Not exactly, they hired the developers that did - most of the people who designed VMS for DEC back in the days, tho they were now working on an OS called "project mica" which was meant to run on the new alpha chips still in development.. DEC actually sued microsoft over this, and won, hence why microsoft were forced to port NT to the alpha architecture.
And many of these features existed before NT aswell, hell NT itself is mostly copied from VMS, which predates linux itself by many years... As for support for logical CPU's, linux got support for that in 2.4.x around the same time as XP simply because thats the first time there was such hardware to run it on, however i'm pretty sure some of the higher end unix or mainframe OS's had features like this for many years.
I've only ever see that happen in certain cases where: 1, you hardly ever upgrade, and then you upgrade tons of stuff at once (gentoo devs upgrade regularly so they never encounter these problems really) 2, you turn on the beta versions "~arch keyword" 3, you kill an install halfway through the "make install" process 4, you manually install something that conflicts with something else installed by emerge
Actually, 2000 was supposed to be the consumer version that unified NT and 9x, hence why it was called 2000 (following the 9x naming scheme) and not NT5 as originally planned.. However, it was too incompatible with existing software for 9x, and noticeably slower at running games.. Also driver support wasn't as good especially for the kind of hardware gamers used.. Consequently, out came ME.. an intentionally crippled version designed to convince users that the 9x series was total crap and that they must upgrade to xp.. Admittedly, 9x was total crap... but 98 was always way more stable than ME.
Installing any OS is easy *IF YOUR HARDWARE IS SUPPORTED BY IT* Example here... I have a newish AMD64 machine, mandrake 10 installs right out of the box on it, XP doesnt.. first i had to hit F6 and load the SATA driver from floppy, then when it had finally installed i had to manually install the ethernet driver and display driver as there was no ethernet support and only a slow generic display driver... A newbie can't be expected to do all this.. To contrast, mandrake went straight on and detected everything... Imagine trying to install windows when you dont have the driver CD's handy? How would i have got my ethernet working? how would i have even got the os installed without the floppy containing sata drivers? all more stuff a newbie has to know, and more media to keep track of.. if you lose it, your screwed.
Not to mention the fact that people may have other commitments at the time a game is released, or may not have the money to buy the required hardware and such.. But a few years later now has the hardware (because its much cheaper!) and wants to play the game he lusted after not so long ago... Yeah i was poor as a kid, didnt have the latest hardware etc, now i would like to play some of the games i missed out on back then, but i cant because those software publishers dont want people to have it anymore. Infact the whole situation makes me so bitter towards the software companies that i wont buy software from any of these companies anymore, opting to pirate it instead... However i do buy software from companies who make their old games available still, via whatever method (cheaper version, bundles of older games, freeware distribution etc) For instance, frontier elite 2 is available for free download now, that game was awesome in its day and i will definately buy elite 4 if/when it's available.
What, it's not immoral that they spend so long hyping a game up telling you how good it is, only a couple of years later to say "yeah its great, and you cant have it.. ha ha ha" That reminds me of snotty rich kids who will taunt you with what they have and you cant afford.
But as the story says, some of the illegal activities were traced to a shell account that the server admin claimed belonged to a fraudulent account. It didnt, it was one of his own accounts.. So, what's to stop the foonet staff claiming that the servers on which they store their illegal files are owned by customers? The FBI had no choice but to sieze everything and quickly before they had chance to destroy any evidence.
On the contrary, Foonet was well known as a hosting company where illegal/unethical actions are tollerated.. Many people wishing to do questionable or downright illegal activity online would specifically choose foonet for just that reason... Other than that their service was well known for being slow and pricey.. The end result is that most of their customers were people looking for a safe haven for their illegal activities. A lot of spam originated on the foonet network, a lot of ddos networks were controlled from servers hosted there and a lot of illegal files were hosted on servers there, a lot of child pornography was hosted at foonet for instance, and the admins were well aware of it's presence and simply didn't care so long as they got paid.
If your superiors are both capable and willing of doing such things, then whats to stop them torturing or raping you? or your family? or your friends? And why wouldn't they do that if you disobeyed their orders? People under the command of such people are often kept in line through fear... Sure you could try to defect, but would the propoganda even let you know theres somewhere to defect to that wont be overrun soon? could you take everyone you care about? what are the risks of being caught trying to defect? The fact is, your screwed if your under such a dictatorship, you either obey their orders or you become another of their victims.
And there's also no guarantee they will continue to produce CD's for sale in shops. However a download version could conceivably be maintained indefinately, which would solve another major nuisance to me - older games being impossible to get hold of... A lot of software companies try to shut down abandonware sites but don't offer you any legitimate way to get hold of the program. It should be mandatory for the software to be available for purchase via an online download if it's not available on hard media. If neither of these is available, then it should be fully legal to download from third parties.
Well VNC is slow as hell.. who would want to use VNC anyway? X11 supports remote displays NATIVELY and is much faster.. Ofcourse it's still slower than a text based console, but what would you expect?
Well, here atleast i have gpm running in relay mode (otherwise the mouse fucks up when you switch between X and console) using/dev/psaux and type ps2, and i have the usb_hid driver which handles a usb mouse when i plug it in.. Right now i can use a ps2 mouse and a usb mouse at the same time, with both of them fighting to control the pointer - it looks weird but it works.
Compiling for 386 is a bad idea... Useless for users on non x86 architectures.. Useless for AMD64 users who are running in 64bit mode, same for the intel 64bit extensions to the xeon chips.. Can't take advantage of new performance-improving features like mmx/sse etc, this is especially important for video-related drivers.. not just video cards, but video capture cards and such.. Also these drivers can become useless if people upgrade their distribution, the ati firegl cards require xfree86 4.2.0 for instance, and theres the differences between kernel revisions - a lot of drivers dont support newer kernel versions
Installing a personal firewall requires administrative priveleges, which you are unlikely to have on a corporate machine... There are many things that are likely to be open to ease the job of the admins, network shares for instance..
Try getting a SUN PCI 10/100 ethernet card or quad ethernet card working with windows.. It wont, it works perfectly with linux tho and freebsd definately supports the chipset on sparc so it *should* work on other architectures too.
Well, aside from the fact that slashdot is just peoples opinions and isn't commercial advertisements.. If sun were to start publishing untrue statements about star office then yes, you would have grounds for complaint.. As for the truth of the statement, for many functions openoffice is viable, for some it is not.. It is totally subjective to your needs.
Well, Linux can easily be installed without using a CDR atall, and you can use an old installation cd or floppy to connect to the network and install the latest versions anyway..
Or how about windows running on the mainframe* vs linux running on the dual xeon, compared on price and performance. Or how about running linux on a quad opteron instead, a machine which windows doesn't fully support yet.
* Since windows won't run natively on the mainframe, we would need to run it under an emulation environment such as bochs
Can publisher open word documents? If i'm using the wrong program it's because the company i work for provides me with the wrong program, i dont have any choice in the matter, i just complain about it regularly.
Open source programs often suffer from the same.. I like the approach the linux kernel takes, you can configure at both compiletime and at runtime (with modules) exactly which features you want and you can , resulting in a smaller binary without support for all the crap you dont want, and consequently not vulnerable to any potential security holes in the unused features... You can do this with most OS's too.. Whenever i setup a unix box i disable all the crap i dont need, like all the old telnet/r* services etc.. and only keep what the particular machine needs.. You can do the same with windows to an extent, but theres far too many things you cant get rid of and even more things you can try to disable but cant uninstall.
I find the grammar checker very annoying and usually turn it off... Personally i`m forced to use word at work, and have to constantly deal with bugs and annoyances.. However i have found other programs to be even worse.. I do keep waiting for openoffice to improve but for now word is actually better, which is very rare for a microsoft product.. However, i would much prefer to run on linux or some other non windows os, word may be the least unuseable word processor out there, but windows is most definately not. I used to use wordperfect back in the days and wordworth on the amiga, both were nice apps but both seem to have died out.. The amiga used to differentiate between desktop publishing and word processing... with a DTP program you put your text in boxes and were free to drag it around the page to exactly where you wanted it, this was a very nice feature and sorely lacking or poorly implemented in modern programs.
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Not exactly, they hired the developers that did - most of the people who designed VMS for DEC back in the days, tho they were now working on an OS called "project mica" which was meant to run on the new alpha chips still in development..
DEC actually sued microsoft over this, and won, hence why microsoft were forced to port NT to the alpha architecture.
And many of these features existed before NT aswell, hell NT itself is mostly copied from VMS, which predates linux itself by many years...
As for support for logical CPU's, linux got support for that in 2.4.x around the same time as XP simply because thats the first time there was such hardware to run it on, however i'm pretty sure some of the higher end unix or mainframe OS's had features like this for many years.
I've only ever see that happen in certain cases where:
1, you hardly ever upgrade, and then you upgrade tons of stuff at once (gentoo devs upgrade regularly so they never encounter these problems really)
2, you turn on the beta versions "~arch keyword"
3, you kill an install halfway through the "make install" process
4, you manually install something that conflicts with something else installed by emerge
Actually, 2000 was supposed to be the consumer version that unified NT and 9x, hence why it was called 2000 (following the 9x naming scheme) and not NT5 as originally planned..
However, it was too incompatible with existing software for 9x, and noticeably slower at running games.. Also driver support wasn't as good especially for the kind of hardware gamers used..
Consequently, out came ME.. an intentionally crippled version designed to convince users that the 9x series was total crap and that they must upgrade to xp..
Admittedly, 9x was total crap... but 98 was always way more stable than ME.
Installing any OS is easy *IF YOUR HARDWARE IS SUPPORTED BY IT*
Example here...
I have a newish AMD64 machine, mandrake 10 installs right out of the box on it, XP doesnt.. first i had to hit F6 and load the SATA driver from floppy, then when it had finally installed i had to manually install the ethernet driver and display driver as there was no ethernet support and only a slow generic display driver... A newbie can't be expected to do all this..
To contrast, mandrake went straight on and detected everything...
Imagine trying to install windows when you dont have the driver CD's handy? How would i have got my ethernet working? how would i have even got the os installed without the floppy containing sata drivers? all more stuff a newbie has to know, and more media to keep track of.. if you lose it, your screwed.
Not to mention the fact that people may have other commitments at the time a game is released, or may not have the money to buy the required hardware and such.. But a few years later now has the hardware (because its much cheaper!) and wants to play the game he lusted after not so long ago...
Yeah i was poor as a kid, didnt have the latest hardware etc, now i would like to play some of the games i missed out on back then, but i cant because those software publishers dont want people to have it anymore. Infact the whole situation makes me so bitter towards the software companies that i wont buy software from any of these companies anymore, opting to pirate it instead...
However i do buy software from companies who make their old games available still, via whatever method (cheaper version, bundles of older games, freeware distribution etc)
For instance, frontier elite 2 is available for free download now, that game was awesome in its day and i will definately buy elite 4 if/when it's available.
What, it's not immoral that they spend so long hyping a game up telling you how good it is, only a couple of years later to say "yeah its great, and you cant have it.. ha ha ha"
That reminds me of snotty rich kids who will taunt you with what they have and you cant afford.
But as the story says, some of the illegal activities were traced to a shell account that the server admin claimed belonged to a fraudulent account. It didnt, it was one of his own accounts..
So, what's to stop the foonet staff claiming that the servers on which they store their illegal files are owned by customers? The FBI had no choice but to sieze everything and quickly before they had chance to destroy any evidence.
On the contrary, Foonet was well known as a hosting company where illegal/unethical actions are tollerated.. Many people wishing to do questionable or downright illegal activity online would specifically choose foonet for just that reason... Other than that their service was well known for being slow and pricey.. The end result is that most of their customers were people looking for a safe haven for their illegal activities. A lot of spam originated on the foonet network, a lot of ddos networks were controlled from servers hosted there and a lot of illegal files were hosted on servers there, a lot of child pornography was hosted at foonet for instance, and the admins were well aware of it's presence and simply didn't care so long as they got paid.
If your superiors are both capable and willing of doing such things, then whats to stop them torturing or raping you? or your family? or your friends? And why wouldn't they do that if you disobeyed their orders?
People under the command of such people are often kept in line through fear... Sure you could try to defect, but would the propoganda even let you know theres somewhere to defect to that wont be overrun soon? could you take everyone you care about? what are the risks of being caught trying to defect?
The fact is, your screwed if your under such a dictatorship, you either obey their orders or you become another of their victims.
And there's also no guarantee they will continue to produce CD's for sale in shops. However a download version could conceivably be maintained indefinately, which would solve another major nuisance to me - older games being impossible to get hold of...
A lot of software companies try to shut down abandonware sites but don't offer you any legitimate way to get hold of the program. It should be mandatory for the software to be available for purchase via an online download if it's not available on hard media. If neither of these is available, then it should be fully legal to download from third parties.
Well VNC is slow as hell.. who would want to use VNC anyway? X11 supports remote displays NATIVELY and is much faster.. Ofcourse it's still slower than a text based console, but what would you expect?
Well, here atleast i have gpm running in relay mode (otherwise the mouse fucks up when you switch between X and console) using /dev/psaux and type ps2, and i have the usb_hid driver which handles a usb mouse when i plug it in.. Right now i can use a ps2 mouse and a usb mouse at the same time, with both of them fighting to control the pointer - it looks weird but it works.
Well, scanners used to use SCSI, as did some printers
Compiling for 386 is a bad idea...
Useless for users on non x86 architectures..
Useless for AMD64 users who are running in 64bit mode, same for the intel 64bit extensions to the xeon chips..
Can't take advantage of new performance-improving features like mmx/sse etc, this is especially important for video-related drivers.. not just video cards, but video capture cards and such..
Also these drivers can become useless if people upgrade their distribution, the ati firegl cards require xfree86 4.2.0 for instance, and theres the differences between kernel revisions - a lot of drivers dont support newer kernel versions
Installing a personal firewall requires administrative priveleges, which you are unlikely to have on a corporate machine...
There are many things that are likely to be open to ease the job of the admins, network shares for instance..
Try getting a SUN PCI 10/100 ethernet card or quad ethernet card working with windows.. It wont, it works perfectly with linux tho and freebsd definately supports the chipset on sparc so it *should* work on other architectures too.
Cut is just copy and delete, since by selecting the text you auto copy it, just hit delete to turn that copy into cut.
Well, aside from the fact that slashdot is just peoples opinions and isn't commercial advertisements..
If sun were to start publishing untrue statements about star office then yes, you would have grounds for complaint..
As for the truth of the statement, for many functions openoffice is viable, for some it is not.. It is totally subjective to your needs.
But think how many CDR's you'd need in order to pirate all the equivalent apps for windows aswell..
Well, Linux can easily be installed without using a CDR atall, and you can use an old installation cd or floppy to connect to the network and install the latest versions anyway..
Or how about windows running on the mainframe* vs linux running on the dual xeon, compared on price and performance. Or how about running linux on a quad opteron instead, a machine which windows doesn't fully support yet.
* Since windows won't run natively on the mainframe, we would need to run it under an emulation environment such as bochs
Can publisher open word documents?
If i'm using the wrong program it's because the company i work for provides me with the wrong program, i dont have any choice in the matter, i just complain about it regularly.
Open source programs often suffer from the same..
I like the approach the linux kernel takes, you can configure at both compiletime and at runtime (with modules) exactly which features you want and you can , resulting in a smaller binary without support for all the crap you dont want, and consequently not vulnerable to any potential security holes in the unused features...
You can do this with most OS's too.. Whenever i setup a unix box i disable all the crap i dont need, like all the old telnet/r* services etc.. and only keep what the particular machine needs.. You can do the same with windows to an extent, but theres far too many things you cant get rid of and even more things you can try to disable but cant uninstall.
I find the grammar checker very annoying and usually turn it off...
Personally i`m forced to use word at work, and have to constantly deal with bugs and annoyances.. However i have found other programs to be even worse.. I do keep waiting for openoffice to improve but for now word is actually better, which is very rare for a microsoft product..
However, i would much prefer to run on linux or some other non windows os, word may be the least unuseable word processor out there, but windows is most definately not.
I used to use wordperfect back in the days and wordworth on the amiga, both were nice apps but both seem to have died out..
The amiga used to differentiate between desktop publishing and word processing... with a DTP program you put your text in boxes and were free to drag it around the page to exactly where you wanted it, this was a very nice feature and sorely lacking or poorly implemented in modern programs.