RBL's are like a fever. They tell you when something it wrong and only a dork blames the fever when the problem is the disease.
It's not like any fever I've come across. For the analogy to hold, when I'm ill my entire village would get a fever, and some of the population might die, in the hope that the sound of the ambulances and funerals might alert me to the fact that I have a problem.
I'm glad you are so happy about having your reputation threatened when you have done nothing wrong. Our business is hosting websites on our own machines in a server park. Server parks are always going to be a good place for spammers to rent cheap machines, and if our clients start getting their mails bounced, they don't write to the server park owners, they cancel their contracts with us. And, no, we can't just take our servers elsewhere at 3 minutes' notice, so the RBL puts zero economic pressure on our server park (which seems to act fairly promptly on abuse compaints anyway).
RBLs punish the innocent to get at the guilty. This is wrong. The next time my business is hit by SPEWS or any other such system, I'm going to start writing pithy articles for the general press, with the aim of scaring customers away from ISPs that use RBLs, eg "Do you want your ISP to tell you what email you can read?. And I shall certainly take legal advice on whether I can sue companies who bounce my mail with any rejection message containing the word 'spam' for libel or something similar.
Yes, all that is true, but, in practice, to the extent that Redhat becomes the de facto standard for professional use, they have a certain amount of control. If 3rd party binaries have more chance of working (ever tried installing random rpms with Suse?), Linux staff have RH-flavoured skills and the bookstores sell RH-flavoured guides, you are close to 'no-one ever got fired for running Redhat'. Sure, you can fork, or install Debian, or something, but most commercial users want some sort of road map.
Personally, I'm rooting for Redhat all the way. A bit less variety in the Linux world would make for a less exciting but more productive life.
I don't think they lied, it all has to do with reality. The reality is that the cpus have not sold in the quantities that they would have liked.
A bit of assembler is about as close as I have ever got to the core of a chip, so sorry if all the terms that follow are inaccurate. But I also thought that by far the most interesting thing about the Crusoe was that you could potentially produce a different instruction set. And, sure, I guess it takes a lot of work, but isn't this the sort of insane project that could potentially be tackled by the Open Source community?
One of the machines I used a long way back had microcode that was loaded from disc (it had a separate 68000 just to bootstrap the main processor, which was a circuit board the size of a large suitcase), so you could really edit your instruction set in emacs, reboot, and presumably watch your machine die. Can you do that with a Crusoe, or is the microcode (or whatever it's called nowadays) blown into the silicon?
The potential benefits of doing this sort of thing could be quite high. The machine mentioned above had an instruction set that was optimised for lisp-like data structures, and, as a result, ran lisp much faster than other processors of the time with similar clock speeds. There must be other applications where a custom-made reduced instruction set would pay dividends.
Come on guys, it's a classic in-group out-group thing. Most people on/. don't do spam (or, if they do, they are not dumb enough to admit it), so spam is evil. Some/.ers like looking inside other people's computers, so crackers are not evil.
It's simple human nature, we pick the definition of evil that puts us and our friends in a good light and the people we dislike or don't care about in a bad light, and then we can feel good about ourselves. The reason the govt is passing so many laws against allegedly evil crackers is that the politicians don't know any crackers, and, anyway, I bet most/.ers don't bother to vote. Politicians do know corrupt businessmen, so they have to be more careful with them.
Sure, some 8 year-olds end up looking at nasty pictures because of spam. But then they could find whatever sort of image they want in 20 seconds with Google. The solution here would be to ban ISPs from carrying pornographic images. But, judging from quite a lot of sigs, Porn is Good on/. You see, it is very important to draw the arbitrary lines in just the right places.
I can't help thinking that the domain name system worked a lot better when it was all run by one company. I register domains with OpenSRS, and trying to take over domains administered by Network Solutions, for example, is a nightmare, because half the time they just ignore the requests to hand over the domain. The last thing we want is to introduce that kind of behaviour at the next level up.
Why IT is not (yet) telecoms
on
The New IT Crisis
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Telephony is a mature technology that doesn't completely change the way it works every five years. For 80 or so years the way the signals got routed didn't change much at all. Then exchanges went digital, and, for the transition period, it was all bailing wire like the article says, except that the telephone companies had - dare I say it - telephone number budgets to pay for the changeover.
By comparison, the rate of change in IT is still very high. We've gone from mainframe to micro, from thin client through peer networking and back to thin client, from standalone to the Internet, we've done dial-up, ADSL, wireless...
... and one of the main reasons for all the bailing wire is that no company can afford to throw away all it's infrastructure every 24 months. If telephone systems stored data, and if handsets ran bespoke software, there would still be a few manual exchanges in use for backward compatibility.
Re:Too many distributions
on
Mandrake News
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· Score: 2
Absolutely. I've ended up using Redhat just because I got fed up with finding that binaries didn't work with other distros, but I still come across programs that have been tested on something forked from something that was once Debian. And then we wonder why people have trouble taking open source seriously...
Re:If this is good news...
on
Mandrake News
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· Score: 2
I think Redhat makes a small profit now
My understanding was that RedHat were making a small profit, but the profits came from support to fairly large corporate customers, not from the distro itself.
Selling Windows pays for Microsoft and a few large companies.
I was more thinking of all the companies who make money (re)selling Windows products. I know plenty of people who make a very nice living installing Windows systems and supporting them, both for end users and companies. From my experiences here in France, I don't think anyone could make money supporting Linux for end users, and I'm not even sure about installing networks: a few companies have tried, and have got some business from schools, govt departments etc, but I'm not sure any of them are still trading.
I doubt if you would be successful with a Windows startup right now
You are certainly right in my case, and probably right in the more general case too. But there are plenty of companies selling solutions for Windows who manage to pay their bills, and not all of them are large: I can think of one company I know with 3 staff that knocks out bespoke solutions based on the Sage accounting package. The only people I can think of who might be making money on Linux are IBM.
One of the many things I don't get is why everyone wants to ditch CRT in favour of LCD.
Sure, the footprint is smaller (I guess my 19" CRT would look a bit odd attached to a laptop by a hinge). But, in terms of viewing experience, no LCD screen I have used gets close to a halfway decent CRT. The pixels are too discrete, the viewing angle is too narrow and they aren't as bright.
Admittedly the ones I have seen are mainly entry level (ie only twice as expensive as my CRT) so maybe the ones that cost more than my house are better.
Does anyone out there like looking at LCD displays, as opposed to the trendy box they come in?
Re:If this is good news...
on
Mandrake News
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· Score: 2
They ARE making money now, but are still in the red
OK, but if we replace 'making money' with 'being profitable', we still seem to end up at the same point, ie this isn't a great incentive to get into their line of business, at least for the moment.
Also, you appear to be describing a major crisis, a restructuring and a recovery, all in less than a year. That might be good, or it might be terrible. They could achieve an operating profit in the short term by firing all their development staff, doing no more publicity and cashing cheques for the stuff they have shipped, but they would be out of business in a year.
If they become profitable, and stay there for a full year, it starts to sound like good news. For the moment, it still sounds like slightly less terrible news than before.
If this is good news...
on
Mandrake News
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
So this is the most overtly aimed-at-end-users and putting-the-emphasis-on-ease-of-use installation around, and they still can't make money? And this is good news? Is it just me, or are we in the twilight zone?
Surely one of the enormous problems we have with Linux is that no-one seems to be able to make any money out of it. Linux almost bankrupted Corel, and even Redhat distributes the software at a loss. Selling Windows pays, selling Linux manifestly doesn't. As long as that is the case, it is hardly surprising that most distributors don't want to know.
I think one of the things that will have to change if Linux is to get much further in terms of market penetration is the look it didn't cost me a bean mentality. At one point I was going to offer Linux support from my cybercafe. Then I noticed that people with Windows problems expect to pay and ask for a price up front, whereas Linux users expect two hours of my undivided attention and might possibly buy a cup of coffee.
Giving money to Mandrake is nice, but I would suggest that buying a boxed copy from time to time from a non-specialist supplier would do far more to improve the distribution of Linux.
I buy mainly programming books, and I find the comments extremely useful on the whole. I'm amazed how candid some of the comments are: on more than one occasion I have been thinking of buying a book, and the reviews have been so bad I have changed my mind.
Reviews are like interviews: if they are good, they don't tell you much, but if they are bad, they are usually worth listening to. On the occasions I have bought a book from Amazon in spite of the bad reviews, I have usually ended up agreeing with the negative review.
And I can't imagine that Amazon care much: if I go to their site, it's because I want to buy a book, so helping me to buy the right book makes sense for them and me. It's a win-win situation.
My one frustration is that there are not more reviews for some of the more specialised books. But then maybe I should submit some myself...
I don't like adverts either, but what's the alternative for companies offering free hosting? Are we saying that all hosting should be paying, either as part of ISP subscriptions or as a standalone service? If not, how do all the people posting about the evils of adverts think that that free hosting should be financed? Selling email addresses to spam merchants?
Web advertising does pay, otherwise people wouldn't do it. Sure, Looking at the sites that people use in my cybercafe, masses of hideous publicity dosn't seem to put a lot of people off.
What about the FrontPage extensions module for Apache? MS are not ideologues, they will do whatever suits their bottom line. And, as has been demonstrated on numerous occasions, they really don't care about performing u-turns.
I can't believe some of the arguments being posted here, especially the 'no-one would buy MS products for Linux' one. That's been the argument for just about everything they have ever produced, and, in almost every case, they have ended up with the lion's share of the market. A couple of years ago, the story was that no-one would use Media Player instead of RealPlayer.
And OSS wps are just so bad! Do any of the people singing the praises of Open Office actually use it in a corporate setting? I'm about to install W2K alongside my Linux network just so the clients can produce CVs that anyone else in the world can read more than one time in three.
You're right of course. Some of the other issues are serial port speed etc, but, like you say, you don't have to emulate these limitations.
Faster than Arcem
I suspect it depends a lot on what you do. As I take great pleasure in pointing out to what's left of the Acorn community, the new Iyonix thingey will still be slower than the 7500-based systems for anything using intensive FP... The main issue for me is that VA is a turnkey solution, whereas Arcem sounds like it needs some fiddling (and may not be entirely legal). I'm going to set up a VA/W2K/Linux 2.5 boot system for a client over Christmas, so maybe I'll be eating my words by New Year!
Finally, an article that states the blindingly obvious but constantly ignored fact that spam is not about to destroy life as we know it. Can we move on and be paranoid about something else now?
Virtual Acorn emulates an A5000, which means ARM3 rather than ARM2, and will address 16Mb rather than 4 (maybe Arcem does too, but, if it does, it isn't strictly emulating the A440). The VA website claims that their product will run software 60 times faster than an A3000 (which, by memory, was about the same speed as an A440).
Most RISC OS software will indeed run under 3.1, but Risc OS 4 has several attractive features for a multi-platform environment - ie just about everywhere nowadays! - including long filenames, more than 77 items per directory, support for large hard discs and so on. Having said that, I'm still on 3.7 and the above irritations have never driven me to fork out the money to upgrade:-)
At one point just about every school in the country was using them, so there is still a load of educational software for it. It boots in under 10 seconds, the dtp and vector drawing packages are still the fastest I have used on any system, and the applications all work together, somewhat like Un*x at the command line level, except this is all GUI. I'm using my RISC OS machine to print out display letters at this very moment.
The problem was that ARM couldn't play the MHz game, and, in the end, compatibility with the rest of the world became an issue, even in education and DTP. I doubt if I'll buy one, but when I use the neolithic Linux GUIs I still get nostalgic.
Well, yes, you can run it, but, unfortunately, it provides a pretty good demonstration of how the once legendary speed of Acorn machines had a lot more to do with their very tight coding than with their hardware. I installed it on a StrongARM system, and it was significantly slower than P166 systems I have set up. And that's before we get onto the fact that the disto is Debian and half the apps don't work. It's impressive, but I'm not convinced it's useful.
Wouldn't it be about 3 times smaller if it didn't have the CD ROM? Then you could plug in a USB one when you need it, or share one CD between half a dozen units, or whatever.
But what about all the sollicited post in his area? I mean, several tons of junk mail a day doesn't just affect one person, it could put the postman's back out, or break the suspension on the van, or fill up the sorting office, and then all the other Post Office users will suffer too, and in the end people will board up their post boxes and only accept letters from people they know and it will be the end of life as we know it.
Surely what he should do is ask his post office not to deliver any shrinked-wrapped mail to anyone in his entire postcode range until the/. campaign is halted. And if his neighbours don't like it, they should exercise their right to move house.
I know, I know, it's a stupid idea, it's just that it sounds a lot like SPEWS to me...
How long ago did you hear, "OK so there is a GUI but there will never be an office"?
About 30 seconds ago, when one of my clients asked if she could save a file directly onto a floppy disc from Star Office, and I told her that, unfortunately, this hangs the program and permanently locks up the floppy drive until the next reboot. Her next words were not "Where can I get a copy of this great program?". And I don't think we can blame this particular problem on MS.
And calling it OSS is a bit dubious anyway. All the development work was done by a private company. They went open source (ish) when it became clear that no-one was going to actually pay for the product. I haven't seen a whole lot of new functionality in SO or OO since.
SO is a great office suite for people who don't need an office suite. If you spend most of your time coding and want to open the odd file attachment or write the odd letter, it's great. But, as others have already posted, only a masochistic would want to use it 40 hours a day to earn your living.
"chique factor" advantages to Sony for supporting StarOffice
Sorry? Chique factor? Sony's PR people must be hiding under the table. Of all the flagships that the Open Source community could choose, this is the one that has the most holes below the waterline.
the essence of this is a tit-for-tat response to Microsoft releasing X-Box.
I really don't think so. Surely it went something like this:
Some accountant in a suit works out that applications software contributes quite a lot to the cost of PCs, and that the market is price sensitive at present
the market research people confirm that a lot of customers don't care what office suite is shipped with their machine, either because they don't use it, they have a licence from their last machine or they are going to pirate Office from work anyway
their secretary finds a copy of Star Office on the cover disc of her son's magazine.
Sony are using Star Office because it is cheap, because it increases their margins and/or reduces their RRP. Star Office is a poor advert for OSS, and Sony are using it for the least noble of all possible reasons. So, while it isn't a bad thing, I think the street parties are premature.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you also taking legal advice on whether you can sue the /. posters who post a reply containing the word 'idiot' for libel or something similar?
No, because none of our customers read /. :-)
RBL's are like a fever. They tell you when something it wrong and only a dork blames the fever when the problem is the disease.
It's not like any fever I've come across. For the analogy to hold, when I'm ill my entire village would get a fever, and some of the population might die, in the hope that the sound of the ambulances and funerals might alert me to the fact that I have a problem.
I'm glad you are so happy about having your reputation threatened when you have done nothing wrong. Our business is hosting websites on our own machines in a server park. Server parks are always going to be a good place for spammers to rent cheap machines, and if our clients start getting their mails bounced, they don't write to the server park owners, they cancel their contracts with us. And, no, we can't just take our servers elsewhere at 3 minutes' notice, so the RBL puts zero economic pressure on our server park (which seems to act fairly promptly on abuse compaints anyway).
RBLs punish the innocent to get at the guilty. This is wrong. The next time my business is hit by SPEWS or any other such system, I'm going to start writing pithy articles for the general press, with the aim of scaring customers away from ISPs that use RBLs, eg "Do you want your ISP to tell you what email you can read?. And I shall certainly take legal advice on whether I can sue companies who bounce my mail with any rejection message containing the word 'spam' for libel or something similar.
Yes, all that is true, but, in practice, to the extent that Redhat becomes the de facto standard for professional use, they have a certain amount of control. If 3rd party binaries have more chance of working (ever tried installing random rpms with Suse?), Linux staff have RH-flavoured skills and the bookstores sell RH-flavoured guides, you are close to 'no-one ever got fired for running Redhat'. Sure, you can fork, or install Debian, or something, but most commercial users want some sort of road map.
Personally, I'm rooting for Redhat all the way. A bit less variety in the Linux world would make for a less exciting but more productive life.
I don't think they lied, it all has to do with reality. The reality is that the cpus have not sold in the quantities that they would have liked.
A bit of assembler is about as close as I have ever got to the core of a chip, so sorry if all the terms that follow are inaccurate. But I also thought that by far the most interesting thing about the Crusoe was that you could potentially produce a different instruction set. And, sure, I guess it takes a lot of work, but isn't this the sort of insane project that could potentially be tackled by the Open Source community?
One of the machines I used a long way back had microcode that was loaded from disc (it had a separate 68000 just to bootstrap the main processor, which was a circuit board the size of a large suitcase), so you could really edit your instruction set in emacs, reboot, and presumably watch your machine die. Can you do that with a Crusoe, or is the microcode (or whatever it's called nowadays) blown into the silicon?
The potential benefits of doing this sort of thing could be quite high. The machine mentioned above had an instruction set that was optimised for lisp-like data structures, and, as a result, ran lisp much faster than other processors of the time with similar clock speeds. There must be other applications where a custom-made reduced instruction set would pay dividends.
Come on guys, it's a classic in-group out-group thing. Most people on /. don't do spam (or, if they do, they are not dumb enough to admit it), so spam is evil. Some /.ers like looking inside other people's computers, so crackers are not evil.
It's simple human nature, we pick the definition of evil that puts us and our friends in a good light and the people we dislike or don't care about in a bad light, and then we can feel good about ourselves. The reason the govt is passing so many laws against allegedly evil crackers is that the politicians don't know any crackers, and, anyway, I bet most /.ers don't bother to vote. Politicians do know corrupt businessmen, so they have to be more careful with them.
Sure, some 8 year-olds end up looking at nasty pictures because of spam. But then they could find whatever sort of image they want in 20 seconds with Google. The solution here would be to ban ISPs from carrying pornographic images. But, judging from quite a lot of sigs, Porn is Good on /. You see, it is very important to draw the arbitrary lines in just the right places.
I can't help thinking that the domain name system worked a lot better when it was all run by one company. I register domains with OpenSRS, and trying to take over domains administered by Network Solutions, for example, is a nightmare, because half the time they just ignore the requests to hand over the domain. The last thing we want is to introduce that kind of behaviour at the next level up.
Telephony is a mature technology that doesn't completely change the way it works every five years. For 80 or so years the way the signals got routed didn't change much at all. Then exchanges went digital, and, for the transition period, it was all bailing wire like the article says, except that the telephone companies had - dare I say it - telephone number budgets to pay for the changeover.
By comparison, the rate of change in IT is still very high. We've gone from mainframe to micro, from thin client through peer networking and back to thin client, from standalone to the Internet, we've done dial-up, ADSL, wireless...
... and one of the main reasons for all the bailing wire is that no company can afford to throw away all it's infrastructure every 24 months. If telephone systems stored data, and if handsets ran bespoke software, there would still be a few manual exchanges in use for backward compatibility.
Absolutely. I've ended up using Redhat just because I got fed up with finding that binaries didn't work with other distros, but I still come across programs that have been tested on something forked from something that was once Debian. And then we wonder why people have trouble taking open source seriously...
I think Redhat makes a small profit now
My understanding was that RedHat were making a small profit, but the profits came from support to fairly large corporate customers, not from the distro itself.
Selling Windows pays for Microsoft and a few large companies.
I was more thinking of all the companies who make money (re)selling Windows products. I know plenty of people who make a very nice living installing Windows systems and supporting them, both for end users and companies. From my experiences here in France, I don't think anyone could make money supporting Linux for end users, and I'm not even sure about installing networks: a few companies have tried, and have got some business from schools, govt departments etc, but I'm not sure any of them are still trading.
I doubt if you would be successful with a Windows startup right now
You are certainly right in my case, and probably right in the more general case too. But there are plenty of companies selling solutions for Windows who manage to pay their bills, and not all of them are large: I can think of one company I know with 3 staff that knocks out bespoke solutions based on the Sage accounting package. The only people I can think of who might be making money on Linux are IBM.
One of the many things I don't get is why everyone wants to ditch CRT in favour of LCD.
Sure, the footprint is smaller (I guess my 19" CRT would look a bit odd attached to a laptop by a hinge). But, in terms of viewing experience, no LCD screen I have used gets close to a halfway decent CRT. The pixels are too discrete, the viewing angle is too narrow and they aren't as bright.
Admittedly the ones I have seen are mainly entry level (ie only twice as expensive as my CRT) so maybe the ones that cost more than my house are better.
Does anyone out there like looking at LCD displays, as opposed to the trendy box they come in?
They ARE making money now, but are still in the red
OK, but if we replace 'making money' with 'being profitable', we still seem to end up at the same point, ie this isn't a great incentive to get into their line of business, at least for the moment.
Also, you appear to be describing a major crisis, a restructuring and a recovery, all in less than a year. That might be good, or it might be terrible. They could achieve an operating profit in the short term by firing all their development staff, doing no more publicity and cashing cheques for the stuff they have shipped, but they would be out of business in a year.
If they become profitable, and stay there for a full year, it starts to sound like good news. For the moment, it still sounds like slightly less terrible news than before.
So this is the most overtly aimed-at-end-users and putting-the-emphasis-on-ease-of-use installation around, and they still can't make money? And this is good news? Is it just me, or are we in the twilight zone?
Surely one of the enormous problems we have with Linux is that no-one seems to be able to make any money out of it. Linux almost bankrupted Corel, and even Redhat distributes the software at a loss. Selling Windows pays, selling Linux manifestly doesn't. As long as that is the case, it is hardly surprising that most distributors don't want to know.
I think one of the things that will have to change if Linux is to get much further in terms of market penetration is the look it didn't cost me a bean mentality. At one point I was going to offer Linux support from my cybercafe. Then I noticed that people with Windows problems expect to pay and ask for a price up front, whereas Linux users expect two hours of my undivided attention and might possibly buy a cup of coffee.
Giving money to Mandrake is nice, but I would suggest that buying a boxed copy from time to time from a non-specialist supplier would do far more to improve the distribution of Linux.
I buy mainly programming books, and I find the comments extremely useful on the whole. I'm amazed how candid some of the comments are: on more than one occasion I have been thinking of buying a book, and the reviews have been so bad I have changed my mind.
Reviews are like interviews: if they are good, they don't tell you much, but if they are bad, they are usually worth listening to. On the occasions I have bought a book from Amazon in spite of the bad reviews, I have usually ended up agreeing with the negative review.
And I can't imagine that Amazon care much: if I go to their site, it's because I want to buy a book, so helping me to buy the right book makes sense for them and me. It's a win-win situation.
My one frustration is that there are not more reviews for some of the more specialised books. But then maybe I should submit some myself...
I don't like adverts either, but what's the alternative for companies offering free hosting? Are we saying that all hosting should be paying, either as part of ISP subscriptions or as a standalone service? If not, how do all the people posting about the evils of adverts think that that free hosting should be financed? Selling email addresses to spam merchants?
Web advertising does pay, otherwise people wouldn't do it. Sure, Looking at the sites that people use in my cybercafe, masses of hideous publicity dosn't seem to put a lot of people off.
What about the FrontPage extensions module for Apache? MS are not ideologues, they will do whatever suits their bottom line. And, as has been demonstrated on numerous occasions, they really don't care about performing u-turns.
I can't believe some of the arguments being posted here, especially the 'no-one would buy MS products for Linux' one. That's been the argument for just about everything they have ever produced, and, in almost every case, they have ended up with the lion's share of the market. A couple of years ago, the story was that no-one would use Media Player instead of RealPlayer.
And OSS wps are just so bad! Do any of the people singing the praises of Open Office actually use it in a corporate setting? I'm about to install W2K alongside my Linux network just so the clients can produce CVs that anyone else in the world can read more than one time in three.
A5000 is 15 year-old technology
You're right of course. Some of the other issues are serial port speed etc, but, like you say, you don't have to emulate these limitations.
Faster than Arcem
I suspect it depends a lot on what you do. As I take great pleasure in pointing out to what's left of the Acorn community, the new Iyonix thingey will still be slower than the 7500-based systems for anything using intensive FP... The main issue for me is that VA is a turnkey solution, whereas Arcem sounds like it needs some fiddling (and may not be entirely legal). I'm going to set up a VA/W2K/Linux 2.5 boot system for a client over Christmas, so maybe I'll be eating my words by New Year!
Finally, an article that states the blindingly obvious but constantly ignored fact that spam is not about to destroy life as we know it. Can we move on and be paranoid about something else now?
Virtual Acorn emulates an A5000, which means ARM3 rather than ARM2, and will address 16Mb rather than 4 (maybe Arcem does too, but, if it does, it isn't strictly emulating the A440). The VA website claims that their product will run software 60 times faster than an A3000 (which, by memory, was about the same speed as an A440).
Most RISC OS software will indeed run under 3.1, but Risc OS 4 has several attractive features for a multi-platform environment - ie just about everywhere nowadays! - including long filenames, more than 77 items per directory, support for large hard discs and so on. Having said that, I'm still on 3.7 and the above irritations have never driven me to fork out the money to upgrade :-)
Because it appears to emulate the A440, which is 15 year-old technology?
At one point just about every school in the country was using them, so there is still a load of educational software for it. It boots in under 10 seconds, the dtp and vector drawing packages are still the fastest I have used on any system, and the applications all work together, somewhat like Un*x at the command line level, except this is all GUI. I'm using my RISC OS machine to print out display letters at this very moment.
The problem was that ARM couldn't play the MHz game, and, in the end, compatibility with the rest of the world became an issue, even in education and DTP. I doubt if I'll buy one, but when I use the neolithic Linux GUIs I still get nostalgic.
Well, yes, you can run it, but, unfortunately, it provides a pretty good demonstration of how the once legendary speed of Acorn machines had a lot more to do with their very tight coding than with their hardware. I installed it on a StrongARM system, and it was significantly slower than P166 systems I have set up. And that's before we get onto the fact that the disto is Debian and half the apps don't work. It's impressive, but I'm not convinced it's useful.
Wouldn't it be about 3 times smaller if it didn't have the CD ROM? Then you could plug in a USB one when you need it, or share one CD between half a dozen units, or whatever.
But what about all the sollicited post in his area? I mean, several tons of junk mail a day doesn't just affect one person, it could put the postman's back out, or break the suspension on the van, or fill up the sorting office, and then all the other Post Office users will suffer too, and in the end people will board up their post boxes and only accept letters from people they know and it will be the end of life as we know it.
Surely what he should do is ask his post office not to deliver any shrinked-wrapped mail to anyone in his entire postcode range until the /. campaign is halted. And if his neighbours don't like it, they should exercise their right to move house.
I know, I know, it's a stupid idea, it's just that it sounds a lot like SPEWS to me...
How long ago did you hear, "OK so there is a GUI but there will never be an office"?
About 30 seconds ago, when one of my clients asked if she could save a file directly onto a floppy disc from Star Office, and I told her that, unfortunately, this hangs the program and permanently locks up the floppy drive until the next reboot. Her next words were not "Where can I get a copy of this great program?". And I don't think we can blame this particular problem on MS.
And calling it OSS is a bit dubious anyway. All the development work was done by a private company. They went open source (ish) when it became clear that no-one was going to actually pay for the product. I haven't seen a whole lot of new functionality in SO or OO since.
SO is a great office suite for people who don't need an office suite. If you spend most of your time coding and want to open the odd file attachment or write the odd letter, it's great. But, as others have already posted, only a masochistic would want to use it 40 hours a day to earn your living.
"chique factor" advantages to Sony for supporting StarOffice
Sorry? Chique factor? Sony's PR people must be hiding under the table. Of all the flagships that the Open Source community could choose, this is the one that has the most holes below the waterline.
the essence of this is a tit-for-tat response to Microsoft releasing X-Box.
I really don't think so. Surely it went something like this:
Sony are using Star Office because it is cheap, because it increases their margins and/or reduces their RRP. Star Office is a poor advert for OSS, and Sony are using it for the least noble of all possible reasons. So, while it isn't a bad thing, I think the street parties are premature.