According to the README that is found in the Red Hat directory accompanying the binary RPMs, they should work with Red Hat 7.0 or higher.
Since 6.2 is substantially different from 7.2, I'd say the new packages are very unlikely to work for you. Red Hat 6.2 was a great release. But this might give you the motivation to upgrade to 7.3 once it's out, assuming your system is up to the increased hardware requirements (offhand, I'd say 400 MHz CPU, 128 MB RAM would do). Some software has gotten bigger.
One thing to note about the Red Hat packages is they replace KDE2 on a running system. From what I've seen of the Mandrake and SuSE packages, they preserve KDE2. However, my experience w/ Mandrake 8.2 is that the only way to choose KDE2 or KDE3 is from the console. From kdm, choosing KDE as the WM means KDE3; there are no separate options for the two major versions (which would have been nice for testing).
Also, the parent post that recommends installing the packages w/o dependency checking is not good advice. That defeats one of the major reasons for using RPM in the first place.
Instead, if you're installing what are essentially "foreign" packages, you need to determine what they require. RPM will somewhat tell you what shared libraries are prerequisite, but unfortunately, unlike.deb it doesn't say "You need to install the package named XYZ to support ABC". For the average user, rpm's error message that some arcane library is missing is unhelpful.
Mandrake's Software Manager (and SuSE's Yast2) will conveniently resolve necessary packages automatically for software that comes with the distro. Unfortunately, because of RPM's inherent weaknesses, they don't do so for "foreign" packages.
In general, I wouldn't recommend compiling unless you're a seasoned hacker. For one, your configuration will be quite different from the typical host used to build the other binaries. For two, KDE is a large suite of applications, and takes some times to build. Do you really want to build, integrate and test all of that yourself?
If Palm's OS division is making a Palm OS for an ARM processor, will we start to see Palm OS as an option on iPaq's and th like?
I'd say fat chance under current conditions. Even though M$ signed a consent decree promising otherwise in 1995, they've still been able to strong-arm OEMs into exclusive licensing deals for Windows. If not by contract, certainly by pricing pressure. One of the anti-trust settlement terms the government is trying to insist upon (since the breakup was nixed) is that Microsoft publishes a public price list that all OEMs would be able to purchase licenses at. That way a particular OEM would be able to offer Linux (or whatever alternative OS) without worrying that their Windows licensing terms will be jeopardized.
The problem is, the average "user" is not an admin. How is such a person going to have the knowledge to set themselves up with a user account to protect them from themselves?
You've raised an excellent point, that I'll paraphrase somewhat differently. Normal home PC users don't even begin to understand security well enough to craft any sort of security plan (or measures such as always running a virus scanner on downloads/attachments). There's a trade-off between security and convenience; Microsoft tends to err on the side of convenience (as in the topic of this article).
I think the short answer to your question is education. Windows XP is a secure multi-user OS, and it's now shipping on consumer PCs. Many users now will have no choice but to gain a better understanding of at least logging in, and what activities (app installation) aren't possible with a "restricted" user account.
Having said that, I found the Microsoft scheme to ease multiple user computing for consumers is incredibly convoluted. During installation, a superuser account synonymous with root on Unix named Administrator is created.
However, after booting Lose-XP for the first time and logging in as Administrator, you'll want to add user accounts. Lose-XP forces you to create a "Computer Administrator" account before you can create regular user accounts. After doing so, the Administrator account is hidden from XP's new simplified login screen. The point I'm trying to make is that a relatively basic concept is made more complex, even though the supposedly goal was to make the login screen simpler for Joe Schmoe.
In an OS that is designed to be operated by the average user, isn't the de-facto superuser account always going to be an issue?
It's an issue, but as alluded to before, it's being handled very differently now. In DOS and legacy Windows, there was only the de-facto superuser-level user. Now that XP is slated to become standard on all consumer PCs, this is obviously no longer the case.
Besides my earlier complaint that the handling of users is more complex than it used to be, there is I believe another wrinkle to it (that I read somewhere else). If you add accounts during installation of XP, they receive Administrator credentials instead of normal user privileges. Besides (pre-)installation, login is the first feature users will meet. I don't understand why accounts seem so convoluted in XP.
Finally, Mac OS X takes a different tack. From what I understand, all created accounts are user level accounts in the Unix sense. To access the admin-level account, you have to explicitly enable root. I don't know enough about OS X to comment, but on the face of things, this seems like a simple security policy that many users can actually understand if explained to them.
In short, unless users are going to treat their PCs as black-box Internet appliances (admin'd by a friend or relative), many of them will have to understand and admin their Windows boxes more than they've been accustomed to.
I'm surprised the parent was modded up as insightful:
Most users don't care so much about the system files, which are just a matter of rerunning the install process. Their personal data is far more valuable to them.
Maybe this will save a little data on systems with multiple users, but we're talking about personal computers here. By definition they are primarily used by one person.
The protection offered by an administrator account is minimal.
Yes, data is of primary value to users. However, it costs time and money to fix a hosed system. Especially for the average user, "rerunning the install process" isn't part of a viable security plan.
As far as protection by using the Admin account, this is a basic tenet of security: assign only the necessary privileges for software to function. Ever wonder why DOS/Win95/Win98/Me are so succeptible to havoc caused by viruses (beyond popularity and braindead M$ application features)? It's because you're always running as de-facto superuser account.
The only reason you claim the Admin account provides "minimal" protection is because you believe the time and effort to restore a system is trivial. Even if that were the case, always running as the Admin account makes it a lot easier for a worm/virus to completely trash your system, taking down your valuable data files along with everything else.
I think fortunately for Microsoft and its millions of users worldwide, most worms/macro viruses these days are pests that put a drag on the Internet infrastructure, rather than seeking out your data files and wiping them away.
If you want a bleeding-edge desktop Linux, as you call Mandrake, then you really need to feed it adequate RAM. Esp. since you state your hard drives are piss-slow, why leave a horrible bottleneck in your system? It doesn't make any sense at all. The best thing you can do for your system right now is to bring the RAM up to at least 256 MB; RAM is dirt-cheap right now anyway.
Mandrake (and other Linux) releases will continue to get bigger, whether you upgrade your RAM or not. Limiting your system's performance won't influence Linux development at all.
As an analogy, if you refused to wear your auto seat belt because you felt cars needed to be made safer, would the manufacturers go back to the drawing board?
Re:Last stable release until February
on
KDE 2.2.1 Up
·
· Score: 1
Of course, KDE is notorious for frequent releases, so I would imagine there will be betas / release candidates every 6 weeks or so until the final 3.0.
It's quite seldom that notorious is used as such an unabashed compliment.;-)
Debate over the modem/LAN specification aside, if you're swapping a $400 (retail) M$ OS/office suite for a $30 (retail, with discs) Linux distro, then you've just bought yourself $370 of retail margin right there to spend on goodies, or to leverage at point of sale.
Do you really think IBM is passing these savings along to you, Joe Consumer? If so, I have some M$ software licenses to sell to you.;)
When I, as a home user, wanted an actual stable Windows OS, I went to Windows 2000, as did quite a few people I know. We did lose some legacy and DOS-based support but AFAIK Windows XP loses most if it as well
Two big problems with this switch:
Admin'ing Windows2000 is not for the average user.
Software compatibility.
While Windows2000 (and likely XP) does retain important M$ legacy compatibility, the security model gets in the way. There are still a ton of apps out there (i.e. Turbotax) that require you to run as the Administrator user, or are not even coded to support multiple users (aka profiles).
So in reality, Windows app compatibility remains a problem. There are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of custom and small 3rd-party apps out there designed for the Win3.x/9x (non)security model. These apps are a pain to integrate properly into WinNT/2000/XP. For a lot of them, you either have to run as Administrator, or loosen up filesystem permissions one by one. Pick your poison.
You've overstated the upgrade cost. Historically, the retail price for Windows (not NT/2000) upgrades was $89. Mickeysoft made a couple exceptions, I believe for Win98SE, and you state they made one for WinME. However, I checked around and the standard retail price for WinME is still $89. The upgrade price for XP Home is only $10 more. And I doubt that the license price OEMs are paying to preinstall Windows will change much.
The times they made exceptions were because the upgrade was so incremental over the previous version that they knew they had to somehow make the upgrade more affordable. For example, Win98SE had two main differences w/ Win98: some bug fixes, and integrated IE5. IIRC, there was a "Step-up" upgrade specifically for Win98->Win98SE that cost about $30.
In general, the upgrade game is just one of the monopoly's many cash cows. Although Microsoft has gotten quite better at releasing security patches, they generally do not release many bug fixes for operating systems, instead forcing consumers to buy the latest OS upgrade instead. A few years back, I would have been happy to continue running Win95 if they would actually support it with fixes & feature updates. Of course they didn't.
In contrast, although Red Hat also frequently releases distros, the difference is that Red Hat does a better job of releasing updates, and their product is much more affordable anyway ($30 list price). Not to mention the fact that you're not limited to one purchase per machine, as with the M$ monopoly.
Seriously, are we approaching the day that windows will cost more than the computer it runs on for most people?
Unlikely. OEMs pay about $30-$40 for consumer Windows licenses for preinstallations on new machines (more of course for Windows 2000, or the upcoming WinXP Pro). And I don't see any scenario in the next decade where the costs for a standard PC's hardware to drop below $100.
readying content eh? Doesn't that remind anyone of excite's now-doomed business model?
The @Home business, although not stellar, has been able to round up significantly more subscribers than DSL. If or when the company goes under, it's because the content/portal side hemorrhaged money.
Makes you wonder if they could have saved themselves if they just threw away the whole portal/content business at the beginning of this year when troubles became unreversible. Now it's really looking like it's too late.
I think that was my first point - just keep building version A. The legality is in question, IMHO, because version B uses GPL'd source, which means it must be GPL'd as well, right?
wrong, if the code is solely copyrighted to them, they can license version B however they wish.
It gets much trickier when you have a true collaborative effort like the Linux kernel, which has had scores of contributors over the years. Theoretically speaking, if Linus one day decided to release the kernel under a different license, he'd have to contact all current and past contributors and get their okay as well (since each contributor retains copyright on his code contribution).
However, as others have picked up on, you can take GPL'd version A and develop that code independently.
First off, a lot of times you don't actually have a choice in PC operating system. For example, if you want to buy a desktop PC from Dell (widely considered the best brand-name), you have to pick a flavor of Windows. They no longer will offer Red Hat (which they didn't really care about anyway). And they won't even allow you to pick none.
Another example: although Microsoft signed a 1995 consent decree, in which it agreed to no longer use "exclusive" licensing practices, it's still virtually impossible for you to buy a PC notebook without Windows pre-installed. For all intents and purposes, all of the major notebook vendors only ship Windows, and you can't even opt out. If I'm going to install Red Hat onto my box anyway, why do I have to pay for a Windows license? Because Microsoft has that much market power over PC OEMs.
Secondly, you are right that legacy compatibility is one of the strong suits of Windows. However, this isn't a knock on Linux, so much as it's just plain evidence that Microsoft has a firm lock on the desktop OS. Even when Linux matures into a great desktop with abundant applications (which will happen), it'll still largely be ignored by the mainstream IMHO.
Your final point that commercial software compatibility on Linux distributions can be frustrating is actually a good one. I think there are a couple issues at play here, one that there are too many distros out there. I think going forward, there will probably be only 3 major ones remaining (and perhaps still too many fringe distros). This de-facto fragmentation does affect how well 3rd-party apps integrate into your particular Linux distro. Then again, if you're familiar with DLL hell, you're well aware that Windows has plenty of its own compability problems.
Second, Linux is a fast-moving platform that's actively developed (and evolving). Although the kernel itself has great backward compatibility, the integrated final product may not. While this is just a reflection of the vast improvements that Linux distros make year-to-year, I think the compatibility problem is one that's still to be solved.
On a bright note though, it's not as bad as it seems. Assuming we're down to only 3 distros that matter, and that most distros will adhere to the Linux Standards Base, commercial software vendors will only need to support a small number of versions on distributions.
A good comparison would be web browsers. Some people speculated that content creators would have a nightmare supporting legacy browsers, NS4, IE4, IE5+, and NS6/Mozilla, et al. However, as it turns out, IE5 is the dominant browser, and going forward NS6/Mozilla is extremely standards-compliant. NS4 really is the only reason content creators currently yank out their hair, but this compatibility problem should improve as NS4 dies out (eventually).
One interesting observation concerns a recent install I did on my IBM X21 Laptop, when SuSE was installed from DVD it installed
completely in under an hour and correctly recognised network card and video Driver. Installing Windows 2000 on the other partition failed
to recognise network or video card, it took 5 hours of downloads to fix this.
Isn't this a little ignorant? Because it took you 5 hours to figure out your Win2K problem, doesn't mean it's the OSes fault. W2K took 45 minutes to
install on my machine and everything was recognized on my system on 1st boot. OTOH, when I installed RH7, it refused to boot properly at all. I
don't go around saying "Win2K is better than Linux 'cause I got it to work right away" because I wasn't knowledgeable enough to know what the
problem was.
And can't you read? All he said was his observation, and that it took 5 hours of downloads to remedy the situation. If you've ever downloaded drivers for Thinkpad notebooks, you'd understand he's not joking around. He never waved his hands, and said that proves Linux is superior to Windows.
By your logic, we should think you're a dumb ass, because you couldn't even get Red Hat to boot up. You weren't "knowledgeable" enough to fix the problem, right?
First off the 845 chipset is a POS. SDRAM just doesn't provide the memory bandwidth necessary for the P4 platform. It does allow Intel to sell budget P4 systems, so they probably won't lose due to this inferior chipset.
And AMD grabbed market share because the Athlon was just a better CPU than P3 (at similar clock speeds, and similar dates in time). Intel designed the P4 specifically for higher clock rates, and not necessarily higher real world performance, because they know they can out-market AMD to the average consumer.
And although AMD's margins are being squeezed dry, it's still premature to predict their demise when they still have solid designs on the way.
AMD does all that and does it faster while being cheaper, that's why.
Why pay $300 for a chip when you can get a faster one for $200? Just as compatible. Has the same MMX. They do SMP.
AMD just barely started doing 2-way SMP, so that is one area where there is absolutely no comparison. If you need SMP, you'll almost certainly want to stick w/ Intel for now.
Slow service? I don't know about other @home customers (I'd like to hear) but my net connection was completely _down_ for about 8 hours this afternoon. As a matter of fact I just got back on.
The interesting thing was that the "cable" light on my cable modem was still on when usually when I can't get on the net it is off.
So I wonder what the problem really was. If maybe the routers were all up but the dhcp servers were down or something....
Anyone else have similar problems?
I don't use DHCP (it didn't seem to work well for multiple IPs), so I don't think that's it. Service has been touch and go for the past 30 hours or so, although it's relatively stable this evening. When service was down, I would ping my subnet's default gateway, and not receive a response. I subscribe to 2 IPs, on different subnets, and they've both been affected at various different times.
Personally, I feel that if this continues, @Home needs to credit me back part of my subscription fee.
The main problem with this scenario is if Dell forces its customers to eat the Mickeysoft tax, which I believe it does.
If they don't want to sell Linux, then fine, ship the box without Windows. If they actually install Windows just to test the damn thing, then they could wipe out the MBR and partition table afterwards.
So long as all the drivers are actually downloadable, then this is an acceptable (albeit not entirely convenient) procedure. This way, you'll achieve more of a minimal install, sans any of the extra unnecessary programs OEMs usually install for you (and often which you can't uninstall). Many businesses don't mind as they standardize on a particular model, and could clone a "perfect" installation onto multiple machines.
The only serious drawback is that some useful apps that come preinstalled are not generally downloadable, i.e. software DVD players.
Oh and btw, for many laptops these days, it's a smooth procedure to install a recent Linux distro, i.e. Red Hat 7.1 or SuSE 7.2, and of course you don't have to download umpteen drivers. Your machine's hardware just needs to be supported by the kernel, and you're in good shape. Funny how Linux actually wins in usability in certain cases, huh?
AOL is by far the biggest ISP, but they aren't a broadband provider. And instead of building up the infrastructure, I believe they've instead signed deals w/ the telco DSL companies to provide the high-speed connection.
Right now, AOL makes a killing on subscription fees of $24/mo. However, it's tough to see a large chunk of their existing user base requiring more bandwidth, and be willing to pay for it (on the order of $50/mo).
Finally, calling these businesses cable modem units is kinda silly. The cable modem is only a single piece of hardware installed at the customer location, and it is manufactured by a 3rd-party. Cable Internet provider is a more accurate term.
self-fulfulling prophecy, probably NOT. Quite simply, consumer (not even getting into commercial) tech spending has been weak in the past 9 months or so. While this doesn't mean the demand curve for PDAs has shifted downward, it does suggest that growth is leveling off as everybody who wants a Palm handheld already has a nice, relatively-new one. But this doesn't explain why Palm went into the shit-can.
Worse off for Palm, they absolutely BLEW the launch of the new m50x series. They announced the product, which dried up their sales as consumers awaited the new product. Then they delayed the actual launch of the product. By the time it finally came out, the color m505 got very mixed reviews.
While the other replies that the Palm OS user base is extremely healthy, the fact still remains that Palm's business has literally fallen off a cliff the past half year or so. With Palm & Handspring thoroughly owning the PDA market for a while, it's quite surprising that Compaq has gotten to this point so very quickly, even if it only reflects total revenue.
The PIII will be Intel's bread and butter until their 64-bit stuff is at least 9 months old.
Actually Intel is serious about phasing out the desktop P3 by the end of this calendar year. Although this updated P3 core would compete very nicely against Athlons, it would also eat into P4 sales. That's exactly the point of Tom's article.. that Intel has a good product they are afraid of releasing.
Don't worry though, you will see these new P3s in 1 GHz and higher speeds for the notebook market, which Intel completely owns.
They still have the server market locked up, because AMD didn't have any SMP
offerings. Now that AMD dual boards are out, Intel needs to offer something better than the current PIII's.
I disagree with this because AMD dual systems will be most popular with tech geeks looking for low-cost home workstations and servers. Although a dual-Athlon system would have plenty of juice to run the typical "departmental" server, it won't change the simple fact that "nobody ever got fired for buying Intel." Currently, AMD has made relatively small inroads in corporate PC sales. To think they can now take market share in corporate servers just because they finally have a dual CPU offering is too optimistic.
Although there isn't much special about Xeon CPUs themselves (besides much larger L2 caches), they will be considered a different CPU than your current run-of-the-mill Athlons (again, very fast but not necessarily excellent for company in-house servers).
although theoretically, you can implement anti-aliasing given enough shades of gray, it wouldn't help unless you had a decent amount of resolution to work with. Anti-aliasing text is basically blending in some gray pixels at the edges of characters, and you can't effectively do this with (relatively) large pixels.
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Since 6.2 is substantially different from 7.2, I'd say the new packages are very unlikely to work for you. Red Hat 6.2 was a great release. But this might give you the motivation to upgrade to 7.3 once it's out, assuming your system is up to the increased hardware requirements (offhand, I'd say 400 MHz CPU, 128 MB RAM would do). Some software has gotten bigger.
One thing to note about the Red Hat packages is they replace KDE2 on a running system. From what I've seen of the Mandrake and SuSE packages, they preserve KDE2. However, my experience w/ Mandrake 8.2 is that the only way to choose KDE2 or KDE3 is from the console. From kdm, choosing KDE as the WM means KDE3; there are no separate options for the two major versions (which would have been nice for testing).
Also, the parent post that recommends installing the packages w/o dependency checking is not good advice. That defeats one of the major reasons for using RPM in the first place.
Instead, if you're installing what are essentially "foreign" packages, you need to determine what they require. RPM will somewhat tell you what shared libraries are prerequisite, but unfortunately, unlike .deb it doesn't say "You need to install the package named XYZ to support ABC". For the average user, rpm's error message that some arcane library is missing is unhelpful.
Mandrake's Software Manager (and SuSE's Yast2) will conveniently resolve necessary packages automatically for software that comes with the distro. Unfortunately, because of RPM's inherent weaknesses, they don't do so for "foreign" packages.
In general, I wouldn't recommend compiling unless you're a seasoned hacker. For one, your configuration will be quite different from the typical host used to build the other binaries. For two, KDE is a large suite of applications, and takes some times to build. Do you really want to build, integrate and test all of that yourself?
You can have the midget,
I'll take one of the AOL (NS, ICQ, Winamp, yada yada) TW Sports Illustrated swimsuit models.
I think the short answer to your question is education. Windows XP is a secure multi-user OS, and it's now shipping on consumer PCs. Many users now will have no choice but to gain a better understanding of at least logging in, and what activities (app installation) aren't possible with a "restricted" user account.
Having said that, I found the Microsoft scheme to ease multiple user computing for consumers is incredibly convoluted. During installation, a superuser account synonymous with root on Unix named Administrator is created.
However, after booting Lose-XP for the first time and logging in as Administrator, you'll want to add user accounts. Lose-XP forces you to create a "Computer Administrator" account before you can create regular user accounts. After doing so, the Administrator account is hidden from XP's new simplified login screen. The point I'm trying to make is that a relatively basic concept is made more complex, even though the supposedly goal was to make the login screen simpler for Joe Schmoe.
It's an issue, but as alluded to before, it's being handled very differently now. In DOS and legacy Windows, there was only the de-facto superuser-level user. Now that XP is slated to become standard on all consumer PCs, this is obviously no longer the case.Besides my earlier complaint that the handling of users is more complex than it used to be, there is I believe another wrinkle to it (that I read somewhere else). If you add accounts during installation of XP, they receive Administrator credentials instead of normal user privileges. Besides (pre-)installation, login is the first feature users will meet. I don't understand why accounts seem so convoluted in XP.
Finally, Mac OS X takes a different tack. From what I understand, all created accounts are user level accounts in the Unix sense. To access the admin-level account, you have to explicitly enable root. I don't know enough about OS X to comment, but on the face of things, this seems like a simple security policy that many users can actually understand if explained to them.
In short, unless users are going to treat their PCs as black-box Internet appliances (admin'd by a friend or relative), many of them will have to understand and admin their Windows boxes more than they've been accustomed to.
As far as protection by using the Admin account, this is a basic tenet of security: assign only the necessary privileges for software to function. Ever wonder why DOS/Win95/Win98/Me are so succeptible to havoc caused by viruses (beyond popularity and braindead M$ application features)? It's because you're always running as de-facto superuser account.
The only reason you claim the Admin account provides "minimal" protection is because you believe the time and effort to restore a system is trivial. Even if that were the case, always running as the Admin account makes it a lot easier for a worm/virus to completely trash your system, taking down your valuable data files along with everything else.
I think fortunately for Microsoft and its millions of users worldwide, most worms/macro viruses these days are pests that put a drag on the Internet infrastructure, rather than seeking out your data files and wiping them away.
Mandrake (and other Linux) releases will continue to get bigger, whether you upgrade your RAM or not. Limiting your system's performance won't influence Linux development at all.
As an analogy, if you refused to wear your auto seat belt because you felt cars needed to be made safer, would the manufacturers go back to the drawing board?
- Admin'ing Windows2000 is not for the average user.
- Software compatibility.
While Windows2000 (and likely XP) does retain important M$ legacy compatibility, the security model gets in the way. There are still a ton of apps out there (i.e. Turbotax) that require you to run as the Administrator user, or are not even coded to support multiple users (aka profiles).So in reality, Windows app compatibility remains a problem. There are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of custom and small 3rd-party apps out there designed for the Win3.x/9x (non)security model. These apps are a pain to integrate properly into WinNT/2000/XP. For a lot of them, you either have to run as Administrator, or loosen up filesystem permissions one by one. Pick your poison.
The times they made exceptions were because the upgrade was so incremental over the previous version that they knew they had to somehow make the upgrade more affordable. For example, Win98SE had two main differences w/ Win98: some bug fixes, and integrated IE5. IIRC, there was a "Step-up" upgrade specifically for Win98->Win98SE that cost about $30.
In general, the upgrade game is just one of the monopoly's many cash cows. Although Microsoft has gotten quite better at releasing security patches, they generally do not release many bug fixes for operating systems, instead forcing consumers to buy the latest OS upgrade instead. A few years back, I would have been happy to continue running Win95 if they would actually support it with fixes & feature updates. Of course they didn't.
In contrast, although Red Hat also frequently releases distros, the difference is that Red Hat does a better job of releasing updates, and their product is much more affordable anyway ($30 list price). Not to mention the fact that you're not limited to one purchase per machine, as with the M$ monopoly.
readying content eh? Doesn't that remind anyone of excite's now-doomed business model?
The @Home business, although not stellar, has been able to round up significantly more subscribers than DSL. If or when the company goes under, it's because the content/portal side hemorrhaged money.
Makes you wonder if they could have saved themselves if they just threw away the whole portal/content business at the beginning of this year when troubles became unreversible. Now it's really looking like it's too late.
It gets much trickier when you have a true collaborative effort like the Linux kernel, which has had scores of contributors over the years. Theoretically speaking, if Linus one day decided to release the kernel under a different license, he'd have to contact all current and past contributors and get their okay as well (since each contributor retains copyright on his code contribution).
However, as others have picked up on, you can take GPL'd version A and develop that code independently.
First off, a lot of times you don't actually have a choice in PC operating system. For example, if you want to buy a desktop PC from Dell (widely considered the best brand-name), you have to pick a flavor of Windows. They no longer will offer Red Hat (which they didn't really care about anyway). And they won't even allow you to pick none.
Another example: although Microsoft signed a 1995 consent decree, in which it agreed to no longer use "exclusive" licensing practices, it's still virtually impossible for you to buy a PC notebook without Windows pre-installed. For all intents and purposes, all of the major notebook vendors only ship Windows, and you can't even opt out. If I'm going to install Red Hat onto my box anyway, why do I have to pay for a Windows license? Because Microsoft has that much market power over PC OEMs.
Secondly, you are right that legacy compatibility is one of the strong suits of Windows. However, this isn't a knock on Linux, so much as it's just plain evidence that Microsoft has a firm lock on the desktop OS. Even when Linux matures into a great desktop with abundant applications (which will happen), it'll still largely be ignored by the mainstream IMHO.
Your final point that commercial software compatibility on Linux distributions can be frustrating is actually a good one. I think there are a couple issues at play here, one that there are too many distros out there. I think going forward, there will probably be only 3 major ones remaining (and perhaps still too many fringe distros). This de-facto fragmentation does affect how well 3rd-party apps integrate into your particular Linux distro. Then again, if you're familiar with DLL hell, you're well aware that Windows has plenty of its own compability problems.
Second, Linux is a fast-moving platform that's actively developed (and evolving). Although the kernel itself has great backward compatibility, the integrated final product may not. While this is just a reflection of the vast improvements that Linux distros make year-to-year, I think the compatibility problem is one that's still to be solved.
On a bright note though, it's not as bad as it seems. Assuming we're down to only 3 distros that matter, and that most distros will adhere to the Linux Standards Base, commercial software vendors will only need to support a small number of versions on distributions.
A good comparison would be web browsers. Some people speculated that content creators would have a nightmare supporting legacy browsers, NS4, IE4, IE5+, and NS6/Mozilla, et al. However, as it turns out, IE5 is the dominant browser, and going forward NS6/Mozilla is extremely standards-compliant. NS4 really is the only reason content creators currently yank out their hair, but this compatibility problem should improve as NS4 dies out (eventually).
By your logic, we should think you're a dumb ass, because you couldn't even get Red Hat to boot up. You weren't "knowledgeable" enough to fix the problem, right?
First off the 845 chipset is a POS. SDRAM just doesn't provide the memory bandwidth necessary for the P4 platform. It does allow Intel to sell budget P4 systems, so they probably won't lose due to this inferior chipset.
And AMD grabbed market share because the Athlon was just a better CPU than P3 (at similar clock speeds, and similar dates in time). Intel designed the P4 specifically for higher clock rates, and not necessarily higher real world performance, because they know they can out-market AMD to the average consumer.
And although AMD's margins are being squeezed dry, it's still premature to predict their demise when they still have solid designs on the way.
Slow service? I don't know about other @home customers (I'd like to hear) but my net connection was completely _down_ for about 8 hours this afternoon. As a matter of fact I just got back on.
The interesting thing was that the "cable" light on my cable modem was still on when usually when I can't get on the net it is off.
So I wonder what the problem really was. If maybe the routers were all up but the dhcp servers were down or something....
Anyone else have similar problems?
I don't use DHCP (it didn't seem to work well for multiple IPs), so I don't think that's it. Service has been touch and go for the past 30 hours or so, although it's relatively stable this evening. When service was down, I would ping my subnet's default gateway, and not receive a response. I subscribe to 2 IPs, on different subnets, and they've both been affected at various different times.
Personally, I feel that if this continues, @Home needs to credit me back part of my subscription fee.
The main problem with this scenario is if Dell forces its customers to eat the Mickeysoft tax, which I believe it does.
If they don't want to sell Linux, then fine, ship the box without Windows. If they actually install Windows just to test the damn thing, then they could wipe out the MBR and partition table afterwards.
So long as all the drivers are actually downloadable, then this is an acceptable (albeit not entirely convenient) procedure. This way, you'll achieve more of a minimal install, sans any of the extra unnecessary programs OEMs usually install for you (and often which you can't uninstall). Many businesses don't mind as they standardize on a particular model, and could clone a "perfect" installation onto multiple machines.
The only serious drawback is that some useful apps that come preinstalled are not generally downloadable, i.e. software DVD players.
Oh and btw, for many laptops these days, it's a smooth procedure to install a recent Linux distro, i.e. Red Hat 7.1 or SuSE 7.2, and of course you don't have to download umpteen drivers. Your machine's hardware just needs to be supported by the kernel, and you're in good shape. Funny how Linux actually wins in usability in certain cases, huh?
AOL is by far the biggest ISP, but they aren't a broadband provider. And instead of building up the infrastructure, I believe they've instead signed deals w/ the telco DSL companies to provide the high-speed connection.
Right now, AOL makes a killing on subscription fees of $24/mo. However, it's tough to see a large chunk of their existing user base requiring more bandwidth, and be willing to pay for it (on the order of $50/mo).
Finally, calling these businesses cable modem units is kinda silly. The cable modem is only a single piece of hardware installed at the customer location, and it is manufactured by a 3rd-party. Cable Internet provider is a more accurate term.
self-fulfulling prophecy, probably NOT. Quite simply, consumer (not even getting into commercial) tech spending has been weak in the past 9 months or so. While this doesn't mean the demand curve for PDAs has shifted downward, it does suggest that growth is leveling off as everybody who wants a Palm handheld already has a nice, relatively-new one. But this doesn't explain why Palm went into the shit-can.
Worse off for Palm, they absolutely BLEW the launch of the new m50x series. They announced the product, which dried up their sales as consumers awaited the new product. Then they delayed the actual launch of the product. By the time it finally came out, the color m505 got very mixed reviews.
While the other replies that the Palm OS user base is extremely healthy, the fact still remains that Palm's business has literally fallen off a cliff the past half year or so. With Palm & Handspring thoroughly owning the PDA market for a while, it's quite surprising that Compaq has gotten to this point so very quickly, even if it only reflects total revenue.
Actually Intel is serious about phasing out the desktop P3 by the end of this calendar year. Although this updated P3 core would compete very nicely against Athlons, it would also eat into P4 sales. That's exactly the point of Tom's article.. that Intel has a good product they are afraid of releasing.
Don't worry though, you will see these new P3s in 1 GHz and higher speeds for the notebook market, which Intel completely owns.
I disagree with this because AMD dual systems will be most popular with tech geeks looking for low-cost home workstations and servers. Although a dual-Athlon system would have plenty of juice to run the typical "departmental" server, it won't change the simple fact that "nobody ever got fired for buying Intel." Currently, AMD has made relatively small inroads in corporate PC sales. To think they can now take market share in corporate servers just because they finally have a dual CPU offering is too optimistic.
Although there isn't much special about Xeon CPUs themselves (besides much larger L2 caches), they will be considered a different CPU than your current run-of-the-mill Athlons (again, very fast but not necessarily excellent for company in-house servers).
although theoretically, you can implement anti-aliasing given enough shades of gray, it wouldn't help unless you had a decent amount of resolution to work with. Anti-aliasing text is basically blending in some gray pixels at the edges of characters, and you can't effectively do this with (relatively) large pixels.
for the record, this is the same guy who mistakenly ragged on Debian security.