Are you finding it frustrating when everything works on minix? No more all-
nighters to get a nifty program working? Then this post might be just
for you:-)
Linux wasn't supposed to work, from the beginning!;)
BTW, is there anything more ironic than 15 identical posts going "haven't we seens this already?"
Of course you'll still need something like 150 CDRs to get everything, inceremental or not - and that's just the first dump that will keep growing.
BTW, to the other replies to this - one of the companies I worked for, we did full, weekly backups of all the important systems (ie the actual OS and software - not the data) like the domain controller, database servers, fileservers, firewall, the backup servers themselves, etc. and then daily incrementals on them.
For the actual data on the file and database server, plus everyone's personal workstations (something like 100 people) it was a full backup once a month (maybe less) and nightly incrementals, which worked great because here people usually wanted just a couple of files their dumb asses deleted a week ago (usually perfectly timed to want the tape that just went off to off site storage:) ) All in all that achieved very good granularity. Of course the incremental tapes were recycled after about two months or so.
The database servers were a bit more tricky so additional full dumps were done manually, when, let's say, 500,000 new compounds were imported. There were also databases attached to data collection robots that had their own separate system going.
All in all, this took three backup servers (one for the data collection databases, one for individuals PCs and one for the other stuff) with their respective tape loaders, plus individual tape drives for the main database servers (we also had things like SGI workstations, but the scintists on those did their own thing), and the full backups did take up almost the entire weekend. But it was setup well enough that it took only a few minutes a week to maintain the whole thing - get a new tape, write on it what the server tells you to, put it in the loader, take the specified one out, send it off - you are done. And it did work - they had to recover after a fire once (before my time) and did it without any problems.
Anyway, the point of the story was this - it's not as simple as "do incrementals" or "no! do full backups" when you are talking about actual companies, it's a bit more tricky than that.
Between my PC, my development server and my fileserver I am pushing 150GB total (with 100GB on the fileserver) - like they said, HDs are cheap (of course I am not using it all).
So far I've just been backing up the important (ie not media) stuff onto CDR. I would like a way to back up everything, but tape drives are too expensive. What I've been doing so far, is keeping a couple of spare 20-30 giggers around and catching bad active ones before they die - obviously far from perfect, but I haven't had major disasters yet.
For normal, day to day operation (including installing "common" software) modern, "newbie oriented" Linux distros (such as Mandrake, SuSE and to a lesser extent RedHat) are completely "point and click", "drag and drop", "slap and tickle" or whatever GUI goodness you want. In fact you don't ever have to even see the CLI if you don't want to.
There are several good, graphical RPM managers included with these systems, that will keep track of what you have installed, what you have on your CDs and what you can download (in Ximian's case) all without a single text command.
Hardware is of course a different issue. Windows is obviously better supported by hardware manufactureres, but Linux will have no problem within the window of "modern enough, but not made yesterday." On reasonably modern systems, the only piece of hardware that I cannot use is my Philips Accoustic Edge, for obvious reasons. But if a piece of hardware is supported, most modern distros will detect it and install support for without you even having to think about it. Once again, I am not talking about any fancy stuff here, but that's what end users need anyway. (interestingly, Mandrake found and installed drivers and software for my Pinnacle Studio PCTV, something I've given up on getting to work in Windows with the manufacturer's software and only recently got working with third-party drivers - just goes to show that hardware compatibility is rarely the fault of the OS itself)
Anyway, to sum up:
Many advances have been made since RH 6 (and many of them by others). The "average" user doesn't need the CLI 99.9% of the time. With a proper manager, RPM is just as easy to use as install shield, and a lot more powerful (that's only rpms of course, software installation in general is a mess only a geek could love, and we do - but I realize that's far from everyone) I (and many others) use the CLI because we find it to be more efficient and (dare I say it?) powerful - but only because we want to, no one's forcing us.
First, calling you "stupid" wouldn't help as the vast majority of computer users in fact are.;)
I am not sure what you mean by "metaphore", I'd think the whole window thing still applies? After all you don't say "Open a Linux" in Linux, you still call it a window.
Compiling kernels - not something users ever need to do, period. Most of these users are with a major distribution, whose only reason to exist is to make life easier for the user, they release kernel updates in packages and the user doesn't have to worry about configuring anything. Same goes for installing software - "rpm -ivh blahblah.rmp" should be easy enough for anyone to handle. If you want the more esoteric stuff, that isn't distributed as packages - well then you'll have to put in some effort, but the vast majority of people won't (won't need to, that is)
Out of curiousity - what distribution were you using? I think this is precisely the point of the article - many people don't realize just how many advances have been made (and constantly continue to be made) in these areas.
People have been taught to fear the CLI and learning anything at all about the machines they use.
I think the point of the article was that most people don't realize that you don't have to use the CLI anymore with the newer distributions, if you are so inclined - which is absolutely true.
I still use the CLI because I like it and it lets me do some tings faster, but they do have a point, that nowadays, fear of CLI and learning new things or not, the "average user" (dumbshit with email and word) doesn't have to ever see it.
It's surprisign how much sense that makes. It's a shame that this will never happen. In fact such formats (especially media related ones) will become more and more closed and covered up by patents, as that will "ensure protection" of the copyright holder's rights.
Why? Because the entertainment industry makes a lot of money, and as such is more important than "freedom" - hey, the MPAA said that, not me, and the gov't seems to be agreeing.
reads even fewer Office files than current Free Software office suites
Actually, OpenOffice reads (and writes) many more different file formats than MS Office, simply because it reads most MS, but doesn't limit itself to them. Just inherent in the way they do things I guess.
Well I believe that the original point was that companies (and MS is one of them) are still subourdinate to the government, and it should be able to force them to do what it sees fit, even if it is inconvinient for the company. I am pretty sure this outlook will no long hold at all by the time this MS thing is over (well, as "over" as it will ever get, anyway).
And caused a new problem, which didn't have to be caused. No matter what they say on TV in the US, one person (company, entity) doing something stupid, doesn't justify another person doing something stupid in response. Especially if that person is a Judge. Especially if they are also overstepping their boundaries.
This is a bit like shutting down an entire university's network, because a dozen dumb kids were sharingn underaged bukkake pr0n from their dorm.
Personally I can't see any home users who would like this idea (hell StarOffice is becoming too much like MS Office for me to use it lately - they've even got a goddamn Clippy counterpart)
The famed enterprise market is of course a different story, if you are spending $600 (or whatever it is these days) on Office, you'll likely cough up the dough for the OS on which it runs better. And lets face it, goverment or no government MS Office will ALWAYS work A LOT better on Windows than anything else (any one used MS Office for the Mac? shudder)
The judge shutting down unrelated services is not the judges fault?
If you think wanting to be rash is one of those characteristics judges need, I don't think you have a good grasp on what it is they are there to do.
Even if the judge deemed the other parts of this network to be as crappily put together (evidence to which effect, we have not seen) shutting down the whole thing is still something that he (she? don't remember) should not be able to do, as it has nothing to do with the case at hand.
I believe it's the fact that a huge network with many useful services was brought down to protect one, relatively small, part of it. (instead of disconnecting just the one part)
negative effect on my social life in the real world
Well yeah, the whole idea of games like EQ is to provide a substitute for social life in the real world. Their target audience are people who have none, and you obviously fall outside it.
Good! Those specs are reasonable for a modern computer, it is reasonable to have a modern computer if you are into games. A lot of software development/advancement is hindered by having to cater to people who want to play it on their bloody 486's. If Sony can force a couple hundred thousand bloody hardcore gaming freaks to upgrade their outdated systems, then that just raises the lagging "average" user standard by a tinsy bit - and every bit counts.
Slashdot Mirror
They do - it's under "kernel/Historic"
Wonder if we could find the first use of "teh" on there.... now that's a milestone!
"If you write programs for linux today, you shouldn't have too many surprises when you just recompile them for Hurd in the 21st century."
Linus just seems to have known how these things work out...
Linux wasn't supposed to work, from the beginning! ;)
BTW, is there anything more ironic than 15 identical posts going "haven't we seens this already?"
Of course you'll still need something like 150 CDRs to get everything, inceremental or not - and that's just the first dump that will keep growing.
BTW, to the other replies to this - one of the companies I worked for, we did full, weekly backups of all the important systems (ie the actual OS and software - not the data) like the domain controller, database servers, fileservers, firewall, the backup servers themselves, etc. and then daily incrementals on them.
For the actual data on the file and database server, plus everyone's personal workstations (something like 100 people) it was a full backup once a month (maybe less) and nightly incrementals, which worked great because here people usually wanted just a couple of files their dumb asses deleted a week ago (usually perfectly timed to want the tape that just went off to off site storage :) ) All in all that achieved very good granularity. Of course the incremental tapes were recycled after about two months or so.
The database servers were a bit more tricky so additional full dumps were done manually, when, let's say, 500,000 new compounds were imported. There were also databases attached to data collection robots that had their own separate system going.
All in all, this took three backup servers (one for the data collection databases, one for individuals PCs and one for the other stuff) with their respective tape loaders, plus individual tape drives for the main database servers (we also had things like SGI workstations, but the scintists on those did their own thing), and the full backups did take up almost the entire weekend. But it was setup well enough that it took only a few minutes a week to maintain the whole thing - get a new tape, write on it what the server tells you to, put it in the loader, take the specified one out, send it off - you are done. And it did work - they had to recover after a fire once (before my time) and did it without any problems.
Anyway, the point of the story was this - it's not as simple as "do incrementals" or "no! do full backups" when you are talking about actual companies, it's a bit more tricky than that.
Between my PC, my development server and my fileserver I am pushing 150GB total (with 100GB on the fileserver) - like they said, HDs are cheap (of course I am not using it all).
So far I've just been backing up the important (ie not media) stuff onto CDR. I would like a way to back up everything, but tape drives are too expensive. What I've been doing so far, is keeping a couple of spare 20-30 giggers around and catching bad active ones before they die - obviously far from perfect, but I haven't had major disasters yet.
For normal, day to day operation (including installing "common" software) modern, "newbie oriented" Linux distros (such as Mandrake, SuSE and to a lesser extent RedHat) are completely "point and click", "drag and drop", "slap and tickle" or whatever GUI goodness you want. In fact you don't ever have to even see the CLI if you don't want to.
There are several good, graphical RPM managers included with these systems, that will keep track of what you have installed, what you have on your CDs and what you can download (in Ximian's case) all without a single text command.
Hardware is of course a different issue. Windows is obviously better supported by hardware manufactureres, but Linux will have no problem within the window of "modern enough, but not made yesterday." On reasonably modern systems, the only piece of hardware that I cannot use is my Philips Accoustic Edge, for obvious reasons. But if a piece of hardware is supported, most modern distros will detect it and install support for without you even having to think about it. Once again, I am not talking about any fancy stuff here, but that's what end users need anyway. (interestingly, Mandrake found and installed drivers and software for my Pinnacle Studio PCTV, something I've given up on getting to work in Windows with the manufacturer's software and only recently got working with third-party drivers - just goes to show that hardware compatibility is rarely the fault of the OS itself)
Anyway, to sum up:
Many advances have been made since RH 6 (and many of them by others).
The "average" user doesn't need the CLI 99.9% of the time.
With a proper manager, RPM is just as easy to use as install shield, and a lot more powerful (that's only rpms of course, software installation in general is a mess only a geek could love, and we do - but I realize that's far from everyone)
I (and many others) use the CLI because we find it to be more efficient and (dare I say it?) powerful - but only because we want to, no one's forcing us.
First, calling you "stupid" wouldn't help as the vast majority of computer users in fact are. ;)
I am not sure what you mean by "metaphore", I'd think the whole window thing still applies? After all you don't say "Open a Linux" in Linux, you still call it a window.
Compiling kernels - not something users ever need to do, period. Most of these users are with a major distribution, whose only reason to exist is to make life easier for the user, they release kernel updates in packages and the user doesn't have to worry about configuring anything. Same goes for installing software - "rpm -ivh blahblah.rmp" should be easy enough for anyone to handle. If you want the more esoteric stuff, that isn't distributed as packages - well then you'll have to put in some effort, but the vast majority of people won't (won't need to, that is)
Out of curiousity - what distribution were you using? I think this is precisely the point of the article - many people don't realize just how many advances have been made (and constantly continue to be made) in these areas.
People have been taught to fear the CLI and learning anything at all about the machines they use.
I think the point of the article was that most people don't realize that you don't have to use the CLI anymore with the newer distributions, if you are so inclined - which is absolutely true.
I still use the CLI because I like it and it lets me do some tings faster, but they do have a point, that nowadays, fear of CLI and learning new things or not, the "average user" (dumbshit with email and word) doesn't have to ever see it.
I've always felt uneasy using commands like "man mount" - just doesn't sound good.
this way there is no cost to LucasFilm - why did you think?
Wow, I didn't know MS was this warm and cuddly to us consumers! Why I'll run out and by a copy of XP right now!
You don't think the price of Windows (and especially Office) is ridiculous enough?
You and your "reading the article"! Spoiling all the fun!
It's surprisign how much sense that makes. It's a shame that this will never happen. In fact such formats (especially media related ones) will become more and more closed and covered up by patents, as that will "ensure protection" of the copyright holder's rights.
Why? Because the entertainment industry makes a lot of money, and as such is more important than "freedom" - hey, the MPAA said that, not me, and the gov't seems to be agreeing.
reads even fewer Office files than current Free Software office suites
Actually, OpenOffice reads (and writes) many more different file formats than MS Office, simply because it reads most MS, but doesn't limit itself to them. Just inherent in the way they do things I guess.
Well I believe that the original point was that companies (and MS is one of them) are still subourdinate to the government, and it should be able to force them to do what it sees fit, even if it is inconvinient for the company. I am pretty sure this outlook will no long hold at all by the time this MS thing is over (well, as "over" as it will ever get, anyway).
And caused a new problem, which didn't have to be caused. No matter what they say on TV in the US, one person (company, entity) doing something stupid, doesn't justify another person doing something stupid in response. Especially if that person is a Judge. Especially if they are also overstepping their boundaries.
This is a bit like shutting down an entire university's network, because a dozen dumb kids were sharingn underaged bukkake pr0n from their dorm.
Or at least I would find that interesting.
Personally I can't see any home users who would like this idea (hell StarOffice is becoming too much like MS Office for me to use it lately - they've even got a goddamn Clippy counterpart)
The famed enterprise market is of course a different story, if you are spending $600 (or whatever it is these days) on Office, you'll likely cough up the dough for the OS on which it runs better. And lets face it, goverment or no government MS Office will ALWAYS work A LOT better on Windows than anything else (any one used MS Office for the Mac? shudder)
The judge shutting down unrelated services is not the judges fault?
If you think wanting to be rash is one of those characteristics judges need, I don't think you have a good grasp on what it is they are there to do.
Even if the judge deemed the other parts of this network to be as crappily put together (evidence to which effect, we have not seen) shutting down the whole thing is still something that he (she? don't remember) should not be able to do, as it has nothing to do with the case at hand.
whats the problem here?
I believe it's the fact that a huge network with many useful services was brought down to protect one, relatively small, part of it. (instead of disconnecting just the one part)
negative effect on my social life in the real world
Well yeah, the whole idea of games like EQ is to provide a substitute for social life in the real world. Their target audience are people who have none, and you obviously fall outside it.
Good! Those specs are reasonable for a modern computer, it is reasonable to have a modern computer if you are into games. A lot of software development/advancement is hindered by having to cater to people who want to play it on their bloody 486's. If Sony can force a couple hundred thousand bloody hardcore gaming freaks to upgrade their outdated systems, then that just raises the lagging "average" user standard by a tinsy bit - and every bit counts.
Hardware's cheap.
umm what exactly do you think "nerves" are made up of?
Potentially, but growing new optic nerves in a lab would make baby Jesus cry.