In mainframe culture the success criteria cluster around finely hones change control, getting a finite sized chunk of code to work, and work cleanly, fast, first time with known bells and whistles and no more.
Unix success criteria cluster around getting it done somewhat quickly, build it light so you can change it on the fly, include lots of function stubs for unimplemented functions you MIGHT need later on, don't worry about reusability or longevity and make it run good enough.
Each approach has its advantages and disadvantages but each is disasterous for the other. If you try to run with mainframe mindset in the Unix world you'll fall too far behind. Conversely if you approach mainframes with Unix success criteria you will never get anything done at all.
Or at least an arm's race and anyone who thinks that sunday school models of good behavior and just plain ol being nice is a better way to proceed, is being childish.
I wouldn't stop at email requests. I would hurl massive amounts of big frames at them all day like a REAL D/DOS attack. All you have to do is increase their cost of doing business a few percentage points.
One of the biggest problems with OS/2 Warp was the single threaded IO queue. If for whatever reason the IO queue got filled or broken in any way it would hard hang the system requiring a cold restart. There were some hacks to arbitrarily extend the length of the queue but that only postponed the pain.
See the point is that there should be correlation between the cost or economic value of the hardware and the cost or economic value of the software. If I had a spare $600 PC laying around, I really wouldn't care all that much about the cost of the desktop OS for ordinary desktop middle of the road duties. If I need a $600 PC to run a free OS versus a $100 PC to run a $90 OS (like win98) then I'll pick the lower cost option in toto.
Moreover one would think that a software vendor understands that if their hardware requirements are roughly 2 years back or newer that given the residual economic value of a PC 2 years old or less, that vendor could or should invest minimal time and effort into building a complete desktop environment that installs and operates out of the box more or less with the same level of difficulty as Windows.
By comparison, if you had that same $600 give or take you couldn't grab a Mini Mac off the shelf. See the difference?
This really goes to the heart of the issue. The Windows community and the Peguin community have fundamentally different definitions of 'Desktop'. They are not speaking the same language. One is not worse than the other, just profoundly different. So when we talk about so called 'Desktop Linux' we're not talking about the same kind of desktop when we talk about 'Desktop Windows' or 'Desktop Mac' for that matter.
I didn't refuse to run Slackware, I raqn Vector which is Slackware. If Vector was unmanageable and it is Slackware + minimal usability enhancements then Slackware on its own would have been unworkable.
Yes in fact I do. I know that the latest turn of the crank of Intel processors hit a physical wall of the limits of solid state physics to manage heat dissipation. It's been very very well documented elsewhere.
Project: Find a Linux desktop distro which can be installed on a low end PC and function as a credible replacement for Win95/98 which previously ran on that hardware. The OS has to be semi-easy to install, relatively bug free, it has to support a modicum of normal desktop apps that the typical student or home user would use or be able to use, and it has to be relatively straightforward to maintain from the perspective of installing printers and other common devices as well as installing patches or updates. It has to boot in a reasonable amount of time and it has to recover from a 'pull the plug' shutdown with few if any messages or user intervention. No Windows OS software or partitions are preserved.
Hardware An IBM PC750 model 6887 (mod 80H engineering model never marketed). 112MB RAM. 2 IDE drives: 6GB and 4GB. The BIOS limits a single drive to 6GB. A 40x12x16 CDRW. AMDK6-2 400 drop in replacement CPU. D-Link, 10/100Ethernet NIC, Realtek 8129 family. AWE64 ISA sound card. I acknowledge that this is an ancient machine that is neither supported nor can be affordably upgraded. It is theoretically possible to upgrade RAM to 144MB but very expensive. Video is embedded S3VG64+.
RH based: All the RH based distros are very similar look and feel and toolset. They are require significant hardware to run well. They all boot with a failure to start the sound server. If you have the hardware to run them they are probably a good choice for a desktop. General hardware minimum recommendations are at least 128MB RAM and 400Mhz CPU. Practical minimums are at least twice that: 256MB RAM and 700 -1200Mhz CPU minimum and at least 3-4GB diskspace. Some distros check the disk and made the volume a hard requirement.. Generally, from a pure usage perspective there is little to distinguish them from one another. Some had a much easier time installing printers in CUPS for example but I did not install anything significant to see whether one had more success than another. Sound server generally failed on boot. Video cards were generally detected as S3VG64 generic and not '+'; changing resolution was hit or miss. I did not try to install or run Wine. While they install well and have an elegant look and feel they are basically unusable with this hardware.
ELX - Automatic partition, very clean. This may be an orphan product however good it is.
Cobind - Very similar, manual partition, low numbered release (0.1)
SOT/LBA - Very similar, manual partition
Lorma - Very similar, manual partition. Developed at and for Lorma College. Multiple versions for i386 and 686 but the differences are not obvious on an AMDK6
OpenNA - Installs but does not run on AMDK6
Live CDs: Most are Knoppix/Debian based distros and with the exception of Knoppix strangely, require user intervention for installation to input manual frame buffer params. These lightweight distros all have more or less the same applications. Individual variations are minor and focus on hardware support or multimedia. There is Knoppix and there is everything else. Knoppix runs very well is very complete, in fact it's a little bloated and runs fairly slow. These distros are all pretty much the same in terms of which apps they have and they run. Feather and DSL really are stripped down, many of their apps are text based in a Window or use Dilo instead of Firefox or Konquerer. Some do not install or run at all. The only unusual one is Puppy which looks almost identical to Win98. Puppy also has a very complicated mode to install on to the harddrive - I'm not sure if it's possible. Video was detected adequately. Most are not numbered version 1.0 or higher
Peanut - Does not install, does not run on AMDK6
Feather - Good script for to hard drive. Runs either on CD or harddrive equally well. With a little more RAM you can dump the entire OS into a RAMdisk. Primitive GUI, printer installation is difficult.
DSL - Very simple, fast installation. Primitive gui. Printer installation is difficult.
Sl
Gee I hope Apple has to abandon all of their interesting form factors and stick with the grey putty mini tower of Chairman Bill. Because all that borderline melting 75W Intel goodness will need it.
A Mac with 6 fans and a heatsink the size of a car battery. Wowie.
Yeah we have that too. The teachers wave their hands around and tell the kids to 'go do some research on the internet. bring back a powerpoint in 2 weeks'.
OS's don't catch on for the same reason new doesn't catch on. For the same reason most resturants fail and half of all marriages fail and 99% of every life form that ever was is extinct. Mostly everthing fails, collapses, dies or is left in the dust for no obvious reason.
Last week's SC decision guaranteeing cable monopolies for data access practically creates this busines from the ground up. Cable companies will move into telephony big time now that they have protected markets and phone companies do not.
Not because I care about the music industry but because it's about time that someone besides the endpoint is held responsible for content. For Christ's sake I can go to jail for content that goes through someone else's network and they get to hide behind a lot of legal mumbo jumbo.
At least that's what the text skimming adbot on the rightside of the page for Deimos, Phobos sister moon has. For Phobos you have to be satisfied with ads for relativity and photons and such.
Many Manhattan Project scientists wanted to quit the program after Germany surrendered because hitting Germany was their prime objective. Would that the project completed 6 months earlier. We could have bombed Germany instead. Not being Asian I have relatively little animosity toward the history of Japan in WW2. But I sincerely regret we didn't erase Germany from the map.
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In mainframe culture the success criteria cluster around finely hones change control, getting a finite sized chunk of code to work, and work cleanly, fast, first time with known bells and whistles and no more.
Unix success criteria cluster around getting it done somewhat quickly, build it light so you can change it on the fly, include lots of function stubs for unimplemented functions you MIGHT need later on, don't worry about reusability or longevity and make it run good enough.
Each approach has its advantages and disadvantages but each is disasterous for the other. If you try to run with mainframe mindset in the Unix world you'll fall too far behind. Conversely if you approach mainframes with Unix success criteria you will never get anything done at all.
Or at least an arm's race and anyone who thinks that sunday school models of good behavior and just plain ol being nice is a better way to proceed, is being childish.
I wouldn't stop at email requests. I would hurl massive amounts of big frames at them all day like a REAL D/DOS attack. All you have to do is increase their cost of doing business a few percentage points.
Let's go and fuck it up.
Yeah let's UNINVENT all sorts of things we don't like because that will be like, you know, cool.
One of the biggest problems with OS/2 Warp was the single threaded IO queue. If for whatever reason the IO queue got filled or broken in any way it would hard hang the system requiring a cold restart. There were some hacks to arbitrarily extend the length of the queue but that only postponed the pain.
You talk about 10 years ago like it's some far off mythical land with hobbits and trolls and shit.
.fam: famine .bmb: bomb .slv: slavery .shr: Sharia .ter: terrorism .plo: kill the Jews .crp: corruption .isf: islamofascism .ict: inaction .brb: bribery .cya: cover your (own) ass .mgb: Mugabe
See the point is that there should be correlation between the cost or economic value of the hardware and the cost or economic value of the software. If I had a spare $600 PC laying around, I really wouldn't care all that much about the cost of the desktop OS for ordinary desktop middle of the road duties. If I need a $600 PC to run a free OS versus a $100 PC to run a $90 OS (like win98) then I'll pick the lower cost option in toto.
Moreover one would think that a software vendor understands that if their hardware requirements are roughly 2 years back or newer that given the residual economic value of a PC 2 years old or less, that vendor could or should invest minimal time and effort into building a complete desktop environment that installs and operates out of the box more or less with the same level of difficulty as Windows.
By comparison, if you had that same $600 give or take you couldn't grab a Mini Mac off the shelf. See the difference?
This really goes to the heart of the issue. The Windows community and the Peguin community have fundamentally different definitions of 'Desktop'. They are not speaking the same language. One is not worse than the other, just profoundly different. So when we talk about so called 'Desktop Linux' we're not talking about the same kind of desktop when we talk about 'Desktop Windows' or 'Desktop Mac' for that matter.
I didn't refuse to run Slackware, I raqn Vector which is Slackware. If Vector was unmanageable and it is Slackware + minimal usability enhancements then Slackware on its own would have been unworkable.
Yes in fact I do. I know that the latest turn of the crank of Intel processors hit a physical wall of the limits of solid state physics to manage heat dissipation. It's been very very well documented elsewhere.
Project:
Find a Linux desktop distro which can be installed on a low end PC and function as a credible replacement for Win95/98 which previously ran on that hardware. The OS has to be semi-easy to install, relatively bug free, it has to support a modicum of normal desktop apps that the typical student or home user would use or be able to use, and it has to be relatively straightforward to maintain from the perspective of installing printers and other common devices as well as installing patches or updates. It has to boot in a reasonable amount of time and it has to recover from a 'pull the plug' shutdown with few if any messages or user intervention. No Windows OS software or partitions are preserved.
Hardware
An IBM PC750 model 6887 (mod 80H engineering model never marketed). 112MB RAM. 2 IDE drives: 6GB and 4GB. The BIOS limits a single drive to 6GB. A 40x12x16 CDRW. AMDK6-2 400 drop in replacement CPU. D-Link, 10/100Ethernet NIC, Realtek 8129 family. AWE64 ISA sound card. I acknowledge that this is an ancient machine that is neither supported nor can be affordably upgraded. It is theoretically possible to upgrade RAM to 144MB but very expensive. Video is embedded S3VG64+.
RH based:
All the RH based distros are very similar look and feel and toolset. They are require significant hardware to run well. They all boot with a failure to start the sound server. If you have the hardware to run them they are probably a good choice for a desktop. General hardware minimum recommendations are at least 128MB RAM and 400Mhz CPU. Practical minimums are at least twice that: 256MB RAM and 700 -1200Mhz CPU minimum and at least 3-4GB diskspace. Some distros check the disk and made the volume a hard requirement.. Generally, from a pure usage perspective there is little to distinguish them from one another. Some had a much easier time installing printers in CUPS for example but I did not install anything significant to see whether one had more success than another. Sound server generally failed on boot. Video cards were generally detected as S3VG64 generic and not '+'; changing resolution was hit or miss. I did not try to install or run Wine. While they install well and have an elegant look and feel they are basically unusable with this hardware.
ELX - Automatic partition, very clean. This may be an orphan product however good it is.
Cobind - Very similar, manual partition, low numbered release (0.1)
SOT/LBA - Very similar, manual partition
Lorma - Very similar, manual partition. Developed at and for Lorma College. Multiple versions for i386 and 686 but the differences are not obvious on an AMDK6
OpenNA - Installs but does not run on AMDK6
Live CDs:
Most are Knoppix/Debian based distros and with the exception of Knoppix strangely, require user intervention for installation to input manual frame buffer params. These lightweight distros all have more or less the same applications. Individual variations are minor and focus on hardware support or multimedia. There is Knoppix and there is everything else. Knoppix runs very well is very complete, in fact it's a little bloated and runs fairly slow. These distros are all pretty much the same in terms of which apps they have and they run. Feather and DSL really are stripped down, many of their apps are text based in a Window or use Dilo instead of Firefox or Konquerer. Some do not install or run at all. The only unusual one is Puppy which looks almost identical to Win98. Puppy also has a very complicated mode to install on to the harddrive - I'm not sure if it's possible. Video was detected adequately. Most are not numbered version 1.0 or higher
Peanut - Does not install, does not run on AMDK6
Feather - Good script for to hard drive. Runs either on CD or harddrive equally well. With a little more RAM you can dump the entire OS into a RAMdisk. Primitive GUI, printer installation is difficult.
DSL - Very simple, fast installation. Primitive gui. Printer installation is difficult.
Sl
Gee I hope Apple has to abandon all of their interesting form factors and stick with the grey putty mini tower of Chairman Bill. Because all that borderline melting 75W Intel goodness will need it.
A Mac with 6 fans and a heatsink the size of a car battery. Wowie.
Yeah we have that too. The teachers wave their hands around and tell the kids to 'go do some research on the internet. bring back a powerpoint in 2 weeks'.
Though I'm not sure what that means in the big scheme of things either.
Those are all run by software too and I would think that they have higher failure standards than a rollercoaster.
OS's don't catch on for the same reason new doesn't catch on. For the same reason most resturants fail and half of all marriages fail and 99% of every life form that ever was is extinct. Mostly everthing fails, collapses, dies or is left in the dust for no obvious reason.
Last week's SC decision guaranteeing cable monopolies for data access practically creates this busines from the ground up. Cable companies will move into telephony big time now that they have protected markets and phone companies do not.
Not because I care about the music industry but because it's about time that someone besides the endpoint is held responsible for content. For Christ's sake I can go to jail for content that goes through someone else's network and they get to hide behind a lot of legal mumbo jumbo.
Any more than races between horses and horseless carriages. I mean people are not machines, get over it.
For only $9,000 a piece we can supply the entire DoD with hard drives that fight terrorism!
At least that's what the text skimming adbot on the rightside of the page for Deimos, Phobos sister moon has. For Phobos you have to be satisfied with ads for relativity and photons and such.
Probably not, at least not with anger management problems like yours.
Oh I've already had cancer but thanks all the same.
It's about software. You won't learn about software from a 'more accessible' ancient computer. Sorry but you wont.
Many Manhattan Project scientists wanted to quit the program after Germany surrendered because hitting Germany was their prime objective. Would that the project completed 6 months earlier. We could have bombed Germany instead. Not being Asian I have relatively little animosity toward the history of Japan in WW2. But I sincerely regret we didn't erase Germany from the map.