Yeah, no kidding. Five grand gets a decent used car. If it's the size of the damn thing that makes it so cool, five grand will get you a very decent used motorcycle or a half decent new one. If you absolutely must drive it on the sidewalk then get one of those little foldable scooters that kids are running around with. Some of them are motorized. Hell, if it's the laziness factor that kicks so much ass about these things, then why stand? Get a comparibly-priced normal scooter or an electric wheelchair. People will still laugh at you, but maybe less if you use it all the time and refrain from rollerblading in public.
And why do you need a freakin server for every tiny piece of bullshit?
Modularity. One of the nicest things about a true multitasking *NIX environment. If something doesn't work the way you want it to, you can take a piece of it, the piece you don't like, change it, and contribute it. Or install someone else's contribution. I'm actually glad there are a million complete little programs running around on this machine doing things that could be handled by one piece of software with everything integrated. Do you want about ten different sound servers, or do you want about ten slightly different versions of X to choose from? Make that twenty if there are even two different font servers. That would be the clusterfuck. I'll venture to guess that the modular nature of Linux is one of the major reasons people like it. Screw the idea of everyone agreeing on how it should be, even if that were possible. I love my Frankenstein GUI, and if I decide one day that I don't I'll log out and pick another one. Stupid Linux geeks don't have to work with whatever Microsoft or Apple (Or GNOME, or KDE) thinks their desktops should behave like. It's not for everybody; if you conform to Microsoft's market research, or Apple's, or that of the BeOS or Amiga folks, then their desktop is made for you. Mine is made for me, but only because I could customize the unholy hell out of it, and if I wanted something to be different then somebody, somewhere had written the code for me to change it. Yeah, keep a freakin' server for every tiny piece of bullshit, and God forbid it should ever be any other way.
Works great for me - I do have 512mb, but only a quarter of that's allocated to VMware. If you're not sucking up most of that 128mb in the background running Gator, ICQ banner ads, a monstrous WinAmp 3 skin, Bonzi Buddy and AOL then you're fine. The trick to VMware is using a minimal Windows installation, running as few apps as possible and doing everything else in the host OS. I have three monitors configured without Xinerama, I run Vncviewer in fullscreen mode on the right side with VMware minimized so that I can share the mouse easily and still see my images in the proper size, and Windows still is actually running faster under VMware than it did natively because of its relatively basic "hardware" and low-calorie environment.
Photoshop kept me on Windows for a long time. The interface is the only thing that really bugged me about GIMP. Having used Photoshop for about as long as you have, it just never occured to me that I should right-click on my work to save it. Maybe it would if GIMP didn't have a "File" menu in plain sight already. Then I might have thought to look for the option that way, but at first I didn't. Once I learned that "works like Photoshop" doesn't mean "acts like Photoshop" I started liking it a lot more. I still prefer Photoshop, but it's not what keeps my machine booting Windows; it's what keeps me using VMware.
I'm sitting here at work browsing Slashdot with 'Zilla on my Redhat mail/web/SQL server next to my Windows 2000 box that's here simply to store files for about ten users and serve up a couple of web pages now and then. IIS blew up again a couple of weeks ago; now it runs Apache and that's one less thing I've had to check every day. I'm reading Slashdot because I have to keep an eye on the 2000 box while I re-reinstall Service Pack 2. Oh, look! It seems the installation has hung again. I'm installing SP2 because SP3 includes some things I don't like; mainly the ability to download and run code from Microsoft any time it feels the need to do so. So I have to apply each relevant patch as it gets posted. Nothing new there. I was doing that anyway. I'm reinstalling the Service Pack because yesterday the box decided it would pick and choose which apps it wanted to run at random, and a virus scan (Virus scan - Have I even done that on the Linux machine? Have I had a reason to?) yeilded no answer. Both of these machines are behind a hardware firewall, with only a handful of ports going to the Windows box, and yet the Windows server will still catch whatever the Malady of the Month happens to be most of the time. I'm venturing to guess this probably comes from all of our Outlook-happy staff storing files on it, but I'm thinking they'd never know the difference if suddenly Samba starts handling all of that and the worms have nothing to run on. I'm glad I was on an OSS kick when IIS failed, else I'd have probably been here all night trying to make it work before reinstalling the OS and restoring data from a backup. I've yet to know why this happened, but I don't care anymore. Ultimately, even when it's working like it's supposed to, our Windows server requires constant attention. Sure, I spent two weeks setting up this Linux machine to do what I wanted it to since I'd never been exposed to it before, but I haven't had to lay a hand on it since then, except times like this one when I catch up on Slashdot while waiting for this sad waste of hardware next to me to get its act together. Wow, it's already 10am, the 2000 box is still posessed, and I still haven't gotten any work done. I shudder to think what this would be like if I had to deal with these issues on a large scale. I have one word for you: Yes.
I was thinking it would have to take an asshole of great magnitude to do that to his server, but I didn't care enough not to click the link. His site's loading rather well even in the face of a slashdotting. I'm impressed.
Doesn't matter to most of us, but it's extremely frustrating to someone who's visually impaired and uses a screen reader such as JAWS when too much of the text is displayed as an image without a meaningful ALT caption. The more gimmicks that get used lately such as Flash and Java, the less useful the web becomes to someone who's blind. Granted it's nice when the banner ads are a lot easier to ignore, but a popup throws off the screen readers quickly, and ALT-TABbing your way back to what you were trying to read is a major bitch when you get caught in a "mousetrap" and the ads start flying around. It's very easy to code a site to be handicap accessible without making it any less meaningful to the majority, but almost no one thinks about it. This is almost as annoying to me as seeing new buildings that could have easily been made wheelchair accessible, but no one cared enough to do so. The Internet has no Americans with Disabilities Act, but it's a hell of a lot easier to make a website accessible than it is to put ramps and elevators in.
Honestly, now - How many of us have moved into a house with a roommate or two, also geeks, and said something along the lines of, "We'll get some wall plates and string some of this cat-5 in the attic next weekend..." Anyone? Oh, yes. You know what I'm talking about. That's where it starts, every time. The weekend comes and goes, several times, and the idea is abandoned some months later, but not before guests or inebriated roommates have not only got compound fractures in their shins, but more importantly they've snatched the ports out of the only two NIC cards that you ever actually paid for? Did you discover you could trip on a wire on the way into the bathroom in the morning and make a print server JetDirectly into the toilet? Did you question the fact that you didn't question the presence of a printer in the bathroom? Of course not. The bathroom was the centermost point between the bedrooms. Did you clean your room every two or three months? Not because you couldn't walk in, but because you'd lost yet another keyboard due to the cat knocking over the Great Beer-A-Mid on your desk and you knew you had another one in there somewhere? Did you think that in moving out of your parents' home and away from your little brother that your days of squarely planting the tender soles of your feet onto well-honed blades wielded by vigilantly waiting action figures were over? Oh, no. You still had to limp around painfully and try to ignore the bitchings of the little twit whose toy you'd just slain without remorse, only now you've got a hangover to go with it, and at least your little brother didn't have the habit of getting up minutes before you did so he could usurp your claim on the Last Beer for breakfast. Yes, brothers. I have felt your pain.
It wouldn't surprise me if their finanical trouble started relatively small and then snowballed. My boss just had XM installed in the Company Pimp Van, but he we originally looking at Sirius. Our city was one of the initial test markets for Sirius, and the store he went into was covered in Sirius promotional propaganda. When he asked about it though, the salesmen wouln't even demo it, saying "Nah, you don't want that. They may be gone in a year - You want XM." I can't help but wonder if their sales reps aren't partially to blame for the decline.
Freedom to install the OS on any machine you want to without asking "Mother May I?" Not quite. I can install it on any machine I want to, assuming that the machine is compatable with the OS hardware support. The main issue of course being that there are still seperate distros of Linux (PPC, x86, SPARC). When will we see a distro with all the nessesary code in one package, and a universal install?"
...I'm pretty sure he meant legally. I can, have, and still do shamelessly install whatever flavor of Windows onto whatever machines I want to. It's not permitted in the EULA though. Although Linux completely takes the fun out of this concept for me, I can take Redhat 8 Professional, (yes, the retail version - Ironically the only OS I've ever paid for) and install it on a couple of new servers and a few workstations, in a commercial environment where even I don't have the balls to use something without a license, and it's cool. Encouraged, even. Yes, you have the same option with MacOS as I do with Windows, but with Linux neither of us are getting fired or paying fines. And most Linux distributions do have a universal installer - FTP.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, no kidding. Five grand gets a decent used car. If it's the size of the damn thing that makes it so cool, five grand will get you a very decent used motorcycle or a half decent new one. If you absolutely must drive it on the sidewalk then get one of those little foldable scooters that kids are running around with. Some of them are motorized. Hell, if it's the laziness factor that kicks so much ass about these things, then why stand? Get a comparibly-priced normal scooter or an electric wheelchair. People will still laugh at you, but maybe less if you use it all the time and refrain from rollerblading in public.
Where is the innovation in picoGui? It looks like Aqua of Mac Os X.
Dude! You're RIGHT! Not only that, but it also looks just like KDE! And WindowBlinds!
And why do you need a freakin server for every tiny piece of bullshit?
Modularity. One of the nicest things about a true multitasking *NIX environment. If something doesn't work the way you want it to, you can take a piece of it, the piece you don't like, change it, and contribute it. Or install someone else's contribution. I'm actually glad there are a million complete little programs running around on this machine doing things that could be handled by one piece of software with everything integrated. Do you want about ten different sound servers, or do you want about ten slightly different versions of X to choose from? Make that twenty if there are even two different font servers. That would be the clusterfuck. I'll venture to guess that the modular nature of Linux is one of the major reasons people like it. Screw the idea of everyone agreeing on how it should be, even if that were possible. I love my Frankenstein GUI, and if I decide one day that I don't I'll log out and pick another one. Stupid Linux geeks don't have to work with whatever Microsoft or Apple (Or GNOME, or KDE) thinks their desktops should behave like. It's not for everybody; if you conform to Microsoft's market research, or Apple's, or that of the BeOS or Amiga folks, then their desktop is made for you. Mine is made for me, but only because I could customize the unholy hell out of it, and if I wanted something to be different then somebody, somewhere had written the code for me to change it. Yeah, keep a freakin' server for every tiny piece of bullshit, and God forbid it should ever be any other way.
Works great for me - I do have 512mb, but only a quarter of that's allocated to VMware. If you're not sucking up most of that 128mb in the background running Gator, ICQ banner ads, a monstrous WinAmp 3 skin, Bonzi Buddy and AOL then you're fine. The trick to VMware is using a minimal Windows installation, running as few apps as possible and doing everything else in the host OS. I have three monitors configured without Xinerama, I run Vncviewer in fullscreen mode on the right side with VMware minimized so that I can share the mouse easily and still see my images in the proper size, and Windows still is actually running faster under VMware than it did natively because of its relatively basic "hardware" and low-calorie environment.
Photoshop kept me on Windows for a long time. The interface is the only thing that really bugged me about GIMP. Having used Photoshop for about as long as you have, it just never occured to me that I should right-click on my work to save it. Maybe it would if GIMP didn't have a "File" menu in plain sight already. Then I might have thought to look for the option that way, but at first I didn't. Once I learned that "works like Photoshop" doesn't mean "acts like Photoshop" I started liking it a lot more. I still prefer Photoshop, but it's not what keeps my machine booting Windows; it's what keeps me using VMware.
I'm sitting here at work browsing Slashdot with 'Zilla on my Redhat mail/web/SQL server next to my Windows 2000 box that's here simply to store files for about ten users and serve up a couple of web pages now and then. IIS blew up again a couple of weeks ago; now it runs Apache and that's one less thing I've had to check every day. I'm reading Slashdot because I have to keep an eye on the 2000 box while I re-reinstall Service Pack 2. Oh, look! It seems the installation has hung again. I'm installing SP2 because SP3 includes some things I don't like; mainly the ability to download and run code from Microsoft any time it feels the need to do so. So I have to apply each relevant patch as it gets posted. Nothing new there. I was doing that anyway. I'm reinstalling the Service Pack because yesterday the box decided it would pick and choose which apps it wanted to run at random, and a virus scan (Virus scan - Have I even done that on the Linux machine? Have I had a reason to?) yeilded no answer. Both of these machines are behind a hardware firewall, with only a handful of ports going to the Windows box, and yet the Windows server will still catch whatever the Malady of the Month happens to be most of the time. I'm venturing to guess this probably comes from all of our Outlook-happy staff storing files on it, but I'm thinking they'd never know the difference if suddenly Samba starts handling all of that and the worms have nothing to run on. I'm glad I was on an OSS kick when IIS failed, else I'd have probably been here all night trying to make it work before reinstalling the OS and restoring data from a backup. I've yet to know why this happened, but I don't care anymore. Ultimately, even when it's working like it's supposed to, our Windows server requires constant attention. Sure, I spent two weeks setting up this Linux machine to do what I wanted it to since I'd never been exposed to it before, but I haven't had to lay a hand on it since then, except times like this one when I catch up on Slashdot while waiting for this sad waste of hardware next to me to get its act together. Wow, it's already 10am, the 2000 box is still posessed, and I still haven't gotten any work done. I shudder to think what this would be like if I had to deal with these issues on a large scale. I have one word for you: Yes.
I was thinking it would have to take an asshole of great magnitude to do that to his server, but I didn't care enough not to click the link. His site's loading rather well even in the face of a slashdotting. I'm impressed.
Doesn't matter to most of us, but it's extremely frustrating to someone who's visually impaired and uses a screen reader such as JAWS when too much of the text is displayed as an image without a meaningful ALT caption. The more gimmicks that get used lately such as Flash and Java, the less useful the web becomes to someone who's blind. Granted it's nice when the banner ads are a lot easier to ignore, but a popup throws off the screen readers quickly, and ALT-TABbing your way back to what you were trying to read is a major bitch when you get caught in a "mousetrap" and the ads start flying around. It's very easy to code a site to be handicap accessible without making it any less meaningful to the majority, but almost no one thinks about it. This is almost as annoying to me as seeing new buildings that could have easily been made wheelchair accessible, but no one cared enough to do so. The Internet has no Americans with Disabilities Act, but it's a hell of a lot easier to make a website accessible than it is to put ramps and elevators in.
Honestly, now - How many of us have moved into a house with a roommate or two, also geeks, and said something along the lines of, "We'll get some wall plates and string some of this cat-5 in the attic next weekend..." Anyone? Oh, yes. You know what I'm talking about. That's where it starts, every time. The weekend comes and goes, several times, and the idea is abandoned some months later, but not before guests or inebriated roommates have not only got compound fractures in their shins, but more importantly they've snatched the ports out of the only two NIC cards that you ever actually paid for? Did you discover you could trip on a wire on the way into the bathroom in the morning and make a print server JetDirectly into the toilet? Did you question the fact that you didn't question the presence of a printer in the bathroom? Of course not. The bathroom was the centermost point between the bedrooms. Did you clean your room every two or three months? Not because you couldn't walk in, but because you'd lost yet another keyboard due to the cat knocking over the Great Beer-A-Mid on your desk and you knew you had another one in there somewhere? Did you think that in moving out of your parents' home and away from your little brother that your days of squarely planting the tender soles of your feet onto well-honed blades wielded by vigilantly waiting action figures were over? Oh, no. You still had to limp around painfully and try to ignore the bitchings of the little twit whose toy you'd just slain without remorse, only now you've got a hangover to go with it, and at least your little brother didn't have the habit of getting up minutes before you did so he could usurp your claim on the Last Beer for breakfast. Yes, brothers. I have felt your pain.
It wouldn't surprise me if their finanical trouble started relatively small and then snowballed. My boss just had XM installed in the Company Pimp Van, but he we originally looking at Sirius. Our city was one of the initial test markets for Sirius, and the store he went into was covered in Sirius promotional propaganda. When he asked about it though, the salesmen wouln't even demo it, saying "Nah, you don't want that. They may be gone in a year - You want XM." I can't help but wonder if their sales reps aren't partially to blame for the decline.
supports both Macintosh and Windows platforms
They say this like there are only two.
"We got both kinds of music here - Country and Western."
MacOS installs have never had license codes, serial numbers, or any of that.
...Nice of them to make it easy on us by not using code to "enforce" their license agreement, but the license or lack of it is still there.
Freedom to install the OS on any machine you want to without asking "Mother May I?"
...I'm pretty sure he meant legally. I can, have, and still do shamelessly install whatever flavor of Windows onto whatever machines I want to. It's not permitted in the EULA though. Although Linux completely takes the fun out of this concept for me, I can take Redhat 8 Professional, (yes, the retail version - Ironically the only OS I've ever paid for) and install it on a couple of new servers and a few workstations, in a commercial environment where even I don't have the balls to use something without a license, and it's cool. Encouraged, even. Yes, you have the same option with MacOS as I do with Windows, but with Linux neither of us are getting fired or paying fines. And most Linux distributions do have a universal installer - FTP.
Not quite. I can install it on any machine I want to, assuming that the machine is compatable with the OS hardware support. The main issue of course being that there are still seperate distros of Linux (PPC, x86, SPARC). When will we see a distro with all the nessesary code in one package, and a universal install?"
Whatever they call it, I'm certain that the pins on the SDRAM cards will have to be reduced in size by half.