George Michael could turn up on my doorstep with his entire back catalogue of CDs signed is his own blood and hand me the keys to a brand new Ferrari and I still wouldn't play his music!
Sure, I'd take the Ferrari but as I wheelspun away up the road leaving George in a cloud of dust, it would be AC/DC's "Back In Black" blaring on the car stereo, not "Careless Whisper"...
Why do most people assume that if you need to create documents, spreadsheets or presentations, that the only software you can use is MS Office?
Surely educational departments, some of which are in poor urban areas, should be doing their best not to alienate less wealthy students by using an expensive (if used legally) office package? Bear in mind that these students will probably expect to use the same software at home that they do at school or college.
Besides I fail to see why a student, who is probably not too far off from learning the basics of word processors, etc., needs the myriads of redundant features (at that level) that Office 2003 provides. It's one thing having to create an impressive presentation for your CEO at work, but in an educational environment, surely content of a presentation is far more important than how it looks?
As a tax payer who is constantly being told that education is suffering through endless governmental cutbacks (although I suspect you are in the USA, the situation is the same here in Europe), I would much rather the taxes I pay were spent on books for libraries rather than lining Bill Gates' pockets.
OpenOffice.org is more than adequate for most people in the workplace, let alone students starting out with computers and it's free.
Unfortunately, the problem with the commercial games market at the moment is summarised as follows:
1. Games developers would not choose to create games for the PC anyway, given the choice. They prefer the less pirate-able, higher revenue console platforms but cannot afford to ignore the huge "Windows PC" market but don't financially have to give a damn about we "minority" Linux users.
2. So much money is spent on commercial games development these days that any title has to guarantee high sales before it's released. This means that most titles follow popular formulas - like football/soccer games in Europe that are always big sellers - meaning that the games market is bland and unoriginal with little exception (IMHO despite being an avid games player myself). It follows that with no interest in original games in the first place, they can continue to follow their previous strategies of developing only for certain platforms.
3. Because games development costs are so high, APIs like DirectX greatly simplify the development process and allow games companies to cut costs quite considerably since they no longer need to worry about driver-level concerns of sound and video cards, joysticks, etc. They therefore prefer to develop DirectX games (and therefore Windows-only games) for the PC.
4. Games that are ported to Linux fall into one of two categories:
a. Those that use OpenGL APIs, which exist on Windows, Linux and possibly other OSes meaning that multi-platform development is possible from the outset - as was the case with Quake 1/2/3, Unreal Tournament and the games that use their grapics engines, or:
b. Originally DirectX-based games that companies like Loki ported for Linux (Heroes of Might & Magic III, Alpha Centauri, Civilisation Call To Power, etc). My guess is that Loki managed to license the games for a low enough cost to believe they could get enough Linux user sales to justify the time and expense of porting to Linux although this was, unfortunately, not the case in the end.
The upshot of all of this leaves a "chicken and egg" situation - games developers won't create for Linux until there are enough Linux users (who are also willing to pay for games) and many people won't use Linux without games being available.
All I can say is that the games market is dull anyway at the moment and I've personally had more fun going into my back-catalogue of older games and playing some of those recently - with free tools like DosBox and Wine, you have a chance of playing some of those within Linux and a lot of the others have been ported to Linux natively due to Open Sourcing of various older good games like Duke Nukem, Doom, Quake, etc. Not forgetting the emulators to play Amiga, NES & SNES, etc. games in Linux.
I'm looking forward to Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 (with hopefiully native Linux support) and the only other game I'd like to see Open Sourced for Linux is Total Annihilation.
- Monitor all incoming connections to your computer, automatically shut down any connections that look suspicious and email you a warning that it's done that.
- Automatically convert a directory full of graphics images into JPEG/GIF/etc. formats, achive them up and burn them straight to CD
- Play a computer game when you're really bored, have no games installed but have access to a terminal, the Internet and your home machine with Nethack or an Infocom adventure on it.
- Use bash and pine to access your ISP email from work when you're sick and tired of the ISP's web interface timing out before you've finished entering a reply.
I'm productive because I use the GUI for some things and the CLI for others. What's your excuse?
They are support guys who have Windows 2000 laptops and are used to working on those.
They have little or no UNIX experience but are expected to support a telephony application that has been migrated to Linux server platforms.
Prior to the migration, they worked purely within the telephony application but now have to find their way around Linux including checking system logs, configuring TCP/IP and interfaces, apply patches, etc. They also need to pull off information from multiple files to mail off to software developers etc.
My course didn't teach them to shell-script. I taught them where files were and gave them a lot of commands for text manipulation, about as much as you can expect to deliver in a 2-day Linux introduction.
I was trying to illustrate that these guys are not even knowledgeable with scripting, even at the DOS shell prompt, but given particular things they needed to achieve, they were able to use the commands and rules I gave them to create their own quite powerful programs.
For example, I'd never even mentioned about arguments to scripts ($1, $2, etc.) but they'd worked those out for themselves within a couple of weeks and wrote scripts to manipulate those also along with some simple error checking.
The point of my post, which you seem to have missed, was that the command line is a powerful tool for automation that is not difficult to start using to great effect if you have a particular problem to solve and know a few commands.
I developed an training course at work to introduce Windows-orientated users to Linux.
From the word go I had them "cat"-ing, "sort"-ing, "grep"-ing and "cut"-ing files, showed them how to combine commands on the command line and how to turn them into shell-scripts.
The guys I taught were, like me, support engineers on Linux-based telephony products and were keen on learning how to strip relevant info from log & text files.
Within a couple of weeks they were churning out pretty good shell-scripts that were extracting info from files all across the system, "gzip"-ing them up and mailing them off automatically in cron jobs. Many of the commands they used in the scripts I'd never even mentioned in the training but had showed them about man pages and "find"-ing files on the system.
The moral behind the story is that if you give people enough of the basics, they'll soon go find problems they need to solve and work out their own ways of doing it.
It doesn't stop an "intelligent" user doing that. Unfortunately, Joe Sixpack will continue to blindly download WMP without thinking and all of a sudden, DRM formats become the majority and everyone loses their freedoms and subjects of the Microsoft tax.
It's not WMP that's the problem, it's the implications of it becoming the majority player that is the problem.
If the car is the end product then the parts of that car that make it work are core to the original design and cannot be substituted for other parts unless they are "standard" parts like tyres, wiper blades or the music system.
However, the manufacturer of the car has little impact on deciding "how you run" that car - so you can fill up from any petrol/gas station you wish, can use whatever breakdown service you require and you can drive the car safely and carefully or at speed.
Microsoft's attitude is to lock you into Windows and their products only - that's standard business practice. The fact is that they can afford to give some of those products away "freely" (like IE or WMP) while others cost money because of the size and complexity of those products (like MS Office).
However, many of those products do not constitute the "operating system" and are designed into forcing you to use the computer in specific ways - i.e. force you into using specific file formats, force you into using specific keyboard and menu shortcuts, etc.
If you don't accept this, have a look at a lot of modern devices like routers, switches, telephony systems, set-top boxes - all of these run (frequently embedded) operating systems that provide the necessary functionality for the job that is required but due to size an memory constraints do not have redundant extra applications that never need to be used in those environments.
Added to this, why do you need to install extra redundant software for a PC that is going to act purely as a web server, for example? It could be argued that you don't even need a GUI for such a box.
The fact is that it is desktop users want programs like media players, browsers, office apps, etc., so it could be argued that Windows, OS X and Linux with KDE/Gnome are "desktop environments", not just operating systems. At the point a system becomes a desktop environment, then its usability is subject to what the user him/herself deems to be usable software - it is therefore reasonable to expect the user to have a choice in what he/she runs to perform a specific task.
I'm also "annoyed" at this term that several people here have used - "modern operating systems" and I would dearly like one of those people to define that term better.
I'm going to take an intuitive leap here and assume that those people mean "a GUI driven OS that has no reliance on the command line" when they talk about a "modern OS".
However, these same people fail to realise that the command line has the power of providing automation and scripting, something that most Linux & UNIX power users learn very quickly - even in a corporate Windows environment, command-line scripts get run to update software, add network shares, etc.
There is actually no such thing as a "modern OS". What there are are "good OSes" that allow the user or the administrator to customise the operating system to be as suitable and as easy as possible to use. With Windows, it's a Microsoft-orientated way of doing things that some people no doubt find acceptable while others prefer the UNIX/Linux methodology of very in-depth customisation.
But whichever method you use, the concept of the OS is the same - to provide a software platform that makes the hardware as easy to use as possible and lets you decide what applications you want to run on it.
I don't agree with the forced exclusion of WMP either except for the fact that WMP is a mechanism for MS to get DRM in through the back door.
The problem is that most Windows users use WMP because it's free and don't think about the implications of having to pay MS a "tax" in future to used DRM licenses. When these people cannot play MP3s & MPEGs anymore because WMP has killed all competition, it will be too late by then.
Any move that helps us maintain our rights and freedoms with the media we rightfully own is a good move...
I had the "sluggish mapped drives" problem myself for a while in Windows 98 but I found out a lot of the problem was from running IPX/SPX (for some older games) in parallel with TCP/IP.
Once I took this off and applied all the relevant Windows 98 updates, it ran most reasonably.
If you just require desktop functionality and Internet access, Windows 98 is a perfectly reasonable OS to use if you can put up with the poor memory management and lack of support for some later hardware.
Windows 98 does not contain a "full" IP stack and does not run lots of services in background so, in many respects, is a more secure OS from the point of view of Joe Sixpack who does not understand the finer points of securing Windows 2000 or XP fully. Sure, IE is buggy and difficult to remove but Mozilla runs perfectly happily on it together with the endless non-Microsoft mail clients.
Although Linux is my main OS, I run Windows at home for games and a few applications. I only upgraded to Windows 2000 here recently, from Windows 98, purely because of Windows Explorer which seemed to suffer wierd slowdown problems when dealing with folders with large numbers of files in. Otherwise, with a bit of messing around in config.sys and autoexec.bat, I got some degree
of stable memory management going (though not as good as Windows 2000 admittedly) and was fairly happy with it.
As for Windows XP, I won't touch it. It may be stabler and better than Windows 2000 but I find it far too "patronsing" - the desktop is far too bloaty and filled with unnecessary features and I don't like all the decisions about commonly run programs, etc.
But you are right about one thing - Windows 98 does seem a lot more responsive than does Windows 2000 and my (limited) experience with XP once you've tweaked Windows 98 a little.
You cannot compare "Linux" to "Longhorn" because it is meaningless. I know (or care) little for Microsoft products but I am assuming that a Longhorn machine will function as a desktop or as server machine.
In Linux, a purely server machine does not require any form of desktop functionality so there is little point in installing a "heavy" desktop like KDE or Gnome - you might install X-Windows and a light Window manager in which case the memory footprint will be much smaller. With Windows, you are always required to run the GUI environment with all the overhead that requires.
If Longhorn currently has a 480-odd MB memory imprint then if you use it for desktop work, you will probably find 1GB RAM to be more an ideal amount of memory once you start running Office and graphics applications - otherwise, you will get a lot of slowdown due to file-paging.
Memory is not a real issue because of its cheapness but the type of Linux distribution you use will heavily impact memoey usage - Mandrake, SuSE or RedHat are likely very memory hungry distributions whereas Slackware and Gentoo can be slimmed down very considerably.
Isn't it a little pointless making a record of every event in your life unless you have a specific need to review all that information?
Would you therefore not end up spending your entire life reviewing those previous events in your life? To the point where you end up reviewing yourself reviewing previous events?
On the other hand, if you record all the events in your life for future generations, wouldn't those future generations care nothing about 99.99% of what you did?
Sure, I'd love to see a visual record of the battles of Alexander the Great but I'm not sure I'd give a damn about what time his daily bowel movements were or whether he liked his meat rare or well-done.
The Creator / process of evolution (delete where applicable) has already endowed me with an organic device called a "brain". While I doubt this organ has been stamped with a "Copyright Microsoft Corp." logo, it has served me well for over four decades.
Sure, sometimes it's a little slow, particularly in the mornings, and doesn't always retrieve stored data quite as quickly as I might like but it's mine, paid for and has contents available under an Open Source license - i.e. anyone who wants a description of what's held in it is generally welcome to it. Oh, and it never Blue Screens...
Quite frankly, I quite like the fact that it's there doing the job it does. It gives me connectivity to 5 important sensory inputs that I can sometimes enhance with manual devices like cameras (to provide visual enhancements to my stored memory) and headphones (to focus my mind on very specific sound stimulations).
Yes, it's limited sometimes. I cannot always remember where I've met someone before or what a person's name is but at that point, I can kick in my in-built communications mode and go find out the information I need for myself. That's because I'm sentient and adaptable and capable of making decisions for myself, you see.
In summary, please rest assured that if and when I feel I have the need for handing over some or all of my existing thought processes into the arms of a mega-corporation, I'm afraid it's unlikely to be Microsoft.
No doubt your marketing department will offer this replacement to me as "Brain XP" or "Mindows Longhorn" but I'm afraid I'll be forced to stick with good old "Brain v1.0" - it may be slow, a bland grey colour and possibly a little bloated but it rarely lies, believes in choice and freedom and never needs a Service Pack.
Only 15 years ago, Dell's new CEO was up on stage fronting his band, Dexy's Midnight Runners, dressed in faded denim dungarees and singing "Come On Eileen" and now look at him... chairman of a global computer corporation... amazing.
How I wish that the (generally) above average intelligence of the/. community would spread into the wider world!
We could stop all this bullsh*t tomorrow if we just took direct positive action and stopped buying those products that restrict our basic rights.
Throughout the thousands of years of human culture, we have shared music, dance and stories within small tribal communities and huge world-spanning empires. Now all that will stop purely because of one thing... money.
Culturally, we are entering into a dark age of human-kind. Globalisation means that our cultural roots become diluted and entertainment is enjoyed only by those that can afford it - those that make that entertainment can only do so because it is profitable meaning that entertainers deemed to be for a minority audience are stifled and ignored by the big corporations that control the media of entertainment.
It's happening now - Hollywood movies have become formulaic, music has become manufactured and plastic, television crammed to the brim with cheap, reality TV programs.
One day, this will all change for the better. As the corporations impose more and more restrictions on the general masses, more people will become disillusioned and there will be a breaking point.
How I hope that one day we become organised enough as "consumers" to take direct positive action. Just imagine if the entire human race, for just 24 hours, didn't go to the cinema... didn't buy a CD or a DVD... turned the televisions off. Imagine the fear that would create in the likes of Disney, Sony & the other media corporations. They would have to listen to us...
It's not strictly legal but you can always go get yourself a copy of Frotz and then go trawl some of the ROM and emulation sites for Infocom games - because they released a lot of the games for the Commodore Amiga, Apple II, Commodore 64, etc., you can download the ROMs and then strip the data files out to run the games in Frotz. (There are utilities that will do this.)
Alternatively, if you have Usenet access, go take a look in the alt.binaries.emulation.misc or alt.binaries.emulation.tosec groups which have a lot of ROMs regularly posted in there.
Does anyone else see the events of the last few years as signalling "The End" for Microsoft? Or at least backing them into a corner where they must change their business strategies?
In the past few years, look at what Microsoft's user base has suffered as a result of using their products:
1. Countless viruses - okay, not directly Microsoft's fault but nobody here would agree that MS have done all they could have done to make their products as secure as possible.
2. Licensing changes - costing businesses more.
Okay, so there's nothing new in either of the above except that both the above have had sometimes dramatic reductions on company profits through downtimes and extra IT costs. Add to that the shrinkage in the high-tech industry over the past few years and, all of a sudden, there are a heap of governments out there getting less income from taxation as a result.
On top of that, those same governments are being squeezed to spend less and less on public services and along comes Open Source that suddenly seems to offer a way of cutting down on a lot of the government's IT expenditure.
I know these discussions have been had on/. many times before but this issue in Japan just seems the latest in a long line of governments wanting to simply give, rightly or wrongly, Microsoft "a good kicking" - firstly the DOJ, then Europe, now Japan.
I don't think it matters whether or not MS is a "monopoly" but it is apparent that they could have done a lot more in the past to stop what's happening to them now.
This definitely needs some action from us license payers...
Firstly, I don't mind the BBC license at all because I get advert-free TV and radio programming that's of a consistently good quality. It's worth the money in that respect.
Secondly, the "illusion" that ITV is "free" is a myth - we all pay higher prices for products because a proportion of those prices funds TV & radio advertisement. Get those channels through satellite or cable TV and you pay an extra subscription charge on the top of that...
However, there's a much deeper issue here. The BBC has been in existence for most of the 20th century and their archive includes a very detailed log of global history throughout that time as well as entertainment programs. The value of that archive cannot be underestimated as a historical, social and political eductaional resource for future generations - therefore, if it is to be "opened to the public" then it must be done so in a manner independent of DRM enforced by an American software company! Otherwise, the public ends up paying Microsoft to access information that should be accessible to all, no matter whether they can afford to pay MS for a DRM license.
I must admit, I'm not sure about how access should be controlled to entertainment programs in the archive - for example, I guess a lot of people already own taped copies of "Hitch-Hikers Guide To The Galaxy" when it was first broadcast on BBC Radio while many others have purchased legitimate tapes and CDs of the same programs; the same can be said for the superb "Lord Of The Rings" and Asimov's "Foundation" dramatisations that were also broadcast on BBC radio.
I think the answer probably lies in the BBC making lower quality audio and video versions freely available in their archive with the option to purchase higher quality versions legitimately - in the way that MP3 downloading has done no real damage to CD sales.
However, the core issue here is maintaining the right to free information. Just as anyone (in the UK at least) can stroll into a public library and have free access to important historical books, the factual BBC archive must be handled in a similar fashion, even to the point where there's a PC in every library to be able to get to that archive also.
Anyone know of the best place to send an email to on this within the BBC? They'll have to listen to those if us that pay our licenses:-)
To be perfectly honest, if MS used their own proprietary XML extensions, I don't see how it would work anyway.
It's a fact of life that MS Exchange lives in corporate environments but ISPs and everyone use sendmail (or a sendmail derivative) for mail routing over the Internet.
It's actually in MS's interests to work with sendmail on an open protocol to do spam filtering properly (whatever that protocol is ultimately).
Remember that TCP/IP is an open standard and MS supports TCP/IP open protocols like FTP, HTTP, POP3, SMTP, etc. already in their products so this is no different.
Who are you trying to punish with this, MS, or Windows users?
I don't see how anyone is punishing you. Even if MS is forced to unbundle WMP from Windows, you would still be able to download and install it yourself if you really like it.
What you don't realise is that by using WMP you are effectively giving Microsoft the "green light" to go ahead and install all manner of DRM libraries and tools - before you know it, you'll find that you can't play your MP3s or MPEG movies any longer - unless you pay a tax to Microsoft.
The fact is that up until now, we've all had reasonably fair use of DVDs, CDs & software that we've paid for because no-one's stopped us copying our own stuff to do what we like with it for our own private use.
Unfortunately, Microsoft, movie studios and record companies all want us to "rent" this material in future because there is no longer anything great for them to sell to us - musical innovation is pretty much dead, there's very few good movies worth buying these days and all that can be done with software has now just about been done.
Add to this the fact that there were quality reasons to upgrade from VHS video to DVD, vinyl to audio CD and floppy disk to data CD which meant a lot of us bought stuff again for those reasons. But now, the only way forward is miniaturisation - flash memory, etc - and we're all doing that anyway with MP3 and MPEG.
DRM technology is being pushed out because it "prevents piracy" and "protects our PCs from running bad software" but it is just about making a whole bunch of rich people a whole lot richer at the extent of our freedom.
Use Windows, it's your choice but please take a moment to stop and think about what that might ultimately mean to the personal freedoms of all of us.
Michael Robertson is like the schoolboy that has got sick and tired of the school bully so rallies all the other kids to come with him into the playground to face the bully en masse.
And as Michael squares up to the bully, he takes a look over his shoulder to see none of the other kids standing behind him...
It's fun watching Robertson strutting his stuff and puffing out his chest to Gates but when he gets beaten to the ground, we'll all just turn away and go back to doing what we were doing previously.
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There will be a South-Westerly breeze of 12 mph...
Pepsi-rise will be at 6:14am and Nike-set will be at 8:48pm...
Sure, I'd take the Ferrari but as I wheelspun away up the road leaving George in a cloud of dust, it would be AC/DC's "Back In Black" blaring on the car stereo, not "Careless Whisper"...
Surely educational departments, some of which are in poor urban areas, should be doing their best not to alienate less wealthy students by using an expensive (if used legally) office package? Bear in mind that these students will probably expect to use the same software at home that they do at school or college.
Besides I fail to see why a student, who is probably not too far off from learning the basics of word processors, etc., needs the myriads of redundant features (at that level) that Office 2003 provides. It's one thing having to create an impressive presentation for your CEO at work, but in an educational environment, surely content of a presentation is far more important than how it looks?
As a tax payer who is constantly being told that education is suffering through endless governmental cutbacks (although I suspect you are in the USA, the situation is the same here in Europe), I would much rather the taxes I pay were spent on books for libraries rather than lining Bill Gates' pockets.
OpenOffice.org is more than adequate for most people in the workplace, let alone students starting out with computers and it's free.
1. Games developers would not choose to create games for the PC anyway, given the choice. They prefer the less pirate-able, higher revenue console platforms but cannot afford to ignore the huge "Windows PC" market but don't financially have to give a damn about we "minority" Linux users.
2. So much money is spent on commercial games development these days that any title has to guarantee high sales before it's released. This means that most titles follow popular formulas - like football/soccer games in Europe that are always big sellers - meaning that the games market is bland and unoriginal with little exception (IMHO despite being an avid games player myself). It follows that with no interest in original games in the first place, they can continue to follow their previous strategies of developing only for certain platforms.
3. Because games development costs are so high, APIs like DirectX greatly simplify the development process and allow games companies to cut costs quite considerably since they no longer need to worry about driver-level concerns of sound and video cards, joysticks, etc. They therefore prefer to develop DirectX games (and therefore Windows-only games) for the PC.
4. Games that are ported to Linux fall into one of two categories:
a. Those that use OpenGL APIs, which exist on Windows, Linux and possibly other OSes meaning that multi-platform development is possible from the outset - as was the case with Quake 1/2/3, Unreal Tournament and the games that use their grapics engines, or:
b. Originally DirectX-based games that companies like Loki ported for Linux (Heroes of Might & Magic III, Alpha Centauri, Civilisation Call To Power, etc). My guess is that Loki managed to license the games for a low enough cost to believe they could get enough Linux user sales to justify the time and expense of porting to Linux although this was, unfortunately, not the case in the end.
The upshot of all of this leaves a "chicken and egg" situation - games developers won't create for Linux until there are enough Linux users (who are also willing to pay for games) and many people won't use Linux without games being available.
All I can say is that the games market is dull anyway at the moment and I've personally had more fun going into my back-catalogue of older games and playing some of those recently - with free tools like DosBox and Wine, you have a chance of playing some of those within Linux and a lot of the others have been ported to Linux natively due to Open Sourcing of various older good games like Duke Nukem, Doom, Quake, etc. Not forgetting the emulators to play Amiga, NES & SNES, etc. games in Linux.
I'm looking forward to Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 (with hopefiully native Linux support) and the only other game I'd like to see Open Sourced for Linux is Total Annihilation.
- Automatically convert a directory full of graphics images into JPEG/GIF/etc. formats, achive them up and burn them straight to CD
- Play a computer game when you're really bored, have no games installed but have access to a terminal, the Internet and your home machine with Nethack or an Infocom adventure on it.
- Use bash and pine to access your ISP email from work when you're sick and tired of the ISP's web interface timing out before you've finished entering a reply.
I'm productive because I use the GUI for some things and the CLI for others. What's your excuse?
They have little or no UNIX experience but are expected to support a telephony application that has been migrated to Linux server platforms.
Prior to the migration, they worked purely within the telephony application but now have to find their way around Linux including checking system logs, configuring TCP/IP and interfaces, apply patches, etc. They also need to pull off information from multiple files to mail off to software developers etc.
My course didn't teach them to shell-script. I taught them where files were and gave them a lot of commands for text manipulation, about as much as you can expect to deliver in a 2-day Linux introduction.
I was trying to illustrate that these guys are not even knowledgeable with scripting, even at the DOS shell prompt, but given particular things they needed to achieve, they were able to use the commands and rules I gave them to create their own quite powerful programs.
For example, I'd never even mentioned about arguments to scripts ($1, $2, etc.) but they'd worked those out for themselves within a couple of weeks and wrote scripts to manipulate those also along with some simple error checking.
The point of my post, which you seem to have missed, was that the command line is a powerful tool for automation that is not difficult to start using to great effect if you have a particular problem to solve and know a few commands.
If they're on a Unix system, they can type "man [command]" and get all the flags they need.
The man pages for a "flavour" will give appropriate switches for that flavour.
I fail to see why there's a need to carry round a UNIX handbook...
From the word go I had them "cat"-ing, "sort"-ing, "grep"-ing and "cut"-ing files, showed them how to combine commands on the command line and how to turn them into shell-scripts.
The guys I taught were, like me, support engineers on Linux-based telephony products and were keen on learning how to strip relevant info from log & text files.
Within a couple of weeks they were churning out pretty good shell-scripts that were extracting info from files all across the system, "gzip"-ing them up and mailing them off automatically in cron jobs. Many of the commands they used in the scripts I'd never even mentioned in the training but had showed them about man pages and "find"-ing files on the system.
The moral behind the story is that if you give people enough of the basics, they'll soon go find problems they need to solve and work out their own ways of doing it.
As long as "makewhatis" is setup first, that will do about the same thing.
It's not WMP that's the problem, it's the implications of it becoming the majority player that is the problem.
If the car is the end product then the parts of that car that make it work are core to the original design and cannot be substituted for other parts unless they are "standard" parts like tyres, wiper blades or the music system.
However, the manufacturer of the car has little impact on deciding "how you run" that car - so you can fill up from any petrol/gas station you wish, can use whatever breakdown service you require and you can drive the car safely and carefully or at speed.
Microsoft's attitude is to lock you into Windows and their products only - that's standard business practice. The fact is that they can afford to give some of those products away "freely" (like IE or WMP) while others cost money because of the size and complexity of those products (like MS Office). However, many of those products do not constitute the "operating system" and are designed into forcing you to use the computer in specific ways - i.e. force you into using specific file formats, force you into using specific keyboard and menu shortcuts, etc.
If you don't accept this, have a look at a lot of modern devices like routers, switches, telephony systems, set-top boxes - all of these run (frequently embedded) operating systems that provide the necessary functionality for the job that is required but due to size an memory constraints do not have redundant extra applications that never need to be used in those environments.
Added to this, why do you need to install extra redundant software for a PC that is going to act purely as a web server, for example? It could be argued that you don't even need a GUI for such a box.
The fact is that it is desktop users want programs like media players, browsers, office apps, etc., so it could be argued that Windows, OS X and Linux with KDE/Gnome are "desktop environments", not just operating systems. At the point a system becomes a desktop environment, then its usability is subject to what the user him/herself deems to be usable software - it is therefore reasonable to expect the user to have a choice in what he/she runs to perform a specific task.
I'm also "annoyed" at this term that several people here have used - "modern operating systems" and I would dearly like one of those people to define that term better.
I'm going to take an intuitive leap here and assume that those people mean "a GUI driven OS that has no reliance on the command line" when they talk about a "modern OS".
However, these same people fail to realise that the command line has the power of providing automation and scripting, something that most Linux & UNIX power users learn very quickly - even in a corporate Windows environment, command-line scripts get run to update software, add network shares, etc.
There is actually no such thing as a "modern OS". What there are are "good OSes" that allow the user or the administrator to customise the operating system to be as suitable and as easy as possible to use. With Windows, it's a Microsoft-orientated way of doing things that some people no doubt find acceptable while others prefer the UNIX/Linux methodology of very in-depth customisation.
But whichever method you use, the concept of the OS is the same - to provide a software platform that makes the hardware as easy to use as possible and lets you decide what applications you want to run on it.
The problem is that most Windows users use WMP because it's free and don't think about the implications of having to pay MS a "tax" in future to used DRM licenses. When these people cannot play MP3s & MPEGs anymore because WMP has killed all competition, it will be too late by then.
Any move that helps us maintain our rights and freedoms with the media we rightfully own is a good move...
Once I took this off and applied all the relevant Windows 98 updates, it ran most reasonably.
Windows 98 does not contain a "full" IP stack and does not run lots of services in background so, in many respects, is a more secure OS from the point of view of Joe Sixpack who does not understand the finer points of securing Windows 2000 or XP fully. Sure, IE is buggy and difficult to remove but Mozilla runs perfectly happily on it together with the endless non-Microsoft mail clients.
Although Linux is my main OS, I run Windows at home for games and a few applications. I only upgraded to Windows 2000 here recently, from Windows 98, purely because of Windows Explorer which seemed to suffer wierd slowdown problems when dealing with folders with large numbers of files in. Otherwise, with a bit of messing around in config.sys and autoexec.bat, I got some degree of stable memory management going (though not as good as Windows 2000 admittedly) and was fairly happy with it.
As for Windows XP, I won't touch it. It may be stabler and better than Windows 2000 but I find it far too "patronsing" - the desktop is far too bloaty and filled with unnecessary features and I don't like all the decisions about commonly run programs, etc.
But you are right about one thing - Windows 98 does seem a lot more responsive than does Windows 2000 and my (limited) experience with XP once you've tweaked Windows 98 a little.
You cannot compare "Linux" to "Longhorn" because it is meaningless. I know (or care) little for Microsoft products but I am assuming that a Longhorn machine will function as a desktop or as server machine.
In Linux, a purely server machine does not require any form of desktop functionality so there is little point in installing a "heavy" desktop like KDE or Gnome - you might install X-Windows and a light Window manager in which case the memory footprint will be much smaller. With Windows, you are always required to run the GUI environment with all the overhead that requires.
If Longhorn currently has a 480-odd MB memory imprint then if you use it for desktop work, you will probably find 1GB RAM to be more an ideal amount of memory once you start running Office and graphics applications - otherwise, you will get a lot of slowdown due to file-paging.
Memory is not a real issue because of its cheapness but the type of Linux distribution you use will heavily impact memoey usage - Mandrake, SuSE or RedHat are likely very memory hungry distributions whereas Slackware and Gentoo can be slimmed down very considerably.
Would you therefore not end up spending your entire life reviewing those previous events in your life? To the point where you end up reviewing yourself reviewing previous events?
On the other hand, if you record all the events in your life for future generations, wouldn't those future generations care nothing about 99.99% of what you did?
Sure, I'd love to see a visual record of the battles of Alexander the Great but I'm not sure I'd give a damn about what time his daily bowel movements were or whether he liked his meat rare or well-done.
The Creator / process of evolution (delete where applicable) has already endowed me with an organic device called a "brain". While I doubt this organ has been stamped with a "Copyright Microsoft Corp." logo, it has served me well for over four decades.
Sure, sometimes it's a little slow, particularly in the mornings, and doesn't always retrieve stored data quite as quickly as I might like but it's mine, paid for and has contents available under an Open Source license - i.e. anyone who wants a description of what's held in it is generally welcome to it. Oh, and it never Blue Screens...
Quite frankly, I quite like the fact that it's there doing the job it does. It gives me connectivity to 5 important sensory inputs that I can sometimes enhance with manual devices like cameras (to provide visual enhancements to my stored memory) and headphones (to focus my mind on very specific sound stimulations).
Yes, it's limited sometimes. I cannot always remember where I've met someone before or what a person's name is but at that point, I can kick in my in-built communications mode and go find out the information I need for myself. That's because I'm sentient and adaptable and capable of making decisions for myself, you see.
In summary, please rest assured that if and when I feel I have the need for handing over some or all of my existing thought processes into the arms of a mega-corporation, I'm afraid it's unlikely to be Microsoft.
No doubt your marketing department will offer this replacement to me as "Brain XP" or "Mindows Longhorn" but I'm afraid I'll be forced to stick with good old "Brain v1.0" - it may be slow, a bland grey colour and possibly a little bloated but it rarely lies, believes in choice and freedom and never needs a Service Pack.
Thank you for your time.
Only 15 years ago, Dell's new CEO was up on stage fronting his band, Dexy's Midnight Runners, dressed in faded denim dungarees and singing "Come On Eileen" and now look at him... chairman of a global computer corporation... amazing.
We could stop all this bullsh*t tomorrow if we just took direct positive action and stopped buying those products that restrict our basic rights.
Throughout the thousands of years of human culture, we have shared music, dance and stories within small tribal communities and huge world-spanning empires. Now all that will stop purely because of one thing... money.
Culturally, we are entering into a dark age of human-kind. Globalisation means that our cultural roots become diluted and entertainment is enjoyed only by those that can afford it - those that make that entertainment can only do so because it is profitable meaning that entertainers deemed to be for a minority audience are stifled and ignored by the big corporations that control the media of entertainment.
It's happening now - Hollywood movies have become formulaic, music has become manufactured and plastic, television crammed to the brim with cheap, reality TV programs.
One day, this will all change for the better. As the corporations impose more and more restrictions on the general masses, more people will become disillusioned and there will be a breaking point.
How I hope that one day we become organised enough as "consumers" to take direct positive action. Just imagine if the entire human race, for just 24 hours, didn't go to the cinema... didn't buy a CD or a DVD... turned the televisions off. Imagine the fear that would create in the likes of Disney, Sony & the other media corporations. They would have to listen to us...
Alternatively, if you have Usenet access, go take a look in the alt.binaries.emulation.misc or alt.binaries.emulation.tosec groups which have a lot of ROMs regularly posted in there.
In the past few years, look at what Microsoft's user base has suffered as a result of using their products:
1. Countless viruses - okay, not directly Microsoft's fault but nobody here would agree that MS have done all they could have done to make their products as secure as possible.
2. Licensing changes - costing businesses more.
Okay, so there's nothing new in either of the above except that both the above have had sometimes dramatic reductions on company profits through downtimes and extra IT costs. Add to that the shrinkage in the high-tech industry over the past few years and, all of a sudden, there are a heap of governments out there getting less income from taxation as a result.
On top of that, those same governments are being squeezed to spend less and less on public services and along comes Open Source that suddenly seems to offer a way of cutting down on a lot of the government's IT expenditure.
I know these discussions have been had on /. many times before but this issue in Japan just seems the latest in a long line of governments wanting to simply give, rightly or wrongly, Microsoft "a good kicking" - firstly the DOJ, then Europe, now Japan.
I don't think it matters whether or not MS is a "monopoly" but it is apparent that they could have done a lot more in the past to stop what's happening to them now.
Firstly, I don't mind the BBC license at all because I get advert-free TV and radio programming that's of a consistently good quality. It's worth the money in that respect.
Secondly, the "illusion" that ITV is "free" is a myth - we all pay higher prices for products because a proportion of those prices funds TV & radio advertisement. Get those channels through satellite or cable TV and you pay an extra subscription charge on the top of that...
However, there's a much deeper issue here. The BBC has been in existence for most of the 20th century and their archive includes a very detailed log of global history throughout that time as well as entertainment programs. The value of that archive cannot be underestimated as a historical, social and political eductaional resource for future generations - therefore, if it is to be "opened to the public" then it must be done so in a manner independent of DRM enforced by an American software company! Otherwise, the public ends up paying Microsoft to access information that should be accessible to all, no matter whether they can afford to pay MS for a DRM license.
I must admit, I'm not sure about how access should be controlled to entertainment programs in the archive - for example, I guess a lot of people already own taped copies of "Hitch-Hikers Guide To The Galaxy" when it was first broadcast on BBC Radio while many others have purchased legitimate tapes and CDs of the same programs; the same can be said for the superb "Lord Of The Rings" and Asimov's "Foundation" dramatisations that were also broadcast on BBC radio.
I think the answer probably lies in the BBC making lower quality audio and video versions freely available in their archive with the option to purchase higher quality versions legitimately - in the way that MP3 downloading has done no real damage to CD sales.
However, the core issue here is maintaining the right to free information. Just as anyone (in the UK at least) can stroll into a public library and have free access to important historical books, the factual BBC archive must be handled in a similar fashion, even to the point where there's a PC in every library to be able to get to that archive also.
Anyone know of the best place to send an email to on this within the BBC? They'll have to listen to those if us that pay our licenses :-)
It's a fact of life that MS Exchange lives in corporate environments but ISPs and everyone use sendmail (or a sendmail derivative) for mail routing over the Internet.
It's actually in MS's interests to work with sendmail on an open protocol to do spam filtering properly (whatever that protocol is ultimately).
Remember that TCP/IP is an open standard and MS supports TCP/IP open protocols like FTP, HTTP, POP3, SMTP, etc. already in their products so this is no different.
I don't see how anyone is punishing you. Even if MS is forced to unbundle WMP from Windows, you would still be able to download and install it yourself if you really like it.
What you don't realise is that by using WMP you are effectively giving Microsoft the "green light" to go ahead and install all manner of DRM libraries and tools - before you know it, you'll find that you can't play your MP3s or MPEG movies any longer - unless you pay a tax to Microsoft.
The fact is that up until now, we've all had reasonably fair use of DVDs, CDs & software that we've paid for because no-one's stopped us copying our own stuff to do what we like with it for our own private use.
Unfortunately, Microsoft, movie studios and record companies all want us to "rent" this material in future because there is no longer anything great for them to sell to us - musical innovation is pretty much dead, there's very few good movies worth buying these days and all that can be done with software has now just about been done.
Add to this the fact that there were quality reasons to upgrade from VHS video to DVD, vinyl to audio CD and floppy disk to data CD which meant a lot of us bought stuff again for those reasons. But now, the only way forward is miniaturisation - flash memory, etc - and we're all doing that anyway with MP3 and MPEG.
DRM technology is being pushed out because it "prevents piracy" and "protects our PCs from running bad software" but it is just about making a whole bunch of rich people a whole lot richer at the extent of our freedom.
Use Windows, it's your choice but please take a moment to stop and think about what that might ultimately mean to the personal freedoms of all of us.
And as Michael squares up to the bully, he takes a look over his shoulder to see none of the other kids standing behind him...
It's fun watching Robertson strutting his stuff and puffing out his chest to Gates but when he gets beaten to the ground, we'll all just turn away and go back to doing what we were doing previously.