> Once the LSB gets finished and accepted, then fragmentation will be fine
I'd agree here. There has to be a minimal set of standards - such as libraries and directory setup and services. After that, it's a matter of competition. The best applications win.
That being said, fragmentation does tend to scare off applications developers. Things get dicy when you're trying to test, and I'd hate to see a good application fail just because the developer(s) picked the wrong distribution.
I say keep him on, and then vote again after a couple more articles. I'm usually pretty good at slogging through this kind of writing, but the buzzword factor was so high I was having problems gleaning any real content. In the future though, if I decide he doesn't have anything interesting to say, I can just use the new nufty-difty filters and ignore his posts. Floats my boat.
Actually, the big names like IBM and HP are making claims of 99.99% up time (a little more than 50 minutes "unscheduled" down time per year), and some are even pushing the 99.999% point.
The funny part was that the article (in the April issue of Performance Computing) says that NT can barely reach 99% up time (that's 10 work days of unscheduled down time), which is why it's so laughable a choice for a data center server. I'm not sure though if they're comparing apples with apples (e.g., clustering servers).
Now all we need is for Rational to port over their "Rose" UML tools, and I could FINALLY dump that stupid NT box I've got chained around my neck at work!
I must admit though, even I'm getting tired of this stuff. Pretty sad. Sort of like the Y2K bug - I just wish we could get it over with and get on with our lives.
Does the job... for free. Got a problem with that?
> Your wife sound like a drooling idiot.
(*snicker*) You wish...
> A P166 is not a suitable box for NT.
Duh!
> A P2-400 is a good starting point for NT.
Helloooooo.... That's my point. NT and all the MS network services that go with it, are so bloated you have to buy a new computer every year just to keep even. However, when the machine's handed to you to do a job, you don't have much choice. If I could find a Linux OO UML Modeling tool, the NT would be gone in a heartbeat.
You're right, but I still think it's pretty amusing how many people think of themselves as "moderates", even when they are foaming at the mouth and calling names.
I suppose it's safe to say RHS doesn't think of himself as a moderate...
I think the previous poster was referring to Mr. Rose's testimony, or that of the various Microsoft representatives - i.e., lieing through their teeth again and again. The botched/faked videotape is another example.
Seems like the judge just keeps handing out more rope for MS to hang itself with...
There's more to contributing to Linux than writing kernel code. I just passed out 50 copies of the RH5.2 CD the other day where I work, along with boot floppies and a one page "Getting Started" sheet. (We were having an employee "Trade Show" at one of our quarterly meetings.) I don't know if that makes me a "lead Linux type", but it helps make more people aware of the alternatives to MS.
Like they say, if you don't like the articles, then don't whine about having to read them.
My son plays games on an old Win95 box I have at home. He'd like a faster processor (AMD5x86 133 == P75), but he doesn't care if it crashes. Windows is "good enough" for him.
My wife runs Juno, writes letters with MS Word 6 and makes greeting cards with some other package. She gets upset if it crashes and she loses work. In general, Win95 is "good enough" for her, but I think she'd appreciate something that didn't lock up so often. (It's a good thing she has a couple of computer experts in the house to bail her out every time Windows barfs.)
I'm stuck at work with a P166 with 64Meg RAM, running NT. I can't find UML modeling apps that run under Linux, so I have to use NT. IT'S A PIECE OF CRAP. I'm constantly waiting for it to respond, or rebooting, or screaming at it, or tearing out my hair.
It all depends on what you're doing, and how hard you push the OS. NT probably runs "good enough" on a 200MHz with 96Meg, but I could probably build a real kick-ass server running Linux on a box like that.
Don't waste your time reading this article.
on
Free the Open Source
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· Score: 1
> Your message, on the other hand, does a wonderful job of refuting the "crap" in the article...
Nothing there to refute... Hey, the guy does some name calling and dredges up the tired old, "This ain't a valid business model" drivel, but he has nothing new to say. I'll agree with you that there's plenty of shaking out to take place in the OSS development model, and we have yet to see how it scales on more and more complex projects, but ANYONE can tell you that. Again, this article does nothing more repeat the same old FUD we've been hearing all along.
In my experience, Win95 is better than Win3.1, but get some odd piece of hardware (read: more than a couple of years old) and you're SOL! Any OS is going to be difficult to install from scratch until you've done it a couple of times in different situations.
Has anyone else noticed that the Windows install is too brain dead to reinstall the boot loader??? I tried to install Win95 on a HD that I'd put Linux on before, and even after doing a FORMAT/S, it kept coming up with the LILO boot prompt.
I wonder if this might be interpreted to mean that corporatins that collect private information (everything from online surveys to magazine subscriptions to ISP applications) might need to get explicit permission before selling this information to Direct Marketing (a.k.a., SPAM) companies?
The one reasonable point where the ISP should be held liable would be security holes in their server that allow people to spoof posts. This would include lax control of accounts and passwords, and allowing people to hack into them.
(uh, I guess I should read the rest of the story first...)
It depends on the age, but the more REAL educators I talk to (i.e., the ones working with kids, not stuffy administrators in their ivory towers), the more I hear that kids should NOT be spending a lot of time in "Interactive Educational Programs" at a young age - meaning up to somewhere around 5th or 6th grade. Most software for that age does little more than teach kids to poke the mouse and follow tightly constrained scripts. No imagination or "interaction" involved.
They're OK for entertainment, but don't think you're teaching them creativity or reasoning. Reading them a book does 100X what any "educational software" can do at that age.
(By Junior High though, things change fast. I'm now wondering how to teach my 14 yr old Object Oriented Analysis and Design when they're handing out VB software at school!:-/ )
...playing my son at home, over scrounged ethernet cable/NIC's. He on the Win95, Me on Linux. Too bad running on the better OS doesn't prevent me from getting my ars whooped by that 14 yr old kid every time we play...;-)
Hummm... 12:30 to 2:04. So, they were down for an hour and a half. Worse than I would expect, but still not bad for a major company move. Had they been running NT, it'd probably take that long just to reboot the servers...;-)
Why don't they go to optical disk libraries? (I mean the big 14inch disks.)
I wonder about some of these time estimates though. Are they talking about the total time to copy all the tapes one at a time? Seems like they could just add more tape drives. The one bottleneck might be the fixed number of readers, since the formats are so old they can't buy new drives to read them...
(gack! The media loves to latch on to "disaster" stories.:-/)
Hey, actually, I think most ppl, including me cares if the computer crashes from time to time.
True enough, but I'm willing to bet you're the exception rather than the rule. Most people get upset when their game crashes (or their letter to Grandma is lost, or their latest checkbook updates get scrogged), but how many get upset enough to abandon their comfortable MS "womb"?
Don't get me wrong - home users will come in time, but it's going to take a while.
Given the general MS brainwashing of the public that exists now, is it any surprise that Linux is taking the server market by storm, while the desktop is lagging? It's the people who's jobs depend on maintainability and stability who are not afraid to look for alternatives. They recognize that a system coming down means an angry mob of users banging on your door with tar and feathers.
Face it, if you're sitting in front of a single user PC, doing email, Web surfing and running games, what do you care if your system crashes once in a while??? Linux will eventually make its way into that market, but not for a while.
First come the back room servers.
Then the workstations (people sitting all day long at desks doing design, CAD, high powered IT).
Last (but not least) Joe Schmoe running games at home.
(One possible twist in this - if networked games like Quake really take off, and Linux really runs these games over the Net faster because of better TCP/IP, then you could see that market really drive Linux. Just a thought...)
Funny... my experience here has been the opposite - the CompUSA service was better than the Computer City service, that was, until Computer City got bought out. However, I've always gone in there knowing pretty much what I wanted and how much I expected to pay for it.
Don't remember which store it was where the droid told me when I returned a DOA 8X CDROM drive that it wouldn't work because I was using it on a 486, which was too slow. (Heaven forbid that the drive might have been broken!) I then exchanged it for a new Creative 8X drive (for $10 less), which I took home and had it work first try.
Moral: Do your homework before you step foot in ANY compuer store.
I had a problem once where my ISP pulled some trick that broke my Linux PPP login, while my Win95 box continued to work. I tried to log directly into the server with minicom, and all I could get was a "Access Denied" error. The Win95 "dial-up networking" worked fine.
I complained, and after a week or so, the situation suddenly went away.
Go figure...
(There is a small chance this could have been related to the modem speed difference between the boxes, but I doubt it.)
Switch that the other way 'round - Linux will be popular when lots of people start writing games for it.
Anyone who says Windows is easy to install hasn't installed enough Windows systems! Your "Joe Average" computer user would be hopelessly lost on most installs on anything other than a carefully selected setup of the most recent hardware, precisely tuned for the OS. One little mistake and you're SOL.
Show two systems to an average user, one with Windows and one with Linux, and he will ask, "Can I run games?" and "Can I run word-processing and email?" in that order...
I can't see how any retailer could in clear conscience sell a system that they hadn't even tested! My guess is that they installed Win95, "just for testing", verified that all the hardware was working, and then blew away everything except the COMMAND.COM file (and perhaps some HW drivers). It's impossible to say if they paid M$ for the OS, or for that matter, if you paid for it burried in the cost of the system. I suspect though it was not a legal copy. Since you removed it right away, "All's well that ends well..." (i.e., M$ can't come after you for a pirated copy of the OS, and you can't go after M$ for the price of the unused software.)
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I'd agree here. There has to be a minimal set of standards - such as libraries and directory setup and services. After that, it's a matter of competition. The best applications win.
That being said, fragmentation does tend to scare off applications developers. Things get dicy when you're trying to test, and I'd hate to see a good application fail just because the developer(s) picked the wrong distribution.
I say keep him on, and then vote again after a couple more articles. I'm usually pretty good at slogging through this kind of writing, but the buzzword factor was so high I was having problems gleaning any real content. In the future though, if I decide he doesn't have anything interesting to say, I can just use the new nufty-difty filters and ignore his posts. Floats my boat.
The funny part was that the article (in the April issue of Performance Computing) says that NT can barely reach 99% up time (that's 10 work days of unscheduled down time), which is why it's so laughable a choice for a data center server. I'm not sure though if they're comparing apples with apples (e.g., clustering servers).
FWIW...
Now all we need is for Rational to port over their "Rose" UML tools, and I could FINALLY dump that stupid NT box I've got chained around my neck at work!
Not something I'd want to sink $61,000 into, but pretty cool nonetheless.
I must admit though, even I'm getting tired of this stuff. Pretty sad. Sort of like the Y2K bug - I just wish we could get it over with and get on with our lives.
Hummm... Runs Win95 just fine
> Juno is an email service for idiots.
Does the job... for free. Got a problem with that?
> Your wife sound like a drooling idiot.
(*snicker*) You wish...
> A P166 is not a suitable box for NT.
Duh!
> A P2-400 is a good starting point for NT.
Helloooooo.... That's my point. NT and all the MS network services that go with it, are so bloated you have to buy a new computer every year just to keep even. However, when the machine's handed to you to do a job, you don't have much choice. If I could find a Linux OO UML Modeling tool, the NT would be gone in a heartbeat.
I suppose it's safe to say RHS doesn't think of himself as a moderate...
Seems like the judge just keeps handing out more rope for MS to hang itself with...
Like they say, if you don't like the articles, then don't whine about having to read them.
(BTW, how does flaming MS help MS???)
My wife runs Juno, writes letters with MS Word 6 and makes greeting cards with some other package. She gets upset if it crashes and she loses work. In general, Win95 is "good enough" for her, but I think she'd appreciate something that didn't lock up so often. (It's a good thing she has a couple of computer experts in the house to bail her out every time Windows barfs.)
I'm stuck at work with a P166 with 64Meg RAM, running NT. I can't find UML modeling apps that run under Linux, so I have to use NT. IT'S A PIECE OF CRAP. I'm constantly waiting for it to respond, or rebooting, or screaming at it, or tearing out my hair.
It all depends on what you're doing, and how hard you push the OS. NT probably runs "good enough" on a 200MHz with 96Meg, but I could probably build a real kick-ass server running Linux on a box like that.
Nothing there to refute... Hey, the guy does some name calling and dredges up the tired old, "This ain't a valid business model" drivel, but he has nothing new to say. I'll agree with you that there's plenty of shaking out to take place in the OSS development model, and we have yet to see how it scales on more and more complex projects, but ANYONE can tell you that. Again, this article does nothing more repeat the same old FUD we've been hearing all along.
Has anyone else noticed that the Windows install is too brain dead to reinstall the boot loader??? I tried to install Win95 on a HD that I'd put Linux on before, and even after doing a FORMAT /S, it kept coming up with the LILO boot prompt.
Duh...
(Well, one can deram...)
(uh, I guess I should read the rest of the story first...)
They're OK for entertainment, but don't think you're teaching them creativity or reasoning. Reading them a book does 100X what any "educational software" can do at that age.
(By Junior High though, things change fast. I'm now wondering how to teach my 14 yr old Object Oriented Analysis and Design when they're handing out VB software at school! :-/ )
...playing my son at home, over scrounged ethernet cable/NIC's. He on the Win95, Me on Linux. Too bad running on the better OS doesn't prevent me from getting my ars whooped by that 14 yr old kid every time we play... ;-)
So, what are you whining about?
I wonder about some of these time estimates though. Are they talking about the total time to copy all the tapes one at a time? Seems like they could just add more tape drives. The one bottleneck might be the fixed number of readers, since the formats are so old they can't buy new drives to read them...
(gack! The media loves to latch on to "disaster" stories. :-/)
True enough, but I'm willing to bet you're the exception rather than the rule. Most people get upset when their game crashes (or their letter to Grandma is lost, or their latest checkbook updates get scrogged), but how many get upset enough to abandon their comfortable MS "womb"?
Don't get me wrong - home users will come in time, but it's going to take a while.
Face it, if you're sitting in front of a single user PC, doing email, Web surfing and running games, what do you care if your system crashes once in a while??? Linux will eventually make its way into that market, but not for a while.
- First come the back room servers.
- Then the workstations (people sitting all day long at desks doing design, CAD, high powered IT).
- Last (but not least) Joe Schmoe running games at home.
(One possible twist in this - if networked games like Quake really take off, and Linux really runs these games over the Net faster because of better TCP/IP, then you could see that market really drive Linux. Just a thought...)Don't remember which store it was where the droid told me when I returned a DOA 8X CDROM drive that it wouldn't work because I was using it on a 486, which was too slow. (Heaven forbid that the drive might have been broken!) I then exchanged it for a new Creative 8X drive (for $10 less), which I took home and had it work first try.
Moral: Do your homework before you step foot in ANY compuer store.
I complained, and after a week or so, the situation suddenly went away.
Go figure...
(There is a small chance this could have been related to the modem speed difference between the boxes, but I doubt it.)
Anyone who says Windows is easy to install hasn't installed enough Windows systems! Your "Joe Average" computer user would be hopelessly lost on most installs on anything other than a carefully selected setup of the most recent hardware, precisely tuned for the OS. One little mistake and you're SOL.
Show two systems to an average user, one with Windows and one with Linux, and he will ask, "Can I run games?" and "Can I run word-processing and email?" in that order...