I know?
It might be better than some linux UIs, however, we get to have more than 1 UI. At once. And even some of the crappy ones are more consistent, simpler in the "simpler is better" sense, and customizable.
I say this from Firefox running in Windowmaker with several partially obscured xterms peeking out behind it.
What I'm wondering, is whether M$ will have sense enough to steal OSX's network "location" feature, so that I don't have to tell customers that there is no easy way to set up their XP machine to have a static on our DSL, and DHCP when they take the laptop to work. Might not hurt to lose the "we won't let you start IE from a fresh install" thing they have going on too...
I'd rather see the Director for IE development swim to the bottom of the atlantic.
For the price of a custom mainboard...
on
Custom Motherboards?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
He could easily afford a x8 or x16 cpu machine from a big vendor. One that has been thoroughly tested, rather than an engineer's first prototype. With his pick of actual SMP-capable cpus, no less.
So how about a less dumb motherboard question?
Q) I need as many PCI slots as possible, with at least a few being 64bit. 4-6 slots isn't nearly enough, I'm a guy that could fill 10+ easily. And a few (read:2-3) ISA slots would be nice also.
I'm not so picky on other things, but a wishlist in order of priority is as follows:
#(10+) PCI slots dual cpus 64bit cpus amd cpus dual onboard gigabit #(1-3) isa slots dual onboard serial ports
I think that a passive backplane is the answer I'm looking for. Things like the Magma PCI expansion system (where 7 pci slots sit in their own rackmount case) aren't quite what I need. I understand enough about backplanes now, to know that I need a PICMG single board computer. Is it the right answer for what I want?
What price range are we talking, working up through modest configurations, up to the ones that meet all of my wishlist items?
Am I overlooking some other (presumably lesser known) options that would meet most of these needs?
Are there any pitfalls in installing and using linux on such a system?
Not that I've ever had them put it somewhere other than where it ought to be. Maybe you should stop going out of your way to install every single shitty windows-shareware-like piece of crap you stumble upon?
You sir are an ass. If you had posted this just 10 days ago, I had mod points on two of my accounts at once, and could have put it at Score:3... why did you wait?
area who would like to join me in being ultra unamerican, and you happen to be in the market for a home, how about buying in my neighborhood? Sure it's practically a ghetto with it's little cheap crackerbox houses, but this summer we can use our spare time digging trenches and laying conduit with fiber. Fiber gigabit to the demarc, haha!
Seriously if there were a dozen of us or more, why not do it, and hook up all our homes together, at that point we could see what kind of backbone pipe could be brought in.
(Note: quick look on ebay says the fiber is cheap enough, but it might have to be a 100mbit switch with gigabit uplink at first).
Yes, but do not trivialize the fact that even with a finite number of hardware configurations, it still takes hard work and careful software design to not have problems.
I contend that even if Windows had this advantage, they'd still screw it up. Too much cruft in the win32 codebase, still too many monkeys there hacking away as if no one has ever had to solve the same OS problems that they have to solve (but somehow manage not to).
User: "Hey tech support, I modified my player, and then you remotely sabotaged it!!!"
TS: "Not our problem. But please remain where you are, so we can have you arrested and demonized in the press."
User: "But I only wanted a single still from the video for a term paper I was doing on movie violence!"
TS: "Like I care. Maybe you should have bought a congressman or two. I only make $8 an hour at this crummy job, don't expect me to be able to bribe them."
In my opinion, just simply the fact that it's not windows. Click-to-focus isn't what bothers her, it's seeing the gnome footprint icon on the bottom left corner.
Let's change that to the windows logo, just as it looks on XP.
Doing phone support for a DSL company, it's not that simple. It never will be. I talk to more people who have these sorts of problems in a week, than you ever will. Most of the software they have preinstalled on their machine doesn't even come with user manuals anymore. How are they supposed to actually learn how to turn the firewall on, or configure it? Not that anything on windows can ever be a real firewall, what with it's IP stack architecture.
And I'll barely mention those people for whom the firewall actually blocks outgoing packets.
If you expect these people to stop using computers, get real. If you expect them to become as clueful as you are, get real. It will never happen.
It doesn't even need to happen. There are solutions that will reduce these problems to 10% of what they once were, that doesn't require they go back to college for Zone Alarm 101.
Windows is unmaintainable by the vast majority. Cars once were. Now days they build better cars that need less maintenance. They also build such operating systems.
You're missing the point. Linux is already better, can do the things I need, and in my case, that my girlfriend needs.
However, she just won't use it. It's a headache, even after I reinstalled win2k, she's went right back to installing the stupid shareware games that caused the problem in the first place.
But linux that looks like windows? She'd never know. Have the few things she installs run through wine, and if wine can't handle them... "Honey, I dunno.. those shareware guys aren't the brightest, maybe their game doesn't even work!".
Slashdot Mirror
True, for him.
But I certainly don't feel like I'm helping push the boundaries of computer science or anything.
You can't design a decent control panel, when you're batshit crazy trying to hide control panel applets from people. Asylum lunatics wouldn't be as gleeful, at concealing things that shouldn't be hidden, as Billy's crew seems to be.
Ever try to talk a retard into clicking on XP's "Switch to classic view" at 11:45pm, over the phone?
You guys do all realize that programs are loaded into ram, and executed from there? Only the most minimalistic embedded systems execute from storage, and even then it's usually a chip.
When you delete the executable off the drive (assuming it lets you), the copy in ram can still run (at least until it needs to look at a config file again).
For bigger executables this may not be completely true, the system may only load chunks of exe at a time, choosing to load others later to save ram or whatever. And on windows, there are always dll files that may be loaded long after the program has started.
My personal favorite:
I do alot of rollouts. Barely IT work at all, the guy who mops the control center floor at NASA doesn't get to claim to be an astronaut or rocket scientist either. But the worst rollout ever, was for a public school system.
This public school system was more ghetto than most, by rollout, I mean maybe replacing 3-5 of the PCs in labs that had 20 (so there was always a mix of crap systems), maybe only half the computer lab rooms in any one building. And often, things would never be scheduled right, so we were told to go in the rooms even during class, and just be quiet, teachers knew we'd be there, wasn't a problem.
Being ghetto, the kids weren't expected to do real schoolwork, and would goof off. Porn sites, gambling, all the stupidest shit you've ever seen. Well, 20 minutes into this, almost done setting it all up, this black girl screams, "Oh my god, it say I won a million dollar, is it fo real!?!". A stupid spammy popup of course, but she had no critical thinking skills, nor had anyone ever bothered to tell her how much spam like this was out there. No big deal right, she's a kid?
So, me being the fool that I am, I try to explain to her what it is, not sarcastic or anything. Really. Can't remember how I worded it, but the tone of my voice was such that I was trying my best not to sound like I was patronizing, nor like I was making fun of her. Before I had even finished the one sentence, the cow-like teacher was "How do you know, she might have won something, you jus don want her to win." As the teacher waddled over to the computer screen, I shut up, she didn't bother to follow up with a tirade, and I finished up as soon as possible. Got the hell out of there.
I'm not sure I'm articulating it correctly. The idea is still rather fuzzy.
Why are we keeping source code and comments in the same file? What would be nice, would be a editor that keeps them in 2 different files, say, file.c and file.cmt or such such, but when you want, with a single keystroke toggle, superimposes the comments in your source. The comment file format would need some metadata, to show where it should appear, I'd think.
but i think whatever OS has most (clueless) users will be targeted most
You'd think that, wouldn't you? But no, the OSX users are targeted not often at all, maybe never. Why? Decent OS architecture going on there. Decent may not even be generous enough.
(Note to OSX users: This is *not* intended as a flame. I'm only pointing out that you don't have to become a computer engineer, when the OS designer doesn't sell you garbage.)
Most gated community residents are clueless when it comes to hand-to-hand combat, but murders still happen more frequently in a Sao Paulo shantytown. Why? Why indeed. Go live in the Microsoft ghetto if you want, but don't say we didn't invite you to your own mansion.
The homework where we know, time and time again, Microsoft neither gets the eye candy nor the backend right? Where we can neither call it good, nor pretty? Are you talking about that homework.
There has to come a point, mind you, it might not be the same point for everyone so I have to be a little tolerant, where you say "too little, too late". With me, that point has come and gone, and I cant believe that it's that far off for other people. But what do I know?
It might be better than some linux UIs, however, we get to have more than 1 UI. At once. And even some of the crappy ones are more consistent, simpler in the "simpler is better" sense, and customizable.
I say this from Firefox running in Windowmaker with several partially obscured xterms peeking out behind it.
What I'm wondering, is whether M$ will have sense enough to steal OSX's network "location" feature, so that I don't have to tell customers that there is no easy way to set up their XP machine to have a static on our DSL, and DHCP when they take the laptop to work. Might not hurt to lose the "we won't let you start IE from a fresh install" thing they have going on too...
I'd rather see the Director for IE development swim to the bottom of the atlantic.
He could easily afford a x8 or x16 cpu machine from a big vendor. One that has been thoroughly tested, rather than an engineer's first prototype. With his pick of actual SMP-capable cpus, no less.
So how about a less dumb motherboard question?
Q) I need as many PCI slots as possible, with at least a few being 64bit. 4-6 slots isn't nearly enough, I'm a guy that could fill 10+ easily. And a few (read:2-3) ISA slots would be nice also.
I'm not so picky on other things, but a wishlist in order of priority is as follows:
#(10+) PCI slots
dual cpus
64bit cpus
amd cpus
dual onboard gigabit
#(1-3) isa slots
dual onboard serial ports
I think that a passive backplane is the answer I'm looking for. Things like the Magma PCI expansion system (where 7 pci slots sit in their own rackmount case) aren't quite what I need. I understand enough about backplanes now, to know that I need a PICMG single board computer. Is it the right answer for what I want?
What price range are we talking, working up through modest configurations, up to the ones that meet all of my wishlist items?
Am I overlooking some other (presumably lesser known) options that would meet most of these needs?
Are there any pitfalls in installing and using linux on such a system?
What you say makes perfect sense. This is exactly why no one should ever use KDE. Run wmaker instead and keep the desktop simple.
./configure --prefix=/where-ever
Not that I've ever had them put it somewhere other than where it ought to be. Maybe you should stop going out of your way to install every single shitty windows-shareware-like piece of crap you stumble upon?
Hell, makefiles generally take care of that.
Um... anyone that sees google maps side by side with mapquest might come to that conclusion.
In other words, you really do want to save Star Trek from ill-concieved and poorly executed spinoffs?
Or do 2 different hashes. Even if they can break md5, can they find a file that generates the same md5 *AND* sha1 hash?
You sir are an ass. If you had posted this just 10 days ago, I had mod points on two of my accounts at once, and could have put it at Score:3... why did you wait?
area who would like to join me in being ultra unamerican, and you happen to be in the market for a home, how about buying in my neighborhood? Sure it's practically a ghetto with it's little cheap crackerbox houses, but this summer we can use our spare time digging trenches and laying conduit with fiber. Fiber gigabit to the demarc, haha!
Seriously if there were a dozen of us or more, why not do it, and hook up all our homes together, at that point we could see what kind of backbone pipe could be brought in.
(Note: quick look on ebay says the fiber is cheap enough, but it might have to be a 100mbit switch with gigabit uplink at first).
Yes, but do not trivialize the fact that even with a finite number of hardware configurations, it still takes hard work and careful software design to not have problems.
I contend that even if Windows had this advantage, they'd still screw it up. Too much cruft in the win32 codebase, still too many monkeys there hacking away as if no one has ever had to solve the same OS problems that they have to solve (but somehow manage not to).
More like:
User: "Hey tech support, I modified my player, and then you remotely sabotaged it!!!"
TS: "Not our problem. But please remain where you are, so we can have you arrested and demonized in the press."
User: "But I only wanted a single still from the video for a term paper I was doing on movie violence!"
TS: "Like I care. Maybe you should have bought a congressman or two. I only make $8 an hour at this crummy job, don't expect me to be able to bribe them."
In my opinion, just simply the fact that it's not windows. Click-to-focus isn't what bothers her, it's seeing the gnome footprint icon on the bottom left corner.
Let's change that to the windows logo, just as it looks on XP.
Doing phone support for a DSL company, it's not that simple. It never will be. I talk to more people who have these sorts of problems in a week, than you ever will. Most of the software they have preinstalled on their machine doesn't even come with user manuals anymore. How are they supposed to actually learn how to turn the firewall on, or configure it? Not that anything on windows can ever be a real firewall, what with it's IP stack architecture.
And I'll barely mention those people for whom the firewall actually blocks outgoing packets.
If you expect these people to stop using computers, get real. If you expect them to become as clueful as you are, get real. It will never happen.
It doesn't even need to happen. There are solutions that will reduce these problems to 10% of what they once were, that doesn't require they go back to college for Zone Alarm 101.
Windows is unmaintainable by the vast majority. Cars once were. Now days they build better cars that need less maintenance. They also build such operating systems.
You're missing the point. Linux is already better, can do the things I need, and in my case, that my girlfriend needs.
However, she just won't use it. It's a headache, even after I reinstalled win2k, she's went right back to installing the stupid shareware games that caused the problem in the first place.
But linux that looks like windows? She'd never know. Have the few things she installs run through wine, and if wine can't handle them... "Honey, I dunno.. those shareware guys aren't the brightest, maybe their game doesn't even work!".
Metric BSUs or standard BSUs?