I installed 7.0 because I bought a boxed version used (to save money) when the latest release was 8.x, and then later obtained the notebook for free from a tech support client. All I had was dialup so ISOs for 8.0 were out of the question. 9.0 came out afterwards. 7.0 suits my needs, but it doesn't run the latest software without dependency hell. Yes Debian is an option, but it requires 6 ISOs (which with 300 kbps throughput isn't really worth the doubtful payoff) and the links to the single ISO for a network install are broken. Plus I could never get Debian to install on a 486 so I'm not too optimistic.
I take your word for it that there's a way to run linux and the latest software on a p-233, but it's kind of hard. Windows sucks, but by contrast on the computer I am now typing on, a P-II 266, I'm running Windows 95 OSR2 and I have Mozilla 1.3, OO 1.01, recent Java, the latest flash, and I can install Mozilla 1.5, and with 512mb of RAM it's pretty fast. It's not really true about dependency hell. It's five years older and I can still run later software with it than RH7.
On the same p-II I have RH9 installed on a separate partition, and it's great, except that I can't get Lotus Notes 4.5 to work right under Wine (can't paste in big clipboards). Again these are just little glitches but they're enough to keep me from using it for everything. I use the notebook for research though.
Yeah okay. I installed Redhat 7.0 on my notebook, installed Office 1.0 and Mozilla 1.3 okay, but couldn't use flash, Mozilla 1.4, OpenOffice 1.01 because glibc too old, can't figure out how to upgrade glibc because of dependencies. Up2date I'm ineligible for unless I pay (7.1 and after only) so is there some way to upgrade this without dependency hell? And RH9 on a P-100? I don't think so. And yes, this could and did run Win98 with a ton more stuff for Windows.
Don't get me wrong, I reformatted it wiping Win98 and am happily using Linux, and it has yet to crash, but please don't deny the steep learning curve and outright PITA of using Linux.
OpenOffice it would be nice to be able to start page numbering at an arbitrary number, for say a book where your chapters are separate files. At this point to do this you have to insert a page break, which will end up somewhere other than the last line of the first page if there is any text reflow. This is really kind of a stupid oversight, and it's obvious they put a ton more effort into crap like autocompletion that is really more characteristic of a text editor than a word processor.
I actually spent quite a few hours downloading RH9, installing it, installing OpenOffice and Mozilla, and downloading and installing Wine, then getting Notes to work under Wine. The cut and paste just doesn't work beyond a small amount of text. I posted this bug to the WineHQ site.
If anyone is posting without thinking or understanding something thoroughly here, it's you.
Yeah really--how about cut and paste working between applications? The main reason I'm not using Redhat on my desktop right now as my main OS is that I can't paste large files from OpenOffice into Lotus Notes under Wine.
Windows 95 is great and fast the only thing wrong with it is that it's a piece of shite and crashes like a mofo I still can't get my CDRW working with it.
I have Redhat 7.0 on my notebook and it has never crashed--perfect for doing research in the archives when I can't chance a crash.
That said I couldn't get debian to install on my old 486 notebook which I now have running as a NAS device on Win95 using a Xircom parallel port ethernet adapter and it's just the thing. I copy my files over and it just sits there no problem. I don't know jack about networking but there you have it. Sure it's unreliable but that and my desktop also OSR2 are unlikely to go out simultaneously. Then I just backup critical to Yahoo Briefcase I have a Netgear $30 router so that makes 4 computers, two OSR2 two Linux yippee!
This should have been obvious, but after reading this story I realize that IBM is supporting Linux to drive Sun under, and they're succeeding. Sun is the only one of the top four Unix vendors to see a decrease in server unit sales this quarter, when overall unit sales were up 21 percent. IBM's increased 37 percent, while Sun's fell 6 percent.
Re:Well, since the conclusion of his last book
on
Human Accomplishment
·
· Score: 1
"...since the conclusion of his last book was that blacks are inherently stupid..."
That's not what he concluded, now was it.
That is exactly what he concluded. The distribution of black peoples' IQ was significantly lower than that of white peoples', and this difference was biological and congenital. Stupidity he argued is a black biological trait.
Murray is a professional racist and is trying to revive the respectability of social darwinism that has (or had?) been thought of as fascist since the 1940s. This was a very common view among the elite in the 19th century, but most of those in academia and the sciences dismiss race as an ideology now. It's really a shame that so many techies are receptive to it. It reflects the layer of pseudoscience present in much of the tech culture that was due to the outsized economic gains that were reaped in the late 90s. It seems with the bust tech people were becoming more sympathetic to others due to overseas outsourcing and unemloyment, but now that there has been an uptick in the sector I hope it doesn't go back to social darwinism.
Well it's an always-on connection, which a modem is not. So you can talk on the phone and read your e-mail on a shell using Pine, or read Usenet using trn, or browse the web to read AP feeds using lynx, or download software using ftp, or chat using IRC, or download images one at a time....
The web and java changed people's colloquial understanding of what the "Internet" is, but remember, the web is not the Internet.
That's true--moreover even M$ isn't on the line because of their illegally maintained monopoly. You can't fire them in the sense of buying something else because they prevent anything else from coming to market. When he said they get their engineers on it right away if there's market penetration somewhere from open source, we all know what that means. Make it so that something about a M$ application that everyone is using won't work with the OSS products achieving penetration, or incoporate some version of the competitor's software into the OS and make it so the competitor's warez won't work with Winblows.
Also the stuff he said about not having anyone to turn to for bugs is total bs. Mozilla has bugzilla, Wine has WinHQ (which I've used), OpenOffice has a bug reporting process. Linux I don't know about the various distros, but there's tons of discussion about Linux development on Usenet and people helping out with support issues. So basically he was talking about of his ass.
And what a dick he came off to be. "How do you know if some hacker working in China" blah blah blah. I'm stunned, although I guess I shouldn't be. What a steak-fed ogre Ballmer is.
As for HDDs, I would think that they last longer if they're not spinning, although I have no proof of this. This is an important reason why I don't leave them spinning. And the displays, no question about it that it being on, screen saver or no, decreases its life. A given vacuum tube has a certain number of hours of life in it. If it's on, the numbers left go down. That's why I don't use a screen saver but instead have the monitor shut itself off.
I've noticed a significant difference in my electric bill if I don't use the suspend function in my computer. I don't have the bills in front of me but maybe $10 a month. I'm using one of the early, high-power consuming P-IIs though.
It's all about lowering costs, being more efficient and freeing you to spend less money while keeping more of what you make. And that truly is what business is about.
That is correct, and that is the basic misunderstanding of the article and of much of the advocacy of much of open source. Open source is not about disrupting private property rights or communism. It is about enhancing competition and reducing anti-competitive monopoly power and monopoly profits. It is an attempt to bring to commercial software the same system of ethics that governs programming or other kinds of research in a scientific or academic setting. Those settings are not anticapitalist in principle, and authorship is respected there, but what is not possible is on the one hand secrecy and on the other hand general acceptance of valid results. GPL is a form of private property, not a disavowal of ownership. It is a restriction upon how the use may be restricted, which is itself precisely what property rights are--en enforceable claim to exclude someone from the use of something.
The author is trying to point out a contradiction between the rhetoric of the open source community as anticapitalist and anti-private property and the reality. In this he is correct--there is such hypocrisy. But he is wrong in saying that the contradiction goes to the heart of open source. It's the rhetoric of some open source advocacy and some representation of open source that contradicts this enforcement action, not the core of open source.
He is also wrong in suggesting that there is something wrong with this enforcement action. What he is really implying is that a corporation should have its IP enforced, but that a far-flung network of volunteers should not. Asking a corporation to pay them or abide by the restriction they place on use of their IP is unfair if it prevents the corporation from making money. The proof of the corporation's merit is that it sold 400,000 units. If releasing the code will remove an advantage over its competitors, that's just too bad for the volunteers.
This is why some in the open source movement embrace libertarianism and social darwinism and speak of the results of unrestricted competition under a regime of private property rights as if they genuinely reward merit. Private property and corporations are legal entities, creations of the state. Laissez-faire and perfect competition is no more absent government intervention than state-directed communism. It is a different set of rules governing contracts and property, not the absence of such rules in either case.
Can you start page numbering on a number other than one (or another number that would appear later in the document) yet? As in for continuously numbered chapters?
Also, OT, can MySql substitute for Lotus Notes as a kind of research database? I can run Notes under Wine, but I can't seem to paste in large clipboards as I like to do to enter the data. I.e. I take notes on a word processor and then just paste in the data.
The big moments were nytimes.com and news.google.com. As you go back in time it gets harder and harder, however. If you want to learn about steelworkers in the 1890s, you're better off going to the library.
I think overreliance on the Internet for information is why so many tech stocks bubbled and why so many techies are so insensitive to the effects of technology on people, as well as a sort of social darwinist ideology that the free market correlates perfectly with ability (even at the same time as M$ is bashed albeit often for anti-free market principles) or with public taste. If you don't see it on the screen, it doesn't happen.
That and getting information from games like SimCity (software is the cleanest and highest value of all industries) and Civilization (limited liability is an important moment of progress). The general conclusion is that corporate expansion and economic growth means greater efficiency, which is the way that all people become better off. This seems so self evident based on most of the information you get from the Internet that as soon as I write it I realize that the mere questioning of it will seem absurd to most people. The fact that the vast majority of people in human history did not believe this to be true is something you would have very little indication of from the informatoin available from the Internet. That is to say that the Internet is suffused with a Taylorist, efficiency based ideology.
The important distinction is that a computer also stores your older work and previous versions of your current work, as well as research notes, sometimes in database form. Now it also serves as a medium for circulating drafts and communicating with colleagues. It can also increasingly be a method of conducting research--searching catalogs, requesting interlibrary loan items, and in some cases downloading primary documents or finding facts that can be cited. So it's never really been accurate to call it a typewriter, and it's becoming less and less so.
I have liked wp5.1 the best of the word processors I used. It was more of a typewriter than a desktop publisher, in the sense that it positioned things according to character space and line space rather than inches. Since I was taught to type in a typing class this made intuitive sense to me. Word has always seemed to place things without my consent or the complete control of true desktop publishing software (although it's gotten better in terms of control). Word had two critical advantages, however. It displayed proportional fonts correctly and it allowed you to edit the footnotes all together instead of just one at a time.
I think though that most writers just use the latest word processors. The author of the article and the other anecdotes cited are not typical examples. They are in the minority (although perhaps a somewhat substantial one). What evidence do I have? I am a graduate student and the faculty just use the word processors IT installs. And I've worked at several magazines including Foreign Affairs and observed writers using the latest software. To the extent they use something older, I don't think it's due to any great love so much as it's the product of not having upgraded their computer. When they upgrade they just use whatever is preinstalled.
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I installed 7.0 because I bought a boxed version used (to save money) when the latest release was 8.x, and then later obtained the notebook for free from a tech support client. All I had was dialup so ISOs for 8.0 were out of the question. 9.0 came out afterwards. 7.0 suits my needs, but it doesn't run the latest software without dependency hell. Yes Debian is an option, but it requires 6 ISOs (which with 300 kbps throughput isn't really worth the doubtful payoff) and the links to the single ISO for a network install are broken. Plus I could never get Debian to install on a 486 so I'm not too optimistic.
I take your word for it that there's a way to run linux and the latest software on a p-233, but it's kind of hard. Windows sucks, but by contrast on the computer I am now typing on, a P-II 266, I'm running Windows 95 OSR2 and I have Mozilla 1.3, OO 1.01, recent Java, the latest flash, and I can install Mozilla 1.5, and with 512mb of RAM it's pretty fast. It's not really true about dependency hell. It's five years older and I can still run later software with it than RH7.
On the same p-II I have RH9 installed on a separate partition, and it's great, except that I can't get Lotus Notes 4.5 to work right under Wine (can't paste in big clipboards). Again these are just little glitches but they're enough to keep me from using it for everything. I use the notebook for research though.
Check that it should read P-233.
Yeah okay. I installed Redhat 7.0 on my notebook, installed Office 1.0 and Mozilla 1.3 okay, but couldn't use flash, Mozilla 1.4, OpenOffice 1.01 because glibc too old, can't figure out how to upgrade glibc because of dependencies. Up2date I'm ineligible for unless I pay (7.1 and after only) so is there some way to upgrade this without dependency hell? And RH9 on a P-100? I don't think so. And yes, this could and did run Win98 with a ton more stuff for Windows.
Don't get me wrong, I reformatted it wiping Win98 and am happily using Linux, and it has yet to crash, but please don't deny the steep learning curve and outright PITA of using Linux.
OpenOffice it would be nice to be able to start page numbering at an arbitrary number, for say a book where your chapters are separate files. At this point to do this you have to insert a page break, which will end up somewhere other than the last line of the first page if there is any text reflow. This is really kind of a stupid oversight, and it's obvious they put a ton more effort into crap like autocompletion that is really more characteristic of a text editor than a word processor.
I actually spent quite a few hours downloading RH9, installing it, installing OpenOffice and Mozilla, and downloading and installing Wine, then getting Notes to work under Wine. The cut and paste just doesn't work beyond a small amount of text. I posted this bug to the WineHQ site.
If anyone is posting without thinking or understanding something thoroughly here, it's you.
Yeah really--how about cut and paste working between applications? The main reason I'm not using Redhat on my desktop right now as my main OS is that I can't paste large files from OpenOffice into Lotus Notes under Wine.
Windows 95 is great and fast the only thing wrong with it is that it's a piece of shite and crashes like a mofo I still can't get my CDRW working with it.
I have Redhat 7.0 on my notebook and it has never crashed--perfect for doing research in the archives when I can't chance a crash.
That said I couldn't get debian to install on my old 486 notebook which I now have running as a NAS device on Win95 using a Xircom parallel port ethernet adapter and it's just the thing. I copy my files over and it just sits there no problem. I don't know jack about networking but there you have it. Sure it's unreliable but that and my desktop also OSR2 are unlikely to go out simultaneously. Then I just backup critical to Yahoo Briefcase I have a Netgear $30 router so that makes 4 computers, two OSR2 two Linux yippee!
This means one thing and one thing only--Red Hat is increasing their prices, and what they sell is support.
Does noone see that the open source community is nothing more than a source of free labour to IBM?
And a way to put Sun, which was kicking their mainframe dinosaur ass all over the place, out of business.
Hrm should have read top four server vendors.
This should have been obvious, but after reading this story I realize that IBM is supporting Linux to drive Sun under, and they're succeeding. Sun is the only one of the top four Unix vendors to see a decrease in server unit sales this quarter, when overall unit sales were up 21 percent. IBM's increased 37 percent, while Sun's fell 6 percent.
That's not what he concluded, now was it.
That is exactly what he concluded. The distribution of black peoples' IQ was significantly lower than that of white peoples', and this difference was biological and congenital. Stupidity he argued is a black biological trait.
Murray is a professional racist and is trying to revive the respectability of social darwinism that has (or had?) been thought of as fascist since the 1940s. This was a very common view among the elite in the 19th century, but most of those in academia and the sciences dismiss race as an ideology now. It's really a shame that so many techies are receptive to it. It reflects the layer of pseudoscience present in much of the tech culture that was due to the outsized economic gains that were reaped in the late 90s. It seems with the bust tech people were becoming more sympathetic to others due to overseas outsourcing and unemloyment, but now that there has been an uptick in the sector I hope it doesn't go back to social darwinism.
The web and java changed people's colloquial understanding of what the "Internet" is, but remember, the web is not the Internet.
Yeah, and wtf does "five to ten times" higher mean? How many times higher was it?
Also the stuff he said about not having anyone to turn to for bugs is total bs. Mozilla has bugzilla, Wine has WinHQ (which I've used), OpenOffice has a bug reporting process. Linux I don't know about the various distros, but there's tons of discussion about Linux development on Usenet and people helping out with support issues. So basically he was talking about of his ass.
And what a dick he came off to be. "How do you know if some hacker working in China" blah blah blah. I'm stunned, although I guess I shouldn't be. What a steak-fed ogre Ballmer is.
As for HDDs, I would think that they last longer if they're not spinning, although I have no proof of this. This is an important reason why I don't leave them spinning. And the displays, no question about it that it being on, screen saver or no, decreases its life. A given vacuum tube has a certain number of hours of life in it. If it's on, the numbers left go down. That's why I don't use a screen saver but instead have the monitor shut itself off.
I've noticed a significant difference in my electric bill if I don't use the suspend function in my computer. I don't have the bills in front of me but maybe $10 a month. I'm using one of the early, high-power consuming P-IIs though.
That is correct, and that is the basic misunderstanding of the article and of much of the advocacy of much of open source. Open source is not about disrupting private property rights or communism. It is about enhancing competition and reducing anti-competitive monopoly power and monopoly profits. It is an attempt to bring to commercial software the same system of ethics that governs programming or other kinds of research in a scientific or academic setting. Those settings are not anticapitalist in principle, and authorship is respected there, but what is not possible is on the one hand secrecy and on the other hand general acceptance of valid results. GPL is a form of private property, not a disavowal of ownership. It is a restriction upon how the use may be restricted, which is itself precisely what property rights are--en enforceable claim to exclude someone from the use of something.
The author is trying to point out a contradiction between the rhetoric of the open source community as anticapitalist and anti-private property and the reality. In this he is correct--there is such hypocrisy. But he is wrong in saying that the contradiction goes to the heart of open source. It's the rhetoric of some open source advocacy and some representation of open source that contradicts this enforcement action, not the core of open source.
He is also wrong in suggesting that there is something wrong with this enforcement action. What he is really implying is that a corporation should have its IP enforced, but that a far-flung network of volunteers should not. Asking a corporation to pay them or abide by the restriction they place on use of their IP is unfair if it prevents the corporation from making money. The proof of the corporation's merit is that it sold 400,000 units. If releasing the code will remove an advantage over its competitors, that's just too bad for the volunteers.
This is why some in the open source movement embrace libertarianism and social darwinism and speak of the results of unrestricted competition under a regime of private property rights as if they genuinely reward merit. Private property and corporations are legal entities, creations of the state. Laissez-faire and perfect competition is no more absent government intervention than state-directed communism. It is a different set of rules governing contracts and property, not the absence of such rules in either case.
Also, OT, can MySql substitute for Lotus Notes as a kind of research database? I can run Notes under Wine, but I can't seem to paste in large clipboards as I like to do to enter the data. I.e. I take notes on a word processor and then just paste in the data.
I think overreliance on the Internet for information is why so many tech stocks bubbled and why so many techies are so insensitive to the effects of technology on people, as well as a sort of social darwinist ideology that the free market correlates perfectly with ability (even at the same time as M$ is bashed albeit often for anti-free market principles) or with public taste. If you don't see it on the screen, it doesn't happen.
That and getting information from games like SimCity (software is the cleanest and highest value of all industries) and Civilization (limited liability is an important moment of progress). The general conclusion is that corporate expansion and economic growth means greater efficiency, which is the way that all people become better off. This seems so self evident based on most of the information you get from the Internet that as soon as I write it I realize that the mere questioning of it will seem absurd to most people. The fact that the vast majority of people in human history did not believe this to be true is something you would have very little indication of from the informatoin available from the Internet. That is to say that the Internet is suffused with a Taylorist, efficiency based ideology.
I second gmud for Winblows and I would suggest kmud for Linux.
How about Dual Itanic?
Which brings up one critical advantage of the typewriter or pen and paper--it's much more portable than even a laptop, especially a manual typewriter.
The important distinction is that a computer also stores your older work and previous versions of your current work, as well as research notes, sometimes in database form. Now it also serves as a medium for circulating drafts and communicating with colleagues. It can also increasingly be a method of conducting research--searching catalogs, requesting interlibrary loan items, and in some cases downloading primary documents or finding facts that can be cited. So it's never really been accurate to call it a typewriter, and it's becoming less and less so.
I think though that most writers just use the latest word processors. The author of the article and the other anecdotes cited are not typical examples. They are in the minority (although perhaps a somewhat substantial one). What evidence do I have? I am a graduate student and the faculty just use the word processors IT installs. And I've worked at several magazines including Foreign Affairs and observed writers using the latest software. To the extent they use something older, I don't think it's due to any great love so much as it's the product of not having upgraded their computer. When they upgrade they just use whatever is preinstalled.