The linux plugin is very buggy, closed source (difficult to integrate with new browsers, cant fix bugs) and the existance of the closed source plugin stops people from developing an open plugin. There are no native plugins for linux running on non x86 architectures, theres no native plugins for the *BSD's or for the commercial unixes or other OS's such as VMS. The problem with propriatory formats becoming popular, is they can stifle the adoption of new platforms, the more widespread swf becomes, the more useless any platform not supporting it becomes for web browsing. Someone could invent a super os or a super platform tomorrow, something that beat all the competition hands down and totally undercut it on price, but this innovation would be stifled by an inability to support these propriatory formats. Contrast this with open standards, where the software vendor can implement it themselves, or open source where the vendor can port existing applications to their new platform. If it werent for propriatory apps and formats, do you think people would still be using kludgy x86 processors, legacy bioses and a number of other old things anymore? Hardware designers would have much more freedom to innovate without the need to directly support backwards compatibility.. Speak to some engineers at AMD and ask them how much the need for x86 backwards compatibility has hindered them and held them back.
"Why in the world would anyone use SYN packets to try saturating someone's pipe? SYN packets are very small, so they'd be a lousy choice. "
- Wrong, the victim host/routers must process each packet, if theres any filtering rules they must be applied to each packet, and atleast on a pci nic, each packet generates an interrupt. Thus, a flood of small packets will saturate the system long before it saturates a fast network link, for instance a 100mbit nic on 32bit 33mhz pci will often choke under 80mbit worth of synfloods, but it can handle full 100mbit worth of larger packets.
Well, many of the file managers on the Amiga would determine the file type during a directory listing, either display it alongside, but not abbreviated, as this would tend to confuse people.. Windows does the same, if you go for a detailed listing, you will see "jpeg image" alongside, or "microsoft html document" as if they somehow invented the html format.. Or in an icon based view it will display an appropriate icon based on filetype, AmigaOS, MacOS and IRIX atleast can do this based on content and not filename. Relying purely on filename to identify filetype is a stupid idea, many windows programs will not open a file unless it's correctly named, once renamed it works just fine. The use of filenames to determine type have also helped cause several windows security flaws
Windows Media Player Windows Media Video Windows Media Audio Windows Messenger* MSN Messenger MSN Explorer etc etc etc... using one well known product to promote something else, or tagging another product name onto an already successfull product to promote it.
* Windows messenger existed before, otherwise known as winpopup, funny how an old program name is brought back as a supposedly new product.
They`ve done this before, tried to push java too hard into places where it doesnt belong... HotJava - a very poor effort at a web browser JavaOS - very very slow and always a few revisions behind JavaStation - ran much slower than the older X terminals, mainly due to JavaOS, also couldn`t run a regular copy of solaris.
Filename should __NEVER__ be used to determine file content, it`s far more efficient to read the file header and determine what a file actually contains, that way it doesnt matter atall what the file is named. Back in the amiga days, no filenames ever contained a dot, and they were identified based on content, unix does this too with the "file" command, and the mac is more amiga-like, but stores the filetype as meta data in the filesystem, and like the amiga, also defining a "creator" that`s automatically invoked if you click on the icon.
I`m not sure on this, but i believe Alpha and VAX have similar security features, the DEC compiler on both linux and Tru64 include a -check_bounds option atleast, which generates a SIGTRAP if a buffer is overflowed, it would probably be a good idea to recompile all network-listening processes and setuid bins using this.. better to have a daemon crash than to possibly execute shellcode for an attacker.
I was immensely disappointed to see the Athlon64 systems booting with an old-style bios, running the cpu in 16bit mode or whatever it uses.. x86 firmware is the WORST in the industry, its incredibly inflexible and kludgy... It`s about the only firmware that can`t natively netboot (no, booting seperate drivers from the nic rom dont count) or support a remote serial console, look at SGI`s firmware, it has an easy to use gui, including options to boot, install an os from cd/tape/network, run diagnostics or drop to a textmode console where you have a little more flexibility, and you get the text console by default if your using a device without graphics support, such as a serial console... DEC SRM is also very flexible, tho harder to use than SGI`s, SUN`s firmware is also very powerfull. These firmwares also provide usefull functions to the os, modern OS`s dont touch the x86 bios much anymore, using it as little more than a dumb bootstrapper, which is about all it is. The ability to control the firmware remotely from a serial console is VERY usefull, it`s possible to install an os onto a machine thats halfway around the world, you can diagnose why the os won`t boot if theres a problem, and personally has saved me a LOT of time and gas-money not having to drive to the facility where i have machines hosted. I understand some server-class x86 machines have hacks to allow remote control like this, but it`s far from standard and often very costly and puts the price up in the same range as risc hardware, which has these features by default.
First 64bit laptop? What about the "Tadpole Alphabook" - i believe that was the first 64bit laptop, but i could be wrong... i believe it came out in the first half of the 90`s and use a 166 or 233mhz 64bit Alpha EV4 processor. Also tadpole produced HP PA-RISC laptops (precisionbook) and ultrasparc laptops, altho they came much later, they still predate the G5 by a few years. On a side note, if anyone has a working alphabook for sale.. get in touch with me!
I used to do raytracing on my 14mhz 68020 based Amiga, it was very very slow.. no fpu there either. Later i upgraded to a 50mhz 68060 and it was several orders of magnitude faster, then i moved on to other things.. Just recently i found one of my old disks with some large scenes on, and figured i`d load it into lightwave on my SGI workstation and see how long it took to render... A render that took overnight on the Amiga, completed right before my eyes..
Infact there were talks of the UK division of Commodore buying out the american parent company. In Europe the Amiga was sold primarily as a games playing machine, capable of connecting to a TV and competing with the likes of Sega and Nintento, but with the added advantage of writeable media. A very small percentage of Amiga owners ever used the OS or any of the more advanced functions beyond booting a game from a floppy much like you would with a playstation today. In the USA, the Amiga was sold as a graphics system, used for doing video graphics on tv shows and such, pretty much a cheaper lower end competitor to SGI, programs such as Lightwave started life on the Amiga platform.
The ITV chart show used to run on an amiga too, you even got to see the amigaos 1.x style mouse pointer as someone moved it to clock the "information" icons which were overlayed above the video in the background.
There was an AA information kiosk at a service station in the UK, it was supposed to give you traffic reports for wherever you were going, but when i saw it.. it was displaying the Amiga insert-disk screen, the newer animated one from kickstart 2.x
True, Free Software and Open Source are closer to communism, not the pseudo communism which existed in the USSR, but rather the true ideal of communism, which unfortunately never existed and simply got corrupted. It also fits with the idea of a free market and of capitalism, having something as widely used as software available for free benefits a large number of people and business interests, propriatory software only benefits the relatively small number of people selling it. The USSR was more of a dictatorship than a communist system, they marched under the banner of communism simply because it was popular at the time. They rose to power via military force, rather than as a gradual evolution towards communism as marx envisioned. And then held on to power with the same military force. Microsoft work in much the same way, they are not competing on the free market by providing cheaper and/or superior products, they are competing by trying to put down the competition rather than simply providing a superior product.
Gaim (gaim.sourceforge.net) is a nice multi-network im client, all your contacts come up in a single list with different icons to differentiate the protocol in use, and the chats with them come up in a single tabbed window, again with the icons to differentiate the protocol. I use it primarily for aim, but sometimes for yahoo aswell.. i avoid msn on principle and will continue to do so, besides.. all my friends who do use msn, also use aim or icq aswell. Games are the one reason i still have a dual-boot install of windows on a single machine, for any purpose other than games i use one of my unix workstations, and even then i play games under linux when there is a native version available.
Virtually all of such users have adequate skills with windows because they had no choice but to learn it, and having been presented with something else, would have learned that too... people used to do their word processing on dos and had no trouble with it. Had these users started out on any other system, they would now have adequate skills on that system and not want to change either... Assuming that both windows and say Linux or BSD are adequate for the tasks you need, surely it makes sense to use linux or bsd, if purely because of cost. Remember, a system thats 10% faster will run comparably on a system thats 10% slower, thus cheaper.
Everyone has to learn to use windows, if they learned to use linux or macos first, then they would stick with that, exactly like you said.. The fact it doesn`t come preinstalled means people dont become familiar with it. As you already said, these people arent computer geeks, they dont want to go searching for an os to use, they use whatever is sold to them with the hardware, and then become dependant on it... rather like a drug. So really, these people`s initial choices are taken away from them, thus forcing them into a path of dependance on a product that most likely was never the best solution for them. Think of it like smoking, once you start, its difficult to stop, even tho it was never a good idea to start in the first place.
DEC were always good, from an end user perspective anyway, they catered to technical users and provided quality products. Unfortunately, marketting is far more powerfull than product quality, DEC had all the end users impressed, but the managers were more impressed by flashy sales gimmicks and so-called "discounts" "Yes our product costs twice as much as theirs, but i`l give you 30% off!!"
We were taught wordperfect in schools, and i used wordworth (on the amiga) at home, both were fairly similar... Later when forced to use word (95 i believe) i found it a wholly inferior product to wordperfect and wordworth, especially troublesome was placing a picture, and the fact the display isnt wysiwyg by default.
Re:For me, it's only about FREEDOM and INDEPENDANC
on
Security FUD On Linux
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Naive. FUD tactics _DO_ Work... how do you think microsoft got their current marketshare, and held onto it in the face of superior competition (Mac, OS/2, BeOS) It certainly wasn't by having a superior product, it is well accepted that given versions of OS/2 BeOS or MacOS have always been superior to the versions of windows available at the same time. OS/2 had the best chance, since at the time not only was it compatible and capable of running windows/dos programs, it was also considerably faster and more stable than windows.. How did microsoft beat them? they held them back with FUD and then changed their api for intentional incompatibility.
Not atall, the xbox was always more expensive to produce than the ps2 or gamecube. Also bear in mind that it uses a laptop cpu, not a desktop cpu, again a more expensive item, and that even taking into account the laptop cpu, the console as a whole consumes more power and generates more heat than competing consoles.
Also the fact it was standard hardware, familiar and compatible, and cheaper than buying the same hardware off the shelf, resulted in people buying the machines to hack them into doing things they werent designed for.
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The linux plugin is very buggy, closed source (difficult to integrate with new browsers, cant fix bugs) and the existance of the closed source plugin stops people from developing an open plugin. There are no native plugins for linux running on non x86 architectures, theres no native plugins for the *BSD's or for the commercial unixes or other OS's such as VMS.
The problem with propriatory formats becoming popular, is they can stifle the adoption of new platforms, the more widespread swf becomes, the more useless any platform not supporting it becomes for web browsing. Someone could invent a super os or a super platform tomorrow, something that beat all the competition hands down and totally undercut it on price, but this innovation would be stifled by an inability to support these propriatory formats. Contrast this with open standards, where the software vendor can implement it themselves, or open source where the vendor can port existing applications to their new platform.
If it werent for propriatory apps and formats, do you think people would still be using kludgy x86 processors, legacy bioses and a number of other old things anymore? Hardware designers would have much more freedom to innovate without the need to directly support backwards compatibility.. Speak to some engineers at AMD and ask them how much the need for x86 backwards compatibility has hindered them and held them back.
Well, you can always use the standard size vga and ethernet ports as a size reference
France and germany dont use francs or marks anymore, they use euros
"Why in the world would anyone use SYN packets to try saturating someone's pipe? SYN packets are very small, so they'd be a lousy choice. "
- Wrong, the victim host/routers must process each packet, if theres any filtering rules they must be applied to each packet, and atleast on a pci nic, each packet generates an interrupt. Thus, a flood of small packets will saturate the system long before it saturates a fast network link, for instance a 100mbit nic on 32bit 33mhz pci will often choke under 80mbit worth of synfloods, but it can handle full 100mbit worth of larger packets.
Well, many of the file managers on the Amiga would determine the file type during a directory listing, either display it alongside, but not abbreviated, as this would tend to confuse people.. Windows does the same, if you go for a detailed listing, you will see "jpeg image" alongside, or "microsoft html document" as if they somehow invented the html format.. Or in an icon based view it will display an appropriate icon based on filetype, AmigaOS, MacOS and IRIX atleast can do this based on content and not filename.
Relying purely on filename to identify filetype is a stupid idea, many windows programs will not open a file unless it's correctly named, once renamed it works just fine.
The use of filenames to determine type have also helped cause several windows security flaws
Or, since it's SUN, they should call it .COM desktop
Windows Media Player
Windows Media Video
Windows Media Audio
Windows Messenger*
MSN Messenger
MSN Explorer
etc etc etc...
using one well known product to promote something else, or tagging another product name onto an already successfull product to promote it.
* Windows messenger existed before, otherwise known as winpopup, funny how an old program name is brought back as a supposedly new product.
They`ve done this before, tried to push java too hard into places where it doesnt belong...
HotJava - a very poor effort at a web browser
JavaOS - very very slow and always a few revisions behind
JavaStation - ran much slower than the older X terminals, mainly due to JavaOS, also couldn`t run a regular copy of solaris.
Filename should __NEVER__ be used to determine file content, it`s far more efficient to read the file header and determine what a file actually contains, that way it doesnt matter atall what the file is named. Back in the amiga days, no filenames ever contained a dot, and they were identified based on content, unix does this too with the "file" command, and the mac is more amiga-like, but stores the filetype as meta data in the filesystem, and like the amiga, also defining a "creator" that`s automatically invoked if you click on the icon.
I`m not sure on this, but i believe Alpha and VAX have similar security features, the DEC compiler on both linux and Tru64 include a -check_bounds option atleast, which generates a SIGTRAP if a buffer is overflowed, it would probably be a good idea to recompile all network-listening processes and setuid bins using this.. better to have a daemon crash than to possibly execute shellcode for an attacker.
I was immensely disappointed to see the Athlon64 systems booting with an old-style bios, running the cpu in 16bit mode or whatever it uses..
x86 firmware is the WORST in the industry, its incredibly inflexible and kludgy... It`s about the only firmware that can`t natively netboot (no, booting seperate drivers from the nic rom dont count) or support a remote serial console, look at SGI`s firmware, it has an easy to use gui, including options to boot, install an os from cd/tape/network, run diagnostics or drop to a textmode console where you have a little more flexibility, and you get the text console by default if your using a device without graphics support, such as a serial console...
DEC SRM is also very flexible, tho harder to use than SGI`s, SUN`s firmware is also very powerfull.
These firmwares also provide usefull functions to the os, modern OS`s dont touch the x86 bios much anymore, using it as little more than a dumb bootstrapper, which is about all it is.
The ability to control the firmware remotely from a serial console is VERY usefull, it`s possible to install an os onto a machine thats halfway around the world, you can diagnose why the os won`t boot if theres a problem, and personally has saved me a LOT of time and gas-money not having to drive to the facility where i have machines hosted. I understand some server-class x86 machines have hacks to allow remote control like this, but it`s far from standard and often very costly and puts the price up in the same range as risc hardware, which has these features by default.
First 64bit laptop? What about the "Tadpole Alphabook" - i believe that was the first 64bit laptop, but i could be wrong... i believe it came out in the first half of the 90`s and use a 166 or 233mhz 64bit Alpha EV4 processor.
Also tadpole produced HP PA-RISC laptops (precisionbook) and ultrasparc laptops, altho they came much later, they still predate the G5 by a few years.
On a side note, if anyone has a working alphabook for sale.. get in touch with me!
I used to do raytracing on my 14mhz 68020 based Amiga, it was very very slow.. no fpu there either.
Later i upgraded to a 50mhz 68060 and it was several orders of magnitude faster, then i moved on to other things..
Just recently i found one of my old disks with some large scenes on, and figured i`d load it into lightwave on my SGI workstation and see how long it took to render...
A render that took overnight on the Amiga, completed right before my eyes..
Infact there were talks of the UK division of Commodore buying out the american parent company.
In Europe the Amiga was sold primarily as a games playing machine, capable of connecting to a TV and competing with the likes of Sega and Nintento, but with the added advantage of writeable media. A very small percentage of Amiga owners ever used the OS or any of the more advanced functions beyond booting a game from a floppy much like you would with a playstation today.
In the USA, the Amiga was sold as a graphics system, used for doing video graphics on tv shows and such, pretty much a cheaper lower end competitor to SGI, programs such as Lightwave started life on the Amiga platform.
Acorn only contributed the basic architecture of the processor, it was DEC who really turned it into a usefull product.
The ITV chart show used to run on an amiga too, you even got to see the amigaos 1.x style mouse pointer as someone moved it to clock the "information" icons which were overlayed above the video in the background.
There was an AA information kiosk at a service station in the UK, it was supposed to give you traffic reports for wherever you were going, but when i saw it.. it was displaying the Amiga insert-disk screen, the newer animated one from kickstart 2.x
True, Free Software and Open Source are closer to communism, not the pseudo communism which existed in the USSR, but rather the true ideal of communism, which unfortunately never existed and simply got corrupted. It also fits with the idea of a free market and of capitalism, having something as widely used as software available for free benefits a large number of people and business interests, propriatory software only benefits the relatively small number of people selling it.
The USSR was more of a dictatorship than a communist system, they marched under the banner of communism simply because it was popular at the time. They rose to power via military force, rather than as a gradual evolution towards communism as marx envisioned. And then held on to power with the same military force. Microsoft work in much the same way, they are not competing on the free market by providing cheaper and/or superior products, they are competing by trying to put down the competition rather than simply providing a superior product.
Gaim (gaim.sourceforge.net) is a nice multi-network im client, all your contacts come up in a single list with different icons to differentiate the protocol in use, and the chats with them come up in a single tabbed window, again with the icons to differentiate the protocol. I use it primarily for aim, but sometimes for yahoo aswell.. i avoid msn on principle and will continue to do so, besides.. all my friends who do use msn, also use aim or icq aswell.
Games are the one reason i still have a dual-boot install of windows on a single machine, for any purpose other than games i use one of my unix workstations, and even then i play games under linux when there is a native version available.
Virtually all of such users have adequate skills with windows because they had no choice but to learn it, and having been presented with something else, would have learned that too... people used to do their word processing on dos and had no trouble with it. Had these users started out on any other system, they would now have adequate skills on that system and not want to change either...
Assuming that both windows and say Linux or BSD are adequate for the tasks you need, surely it makes sense to use linux or bsd, if purely because of cost.
Remember, a system thats 10% faster will run comparably on a system thats 10% slower, thus cheaper.
Everyone has to learn to use windows, if they learned to use linux or macos first, then they would stick with that, exactly like you said.. The fact it doesn`t come preinstalled means people dont become familiar with it. As you already said, these people arent computer geeks, they dont want to go searching for an os to use, they use whatever is sold to them with the hardware, and then become dependant on it... rather like a drug.
So really, these people`s initial choices are taken away from them, thus forcing them into a path of dependance on a product that most likely was never the best solution for them.
Think of it like smoking, once you start, its difficult to stop, even tho it was never a good idea to start in the first place.
DEC were always good, from an end user perspective anyway, they catered to technical users and provided quality products.
Unfortunately, marketting is far more powerfull than product quality, DEC had all the end users impressed, but the managers were more impressed by flashy sales gimmicks and so-called "discounts" "Yes our product costs twice as much as theirs, but i`l give you 30% off!!"
We were taught wordperfect in schools, and i used wordworth (on the amiga) at home, both were fairly similar... Later when forced to use word (95 i believe) i found it a wholly inferior product to wordperfect and wordworth, especially troublesome was placing a picture, and the fact the display isnt wysiwyg by default.
Naive.
FUD tactics _DO_ Work... how do you think microsoft got their current marketshare, and held onto it in the face of superior competition (Mac, OS/2, BeOS)
It certainly wasn't by having a superior product, it is well accepted that given versions of OS/2 BeOS or MacOS have always been superior to the versions of windows available at the same time. OS/2 had the best chance, since at the time not only was it compatible and capable of running windows/dos programs, it was also considerably faster and more stable than windows.. How did microsoft beat them? they held them back with FUD and then changed their api for intentional incompatibility.
Not atall, the xbox was always more expensive to produce than the ps2 or gamecube. Also bear in mind that it uses a laptop cpu, not a desktop cpu, again a more expensive item, and that even taking into account the laptop cpu, the console as a whole consumes more power and generates more heat than competing consoles.
Also the fact it was standard hardware, familiar and compatible, and cheaper than buying the same hardware off the shelf, resulted in people buying the machines to hack them into doing things they werent designed for.