> One, LFNs were not implemented right on top of FAT in a "reasonably backwards-compatible way".
I said "reasonably" (as opposed to "perfectly") for a reason, but on the whole it mostly worked pretty well. I should know: I multibooted DOS 6, Windows 95 OSR2, and Linux for several years, going from Debian 1.3.1 on the Linux partition through RedHat 6 and on to Mandrake 7 before I eventually mostly quit booting DOS and Windows[1]. I shared a lot of data between all three systems, and not just data but also applications between DOS and Windows, so I have a fair idea what the interoperability concerns were.
At no point did the LFNs cause data loss or prevent the files from being used in DOS. You had to use the 8.3 filename in DOS, and if you moved files around in DOS (or edited them in an app that writes out the new file first, then erases the old file and renames the new one to the original name -- like Emacs does, though I seldom used Emacs in DOS) then the long filename would be lost (even in Windows -- you'd see the 8.3 filename there too then), but there was never any really *serious* problem, like the actual files themselves getting lost, directories or file allocation tables being corrupted, or anything of that nature.
Actually the real trouble happened not when you shared data with DOS, but rather when you used Windows software, on Windows, that re-used old Win16 or DOS code (either in the app itself or in a library) and therefore made assumptions that were rendered invalid by the introduction of LFNs. The most common of these situations was explicitely looking for spaces in command line args and assuming that they were necessarily delimeters. Apps like that, when associated (in Windows Explorer) with certain filename extensions, could not correctly open files when you double-clicked them, if any part of the path contained a space -- for instance, if the files were stored in a directory called "My Documents". However, this was purely a consequence of introducing filename characters that were formerly illegal, and would have happened regardless of the underlying implementation details at the filesystem level. The same apps also can't handle spaces in filenames on NTFS (if they'll even run on a version of Windows that supports NTFS; some of them will, and some won't).
Personally, I still feel that allowing spaces in filenames is an idea of highly dubious merit (on _any_ OS, but especially on one that was supposed to run code written for an earlier one that didn't allow such things[2]), and that having spaces in important out-of-the-box-default directories like "My Documents" was an exceptionally, spectacularly, fantastically, stupendously, terribly bad idea, but that is really neither here nor there, as far as the backward-compatibility at the filesystem level of the LFN implementation is concerned.
--- [1] The last application I had to give up in order to fully switch over was Pegasus Mail,
and giving it up was rather painful, but I felt I could not remain tied to a specific OS
indefinitely. So I made myself learn to use Gnus.
[2] Yes, it was *possible* on DOS to create a file with a space in its name. However, it
was not easy to do by mistake with the standard tools provided by the OS, although I do
seem to recall one fairly popular third-party word processing app that failed to do the
needed sanity check (*cough* Word Perfect *cough*). Renaming or even opening such
files again was similarly difficult to accomplish if you didn't know what you were doing.
There are two "extensions" I would like to see for vfat, that could be implemented right on top in a reasonably backwards-compatible way (just as LFNs were on top of traditional FAT fs).
The easier and more important one is symbolic links. (Indeed, it ought to be possible to devise a "virtual symlink" system that would work pretty much independent of the underlying filesystem, by simply using hidden pointer files containing the paths to the target files -- similar to.LNK files that the Windows GUI uses, but you'd want them to be supported by the OS at the filesystem layer, just like regular symlinks are on filesystems that have them; also you'd want the design of the pointer files themselves to be cleaner and more platform-agnostic.)
The harder, but ultimately just as important, is journaling (similar to what ext3 does for ext2).
The advantage of extending FAT32 in this way should be obvious: just like with ext2/3, systems that don't support the extension can at least still access the data (although doing so may invalidate the journal). So you don't *lose* any compatibility, you only *gain* the added features. In situations where you *mostly* use the disk with a particular system (e.g., my data drive that spends basically 100% of its time mounted in FreeBSD, but is FAT32 so I can get to my data from a non-BSD system in case of an unforseen emergency), you'd get a lot of benefit from the improved features. (I'd be particularly pleased to have symlinks on my data drive, for instance.) Then you only lose the new features if you need to mount the disk under a system that doesn't support them, e.g., if some piece of hardware on my FreeBSD workstation dies and I need to get my files, I could take the drive and hook it up to just about any computer anywhere and mount it as plain old FAT32 and my files would all be there.
This still doesn't turn FAT into BeFS or ZFS or whatnot, but it would be a welcome improvement.
> Name one show where the replacement person is actually better than the original person who played the role.
The Chief of Security position on Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Of course, the replacement security chief was an existing character who got promoted when the original security chief character was killed off. Still, he was also a much _better_ character.
I also am one of those rare people who actually thought Polaski was better for the show than Crusher, because she was more cantankerous and therefore in some ways better foil and counterpoint to some of the other characters, notably Picard. But after the second season they brought Crusher back, I think because fans viewed her as a potential romantic interest much more than Polaski, and they wanted that.
You remember correctly: they do vary significantly in quality. As do the movies.
The most pathetically terrible movie ever made, absolutely bar none, is The Creeping Terror. The MST3K episode that did this movie is pretty funny, but in some ways the movie is so overwhelmingly outstandingly bad that it doesn't really show off their talent properly. I mean, _anybody_ could make fun of a movie that bad. So from that perspective it might be better to go with one where they pick on a more mundane B-grade movie, such as Cave Dwellers or Bloodlust or The Crawling Hand or even Teenagers from Outer Space.
> (Oh, and I just told Synaptic to mark Gnome and every package that depended on it for removal, > and it said that 315MB would be freed. Vanilla gnome with no other apps installed, then, must > take up less than 315MB. I think KDE uses a bit more. Linux+basic terminal apps+X takes up > MAYBE 200MB, so the 500MB low end of my estimate was closest to reality for a no-app (or, > rather, apps comparable to a vanilla Windows intallation) system with a full-featured GUI.
A lot of stuff that people think of as being "Gnome stuff" (as opposed to "KDE stuff") doesn't actually depend on Gnome as such, just on some of the same things Gnome depends on, notably GTK. I suspect if you mark GTK and everything that depends on it, you'll get a somewhat larger total than for just Gnome.
Like I said upthread, though, hardware space is one of the most abundant of system resources. Memory footprint is a much larger concern for most systems. Drive space? I've got 5.3 GB free on my root filesystem (which is much smaller than the filesystem where I store my data), so what's 300MB among friends? I know people who have individual image files bigger than that sitting around.
> I'm still trying to figure out what XP and Vista do that Windows 95 didn't, which requires > them to take up so much more HD space than it did.
You should be comparing to NT4 (or Win2K), not Win95.
XP and Vista are (more or less) real multi-user systems. Windows 95 let you keep multiple sets of preferences and customizations for things like wallpaper and screensavers and what icons to show on the desktop, but it was not a real multi-user system in technical terms. It had no concept at all of user permissions. Heck, it didn't even have memory protection for processes. The only substantial thing it really offered over Windows 3.1, besides the taskbar, was preemptive multitasking.
Granted, NT4 and even W2K also used a lot less HD space than Vista.
On the other hand, virtually all modern computers have a large surplus of available hard drive space. On desktops that are used mostly by ordinary end users, it is fairly unusual to see more than about 20% of the available space used after five years. (Yes, powerusers use more space. But powerusers aren't really the bulk of Microsoft's userbase, plus they're a lot more willing to invest in additional drives, as compared to end users who normally don't add anything beyond what comes in the box.)
The memory footprint is a more worthwhile thing to complain about, IMO, because even with 3GB of RAM (and most systems still come with less than that) the base system uses a considerable portion of that, which doesn't leave a lot of excess head-room for apps and data.
Also, the virtual memory management in Windows XP is in most ways inferior to that in Linux (since kernel 2.2 came out (IIRC; could be 2.4 if I'm remembering incorrectly, but I think 2.2 was the one that made the big improvement; I do recall kernel 2.0 left something to be desired in this area)). The virtual memory system in Windows is superior in one way: if it needs more virtual memory, it will allocate some automatically from available disk space, unless you specifically configure it not to do so (or unless available disk space is too low). This is better than what Linux does under the same conditions. Linux is better than it used to be: in kernel 2.0, running out of swap space caused Very Bad Things to happen, like for instance closing a window (in order to free up some memory) could take several hours. That was no fun at all. The behavior in 2.4 and 2.6 (killing off the worst-memory-hog processes), while somewhat better, is still not ideal by any means. Still, this doesn't change the fact that the performance characteristics of virtual memory under normal conditions (i.e., when adequate swap space exists) are significantly better on Linux than on Windows XP.
I haven't used Vista, so for all I know it could be a lot better, though I haven't noticed anybody talking excitedly about virtual memory handling improvements, which you would think they would be if any major progress had been made in that area.
Hard drive space? What's a couple of gigabytes, 2% of the total disk space? 5% tops? Is that really enough to be worth getting upset about? If Microsoft could come out with a service pack that caused Windows to only use 5% of the available RAM on a typical system, that would be such an improvement, we'd be dancing in the streets.
> when you have driver troubles in Linux, it's NOT going to be solved by > running a self-executable installer downloaded from the hardware manufacturer.
That doesn't always solve all the problems in Windows, either.
The annoying thing about Windows though is that it _needs_ drivers from the manufacturer for practically everything, even extremely standard components that every other OS on the planet supports out of the box with no messing around. This is particularly annoying with bog-standard video hardware. Any other OS will just go ahead and use 24-bit color, because they haven't made video hardware that can't handle that since roughly the 486 era, but Windows, in the absense of the manufacturer's driver for your exact video hardware, steadfastly refuses to risk anything beyond 8-bit color. I don't know about you, but browsing the web in 8-bit color (even for the short time it takes to get to the manufacturer's website and get the drivers) just about makes my eyes bleed. Another common case is ethernet cards -- even with extremely standard ones that any other OS including BeOS and Mac OS 9 support right out of the box, Windows needs the manufacturer's driver or you're dead in the water. (Easiest solution: pop in a Knoppix CD and use that to download the Windows driver from the manufacturer onto your Windows filesystem.)
Granted, the drivers usually do exist for Windows, and once you get them installed the hardware usually works (though as noted I've run into exceptions from time to time). But it's annoying that you have to hunt down all those drivers and install them. I would understand it for more esoteric hardware like scanners and whatnot, but for bog-standard stuff (like for instance onboard Intel-chipset video) it Ought Not Be Necessary. Seriously.
Of course, if you buy the computer with the OS preinstalled and never have to reinstall (or take the thing into the shop when it needs a reinstall and let somebody _else_ deal with it), then you'll never notice this shortcoming. That's how Microsoft gets away with it, of course, because so many of their users don't install their own stuff.
So in another couple of months at that rate the number of Windows Vista systems being used to browse the web will exceed the number of Windows 98 systems, but it'll be at least a couple of years before it comes close to the number of Windows XP systems.
There are two obvious questions. First, why is this surprising and second, why are we comparing to Mac OS X numbers as if they're even vaguely relevant?
According to <a href="http://mistersanity.blogspot.com/2006/12/wi<nobr>n<wbr></wbr></nobr> dows-vienna-development-timeline.html">my timeline projection</a>, they don't announce it's coming out in 2017 until October of 2016. On the other hand, the current announcement is about three quarters ahead of my timeline, since I didn't have them saying late 2010 until 2008Q2. Thus, by my reckoning, Windows 7 is actually running three quarters of a year ahead of schedule!
> Yes, Vista will eventually gain a large share of the market. I suspect, however, that all of that > marketshare will come at the expense of XP.
Actually, I expect some of it to come at the expense of pre-XP versions of Windows, especially 98SE, which is currently on something like (at a rough guess) 15% of all desktop and laptop computers, most of which are now really starting to show their age and will need to be replaced soon. A few of those will be deliberately replaced with XP because the users were intentionally running the old version out of an aversion to new and unproven technology, but MOST of them are out of date merely because people hadn't bothered to upgrade, and most of the replacements for those systems will come with Vista by default.
Yes, people skip versions all the time. Hardware can (sometimes) last longer than a single OS development cycle, even when it takes as long as Vista did, and most people don't upgrade ad interim. My parents went from Windows 3.1 to Windows 98SE (which they are for now still using), without ever touching Windows 95 in between. If their Win98 box doesn't die horribly before Vista SP1 comes out (ostensibly late this year, according to the press releases, but in reality more likely spring I would guess), they'll probably never have XP.
Oh, and then there's the market share that Vista will gain at the expense of BSD, because as we all know, BSD is dying. (And yes, I'm allowed to make that joke and not get modded down, even though it hasn't been novel or funny in years, because I'm actually right this moment using a FreeBSD system, which is worth at least twice as many geek points as having a good sense of humor:)
> > And why doesn't everyone use fluorescent lighting, since it's cheaper? > That one, I don't have an answer to.
Three reasons I can think of off the top of my head:
First, the up-front cost is what most people use to judge the economy of any given option, not the maintenance and operational costs. It's more obvious and more easily quantifiable, so it's what people go by, mostly. (This is also why inkjet printers are so popular.)
Second, fluorescent lighting, while admittedly more efficient than incandescent, is inferior in certain other ways. It flickers. It doesn't work well in humid weather, sometimes refusing to come on at all. Until quite recently, the bulbs were physically larger, harder to install, and more break-prone. (The new compact ones largely eliminate this concern, and significantly mitigate the previous one as well, but it takes time for people to catch on to such changes.) Breaking the bulbs is more worrisome, due to the mercury. Oh, yeah, and fluorescent bulbs (all gas discharge lamps, actually) produce only limited frequencies of light, rather than a full spectrum, so colors don't look as good under them. That last one is a real killer for a lot of people.
Finally, schools and hospitals and similar institutions have been using fluorescent lighting for decades, so a lot of people psychologically associate it with those environments. Incandescent light feels more comforting and residental.
I'm using FreeBSD, and some of the proprietary-codec-related entries in the ports tree carry big scary warnings from the FreeBSD security team saying that the software in question has known security vulnerabilities, isn't safe, may allow any random website to totally take over your computer, and shouldn't be used.
Who needs legal threats when there are technical ones?
In that case I probably also should mention that I started this job in 2000 and had significant pay raises (like, a dollar an hour type stuff) each of the first three or four years, though now with the budget cuts and the new director my raises have come down to earth a bit (more in line with inflation or a little higher, cost-of-living type stuff).
OTOH, like I said, this is a city of twelve thousand people in central Ohio, so the cost of living is fairly tame. If I took a job in a big city (even a big city in Ohio, like Columbus, much less someplace like Houston) I'd be looking for a substantial pay increase in the bargain, or else I wouldn't take it.
On the gripping hand, that may be partly because I do have several years of meaningful experience to put on my resume. When I didn't, I might have been willing to take less than what I got, if it was all that was on offer.
Finally, money is nice to have, but it is not the only consideration. My current job is about three blocks from my house, so I can walk to work; we're closed on Sundays; and I'm a little bit of a bibliophile, so working at a library is nice from that perspective. Plus I'm part time, which leaves me enough time for some of the other things I do with my life, without burning the candle at both ends. These things are all worth something to me as well.
Bear in mind, however, that I live in a city of about twelve thousand people in central Ohio, so the cost of living is rather lower than it would be in a big city, much less what it would be on either the east or west coast. I put money into savings every month, and there is a non-profit organization that I give to regularly. I'm actually living on significantly less than my full income.
Not that I couldn't find things to do with more money, obviously. But I have what I need. Including (consumer-grade) broadband internet access.
> Generally a company of 20 to 100 employees hires one IT guy to support all desktops, the servers if any, the > website, Internet connection, managers' blackberries, the occasional phone issue and the president's home > computer (and his children's Xbox). That my friend, is a network administrator, occasionally called a system > administrator.
Where I work the official job title is Technology Coordinator, but it's very similar to (if anything a little less specific than) what you describe. Our director doesn't have a Blackberry, and the game console is a different brand, but besides the other things you list I also do staff training, customer support, layout editing, photography, printer maintenance, strategic planning, firewall rulesets, data entry, simple illustrations, technical and non-technical documentation (including reports, disaster plans, policy writeups,...), web development (including some AJAX), general IT consulting, non-IT-related research and reference (paper-based, internet-based, and occasionally microfilm), and even a certain amount of PR work.
The official job title really doesn't matter very much. Everyone just calls me "The Computer Guy". I like to abbreviate that as TCG, as it sounds more official that way. "Technology Coordinator" is just what the former director came up with to call it for the job listing when the position was created, and it stuck long enough to get printed on my business cards.
The one thing I *don't* have to do is manage subordinates. I'm the whole IT department.
Did I mention that I'm technically part time? I average somewhere between 25 and 30 hours per week.
> So if the position you are looking for is say an Exchange Administrator...
A generalist is never going to be happy in a job that hyperspecific.
It's one thing to take a job as a server administrator (which is fairly specific already, from a generalist's perspective), but I cannot imagine applying for a job managing just one specific piece of server software. Such a position would get tediously boring VERY quickly.
I'm not saying your advice is bad, though. Just the example is poorly chosen.
> The organizers believe that text compression and AI are equivalent problems.
I'm pretty sure I don't believe that.
Text compression is very much a form of computation, something computers are naturally very good at. There's a lot of arithmetic, a lot of searching and comparison, and so forth. I'm not aware of any compression algorithm that involves understanding what the text means (unless you count synopsis, but that's very much lossy and gets compression rates that are numerous orders of magnitude better than anything we're talking about here).
Perhaps you were not aware, but in addition to the original list of seven wonders there are approximately seventy hillion bajillion other existing lists of seven wonders. The concept of listing seven wonders of the world was not terribly immaginative in the first place, but after about a thousand iterations, it's now quite thoroughly Done To Death. We already have the original seven wonders of the world, numerous revised lists of seven wonders in the ancient world, several revised lists from medieval Europe, numerous versions for the modern world, at least three different versions of seven wonders of the natural world (one with Niagara falls, one with Victoria falls, and one with both of them), seven wonders of the man-made world, seven wonders of the internet, several new lists of seven wonders, and this is now at least the fifth or sixth list called "the seven new wonders of the world".
At this point practically nobody can keep straight which items are on which lists. Quick, off the top of your head, which list of seven wonders has an international airport on it? Which lists feature "the internet" as one of the wonders? Can you name a list of seven wonders, written since 1750, that doesn't have anything in North America on it? How about one that doesn't have anything south of the equator? Which list doesn't have anything on it that can't be seen from space?
Well, it's larger than any inkjet printer I've ever seen. Most laser printers are. I consider that a minor thing, compared to the cost per page being so much lower, but nonetheless calling the LJ6P small is perhaps overselling it a bit, in a thread about inkjet printers. At a rough guess from memory I'd say it's something like twelve inches by fifteen inches by maybe nine inches tall. That's not enormous, but it's hardly tiny.
On the other hand, that larger desktop footprint buys you a paper drawer, which is nice. (There is also a page-feed mechanism, of course.) Most inkjets only have an open vertical slot for the paper.
The reason I selected the LaserJet 6P to buy on ebay for my home printing needs is because I'd seen that particular model perform already (we had two of them at work, one of which is still in service) and so had a fair idea how it would probably hold up and how many thousands of pages I could expect out of a toner cartridge.
> what has your experience been with inkjet All-in-Ones as far as TCO goes?"
Three words: Avoid, avoid, avoid.
If you print more than about a page a day, get a cheap used black and white laser printer on eBay. I got a used LaserJet 6P on eBay over two years ago, and so far I have replaced the toner cartridge one time. Sure, the toner cartridges are like $60 each, but they print and print and print, then print and print and print some more. The cost per page works out WAY lower.
If you must have color, then fine, keep an inkjet printer around, but ONLY use it when you MUST have color. The rest of the time use the laser printer. Using an inkjet printer when black and white will do is just a fancy way to throw money away.
Slashdot Mirror
> One, LFNs were not implemented right on top of FAT in a "reasonably backwards-compatible way".
I said "reasonably" (as opposed to "perfectly") for a reason, but on the whole it mostly worked pretty well. I should know: I multibooted DOS 6, Windows 95 OSR2, and Linux for several years, going from Debian 1.3.1 on the Linux partition through RedHat 6 and on to Mandrake 7 before I eventually mostly quit booting DOS and Windows[1]. I shared a lot of data between all three systems, and not just data but also applications between DOS and Windows, so I have a fair idea what the interoperability concerns were.
At no point did the LFNs cause data loss or prevent the files from being used in DOS. You had to use the 8.3 filename in DOS, and if you moved files around in DOS (or edited them in an app that writes out the new file first, then erases the old file and renames the new one to the original name -- like Emacs does, though I seldom used Emacs in DOS) then the long filename would be lost (even in Windows -- you'd see the 8.3 filename there too then), but there was never any really *serious* problem, like the actual files themselves getting lost, directories or file allocation tables being corrupted, or anything of that nature.
Actually the real trouble happened not when you shared data with DOS, but rather when you used Windows software, on Windows, that re-used old Win16 or DOS code (either in the app itself or in a library) and therefore made assumptions that were rendered invalid by the introduction of LFNs. The most common of these situations was explicitely looking for spaces in command line args and assuming that they were necessarily delimeters. Apps like that, when associated (in Windows Explorer) with certain filename extensions, could not correctly open files when you double-clicked them, if any part of the path contained a space -- for instance, if the files were stored in a directory called "My Documents". However, this was purely a consequence of introducing filename characters that were formerly illegal, and would have happened regardless of the underlying implementation details at the filesystem level. The same apps also can't handle spaces in filenames on NTFS (if they'll even run on a version of Windows that supports NTFS; some of them will, and some won't).
Personally, I still feel that allowing spaces in filenames is an idea of highly dubious merit (on _any_ OS, but especially on one that was supposed to run code written for an earlier one that didn't allow such things[2]), and that having spaces in important out-of-the-box-default directories like "My Documents" was an exceptionally, spectacularly, fantastically, stupendously, terribly bad idea, but that is really neither here nor there, as far as the backward-compatibility at the filesystem level of the LFN implementation is concerned.
---
[1] The last application I had to give up in order to fully switch over was Pegasus Mail,
and giving it up was rather painful, but I felt I could not remain tied to a specific OS
indefinitely. So I made myself learn to use Gnus.
[2] Yes, it was *possible* on DOS to create a file with a space in its name. However, it
was not easy to do by mistake with the standard tools provided by the OS, although I do
seem to recall one fairly popular third-party word processing app that failed to do the
needed sanity check (*cough* Word Perfect *cough*). Renaming or even opening such
files again was similarly difficult to accomplish if you didn't know what you were doing.
There are two "extensions" I would like to see for vfat, that could be implemented right on top in a reasonably backwards-compatible way (just as LFNs were on top of traditional FAT fs).
.LNK files that the Windows GUI uses, but you'd want them to be supported by the OS at the filesystem layer, just like regular symlinks are on filesystems that have them; also you'd want the design of the pointer files themselves to be cleaner and more platform-agnostic.)
The easier and more important one is symbolic links. (Indeed, it ought to be possible to devise a "virtual symlink" system that would work pretty much independent of the underlying filesystem, by simply using hidden pointer files containing the paths to the target files -- similar to
The harder, but ultimately just as important, is journaling (similar to what ext3 does for ext2).
The advantage of extending FAT32 in this way should be obvious: just like with ext2/3, systems that don't support the extension can at least still access the data (although doing so may invalidate the journal). So you don't *lose* any compatibility, you only *gain* the added features. In situations where you *mostly* use the disk with a particular system (e.g., my data drive that spends basically 100% of its time mounted in FreeBSD, but is FAT32 so I can get to my data from a non-BSD system in case of an unforseen emergency), you'd get a lot of benefit from the improved features. (I'd be particularly pleased to have symlinks on my data drive, for instance.) Then you only lose the new features if you need to mount the disk under a system that doesn't support them, e.g., if some piece of hardware on my FreeBSD workstation dies and I need to get my files, I could take the drive and hook it up to just about any computer anywhere and mount it as plain old FAT32 and my files would all be there.
This still doesn't turn FAT into BeFS or ZFS or whatnot, but it would be a welcome improvement.
> Name one show where the replacement person is actually better than the original person who played the role.
The Chief of Security position on Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Of course, the replacement security chief was an existing character who got promoted when the original security chief character was killed off. Still, he was also a much _better_ character.
I also am one of those rare people who actually thought Polaski was better for the show than Crusher, because she was more cantankerous and therefore in some ways better foil and counterpoint to some of the other characters, notably Picard. But after the second season they brought Crusher back, I think because fans viewed her as a potential romantic interest much more than Polaski, and they wanted that.
You remember correctly: they do vary significantly in quality. As do the movies.
The most pathetically terrible movie ever made, absolutely bar none, is The Creeping Terror. The MST3K episode that did this movie is pretty funny, but in some ways the movie is so overwhelmingly outstandingly bad that it doesn't really show off their talent properly. I mean, _anybody_ could make fun of a movie that bad. So from that perspective it might be better to go with one where they pick on a more mundane B-grade movie, such as Cave Dwellers or Bloodlust or The Crawling Hand or even Teenagers from Outer Space.
Just put an airport beacon on a strobe.
> (Oh, and I just told Synaptic to mark Gnome and every package that depended on it for removal,
> and it said that 315MB would be freed. Vanilla gnome with no other apps installed, then, must
> take up less than 315MB. I think KDE uses a bit more. Linux+basic terminal apps+X takes up
> MAYBE 200MB, so the 500MB low end of my estimate was closest to reality for a no-app (or,
> rather, apps comparable to a vanilla Windows intallation) system with a full-featured GUI.
A lot of stuff that people think of as being "Gnome stuff" (as opposed to "KDE stuff") doesn't actually depend on Gnome as such, just on some of the same things Gnome depends on, notably GTK. I suspect if you mark GTK and everything that depends on it, you'll get a somewhat larger total than for just Gnome.
Like I said upthread, though, hardware space is one of the most abundant of system resources. Memory footprint is a much larger concern for most systems. Drive space? I've got 5.3 GB free on my root filesystem (which is much smaller than the filesystem where I store my data), so what's 300MB among friends? I know people who have individual image files bigger than that sitting around.
> I'm still trying to figure out what XP and Vista do that Windows 95 didn't, which requires
> them to take up so much more HD space than it did.
You should be comparing to NT4 (or Win2K), not Win95.
XP and Vista are (more or less) real multi-user systems. Windows 95 let you keep multiple sets of preferences and customizations for things like wallpaper and screensavers and what icons to show on the desktop, but it was not a real multi-user system in technical terms. It had no concept at all of user permissions. Heck, it didn't even have memory protection for processes. The only substantial thing it really offered over Windows 3.1, besides the taskbar, was preemptive multitasking.
Granted, NT4 and even W2K also used a lot less HD space than Vista.
On the other hand, virtually all modern computers have a large surplus of available hard drive space. On desktops that are used mostly by ordinary end users, it is fairly unusual to see more than about 20% of the available space used after five years. (Yes, powerusers use more space. But powerusers aren't really the bulk of Microsoft's userbase, plus they're a lot more willing to invest in additional drives, as compared to end users who normally don't add anything beyond what comes in the box.)
The memory footprint is a more worthwhile thing to complain about, IMO, because even with 3GB of RAM (and most systems still come with less than that) the base system uses a considerable portion of that, which doesn't leave a lot of excess head-room for apps and data.
Also, the virtual memory management in Windows XP is in most ways inferior to that in Linux (since kernel 2.2 came out (IIRC; could be 2.4 if I'm remembering incorrectly, but I think 2.2 was the one that made the big improvement; I do recall kernel 2.0 left something to be desired in this area)). The virtual memory system in Windows is superior in one way: if it needs more virtual memory, it will allocate some automatically from available disk space, unless you specifically configure it not to do so (or unless available disk space is too low). This is better than what Linux does under the same conditions. Linux is better than it used to be: in kernel 2.0, running out of swap space caused Very Bad Things to happen, like for instance closing a window (in order to free up some memory) could take several hours. That was no fun at all. The behavior in 2.4 and 2.6 (killing off the worst-memory-hog processes), while somewhat better, is still not ideal by any means. Still, this doesn't change the fact that the performance characteristics of virtual memory under normal conditions (i.e., when adequate swap space exists) are significantly better on Linux than on Windows XP.
I haven't used Vista, so for all I know it could be a lot better, though I haven't noticed anybody talking excitedly about virtual memory handling improvements, which you would think they would be if any major progress had been made in that area.
Hard drive space? What's a couple of gigabytes, 2% of the total disk space? 5% tops? Is that really enough to be worth getting upset about? If Microsoft could come out with a service pack that caused Windows to only use 5% of the available RAM on a typical system, that would be such an improvement, we'd be dancing in the streets.
> when you have driver troubles in Linux, it's NOT going to be solved by
> running a self-executable installer downloaded from the hardware manufacturer.
That doesn't always solve all the problems in Windows, either.
The annoying thing about Windows though is that it _needs_ drivers from the manufacturer for practically everything, even extremely standard components that every other OS on the planet supports out of the box with no messing around. This is particularly annoying with bog-standard video hardware. Any other OS will just go ahead and use 24-bit color, because they haven't made video hardware that can't handle that since roughly the 486 era, but Windows, in the absense of the manufacturer's driver for your exact video hardware, steadfastly refuses to risk anything beyond 8-bit color. I don't know about you, but browsing the web in 8-bit color (even for the short time it takes to get to the manufacturer's website and get the drivers) just about makes my eyes bleed. Another common case is ethernet cards -- even with extremely standard ones that any other OS including BeOS and Mac OS 9 support right out of the box, Windows needs the manufacturer's driver or you're dead in the water. (Easiest solution: pop in a Knoppix CD and use that to download the Windows driver from the manufacturer onto your Windows filesystem.)
Granted, the drivers usually do exist for Windows, and once you get them installed the hardware usually works (though as noted I've run into exceptions from time to time). But it's annoying that you have to hunt down all those drivers and install them. I would understand it for more esoteric hardware like scanners and whatnot, but for bog-standard stuff (like for instance onboard Intel-chipset video) it Ought Not Be Necessary. Seriously.
Of course, if you buy the computer with the OS preinstalled and never have to reinstall (or take the thing into the shop when it needs a reinstall and let somebody _else_ deal with it), then you'll never notice this shortcoming. That's how Microsoft gets away with it, of course, because so many of their users don't install their own stuff.
So in another couple of months at that rate the number of Windows Vista systems being used to browse the web will exceed the number of Windows 98 systems, but it'll be at least a couple of years before it comes close to the number of Windows XP systems.
There are two obvious questions. First, why is this surprising and second, why are we comparing to Mac OS X numbers as if they're even vaguely relevant?
Didn't there used to be a cc at one point distributed under the BSD license? What ever happened to that, anyway?
My apologies for posting in extrans mode by mistake. Here, let me repost that link in HTML-formatted mode.
According to <a href="http://mistersanity.blogspot.com/2006/12/wi<nobr>n<wbr></wbr></nobr> dows-vienna-development-timeline.html">my timeline projection</a>, they don't announce it's coming out in 2017 until October of 2016. On the other hand, the current announcement is about three quarters ahead of my timeline, since I didn't have them saying late 2010 until 2008Q2. Thus, by my reckoning, Windows 7 is actually running three quarters of a year ahead of schedule!
> Yes, Vista will eventually gain a large share of the market. I suspect, however, that all of that
:)
> marketshare will come at the expense of XP.
Actually, I expect some of it to come at the expense of pre-XP versions of Windows, especially 98SE, which is currently on something like (at a rough guess) 15% of all desktop and laptop computers, most of which are now really starting to show their age and will need to be replaced soon. A few of those will be deliberately replaced with XP because the users were intentionally running the old version out of an aversion to new and unproven technology, but MOST of them are out of date merely because people hadn't bothered to upgrade, and most of the replacements for those systems will come with Vista by default.
Yes, people skip versions all the time. Hardware can (sometimes) last longer than a single OS development cycle, even when it takes as long as Vista did, and most people don't upgrade ad interim. My parents went from Windows 3.1 to Windows 98SE (which they are for now still using), without ever touching Windows 95 in between. If their Win98 box doesn't die horribly before Vista SP1 comes out (ostensibly late this year, according to the press releases, but in reality more likely spring I would guess), they'll probably never have XP.
Oh, and then there's the market share that Vista will gain at the expense of BSD, because as we all know, BSD is dying. (And yes, I'm allowed to make that joke and not get modded down, even though it hasn't been novel or funny in years, because I'm actually right this moment using a FreeBSD system, which is worth at least twice as many geek points as having a good sense of humor
I have the full timeline right here.
> > And why doesn't everyone use fluorescent lighting, since it's cheaper?
> That one, I don't have an answer to.
Three reasons I can think of off the top of my head:
First, the up-front cost is what most people use to judge the economy of any given option, not the maintenance and operational costs. It's more obvious and more easily quantifiable, so it's what people go by, mostly. (This is also why inkjet printers are so popular.)
Second, fluorescent lighting, while admittedly more efficient than incandescent, is inferior in certain other ways. It flickers. It doesn't work well in humid weather, sometimes refusing to come on at all. Until quite recently, the bulbs were physically larger, harder to install, and more break-prone. (The new compact ones largely eliminate this concern, and significantly mitigate the previous one as well, but it takes time for people to catch on to such changes.) Breaking the bulbs is more worrisome, due to the mercury. Oh, yeah, and fluorescent bulbs (all gas discharge lamps, actually) produce only limited frequencies of light, rather than a full spectrum, so colors don't look as good under them. That last one is a real killer for a lot of people.
Finally, schools and hospitals and similar institutions have been using fluorescent lighting for decades, so a lot of people psychologically associate it with those environments. Incandescent light feels more comforting and residental.
I'm using FreeBSD, and some of the proprietary-codec-related entries in the ports tree carry big scary warnings from the FreeBSD security team saying that the software in question has known security vulnerabilities, isn't safe, may allow any random website to totally take over your computer, and shouldn't be used.
Who needs legal threats when there are technical ones?
In that case I probably also should mention that I started this job in 2000 and had significant pay raises (like, a dollar an hour type stuff) each of the first three or four years, though now with the budget cuts and the new director my raises have come down to earth a bit (more in line with inflation or a little higher, cost-of-living type stuff).
OTOH, like I said, this is a city of twelve thousand people in central Ohio, so the cost of living is fairly tame. If I took a job in a big city (even a big city in Ohio, like Columbus, much less someplace like Houston) I'd be looking for a substantial pay increase in the bargain, or else I wouldn't take it.
On the gripping hand, that may be partly because I do have several years of meaningful experience to put on my resume. When I didn't, I might have been willing to take less than what I got, if it was all that was on offer.
Finally, money is nice to have, but it is not the only consideration. My current job is about three blocks from my house, so I can walk to work; we're closed on Sundays; and I'm a little bit of a bibliophile, so working at a library is nice from that perspective. Plus I'm part time, which leaves me enough time for some of the other things I do with my life, without burning the candle at both ends. These things are all worth something to me as well.
My 2006 W-2 box 1 said 16864.49.
Bear in mind, however, that I live in a city of about twelve thousand people in central Ohio, so the cost of living is rather lower than it would be in a big city, much less what it would be on either the east or west coast. I put money into savings every month, and there is a non-profit organization that I give to regularly. I'm actually living on significantly less than my full income.
Not that I couldn't find things to do with more money, obviously. But I have what I need. Including (consumer-grade) broadband internet access.
> Generally a company of 20 to 100 employees hires one IT guy to support all desktops, the servers if any, the
...), web development (including some AJAX), general IT consulting, non-IT-related research and reference (paper-based, internet-based, and occasionally microfilm), and even a certain amount of PR work.
> website, Internet connection, managers' blackberries, the occasional phone issue and the president's home
> computer (and his children's Xbox). That my friend, is a network administrator, occasionally called a system
> administrator.
Where I work the official job title is Technology Coordinator, but it's very similar to (if anything a little less specific than) what you describe. Our director doesn't have a Blackberry, and the game console is a different brand, but besides the other things you list I also do staff training, customer support, layout editing, photography, printer maintenance, strategic planning, firewall rulesets, data entry, simple illustrations, technical and non-technical documentation (including reports, disaster plans, policy writeups,
The official job title really doesn't matter very much. Everyone just calls me "The Computer Guy". I like to abbreviate that as TCG, as it sounds more official that way. "Technology Coordinator" is just what the former director came up with to call it for the job listing when the position was created, and it stuck long enough to get printed on my business cards.
The one thing I *don't* have to do is manage subordinates. I'm the whole IT department.
Did I mention that I'm technically part time? I average somewhere between 25 and 30 hours per week.
> So if the position you are looking for is say an Exchange Administrator...
A generalist is never going to be happy in a job that hyperspecific.
It's one thing to take a job as a server administrator (which is fairly specific already, from a generalist's perspective), but I cannot imagine applying for a job managing just one specific piece of server software. Such a position would get tediously boring VERY quickly.
I'm not saying your advice is bad, though. Just the example is poorly chosen.
> The organizers believe that text compression and AI are equivalent problems.
I'm pretty sure I don't believe that.
Text compression is very much a form of computation, something computers are naturally very good at. There's a lot of arithmetic, a lot of searching and comparison, and so forth. I'm not aware of any compression algorithm that involves understanding what the text means (unless you count synopsis, but that's very much lossy and gets compression rates that are numerous orders of magnitude better than anything we're talking about here).
Perhaps you were not aware, but in addition to the original list of seven wonders there are approximately seventy hillion bajillion other existing lists of seven wonders. The concept of listing seven wonders of the world was not terribly immaginative in the first place, but after about a thousand iterations, it's now quite thoroughly Done To Death. We already have the original seven wonders of the world, numerous revised lists of seven wonders in the ancient world, several revised lists from medieval Europe, numerous versions for the modern world, at least three different versions of seven wonders of the natural world (one with Niagara falls, one with Victoria falls, and one with both of them), seven wonders of the man-made world, seven wonders of the internet, several new lists of seven wonders, and this is now at least the fifth or sixth list called "the seven new wonders of the world".
At this point practically nobody can keep straight which items are on which lists. Quick, off the top of your head, which list of seven wonders has an international airport on it? Which lists feature "the internet" as one of the wonders? Can you name a list of seven wonders, written since 1750, that doesn't have anything in North America on it? How about one that doesn't have anything south of the equator? Which list doesn't have anything on it that can't be seen from space?
1998 called. They want their news story back.
> the printer is physically fairly small
Well, it's larger than any inkjet printer I've ever seen. Most laser printers are. I consider that a minor thing, compared to the cost per page being so much lower, but nonetheless calling the LJ6P small is perhaps overselling it a bit, in a thread about inkjet printers. At a rough guess from memory I'd say it's something like twelve inches by fifteen inches by maybe nine inches tall. That's not enormous, but it's hardly tiny.
On the other hand, that larger desktop footprint buys you a paper drawer, which is nice. (There is also a page-feed mechanism, of course.) Most inkjets only have an open vertical slot for the paper.
The reason I selected the LaserJet 6P to buy on ebay for my home printing needs is because I'd seen that particular model perform already (we had two of them at work, one of which is still in service) and so had a fair idea how it would probably hold up and how many thousands of pages I could expect out of a toner cartridge.
> what has your experience been with inkjet All-in-Ones as far as TCO goes?"
Three words:
Avoid, avoid, avoid.
If you print more than about a page a day, get a cheap used black and white laser printer on eBay. I got a used LaserJet 6P on eBay over two years ago, and so far I have replaced the toner cartridge one time. Sure, the toner cartridges are like $60 each, but they print and print and print, then print and print and print some more. The cost per page works out WAY lower.
If you must have color, then fine, keep an inkjet printer around, but ONLY use it when you MUST have color. The rest of the time use the laser printer. Using an inkjet printer when black and white will do is just a fancy way to throw money away.