Re:Pity for Mickeysoft Astroturfers.
on
FreeBSDCon 99
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· Score: 1
No, the real pity is that people think that criticizing Linux is only something a "pro-Microsoft" person would do. It has nothing to do with Microsoft. It's only been recently that forces have come on the scene who think that Linux is a club to beat Microsoft with.
We aren't all Windows refugees, ya know. I for one use a wide variety of operating systems, including BeOS, OS/2, NetBSD, Slackware Linux, and yes, Microsoft.
Apple is the only vendor competeing in the desktop/commodity/consumer hardware business with the PPC chip. All those other uses you cite are embedded applications. Embedded is Motorola's bread-and-butter (and they do damn well in that market segment, because they're good at it).
In fact, my rights may end up being more secured, if this measure makes it easier to delineate between criminals and law abiding citizenry.
When a line is drawn, the police are inclined to respect it. With no line drawn, the more vigilant agents in the police force will act on their own.
Pity for the Victims of the Children's Crusade
on
FreeBSDCon 99
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· Score: 1
Judging from the ignorant anti-BSD ranting that seems to go on anytime Slashdot has a BSD-related article, I am ever more and more glad that I'm migrating away from Linux to NetBSD. I still have a Slackware machine for cdparanoia, but that's about all it gets used for.
Eventually we will come to pity the mature forward-thinking people in the Linux community who have to put up with all these children.
Is the embedded processor in your keyboard (at both ends of the coiled cable, at the keyboard end and the motherboard end) running open source software? How about the firmware in your modem? How about the firmware in your hard drive? In your video card?
(not trying to make anybody paranoid, just issuing a heads up)
I don't hate Apple for this (there are plenty of other reasons.... but offtopic here). I hate the whole concept of 'branding' the way it's taken root in this age. I looked at pictures of me and my sisters when we were little kids recently. I was thrown aback by some things about us. We had no clothing on with brand names emblazoned on it. And we seemed quite happy in the photographs.
I am tired of a world of hype in which 'trade dress' becomes a major selling point. I'm tired of Apple basically admitting in court that "trade dress" is all they have to differentiate their product in the marketplace, then turning around and forever making claims about the superiority of "what's inside the box" (OS, processor, architecture)
It's bad enough when a blue jeans manufacturer acts like the tag is what makes their product (and justifies their %75 price markup), let alone when a complex piece of hardware like a computer system is seen the same way.
People have been saying for years that the Mac is a fad-item. Apple seems to be claiming here that such factors are key in how they market their product. It's like they're admitting in public that all they have to go on is a pretty case. And that's saddening.
About a year ago I distinctly remember Motorola saying that they wanted out of the 'desktop CPU chip' business, because it was a market segment where they couldn't compete with the x86 parts vendors. This would definitely be the case after Apple killed off all the Mac clones, leaving Motorola with a single customer for said chips.
We sent men to the moon with tons and tons of vacuum-tube and discrete-transistor analog technology. And quite a heap of mainframe computer technology as well.
We couldn't have done it without the computer. But we did it without what 80% of the people at random would think you meant by the word 'computer' today.
Judging by how slow American car manufacturers have been to adopt the level of automation found in Japanese plants, I would say we have a whole lot of trade unions here in the US.
Nowhere in my post did I say that year old PCs are 'roadkill'. Hardware Review websites need to review hardware that is actually available at vendors, not hardware that's a year old and hasn't been available for six months. I bought a new Pentium III motherboard a month ago. I figured "what the heck, you already spent your $$ on it" and went to Tom's to see what the pundits would have to say.
The only review was of the previous generation of motherboarboard. A review dated back last fall.
If Tom's Hardware only aims to review hardware available solely at places like www.computersurplusoutlet.com it should be made clear up front on the site.
BTW- 486's are good for lots of things. I have tons of them. And five generations of Pentiums too. All have their value.
Re:Implementations vs. Standards.
on
Is X The Future?
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· Score: 1
The only problem with your statement is: Linux is not POSIX compliant. It's kinda-sorta compliant.
One of the 'big guns' now supporting Linux should fund the efforts needed to get POSIX compliance for Linux. The problem is, then Linux developers would have to get a cluse in order to keep it compliant.
Recently in a newsgroup thread, the primary maintainer of the Bash project stepped into a discussion, where somebody was claiming that Bash was based on the POSIX shell spec., and admitted he didn't even have access to a copy of the POSIX standards. From my reading recently, a strong anti-standards bias seems to be built into the GNU community. There's a remarkable attitude that says "add it to the GNU version and everybody else will catch up eventually."
This is also how irresponsible "journalists" (read: anybody with an HTML editor can make claims of being a journalist these days) like Blatt Grudge get taken down a few dozen notches.
Some have theorized that a tremendous amount of time is wasted by people futzing around, playing with the PC on their desk. Adding a new screensaver, changing the desktop in various ways, sending email to friends describing your cool new screensaver, and the new desktop setup you are using. All this eats up productivity time. I don't buy for a minute the gloatful 'theory' being bandied about here that it's because the machine crashes. None of the systems we use at my work are crash prone enough to be acutally affecting productivity to the degree implied in the article.
Perhaps a more locked-down Unix-type environment would improve productivity. Give people a desktop machine with a window manager locked into place, with a limited number of things to tweak. Make it impossible for them to write anywhere outside their home directory. Assign them an operating environment where they can't drag in games from home, except in glaringly obvious places like ~/bin.
Yep, that would eliminate quite a bit of fooling around. It would also make a lot of people hate working in a stiff unchangable Unix environment. (Of course, it's not fair to say it would have to be a Unix environment. A Windows NT desktop user with no administrator privledges can be locked down pretty tight as well.) Of course they would only hate it until they came to recognise that they were getting more done. The incurable tweaks and games players would quit. (yet another improvement in overall productivity!)
Oh yeah, and it would make all the sysadmins who read and participate on Slashdot into a elite. Cool, man!
Gack! Spare us the boilerplate lecture on the Virtues of Open Source and stop lecturing us like we are schoolchildren.
You can feed your family digging ditches. Or robbing banks for that matter.
Cryptography is a rarified branch of software development. A priesthood of crypto-folk definitely don't represent mainstream software developers. It's laughable if cryptography and a passel of re-written free Unix tools are all that can be pointed to as Open Source successes in the commercial world. But that's about it.
So, you're saying that any software that isn't Open Source(tm) and subjected to "peer review" is software that isn't good for anything?
First off, the concept of "peer review" comes from the academic sphere, where it is new ideas that are reviewed, not tarballs. Furthermore, the "peers" in the academic sphere are qualified and credentialed people. Not just a random ad-hoc meritocracy made up of the people who live online.
Second, there is a lot of good code out there which is only distributed in binary form, which is very well produced, and doesn't need to beg it's userbase to fix it.
You can have your little guilds of programmers if you like, and read each other's code with gusto, if that's what you enjoy doing. That doesn't mean you can crawl around in everybody else's code, nor does it mean your code is automatically better than theirs.
This is not an 'astroturfer' sentiment. It's the way a whole lot of code is written, distributed, and used. Not just code from Microsoft.
Yes, In-Win are presently the best cases I have been able to find. I have three of them now. The ATX models are sooo thick.
I typically will spend almost any extra amount needed to get the best case for a system. Since my cases traditionally get used for four or five generations of motherboards, it just makes sense.
Modern Plastic cases all still have to be coated on the inside with some form of metallic shielding. Which it's fairly certain will end up being rather opaque.
A clear computer case would have to be certified as meeting at a minimum Class A and probably Class B requirements for interference (Class B is more restrictive, for places where your neighbor is likely to want to listen to the radio, watch TV, etc.).
Individual computer enthusiasts can run their hardware unshielded and get away with it, because it most often probably isn't bothering anybody (or at least it isn't bothering anybody who has the means to figure out who the jerk with the unshielded PC is...) When it becomes a matter of mass marketing such things, the FCC will step in and you'll be dumping a lot of plastic in a landfill somewhere if you didn't plan your design properly.
Slashdot Mirror
No, the real pity is that people think that criticizing Linux is only something a "pro-Microsoft" person would do. It has nothing to do with Microsoft. It's only been recently that forces have come on the scene who think that Linux is a club to beat Microsoft with.
We aren't all Windows refugees, ya know. I for one use a wide variety of operating systems, including BeOS, OS/2, NetBSD, Slackware Linux, and yes, Microsoft.
Apple is the only vendor competeing in the desktop/commodity/consumer hardware business with the PPC chip. All those other uses you cite are embedded applications. Embedded is Motorola's bread-and-butter (and they do damn well in that market segment, because they're good at it).
Almost certainly so.
In fact, my rights may end up being more secured, if this measure makes it easier to delineate between criminals and law abiding citizenry.
When a line is drawn, the police are inclined to respect it. With no line drawn, the more vigilant agents in the police force will act on their own.
Judging from the ignorant anti-BSD ranting that seems to go on anytime Slashdot has a BSD-related article, I am ever more and more glad that I'm migrating away from Linux to NetBSD. I still have a Slackware machine for cdparanoia, but that's about all it gets used for.
Eventually we will come to pity the mature forward-thinking people in the Linux community who have to put up with all these children.
Is the embedded processor in your keyboard (at both ends of the coiled cable, at the keyboard end and the motherboard end) running open source software? How about the firmware in your modem? How about the firmware in your hard drive? In your video card?
(not trying to make anybody paranoid, just issuing a heads up)
I woke up this morning, and my rights hadn't vanished.
Actually, the iMac looks most like a Lear-Siegler ADM-3 terminal. But only if one has the good taste to spray paint the ugly thing an opaque beige.
I don't hate Apple for this (there are plenty of other reasons.... but offtopic here). I hate the whole concept of 'branding' the way it's taken root in this age. I looked at pictures of me and my sisters when we were little kids recently. I was thrown aback by some things about us. We had no clothing on with brand names emblazoned on it. And we seemed quite happy in the photographs.
I am tired of a world of hype in which 'trade dress' becomes a major selling point. I'm tired of Apple basically admitting in court that "trade dress" is all they have to differentiate their product in the marketplace, then turning around and forever making claims about the superiority of "what's inside the box" (OS, processor, architecture)
It's bad enough when a blue jeans manufacturer acts like the tag is what makes their product (and justifies their %75 price markup), let alone when a complex piece of hardware like a computer system is seen the same way.
People have been saying for years that the Mac is a fad-item. Apple seems to be claiming here that such factors are key in how they market their product. It's like they're admitting in public that all they have to go on is a pretty case. And that's saddening.
About a year ago I distinctly remember Motorola saying that they wanted out of the 'desktop CPU chip' business, because it was a market segment where they couldn't compete with the x86 parts vendors. This would definitely be the case after Apple killed off all the Mac clones, leaving Motorola with a single customer for said chips.
Maybe they had the floppy-disk version.
heh
We sent men to the moon with tons and tons of vacuum-tube and discrete-transistor analog technology. And quite a heap of mainframe computer technology as well.
We couldn't have done it without the computer. But we did it without what 80% of the people at random would think you meant by the word 'computer' today.
Judging by how slow American car manufacturers have been to adopt the level of automation found in Japanese plants, I would say we have a whole lot of trade unions here in the US.
Nowhere in my post did I say that year old PCs are 'roadkill'. Hardware Review websites need to review hardware that is actually available at vendors, not hardware that's a year old and hasn't been available for six months. I bought a new Pentium III motherboard a month ago. I figured "what the heck, you already spent your $$ on it" and went to Tom's to see what the pundits would have to say.
The only review was of the previous generation of motherboarboard. A review dated back last fall.
If Tom's Hardware only aims to review hardware available solely at places like www.computersurplusoutlet.com it should be made clear up front on the site.
BTW- 486's are good for lots of things. I have tons of them. And five generations of Pentiums too. All have their value.
The only problem with your statement is: Linux is not POSIX compliant. It's kinda-sorta compliant.
One of the 'big guns' now supporting Linux should fund the efforts needed to get POSIX compliance for Linux. The problem is, then Linux developers would have to get a cluse in order to keep it compliant.
Recently in a newsgroup thread, the primary maintainer of the Bash project stepped into a discussion, where somebody was claiming that Bash was based on the POSIX shell spec., and admitted he didn't even have access to a copy of the POSIX standards. From my reading recently, a strong anti-standards bias seems to be built into the GNU community. There's a remarkable attitude that says "add it to the GNU version and everybody else will catch up eventually."
Sounds like Gnumerics is using 'embrace and extend' tactics.
This is also how irresponsible "journalists" (read: anybody with an HTML editor can make claims of being a journalist these days) like Blatt Grudge get taken down a few dozen notches.
If the site was updated every month it would be better than it is.
There are areas where the info is a year old. That's roadkillsville in the PC market.
Some have theorized that a tremendous amount of time is wasted by people futzing around, playing with the PC on their desk. Adding a new screensaver, changing the desktop in various ways, sending email to friends describing your cool new screensaver, and the new desktop setup you are using. All this eats up productivity time. I don't buy for a minute the gloatful 'theory' being bandied about here that it's because the machine crashes. None of the systems we use at my work are crash prone enough to be acutally affecting productivity to the degree implied in the article.
Perhaps a more locked-down Unix-type environment would improve productivity. Give people a desktop machine with a window manager locked into place, with a limited number of things to tweak. Make it impossible for them to write anywhere outside their home directory. Assign them an operating environment where they can't drag in games from home, except in glaringly obvious places like ~/bin.
Yep, that would eliminate quite a bit of fooling around. It would also make a lot of people hate working in a stiff unchangable Unix environment. (Of course, it's not fair to say it would have to be a Unix environment. A Windows NT desktop user with no administrator privledges can be locked down pretty tight as well.) Of course they would only hate it until they came to recognise that they were getting more done. The incurable tweaks and games players would quit. (yet another improvement in overall productivity!)
Oh yeah, and it would make all the sysadmins who read and participate on Slashdot into a elite. Cool, man!
Gack! Spare us the boilerplate lecture on the Virtues of Open Source and stop lecturing us like we are schoolchildren.
You can feed your family digging ditches. Or robbing banks for that matter.
Cryptography is a rarified branch of software development. A priesthood of crypto-folk definitely don't represent mainstream software developers. It's laughable if cryptography and a passel of re-written free Unix tools are all that can be pointed to as Open Source successes in the commercial world. But that's about it.
So, you're saying that any software that isn't Open Source(tm) and subjected to "peer review" is software that isn't good for anything?
First off, the concept of "peer review" comes from the academic sphere, where it is new ideas that are reviewed, not tarballs. Furthermore, the "peers" in the academic sphere are qualified and credentialed people. Not just a random ad-hoc meritocracy made up of the people who live online.
Second, there is a lot of good code out there which is only distributed in binary form, which is very well produced, and doesn't need to beg it's userbase to fix it.
You can have your little guilds of programmers if you like, and read each other's code with gusto, if that's what you enjoy doing. That doesn't mean you can crawl around in everybody else's code, nor does it mean your code is automatically better than theirs.
This is not an 'astroturfer' sentiment. It's the way a whole lot of code is written, distributed, and used. Not just code from Microsoft.
There's already a Posix layer for Windows (NT). It's not free, and it's not from Microsoft. (they have a crippled Posix subsystem by default).
Interix
He's going to wire-wrap the PCI buss, too.
heh
And humanity will have no need for more than five or six mainframe computer systems.
And nobody will ever use more than 640K of RAM.
And we have a final solution to stregnthen the strain.
whatever.
Yes, In-Win are presently the best cases I have been able to find. I have three of them now. The ATX models are sooo thick.
I typically will spend almost any extra amount needed to get the best case for a system. Since my cases traditionally get used for four or five generations of motherboards, it just makes sense.
Modern Plastic cases all still have to be coated on the inside with some form of metallic shielding. Which it's fairly certain will end up being rather opaque.
A clear computer case would have to be certified as meeting at a minimum Class A and probably Class B requirements for interference (Class B is more restrictive, for places where your neighbor is likely to want to listen to the radio, watch TV, etc.).
Individual computer enthusiasts can run their hardware unshielded and get away with it, because it most often probably isn't bothering anybody (or at least it isn't bothering anybody who has the means to figure out who the jerk with the unshielded PC is...) When it becomes a matter of mass marketing such things, the FCC will step in and you'll be dumping a lot of plastic in a landfill somewhere if you didn't plan your design properly.