I was in that situation with MS Project for
a long while, until I tried Win4Lin on my
ancient-junk Pentium 133...
Project ran faster under Windows 95 under Win4Lin under Red Hat 7.3 than it did on the same hardware with just Windows 95.
In fact, it ran fast enough that I could
dedicate the machine to w4l and xhost it
to my Ultra when I needed to run Project.
I was pleased enough that I went and bought a copy for my non-junk
PC at work and converted it too, with similarly pleasant results.
I guess a real MMU and an ext3 filesystem are
Good Things (:-)).
There is a downside to high areal densities.
If you need eight drives striped together
get the bandwidth for video, for example,
you have to buy eight times 80 GB of space to
keep the same speed.
Unfortunately the departmental accountant
knows you only need 160 GB total, so he cancels
the other six "unneeded" drives, not realizing
it's the eight heads you needed.
Sorry lad, but it saw the light of day.
As recently as ten years ago there was an
ad in the Toronto paper for a Multics person
for Bell Canada. Bell, it seems,
preferred it to Unix...
Back when I worked for a big, conservative
company, we asked our equally conservative
customers what they wanted for qualifying
gcc as one of the compilers we supported.
Everyone wanted at least three things
A stable product release on a CD
A book (preferably an O'Reilly book (;-)) on it
Someone who would provide support for money
So we added gcc one quarter, included the
information about getting the three items
above, and no-one objected.
So I signed up to work on the Samba book!
Indeed, it's a legal problem, albeit one
that affects the computer programs.
In a previous life, I worked on a library system
for a well-known company in the industry.
Because the program was to be sold into
numerous different states in the US, we had
to
Keep records until a book was returned
or reported lost and paid for
delete those records as soon as the
book was returned or paid for.
No other combination of rules satisfied more
than a few states and provinces, so unless we
wanted to customize for every customer, we had
to meet the two requirements above.
This means, by the way, that libraries using
our software would have to manually report
on books out by patron, and store those
reports, probably on paper, for the courts
to subpoena...
--dave
> This would make Java's type system much > cleaner. We'd no longer need to use type- > wrapper classes
Actually Smalltalk solved this problem by always executing the machine code primitive for, for example, integer add. If this failed an assertion, it faulted out to the more general class code.
Substantially the same thing could be done for Java, so that one could have full generality without a performance penalty.
I noted in a comment to the initial article that compatability is a requirement, but that incompatable features can be added and old ones phased out...
Thus ia actually a solved problem from before Unix was written: I learned it from a Multician.
Repeatedly, copy protection schemes have been
tried by companies and found to cost them more
they they bring in in revenue. They have then
been dropped.
This happended on CP/M with dongles,
then with 8" diskettes, on CP/M and
PCs with 5 1/4" diskettes and again on later
PCs with 3 1/2" diskettes.
Each time software companies tried the
copy-protection vendors' products, found
their sales did not increase, but their
support costs had skyrocketed. Instead of
one support call for 50 sales, they
were seeing calls on every other sale,
plus the cost of sending out replacement
diskettes at a frightening rate,
approaching several hundred percent of sales.
The protection, you see, made the disks required
for every single use, instead of only
once for installation. Net result?
the disks failed. A lot.
This also made the customers mad, so
once they noticed that there was no advantage and huge costs disadvantages, software companies stopped using copy protection and the protection vendors went out of business.
Until, of course, a new sucker came along
and announced copy protection for the next new
diskette format. And started the whole suicidal
cycle over again. In this case, with CDs which
are unreliable and require re-purchase, something
which tends to make customers grumpy.
Fjord said: Also check the how well specialized applications under wine.
For most specialized apps, it's safer to run Win4Lin, the oldest Windows possible and the app.
I run Project via a script that says
win C:/PROGRA~1/MICROS~2/OFFICE/WIPROJ D:"$@"
which tells w4l to start and run project,
optionally with a data file from my work directory.
Other applications can be run via similar scripts,
stright from the comand line, or from the Linux desktop if you write a Project.desktop file. By the way, Project also runs faster on Windows under Win4Lin under Linux han it ever did on the same hardware under just Windows.
Instead of dooming the "business guys" to windows,
phase the new services in. Don't make any of your users second-class citizins. Just do a particularly good job of setting up the desktop to keep the non-nerds from going nuts (;-))
I'm running it on a pentium 133 at home,
and it runs quickly and well. VMware requires
a substantially faster procerssor.
To be precise: Win4lin 3.x boots, loads
MS project and displays the selected file
in less time under Linux, w4l and Windows
95 than starting Project alone did, under just Win95 on the exact same hardware.
Having a real OS and filesystem on your machine is a good thing (:-))
I realy need a faster machine for Red Hat
7.2, but it's quite adequate for running Windows
programs under emulation, for which I thank
the w4l folks. I didn't expect Project to run
well on a 133, but the faster OS makes it
quite zippy.
"Using Samba" is another positive example.
on
Sharing Doesn't Hurt
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
It's free, and even though it was competing
against lots of other Samba titles, it flew off
the shelves. Bookstores I spoke to said
buyers had alread read it and wanted it in paper.
O'Reilly can't really say if it's a statistically
sigificant advantage, but the opposite hypothesis,
that it might hurt sales, sure ain't true!
When you read a well-argued legal opinion which
purports to be a definitive statement of what
the law is, then you should conclude that... the
author thinks you're too stupid to use a law library.
You often see these is newspapers who are
on one side or the other of an issue: when you
do, you know the newspaper's biased.
Interesting: in a previous life at Siemens/Sietec
we regarded OS/2 as substantially more Unix-like
than windows-like. My leaky memory says our
build system (qef, at http://www.qef.com)
treated it a a slightly brain-damaged Unix.
There is a famous, recent parallell case,
involving the United States. Copyright.
As you may recollect, The Lord of the Rings
was "pirated" in the U.S. by a major publisher,
because the U.S. copyright system did not
at that time honor British copyright. It had
not since the revolution (although for a number
of years it was claimed to, although the
exceptions functioned in such a way as
to allow it to be avoidd at will).
As a result, copies from the lawfull U.S.
publisher carried prominent notices on the endpapers that purchasers of the other
publisher's books were denying the author
his royalties.
This was publically defended in the U.S.
Senate as a necessary means to the establishment
and maintenance
of a national publishing industry,
and
a necessary and proper reduction in the rights of the author, a foreigner.
This, then, gives a case quite parallel to the
cited patent cases, involving a large
and relatively well-to-do country (;-)).
rtrifts wrote: but what you are referring to is contrary to the Copyright
Act and is a criminal offence.
Sorry, but your conclusion doesn't follow
from your evidence. In the act you quote,
the terms prohibit "makes for sale or rental",
"sells or rents out, or by way of trade..",
"distributes.. either for the purpose of trade or to such an extent as to affect prejudicially the owner of the copyright", "by way of trade exhibits
" and "imports for sale or rental".
A more credible conclusion is that one cannot
make copies for sale, or so many free copies as
to make the record unsalable. This is different
from making personal copies.
It's also unusual to cite a breach of the Copyright Act as being
a criminal offense: it's traditionally considered
part of the civil law, while matters under the
Criminal Code of Canada are traditionally considered to be criminal law.
Actually it's the government requiring folks who
use the fair use provisions of our law to pay
an honorarium to the authors.
This is a very normal Canadian practice:
each time you use your rights, you accept
your responsibilities.
One of the obvious strengths of this is
that the money goes to the copyright owners,
not third parties (unless the record companies
have managed to secure ownership of the
songs, which is known to happen).
Finally, a weakness is the very indirect
way one estimates the amount of the honorarium, which takes us back to the original point:
the proposal is that it be raised unreasonably.
... the Xybernaut lawyer handling the case against Whatley, said
Whatley had been served
notice of the lawsuit by certified mail.
Note that he said certified mail, not registered mail.
That means different things in different jurisdictions: I once used (Canadian) certified mail to put my landlord on notice, only to find
that it didn't guarantee delivery, or provide
me notification of non-delivery.
If the same is true in Virginia, the lawyer
could technically be telling the truth,
while actually telling what logicians consider a "lie of omission".
Slashdot Mirror
Project ran faster under Windows 95 under Win4Lin under Red Hat 7.3 than it did on the same hardware with just Windows 95. In fact, it ran fast enough that I could dedicate the machine to w4l and xhost it to my Ultra when I needed to run Project.
I was pleased enough that I went and bought a copy for my non-junk PC at work and converted it too, with similarly pleasant results.
I guess a real MMU and an ext3 filesystem are Good Things (:-)).
Dave C-B
Unfortunately the departmental accountant knows you only need 160 GB total, so he cancels the other six "unneeded" drives, not realizing it's the eight heads you needed.
--dave
--dave (DRBrown.TSDC@Hi-Multics.ARPA) c-b
- A stable product release on a CD
- A book (preferably an O'Reilly book (;-)) on it
- Someone who would provide support for money
So we added gcc one quarter, included the information about getting the three items above, and no-one objected. So I signed up to work on the Samba book!- Keep records until a book was returned
or reported lost and paid for
- delete those records as soon as the
book was returned or paid for.
No other combination of rules satisfied more than a few states and provinces, so unless we wanted to customize for every customer, we had to meet the two requirements above. This means, by the way, that libraries using our software would have to manually report on books out by patron, and store those reports, probably on paper, for the courts to subpoena... --dave> This would make Java's type system much
> cleaner. We'd no longer need to use type-
> wrapper classes
Actually Smalltalk solved this problem
by always executing the machine code
primitive for, for example, integer add.
If this failed an assertion, it faulted out
to the more general class code.
Substantially the same thing could be done for
Java, so that one could have full generality
without a performance penalty.
I noted in a comment to the initial article
that compatability is a requirement, but
that incompatable features can be added and
old ones phased out...
Thus ia actually a solved problem from
before Unix was written: I learned it from
a Multician.
--dave
Just FYI: you don't. The Samba team reverse
enginers SMB and implements it directly.
--dave
I'm seeing improvement even though I'm using Netscape 4.76 (for stability purposes: I want my work desktop **boring**).
--dave
This happended on CP/M with dongles, then with 8" diskettes, on CP/M and PCs with 5 1/4" diskettes and again on later PCs with 3 1/2" diskettes.
Each time software companies tried the copy-protection vendors' products, found their sales did not increase, but their support costs had skyrocketed. Instead of one support call for 50 sales, they were seeing calls on every other sale, plus the cost of sending out replacement diskettes at a frightening rate, approaching several hundred percent of sales. The protection, you see, made the disks required for every single use, instead of only once for installation. Net result? the disks failed. A lot.
This also made the customers mad, so once they noticed that there was no advantage and huge costs disadvantages, software companies stopped using copy protection and the protection vendors went out of business.
Until, of course, a new sucker came along and announced copy protection for the next new diskette format. And started the whole suicidal cycle over again. In this case, with CDs which are unreliable and require re-purchase, something which tends to make customers grumpy.
Fjord said: Also check the how well specialized applications under wine. For most specialized apps, it's safer to run Win4Lin, the oldest Windows possible and the app. I run Project via a script that says
win C:/PROGRA~1/MICROS~2/OFFICE/WIPROJ D:"$@" which tells w4l to start and run project, optionally with a data file from my work directory. Other applications can be run via similar scripts, stright from the comand line, or from the Linux desktop if you write a Project.desktop file. By the way, Project also runs faster on Windows under Win4Lin under Linux han it ever did on the same hardware under just Windows.
Instead of dooming the "business guys" to windows, phase the new services in. Don't make any of your users second-class citizins. Just do a particularly good job of setting up the desktop to keep the non-nerds from going nuts (;-))
By the time I plan to pull a server out of the front line, I'm probably also planning to switch the service from 24/7 to exchange-parts-only.
They just added WinME, so they're making progress. I spoke (emailed) to one of the staff some time ago and they were really very bright and helpfull.
To be precise: Win4lin 3.x boots, loads MS project and displays the selected file in less time under Linux, w4l and Windows 95 than starting Project alone did, under just Win95 on the exact same hardware.
Having a real OS and filesystem on your machine is a good thing (:-))
I realy need a faster machine for Red Hat 7.2, but it's quite adequate for running Windows programs under emulation, for which I thank the w4l folks. I didn't expect Project to run well on a 133, but the faster OS makes it quite zippy.
O'Reilly can't really say if it's a statistically sigificant advantage, but the opposite hypothesis, that it might hurt sales, sure ain't true!
--dave (the 2nd author) c-b
Its arguably a non-issue: there hasn't even been discussion of the claim on samba-technical.
You often see these is newspapers who are on one side or the other of an issue: when you do, you know the newspaper's biased.
Interesting: in a previous life at Siemens/Sietec we regarded OS/2 as substantially more Unix-like than windows-like. My leaky memory says our build system (qef, at http://www.qef.com) treated it a a slightly brain-damaged Unix.
... which cuts off access to other mime-types.
"The law, in its August Majesty, prohibits the rich as well as the poor from sleeping under bridges."
This, then, gives a case quite parallel to the cited patent cases, involving a large and relatively well-to-do country (;-)).
rtrifts wrote: but what you are referring to is contrary to the Copyright Act and is a criminal offence. Sorry, but your conclusion doesn't follow from your evidence. In the act you quote, the terms prohibit "makes for sale or rental", "sells or rents out, or by way of trade..", "distributes .. either for the purpose of trade or to such an extent as to affect prejudicially the owner of the copyright", "by way of trade exhibits
" and "imports for sale or rental".
A more credible conclusion is that one cannot
make copies for sale, or so many free copies as
to make the record unsalable. This is different
from making personal copies.
It's also unusual to cite a breach of the Copyright Act as being
a criminal offense: it's traditionally considered
part of the civil law, while matters under the
Criminal Code of Canada are traditionally considered to be criminal law.
Actually it's the government requiring folks who use the fair use provisions of our law to pay an honorarium to the authors. This is a very normal Canadian practice: each time you use your rights, you accept your responsibilities. One of the obvious strengths of this is that the money goes to the copyright owners, not third parties (unless the record companies have managed to secure ownership of the songs, which is known to happen). Finally, a weakness is the very indirect way one estimates the amount of the honorarium, which takes us back to the original point: the proposal is that it be raised unreasonably.
... the Xybernaut lawyer handling the case against Whatley, said Whatley had been served notice of the lawsuit by certified mail. Note that he said certified mail, not registered mail. That means different things in different jurisdictions: I once used (Canadian) certified mail to put my landlord on notice, only to find that it didn't guarantee delivery, or provide me notification of non-delivery. If the same is true in Virginia, the lawyer could technically be telling the truth, while actually telling what logicians consider a "lie of omission".