The article stated that MS will go on the offencive to 'get the facts out'.
Hey Steve Ballmer - why don't you get a good fucking product out the door then you wouldn't have to spend a coupla hundred million bucks spinning shit into gold, now would you?
Don't 'give me the facts' I know what the damn facts are. Just make Windows more secure. And here's a tip, Microsoft, just a thought....
Instead of carrying on about the animated 3D Video crushing interface in Longhorn THAT IS ALREADY 2 YEARS LATE....Why don't you spend that effort on making Windows more secure?
Or isn't that sexy enough for your PR guys. I swear you MS morons must go to sleep every night dreaming of new ways to be useless.
Re:That's great, now count me out.
on
SLI Primer
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· Score: 1
You'd better hope it's less than extremely unlikely. You'd better hope it's zero. And as I'm sure you know the hand in glove relationship between Intel and Redmond had nothing, absolutely nothing to do with the endless push-me pull-you relationship between each turn of the crank pumping out Intel's capabilities and each new crop of requirements on Redmond's part. Absolutely nothing, nothing to see here folks, no that's not a spaceship that crashed. Nope.
Seriously. A leader has to understand the business the company is in and in key ways it really doesn't matter what the 'technical' details are. Does Merrill Lynch need a mathematician who can trade 3rd order derivatives online? Does Glaxo need a molecular chemist leading the troops? Does Lockeed literally need a rocket scientist?
No or course not. A company needs a leader who can lead and can understand what it takes to succeed in that business. Now in some companies it might help to know the nits and gnats of technical arcana and many companies like in Big 5 consulting shops that is the only real career path. But on the whole 'up from the ranks' is not worth a lot.
Also don't discount the fact that the basic personality type of IT geeks is antisocial. I don't mean sociopathic like most CEO's I mean agoraphobic. Not a good skill set to run things.
That's great, now count me out.
on
SLI Primer
·
· Score: 1
Great news dudes and dudettes. Now let me stay out of this fray and install Windows in such a way that bypasses this requirement if I so choose. The idea that I'll have to buy an expensive video adapter to not play games only a horny teenager could love makes we want to blow up Redmond campus. There for shit sure better be a way to avoid this or the stink of collusion between Microsoft and game hardware builders will reek to heaven.
I will never play videogames on any of my home computers and I will not upgrade, Bill, to the next version of Windows if the hardware requirements are more than the slighest bit higher than they are now, unless I can disable all the 'great-perks-for-hardware-stockholders' features. I, and I suspect millions like me will wait until our existing software is no longer patch-able or gets broken or runs out of gas and then we will switch to a 2 or 3 years more mature Fedora Core.
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
So what Redmond has to do is invest billions of stockholder dollars to develop a product they know they will kill once it kills everyone else and most of their own customer base is stranded in a no man's land of neither Windows mor Linux.
I haven't heard logic like that since Metallica sued their own fans.
MS is a closed company making closed products. The only way they can 'kill' Linux is to:
1) Be safer, faster more stable 2) Cheaper 3) Easier to manage
They already lost on 1 & 2 but they are winning on 3.
To be fair though there are whole categories of drivers that Linux does not do a great job with. Like Wacom tablets. The official Linux driver is source code you get from sourceforge and build it yourself. Lots of sound cards don't work, etc..
No not at all - think of it this way. If you're selling a Bentley then your competition is not other cars. It's a plane or a skil lodge in Vail. That's their business plan. If you are MS and you spend 3 decades cobbling together mid-level products half of which were conceived by other companies then your competition is not other firms making similar products. That is not your business plan. They don't compete on product. So the product per se really isn't all that important.
No not all the way, the desktop doesn't run with drag and drop and the 'user experience' the way WinXP does. There are some subtle differences in XP that actually make a pretty good desktop at this point.
But I understand your point and wish for example that someone would just kill RPM and dependency hell once and for all.
Yes I meant office/school use and not entertainment. My bad. If you know RH/Fedora then there are a few distros like ELX, SOT/LBA and Lorma that do a pretty credible job installing on their own brainlessly and the end result is stable and reasonably mature. The problem is that they need as much hardware as XP to run aka they are as bloated, and they run slower than they should - probably because of X, which speaks to your gaming question. But I'd like to see what happens to the computer game/super highend video card market once the next PlayStation comes out. On paper it's a graphics supercomputer and the excuse that gamers use to run their PC's - better graphics performance might disappear. I which case people will have their PS stacked on top of their Linux box with a KVM switch sharing the screen and keyboard.
The last two XP loaded machines I bought didn't come with orginal MS media, OEM media, boot diskettes or anything else. They gave me 6 blank CD's and a system recovery program and said "Good luck, burn these and don't lose them".
Seriously we are maybe 2 years away from being able to replicate 100% of the desktop functionality of WinXP using Linux. And with the exception of Visio there are no office desktop applications from MS that you HAVE to run in Wine in lieu of native Linux apps.
What with the Brazilian government wanting to kick MS off all government desktops, the fact that a disproportionate number of distros come from Brazil & it's the 5th most populous country in the world I'd say it's somewhat strategic in nature for Mandrake to do this.
Could we just kill the major security issues once and for all by dedicating one core 100% to security and encryption chores? I'd love to see hardware implementations for virus scanning, spyware, firewalling, encryption, VPN tunneling, authentication and smart patch managment that have free use of their own high end CPU
Oh it basically is. The browser 'experience' is pretty much all the same with some subtle differences and varying degrees of clean and successful implementation. One is an Accord, the other is a Camry. But generally they both do the same things the same ways and what makes your experience hard or easy or interesting or valuable for one is equally true for the other. For something to be different it would have to function differently like the address bar in XP except after that the experience is still the same. If a 'browser' worked like the XP address bar and then popped the results in a translucent subwindow inside the application you were already using, that would be a differet experience, for example.
Wouldn't it be interesting if the future of real competition to MS consisted of Vietnamese programmers working for pennies on open source code which is then thrown over the wall to Bangalore who staffs the help desks to support it? Wouldn't it be interesting if the only credible response to MS's dominance was to cut the cost of development and support to near-zero and pray that no one makes a breakout development. In other words, what if the only way to fight MS is to completely destroy all innovation and fight purely on crappy service and low cost?
Mitch oughta know this by now. Product is just the wrapper for the business plan. Product is just a carton you put on a shelf to aim your markeing at. Product really doesn't matter all that much. If it did then Firefox and Openoffice would have been able to charge $5 for their product and make billions doing it. And Bill knows this too because the great genius of Bill Gates is understanding that if you talk to your competitors about 'product' it will distract them from looking at your business plan. And without a credible bizplan, products like Mozilla are essentially interesting experiments that demonstrate how close you can come to MS's product. In other words they are triumphs of reverse engineering. But as I said, 'product' really doesn't matter so those organizations have spent all their time and effort to replicate a wrapper, a box without having anything to put in the box.
Ok it's pretty underhanded and something Lexmark is currently being sued for. But you don't have to get your NGO black flag doo-rags out just yet. While I feel your pain, I replace all 4 carts on my Epson C86 once or twice a month so I never experience ageing carts. Frankly it would amaze me if your inkjet printer doesn't get clogged and clotted when it's used that infrequently.
Here are the UN sanctioned domain names:.UN (UN).BM (boom).JD (jihad).TW (third world).FA (famine).BH (blue helmet).WC (war criminals).OF (oil for food)
I mean it's all well and good to have LAWS that Protect PEOPLE, but that's lesbo potsmoking terrorist homosexual communism. And that's what we're fighting against, isn't it people? Or do you HATE freedomlibertylibertyfreedomfreedom and Jesus?
Now get in line and leave your luggage on the platform. You're only being relocated to the east.
Wouldn't it be the case that if you are developing an embedded operating enviroment that the simple fact you can have run levels almost pay for itself versus Windows? That and the ability to spawn terminals, and oh yes, the fact you can embed it at all and the fact that there HRT (hard real time) versions of Linux?
It seems like saying 'more cars have round wheels than Microsoft's Visual SquareWheel #+'.
Maybe I'm retarded, but unlike your President I'm not actually proud of that fact Plus I don't actually run the country. So what the fuck does that make you, asshole? Just another bootspittle blind monkeyfuck follower, doesn't it.
Now go back home and masturbate to pictures of Sean Hannity, ok?
Remember in the early 90's when many of you were still in grade school and the TCM based mainframes with their 400psi water chiller pumps were beginning to make way for the CMOS era? And we heard that a 10 CMOS CEC could easily replace a 2-3 TCM CEC because even though each one was rather slow and low powered they could gang them together and heat would not be a problem? We all chucked our TCM mainframes, got rid of all the chiller machinery with hacksaws and went on our merry ways.
Well it looks like the prognostication for a Brave New World was a little premature. It looks like we'll start to see the return of complex and expensive water chillers yet. Not the homemade black tee shirt and Krispy Kreme version but real, large, complicated chiller pipes that are built right into the CPU chip.
Slashdot Mirror
The article stated that MS will go on the offencive to 'get the facts out'.
Hey Steve Ballmer - why don't you get a good fucking product out the door then you wouldn't have to spend a coupla hundred million bucks spinning shit into gold, now would you?
Don't 'give me the facts' I know what the damn facts are. Just make Windows more secure. And here's a tip, Microsoft, just a thought....
Instead of carrying on about the animated 3D Video crushing interface in Longhorn THAT IS ALREADY 2 YEARS LATE....Why don't you spend that effort on making Windows more secure?
Or isn't that sexy enough for your PR guys. I swear you MS morons must go to sleep every night dreaming of new ways to be useless.
You'd better hope it's less than extremely unlikely. You'd better hope it's zero. And as I'm sure you know the hand in glove relationship between Intel and Redmond had nothing, absolutely nothing to do with the endless push-me pull-you relationship between each turn of the crank pumping out Intel's capabilities and each new crop of requirements on Redmond's part. Absolutely nothing, nothing to see here folks, no that's not a spaceship that crashed. Nope.
Seriously. A leader has to understand the business the company is in and in key ways it really doesn't matter what the 'technical' details are. Does Merrill Lynch need a mathematician who can trade 3rd order derivatives online? Does Glaxo need a molecular chemist leading the troops? Does Lockeed literally need a rocket scientist?
No or course not. A company needs a leader who can lead and can understand what it takes to succeed in that business. Now in some companies it might help to know the nits and gnats of technical arcana and many companies like in Big 5 consulting shops that is the only real career path. But on the whole 'up from the ranks' is not worth a lot.
Also don't discount the fact that the basic personality type of IT geeks is antisocial. I don't mean sociopathic like most CEO's I mean agoraphobic. Not a good skill set to run things.
Great news dudes and dudettes. Now let me stay out of this fray and install Windows in such a way that bypasses this requirement if I so choose. The idea that I'll have to buy an expensive video adapter to not play games only a horny teenager could love makes we want to blow up Redmond campus. There for shit sure better be a way to avoid this or the stink of collusion between Microsoft and game hardware builders will reek to heaven.
I will never play videogames on any of my home computers and I will not upgrade, Bill, to the next version of Windows if the hardware requirements are more than the slighest bit higher than they are now, unless I can disable all the 'great-perks-for-hardware-stockholders' features. I, and I suspect millions like me will wait until our existing software is no longer patch-able or gets broken or runs out of gas and then we will switch to a 2 or 3 years more mature Fedora Core.
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
So what Redmond has to do is invest billions of stockholder dollars to develop a product they know they will kill once it kills everyone else and most of their own customer base is stranded in a no man's land of neither Windows mor Linux.
I haven't heard logic like that since Metallica sued their own fans.
MS is a closed company making closed products. The only way they can 'kill' Linux is to:
1) Be safer, faster more stable
2) Cheaper
3) Easier to manage
They already lost on 1 & 2 but they are winning on 3.
To be fair though there are whole categories of drivers that Linux does not do a great job with. Like Wacom tablets. The official Linux driver is source code you get from sourceforge and build it yourself. Lots of sound cards don't work, etc..
No not at all - think of it this way. If you're selling a Bentley then your competition is not other cars. It's a plane or a skil lodge in Vail. That's their business plan. If you are MS and you spend 3 decades cobbling together mid-level products half of which were conceived by other companies then your competition is not other firms making similar products. That is not your business plan. They don't compete on product. So the product per se really isn't all that important.
No not all the way, the desktop doesn't run with drag and drop and the 'user experience' the way WinXP does. There are some subtle differences in XP that actually make a pretty good desktop at this point.
But I understand your point and wish for example that someone would just kill RPM and dependency hell once and for all.
Yes I meant office/school use and not entertainment. My bad. If you know RH/Fedora then there are a few distros like ELX, SOT/LBA and Lorma that do a pretty credible job installing on their own brainlessly and the end result is stable and reasonably mature. The problem is that they need as much hardware as XP to run aka they are as bloated, and they run slower than they should - probably because of X, which speaks to your gaming question. But I'd like to see what happens to the computer game/super highend video card market once the next PlayStation comes out. On paper it's a graphics supercomputer and the excuse that gamers use to run their PC's - better graphics performance might disappear. I which case people will have their PS stacked on top of their Linux box with a KVM switch sharing the screen and keyboard.
The last two XP loaded machines I bought didn't come with orginal MS media, OEM media, boot diskettes or anything else. They gave me 6 blank CD's and a system recovery program and said "Good luck, burn these and don't lose them".
Seriously we are maybe 2 years away from being able to replicate 100% of the desktop functionality of WinXP using Linux. And with the exception of Visio there are no office desktop applications from MS that you HAVE to run in Wine in lieu of native Linux apps.
What with the Brazilian government wanting to kick MS off all government desktops, the fact that a disproportionate number of distros come from Brazil & it's the 5th most populous country in the world I'd say it's somewhat strategic in nature for Mandrake to do this.
Could we just kill the major security issues once and for all by dedicating one core 100% to security and encryption chores? I'd love to see hardware implementations for virus scanning, spyware, firewalling, encryption, VPN tunneling, authentication and smart patch managment that have free use of their own high end CPU
Oh it basically is. The browser 'experience' is pretty much all the same with some subtle differences and varying degrees of clean and successful implementation. One is an Accord, the other is a Camry. But generally they both do the same things the same ways and what makes your experience hard or easy or interesting or valuable for one is equally true for the other. For something to be different it would have to function differently like the address bar in XP except after that the experience is still the same. If a 'browser' worked like the XP address bar and then popped the results in a translucent subwindow inside the application you were already using, that would be a differet experience, for example.
Wouldn't it be interesting if the future of real competition to MS consisted of Vietnamese programmers working for pennies on open source code which is then thrown over the wall to Bangalore who staffs the help desks to support it? Wouldn't it be interesting if the only credible response to MS's dominance was to cut the cost of development and support to near-zero and pray that no one makes a breakout development. In other words, what if the only way to fight MS is to completely destroy all innovation and fight purely on crappy service and low cost?
Mitch oughta know this by now. Product is just the wrapper for the business plan. Product is just a carton you put on a shelf to aim your markeing at. Product really doesn't matter all that much. If it did then Firefox and Openoffice would have been able to charge $5 for their product and make billions doing it. And Bill knows this too because the great genius of Bill Gates is understanding that if you talk to your competitors about 'product' it will distract them from looking at your business plan. And without a credible bizplan, products like Mozilla are essentially interesting experiments that demonstrate how close you can come to MS's product. In other words they are triumphs of reverse engineering. But as I said, 'product' really doesn't matter so those organizations have spent all their time and effort to replicate a wrapper, a box without having anything to put in the box.
Or is the explanation that the God mysteriously planted the evidence to throw us off the trail?
Hmm a partisan flunkie appointment of a spyware maker to guard our privacy.
Excuse me while me and Julia make love one last time before the Inner Party members come to put the rats on us.
Isn't that what's America all about? Blame SOMEBODY, declare victory. Go home.
Ok it's pretty underhanded and something Lexmark is currently being sued for. But you don't have to get your NGO black flag doo-rags out just yet. While I feel your pain, I replace all 4 carts on my Epson C86 once or twice a month so I never experience ageing carts. Frankly it would amaze me if your inkjet printer doesn't get clogged and clotted when it's used that infrequently.
Here are the UN sanctioned domain names: .UN (UN) .BM (boom) .JD (jihad) .TW (third world) .FA (famine) .BH (blue helmet) .WC (war criminals) .OF (oil for food)
I mean it's all well and good to have LAWS that Protect PEOPLE, but that's lesbo potsmoking terrorist homosexual communism. And that's what we're fighting against, isn't it people? Or do you HATE freedomlibertylibertyfreedomfreedom and Jesus?
Now get in line and leave your luggage on the platform. You're only being relocated to the east.
Wouldn't it be the case that if you are developing an embedded operating enviroment that the simple fact you can have run levels almost pay for itself versus Windows? That and the ability to spawn terminals, and oh yes, the fact you can embed it at all and the fact that there HRT (hard real time) versions of Linux?
It seems like saying 'more cars have round wheels than Microsoft's Visual SquareWheel #+'.
Maybe I'm retarded, but unlike your President I'm not actually proud of that fact Plus I don't actually run the country. So what the fuck does that make you, asshole? Just another bootspittle blind monkeyfuck follower, doesn't it.
Now go back home and masturbate to pictures of Sean Hannity, ok?
Remember in the early 90's when many of you were still in grade school and the TCM based mainframes with their 400psi water chiller pumps were beginning to make way for the CMOS era? And we heard that a 10 CMOS CEC could easily replace a 2-3 TCM CEC because even though each one was rather slow and low powered they could gang them together and heat would not be a problem? We all chucked our TCM mainframes, got rid of all the chiller machinery with hacksaws and went on our merry ways.
Well it looks like the prognostication for a Brave New World was a little premature. It looks like we'll start to see the return of complex and expensive water chillers yet. Not the homemade black tee shirt and Krispy Kreme version but real, large, complicated chiller pipes that are built right into the CPU chip.
And call it Bush's new enviromental protection of the Red Planet.