Dunno about you guys, but whenever I have to actually design or build something, I use the metric system. I have foreign cookbooks where everything is metric, and my scales and measuring equipment all accommodate. Sure, sometimes i have to use imperial, such as when working on older cars, fixing someone else's handiwork, etc., but I also know a lot of common conversions off the top of my head. I've actually been called a "communist" once because of this. I consider it an accomplishment.
Besides, all the engineering, manufacturing, scientific and medical sectors in the U.S. have been using the metric system for decades./dev/phaeton
But the thing is, in his case, he doesn't *want* to learn these things. There's a difference here. There are some of us that dig around in the groady bits of a computer and lick the mosfet-driven voltage regulators around the northbridge to enjoy the hardware as a feat of engineering. We root around in smelly innards of the OS because seeing our favorite brace/indent style releases endorphins in our heads. We're the 'geeks'. We're in love with this stuff.
This guy is just an 'IT Professional". It's just a job for him. Something he does for a paycheck. I hear this same party line from guys just like him.
Even his car analogy proves my point. In the 1950s, all the stuff he talked about employed all kinds of guys just like him. They were called "Mechanics". But there were gearheads in those days too- they were the ones that were converting their flathead engines to OHC, installing dual spark, cherry bomb mufflers, dual carbs with velocity stacks and pulling every non-essential part off the body to make the car lighter and faster. They were geeks, and they were in love with that stuff.
Are the gearheads any *better* than the mechanics? No, but it does make me wonder why he's here reading/., except to troll with his sense of arrogance. Glad his Mac works for him, but I can probably do just as well with some crusty K6-II running FreeBSD, and it won't be a lot of work for me either.
I'm using an MS Natural at the moment. I made the mistake of getting the 4000 or whatever it was called, but it's a serious POS. It died in a month's time, but I disliked it so much I bought a new keyboard instead of exchanging it. Sadly, this is no longer the rich market of the 1990s. It seems like there are only 3 kinds of ergo keyboards in the $20-50 range, and none of them can seem to last more than a year. The next bracket starts around $250 and goes up to $2000. My favourite out of the whole bunch was a black Belkin that lasted almost 8 years, but it's no longer being made.
Meanwhile, all the cheapie $20 ones I bought in the mid to late 90s seem to work just fine, but I only have one computer I can physically plug them into.
I would have thought they could use as much or as little of Gnome as they please. This is hardly anything new: for instance, back in the late '90s, RedHat shipped with Gnome by default, using Enlightenment as its window manager. (IIRC in at least versions 5.2 to 6.2 of the distro.)
On my present (Arch Linux) desktop boxes, it's no longer immediately obvious how much of Gnome I'm using any more. At the UI level, I've done a bit of cherry-picking, using things like compiz-fusion for managing windows and Avant Window Navigator instead of gnome-panel. I spent some time playing with other file managers, but in the end decided Nautilus was actually pretty OK. I haven't had any good reason, however, to replace much of the stuff under the hood that gets fired up by gdm, since I'm fairly happy with how everything works.
Yes there are all kinds of optional configurations and choices when it comes to components and programs and things, but when presented with a pretty usable and nice looking system, one might be less inclined to 'mess with it'. I think that there are also a lot of new users who weren't around for the crusty old days and simply don't know that you can cherry pick and build up your own desktop environment. Believe it or not.
The great thing about modern distributions like Ubuntu is that just anyone can install it and it works. All those battles of yore have been won. However, I think that it also suppresses the notion that it's still made of individual parts.
The thing to keep in mind, is you still need a form of energy to compress the air. Usually we're talking electricity. Granted, this tech + a huge power plant is probably still more efficient and green.
IMHO though, the real ticket would be if they combined this with a solar-powered compressor that could run while the car was sitting out in the parking lot for 8 hours, and in the driveway for another 3 or 4 (plug-in ability is for a back up). For the daily commute and around-town trips for the average person, I bet this would be plenty usable.
I'd feel somewhat more differently if Sony were still the company of the 70s and 80s, a Japanese company concerned with quality and style trying to prove its product to the world. Now they just coast, especially in Japan where their brand is still synonymous with quality because of their past successes, building for next quarter as opposed to the next 5 years (with the exception of the PS3, and even that has been mishandled). There was a reason I still have two working Sony Walkman tape players from the 80s and a working Betamax player (and a still-working set of Beta tapes including Raiders of the Lost Ark), a working 20" Sony Trinitron from 1987(ish), and yet I went through 6 PS2s and 2 PS3s. And I certainly didn't lose the ability to record TV shows on that Betamax player through a firmware update.
Funny.... I have an original PS2 (the big bricky one), and it outlasted my PS3. Blu-Ray drive blew up right after a firmware update. The fact that Sony has to issue press releases that firmware updates aren't the cause of drive failures, kinda says sumpin, no?
"Talking heads are speculating that the worm is too complex for an individual or group, causing blame to be placed on Israel or even the United States "
How does "too complex for an individual or group" equate to "must be Israel or the United States"? I hope I'm reading this wrong.
Otherwise I might have to troll about "German companies blaming the US and the Jews for everything" or something.
In his defense, I used to work in a colocation/hosting facility that had many xServes there, and his experience mirrors mine. In one case, a customer moved from a $400 dedicated linux server to an xServe, then had to add a second to keep up, then evenutally gave up and went back to the linux machine. We later bought the xServes from him, installed NetBSD on them, and redeployed them. They were better without OSX, but the fact remained that the original customer was into them for $25K when a $400 ghetto Debian box was mopping the floor with them.
The thing with the GUI, is that whenever OSX boots up, the GUI is there, tying up resources whether you use it or not. Sure, you could SSH into it and manage it that way, but a lot of times the customers would Timbuk2 (like remote desktop) into it so that they could bring up a terminal window, and brag about how 1337 UN1X guys they were. Their level of arrogance was insane.
....in my experience modern Symantec products such as Norton Internet Security is the most malicious, but successful form of malware ever. It actually gets people to pay money for the product, and in a lot of cases, pay other people to install it and keep it on their system.
I'm so glad I moved out of software maintenance and into hardware maintentance. Now I just wipe harddrives clean as a whistle and make sure the hardware works. Such a load off!
I don't have any skills or abilities to contribute, but I find this to be an interesting conversation between you guys, and maybe I've witnessed a rather historic moment in geekdom. I hope it all works out well (whether anything happens or not), but not at the expense of any current *BSDs.
"Distro-ing" the BSD system as has been done a couple of times (PC-BSD, et al) bugs me- it's like "lets take the worst part of the Linux development model and use it to dilute the project(s) that have it together" sort of thing. I'm glad to see a new effort (midnightbsd) starting as a fork instead, and also starting without a huge falling out.
On a whim (nostalgia, maybe?) I put the latest Ubuntu on one of my workstations just to 'see what linux is up to these days'. Bleh... I wouldn't go so far as to say it gave me the 'heebie jeebies', but I will say that I'm probably done with linux for the rest of my life.
I don't want the netcraft jokes to be true either, but there *are* times that I worry about the future.
Has it actually gotten to the point now where "modem use" is in the same category of archaicism as 80486s, shareware, hotelchat and.... oh wait.. shit...
No seriously. Does the dialup experience now precede the current majority of Internet users? I must be a late adopter of broadband. I was on dialup from 1997 until about 2001 or so. Put my own (first) computer together in 1999, ran Intel Solaris 7 on it (bleh), then various linuxes (like Caldera Openlinux 2.2 bleh), and made a part-time jump to FreeBSD around 4.7, going full-time in 5.0. I lurked Slashdot for a long time before joining sometime in 2000, and there's been a conflict of ownership with my original userid, so I eventually had to re-register.
I've recently set up a small webserver on an old Cyrix 150mhz (shhh! don't tell my cable provider). I chose NetBSD to run on it. In the many years of having Solaris, then Linux, then FreeBSD workstations, I can't think of having this much *joy* poking around a unixy system before. NetBSD just seems so much more light, simple, and straightforward. It feels very 'pure', utilitarian, with minimal frills. I know I should have also found this with the above OSes too, but with NetBSD I feel like i'm really 'getting it' for the first time.
Unfortunately, i think that ESR is going about this all wrong. I strongly disagree with 'comprimising and changing' in order to appeal to anyone. The geeks that learn Klingon or build tesla coils out of scrap monitors need to just be themselves, and to hell with anyone else.
It doesn't matter if you're popular to the masses, only if you're popular to the people that matter- namely people like yourself.
What's interesting, is that even after you peel the thinkgeek/slashdot manufactured fandom/leetness off of it, it's still never before been so *accepted* to be a geek, a nerd, a brainiac or techie.
I dunno. That whole line and concept just rubs me the wrong way.
IMHO, all the anti-windows/anti-microsoft/anti-pc_user digs from apple magazines (some are rife with it), apple themselves is pretty childish. (Yeah, it's just as lame when the Linux fanbois do it too, but we're talking about apple atm).
I know they're trying to be funny and cute (like the "I'm a PC, I'm a Mac" commercials) and they're successful at stroking the ego of current Apple owners/users, but they come off sounding pretty insecure and are probably alienating some of their future customers.
Unless Apple ONLY wants the type of customer that needs their ego stroked, to be told they are 'misunderstood, different, better'.
By the summary, I can't tell if the author was unimpressed by the 'new features', or if he was simply unimpressed with Steve's delivery of it. As far as the 'features', this is all old shit that's been around for ages- why would one expect to be excited about it. You can't blame Steve for boring stuff, can you?
And for Steve? He's getting old. He's possibly sick. Or maybe he's just not as excited about this stuff as usual.
Oh well. Since I don't own a Mac, I guess I'll never 'get it', right?
I agree, but the problem is really one more of the parents don't want to learn. Their kids want to use the programs, regardless of the consequences. The parents can't be bothered to do any sort of parenting of their kids and safe internet practices.
You'd be surprised at how much pr0n I find stashed away on the computer in their kid's accounts, half the time barely hidden at all. Prepubescent girls and all their webcam friends. Stuff like that. The kids get real bent out of shape when you don't back that stuff up on a format/reinstall.
Nothing like getting a 'what-for' from a 14 year old girl because you 'wrecked her internet modelling career'
1) Adult brings computer in for me to clean up. 2) I remove all the crap their kid installed on it. 3) Computer works fine, I get paid, Adult goes home. 4) Within 2 days their kid has reinstalled all their crap onto it.
5) ???? --- either Adult screams that I didn't solve anything, or they bring it back in, but don't reprimand their kid for effing up the computer again.
Even though I recognize your nick, your comments make it sound like Ubuntu is the new $fanboy_linux_distro. For awhile it was Mandrake, then Gentoo, then Knoppix, now Ubuntu?
1) Slackware does have package management. It's called pkg_add.
2) Debian STABLE is old as dirt. Debian testing or unstable is the cutting edge. But iff you want zero-day software, you can always compile it yourself from source.
3) About the video resolution- If it won't auto-detect what you want, can you not just adjust/etc/X11/Xorg.conf?
And yes, I understand that not every linux is for everyone.
There were a number of distributions about 4 years ago, many of which have 'folded' by now that would initially claim "FooLinux based on Debian".
Ok great.
But then they'd go on to say "FooLinux's innovative package system called Foomaptic-get" which was a symlink to apt-get or aptitude, and it was pointed at FooLinux's mirror of Debian unstable, everything renamed. Stuff like that.
So I don't have other examples or sources, which makes my point appear weak and therefore I'm an asshat. This is Slashdot. Hit PgDown a couple of times and it will have already turned into an Apple Fanboy Dickwaving discussion anyways.
However, I still stand by my statement that IMHO Debian has their shit together the most out of all the rest of the Linux systems.
Slashdot Mirror
How are cars (with both mph and kmh ranges on the speedometer) not dual calibrated?
Does 70k km/h on the speedometer suddenly mean something different as soon as you cross the border?
Dunno about you guys, but whenever I have to actually design or build something, I use the metric system. I have foreign cookbooks where everything is metric, and my scales and measuring equipment all accommodate. Sure, sometimes i have to use imperial, such as when working on older cars, fixing someone else's handiwork, etc., but I also know a lot of common conversions off the top of my head. I've actually been called a "communist" once because of this. I consider it an accomplishment.
Besides, all the engineering, manufacturing, scientific and medical sectors in the U.S. have been using the metric system for decades. /dev/phaeton
Well said.
But the thing is, in his case, he doesn't *want* to learn these things. There's a difference here. There are some of us that dig around in the groady bits of a computer and lick the mosfet-driven voltage regulators around the northbridge to enjoy the hardware as a feat of engineering. We root around in smelly innards of the OS because seeing our favorite brace/indent style releases endorphins in our heads. We're the 'geeks'. We're in love with this stuff.
This guy is just an 'IT Professional". It's just a job for him. Something he does for a paycheck. I hear this same party line from guys just like him.
Even his car analogy proves my point. In the 1950s, all the stuff he talked about employed all kinds of guys just like him. They were called "Mechanics". But there were gearheads in those days too- they were the ones that were converting their flathead engines to OHC, installing dual spark, cherry bomb mufflers, dual carbs with velocity stacks and pulling every non-essential part off the body to make the car lighter and faster. They were geeks, and they were in love with that stuff.
Are the gearheads any *better* than the mechanics? No, but it does make me wonder why he's here reading /., except to troll with his sense of arrogance. Glad his Mac works for him, but I can probably do just as well with some crusty K6-II running FreeBSD, and it won't be a lot of work for me either.
Best of luck.
I'm using an MS Natural at the moment. I made the mistake of getting the 4000 or whatever it was called, but it's a serious POS. It died in a month's time, but I disliked it so much I bought a new keyboard instead of exchanging it. Sadly, this is no longer the rich market of the 1990s. It seems like there are only 3 kinds of ergo keyboards in the $20-50 range, and none of them can seem to last more than a year. The next bracket starts around $250 and goes up to $2000. My favourite out of the whole bunch was a black Belkin that lasted almost 8 years, but it's no longer being made.
Meanwhile, all the cheapie $20 ones I bought in the mid to late 90s seem to work just fine, but I only have one computer I can physically plug them into.
I would have thought they could use as much or as little of Gnome as they please. This is hardly anything new: for instance, back in the late '90s, RedHat shipped with Gnome by default, using Enlightenment as its window manager. (IIRC in at least versions 5.2 to 6.2 of the distro.)
On my present (Arch Linux) desktop boxes, it's no longer immediately obvious how much of Gnome I'm using any more. At the UI level, I've done a bit of cherry-picking, using things like compiz-fusion for managing windows and Avant Window Navigator instead of gnome-panel. I spent some time playing with other file managers, but in the end decided Nautilus was actually pretty OK. I haven't had any good reason, however, to replace much of the stuff under the hood that gets fired up by gdm, since I'm fairly happy with how everything works.
Yes there are all kinds of optional configurations and choices when it comes to components and programs and things, but when presented with a pretty usable and nice looking system, one might be less inclined to 'mess with it'. I think that there are also a lot of new users who weren't around for the crusty old days and simply don't know that you can cherry pick and build up your own desktop environment. Believe it or not.
The great thing about modern distributions like Ubuntu is that just anyone can install it and it works. All those battles of yore have been won. However, I think that it also suppresses the notion that it's still made of individual parts.
I saw this yesterday:
http://www.nyteknik.se/nyheter/fordon_motor/bilar/article2494299.ece
http://www.nyteknik.se/incoming/article2494304.ece/BINARY/original/airmotion700.jpg
http://www.nyteknik.se/incoming/article2494301.ece/BINARY/w468/airmotion468.jpg
Also this:
http://www.engadget.com/2007/05/27/indian-air-powered-city-cat-car-prepares-for-production-run/
"68MPH and a range of 125 miles"
On pressurized air ..
The thing to keep in mind, is you still need a form of energy to compress the air. Usually we're talking electricity. Granted, this tech + a huge power plant is probably still more efficient and green.
IMHO though, the real ticket would be if they combined this with a solar-powered compressor that could run while the car was sitting out in the parking lot for 8 hours, and in the driveway for another 3 or 4 (plug-in ability is for a back up). For the daily commute and around-town trips for the average person, I bet this would be plenty usable.
I'd feel somewhat more differently if Sony were still the company of the 70s and 80s, a Japanese company concerned with quality and style trying to prove its product to the world. Now they just coast, especially in Japan where their brand is still synonymous with quality because of their past successes, building for next quarter as opposed to the next 5 years (with the exception of the PS3, and even that has been mishandled). There was a reason I still have two working Sony Walkman tape players from the 80s and a working Betamax player (and a still-working set of Beta tapes including Raiders of the Lost Ark), a working 20" Sony Trinitron from 1987(ish), and yet I went through 6 PS2s and 2 PS3s. And I certainly didn't lose the ability to record TV shows on that Betamax player through a firmware update.
Funny....
I have an original PS2 (the big bricky one), and it outlasted my PS3. Blu-Ray drive blew up right after a firmware update. The fact that Sony has to issue press releases that firmware updates aren't the cause of drive failures, kinda says sumpin, no?
"Talking heads are speculating that the worm is too complex for an individual or group, causing blame to be placed on Israel or even the United States "
How does "too complex for an individual or group" equate to "must be Israel or the United States"? I hope I'm reading this wrong.
Otherwise I might have to troll about "German companies blaming the US and the Jews for everything" or something.
That implies that Linus had a spawn of hairy love-children with Richard Stallman... ..ew.
In his defense, I used to work in a colocation/hosting facility that had many xServes there, and his experience mirrors mine. In one case, a customer moved from a $400 dedicated linux server to an xServe, then had to add a second to keep up, then evenutally gave up and went back to the linux machine. We later bought the xServes from him, installed NetBSD on them, and redeployed them. They were better without OSX, but the fact remained that the original customer was into them for $25K when a $400 ghetto Debian box was mopping the floor with them.
The thing with the GUI, is that whenever OSX boots up, the GUI is there, tying up resources whether you use it or not. Sure, you could SSH into it and manage it that way, but a lot of times the customers would Timbuk2 (like remote desktop) into it so that they could bring up a terminal window, and brag about how 1337 UN1X guys they were. Their level of arrogance was insane.
....in my experience modern Symantec products such as Norton Internet Security is the most malicious, but successful form of malware ever. It actually gets people to pay money for the product, and in a lot of cases, pay other people to install it and keep it on their system.
I'm so glad I moved out of software maintenance and into hardware maintentance. Now I just wipe harddrives clean as a whistle and make sure the hardware works. Such a load off!
....if you don't want Vista to run like OSX.
Besides, this will just accelerate the "faster and cheaper every month" rule for hardware. It's a good thing(tm)
I don't have any skills or abilities to contribute, but I find this to be an interesting conversation between you guys, and maybe I've witnessed a rather historic moment in geekdom. I hope it all works out well (whether anything happens or not), but not at the expense of any current *BSDs.
"Distro-ing" the BSD system as has been done a couple of times (PC-BSD, et al) bugs me- it's like "lets take the worst part of the Linux development model and use it to dilute the project(s) that have it together" sort of thing. I'm glad to see a new effort (midnightbsd) starting as a fork instead, and also starting without a huge falling out.
On a whim (nostalgia, maybe?) I put the latest Ubuntu on one of my workstations just to 'see what linux is up to these days'. Bleh... I wouldn't go so far as to say it gave me the 'heebie jeebies', but I will say that I'm probably done with linux for the rest of my life.
I don't want the netcraft jokes to be true either, but there *are* times that I worry about the future.
BTW, I too was a modem user...
Has it actually gotten to the point now where "modem use" is in the same category of archaicism as 80486s, shareware, hotelchat and.... oh wait.. shit...
No seriously. Does the dialup experience now precede the current majority of Internet users? I must be a late adopter of broadband. I was on dialup from 1997 until about 2001 or so. Put my own (first) computer together in 1999, ran Intel Solaris 7 on it (bleh), then various linuxes (like Caldera Openlinux 2.2 bleh), and made a part-time jump to FreeBSD around 4.7, going full-time in 5.0. I lurked Slashdot for a long time before joining sometime in 2000, and there's been a conflict of ownership with my original userid, so I eventually had to re-register.
Oh wait... i'm getting off topic here...
I've recently set up a small webserver on an old Cyrix 150mhz (shhh! don't tell my cable provider). I chose NetBSD to run on it. In the many years of having Solaris, then Linux, then FreeBSD workstations, I can't think of having this much *joy* poking around a unixy system before. NetBSD just seems so much more light, simple, and straightforward. It feels very 'pure', utilitarian, with minimal frills. I know I should have also found this with the above OSes too, but with NetBSD I feel like i'm really 'getting it' for the first time.
I guess it's hard to explain, nevermind.
But I hope NetBSD stays around and stays itself.
Unfortunately, i think that ESR is going about this all wrong. I strongly disagree with 'comprimising and changing' in order to appeal to anyone. The geeks that learn Klingon or build tesla coils out of scrap monitors need to just be themselves, and to hell with anyone else.
It doesn't matter if you're popular to the masses, only if you're popular to the people that matter- namely people like yourself.
What's interesting, is that even after you peel the thinkgeek/slashdot manufactured fandom/leetness off of it, it's still never before been so *accepted* to be a geek, a nerd, a brainiac or techie.
I dunno. That whole line and concept just rubs me the wrong way.
IMHO, all the anti-windows/anti-microsoft/anti-pc_user digs from apple magazines (some are rife with it), apple themselves is pretty childish. (Yeah, it's just as lame when the Linux fanbois do it too, but we're talking about apple atm).
I know they're trying to be funny and cute (like the "I'm a PC, I'm a Mac" commercials) and they're successful at stroking the ego of current Apple owners/users, but they come off sounding pretty insecure and are probably alienating some of their future customers.
Unless Apple ONLY wants the type of customer that needs their ego stroked, to be told they are 'misunderstood, different, better'.
You tell me.
By the summary, I can't tell if the author was unimpressed by the 'new features', or if he was simply unimpressed with Steve's delivery of it. As far as the 'features', this is all old shit that's been around for ages- why would one expect to be excited about it. You can't blame Steve for boring stuff, can you?
And for Steve? He's getting old. He's possibly sick. Or maybe he's just not as excited about this stuff as usual.
Oh well. Since I don't own a Mac, I guess I'll never 'get it', right?
.... what will be the party line from the truly Apple Devout?
1) Indian tech support is far beneath Apple's *amazing* tech standards?
2) The Mercedes/Pinto comparison again
3) ????
4) Profit!
I agree, but the problem is really one more of the parents don't want to learn. Their kids want to use the programs, regardless of the consequences. The parents can't be bothered to do any sort of parenting of their kids and safe internet practices.
You'd be surprised at how much pr0n I find stashed away on the computer in their kid's accounts, half the time barely hidden at all. Prepubescent girls and all their webcam friends. Stuff like that. The kids get real bent out of shape when you don't back that stuff up on a format/reinstall.
Nothing like getting a 'what-for' from a 14 year old girl because you 'wrecked her internet modelling career'
geez...
I knew RH was in there, but it's ancient history ;)
:D
:D
I've been running FreeBSD for the last three or four years so i haven't stayed up on all this
Oh, and don't forget the RedHat/Mandrake-->OSX Fanboy jump
Of course, the best part is this:
1) Adult brings computer in for me to clean up.
2) I remove all the crap their kid installed on it.
3) Computer works fine, I get paid, Adult goes home.
4) Within 2 days their kid has reinstalled all their crap onto it.
5) ???? --- either Adult screams that I didn't solve anything, or they bring it back in, but don't reprimand their kid for effing up the computer again.
6) Wash, rinse, repeat.
Oh and btw...
;-)
Even though I recognize your nick, your comments make it sound like Ubuntu is the new $fanboy_linux_distro. For awhile it was Mandrake, then Gentoo, then Knoppix, now Ubuntu?
I'm having a hard time keeping up, sorry.
1) Slackware does have package management. It's called pkg_add.
/etc/X11/Xorg.conf?
2) Debian STABLE is old as dirt. Debian testing or unstable is the cutting edge. But iff you want zero-day software, you can always compile it yourself from source.
3) About the video resolution- If it won't auto-detect what you want, can you not just adjust
And yes, I understand that not every linux is for everyone.
Ok... Ubuntu was a bad example on my part.
There were a number of distributions about 4 years ago, many of which have 'folded' by now that would initially claim "FooLinux based on Debian".
Ok great.
But then they'd go on to say "FooLinux's innovative package system called Foomaptic-get" which was a symlink to apt-get or aptitude, and it was pointed at FooLinux's mirror of Debian unstable, everything renamed. Stuff like that.
So I don't have other examples or sources, which makes my point appear weak and therefore I'm an asshat. This is Slashdot. Hit PgDown a couple of times and it will have already turned into an Apple Fanboy Dickwaving discussion anyways.
However, I still stand by my statement that IMHO Debian has their shit together the most out of all the rest of the Linux systems.