Re:probably on Microsoft's list of next important
on
Apache down, IIS up
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· Score: 1
The local phone companies are very similar to microsoft... They're not the *ONLY* player in town, but they're big enough that they could quite easily force any competition out of the market... That's why we have telecom regulators, who make sure the big telco's play fair with the smaller players.
Microsoft are the same, they're not the *ONLY* choice, but they're big enough to squeeze anyone else out if they want to, look what happened to BeOS. All microsoft have to do, is get people hooked on more of their proprietary technologies and keep them locked in. They could try making superior products to their competition too, but that would be far more expensive.
They dropped MacOS9 support a while back too, Mozilla 1.2.x was the last version to support it, while the last version to support NT4/Alpha was something similar...
If code bloat is their concern, it would make sense to split windows support into 2 seperate areas (the base tree already supports a large number of os's, so split windows into 2, one with 9x support and one without) and then concentrate on the newer versions, but keep the older code around so it can still be built, and anyone wanting to keep updating it can do so without interfering with the newer code.
In the case of redhat, you can use the standard mail systems shipped with the OS... Infact, you should never install things manually because then you won't be able to update them using the system package management system.
The same problem can occur with windows, people could be running any one of many mail servers on it, and they won't all be centrally updated.
I have encountered the same problems you describe with multiple systems, a consultant sets up the machine and then leaves, it happens with windows too, but less often, and it's much harder to fix when they've made all kinds of weird registry tweaks, usually the fix is to reinstall, leaving the same problems for someone else in the future.
There really is no excuse for leaving multiple copies of sendmail installed, some from source and some from rpm... But quite often it's necessary to do manual tweaks to any system to make it behave in the way you want... There's also no excuse for not installing your packages through whatever package management system exists, so you can keep track of them and update them more easily.
Kpdf is cool, much better than adobe's reader... The most useful feature is the way it monitors the file for changes, and auto reloads it... Incredibly useful for me, since i do a lot with latex.
Printing to PDF often creates a poor PDF... You lose the ability to create hyperlinks (openoffice transfers hyperlinks to pdf files properly if you use the tagged pdf option when exporting), this also means your table of contents (if your original document has one) will not be transferred to the pdf table of contents (a properly created pdf has a clickable index down the side, a poorly created one will just have thumbnail previews of each page and no index) You also often lose the ability to embed fonts, and it just creates representations of the characters that look crap when zoomed in on, which also tends to make the file much larger.
Because even your modern machine can run less inefficient apps at once as it could run efficient apps. There is no excuse for inefficient code, and such inefficient code is a slippery slope, it just gets worse.
And Solaris does the same, and most of the other commercial unixes... VMS can do the same thing too.
This is much easier to achieve than on dos/windows, for a number of reasons:
UNIX programs tend to use the APIs, rather than accessing hardware directly like dos games did UNIX APIs are standardised, documented and have remained so for years, there is no incentive to use undocumented functionality because that would hurt portability to other platforms (many unix programs are written for multiple unix platforms)
Not without an emulator, but some do exist that can atleast run m68k mac software... The idea is, to break backwards compatibility late enough that you can emulate the old machines as fast or faster than the original hardware the apps ran on. Ofcourse, this relies on people not writing apps for the old OS on new hardware.
Watching microsoft's other apps (for example: publisher) open or save word files can be quite amusing, publisher's support for word files is attrocious, far worse than openoffice infact...
It's quite disturbing how microsoft can't open their own format correctly, even with access to whatever documentation exists and full source code of an existing implementation.
I read somewhere a while ago, that the windows audio format was a pretty poor effort, took considerably longer to encode than other formats, while offering noticeably inferior quality to ogg, mp3pro, aac and some others... Infact, it only seemed to beat realaudio on quality, and was just behind the original MP3 spec.
As for video, their files tend to be smaller than other formats but massively inferior in quality, that's why windows video files are popular for small clips on websites, but are unpopular among movie/tvshow pirates, who usually use the superior divx or xvid formats.
Also, any format which is not an open standard is unusable for me on principle, i want choice as to where i get my media and/or players from, this is the same reason VHS prospered over the technically superior betamax.
WAVE also came late, and was a pretty much pointless format, it's basically raw PCM data with a header, just like the AIFF format which predated it considerably, and the VOICE format which included rudimentary silence compression...
GIF was not good enough, transparency was an all or nothing (no translucency) and GIF didn't support more than 256 colours (8 bit)
AAC also has no reason to exist, your right about the control... The same can be said of the realaudio and windows media audio formats.
RAR is pointless, bzip2 serves a different purpose to zip and is more of a pointless replacement for gzip. Zip was also quite a latecomer, and things like lha, arj, zoo and lzh predate it.
Both the Chinese and US government have access to such equipment... Not to mention that most common hardware is documented and widely understood as to how it works (x86 architecture for example) and any discrepancies would be easy to notice... Contract with proprietary software where it's exact functionality is not completely understood and often subject to change. Also you have to consider, hardware won't change, whereas software will get patched.
Have you tried switching to the console before you suspend (you can put the chvt command into your suspend script so it does it automatically) and then switching back to X after resume? I found i had to do it this way on several machines... Also try software suspend 2 (not suspend 1 which is present in the kernel by default)
There you have the difference between Intel and other processor designing companies... Whereas Intel will design a processor which is barely adequate for today, with no thought for future expansion, and then either kludge the existing design in horrible ways, or have to throw away the whole steaming pile and start again... Other companies think about the future, when AMD designed the K8 they already had dual core and faster memory controllers in mind.
Turion was faster than the centrino chips, which were it's closest competitor at the time... Infact, Turion is 64bit, in many benchmarks faster than centrino, and depending on usage patterns, could consume less power.
On the other hand, intel have dual core laptop chips and AMD dont yet, tho turion is still 64bit and intel has yet to release a 64bit laptop chip.
Which puts the security of *YOUR* details in *YOUR* hands... If a machine has multiple users, I don't want other stupid users getting owned and exposing MY details, what they do with their own files is their own problem however.
Also when your the one expected to fix someone'e totally screwed machine, it's better if the system as a whole won't get shafted, it's much easier to reset their user account to defaults.
And finally if something is running in userspace it can't really hide itself, it can't hook into the kernel to hide the fact it's running like a rootkit does. You can see the malicious process executing and kill it.
Well surely then if it's not suitable for running at home in a safe manner, then it's "Not ready for the desktop".
People rag on about how difficult they perceive linux to be, but in terms of running the system safely today's linux distributions are much easier than windows.
On the other hand you have OSX, which is about the only OS that really is "Ready for the desktop".
Even tho your logged in as non admin, and dont have privilege to reboot the machine, it pops up the dialog telling you about new updates and asking if you want to reboot. Only you can't reboot, nor can you cancel the dialog, it will sit there until someone reboots for you.
It just shows how the whole interface was never designed with multiple users in mind, it's one big nasty kludge.
The security infrastructure in the (NT) kernel was there from the start, but the frontend interface that most people interact with comes from win3.1/9x which most certainly has no concept of security.
When merging the 2 together, they decided that a consistent (ish) interface was more important than security, so the underlying security features got bypassed or papered over.
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The local phone companies are very similar to microsoft...
They're not the *ONLY* player in town, but they're big enough that they could quite easily force any competition out of the market... That's why we have telecom regulators, who make sure the big telco's play fair with the smaller players.
Microsoft are the same, they're not the *ONLY* choice, but they're big enough to squeeze anyone else out if they want to, look what happened to BeOS. All microsoft have to do, is get people hooked on more of their proprietary technologies and keep them locked in. They could try making superior products to their competition too, but that would be far more expensive.
They dropped MacOS9 support a while back too, Mozilla 1.2.x was the last version to support it, while the last version to support NT4/Alpha was something similar...
If code bloat is their concern, it would make sense to split windows support into 2 seperate areas (the base tree already supports a large number of os's, so split windows into 2, one with 9x support and one without) and then concentrate on the newer versions, but keep the older code around so it can still be built, and anyone wanting to keep updating it can do so without interfering with the newer code.
In the case of redhat, you can use the standard mail systems shipped with the OS... Infact, you should never install things manually because then you won't be able to update them using the system package management system.
The same problem can occur with windows, people could be running any one of many mail servers on it, and they won't all be centrally updated.
I have encountered the same problems you describe with multiple systems, a consultant sets up the machine and then leaves, it happens with windows too, but less often, and it's much harder to fix when they've made all kinds of weird registry tweaks, usually the fix is to reinstall, leaving the same problems for someone else in the future.
There really is no excuse for leaving multiple copies of sendmail installed, some from source and some from rpm... But quite often it's necessary to do manual tweaks to any system to make it behave in the way you want... There's also no excuse for not installing your packages through whatever package management system exists, so you can keep track of them and update them more easily.
That's easy, it just has to do with the system clock on windows being completely unreliable.
Kpdf is cool, much better than adobe's reader...
The most useful feature is the way it monitors the file for changes, and auto reloads it... Incredibly useful for me, since i do a lot with latex.
Printing to PDF often creates a poor PDF...
You lose the ability to create hyperlinks (openoffice transfers hyperlinks to pdf files properly if you use the tagged pdf option when exporting), this also means your table of contents (if your original document has one) will not be transferred to the pdf table of contents (a properly created pdf has a clickable index down the side, a poorly created one will just have thumbnail previews of each page and no index)
You also often lose the ability to embed fonts, and it just creates representations of the characters that look crap when zoomed in on, which also tends to make the file much larger.
Because even your modern machine can run less inefficient apps at once as it could run efficient apps.
There is no excuse for inefficient code, and such inefficient code is a slippery slope, it just gets worse.
And Solaris does the same, and most of the other commercial unixes... VMS can do the same thing too.
This is much easier to achieve than on dos/windows, for a number of reasons:
UNIX programs tend to use the APIs, rather than accessing hardware directly like dos games did
UNIX APIs are standardised, documented and have remained so for years, there is no incentive to use undocumented functionality because that would hurt portability to other platforms (many unix programs are written for multiple unix platforms)
Not without an emulator, but some do exist that can atleast run m68k mac software...
The idea is, to break backwards compatibility late enough that you can emulate the old machines as fast or faster than the original hardware the apps ran on. Ofcourse, this relies on people not writing apps for the old OS on new hardware.
Well, actually on highend servers the memory will still be faster overall due to a number of things:
Interleaving
NUMA (one memory controller per cpu)
Wider memory bus width
Watching microsoft's other apps (for example: publisher) open or save word files can be quite amusing, publisher's support for word files is attrocious, far worse than openoffice infact...
It's quite disturbing how microsoft can't open their own format correctly, even with access to whatever documentation exists and full source code of an existing implementation.
Tar and gzip does the same job of compressing all the files in one chunk instead of individually.
Kpdf, and the OSX "Preview" app are very good, adobe reader is actually pretty crappy and very slow.
I read somewhere a while ago, that the windows audio format was a pretty poor effort, took considerably longer to encode than other formats, while offering noticeably inferior quality to ogg, mp3pro, aac and some others... Infact, it only seemed to beat realaudio on quality, and was just behind the original MP3 spec.
As for video, their files tend to be smaller than other formats but massively inferior in quality, that's why windows video files are popular for small clips on websites, but are unpopular among movie/tvshow pirates, who usually use the superior divx or xvid formats.
Also, any format which is not an open standard is unusable for me on principle, i want choice as to where i get my media and/or players from, this is the same reason VHS prospered over the technically superior betamax.
WAVE also came late, and was a pretty much pointless format, it's basically raw PCM data with a header, just like the AIFF format which predated it considerably, and the VOICE format which included rudimentary silence compression...
GIF was not good enough, transparency was an all or nothing (no translucency) and GIF didn't support more than 256 colours (8 bit)
AAC also has no reason to exist, your right about the control... The same can be said of the realaudio and windows media audio formats.
RAR is pointless, bzip2 serves a different purpose to zip and is more of a pointless replacement for gzip. Zip was also quite a latecomer, and things like lha, arj, zoo and lzh predate it.
Both the Chinese and US government have access to such equipment...
Not to mention that most common hardware is documented and widely understood as to how it works (x86 architecture for example) and any discrepancies would be easy to notice... Contract with proprietary software where it's exact functionality is not completely understood and often subject to change.
Also you have to consider, hardware won't change, whereas software will get patched.
Have you tried switching to the console before you suspend (you can put the chvt command into your suspend script so it does it automatically) and then switching back to X after resume? I found i had to do it this way on several machines...
Also try software suspend 2 (not suspend 1 which is present in the kernel by default)
Socket 940 actually came out before 939
There you have the difference between Intel and other processor designing companies...
Whereas Intel will design a processor which is barely adequate for today, with no thought for future expansion, and then either kludge the existing design in horrible ways, or have to throw away the whole steaming pile and start again...
Other companies think about the future, when AMD designed the K8 they already had dual core and faster memory controllers in mind.
Turion was faster than the centrino chips, which were it's closest competitor at the time...
Infact, Turion is 64bit, in many benchmarks faster than centrino, and depending on usage patterns, could consume less power.
On the other hand, intel have dual core laptop chips and AMD dont yet, tho turion is still 64bit and intel has yet to release a 64bit laptop chip.
Which puts the security of *YOUR* details in *YOUR* hands...
If a machine has multiple users, I don't want other stupid users getting owned and exposing MY details, what they do with their own files is their own problem however.
Also when your the one expected to fix someone'e totally screwed machine, it's better if the system as a whole won't get shafted, it's much easier to reset their user account to defaults.
And finally if something is running in userspace it can't really hide itself, it can't hook into the kernel to hide the fact it's running like a rootkit does. You can see the malicious process executing and kill it.
Well surely then if it's not suitable for running at home in a safe manner, then it's "Not ready for the desktop".
People rag on about how difficult they perceive linux to be, but in terms of running the system safely today's linux distributions are much easier than windows.
On the other hand you have OSX, which is about the only OS that really is "Ready for the desktop".
This dialog says it all:l
http://gallery.ev6.net/v/stupid-doze-crap.png.htm
Even tho your logged in as non admin, and dont have privilege to reboot the machine, it pops up the dialog telling you about new updates and asking if you want to reboot. Only you can't reboot, nor can you cancel the dialog, it will sit there until someone reboots for you.
It just shows how the whole interface was never designed with multiple users in mind, it's one big nasty kludge.
To which you can say "NO!" and hang up... Much easier than trecking over there and spending a few hours reinstalling the whole system!
The security infrastructure in the (NT) kernel was there from the start, but the frontend interface that most people interact with comes from win3.1/9x which most certainly has no concept of security.
When merging the 2 together, they decided that a consistent (ish) interface was more important than security, so the underlying security features got bypassed or papered over.