Hey, I mean, If you saw an alien who needed to use your phone what would YOU do?
Probably the same thing Ed O'Neill did, and tell him about 1-800-COLLECT. Save fifty percent to all calls in the Orion Arm, sixty after Galactic Midnight.
First off, who was it a week or two ago here saying that Caldera didn't get any press, and so "was dead"? Care to re-think that position?
Not that this press is anything to write to Mars about, but it's still attention. C|Net is covering the same old ground here, albeit with new products. Ease of installation, sheesh--that's the last thing one should be worried about in an OS. But in today's world, you lock your doors, you burn your credit-card receipts, and you judge operating systems on, among other criteria, how easy they are to install. Sigh.
The article did have a couple of notable passages, bowever. I liked the opening comment--"Nothing moves faster than the Linux world". Hah! What was your first clue? They hurt because they can barely put their electronic stories to bed, forget about print, before they're laughably obsolete. But in today's news-hungry world, fast is good. Expect a lot more attention from a starving press, and hope that at least some of it doesn't suck.
Another item of interest--I happen to be one of the "old-school Linux users" who "appreciate [Caldera's] graphical installer". I appreciated it right up until it bit me in the gatcher. No non-DHCP NFS install? Where's my LILO? Ahem. It didn't take me long to drop back to using their old-style LISA installer, which is no worse than it's ever been. Don't get me wrong--despite the flaws in Caldera's Lizard, it is as much of an advance over the current state of the Linux installation art as Slackware's color installer was over SLS, if not moreso. A few more iterations, and it will set a new standard of excellence. I love it when vendors fight to see who can make my life easier!
And with any luck, once Caldera gets it right (or RedHat or SuSE or whoever gets a polished Lizard-alike on CD first), maybe C|Net will have an article about it, and will get the kernel version right in that one. We can only hope.
It's a shame that they've chosen to do this. There are other meanings of the words "yahoo" and "excite" that one might legitimately search for. Gulliver met the yahoos on his Travels, and excite is one thing that nerve fibers do. Reduces Lycos' utility as a research tool. Oh, well, I tend to use Metacrawler and Google, anyway. But it's embarrassing that someone would pull a stunt like this.
See, if you target corporate business, you need to make a case as to how you're good at it. Has Caldera made a good case about it? I don't think so.
Caldera was a pretty easy sell in our engineering department. I would have hated to try to explain Debian to my boss, but cutting a purchase order to Caldera was right up her alley. I wouldn't dream of suggesting it as a replacement for our 500+ engineering workstations or our 1000+ business desktops, at least not yet, but Caldera's corporate orientation made them easier to get in the door.
As an aside, media is everything. Nobody covers caldera today. So they are dead.
Um, begging your pardon, sir, if I may speak freely--bullshit. What are we discussing right now? An article by a very respected voice in the Linux community about, um, Caldera. They aren't the largest distro by a long shot, but they know how to get the word out. Count the number of articles about Debian that have appeared on CNN, and then count the Caldera articles there. No contest.
Are they even reading this? I doubt it.
Wrong again. Caldera has several employees who are regular Slashdot readers, and Freshmeat, and even User Friendly. Yes, they have aimed more at the big corporate markets than the other distros--are those the circles in which you travel? If not, maybe that's why you have this perception that they're weak. But believe me, they have a rep there.
You are correct that they have not courted the "general" community very well, and that has hurt them. But they're not the total fools you seem to think they are, either.
Hmmm. Ransome Love. Erik Ratcliffe. Jeff Christensen. That's three off the top of my head. No, they are probably not known by as many people as, say, Bob Young or Donnie Barnes. But Caldera isn't used by as many people, either. For those of us on the Caldera user's mailing list, Erik and Jeff are household names. And most folks here have probably heard Ransome's name, even if they didn't recognize him as the CEO of Caldera Systems.
I can't argue that Caldera has a penetration problem in the end-user community. But they're actually pretty well known it the corporate world as Linux distros go, which is what they were aiming at, methinks.
Actually, COL comes with GNOME, it's just in the "contrib" directory. I was able to get the latest-n-greatest GNOME out of CVS and install it on my COL system over the course of a lazy afternoon, and it works great. Well, as great as GNOME works these days. I use Gtk+ and WindowMaker on all my COL systems, and had no trouble installing E. So they don't remove choice. Yeah, you gotta work a little at it, but any CD-ROM Linux distro is going to be out of date the day it's pressed, so you picks your packages as you likes them.
Very good point about the installation, though. I think far too much is made of Linux installation, both how "hard" it is (by the mainstream press) and how "easy" it is (by Nick and others, especially about COL 2.x). Sure, COL is now easier to install than Windows. So what? You do that once in the life of your system if you're lucky, only a few times if you're not. Contrast that with the thousands of hours of computing that you'll do after the install, and it gets to be quite funny.
But if you don't like Caldera, by all means choose another distro. It's more important that you are using Linux or *BSD or even Hurd than it is which distro you choose. Go with what you like and let the rest go hang. Two words of advice, though: Don't believe everything people say on the 'net. Misconceptions abound, as this very discussion ably demonstrates. Try for yourself. Use vmware to manage multiple installs if you have to. And second, times change. The Caldera of today is quite different from the Caldera of two or three years ago. Same for Deb and RedHat and Slack. So every so often, give the others a try, just to keep current. You'll be glad you did.
COL 2.x supports a fully custom installation--you just can't use the neato-spiffy "Lizard" GUI installer to do it. But the "old-style" LISA installer does just as good a job as it always has, and allows fine-grained selection of the installed packages. Is that a flaw? You betcha. Will they fix it? Maybe, someday.
Interesting you should pick those as the advantages of Debian, because I don't think they serve to distinguish it from COL. Upgrades: COL has RPM for package upgrades, and though many might argue, it's easily as good as Debian's system. And COL point upgrades come with an automated script that will analyze your system automatically and upgrade all necessary packages--a one-touch system upgrade. Also, I've never had any problem using source or messing with my COL system's internals--they are in no way "blocked". As for security, Caldera seems as responsive as anyone to security alerts; as for the default settings, they could be better, but it's not a wide-open system after an install.
Where Debian beats the skivvies off Caldera is in three areas: First, it's all free. Caldera isn't as choosy, but they're getting better. Second, and much more important and practical, is the sheer number of packages available for it. Debian dwarfs all other distros that I've seen just for the number of packages that it comes with, not to mention those available around the 'net. Third, Linux is community supported, whether Caldera, Debian, or any other distro. And Debian won't get you laughed or sneered at on a mailing list, an IRC channel, or a newsgroup, where Caldera isn't usually received as well.
My most recent experience with Debian was soured by very bad experiences with dselect and dpkg. I hear it has a new installer either in place or on the way, so maybe I'll give it another try. But Caldera is a serious contender even so, at least in my book.
As far as I can tell, the fancy GUI installer, Lizard, doesn't support network installs to CD-less boxen. To do such non-main-sequence stuff, you must use the "old-style" LISA install. There are instructions in the manual (and probably one of the READMEs) about how to make a LISA boot/install disk. I was able to install over the net using LISA just like I always have--the old installer is still pretty nice, though not as slick as Lizard.
This is one of COL 2.x's biggest shortcomings, IMHO--they don't seem too sure exactly what they're installing. Is it a workstation? A server? A development machine? And who made the decisions about what Lizard supports and what it doesn't? From the look of it, they let the marketers make some of the crucial technical decisions. Not a fatal drawback, but unsightly.
I've been a Caldera customer since their first product, Caldera Network Desktop preview 1. At the time CND was very promising, offering a commercial GUI desktop, a "fully supported" Netscape license, and other goodies. When CND 1.0 finally appeared, priced at $99US, it was a steal because it included a copy of Xi Grapics' Accelerated X server, which was itself $99 if purchased separately. For that server, which was the only thing to support my brandy-new Diamond video card, and for the Gallium font server, which handled TrueType fonts, CND was the only choice for me. I dropped Slackware in a heartbeat.
Times change. Over the years, Caldera distributions were plagued by various problems. First, they dropped AccelX in favor of the far inferior (at the time) Metro-X server, and then for XFree. The Gallium font server disappeared. And throughout it all, Caldera was renowned for being a release or two behind most packages, major and minor. I spent a lot of time building new versions of many packages. Yet, as an early adopter, I was able to take advantage of their aggressive upgrade program to minimize costs for each new version of their distro.
By the time Caldera Open Linux 1.0 came out, I was ready to dump Caldera entirely and move on to something, probably SuSE. I had tried Debian, RedHat, SuSE, and even Slackware, and found each to have about as many problems as COL, though in different areas. The pressure to switch intensified when RedHat switched to libc 6, making most RPM files useless for Caldera systems.
Then came COL 2.2. Its GUI installer was impressive, though not quite perfect. They abandoned their conservative version selections, offering very new versions of most packages. Yes, it's KDE, which I used at work for almost a year, just to make sure I could speak with authority about it. I now use GNOME on my COL systems. And it's libc 6, making arbitrary RPMs typically useful again.
The key is, Caldera is now Just Another Distribution. The things that drew me to them originally--commercial packages, ultra-conservative design, phone support--have largely evaporated or become irrelevant. So take Caldera for what it is, a nice solid distribution with a cute installer and a fairly solid foundation. I've had little trouble building and installing free and open-source packages and my own software on a Caldera system, the price is competitive, the availability is comparable, so why not? It's not a world apart like it used to try to be, but perhaps more importantly, it's fully part of today's world.
Re:Note: I am Insured. So is Nate.
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Condolences. Glad no one was hurt. Here's hoping whatever you get into next is five times as cool. You could stay with us until then if you need to--just say the word.
... I think English has already become this universal language...
I know you are wrong. Good guess, and one shared by a lot of other folks. It has been shared down through the ages by a lot of people about a lot of languages--Latin, French, Russian, and so on. But it was wrong then, and is wrong now. Also, your assertion that English "has a very simple grammar" is quite wrong. As is your assumption that "Sooner or later most of the world's population will acquire this international English as a second language." English usage is actually on the decline worldwide.
But you don't need to continue guessing and getting it wrong--these issues have been studied pretty extensively, and there's a lot of hard data and experience to back it up. Do some reading and speak from a position of strength next time, okay? A good place to start is on one of the many Esperanto sites around the net. Those folks have a strong interest in comparative linguistics, and have good links to the straight poop.
... wouldn't it just be much easier to teach the world English?
Spoken like a true English-speaker. Probably from the USA, right? Sigh.
For every mod hip progressive netizen who thinks that English is the obvious World Interlanguage, and oh, wouldn't it be better if all those misguided little multi-colored and warring peoples in those places with unpronounceable names just stopped using that yip-yap jibber-jabber they call a language, at least in public, and start speaking The Obvious Choice, English, there's another person who thinks roughly the same thing about French, or Chinese, or Russian, or any one of a hundred other of the world's languages.
As for what would be easier, Esperanto would be a good candidate. The Esperanto community has some pretty convincing data that it's actually easier to learn than most other languages, even for those whose native tongue is not derived from the same Latin that Eo is. But hey, that'd mean that you would have to bend your poor little brain around something new, and we couldn't have that, now, could we? Better that the wogs learn to talk proper, eh?
Sorry, you probably deserved only about half of that. I'm calmer now. On the odd chance that you or others would care for some facts in place of my ranting, see esperanto.net for some actual details about a real alternative.
Excellent post. Wish I had moderator points today, so I could move it up! Esperanto just works.
I have come to believe that, in the human brain, the language center is tied somehow to the emotions, because people start acting irrationally whenever you start suggesting language alternatives. It's like asking them to change sexual orientation or something--their language is too strongly tied into their concept of personal identity to permit approach. So in an open forum, I seldom see anyone who is not already an Esperantist discuss the language objectively. Sad, really.
But hope springs eternal. I post this URL every time, in hopes that it may someday be of interest to someone: If you are interested in Esperanto, the world's most popular constructed language, try the Esperanto.net web site for starters.
As for the UNL, most Esperantists have been aware of it for some time. We wish them well, most of us, really we do. But most people who know more than one human language hold limited hope for such a project's success.
I too use lynx for "utility" browsing. I'll switch to Netscape when I have to--when forced into it by a site that's a nest of ECMAscript links, or unmanageable frames, or other trickery.
And the key is that such things are trickery--cute hacks to improve not a site's utility but its trendiness. I have seen maybe three examples in the last five years where Java, ECMAscript, frames, Flash, or any of those other twinky weh gadgets have actually improved a site's benefit to me.
I'll try Opera when it comes out, provided they offer a try-before-you-buy deal. Otherwise, I'll stick with lynx when I can, Netscape (or Mozilla) when I must.
Microsoft was not alone in getting us to the point we're at now. Look to Dell, and Compaq, and IBM, and HP, and so on. Look to Diamond and Matrox and 3Com. Every system manufacturer who offers only an MS OS preloaded, or who gives a significant advantage for preloading same, is collaborating with MS in perpetuating their monopoly. Every peripheral that comes with MS OS drivers and nothing else is putting their penny in MS's hat.
I used to favor breakup, but now I'm leaning toward a more radical and direct solution:
Require all system vendors to offer a minimum of two choices of preloaded OS, if they offer any preloads at all. The different OS preloads must be on equal terms--same level of support, same hardware supported, and so on. Only the price difference in the base OS can be passed along.
Require all hardware that comes with specialized drivers to provide drivers for a minimum of two OS's. As an alternative, they could publish complete specifications of their device's interface. Any provided drivers must provide equivalent functionality.
Require all software that communicates with other software (like over a network) to be accompanied by complete and accurate specifications of the protocols and formats involved in that communication.
Require all software that saves data in files to be accompanied by a complete and accurate description of the formats of those files.
The trouble we're having with Microsoft is only a symptom of a larger problem. If not them, then somebody else would be doing it.
I don't like the idea of more laws, but it seems clear that the current laws have holes in them. If the above regs are applied to Microsoft as well as all of their competitors, it will deal with their abuses nicely. No need to single anyone out.
Oh, what's that you say--MS are the only ones who would be affected by the preload and driver thing? Awww, too bad.
Okay, Eric and Bruce are mad at each other right now. Hey, they're human, ne? Entitled to hurt feelings and a little public scuffling, I'd say.
It's not like it's stopping you from coding, is it? It shouldn't. It isn't stopping me.
Oh, sure, it'll be nice once they kiss (or smack each other) and make up, but until then, I don't see that they're throwing the overall progress of software into jeopardy.
You should emulate the qualities they have which you find agreeable, and eschew those that do not suit. I find both men to have done things I admire, and I try to focus on those things. Try it. I think you'll like it. Nuff said.
Dvorak is the best system security that you can get, especially if you switch your keycaps around.
It's actually better if you don't switch your keycaps, which is what I assume you meant. At my Day Job, I had a machine upon which I switched keycaps back when I was learning Dvorak. The admins could use it, albeit extremely slowly and with much fuming and cursing.
Then it got to be upgrade time. (I love the fact that everyone else uses NT, because it forces our machines to be upgraded every few months. My Linux box doesn't really need to be a P-III 450, but it doesn't hoit.) After I got past my pleasant visions of the Dell reclamation department gazing aghast at the rearranged keys on my old keyboard, I started to pry off the first keycap on my new keyboard. Then it hit me--I'd been using it all morning with the keys in their current positions, and hadn't cared a whit. I had learned Dvorak by touch. So I left them as they were. The next time an admin wanted to shell up to root, I asked him if he could touch-type Dvorak. Guess what his answer was. (You're close, but there were more swear words.)
I shoulda let him think he'd forgotten his password.
I agree completely. I tried Dvorak, liked it, will stay with it until something better comes along. Same with Linux.
The referenced article only used Dvorak peripherally, however, to try to support a rather teunuos and IMHO incorrect supposition about economics. They could just have easily used Twinkies. They evidently started down the Beta-VHS track, but found too many dessicated corpses littering that trail and turned back.
My advice to them, and to the other Packers (not the Green Bay variety) out there: Tha-a-a-at's right, there's nothing to see here, move along quietly now. Just keep on using QWERTY, and MS-Windows, and gas-burning autos and all that. Buy everything you see advertised on the telly. Those of us who are using Dvorak, and Linux, and Ada, and Esperanto, why, we're all cranks and eccentrics and dreamers. We're not gaining a-a-a-a-any advantage whatsoever by our non-mainstream behaviors, no sirree. Nuh-uh, nope. Trust me--have I ever lied to you?
Dvorak may tank when it comes to typing C code, and Perl too for that matter. But it rocks for Ada and Python. I guess maybe there is some justice in the world after all.
Slashdot Mirror
How about the old boxing term, "Slugnutty"?
"Sluglent green is slu-u-u-u-u-ugs!"
Ahem. Damn glad I got that out of my system. Sorry, sorry, so so sorry.
Hey, I mean, If you saw an alien who needed to use your phone what would YOU do?
Probably the same thing Ed O'Neill did, and tell him about 1-800-COLLECT. Save fifty percent to all calls in the Orion Arm, sixty after Galactic Midnight.First off, who was it a week or two ago here saying that Caldera didn't get any press, and so "was dead"? Care to re-think that position?
Not that this press is anything to write to Mars about, but it's still attention. C|Net is covering the same old ground here, albeit with new products. Ease of installation, sheesh--that's the last thing one should be worried about in an OS. But in today's world, you lock your doors, you burn your credit-card receipts, and you judge operating systems on, among other criteria, how easy they are to install. Sigh.
The article did have a couple of notable passages, bowever. I liked the opening comment--"Nothing moves faster than the Linux world". Hah! What was your first clue? They hurt because they can barely put their electronic stories to bed, forget about print, before they're laughably obsolete. But in today's news-hungry world, fast is good. Expect a lot more attention from a starving press, and hope that at least some of it doesn't suck.
Another item of interest--I happen to be one of the "old-school Linux users" who "appreciate [Caldera's] graphical installer". I appreciated it right up until it bit me in the gatcher. No non-DHCP NFS install? Where's my LILO? Ahem. It didn't take me long to drop back to using their old-style LISA installer, which is no worse than it's ever been. Don't get me wrong--despite the flaws in Caldera's Lizard, it is as much of an advance over the current state of the Linux installation art as Slackware's color installer was over SLS, if not moreso. A few more iterations, and it will set a new standard of excellence. I love it when vendors fight to see who can make my life easier!
And with any luck, once Caldera gets it right (or RedHat or SuSE or whoever gets a polished Lizard-alike on CD first), maybe C|Net will have an article about it, and will get the kernel version right in that one. We can only hope.
It's a shame that they've chosen to do this. There are other meanings of the words "yahoo" and "excite" that one might legitimately search for. Gulliver met the yahoos on his Travels, and excite is one thing that nerve fibers do. Reduces Lycos' utility as a research tool. Oh, well, I tend to use Metacrawler and Google, anyway. But it's embarrassing that someone would pull a stunt like this.
See, if you target corporate business, you need to make a case as to how you're good at it. Has Caldera made a good case about it? I don't think so.
Caldera was a pretty easy sell in our engineering department. I would have hated to try to explain Debian to my boss, but cutting a purchase order to Caldera was right up her alley. I wouldn't dream of suggesting it as a replacement for our 500+ engineering workstations or our 1000+ business desktops, at least not yet, but Caldera's corporate orientation made them easier to get in the door.
As an aside, media is everything. Nobody covers caldera today. So they are dead.
Um, begging your pardon, sir, if I may speak freely--bullshit. What are we discussing right now? An article by a very respected voice in the Linux community about, um, Caldera. They aren't the largest distro by a long shot, but they know how to get the word out. Count the number of articles about Debian that have appeared on CNN, and then count the Caldera articles there. No contest.
Are they even reading this? I doubt it.
Wrong again. Caldera has several employees who are regular Slashdot readers, and Freshmeat, and even User Friendly. Yes, they have aimed more at the big corporate markets than the other distros--are those the circles in which you travel? If not, maybe that's why you have this perception that they're weak. But believe me, they have a rep there.
You are correct that they have not courted the "general" community very well, and that has hurt them. But they're not the total fools you seem to think they are, either.
Quick! Name a Caldera employee!
Hmmm. Ransome Love. Erik Ratcliffe. Jeff Christensen. That's three off the top of my head. No, they are probably not known by as many people as, say, Bob Young or Donnie Barnes. But Caldera isn't used by as many people, either. For those of us on the Caldera user's mailing list, Erik and Jeff are household names. And most folks here have probably heard Ransome's name, even if they didn't recognize him as the CEO of Caldera Systems.
I can't argue that Caldera has a penetration problem in the end-user community. But they're actually pretty well known it the corporate world as Linux distros go, which is what they were aiming at, methinks.
Actually, COL comes with GNOME, it's just in the "contrib" directory. I was able to get the latest-n-greatest GNOME out of CVS and install it on my COL system over the course of a lazy afternoon, and it works great. Well, as great as GNOME works these days. I use Gtk+ and WindowMaker on all my COL systems, and had no trouble installing E. So they don't remove choice. Yeah, you gotta work a little at it, but any CD-ROM Linux distro is going to be out of date the day it's pressed, so you picks your packages as you likes them.
Very good point about the installation, though. I think far too much is made of Linux installation, both how "hard" it is (by the mainstream press) and how "easy" it is (by Nick and others, especially about COL 2.x). Sure, COL is now easier to install than Windows. So what? You do that once in the life of your system if you're lucky, only a few times if you're not. Contrast that with the thousands of hours of computing that you'll do after the install, and it gets to be quite funny.
But if you don't like Caldera, by all means choose another distro. It's more important that you are using Linux or *BSD or even Hurd than it is which distro you choose. Go with what you like and let the rest go hang. Two words of advice, though: Don't believe everything people say on the 'net. Misconceptions abound, as this very discussion ably demonstrates. Try for yourself. Use vmware to manage multiple installs if you have to. And second, times change. The Caldera of today is quite different from the Caldera of two or three years ago. Same for Deb and RedHat and Slack. So every so often, give the others a try, just to keep current. You'll be glad you did.
COL 2.x supports a fully custom installation--you just can't use the neato-spiffy "Lizard" GUI installer to do it. But the "old-style" LISA installer does just as good a job as it always has, and allows fine-grained selection of the installed packages. Is that a flaw? You betcha. Will they fix it? Maybe, someday.
Interesting you should pick those as the advantages of Debian, because I don't think they serve to distinguish it from COL. Upgrades: COL has RPM for package upgrades, and though many might argue, it's easily as good as Debian's system. And COL point upgrades come with an automated script that will analyze your system automatically and upgrade all necessary packages--a one-touch system upgrade. Also, I've never had any problem using source or messing with my COL system's internals--they are in no way "blocked". As for security, Caldera seems as responsive as anyone to security alerts; as for the default settings, they could be better, but it's not a wide-open system after an install.
Where Debian beats the skivvies off Caldera is in three areas: First, it's all free. Caldera isn't as choosy, but they're getting better. Second, and much more important and practical, is the sheer number of packages available for it. Debian dwarfs all other distros that I've seen just for the number of packages that it comes with, not to mention those available around the 'net. Third, Linux is community supported, whether Caldera, Debian, or any other distro. And Debian won't get you laughed or sneered at on a mailing list, an IRC channel, or a newsgroup, where Caldera isn't usually received as well.
My most recent experience with Debian was soured by very bad experiences with dselect and dpkg. I hear it has a new installer either in place or on the way, so maybe I'll give it another try. But Caldera is a serious contender even so, at least in my book.
As far as I can tell, the fancy GUI installer, Lizard, doesn't support network installs to CD-less boxen. To do such non-main-sequence stuff, you must use the "old-style" LISA install. There are instructions in the manual (and probably one of the READMEs) about how to make a LISA boot/install disk. I was able to install over the net using LISA just like I always have--the old installer is still pretty nice, though not as slick as Lizard.
This is one of COL 2.x's biggest shortcomings, IMHO--they don't seem too sure exactly what they're installing. Is it a workstation? A server? A development machine? And who made the decisions about what Lizard supports and what it doesn't? From the look of it, they let the marketers make some of the crucial technical decisions. Not a fatal drawback, but unsightly.
I've been a Caldera customer since their first product, Caldera Network Desktop preview 1. At the time CND was very promising, offering a commercial GUI desktop, a "fully supported" Netscape license, and other goodies. When CND 1.0 finally appeared, priced at $99US, it was a steal because it included a copy of Xi Grapics' Accelerated X server, which was itself $99 if purchased separately. For that server, which was the only thing to support my brandy-new Diamond video card, and for the Gallium font server, which handled TrueType fonts, CND was the only choice for me. I dropped Slackware in a heartbeat.
Times change. Over the years, Caldera distributions were plagued by various problems. First, they dropped AccelX in favor of the far inferior (at the time) Metro-X server, and then for XFree. The Gallium font server disappeared. And throughout it all, Caldera was renowned for being a release or two behind most packages, major and minor. I spent a lot of time building new versions of many packages. Yet, as an early adopter, I was able to take advantage of their aggressive upgrade program to minimize costs for each new version of their distro.
By the time Caldera Open Linux 1.0 came out, I was ready to dump Caldera entirely and move on to something, probably SuSE. I had tried Debian, RedHat, SuSE, and even Slackware, and found each to have about as many problems as COL, though in different areas. The pressure to switch intensified when RedHat switched to libc 6, making most RPM files useless for Caldera systems.
Then came COL 2.2. Its GUI installer was impressive, though not quite perfect. They abandoned their conservative version selections, offering very new versions of most packages. Yes, it's KDE, which I used at work for almost a year, just to make sure I could speak with authority about it. I now use GNOME on my COL systems. And it's libc 6, making arbitrary RPMs typically useful again.
The key is, Caldera is now Just Another Distribution. The things that drew me to them originally--commercial packages, ultra-conservative design, phone support--have largely evaporated or become irrelevant. So take Caldera for what it is, a nice solid distribution with a cute installer and a fairly solid foundation. I've had little trouble building and installing free and open-source packages and my own software on a Caldera system, the price is competitive, the availability is comparable, so why not? It's not a world apart like it used to try to be, but perhaps more importantly, it's fully part of today's world.
Condolences. Glad no one was hurt. Here's hoping whatever you get into next is five times as cool. You could stay with us until then if you need to--just say the word.
Cool list. It is interesting to note how Esperanto stacks up against your criteria. Check it out for yourself and see.
I know you are wrong. Good guess, and one shared by a lot of other folks. It has been shared down through the ages by a lot of people about a lot of languages--Latin, French, Russian, and so on. But it was wrong then, and is wrong now. Also, your assertion that English "has a very simple grammar" is quite wrong. As is your assumption that "Sooner or later most of the world's population will acquire this international English as a second language." English usage is actually on the decline worldwide.
But you don't need to continue guessing and getting it wrong--these issues have been studied pretty extensively, and there's a lot of hard data and experience to back it up. Do some reading and speak from a position of strength next time, okay? A good place to start is on one of the many Esperanto sites around the net. Those folks have a strong interest in comparative linguistics, and have good links to the straight poop.
Spoken like a true English-speaker. Probably from the USA, right? Sigh.
For every mod hip progressive netizen who thinks that English is the obvious World Interlanguage, and oh, wouldn't it be better if all those misguided little multi-colored and warring peoples in those places with unpronounceable names just stopped using that yip-yap jibber-jabber they call a language, at least in public, and start speaking The Obvious Choice, English, there's another person who thinks roughly the same thing about French, or Chinese, or Russian, or any one of a hundred other of the world's languages.
As for what would be easier, Esperanto would be a good candidate. The Esperanto community has some pretty convincing data that it's actually easier to learn than most other languages, even for those whose native tongue is not derived from the same Latin that Eo is. But hey, that'd mean that you would have to bend your poor little brain around something new, and we couldn't have that, now, could we? Better that the wogs learn to talk proper, eh?
Sorry, you probably deserved only about half of that. I'm calmer now. On the odd chance that you or others would care for some facts in place of my ranting, see esperanto.net for some actual details about a real alternative.
Um, did they identify themselves as "chix0rs"? Would they, voluntarily? Have you asked them? Maybe you should.
Au strekopunkto, au tranchopunkto, au ech hakamakulo! Dependas de la senco de la angla.
Excellent post. Wish I had moderator points today, so I could move it up! Esperanto just works.
I have come to believe that, in the human brain, the language center is tied somehow to the emotions, because people start acting irrationally whenever you start suggesting language alternatives. It's like asking them to change sexual orientation or something--their language is too strongly tied into their concept of personal identity to permit approach. So in an open forum, I seldom see anyone who is not already an Esperantist discuss the language objectively. Sad, really.
But hope springs eternal. I post this URL every time, in hopes that it may someday be of interest to someone: If you are interested in Esperanto, the world's most popular constructed language, try the Esperanto.net web site for starters.
As for the UNL, most Esperantists have been aware of it for some time. We wish them well, most of us, really we do. But most people who know more than one human language hold limited hope for such a project's success.
I too use lynx for "utility" browsing. I'll switch to Netscape when I have to--when forced into it by a site that's a nest of ECMAscript links, or unmanageable frames, or other trickery.
And the key is that such things are trickery--cute hacks to improve not a site's utility but its trendiness. I have seen maybe three examples in the last five years where Java, ECMAscript, frames, Flash, or any of those other twinky weh gadgets have actually improved a site's benefit to me.
I'll try Opera when it comes out, provided they offer a try-before-you-buy deal. Otherwise, I'll stick with lynx when I can, Netscape (or Mozilla) when I must.
I used to favor breakup, but now I'm leaning toward a more radical and direct solution:
The trouble we're having with Microsoft is only a symptom of a larger problem. If not them, then somebody else would be doing it.
I don't like the idea of more laws, but it seems clear that the current laws have holes in them. If the above regs are applied to Microsoft as well as all of their competitors, it will deal with their abuses nicely. No need to single anyone out.
Oh, what's that you say--MS are the only ones who would be affected by the preload and driver thing? Awww, too bad.
Okay, Eric and Bruce are mad at each other right now. Hey, they're human, ne? Entitled to hurt feelings and a little public scuffling, I'd say.
It's not like it's stopping you from coding, is it? It shouldn't. It isn't stopping me.
Oh, sure, it'll be nice once they kiss (or smack each other) and make up, but until then, I don't see that they're throwing the overall progress of software into jeopardy.
You should emulate the qualities they have which you find agreeable, and eschew those that do not suit. I find both men to have done things I admire, and I try to focus on those things. Try it. I think you'll like it. Nuff said.
Then it got to be upgrade time. (I love the fact that everyone else uses NT, because it forces our machines to be upgraded every few months. My Linux box doesn't really need to be a P-III 450, but it doesn't hoit.) After I got past my pleasant visions of the Dell reclamation department gazing aghast at the rearranged keys on my old keyboard, I started to pry off the first keycap on my new keyboard. Then it hit me--I'd been using it all morning with the keys in their current positions, and hadn't cared a whit. I had learned Dvorak by touch. So I left them as they were. The next time an admin wanted to shell up to root, I asked him if he could touch-type Dvorak. Guess what his answer was. (You're close, but there were more swear words.)
I shoulda let him think he'd forgotten his password.
The referenced article only used Dvorak peripherally, however, to try to support a rather teunuos and IMHO incorrect supposition about economics. They could just have easily used Twinkies. They evidently started down the Beta-VHS track, but found too many dessicated corpses littering that trail and turned back.
My advice to them, and to the other Packers (not the Green Bay variety) out there: Tha-a-a-at's right, there's nothing to see here, move along quietly now. Just keep on using QWERTY, and MS-Windows, and gas-burning autos and all that. Buy everything you see advertised on the telly. Those of us who are using Dvorak, and Linux, and Ada, and Esperanto, why, we're all cranks and eccentrics and dreamers. We're not gaining a-a-a-a-any advantage whatsoever by our non-mainstream behaviors, no sirree. Nuh-uh, nope. Trust me--have I ever lied to you?
"The Christmas we get, we deserve." -- Greg Lake