I happen to have at one time been rather impressed by what I saw in Linux, but have slowly come to recognize it's shortcomings. Probably one of the last straws was when Ken Thompson basically characterized Linux as a wannabe OS, several weeks after I finished reading "A Quarter-Century of Unix" which describes in considerable detail what an exciting, intellectually stimulating environment the Unix community was in the early days. A lot of smart people from Unix's past just shake their heads and walk away when they see people trying to relive that past. It's so damned retro.
I have a linux box sitting across the room from me here. I've worked with Linux off and on since the fall of 1993 when I bought the Yggdrasil Plug&Play release on CD-ROM. I've purchased four commercially packaged versions of Linux, including SuSE and RedHat distributions. I've purchased Applixware, Caldera's Wabi, SWiM Motif, and over three feet of O'Reilly books. I still have Slackware running on one of my machines, though I'm seriously considering putting a *BSD on it for the few things I still do on a Unix-like environment (is CDParanoia ported to NetBSD?). I also have several Windows boxes, including one running Windows 2000.
As I repeated above, you don't have to believe anything you don't choose to believe. In your personal little fairyland Bill Gates can be ruthlessly in pursuit of you to steal away your soul, and fill your hard drive with clay. You seem like a damn fool to a lot of the real world, but nobody can stop you from expressing how you feel. And nobody has to take you seriously.
Seriously, folks, nobody at Microsoft has to do anything to directly take down Linux. It's advocates do that by themselves. The stench gets to be too much sometimes.
Yep, nobody gets tired of the hype that is Linux, unless Microsoft pays them to do so. And Linux will save the world.
The cost of the operating system is just a fraction of the total cost of having the machine on an employee's desk. The hardware costs, the network costs, the time-the-worker-spends-futzing-around costs, the help desk costs. All in all, the operating system itself is a tiny part of the cost of the machine. Particularly if averaged over a three or four year life of the machine.
The whole package costs thousands. The OS at most a hundred. Going to a 'free' OS, with retraining costs, etc., would be greater.
DOJ and other spooks are worried that encryption will prevent them from monitoring the activity of the terrorists, child pornographers, drug dealers, and other meanaces to society. The simple fact of the matter is, encryption is rarely used in these circumstances.
What do you base this statement on? Do you seriously think child pornographers send each other pornographic postcards? Do you think terrorists use Ham radio to communicate?
The US Government is not killing the talent pool. They are hiring it to work at the NSA and keeping the code they produce proprietary for-government-eyes-only. So they're definitely not shooting themselves in the foot. Unless you believe the laughable notion that the NSA don't know what they are doing.
You are probably right that every American can afford the $3 computer. Many definitely cannot afford a $400 computer. Some people don't even have phone connections. Others have no interest in having a computer in their home.
It isn't necessarily a Luddite thing. People just have different priorities in their lives. I didn't have a television set in my house until recently (now I have one with a 2-1/2" LCD screen,) but I have a half dozen computers.
Where did you get the 23x6 reliability figure? Oh, you're repeating what you heard somebody else make up here awhile back? What else that you have to say should we not be believing?
Office 2000 depends on having NT servers to do the really incredible out-there things that are the furthest extension of the office suite, like collaborative scheduling with Outlook, etc. Most of the functionality that people use day to day with an office suite don't require an NT server.
NT is far from a 'dying horse.' Of course, NT 4.0 will die almost immediately when Windows 2000 (aka NT 5) comes out, because it W2K is such a good OS.
You think Microsoft is foolish enough to go to the effort of porting Office 2000 to a dead-dog windowing environment like X11? It would cost at much more than what it cost to produce the Win32 version, and to what benefit?
Ummm, Microsoft Word survives because it's a pretty good word processor. It dominates because of compatability games.
There isn't a good open source word processor. There are fairly good closed source word processors that run on open source OSes like Linux, and there are kinda-sorta-there open source word processors (which are improving regularly.) And there are fantastic typesetting programs like TeX. But that runs on almost any platform you can imagine. Knuth is God, BTW.
I am running Office 2000 on a 486DX-2 50MHz Toshiba Laptop with 28 MB of RAM in it. It runs rather nicely with Windows 95 on that hardware. The fact that you've never run MS Office on hardware you've paid for yourself sure shows. (I imagine you've never run MS Office at all, and are proud of the fact.)
But anyways, you're an expert on Microsoft products. Don't let me interfere with your pronouncements.
As soon as all those blue screen loving Micrsof~t employees
There must be quite a few heartbroken Microsoft employees, then, because I've not heard from anybody running the Windows 2000 Beta who is seeing many of the much beloved (by Linux zealots, anyway) BSOD screens.
Microsoft didn't just sell a version of Unix. They produced a version of Unix called Xenix. I ran it a few years ago on an antique Altos box I bought at a swapmeet. Running on an 8086 with 512K of RAM it supported 5 users on terminals over it's 5 serial ports. It was a nice piece of work for the early 1980s. They later sold Xenix off to SCO when they left the Unix market.
Re:My thoughts on corporations using BSD code
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If you like the NT microkernel, you can bypass the Win32 API by purchasing Interix. It's a Posix-compliant layer that runs directly on the NT kernel, alongside the Win32 layer. It's pricey, but comes with the Exceed X server, Motif, and GCC. I've run X11 code on an NT box and displayed it on an Linux machine running X. Also, although I haven't tried it, there's a port of X11R6 to Interix running on the NT kernel. Interix is Posix certified, btw, not just mostly-there.
Re:WHAT Linux FORKS? Are car dealers's forks of MA
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If all Mazda dealers received an engine from Mazda and could pick and choose what chassis, trim, dashboard, etc. from any other party they wanted to include in building it up into a car, then I would consider a car dealership a fork.
As it is, every Linux distributor produces a fork. There are as many versions of/etc as there are distributions of Linux, and they're different from each other in somewhat frustrating ways.
Does this book mean Stephenson has stepped away from sci-fi?
He's written fewer SF books than non-SF books, so I don't think he has anything there to step away from.
His books get sold in SF bookstores, but the latest one is also prominently on display at Barney's Noble (and that website place some of us hope will eventually dry up and blow away)
Your post engages in a considerable amount of name-calling. "Psuedo-scientist" is a pretty ridiculous term to label the alchemists, since you follow it by proposing that 'science' didn't exist in their time. You also fail to recognize the historical fact that publishing as a form of communications took off because of technological innovations. It wasn't possible to widely publish scientific discoveries before the invention of the printing press. Peppering your writing with slurs like "dead-end path", "rip-off artists", and "latter-day alchemists" partially discredits what you're trying to say. It turns your ideas in polemical writing, nothing more.
Software development is technology, which is very different from science. Technology is not an exploration of the new reaches of science, it is the implementation of the discoveries in practical applications. New algorhythms, new theories and proofs of those theories, is what computer science is about. (The fact that it is facilitated by the Patent process is worth noting.) Slogging through the existing code to fix bugs and make incremental improvements is technology. It's very different from science.
Slashdot Mirror
You're entitled to see things however you like.
You're not entitled to tell us how to see things.
I happen to have at one time been rather impressed by what I saw in Linux, but have slowly come to recognize it's shortcomings. Probably one of the last straws was when Ken Thompson basically characterized Linux as a wannabe OS, several weeks after I finished reading "A Quarter-Century of Unix" which describes in considerable detail what an exciting, intellectually stimulating environment the Unix community was in the early days. A lot of smart people from Unix's past just shake their heads and walk away when they see people trying to relive that past. It's so damned retro.
I have a linux box sitting across the room from me here. I've worked with Linux off and on since the fall of 1993 when I bought the Yggdrasil Plug&Play release on CD-ROM. I've purchased four commercially packaged versions of Linux, including SuSE and RedHat distributions. I've purchased Applixware, Caldera's Wabi, SWiM Motif, and over three feet of O'Reilly books. I still have Slackware running on one of my machines, though I'm seriously considering putting a *BSD on it for the few things I still do on a Unix-like environment (is CDParanoia ported to NetBSD?). I also have several Windows boxes, including one running Windows 2000.
As I repeated above, you don't have to believe anything you don't choose to believe. In your personal little fairyland Bill Gates can be ruthlessly in pursuit of you to steal away your soul, and fill your hard drive with clay. You seem like a damn fool to a lot of the real world, but nobody can stop you from expressing how you feel. And nobody has to take you seriously.
Seriously, folks, nobody at Microsoft has to do anything to directly take down Linux. It's advocates do that by themselves. The stench gets to be too much sometimes.
Yep, nobody gets tired of the hype that is Linux, unless Microsoft pays them to do so. And Linux will save the world.
The cost of the operating system is just a fraction of the total cost of having the machine on an employee's desk. The hardware costs, the network costs, the time-the-worker-spends-futzing-around costs, the help desk costs. All in all, the operating system itself is a tiny part of the cost of the machine. Particularly if averaged over a three or four year life of the machine.
The whole package costs thousands. The OS at most a hundred. Going to a 'free' OS, with retraining costs, etc., would be greater.
DOJ and other spooks are worried that encryption will prevent them from monitoring the activity of the terrorists, child pornographers, drug dealers, and other meanaces to society. The simple fact of the matter is, encryption is rarely used in these circumstances.
What do you base this statement on? Do you seriously think child pornographers send each other pornographic postcards? Do you think terrorists use Ham radio to communicate?
They are trying to keep us from realizing the helicopters aren't black; they are actually teal.
The US Government is not killing the talent pool. They are hiring it to work at the NSA and keeping the code they produce proprietary for-government-eyes-only. So they're definitely not shooting themselves in the foot. Unless you believe the laughable notion that the NSA don't know what they are doing.
Every American can afford a $3-400 pc.
You are probably right that every American can afford the $3 computer. Many definitely cannot afford a $400 computer. Some people don't even have phone connections. Others have no interest in having a computer in their home.
It isn't necessarily a Luddite thing. People just have different priorities in their lives. I didn't have a television set in my house until recently (now I have one with a 2-1/2" LCD screen,) but I have a half dozen computers.
Where did you get the 23x6 reliability figure? Oh, you're repeating what you heard somebody else make up here awhile back? What else that you have to say should we not be believing?
Office 2000 depends on having NT servers to do the really incredible out-there things that are the furthest extension of the office suite, like collaborative scheduling with Outlook, etc. Most of the functionality that people use day to day with an office suite don't require an NT server.
NT is far from a 'dying horse.' Of course, NT 4.0 will die almost immediately when Windows 2000 (aka NT 5) comes out, because it W2K is such a good OS.
You think Microsoft is foolish enough to go to the effort of porting Office 2000 to a dead-dog windowing environment like X11? It would cost at much more than what it cost to produce the Win32 version, and to what benefit?
You would think? When?
Obviously that is the goal.
(why am I even wasting time responding to an AC on a point like this?)
Ummm, Microsoft Word survives because it's a pretty good word processor. It dominates because of compatability games.
There isn't a good open source word processor. There are fairly good closed source word processors that run on open source OSes like Linux, and there are kinda-sorta-there open source word processors (which are improving regularly.) And there are fantastic typesetting programs like TeX. But that runs on almost any platform you can imagine. Knuth is God, BTW.
Of course, none of this is backed up by anything more than the fact that you're posting it as an anonymous coward.
I am running Office 2000 on a 486DX-2 50MHz Toshiba Laptop with 28 MB of RAM in it. It runs rather nicely with Windows 95 on that hardware. The fact that you've never run MS Office on hardware you've paid for yourself sure shows. (I imagine you've never run MS Office at all, and are proud of the fact.)
But anyways, you're an expert on Microsoft products. Don't let me interfere with your pronouncements.
As soon as all those blue screen loving Micrsof~t employees
There must be quite a few heartbroken Microsoft employees, then, because I've not heard from anybody running the Windows 2000 Beta who is seeing many of the much beloved (by Linux zealots, anyway) BSOD screens.
Microsoft didn't just sell a version of Unix. They produced a version of Unix called Xenix. I ran it a few years ago on an antique Altos box I bought at a swapmeet. Running on an 8086 with 512K of RAM it supported 5 users on terminals over it's 5 serial ports. It was a nice piece of work for the early 1980s. They later sold Xenix off to SCO when they left the Unix market.
If you like the NT microkernel, you can bypass the Win32 API by purchasing Interix. It's a Posix-compliant layer that runs directly on the NT kernel, alongside the Win32 layer. It's pricey, but comes with the Exceed X server, Motif, and GCC. I've run X11 code on an NT box and displayed it on an Linux machine running X. Also, although I haven't tried it, there's a port of X11R6 to Interix running on the NT kernel. Interix is Posix certified, btw, not just mostly-there.
If all Mazda dealers received an engine from Mazda and could pick and choose what chassis, trim, dashboard, etc. from any other party they wanted to include in building it up into a car, then I would consider a car dealership a fork.
/etc as there are distributions of Linux, and they're different from each other in somewhat frustrating ways.
As it is, every Linux distributor produces a fork. There are as many versions of
A simple statement by ESR is hard evidence?
Ignorant Microsoft workers? Don't you mean critical Microsoft workers? Oh that's right, anybody who doesn't think the same way you do....
Why would they feel "quite intimidated"? Maybe annoyed or amused...
It was probably more enlightening to ESR than anybody else. He's so used to preaching to the choir...
It's interesting, and notable, that in the book "Finix" is merely credited as being the multiple-boot on the laptop that does "kickass typesetting."
He could have installed LaTeX on Windows NT and had that.
Does this book mean Stephenson has stepped away from sci-fi?
He's written fewer SF books than non-SF books, so I don't think he has anything there to step away from.
His books get sold in SF bookstores, but the latest one is also prominently on display at Barney's Noble (and that website place some of us hope will eventually dry up and blow away)
I thought _The Big U_ was a lot of fun. It captures accurately the lifestyle of at least a significant portion of the Linux community.
And slashdot is the crucible in which we flame the hell out of it, and what is left is the pure gold we were in search of.
Actually, the end result in many instances is tremendous fuel expenditure, and ash.
Often enough, Slashdot is bizzarre mode. So grotesque as to defy common sense.
And yes, you're welcome to come into the Cathederal for a visit. But wipe your feet at the door.
Hint: It already does not matter to many people that linux won't run office, quicktime, etc.
Obviously it doesn't matter. That's a tautology.
It's interesting that your comments clearly differentiate between inventive people, and 'you' just running Linux.
Anyway, carry on!
Your post engages in a considerable amount of name-calling. "Psuedo-scientist" is a pretty ridiculous term to label the alchemists, since you follow it by proposing that 'science' didn't exist in their time. You also fail to recognize the historical fact that publishing as a form of communications took off because of technological innovations. It wasn't possible to widely publish scientific discoveries before the invention of the printing press. Peppering your writing with slurs like "dead-end path", "rip-off artists", and "latter-day alchemists" partially discredits what you're trying to say. It turns your ideas in polemical writing, nothing more.
Software development is technology, which is very different from science. Technology is not an exploration of the new reaches of science, it is the implementation of the discoveries in practical applications. New algorhythms, new theories and proofs of those theories, is what computer science is about. (The fact that it is facilitated by the Patent process is worth noting.) Slogging through the existing code to fix bugs and make incremental improvements is technology. It's very different from science.