Okay, what's the big deal? It's a RaQ. They've been running x86 hardware and some variation of a Linux-based OS for years. The option to run Solaris is sort of novel, but then, that hasn't as much to do with the hardware platform as it does Sun's decision to resume development of Solaris for x86. Yeah it's cool and all, but really, Sun running Linux on x86 hardware isn't all that revolutionary.
(Honestly, I don't know if this is sarcasm either.)
Re:Why two ethernet controllers?
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Most likely, the MCP and MCP-T southbridge chips are almost identical, and the MCP-T relies on external chips for its additional functionality. In this case, both the MCP and MCP-T have the nVidia ethernet controller built into the southbridge, but when they add the second controller to the MCP-T, it's something along the lines of a 3C920 ASIC.
Additionally, 3Com provides no support for OEM products, so yes, there're two different drivers, but no, you don't have to call two different companies for support.
For OSS to gain any significant marketshare it needs to be simple, easy and fast. Are there any good reasons why it can't be?
Perhaps because there's hardly any money to be made selling free software, and thus no real incentive to try to beat huge companies like MS and--to a lesser degree--Apple at their own game (i.e. making friendly GUIs for home-users who don't know how to edit text files). Many companies out there trying to make money on Linux do so by offering support services anyway--i.e. selling their knowledge of how to properly tweak all those text files for optimal performance, stability, and security. It's not entirely in their best interests to make things fast or easy. And yes, there's work being done on fancy GUIs for everything, but the market for Linux and BSD is still primarily server-centered, and the server market cares a lot less about GUIs than does the desktop market.
Additionally, most of the people developing OSS software in their free time are plenty comfortable with a CLI and probably would rather spend time improving the performance/stability of their software, rather than developing GUI wizards for every minor task.
And, in all honesty, Windows isn't that simple either. Windows 2000 takes years to install, requires downloading a few hundred MBs of patches and updates, is bitchy as far as IRQ sharing goes, etc etc etc.
Regardless, it doesn't matter whether you're going through a GUI or CLI--you still have to know what you're doing to be able to configure your system properly. Ask anyone who works in tech support--half the time, a GUI is just a nice little wizard for customers to fuck up their systems, requiring you to spend twice as long with them as you otherwise would have, as you have to undo the damage they've already done, and then take them through installation/configuration from the point they would have otherwise been at, had they stopped clicking buttons when they reached the limits of their knowledge. Lock a person in a room with a big red button labeled "don't push me" and a spiral notebook and pen that says "don't write a novel on me"--I assure you, they'll hit the button a thousand times before they touch the paper.
It took several phone calls -- escalating to the point of calling a Lindows.com executive, an option not available to non-journalists -- before I discovered LindowsOS doesn't yet have a feature for setting the refresh rate. Instead, the company sent me complicated and potentially risky instructions for changing the refresh rate by entering obscure Unix commands such as "xf86cfg."
I do support for a large manufacturer of networking hardware, and frankly, most of the people I deal with who are disappointed with the level of support they've received don't have enough of a clue to properly make that judgement. Look--there are rules to what any technician can support. I support the hardware and the necessary software to give that hardware its basic functionality in your operating system. In your *supported* operating system. I'm not going to help you install your card under Linux, and I'm going to help you write a driver to make it work in a Mac. I'm not going to help you configure file and printer sharing for all of your systems just because you have one of our cards in one of them. I'm not going to help you resolve an operating system issue unrelated to our product.
Lots of people don't seem to understand this. And this is how it is all through the industry. People call in and expect to speak to someone who knows every detail of their system and network inside and out, from 3rd party hardware to BIOS switches to operating system specifics to IP addressing to client/server configuration, etc. I don't know everything about Windows because I don't support it, I support the specific piece of hardware with our name on it. Ditto your router, switch, service provider, etc. You want somebody who knows everything there is to know about your network and systems and will configure anything and everything for you, fine, go hire one. Their hourly rates are 5-10 times what mine is.
And if you have a question on some obscure technical detail of the product, it may not get answered right away, because I'm not an engineer. If you're trying to do something unsupported and are nice about it, I'll try to help you, but if you call up and act like a dickhead from the get-go, you aren't gonna get crap, as I'm under no obligation to help you. Being a condescending jackass isn't going to get you anywhere.
And of course, there's the customer that's angry because no XP drivers are going to be developed for a product that was discontinued 3 years and he picked up on eBay for $10. And the customer who is upset because when he talked to his service provider or OEM, they told him everything was fine, or that the problem is with our product, and won't listen to any instructions as a result.
Yeah, there're customers who are unhappy with the support they receive. But this isn't because I'm incompetent or we're trying to screw them. We support what we support, and we do it well. 95% of the people I deal with on a day-to-day basis understand where our boundaries lie and are quite happy with the support provided. Yeah, it's not like that with a lot of other companies, but the fact is, a lot of the people bitching about bad support wouldn't know good support if it bit them in the ass.
(Of course, I make an exception for cable companies, as they generally have horrible technical support, but I wouldn't really expect the billing guy to know how to push a firmware update anyway.)
I doubt it'll really take off until the benefits of an upgrade outweigh the costs of new infrastructure and the loss of value of existing IPv4 address space.
And your elitism is only outshone by your hypocrisy. Or is socialist snobbery exempt from that label?
As for the rest...
"Corporations look out for profit only, not the people." - This is an argument for socialism, and a valid one. Well, you got the first part right anyway...
Corporations aren't independent, menacing evils. They're made up of independent, sometimes menacing, and sometimes evil people who feel that their personal gain trumps whatever obligation they have to the rest of humanity. The great lie of socialism is that it prevents such people from existing, or at least renders them harmless by putting their vehicle for domination under state control. The great lie of socialism is that it keeps power out of the hands of those who would abuse it. History hasn't exactly demonstrated this to be a possibility with any political or economic system (on anything approaching a large scale, that is), least of all socialism, and it's absurd to think that integrating the two--political and economic power--will somehow lessen the probability of tyranny.
I assume only the binary has been released (I can't get to the site to verify that, though). Release the source, and I'm sure someone out there would continue development.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't buy the fucking game?
... Like you have to worry about that anyway.
... Too late.
Yeah, imagine that dork. Working a thankless job for minimum wage and getting screamed at by some jackass like your roommate.
b) [Some Beowulf joke or another]
Hehe.
Years ago, I knew a guy on IRC who had a sex bot set up. The logs from that were pretty fuckin' hilarious.
Okay, what's the big deal? It's a RaQ. They've been running x86 hardware and some variation of a Linux-based OS for years. The option to run Solaris is sort of novel, but then, that hasn't as much to do with the hardware platform as it does Sun's decision to resume development of Solaris for x86. Yeah it's cool and all, but really, Sun running Linux on x86 hardware isn't all that revolutionary.
That movie was fucking brilliant.
(Honestly, I don't know if this is sarcasm either.)
Additionally, 3Com provides no support for OEM products, so yes, there're two different drivers, but no, you don't have to call two different companies for support.
Perhaps because there's hardly any money to be made selling free software, and thus no real incentive to try to beat huge companies like MS and--to a lesser degree--Apple at their own game (i.e. making friendly GUIs for home-users who don't know how to edit text files). Many companies out there trying to make money on Linux do so by offering support services anyway--i.e. selling their knowledge of how to properly tweak all those text files for optimal performance, stability, and security. It's not entirely in their best interests to make things fast or easy. And yes, there's work being done on fancy GUIs for everything, but the market for Linux and BSD is still primarily server-centered, and the server market cares a lot less about GUIs than does the desktop market.
Additionally, most of the people developing OSS software in their free time are plenty comfortable with a CLI and probably would rather spend time improving the performance/stability of their software, rather than developing GUI wizards for every minor task.
And, in all honesty, Windows isn't that simple either. Windows 2000 takes years to install, requires downloading a few hundred MBs of patches and updates, is bitchy as far as IRQ sharing goes, etc etc etc.
Regardless, it doesn't matter whether you're going through a GUI or CLI--you still have to know what you're doing to be able to configure your system properly. Ask anyone who works in tech support--half the time, a GUI is just a nice little wizard for customers to fuck up their systems, requiring you to spend twice as long with them as you otherwise would have, as you have to undo the damage they've already done, and then take them through installation/configuration from the point they would have otherwise been at, had they stopped clicking buttons when they reached the limits of their knowledge. Lock a person in a room with a big red button labeled "don't push me" and a spiral notebook and pen that says "don't write a novel on me"--I assure you, they'll hit the button a thousand times before they touch the paper.
Any benchmarks on XFS vs. ext3/ReiserFS?
Lordy, it practically reads like satire.
It requires an external controller, which will run you around $200. In other words, it's very much not worth it.
The absolutely useless (and ugly!) graphics they stick in the middle of the article.
Lots of people don't seem to understand this. And this is how it is all through the industry. People call in and expect to speak to someone who knows every detail of their system and network inside and out, from 3rd party hardware to BIOS switches to operating system specifics to IP addressing to client/server configuration, etc. I don't know everything about Windows because I don't support it, I support the specific piece of hardware with our name on it. Ditto your router, switch, service provider, etc. You want somebody who knows everything there is to know about your network and systems and will configure anything and everything for you, fine, go hire one. Their hourly rates are 5-10 times what mine is.
And if you have a question on some obscure technical detail of the product, it may not get answered right away, because I'm not an engineer. If you're trying to do something unsupported and are nice about it, I'll try to help you, but if you call up and act like a dickhead from the get-go, you aren't gonna get crap, as I'm under no obligation to help you. Being a condescending jackass isn't going to get you anywhere.
And of course, there's the customer that's angry because no XP drivers are going to be developed for a product that was discontinued 3 years and he picked up on eBay for $10. And the customer who is upset because when he talked to his service provider or OEM, they told him everything was fine, or that the problem is with our product, and won't listen to any instructions as a result.
Yeah, there're customers who are unhappy with the support they receive. But this isn't because I'm incompetent or we're trying to screw them. We support what we support, and we do it well. 95% of the people I deal with on a day-to-day basis understand where our boundaries lie and are quite happy with the support provided. Yeah, it's not like that with a lot of other companies, but the fact is, a lot of the people bitching about bad support wouldn't know good support if it bit them in the ass.
(Of course, I make an exception for cable companies, as they generally have horrible technical support, but I wouldn't really expect the billing guy to know how to push a firmware update anyway.)
Katz, get a real job already.
... And half of /. readers would never leave their house.
... If none of those 1000 pages included any Katz movie reviews. Which is to say, the quality of the stories here don't make /. worth subscribing to.
I doubt it'll really take off until the benefits of an upgrade outweigh the costs of new infrastructure and the loss of value of existing IPv4 address space.
Can't you find somewhere else to spew this nonsense?
Minus, of course, the one who anally raped his 12 year old daughter and is serving 30 years in jail.
As for the rest...
"Corporations look out for profit only, not the people." - This is an argument for socialism, and a valid one. Well, you got the first part right anyway...
Corporations aren't independent, menacing evils. They're made up of independent, sometimes menacing, and sometimes evil people who feel that their personal gain trumps whatever obligation they have to the rest of humanity. The great lie of socialism is that it prevents such people from existing, or at least renders them harmless by putting their vehicle for domination under state control. The great lie of socialism is that it keeps power out of the hands of those who would abuse it. History hasn't exactly demonstrated this to be a possibility with any political or economic system (on anything approaching a large scale, that is), least of all socialism, and it's absurd to think that integrating the two--political and economic power--will somehow lessen the probability of tyranny.
I assume only the binary has been released (I can't get to the site to verify that, though). Release the source, and I'm sure someone out there would continue development.
Half-truths tend to be amusing.