Too bad Linux kernel & distro developers can't create a kernel standard for common release, and just put a stake in the ground and say "Here's Linux 2003. Any certified standard common pre-compiled driver module dated 2003 or older will work with this years Linux.
On which architecture(s)? What about my Debian Sparc boxes?
The absence of a binary interface (ABI) is a deliberate choice made by the Linux community, not an oversight that's blocking progress. Plug-in closed-source drivers and software are seen as a problem, not a solution.
Eh, but what do I know. I run BeOS and a driver is typically one file that I drop into a folder and usually begins running immediately.:)
How many drivers are there? Will they all fit on a floppy diskette?
The only reason it seems to be needed to have a big computer is because Microsoft bloats its products, since the available CPU power makes up for bad design and programming.
You haven't run Gnome or KDE lately, I take it?
One of the sad facts lately is that the Linux distro people seem to feel catching up to Windows means hogging resources as much.
People have to go out of their way and be obnoxiously 'dissident' in the US to get 'locked up.'
Unlike in certain totalitarian or authoritarian countries where one can be locked up simply for being homosexual, or publishing a newspaper the government doesn't approve of.
How many dissidents do you personally know who are locked up because of their dissent? Don't just cite somebody you read about on a website.
Based on personal experience, I would say that CompuServ made their revenue mostly from slowing down people using their service. Painful, awful numbers of prompts to go from screen to screen. Several 's between each screen of anything meaningful. The last time ever that I went back to try CompuServe as an ISP, they were finally a regular place with a TCP/IP connection, but their portal to Usenet still used their old software.
I have painful memories of going online with CompuServ at 300 baud because dialing into the 300 baud modem pool was only about $6 an hour, versus $12 an hour using the 1200 baud lines.
In short: Yikes! UNIX is a timesharing system for TTY terminals from 1979*.
That's a rather depressing outlook. We need to do better. This is supposed to be a discussion about that, not just another 'UNIX is UNIX because it is UNIX' polemic.
(* Just stating the facts. I connected to a SparcStation with a VT220 terminal as a serial console just last week- it was handy and it's cool that it works.)
They are probably talking about drivers for such things as barcode readers and barcode printers.
I have noticed that a few barcode hardware vendors have linux support, but hardly all of them. Unless you want to be locked into a limited market, you don't pick a software platform that works on a 50% fraction of the hardware.
And... ummm, for anybody who harps about cross-platform meaning more than Intel- sadly x86 carries more than 50% at this point in time. That's the kind of reality a company has to recognize, even if a Linux solution did have some appeal.
(just throwing some thoughts out, guys. Don't crucify me as a 'Micro$oft shill' now)
I don't think you can use MSN with generic PPP settings. I know that back in the day, you could only subscribe to MSN if you were running Windows 95. I figured they'd let NT 4.0 people join up after NT4 came out with a similar gui and scheme of things- no go. I suspect they're letting a few other platforms on MSN (Windows 9x, XP, maybe even 2K- what a diverse bunch!), but definitely nothing that can't run Microsoft Office without emulation.
When I subscribed to AT&T Worldnet, earlier this year, I discovered by reading my logfiles that it was consistently dropping carrier precisely 8 hours and two minutes into a PPP session. Apparently they have a daemon running that kicks you offline after eight hours and it runs about every two minutes.
I wondered for a long time about the line drops that were happening, then after noticing the logfile realized I just needed a different ISP.
I can name many of the successful 'robber baron' capitalists of the 19th century. I can even name the innovations they brought to the marketplace. You think anybody can remember the names of the paunchy bueraucrats and sniveling lawyers who 'persecuted' them in the courtroom??
The same is and will be true with Bill Gates. A lot of people hated Andrew Carnegie back when he was alive. That doesn't change the fact that the Carnegie money did a lot of good spreading libraries and literacy throughout the land. The Gates Foundation seeks (we will see how it comes out in the end) to do the same thing.
If you want an archetypical evil fuck capitalist who stomps on others, look up one of Gates' opponents. A guy named Larry Ellision.
Re:Article ignores most obvious example
on
Decentralization
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· Score: 2
Please stop spreading lies.
Bill Gates wrote code. You're thinking of Steve Jobs and the Woz. Now there is the story of a huckster who locks a hacker in the back room.
One of Gates' last coding projects was the Word Processor for the TRS-80 Model 100. I've seen Paul Allen state that Gates coded it.
cmdrtaco.net is Rob's personal site that happens to enjoy a very small audience.
*rim-shot*
Re:Listen up, this is the last time I'll say this
on
Decentralization
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· Score: 1
So, it wasn't that clear from what you typed there, but with codewords like 'altruistic' and what-not, are you following along in the spirit of the article and implying that profits are eeeeevile?
That's what I get from the initial thesis.
I would say that geeks make stuff for fun and profit. Suits make things justs for profit. And political zealots just sit around ranting about evile 'profit' and prepending 'Big' (i.e. Big Oil, Big Business, Big Labor.... oops, scratch that one) onto things they don't like.
I think it is best if people try to put the fan-epoch of their lives behind them at a certain point, as part of their personal-cultural adolescence.
A big, in fact possibly the major component of 'geek culture' is the state of arrested adolescence. It comes out of the geekdom of the 70's and 80's that spawned all the geek mythos.
It's near impossible for some people to put aside the culture of their youth and move on.
And that isn't a particularly new phenomenon. My father is still stuck on the big-band music that he grew up with. His glory days were those years in the Navy in San Diego when Bob Crosby's Bobcats were in all their glory.
The big difference is the durable, almost shrilly persistent 'youth culture' of the 70's and 80's. 'Drug culture' just reeks of irresponsible adolescence type living. And look at all the heros of 'geekdom': people like Stallman and Raymond, a couple of offbeat counter-culture types. Sure, there's room for responsible Adult types like Larry Wall, but not on center stage.
Well, surprisingly, I am running Debian 3.0 now on my Sun Ultra Enterprise 1. I don't know how much more different a computer people typically run Linux on, but this is definitely a non-standard platform in the desktop market today. And lo and behold, it runs the same software.
I guess I don't see a problem, except for coming from people with the mindset that they should be able to go out and buy those $5 CD games at the drugstore and expect them to run on Linux. They won't on MY linux, in fact they probably NEVER will. But the way that Linux is structured now, it's fairly certain Linux, and the main Linux apps will always run on this Ultra 1.
A lot of the 'standards' stuff people seem to advocate would put an end to that. My box would be largely orphaned by some form of Binary Interface. The hell with that is all I can say...
Re:What did Marc do really?
on
The New IT Crisis
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
What Andreesen did was grab the NCSA Mosaic team, and run off to private industry to write a closed-source competitor. Then his company sought to make the Internet proprietary, by selling a Server that used the proprietary features and protocol twists that their 'free' Browser had.
What he really accomplished was waking up the bear (Microsoft) that was sleeping in a cave, by standing on a stage and loudly proclaiming 'we will eat your lunch'. Without Andreesen's loudmouth blathering, without his attempt to corner the market on web browsers, we might today live in a world of several dozen standards-compliant web browsers.
In the 60's and 70's there were manual card-punches you could use to modify punched cards one column at a time. Slow, but it sure beat waiting in the line at the library for your turn at one of the two IBM keypunches available when your FORTRAN programming assignment is due the next morning.
I would say that would be a better method than the #2 pencil, and more relevant to this discussion of computer-oriented storage.
I have a friend who worked at a place where they used a Frieden Flexowriter to do their word processing. It stored documents on punched paper tape. There was one secretary who was skilled in the craft of splicing the punched paper tape. It was her job to edit and update form letters stored on paper tape.
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I established the criterion for what we're allowed to comment on? Kewl! I really am in charge, and not just a six digit UID on a website!
You're telling us that nobody came back to you and asked you how to install some of the games their son bought with his allowance money at WalMart??
On which architecture(s)? What about my Debian Sparc boxes?
The absence of a binary interface (ABI) is a deliberate choice made by the Linux community, not an oversight that's blocking progress. Plug-in closed-source drivers and software are seen as a problem, not a solution.
How many drivers are there? Will they all fit on a floppy diskette?
Some of us won't pay $1500 for an anything with an anything chip in it. Where do I click to order the ATX motherboard option?
Screw brand-name lock-in. The hell with single sourced hardware.
The only reason it seems to be needed to have a big computer is because Microsoft bloats its products, since the available CPU power makes up for bad design and programming.
You haven't run Gnome or KDE lately, I take it?
One of the sad facts lately is that the Linux distro people seem to feel catching up to Windows means hogging resources as much.
People have to go out of their way and be obnoxiously 'dissident' in the US to get 'locked up.'
Unlike in certain totalitarian or authoritarian countries where one can be locked up simply for being homosexual, or publishing a newspaper the government doesn't approve of.
How many dissidents do you personally know who are locked up because of their dissent? Don't just cite somebody you read about on a website.
Who said the choice was text-only or Flash? There's a middle ground, for properly alt-tagged images in fully documented formats like jpeg.
Based on personal experience, I would say that CompuServ made their revenue mostly from slowing down people using their service. Painful, awful numbers of prompts to go from screen to screen. Several 's between each screen of anything meaningful. The last time ever that I went back to try CompuServe as an ISP, they were finally a regular place with a TCP/IP connection, but their portal to Usenet still used their old software.
I have painful memories of going online with CompuServ at 300 baud because dialing into the 300 baud modem pool was only about $6 an hour, versus $12 an hour using the 1200 baud lines.
In short: Yikes! UNIX is a timesharing system for TTY terminals from 1979*.
That's a rather depressing outlook. We need to do better. This is supposed to be a discussion about that, not just another 'UNIX is UNIX because it is UNIX' polemic.
(* Just stating the facts. I connected to a SparcStation with a VT220 terminal as a serial console just last week- it was handy and it's cool that it works.)
They are probably talking about drivers for such things as barcode readers and barcode printers.
I have noticed that a few barcode hardware vendors have linux support, but hardly all of them. Unless you want to be locked into a limited market, you don't pick a software platform that works on a 50% fraction of the hardware.
And... ummm, for anybody who harps about cross-platform meaning more than Intel- sadly x86 carries more than 50% at this point in time. That's the kind of reality a company has to recognize, even if a Linux solution did have some appeal.
(just throwing some thoughts out, guys. Don't crucify me as a 'Micro$oft shill' now)
I don't think you can use MSN with generic PPP settings. I know that back in the day, you could only subscribe to MSN if you were running Windows 95. I figured they'd let NT 4.0 people join up after NT4 came out with a similar gui and scheme of things- no go. I suspect they're letting a few other platforms on MSN (Windows 9x, XP, maybe even 2K- what a diverse bunch!), but definitely nothing that can't run Microsoft Office without emulation.
When I subscribed to AT&T Worldnet, earlier this year, I discovered by reading my logfiles that it was consistently dropping carrier precisely 8 hours and two minutes into a PPP session. Apparently they have a daemon running that kicks you offline after eight hours and it runs about every two minutes.
I wondered for a long time about the line drops that were happening, then after noticing the logfile realized I just needed a different ISP.
Microwave ovens 'transmit' within a Faraday cage.
If yours doesn't.... ummm... better do something about that.
Oh yeah.
It's The Man keepin' us down some more.
Write it up for your leaflet.
When Noam Chomsky signs an M.I.T. paycheck does he use a ballpoint pen, or the bloody, severed limb of a Cambodian peasant?
.you guys are defending/idolizing a criminal.
Perhaps for some definitions of 'criminal.'
I can name many of the successful 'robber baron' capitalists of the 19th century. I can even name the innovations they brought to the marketplace. You think anybody can remember the names of the paunchy bueraucrats and sniveling lawyers who 'persecuted' them in the courtroom??
The same is and will be true with Bill Gates. A lot of people hated Andrew Carnegie back when he was alive. That doesn't change the fact that the Carnegie money did a lot of good spreading libraries and literacy throughout the land. The Gates Foundation seeks (we will see how it comes out in the end) to do the same thing.
If you want an archetypical evil fuck capitalist who stomps on others, look up one of Gates' opponents. A guy named Larry Ellision.
Please stop spreading lies.
Bill Gates wrote code. You're thinking of Steve Jobs and the Woz. Now there is the story of a huckster who locks a hacker in the back room.
One of Gates' last coding projects was the Word Processor for the TRS-80 Model 100. I've seen Paul Allen state that Gates coded it.
cmdrtaco.net is Rob's personal site that happens to enjoy a very small audience.
*rim-shot*
So, it wasn't that clear from what you typed there, but with codewords like 'altruistic' and what-not, are you following along in the spirit of the article and implying that profits are eeeeevile?
.... oops, scratch that one) onto things they don't like.
That's what I get from the initial thesis.
I would say that geeks make stuff for fun and profit. Suits make things justs for profit. And political zealots just sit around ranting about evile 'profit' and prepending 'Big' (i.e. Big Oil, Big Business, Big Labor
Ummm, you make it sound like:
1. You were not brought up religiously.
2. You know nobody who was brought up religiously.
3. You've embraced stereotypes about what 'religious' means.
I think it is best if people try to put the fan-epoch of their lives behind them at a certain point, as part of their personal-cultural adolescence.
A big, in fact possibly the major component of 'geek culture' is the state of arrested adolescence. It comes out of the geekdom of the 70's and 80's that spawned all the geek mythos.
It's near impossible for some people to put aside the culture of their youth and move on.
And that isn't a particularly new phenomenon. My father is still stuck on the big-band music that he grew up with. His glory days were those years in the Navy in San Diego when Bob Crosby's Bobcats were in all their glory.
The big difference is the durable, almost shrilly persistent 'youth culture' of the 70's and 80's. 'Drug culture' just reeks of irresponsible adolescence type living. And look at all the heros of 'geekdom': people like Stallman and Raymond, a couple of offbeat counter-culture types. Sure, there's room for responsible Adult types like Larry Wall, but not on center stage.
Dreamcast is a dead platform. Ever wonder if your friend helped kill it?
but that they should work with the same software.
Well, surprisingly, I am running Debian 3.0 now on my Sun Ultra Enterprise 1. I don't know how much more different a computer people typically run Linux on, but this is definitely a non-standard platform in the desktop market today. And lo and behold, it runs the same software.
I guess I don't see a problem, except for coming from people with the mindset that they should be able to go out and buy those $5 CD games at the drugstore and expect them to run on Linux. They won't on MY linux, in fact they probably NEVER will. But the way that Linux is structured now, it's fairly certain Linux, and the main Linux apps will always run on this Ultra 1.
A lot of the 'standards' stuff people seem to advocate would put an end to that. My box would be largely orphaned by some form of Binary Interface. The hell with that is all I can say...
What Andreesen did was grab the NCSA Mosaic team, and run off to private industry to write a closed-source competitor. Then his company sought to make the Internet proprietary, by selling a Server that used the proprietary features and protocol twists that their 'free' Browser had.
What he really accomplished was waking up the bear (Microsoft) that was sleeping in a cave, by standing on a stage and loudly proclaiming 'we will eat your lunch'. Without Andreesen's loudmouth blathering, without his attempt to corner the market on web browsers, we might today live in a world of several dozen standards-compliant web browsers.
In the 60's and 70's there were manual card-punches you could use to modify punched cards one column at a time. Slow, but it sure beat waiting in the line at the library for your turn at one of the two IBM keypunches available when your FORTRAN programming assignment is due the next morning.
I would say that would be a better method than the #2 pencil, and more relevant to this discussion of computer-oriented storage.
I have a friend who worked at a place where they used a Frieden Flexowriter to do their word processing. It stored documents on punched paper tape. There was one secretary who was skilled in the craft of splicing the punched paper tape. It was her job to edit and update form letters stored on paper tape.