But can you imagine if it had the computing power of a NetWinder or a cheap PC, that would change things.
How so? You could have an SGI Onyx hooked up to a TV, and it would still suck, because you're limited by the resolution of the display. It doesn't matter if the device has the power to access the web, wordprocess, run Blender, and compile its own kernel in 10 seconds, all at the same time. *I* wouldn't want to do any of those things in fuzzy, not-even-VGA resolution, unless I had a Super-Size bottle of Excedrin handy. Until TV drops its 1950's roots and moves into the digital era, the ubiquitous "set-top appliance" computer will be very limited in its appeal.
magine a future Netwinder type thing, with TV output, pre-configured to connect to the internet by your local dealer, etc., and you have an ideal internet access appliance you can pop into a shop any buy.
Kinda like WebTV, huh? I don't think they're selling 150 million WebTV units a year... This kind of thing has very limited appeal, due mostly to the limitations of the TV itself. I for one gave up using 640x480 a LONG time ago... Once HDTV becomes ubiquitous, maybe. But that's years away, too.
I've gotten used to the way Solaris does things and Red-Hat is not to far off from that but move over to HPUX and its a whole different world.
HP-UX is, I'm convinced, written for and by alien beings. It looks like unix, it smells like unix, but it doesn't feel like unix. It seems (from my experience, YMMV) that the unix world is undergoing a regrouping, and most flavors are tending to meld back together so that the vast differences of one kind vs another are gradually softening - except for HP. They're still off doing their own thing, and not (IMHO) doing it very well...
I think RH has done more good for Linux than any other single corporate entity to date. There are problems with their distro, sure, but every distro has problems. I've been using RH since 4.0, after starting briefly with Slackware, and flirting a bit with Caldera and Debian when Red Hat was suffering the ugliness of the 4.2 -> 5.0 upgrade.
That said, I must admit it irritates the hell out of me when people say "Linux 5.2" when they mean "Red Hat Linux 5.2". Aaaargh!
I think RH has done The Right Thing for the community, releasing all their code under GPL. Red Hat is a much better free software citizen than a lot of the recent "me, too" bandwagon-jumpers will prove to be.
The old IBM keyboards are all I'll use. I have a private stockpile of them that I've rescued from junked PS/2s, and every one of my machines has one hooked to it. I can type at least 25% faster on these bad boys than on newer, "soft-click" mushboards. Plus, it makes a hideous racket when you really get going...
Not as loud as an old IBM System/36 terminal I once used, though. That thing had some sort of tactile/aural feedback relay that thunked inside the keyboard casing with every keystroke. The thing was a huge brick, and looked like a Commodore 64 (two inches thick, with deeply cupped keycaps) and weighed ten pounds. And you know what? It was the best keyboard I've ever typed on...
As a former newbie, the trick to learning linux is to ask someone who's part of the linux community, but is also your friend. Asking the people on irc, or iva an email list, is not necessarily the best way to do things.
That is a very good observation. As good as the help I've gotten from the general internet population is, if I had started out as a newbie asking all my questions of USENET or IRC instead of having a "mentor" to teach it to me (thanks, Eric!), I don't think I would be using Linux today. There are a lot of knowledgable folks out there, but the noise of all the angry cowards hiding behind the anonymity of IRC and USENET tends to drown them out and scare off the uninitiated.
That said, I imagine you'd get the same kinds of thing in Windows newsgroups or IRC channels. "I have a question about Windows 95..." "Windows 95 sucks! Windows NT is better!" et cetera... It's not the OS that's the problem, it's the medium of communication.
So the advice here is, if you want Linux to spread, teach a friend, and be nice to newbies on USENET and IRC. Don't just yell "READ THE FAQ!", because they probably can't even find the FAQ... If you're a newbie, try to find someone you know personally who will help you, unless you like anonymous hostility...
Intel is not a standard. REAL Commodities like SVGA monitors, the size of a soda can, analog clocks, and even winshield wipers ARE standards.
Never spent an hour hunting through every Pep Boys/AutoZone/Wal-Mart in town looking for a set of wipers, eh? Auto manufacturers are just about the worst example of "standards" you could come up with. Aside from the fluids you put in them, there's about 0% "standard parts" in the average automobile...;-)
Remember - What was the wild fantasy of lunatic communists yesterday becomes the accepted standard today (progressive income tax, anyone?), so what is a wild fantasy of a lunatic communist today, _will_ be the accepted standard tomorrow.
Two things:
One, I would hardly call a progressive income tax a resounding endorsement of Communism. It's just an easy way for the government (any government, Communist or otherwise) to extort more money out of the citizenry.
Two, even if the ideas of people who were once considered radicals have become acceptable now, it's very faulty logic to assume that the same must always be true for the future. Maybe today's radicals will be considered wacko idiots by future generations. Just being against the status quo does not guarantee anyone eternal hero status. History is littered with a million nutcases for every Galileo...
Seriously, though, NT does ship with Internet Information Server...
NT Server does, not NT Workstation, which is what the previous post was about. And I concur, NT Workstation is useless without add-ons. It doesn't even have APM support unless you buy it third-party. Who's got better hardware support???
DVD drivers are getting cheaper and cheaper, movies can be rent at most video store here, all 3 dvd software player I have use under windoze are all choppy.....
Which brings up something that's been bothering me for a year or so now: Why would anyone want a DVD drive for movies on their computer? If you want to watch movies, get a DVD player for your 27"+ TV, not your 17" monitor... I for one can't imagine sitting at a desk in front of a computer watching a movie. Am I the only one who thinks DVD movies on a computer is a dumb idea? (Okay, on a laptop, it's almost sensible, since you could hook it up to a TV easily if it had composite output, or maybe watch movies on an airplane or something...)
I guess too many people are dumping windows for Linux for the "charge the windows dweebs out the ass to subsidize the free Linux version" paradigm to work.
Okay, I love Linux, and use it almost exclusively for everything I do. I also think the growth statistics everyone quotes about Linux are underestimated, that it's growing faster than anyone realizes.
However, I doubt that people are flocking off the 100-million user base of Windows in such great numbers as to make Windows an unprofitable platform for developers... If that were true, we'd see companies like Corel, IBM, and Oracle porting to Linux...:-)
Seriously, though, I doubt Linux is making a very significant impact on Windows users - for every user who starts using Linux, there are plenty more yokels out there buying a preloaded box at Best Buy with Windows 98 on it who don't know any better.
That said, $100 is a very small price to pay for a program with the quality of Blender, compared with the other packages out there in the $1000-$10,000 range (that don't even run on Linux). It would be nice if they would offer a discounted key for people who bought the manual, though.
eTrade is being sued for failure to provide a SERVICE. That's not the same as suing a software company for providing buggy software. It's more like suing your garbage man for not picking up the trash. They failed to provide the contracted service, which cost people money. Whether they use computer software or monkeys with headset phones to provide this service is irrelevant.
Hey, fellas, if I'm not mistaken, the article said it would be available on their Intel boxes. Nobody said nuthin' 'bout no PA-RISC or MIPS, nor did anyone say they were replacing anything with Linux, just adding it to the lineup.
Face it, Jon (and those like him) are NOT like us!
Ah, but Jon is trying to pass himself off as a "geek". He keeps claiming he's such a cool uber-geek (Hell, he can even spot them with his super-special GeekRadar (tm), that's how geeky he is!), when he clearly is not technically skilled.
I keep reading his articles, hoping it will get better, but it's not. This whole story just rings false ("I'm not up and running Linux after three months because the dog ate my motherboard...").
I fear that Mr. Katz, in making such a big deal about his foray into Linux, has set himself up. He's talked about it so much, now he's got to have some kind of big show, a massive revelation when he finally Logs In. Truth is, Linux is cool, it's different, it's great, but it ain't going to be the huge religious awakening he's making it out to be.
Okay, Jon, I realize it's not the easiest thing in the world to do, and I realize that I've been using it too long to really remember how difficult it was when I started to use it, but, Christ, man, you make it sound like you're trying to split the atom.
Yes, it's confusing, with all the talk of partitions and monitor refresh rates and whatnot, but any recent distribution is just as easy to install as Windows (anyone ever install Win95 from scratch on a blank hard drive?), which seems to be the "Holy Grail" of ease-of-install that everyone is always comparing Linux to.
I think one of two things is going on here: either you're overanalyzing this and intimidating yourself, making it harder than it has to be, or you're just not as computer-savvy as you like to pretend.
Installing Linux isn't hard; learning how to use it is the tough part.
Hey, I'm not saying it's a good idea, I'm just saying it's not the end of privacy for every human on Earth. For one, Intel doesn't have the market clout to force it on everyone anymore. And for internet sites to require it will be the death of those sites, since old, ID-less CPUs will far outnumber the new ones for a long time (not to mention all the non-Intel computing platforms out there), so I can't imagine an e-commerce site shutting out everyone else.
Yes, hardware keys suck. But if it's not the CPU ID, they'll find another way (MAC address, dongle, whatever) to lock you down for a license.
You know, I wonder how much a company like Sun spends dicking around with licensing issues every year. Another good reason for software companies to move to a "free software, pay for support" model.
Okay, so if they use this for software licensing, it doesn't necessarily tie you to the same CPU for your natural life. Every Sun workstation has a unique hostid that many software manufacturers use for software licensing. Want to upgrade or use the software on a different machine? Just e-mail the info to the license center and they issue a new license. Install the new license, and bang, the software works on the new machine (and not on the old one). It works well. There are obvious problems, one being what happens if you have a machine die and you need to use the software right away? You have to wait for the license center turnaround time to get the new license (in Sun's case, usually an hour or two).
Some software companies are already using unique IDs on Intel-based machines to license their software - an ethernet card MAC address. I know Pro/ENGINEER's NT version used to do this (and I assume it still does). So it's not such a big deal in the software licensing area. It's actually only a major problem for pirates (besides, who uses proprietary software anyway? The free stuff's much better. *grin*).
As for E-commerce, I can imagine the only good it would do is if a site required you to give them your CPU ID in order to buy stuff. Well, I wouldn't buy stuff from them. There are plenty of people willing to take your money without violating your privacy, so I don't imagine that scheme would go very far.
I don't see this as being a big deal, one way or another. It's not a huge privacy problem (the "stolen PC" argument is lame, because as others have pointed out, you still need some software to broadcast this ID), and it's not a very useful feature, either.
At any rate, Compaq is probably the first to do this because they're getting shafted by MS as compared to the other OEM's.
That, and because they have the most to gain from Linux - they can use it to push the Alpha, thus not only getting out from under MS a bit, but also shaking a little of the Intel monkey off their back, too.
I think you're wrong about number 3. Every "common user" I've encountered has used Windows out of ignorance of alternatives, or because they know that Microsoft is the dominating actor in the market and "a sure bet", but they still love complaining about the instability of Windows.
Amen. I gave a computer to my folks last summer, and they're both completely computer-illiterate. Six months later, they're already complaining about it crashing. Same thing with my sister - she works in an office and has just gotten a PC at home, and can't stop complaining about how lame Windows is and how Word is a piece of crap compared to Wordperfect. These are far from power-users, and I think their experiences would tend to lead them away from buying MS products.
P.S. I didn't give my parents Linux, because I couldn't find an equivalent to Broderbund's Print Shop, which they wanted to be able to use. Anyone know of a good, simple, "user friendly" Linux program of this nature? I could easily switch them over if I could find one...
Most of what others have said is very accurate. My tips would be:
1. Play with Linux AND FreeBSD (or OpenBSD, NetBSD, whatever). Learn what's different and why. If you go into a job interview with only Linux and no other Unix flavors, unless they're looking to fill a specific Linux position, you're going to be at a disadvantage. As much as it saddens me to say it, keep up with NT, too. Nearly every job posting you'll see for Unix admins mentions NT somewhere. You don't need to be a guru with NT, but some familiarity will help a lot.
B. Start small. Try to find a job where you'd be kind of a "junior admin", where there's someone on hand to ask questions of. You don't want to be in the hot seat until you're comfortable with your skills.
III. Be prepared to demonstrate knowledge. All of my interviews for admin jobs have involved a lot of technical questions. Don't try to bluff these, either. If you don't know, admit it. Demonstrate that you know where to look to find out, though.
I started my admin career running a lab at school, with a single Linux box, some old, tired SPARCs, and four Indys. I graduated with a degree in Aerospace Engineering (which I have yet to use), and now (two years and three jobs later), I'm making a shade under twice as much as when I first graduated (and a lot more than my Aerospace friends!). The jobs are there, you just have to be willing to start low. Experience builds fast when you're admin'ing a bunch of unix boxes...
Another fringe benefit is that most places are pretty flexible with unix admins. The job tends to attract the odder sort of folk, so they're used to ideosyncracies...
Slashdot Mirror
They're not? http://slashdot.org/articles/984111144 59.shtml
Key Labs appears to be trying to do this. I withhold any opinions or endorsements of the project, but there it is.
Set your comment threshold to -1 and quit whining...
How so? You could have an SGI Onyx hooked up to a TV, and it would still suck, because you're limited by the resolution of the display. It doesn't matter if the device has the power to access the web, wordprocess, run Blender, and compile its own kernel in 10 seconds, all at the same time. *I* wouldn't want to do any of those things in fuzzy, not-even-VGA resolution, unless I had a Super-Size bottle of Excedrin handy. Until TV drops its 1950's roots and moves into the digital era, the ubiquitous "set-top appliance" computer will be very limited in its appeal.
Kinda like WebTV, huh? I don't think they're selling 150 million WebTV units a year... This kind of thing has very limited appeal, due mostly to the limitations of the TV itself. I for one gave up using 640x480 a LONG time ago... Once HDTV becomes ubiquitous, maybe. But that's years away, too.
HP-UX is, I'm convinced, written for and by alien beings. It looks like unix, it smells like unix, but it doesn't feel like unix. It seems (from my experience, YMMV) that the unix world is undergoing a regrouping, and most flavors are tending to meld back together so that the vast differences of one kind vs another are gradually softening - except for HP. They're still off doing their own thing, and not (IMHO) doing it very well...
That said, I must admit it irritates the hell out of me when people say "Linux 5.2" when they mean "Red Hat Linux 5.2". Aaaargh!
I think RH has done The Right Thing for the community, releasing all their code under GPL. Red Hat is a much better free software citizen than a lot of the recent "me, too" bandwagon-jumpers will prove to be.
The old IBM keyboards are all I'll use. I have a private stockpile of them that I've rescued from junked PS/2s, and every one of my machines has one hooked to it. I can type at least 25% faster on these bad boys than on newer, "soft-click" mushboards. Plus, it makes a hideous racket when you really get going...
Not as loud as an old IBM System/36 terminal I once used, though. That thing had some sort of tactile/aural feedback relay that thunked inside the keyboard casing with every keystroke. The thing was a huge brick, and looked like a Commodore 64 (two inches thick, with deeply cupped keycaps) and weighed ten pounds. And you know what? It was the best keyboard I've ever typed on...
That is a very good observation. As good as the help I've gotten from the general internet population is, if I had started out as a newbie asking all my questions of USENET or IRC instead of having a "mentor" to teach it to me (thanks, Eric!), I don't think I would be using Linux today. There are a lot of knowledgable folks out there, but the noise of all the angry cowards hiding behind the anonymity of IRC and USENET tends to drown them out and scare off the uninitiated.
That said, I imagine you'd get the same kinds of thing in Windows newsgroups or IRC channels. "I have a question about Windows 95..." "Windows 95 sucks! Windows NT is better!" et cetera... It's not the OS that's the problem, it's the medium of communication.
So the advice here is, if you want Linux to spread, teach a friend, and be nice to newbies on USENET and IRC. Don't just yell "READ THE FAQ!", because they probably can't even find the FAQ... If you're a newbie, try to find someone you know personally who will help you, unless you like anonymous hostility...
Never spent an hour hunting through every Pep Boys/AutoZone/Wal-Mart in town looking for a set of wipers, eh? Auto manufacturers are just about the worst example of "standards" you could come up with. Aside from the fluids you put in them, there's about 0% "standard parts" in the average automobile... ;-)
Remember - What was the wild fantasy of lunatic communists yesterday becomes the accepted standard today (progressive income tax, anyone?), so what is a wild fantasy of a lunatic communist today, _will_ be the accepted standard tomorrow.
Two things:
One, I would hardly call a progressive income tax a resounding endorsement of Communism. It's just an easy way for the government (any government, Communist or otherwise) to extort more money out of the citizenry.
Two, even if the ideas of people who were once considered radicals have become acceptable now, it's very faulty logic to assume that the same must always be true for the future. Maybe today's radicals will be considered wacko idiots by future generations. Just being against the status quo does not guarantee anyone eternal hero status. History is littered with a million nutcases for every Galileo...
Seriously, though, NT does ship with Internet Information Server...
NT Server does, not NT Workstation, which is what the previous post was about. And I concur, NT Workstation is useless without add-ons. It doesn't even have APM support unless you buy it third-party. Who's got better hardware support???
DVD drivers are getting cheaper and cheaper, movies can be rent at most video store here, all 3 dvd software player I have use under windoze are all choppy.....
Which brings up something that's been bothering me for a year or so now: Why would anyone want a DVD drive for movies on their computer? If you want to watch movies, get a DVD player for your 27"+ TV, not your 17" monitor... I for one can't imagine sitting at a desk in front of a computer watching a movie. Am I the only one who thinks DVD movies on a computer is a dumb idea? (Okay, on a laptop, it's almost sensible, since you could hook it up to a TV easily if it had composite output, or maybe watch movies on an airplane or something...)
Now, using DVD for data storage, I can see...
I guess too many people are dumping windows for Linux for the "charge the windows dweebs out the ass to subsidize the free Linux version" paradigm to work.
:-)
Okay, I love Linux, and use it almost exclusively for everything I do. I also think the growth statistics everyone quotes about Linux are underestimated, that it's growing faster than anyone realizes.
However, I doubt that people are flocking off the 100-million user base of Windows in such great numbers as to make Windows an unprofitable platform for developers... If that were true, we'd see companies like Corel, IBM, and Oracle porting to Linux...
Seriously, though, I doubt Linux is making a very significant impact on Windows users - for every user who starts using Linux, there are plenty more yokels out there buying a preloaded box at Best Buy with Windows 98 on it who don't know any better.
That said, $100 is a very small price to pay for a program with the quality of Blender, compared with the other packages out there in the $1000-$10,000 range (that don't even run on Linux). It would be nice if they would offer a discounted key for people who bought the manual, though.
To paraphrase from "Reservoir Dogs" again:
The words "Too busy" shouldn't be in a web server's vocabulary.
If you're going to set up a web server, make sure network bandwidth, not CPU or RAM, is your bottleneck...
Or maybe it's just a dumb baby? ;-)
eTrade is being sued for failure to provide a SERVICE. That's not the same as suing a software company for providing buggy software. It's more like suing your garbage man for not picking up the trash. They failed to provide the contracted service, which cost people money. Whether they use computer software or monkeys with headset phones to provide this service is irrelevant.
Hey, fellas, if I'm not mistaken, the article said it would be available on their Intel boxes. Nobody said nuthin' 'bout no PA-RISC or MIPS, nor did anyone say they were replacing anything with Linux, just adding it to the lineup.
Face it, Jon (and those like him) are NOT like us!
Ah, but Jon is trying to pass himself off as a "geek". He keeps claiming he's such a cool uber-geek (Hell, he can even spot them with his super-special GeekRadar (tm), that's how geeky he is!), when he clearly is not technically skilled.
I keep reading his articles, hoping it will get better, but it's not. This whole story just rings false ("I'm not up and running Linux after three months because the dog ate my motherboard...").
I fear that Mr. Katz, in making such a big deal about his foray into Linux, has set himself up. He's talked about it so much, now he's got to have some kind of big show, a massive revelation when he finally Logs In. Truth is, Linux is cool, it's different, it's great, but it ain't going to be the huge religious awakening he's making it out to be.
Okay, Jon, I realize it's not the easiest thing in the world to do, and I realize that I've been using it too long to really remember how difficult it was when I started to use it, but, Christ, man, you make it sound like you're trying to split the atom.
Yes, it's confusing, with all the talk of partitions and monitor refresh rates and whatnot, but any recent distribution is just as easy to install as Windows (anyone ever install Win95 from scratch on a blank hard drive?), which seems to be the "Holy Grail" of ease-of-install that everyone is always comparing Linux to.
I think one of two things is going on here: either you're overanalyzing this and intimidating yourself, making it harder than it has to be, or you're just not as computer-savvy as you like to pretend.
Installing Linux isn't hard; learning how to use it is the tough part.
Hey, I'm not saying it's a good idea, I'm just saying it's not the end of privacy for every human on Earth. For one, Intel doesn't have the market clout to force it on everyone anymore. And for internet sites to require it will be the death of those sites, since old, ID-less CPUs will far outnumber the new ones for a long time (not to mention all the non-Intel computing platforms out there), so I can't imagine an e-commerce site shutting out everyone else.
Yes, hardware keys suck. But if it's not the CPU ID, they'll find another way (MAC address, dongle, whatever) to lock you down for a license.
You know, I wonder how much a company like Sun spends dicking around with licensing issues every year. Another good reason for software companies to move to a "free software, pay for support" model.
Okay, so if they use this for software licensing, it doesn't necessarily tie you to the same CPU for your natural life. Every Sun workstation has a unique hostid that many software manufacturers use for software licensing. Want to upgrade or use the software on a different machine? Just e-mail the info to the license center and they issue a new license. Install the new license, and bang, the software works on the new machine (and not on the old one). It works well. There are obvious problems, one being what happens if you have a machine die and you need to use the software right away? You have to wait for the license center turnaround time to get the new license (in Sun's case, usually an hour or two).
Some software companies are already using unique IDs on Intel-based machines to license their software - an ethernet card MAC address. I know Pro/ENGINEER's NT version used to do this (and I assume it still does). So it's not such a big deal in the software licensing area. It's actually only a major problem for pirates (besides, who uses proprietary software anyway? The free stuff's much better. *grin*).
As for E-commerce, I can imagine the only good it would do is if a site required you to give them your CPU ID in order to buy stuff. Well, I wouldn't buy stuff from them. There are plenty of people willing to take your money without violating your privacy, so I don't imagine that scheme would go very far.
I don't see this as being a big deal, one way or another. It's not a huge privacy problem (the "stolen PC" argument is lame, because as others have pointed out, you still need some software to broadcast this ID), and it's not a very useful feature, either.
At any rate, Compaq is probably the first to do this because they're getting shafted by MS as compared to the other OEM's.
That, and because they have the most to gain from Linux - they can use it to push the Alpha, thus not only getting out from under MS a bit, but also shaking a little of the Intel monkey off their back, too.
I think you're wrong about number 3. Every "common user" I've encountered has used Windows out of ignorance of alternatives, or because they know that Microsoft is the dominating actor in the market and "a sure bet", but they still love complaining about the instability of Windows.
Amen. I gave a computer to my folks last summer, and they're both completely computer-illiterate. Six months later, they're already complaining about it crashing. Same thing with my sister - she works in an office and has just gotten a PC at home, and can't stop complaining about how lame Windows is and how Word is a piece of crap compared to Wordperfect. These are far from power-users, and I think their experiences would tend to lead them away from buying MS products.
P.S. I didn't give my parents Linux, because I couldn't find an equivalent to Broderbund's Print Shop, which they wanted to be able to use. Anyone know of a good, simple, "user friendly" Linux program of this nature? I could easily switch them over if I could find one...
Most of what others have said is very accurate. My tips would be:
1. Play with Linux AND FreeBSD (or OpenBSD, NetBSD, whatever). Learn what's different and why. If you go into a job interview with only Linux and no other Unix flavors, unless they're looking to fill a specific Linux position, you're going to be at a disadvantage. As much as it saddens me to say it, keep up with NT, too. Nearly every job posting you'll see for Unix admins mentions NT somewhere. You don't need to be a guru with NT, but some familiarity will help a lot.
B. Start small. Try to find a job where you'd be kind of a "junior admin", where there's someone on hand to ask questions of. You don't want to be in the hot seat until you're comfortable with your skills.
III. Be prepared to demonstrate knowledge. All of my interviews for admin jobs have involved a lot of technical questions. Don't try to bluff these, either. If you don't know, admit it. Demonstrate that you know where to look to find out, though.
I started my admin career running a lab at school, with a single Linux box, some old, tired SPARCs, and four Indys. I graduated with a degree in Aerospace Engineering (which I have yet to use), and now (two years and three jobs later), I'm making a shade under twice as much as when I first graduated (and a lot more than my Aerospace friends!). The jobs are there, you just have to be willing to start low. Experience builds fast when you're admin'ing a bunch of unix boxes...
Another fringe benefit is that most places are pretty flexible with unix admins. The job tends to attract the odder sort of folk, so they're used to ideosyncracies...