Yuppers. My BF is a film student, seeking to become a director. His outlook helps keep me sane too. If I were with another geek, the "feedback loop" of geekiness would probably fry both of our minds.
"Well, serves you right for running a wireless hot-spot. You know those things are nothing more than anonymous leeching posts for music stealers anyhow.";)
Uhwhah? No, Joe Sixpack is a few steps beyond my BF in terms of computer illiteracy, thanks. I wouldn't be hoping to marry a Joe Sixpack type. I probably wouldn't even be speaking with them, except to ream them out for wasting my time with stupid tech-support-type questions.;)
Of course, half the starry-eyed idealist pollyannas on SlashDot will disagree with me, since they've spent so many years stewing in Mommy's attic with no one to talk to but their (equally geeky) friends on the Internet. I'm really sick of how so many people here seem to assume that the world is waiting to mobilize against Windows. It isn't. I still have exchanges like this all the damned time:
User: "So have you played (XYZ game)?"
Me: "I don't run Windows."
User: "Um, then what do you run?
And even then, they're very likely to whine, "This is hard!" until said friend or relative puts Windoze BrainNumber Pro 2005 (or whatever's the 'latest and greatest' edition of Windows) back on...
More seriously... not even my boyfriend will touch Linux, because he can't play his Windoze-only (and/or Win-and-MacOS-only) games on it. He's not willing to touch an emulator. He doesn't want to use a piece of software that makes finding user-friendly software difficult. (Sorry, to you and I, 'bash' or 'grep' is user-friendly. Not so to him.) He doesn't want to use a piece of software that is so incredibly inconsistent that there is NO ONE WAY TO SET UP A NETWORK INTERFACE. (If you're using a shell, do it this way; if you're using Red Hat 8.x or higher, do it that way; if you're running Mandrake, do it this way; if you're running Debian, hack it your damned self cuz you're "supposed" to know how, etc. etc. etc.). And so on and so on. I love Linux as much as the next geek, but we REALLY have missed the boat. Mac OS X has already done more for open-source software in the real world of Joe Sixpack than Linux (and even *BSD) will ever do, in my opinion. I could be wrong, but that's how I feel on the issue.
Joe Sixpack couldn't give a good god damn about ideology. To him, ideology is something you learn in Church or in Ethics classes, and has nothing at all to do with software (or computers in general). To him, the notion that software can be "free as in speech" sounds like a ridiculous, out-of-context anthropomorphization, like saying "My car likes it when I pet the dashboard. See? It's purring!".
And as for "free as in beer", which most OSS/FS also is? To Joe, Windows, Office, etc. are all free as a flock of birds, since you either (A) get them free with new computer, (B) can download them off of KaZaa, or (C) mooch a copy from a friend or family member.
The ONLY way that OSS/FS will ever make headways into Joe Sixpack's life is if (A) it plays all of their games (or as many equivalently good AND POPULAR games), (B) it supports ANY piece of hardware you can buy, including WinModems, WinPrinters, WinWebcams, WinDildos and WinKitchenSinks, (C) things are consistent (which probably won't happen so long as there is more than one distribution) and (D) it STILL manages to be more stable and secure than Windows.
Oh, and it has to look and act just like Windows, too, or he'll say it's "too hard". I'm serious. I've had people tell me that Mac OS (or Mac OS X) is "hard", simply because they grew up in a Windows household, and familiarity breeds a false sense of intuition.
Not to be depressive, but... well, this is your wake-up call...
They don't say that your system is insecure "while filesharing". They say that your system is insecure "while online". While some would call me a nitpicker for pointing this out, I think it indicative of the general anti-technology fears that the MPAA/RIAA "higher-ups" (Valenti/Rosen/etc.) hold.
Whoever moderated this "off-topic" is a nut-job. What, is it only okay to bitch about HUGE FREAKING MS ADS IN THE MIDDLE OF STORIES when the ads are actually what the stories are about!? Jesus. I hate dealing with Winvocates IRL, and I hate dealing with them here...
You obviously didn't read what I said. I just want to telnet into a Unix box (which is on a FASTER LINK and which is located right here, one hop away from the slow-linked box). I won't BE "receiving mail" directly on the slow-linked box.
Also, it's perfectly acceptable for running PINE or for MU*ing.
I know that you speed demons on SlashDot laugh at anything this "low-speed", but for me this is a GODSEND. All I've ever wanted is a low-speed, low-power, reliable wireless tech that would let me bop around the apartment with a laptop and stay telnetted into my server (from which I connect to MU*s and read my email in PINE). I don't need 11Mbps, or 1Mbps, or even.5Mbps. This is exactly what I need, and it looks like the price is right.
Microsoft's ActiveX seems to have a stranglehold on the 3D world. I wonder how relevant most SlashDot readers consider a technology that isn't being used in any new FPS games? Mod me down as a troll, but you know it's true. (And I hate this trend as much as you do. I love OpenGL!)
Oh, come off it. First of all, I would never call anyone a "pussy" or not a "real man", since (among other, more important reasons) I'm a girl. Secondly, it has nothing to do with "niche" versus "non-niche". I'm just freaking sick of people MAKING our field more and more and more and more and more complex, year after wretched year. There is no Law Of Physics which states that computing will get more and more complex, changing year after year. This is something which we as techies have brought upon ourselves.
If, instead of continually reinventing the wheel, we would focus on refining EXISTING technologies, we would be so much further down the road now. Imagine a 4GHz Pentium 4 (or, as I'd prefer, a dual 2GHz Power Macintosh G5) running some beautifully written, hand-optimized C or assembly code, tuned and tweaked and whittled into glistening sleek perfection over the past 20 years. The OS would boot in under 1MB of RAM, including the TCP/IP stack, the Web browsing environment, the sound server, the firewall and the file browser. "System Requirements" sections on software boxes would be a thing of the past, since the software would work on virtually any computer released in the past 15 years. The whole system would include beautifully refined and trimmed APIs, perfected over a decade or more, for all programmers to write to.
But no, at some point along the line, the emphasis in the computing field went from efficiency and quality to "OOH! LOOK! SHINY!". That is where we started to go downhill.
Here is an exercise for you, Mr. New-School Thinker. Go buy a Commodore 64. (or use an emulator...) Install Contiki on it. There you have a complete GUI system that runs in 64 kilobytes of RAM. That's KILOBYTES, not megabytes! The sort of devil-may-care, newer-is-better school of thought you advocate is what has prevented this sort of thing from being a marketable reality. An ounce of restraint on the part of coders would have done so much 10 to 20 years ago, when code bloat started on its eternal downward cycle. I should have seen something bad coming down the pike the instant when I bought Windows 3.0 (this was "back in the day" when it was new) and it brought my '286 to a crawl. Meanwhile, Appleworks, arguably a more complex software system than the entirity of Windows 3.0, ran beautifully on piddly little Apple IIs with 32KB or so of RAM.
And people like you keep advocating newer, bloatier, more "complexified" (to borrow a word from Star Control 3) solutions to fundamentally simple problems.
Some day, I hope to get off my rear end, and prove all of you wrong, by making an OS the right way-- that is, optimize, optimize, optimize, and optimize some more, and DAMN the shiny new tech!
I don't consider this "advancing". Nor do I consider it necessary... or desirable. This is simply the tech equivalent of bureaucracy. It's feature-creep on an industry-wide level.
(I'd rather say "field", but no one but me seems to think of computing as anything other than an "industry" nowadays. Or a "business".)
Jebus. Every time you look around, they're introducing some new technology designed to help us. (And half the time, it's based around XML.) Am I really the only one left on this planet that believes that assembly language, C, BASIC, Cobol, Fortran, Forth, Pascal, HTML, and Perl are "good enough" for anything, and there's no need for another billion languages, "standards", plug-ins, etc.?
I can make "plain old CGIs written in Perl" jump up and do tricks without any fancy new whizbang technology telling me it's time to re-evaluate the whole way I make Web forms. Not to mention the fact that this is going to be a nightmare to integrate into all of the browsers.
When people started talking about Flash as if it were some sort of an IEEE-blessed, completely open standard, and as if it were available in all browsers, (I'm sorry, but "the most common browsers on the most common operating systems" doesn't count), I knew the Web was going downhill fast. Now we're mired in our own complexity, we have a billion plug-ins (Flash, Shockwave, Quicktime, Windows Media Player, etc. etc. etc.)... and now they're telling us that plain old <FORM> isn't good enough. Dammit, I want back to 1995 and Slackware 3.0...
It's possible you and I were using different versions of the book? (If there was more than one?) In any case, the notation in the readme is bad enough. This is ORA we're talking about.
...however, we can't even get most people past the notion that "Linux" isn't the name of an operating system, much less that the "product mentality" doesn't apply to everything.
Most people think that "Linux" is the name of an operating system, and most of those assume it's made by a company. The majority seem to think that "Linux" is an operating system made by Red Hat. Even one ORA book-- to wit, the one on Mastering Algorithms With C, with the pink cover-- noted that its code was tested on "Linux 8.0" (!!!).
We don't need to discuss amongst ourselves the fact that Linux isn't a product. We need to teach others-- including Gartner-Group-reading "IT Manager" types and the PHB corps-- what Linux is, and what it is not.
I have hardly ever seen a major publication (of any sort!) refer to Linux as anything except "an open-source operating system", or the like. It is not an operating system-- it is a kernel. (It is not even "open-source"-- it is "free software"! Not to wax RMSish...)
Until this changes, we cannot honestly expect anyone (outside of our own circles) to understand any of the points brought up by Mr. Murdock.
Slashdot Mirror
I love how you dips continually mod down anything true or incisive as a "troll". This post is right on the mark, and you know it.
Yuppers. My BF is a film student, seeking to become a director. His outlook helps keep me sane too. If I were with another geek, the "feedback loop" of geekiness would probably fry both of our minds.
Oh, fuck off. I type that without even realizing it half the time.
"Well, serves you right for running a wireless hot-spot. You know those things are nothing more than anonymous leeching posts for music stealers anyhow." ;)
Uhwhah? No, Joe Sixpack is a few steps beyond my BF in terms of computer illiteracy, thanks. I wouldn't be hoping to marry a Joe Sixpack type. I probably wouldn't even be speaking with them, except to ream them out for wasting my time with stupid tech-support-type questions. ;)
Hiding for the sake of my sanity. Operating under false names. Avoiding Unix conventions. ;)
Of course, half the starry-eyed idealist pollyannas on SlashDot will disagree with me, since they've spent so many years stewing in Mommy's attic with no one to talk to but their (equally geeky) friends on the Internet. I'm really sick of how so many people here seem to assume that the world is waiting to mobilize against Windows. It isn't. I still have exchanges like this all the damned time:
User: "So have you played (XYZ game)?"
Me: "I don't run Windows."
User: "Um, then what do you run?
And even then, they're very likely to whine, "This is hard!" until said friend or relative puts Windoze BrainNumber Pro 2005 (or whatever's the 'latest and greatest' edition of Windows) back on...
That was Windows 4.0.
"Yes."
More seriously... not even my boyfriend will touch Linux, because he can't play his Windoze-only (and/or Win-and-MacOS-only) games on it. He's not willing to touch an emulator. He doesn't want to use a piece of software that makes finding user-friendly software difficult. (Sorry, to you and I, 'bash' or 'grep' is user-friendly. Not so to him.) He doesn't want to use a piece of software that is so incredibly inconsistent that there is NO ONE WAY TO SET UP A NETWORK INTERFACE. (If you're using a shell, do it this way; if you're using Red Hat 8.x or higher, do it that way; if you're running Mandrake, do it this way; if you're running Debian, hack it your damned self cuz you're "supposed" to know how, etc. etc. etc.). And so on and so on. I love Linux as much as the next geek, but we REALLY have missed the boat. Mac OS X has already done more for open-source software in the real world of Joe Sixpack than Linux (and even *BSD) will ever do, in my opinion. I could be wrong, but that's how I feel on the issue.
Joe Sixpack couldn't give a good god damn about ideology. To him, ideology is something you learn in Church or in Ethics classes, and has nothing at all to do with software (or computers in general). To him, the notion that software can be "free as in speech" sounds like a ridiculous, out-of-context anthropomorphization, like saying "My car likes it when I pet the dashboard. See? It's purring!".
And as for "free as in beer", which most OSS/FS also is? To Joe, Windows, Office, etc. are all free as a flock of birds, since you either (A) get them free with new computer, (B) can download them off of KaZaa, or (C) mooch a copy from a friend or family member.
The ONLY way that OSS/FS will ever make headways into Joe Sixpack's life is if (A) it plays all of their games (or as many equivalently good AND POPULAR games), (B) it supports ANY piece of hardware you can buy, including WinModems, WinPrinters, WinWebcams, WinDildos and WinKitchenSinks, (C) things are consistent (which probably won't happen so long as there is more than one distribution) and (D) it STILL manages to be more stable and secure than Windows.
Oh, and it has to look and act just like Windows, too, or he'll say it's "too hard". I'm serious. I've had people tell me that Mac OS (or Mac OS X) is "hard", simply because they grew up in a Windows household, and familiarity breeds a false sense of intuition.
Not to be depressive, but... well, this is your wake-up call...
They don't say that your system is insecure "while filesharing". They say that your system is insecure "while online". While some would call me a nitpicker for pointing this out, I think it indicative of the general anti-technology fears that the MPAA/RIAA "higher-ups" (Valenti/Rosen/etc.) hold.
The story mentions "Windows 3.2". There was no Windows 3.2...
Could someone please explain the reference in the department title for this story?
...will never go for this. Gimme a break.
Whoever moderated this "off-topic" is a nut-job. What, is it only okay to bitch about HUGE FREAKING MS ADS IN THE MIDDLE OF STORIES when the ads are actually what the stories are about!? Jesus. I hate dealing with Winvocates IRL, and I hate dealing with them here...
I'm only allowed to use technology for the precise purposes it was originally designed for?
Well, I guess there goes "thinking outside the box". Of course, "thinking outside the box" is rapidly becoming illegal now anyhow...
I HAVE, and I've done so on a slower link.
You obviously didn't read what I said. I just want to telnet into a Unix box (which is on a FASTER LINK and which is located right here, one hop away from the slow-linked box). I won't BE "receiving mail" directly on the slow-linked box.
Also, it's perfectly acceptable for running PINE or for MU*ing.
I know that you speed demons on SlashDot laugh at anything this "low-speed", but for me this is a GODSEND. All I've ever wanted is a low-speed, low-power, reliable wireless tech that would let me bop around the apartment with a laptop and stay telnetted into my server (from which I connect to MU*s and read my email in PINE). I don't need 11Mbps, or 1Mbps, or even .5Mbps. This is exactly what I need, and it looks like the price is right.
Microsoft's ActiveX seems to have a stranglehold on the 3D world. I wonder how relevant most SlashDot readers consider a technology that isn't being used in any new FPS games? Mod me down as a troll, but you know it's true. (And I hate this trend as much as you do. I love OpenGL!)
Oh, come off it. First of all, I would never call anyone a "pussy" or not a "real man", since (among other, more important reasons) I'm a girl. Secondly, it has nothing to do with "niche" versus "non-niche". I'm just freaking sick of people MAKING our field more and more and more and more and more complex, year after wretched year. There is no Law Of Physics which states that computing will get more and more complex, changing year after year. This is something which we as techies have brought upon ourselves.
If, instead of continually reinventing the wheel, we would focus on refining EXISTING technologies, we would be so much further down the road now. Imagine a 4GHz Pentium 4 (or, as I'd prefer, a dual 2GHz Power Macintosh G5) running some beautifully written, hand-optimized C or assembly code, tuned and tweaked and whittled into glistening sleek perfection over the past 20 years. The OS would boot in under 1MB of RAM, including the TCP/IP stack, the Web browsing environment, the sound server, the firewall and the file browser. "System Requirements" sections on software boxes would be a thing of the past, since the software would work on virtually any computer released in the past 15 years. The whole system would include beautifully refined and trimmed APIs, perfected over a decade or more, for all programmers to write to.
But no, at some point along the line, the emphasis in the computing field went from efficiency and quality to "OOH! LOOK! SHINY!". That is where we started to go downhill.
Here is an exercise for you, Mr. New-School Thinker. Go buy a Commodore 64. (or use an emulator...) Install Contiki on it. There you have a complete GUI system that runs in 64 kilobytes of RAM. That's KILOBYTES, not megabytes! The sort of devil-may-care, newer-is-better school of thought you advocate is what has prevented this sort of thing from being a marketable reality. An ounce of restraint on the part of coders would have done so much 10 to 20 years ago, when code bloat started on its eternal downward cycle. I should have seen something bad coming down the pike the instant when I bought Windows 3.0 (this was "back in the day" when it was new) and it brought my '286 to a crawl. Meanwhile, Appleworks, arguably a more complex software system than the entirity of Windows 3.0, ran beautifully on piddly little Apple IIs with 32KB or so of RAM.
And people like you keep advocating newer, bloatier, more "complexified" (to borrow a word from Star Control 3) solutions to fundamentally simple problems.
Some day, I hope to get off my rear end, and prove all of you wrong, by making an OS the right way-- that is, optimize, optimize, optimize, and optimize some more, and DAMN the shiny new tech!
I don't consider this "advancing". Nor do I consider it necessary... or desirable. This is simply the tech equivalent of bureaucracy. It's feature-creep on an industry-wide level.
(I'd rather say "field", but no one but me seems to think of computing as anything other than an "industry" nowadays. Or a "business".)
Jebus. Every time you look around, they're introducing some new technology designed to help us. (And half the time, it's based around XML.) Am I really the only one left on this planet that believes that assembly language, C, BASIC, Cobol, Fortran, Forth, Pascal, HTML, and Perl are "good enough" for anything, and there's no need for another billion languages, "standards", plug-ins, etc.?
I can make "plain old CGIs written in Perl" jump up and do tricks without any fancy new whizbang technology telling me it's time to re-evaluate the whole way I make Web forms. Not to mention the fact that this is going to be a nightmare to integrate into all of the browsers.
When people started talking about Flash as if it were some sort of an IEEE-blessed, completely open standard, and as if it were available in all browsers, (I'm sorry, but "the most common browsers on the most common operating systems" doesn't count), I knew the Web was going downhill fast. Now we're mired in our own complexity, we have a billion plug-ins (Flash, Shockwave, Quicktime, Windows Media Player, etc. etc. etc.)... and now they're telling us that plain old <FORM> isn't good enough. Dammit, I want back to 1995 and Slackware 3.0...
It's possible you and I were using different versions of the book? (If there was more than one?) In any case, the notation in the readme is bad enough. This is ORA we're talking about.
...however, we can't even get most people past the notion that "Linux" isn't the name of an operating system, much less that the "product mentality" doesn't apply to everything.
Most people think that "Linux" is the name of an operating system, and most of those assume it's made by a company. The majority seem to think that "Linux" is an operating system made by Red Hat. Even one ORA book-- to wit, the one on Mastering Algorithms With C, with the pink cover-- noted that its code was tested on "Linux 8.0" (!!!).
We don't need to discuss amongst ourselves the fact that Linux isn't a product. We need to teach others-- including Gartner-Group-reading "IT Manager" types and the PHB corps-- what Linux is, and what it is not.
I have hardly ever seen a major publication (of any sort!) refer to Linux as anything except "an open-source operating system", or the like. It is not an operating system-- it is a kernel. (It is not even "open-source"-- it is "free software"! Not to wax RMSish...)
Until this changes, we cannot honestly expect anyone (outside of our own circles) to understand any of the points brought up by Mr. Murdock.
I'm not a he. I'm a girl. And my BOYFRIEND runs Windows. I run Mac OS X.