I agree with most of your post, but this closing poke is uncalled for. XP is based on the NT kernel which was designed using concepts from the VMS kernel, which itself was introduced by DEC in 1979. So if Linux is a leap backwards because it uses 1970s UNIX concepts, XP must also be a giant leap backwards because it uses 1970s VMS concepts.
No man, it's a different CPU endian since they're going PPC instead of Intel for XB2. They'd need to emulate an x86 CPU to get the XB1 game bytecode to run on the XB2. That's fine for normal proggies but for graphics instensive, CPU optimized code like games, it would take a hell of a lot of CPU horse power to make the games enjoyable under an emulator.
My base station is a Linksys WRT54G. It's cheap and damned good... and it runs a Linux kernel so it's kinda hackable if that's your thing. My PCMCIA wlan card (I only do wireless from my laptop so I can't speak on PCI cards) is a Microsoft MN-520 (I think it's been discontinued). Regardless, it's a very solid card and it works well with the Linux wlan project driver. The negative experiences I've lived through/heard of are a) newer Linksys PCMCIA cards (they keep changing the chipsets) and b) Microsoft base stations, not the client cards, mainly connection stability problems.
That's true but it's almost impossible for a worm to reach critical mass on Linux. The reason why Win* is such a hotbed for them is that the environments are so fricken homogeneous that it's very easy to create a "write once, run everywhere"-ish virus. Linux is blessed with a severly heterogeneous install base. To get to the point, the exploit might be there in all that are running the particular kernel version -but- doing anything "?useful?" with your virus is way harder since as a virus writer you have to make assumptions about glib, kernel patches, directory layout, etc. So it'd be easy to target say a stock SuSE 9.1 install on x86 but you'd have a much harder time getting that same code to also inject on RHEL, Debian, Gentoo, Slack, Mandrake, etc. Also, most distros release twice a year, so that SuSE install base is likely to be mainly spread between 9.0 and 9.1, leaving the available infection pool that much smaller.
Hell, I'm confused too, this whole Sony vs. Microsoft is just like the election here in the US. I really dislike lesser-evil type choices. I don't like either company, they're both evil, MS for abusing their monopoly, and Sony via the MPAA and RIAA, that's why I don't buy games to support either platform anymore. On the bright side, I'm saving money... I think.
Same here, and to top it off, MS is one of our key competitors. It absolutely blows my mind some of the shit that comes out of the MSCEs in our IT group's mouths. Outrageous crap like replacing ***our own*** software internally, the same we sell to our customers, with MS software. I have no doubt it's the result of hiring the cheapest help available, which INconveniently are the point-and-click admins I so despise. I wouldn't trust any of those twits to admin an XBox, much less a server.
Well, you can run WINE in a chroot jail. Also, most of the Linux filesystems offer very granualar control over directory and file attributes so you can lock down configs and binaries int the wine home very tightly. Myself, I think that this is probably a task best left to packagers rather than the WINE devs. Keep WINE as lean as possible and let the OS handle the securing it. In fact, this is how my crossover office is setup for viewing those nasty WebEx presentations.
Firstly, I store my music in MP3 format, mostly because my car player doesn't do Vorbis. Second, I think you're right that all things being equal, without a significantly better format, MP3 will remain top dog. However, I fully understand that the MP3 format is patent encumbered and as such it's not free, as in mine to do with as I please. What that means is that Thompson is free to change the rules of the game at any time. They could turn around tomorrow and say that there's now a fee for *playing* an MP3 or even that there's a monthly fee for simply *having* an MP3 file in your possession. Yes it's extremely unlikely to happen and it would be even harder to police. However, if it did, the "significantly better" argument is out the window since significantly *cheaper*, the Classic VHS tale, would almost certainly win in the long run.
companies can advertise 'absolutely NO electronics in our clothes, just pure hemp.' and the crowd goes wild!
Dude, that was damned funny! Phew. I expect that we'll find schematics for reprogramming these little suckers worse comes to worst and their use becomes widespread. It wouldn't be a huge deal for clothes and beer cans but it might be against the law to reprogram your tires. I'll admit I'm not real familiar with how their "flash" is implemented, might be time to start doing some research on it.
Thus they will mandate the RFID tags be tied to our VINs.
That's a scary thought. The pathetic part is they'll bill it as a counter terrorism measure but those same terrorists are the ones who would have no qualms about "overriding" the RFID signatures or simply jamming them. So, they're just about 100% ineffective for their "stated" goal but man they'd sure bring in a nice steady flow of speeding fine money.
Ahhh... that's where you're neglecting a key piece of information. For capitalism to work as per the definition of capitalism, consumers must be "perfectly informed". Companies have a vested interest in keeping the consumer under-informed when it comes to RFID. The solution is for the government to mandate a warning tag like the warnings on cigarette boxes. Then capitalism would decide if RFID lives or dies. Something like, "WARNING: This product contains an chip that publically broadcasts your private usage of this product.". Anyhow, I've got a microwave, nothing 15 seconds in there won't fix.
Your Google search is wrong. I have never seen or dealt with a FreeBSD box at use at any of the Global 500 corp data centers I've visited / worked with. The breakdown is more like there's a whole lot of Solaris, a whole lot of Win2K (groans), a fair amount of AIX and HP-UX, and occasionally Linux (mostly RHEL) in use at major corporations. Understand that this isn't a reflection of how good FreeBSD is, it's simply that major corporations appear to be more interested in support contracts super human uptime guarantees than the quality of the OS in place. Granted, I haven't been to every data center on the planet, nor been told what every box is running (some of these places football field size) , but I've been to A LOT throughout North America and Europe over the years I've been doing this gig. The types of places I'd expect to find FreeBSD are the smaller, less bureaucratic data centers and ISPs where there are a handful of guys with free reign of the place.
I think Trolltech should give serious consideration to the idea of putting QT under the LGPL.
That would be very cool if they did. I think QT is a nice framework (I don't like the moc preprocessor though), it's definately more polished than GTK, but GTK's license is far more liberal, especially for a library. I'm not sure how much money QT makes from dev licenses for QT, but they could probably offset at least some of that lost license revenue with developer support contracts.
Ummm, she inherited that money and the Heinz name from her former husband, the late Senator John Heinz, a Republican. Also, she owns less than 4% of Heinz Co. stock and isn't even on the board. You can bet that her ex-hubbies Republican pals are on there though. Anyhow, I don't have anything against Republicans historically and was once one myself, it's the "new" far-right wing Republicanism that turned me off the party.
I never said it wouldn't run, I said it would take up a lot of the CPU cycles. So yeah, if you let it sit there and do nothing, it's not a problem. I had W2K on that AMD box several years ago and it was not what anybody would call "responsive". In fact after I had used it with Linux as a file server for a while, I put Win98, not W2K, on it to make it usable for the person I gave it to.
Dude, that's a Pentium II 400, not a K6-2 300. Look at the stats and you'll see the the P2 400 takes out the K6-2 300 in all rankings. You comparing a Kia to a BMW. I had a K6-2 300 and it was slow but it was also half the cost of a P2 at the time.
Here's a great link I just found that covers a bunch of Window Managers. There's several on there I've never even heard of. There's also a lot of really ugly ones!
Christ, why are you running KDE on a K6? XP would bring that box to it's knees too. You need to use a lightweight window manager like IceWM or XFCE. KDE (or GNOME) has never had a goal of being "lightweight" so far as a know. IceWM offers a Win98-sh WM and pretty good about staying off the CPU, ditto for XFCE. You should be able to get a decent system running if you stay away from not only KDE and GNOME desktops, but their apps as well since they tend to launch a hefty support layer with them. Stick with QT, GTK, and Motif apps and it should work fine. FWIW, I had the exact same CPU in a box I gave away 2 years ago. It was a fine starter system when I bought it in 1996 and the fact that it run pretty much unaltered for 6 years is pretty impressive for what was a low end system when I bought it.
A classic... another great line is "I'm really sorry your mom blew up Ricky". If you haven't seen One Crazy Summer, it's another funny Cusak flick by the same guy that did BOD.
Actually, the MS WiFi card (MN-520... check first) is one of the easiest cards to get working under Linux. I've got one for my laptop and it works very well.
Seems to work ok in 1.8 alpha under Linux. Might be a bug that got taken care of in the 1.8 tree. I don't have 1.7 around anymore since 1.8 has the junk mail filter improvements and I use Mozilla mail.
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And recreating an OS from the 70's isnt?
I agree with most of your post, but this closing poke is uncalled for. XP is based on the NT kernel which was designed using concepts from the VMS kernel, which itself was introduced by DEC in 1979. So if Linux is a leap backwards because it uses 1970s UNIX concepts, XP must also be a giant leap backwards because it uses 1970s VMS concepts.
You're right, it's not the endianess. The instruction code is different, I spoke without thinking the whole thing out.
No man, it's a different CPU endian since they're going PPC instead of Intel for XB2. They'd need to emulate an x86 CPU to get the XB1 game bytecode to run on the XB2. That's fine for normal proggies but for graphics instensive, CPU optimized code like games, it would take a hell of a lot of CPU horse power to make the games enjoyable under an emulator.
My base station is a Linksys WRT54G. It's cheap and damned good ... and it runs a Linux kernel so it's kinda hackable if that's your thing. My PCMCIA wlan card (I only do wireless from my laptop so I can't speak on PCI cards) is a Microsoft MN-520 (I think it's been discontinued). Regardless, it's a very solid card and it works well with the Linux wlan project driver. The negative experiences I've lived through/heard of are a) newer Linksys PCMCIA cards (they keep changing the chipsets) and b) Microsoft base stations, not the client cards, mainly connection stability problems.
That's true but it's almost impossible for a worm to reach critical mass on Linux. The reason why Win* is such a hotbed for them is that the environments are so fricken homogeneous that it's very easy to create a "write once, run everywhere"-ish virus. Linux is blessed with a severly heterogeneous install base. To get to the point, the exploit might be there in all that are running the particular kernel version -but- doing anything "?useful?" with your virus is way harder since as a virus writer you have to make assumptions about glib, kernel patches, directory layout, etc. So it'd be easy to target say a stock SuSE 9.1 install on x86 but you'd have a much harder time getting that same code to also inject on RHEL, Debian, Gentoo, Slack, Mandrake, etc. Also, most distros release twice a year, so that SuSE install base is likely to be mainly spread between 9.0 and 9.1, leaving the available infection pool that much smaller.
Hell, I'm confused too, this whole Sony vs. Microsoft is just like the election here in the US. I really dislike lesser-evil type choices. I don't like either company, they're both evil, MS for abusing their monopoly, and Sony via the MPAA and RIAA, that's why I don't buy games to support either platform anymore. On the bright side, I'm saving money ... I think.
It runs very well on Linux with CodeWeaver's CrossOver Office WINE. Not sure about the free WINE, haven't tried it there.
Same here, and to top it off, MS is one of our key competitors. It absolutely blows my mind some of the shit that comes out of the MSCEs in our IT group's mouths. Outrageous crap like replacing ***our own*** software internally, the same we sell to our customers, with MS software. I have no doubt it's the result of hiring the cheapest help available, which INconveniently are the point-and-click admins I so despise. I wouldn't trust any of those twits to admin an XBox, much less a server.
Well, you can run WINE in a chroot jail. Also, most of the Linux filesystems offer very granualar control over directory and file attributes so you can lock down configs and binaries int the wine home very tightly. Myself, I think that this is probably a task best left to packagers rather than the WINE devs. Keep WINE as lean as possible and let the OS handle the securing it. In fact, this is how my crossover office is setup for viewing those nasty WebEx presentations.
It's happening in 1.8 alpha too.
That is messed up! Wrong answer in FF, but I can confirm that it works as expected in Moz 1.8 alpha.
Firstly, I store my music in MP3 format, mostly because my car player doesn't do Vorbis. Second, I think you're right that all things being equal, without a significantly better format, MP3 will remain top dog. However, I fully understand that the MP3 format is patent encumbered and as such it's not free, as in mine to do with as I please. What that means is that Thompson is free to change the rules of the game at any time. They could turn around tomorrow and say that there's now a fee for *playing* an MP3 or even that there's a monthly fee for simply *having* an MP3 file in your possession. Yes it's extremely unlikely to happen and it would be even harder to police. However, if it did, the "significantly better" argument is out the window since significantly *cheaper*, the Classic VHS tale, would almost certainly win in the long run.
companies can advertise 'absolutely NO electronics in our clothes, just pure hemp.' and the crowd goes wild!
Dude, that was damned funny! Phew. I expect that we'll find schematics for reprogramming these little suckers worse comes to worst and their use becomes widespread. It wouldn't be a huge deal for clothes and beer cans but it might be against the law to reprogram your tires. I'll admit I'm not real familiar with how their "flash" is implemented, might be time to start doing some research on it.
Thus they will mandate the RFID tags be tied to our VINs.
That's a scary thought. The pathetic part is they'll bill it as a counter terrorism measure but those same terrorists are the ones who would have no qualms about "overriding" the RFID signatures or simply jamming them. So, they're just about 100% ineffective for their "stated" goal but man they'd sure bring in a nice steady flow of speeding fine money.
Ahhh ... that's where you're neglecting a key piece of information. For capitalism to work as per the definition of capitalism, consumers must be "perfectly informed". Companies have a vested interest in keeping the consumer under-informed when it comes to RFID. The solution is for the government to mandate a warning tag like the warnings on cigarette boxes. Then capitalism would decide if RFID lives or dies. Something like, "WARNING: This product contains an chip that publically broadcasts your private usage of this product.". Anyhow, I've got a microwave, nothing 15 seconds in there won't fix.
Your Google search is wrong. I have never seen or dealt with a FreeBSD box at use at any of the Global 500 corp data centers I've visited / worked with. The breakdown is more like there's a whole lot of Solaris, a whole lot of Win2K (groans), a fair amount of AIX and HP-UX, and occasionally Linux (mostly RHEL) in use at major corporations. Understand that this isn't a reflection of how good FreeBSD is, it's simply that major corporations appear to be more interested in support contracts super human uptime guarantees than the quality of the OS in place. Granted, I haven't been to every data center on the planet, nor been told what every box is running (some of these places football field size) , but I've been to A LOT throughout North America and Europe over the years I've been doing this gig. The types of places I'd expect to find FreeBSD are the smaller, less bureaucratic data centers and ISPs where there are a handful of guys with free reign of the place.
I think Trolltech should give serious consideration to the idea of putting QT under the LGPL.
That would be very cool if they did. I think QT is a nice framework (I don't like the moc preprocessor though), it's definately more polished than GTK, but GTK's license is far more liberal, especially for a library. I'm not sure how much money QT makes from dev licenses for QT, but they could probably offset at least some of that lost license revenue with developer support contracts.
Ummm, she inherited that money and the Heinz name from her former husband, the late Senator John Heinz, a Republican. Also, she owns less than 4% of Heinz Co. stock and isn't even on the board. You can bet that her ex-hubbies Republican pals are on there though. Anyhow, I don't have anything against Republicans historically and was once one myself, it's the "new" far-right wing Republicanism that turned me off the party.
I never said it wouldn't run, I said it would take up a lot of the CPU cycles. So yeah, if you let it sit there and do nothing, it's not a problem. I had W2K on that AMD box several years ago and it was not what anybody would call "responsive". In fact after I had used it with Linux as a file server for a while, I put Win98, not W2K, on it to make it usable for the person I gave it to.
Dude, that's a Pentium II 400, not a K6-2 300. Look at the stats and you'll see the the P2 400 takes out the K6-2 300 in all rankings. You comparing a Kia to a BMW. I had a K6-2 300 and it was slow but it was also half the cost of a P2 at the time.
Here's a great link I just found that covers a bunch of Window Managers. There's several on there I've never even heard of. There's also a lot of really ugly ones!
I've got a 300MHz K6-2 with 192MB RAM
Christ, why are you running KDE on a K6? XP would bring that box to it's knees too. You need to use a lightweight window manager like IceWM or XFCE. KDE (or GNOME) has never had a goal of being "lightweight" so far as a know. IceWM offers a Win98-sh WM and pretty good about staying off the CPU, ditto for XFCE. You should be able to get a decent system running if you stay away from not only KDE and GNOME desktops, but their apps as well since they tend to launch a hefty support layer with them. Stick with QT, GTK, and Motif apps and it should work fine. FWIW, I had the exact same CPU in a box I gave away 2 years ago. It was a fine starter system when I bought it in 1996 and the fact that it run pretty much unaltered for 6 years is pretty impressive for what was a low end system when I bought it.
A classic ... another great line is "I'm really sorry your mom blew up Ricky". If you haven't seen One Crazy Summer, it's another funny Cusak flick by the same guy that did BOD.
Actually, the MS WiFi card (MN-520 ... check first) is one of the easiest cards to get working under Linux. I've got one for my laptop and it works very well.
Seems to work ok in 1.8 alpha under Linux. Might be a bug that got taken care of in the 1.8 tree. I don't have 1.7 around anymore since 1.8 has the junk mail filter improvements and I use Mozilla mail.