Perhapse FC2 ain't that difficult, but they probably build the drivers with Fedora in mind. I run Debian, and before throwing $200 on a video card I borrowed a GeForce2 and a Radeon 9600. The Radeon took several hours to install, wasn't stable, and broke when I did a system update. The nVidia took minutes to install, and unless I put in a new kernel, I haven't had to worry about the driver since then. I didn't even have to reinstall the driver after installing my new GeForce 5700.
No, the ATI drivers can be more than just a little more difficult to install than the nVidia ones.
It seems to me that ATI considers 'Linux' and 'Fedora' to be synonyms, and that no other distro matters. It's like releasing a driver that ONLY works with Windows XP. I mean, nobody runs Win2K, or anything else, right?
So you're saying that the product is useless just because the source is unavailable? That's really not entirely fair. The product does what it advertizes to do, and it's got a very clean, intuitive interface. Also, the technicians from Tarantella are smart and very friendly. When we asked for a demonstration, they sent two guys over who set up a two-server cluster for free! Switching from demo mode into production involved installing a new key (yes, I hate stupid license keys, but it was simple and painless). The company is also still small enough that they do make changes to the software at customer request, I've witnessed it first hand!
No, it's not OSS, and I wish it could be. Maybe it's flexibility is limited as a result, but it's an excellent option for someone who doesn't program and needs something powerful that 'just works'.
I'm not a big fan of Windows, but there might be a good, cheap Windows solution that fits your needs. Remember SCO before they turned evil? They are still in business, but they have changed their name to Tarantella, and they sell this excellent product called 'Secure Global Desktop' (Yes, the name sucks) that works with all sorts of thin clients, from old Windows machines, to Linux, to new Wyse terminals. It requires a copy of Windows 2000 installed as a terminal server, but it's really, REALLY easy to use, and it's about half the price of Citrix. It's easy to add servers at any time to improve performance or uptime, and it's flexible enough that you could probably run the entire library system off of it, not just the public terminals.
I have to connections to Tarantella in any way, and I dislike Windows, but I must admit that this is a very good option.
It was much simpler when a kilobyte was understood to be 1024 bytes. Now when someone mentions that they have a 5 meg file, I feel as though I have to ask them whether they are talking about an English swallow or an African swallow.
My roomate's cat pissed on one of my motherboards that was in storage in my closet. It was a really cool old 486-VLB board that I was eager to play with. I got my hands on some VLB expansion cards and plugged it all together, but when it powered up all it did was stink up my bedroom with the most terrible sour-smelling smoke.
I'd much prefer to use an auto installer, I'm not ready for the full shebang yet.
Enlighten me here.
How is a full compile of the kernel done and how long would it take on a 3GHz,756RAM computer?
Also, why not just try it? You have the machine in front of you, give it a whirl! That's what makes computers so much fun; you get to try out new stuff all the time.
VMWare does that with their ESX Server product. It uses Linux 2.4 as a booloader for the virtualization layer, but otherwise it seems to run on bare metal.
That probably depends apon which version of the source this is, the "shared source" version, or the copy used in the MS build labs. I've heard that it's impossible to compile the verions of source provided to "shared source" partners, so there's no proof that it's the same source that was used to compile the binaries that get publicly disributed.
I agree with you that small OSS projects can potentially do horrible things, but I don't think the risk is at all unavoidable and I certainly don't think they offer any less accountability than closed-source apps.
If you're downloading random bits of code from sourceforge and running them than sure, you might muck stuff up, but how is that any different from clicking a curious looking attachment in Outlook? I don't compile code until I've done some basic research about it. Check the bug reports, any mailing lists, and do a quick search on Google. Better yet, see if your distro has a prepackaged version. I'm certain that any software that behaves maliciously will be dropped very quickly from any major distro, if it's even included in the first place at all.
As for closed source, how is download.com or TUCOWS any different from sourceforge? What type of accountability do they offer? Wasn't there some type of spyware diguised as a "spyware removal tool" hosted on one of those sites recently? If I were to download, as per your example, an app to rename all my MP3's and it repartitions my disk, who do I hold accountable?
I feel a whole lot safer installing my software with apt-get or apt-rpm than I do installing from some closed-source freeware site.
Heh, my dad drives me nuts. The power supply on his old computer was failing, so the computer didn't allways like to power up. His solution was to tear the plastic front off of the computer so he could push the button "from the inside". Damn.
Years ago I had a 386SX/33 with 6MB of ram. Just as an experiment I created a 4MB RAMDisk and compressed it with DriveSpace, then I put my Windows swapfile on it. Even with a whopping 10MB of memory, Windows still sucked, and it was quite a hastle to set that up every time I needed to run a Windows app.
There could be an initial advantage to this 'catch up' thing. If someone takes this filesystem and improves apon it before implementing it, they have the advantage of implementing it as a clean installation, instead of having to worry about upgrading an existing infrastructure.
I'm gonna get modded soo far down for this, but heck...
I'm living in Toronto, and about 30 minutes into the blackout, when I started to hear from my friends just how much of Ontario was without power, I started to wonder if in the morning the power would come back on and President George W. would come on the television with an announcement...
Hello Cah-Nah-Dah, I am now your supreme ruler. My closest advisors tell me that you are located somewhere North of me. After spending two hours learning how to pronounce your nation's name, I now own you!!
Turns out I was wrong. Maybe I should cut down on the caffeine a little.
Aside from my laptop and my desktop, we have no Linux desktops. I do network scans and such monthly, and aside from a few Linux-powered embeded devices, I've seen nothing interesting. Mind you, I work at a hospital. There are not very many technically inclined folks here.
I do entirely the same thing. Usually the first thing I do after sitting down in front of a new Windows box is to alias the dir command. All you need is a one-line batch file called c:\wint\ls.bat. The easiest way I have found to far goes as such:
c:\> copy con > c:\winnt\ls.bat
(Your prompt will dissapear, this is the equivalent of cat > filename)
@dir/w %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6
(This is the only line you need in the batchfile. The @ causes silent execution, the %1 and so on pass arguments from the batch program on to the dir program, while the/w causes dir to function like ls -x, which is my preference on a Windows box)
Then hit either CTRL+Z or F6 to indicate End Of File. That's it. You now have ls on Windows. Enjoy!
It's just going underground. The funding will not be cut off, it will come from quieter sources. They made a mistake by making the public so aware of the project in the first place. Americans don't want to be spyed on by their own government. Doesn't mean the government can't spy on them, it simply means they can't spy on them openly. Nothing has changed, TIA will continue. I'm living happily in Canada, thank God.
While the paranoid (sane, perhapse?) side of me believes that a system such as TIA should never be built, the Pure Technical side of me finds this sort of thing very exciting. The DARPA document in the article mentions the need for some sort of large, distributed, flexible, inteligent database backend to manage everything. As soon as I read the requirements, I thought about the Cyc information server from CyCorp. Even the name is creepy. Cyc is, in my opinion, the best approach taken towards AI thus far, and as such it would be perfect for managing this sort of project. It creates logical associations between data objects automatically, finds discrepencies and asks for clarification automatically! It also supports plain english queries, and allready has a good knowlendge of the human world. You could populate it with the information from the TIA project, teach it what a Terrorist is, and it could spit out all sorts of names.
Scary stuff, very scary stuff... but oh, so cool at the same time. Damnit!!
I am probably totally wrong, but wasn't the 640k barrier a software limitation, not hardware? I know that the original 8086 could only access 1 megabyte of memory, 640k RAM and 384k hardware I/O, but wasn't the real problem caused by the way DOS addresses the memory? I have heard that it addressed RAM from the higher addresses down, so that easy expansion beyond 640k would require addressing memory below address zero. If this is true, they it doesn't really matter whether Gates actually said 640k would be enough or not. He designed (or aquired) an OS with serious expandability problems, so he obviously held the opinion that expansion beyond 640k was unneeded.
I agree with what you say about portability, and indeed I do frequently use a laptop at home, but I will never give up my desktop machine. Laptops are not upgradable. I need to be able to swap hard drives in and out, and play with multiple monitors and such. These things are just not really possible with a laptop.
Yeah, that drives me nuts too. Some of my less technical friends have asked me why their computers are so slow, and when I tell them they need more memory, most of them don't believe me. The usual arguement is "the store would never sell a computer that doesn't have enough memory, the problem must be elsewhere."
I usually pull a stick of RAM out of one of my own boxes and lend it too them for a week or so. They usually end up buying more RAM.
It's really amazing how much trust people put in companies. It's even more amazing that companies get away with all the crap they pull.
They can't argue that they didn't know the code was in there. If they think Linus needs to pay attention to where he is getting code submissions from, don't you think that SCO should be responsible for verifying the origin of any code that they are distributing?
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No, the ATI drivers can be more than just a little more difficult to install than the nVidia ones.
It seems to me that ATI considers 'Linux' and 'Fedora' to be synonyms, and that no other distro matters. It's like releasing a driver that ONLY works with Windows XP. I mean, nobody runs Win2K, or anything else, right?
No, it's not OSS, and I wish it could be. Maybe it's flexibility is limited as a result, but it's an excellent option for someone who doesn't program and needs something powerful that 'just works'.
I have to connections to Tarantella in any way, and I dislike Windows, but I must admit that this is a very good option.
It was much simpler when a kilobyte was understood to be 1024 bytes. Now when someone mentions that they have a 5 meg file, I feel as though I have to ask them whether they are talking about an English swallow or an African swallow.
My roomate's cat pissed on one of my motherboards that was in storage in my closet. It was a really cool old 486-VLB board that I was eager to play with. I got my hands on some VLB expansion cards and plugged it all together, but when it powered up all it did was stink up my bedroom with the most terrible sour-smelling smoke.
I've got Fedora Core 2.
yum update kernel*
should install 2.6.7 right?
Why not try it and find out?
I'd much prefer to use an auto installer, I'm not ready for the full shebang yet.
Enlighten me here. How is a full compile of the kernel done and how long would it take on a 3GHz,756RAM computer?
Also, why not just try it? You have the machine in front of you, give it a whirl! That's what makes computers so much fun; you get to try out new stuff all the time.
VMWare does that with their ESX Server product. It uses Linux 2.4 as a booloader for the virtualization layer, but otherwise it seems to run on bare metal.
It's not thast they thought Comcast's bit wasn't legitimate, it's that it wasn't high enough.
That probably depends apon which version of the source this is, the "shared source" version, or the copy used in the MS build labs. I've heard that it's impossible to compile the verions of source provided to "shared source" partners, so there's no proof that it's the same source that was used to compile the binaries that get publicly disributed.
If you're downloading random bits of code from sourceforge and running them than sure, you might muck stuff up, but how is that any different from clicking a curious looking attachment in Outlook? I don't compile code until I've done some basic research about it. Check the bug reports, any mailing lists, and do a quick search on Google. Better yet, see if your distro has a prepackaged version. I'm certain that any software that behaves maliciously will be dropped very quickly from any major distro, if it's even included in the first place at all.
As for closed source, how is download.com or TUCOWS any different from sourceforge? What type of accountability do they offer? Wasn't there some type of spyware diguised as a "spyware removal tool" hosted on one of those sites recently? If I were to download, as per your example, an app to rename all my MP3's and it repartitions my disk, who do I hold accountable?
I feel a whole lot safer installing my software with apt-get or apt-rpm than I do installing from some closed-source freeware site.
Heh, my dad drives me nuts. The power supply on his old computer was failing, so the computer didn't allways like to power up. His solution was to tear the plastic front off of the computer so he could push the button "from the inside". Damn.
DRM is not about trust. The company should be called 'InterNoTrust'.
Years ago I had a 386SX/33 with 6MB of ram. Just as an experiment I created a 4MB RAMDisk and compressed it with DriveSpace, then I put my Windows swapfile on it. Even with a whopping 10MB of memory, Windows still sucked, and it was quite a hastle to set that up every time I needed to run a Windows app.
There could be an initial advantage to this 'catch up' thing. If someone takes this filesystem and improves apon it before implementing it, they have the advantage of implementing it as a clean installation, instead of having to worry about upgrading an existing infrastructure.
Aren't quantum computers built around quaternary logic using qubits instead of bits?
I'm living in Toronto, and about 30 minutes into the blackout, when I started to hear from my friends just how much of Ontario was without power, I started to wonder if in the morning the power would come back on and President George W. would come on the television with an announcement...
Hello Cah-Nah-Dah, I am now your supreme ruler. My closest advisors tell me that you are located somewhere North of me. After spending two hours learning how to pronounce your nation's name, I now own you!!
Turns out I was wrong. Maybe I should cut down on the caffeine a little.
Aside from my laptop and my desktop, we have no Linux desktops. I do network scans and such monthly, and aside from a few Linux-powered embeded devices, I've seen nothing interesting. Mind you, I work at a hospital. There are not very many technically inclined folks here.
c:\> copy con > c:\winnt\ls.bat
(Your prompt will dissapear, this is the equivalent of cat > filename)
@dir /w %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6
(This is the only line you need in the batchfile. The @ causes silent execution, the %1 and so on pass arguments from the batch program on to the dir program, while the /w causes dir to function like ls -x, which is my preference on a Windows box)
Then hit either CTRL+Z or F6 to indicate End Of File. That's it. You now have ls on Windows.
Enjoy!
It's just going underground. The funding will not be cut off, it will come from quieter sources. They made a mistake by making the public so aware of the project in the first place. Americans don't want to be spyed on by their own government. Doesn't mean the government can't spy on them, it simply means they can't spy on them openly. Nothing has changed, TIA will continue. I'm living happily in Canada, thank God.
Scary stuff, very scary stuff... but oh, so cool at the same time. Damnit!!
I am probably totally wrong, but wasn't the 640k barrier a software limitation, not hardware? I know that the original 8086 could only access 1 megabyte of memory, 640k RAM and 384k hardware I/O, but wasn't the real problem caused by the way DOS addresses the memory? I have heard that it addressed RAM from the higher addresses down, so that easy expansion beyond 640k would require addressing memory below address zero. If this is true, they it doesn't really matter whether Gates actually said 640k would be enough or not. He designed (or aquired) an OS with serious expandability problems, so he obviously held the opinion that expansion beyond 640k was unneeded.
I agree with what you say about portability, and indeed I do frequently use a laptop at home, but I will never give up my desktop machine. Laptops are not upgradable. I need to be able to swap hard drives in and out, and play with multiple monitors and such. These things are just not really possible with a laptop.
I usually pull a stick of RAM out of one of my own boxes and lend it too them for a week or so. They usually end up buying more RAM.
It's really amazing how much trust people put in companies. It's even more amazing that companies get away with all the crap they pull.
It's obvious that they've switched focus away from security because they are done. All of their products are now secure, we can trust them.
Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.