You are right, but at the same time I think companies should offer plans for people to get a decent upload speed and static ips. I want to run a server at home, but can't! I currently pay 50 dollars a month just for a dedicated server to run Enemy Territory and a few websites. I'd love to throw that on hardware in my home. It would certainly speed up my ping rate! Now if the hosting company can make money on me at 50 dollars a month, why can't charter? 50 dollars plus the 100 i pay them for cable and internet should certainly cover 3mb down and even 512kb upstream with the 1 static ip i would need. I can nat out the rest from my freebsd machine.
Geeks have special requirements and i'm tired of getting the same packages and treatment as my mother in law.
Maybe you could add a usb ethernet device to it.. it wouldn't make it a super fast router, but if that was just connected to a cable modem or dsl model it would work good enough for casual use.
I dont' think the palm was that revolutionary. There were several pdas before the palm with similar features. Ever looked at the apple newton?
I think NeXT did a lot of things in a new way. It was a succesful Mach based kernel. It has the most useful user interface i've ever used on a computer. It was fast! We've got a NeXT system at my university that was donated to the visualization group. Its only got a 33mhz processor and 24mb ram, but it blows my iBook G4 out of the water running essentially the same programs. Now if you try to compile code on it, thats very slow. If you don't believe me, look at the influence of NeXT on computing. We have Mac OS X, WindowMaker and Afterstep, GNUStep, and even GNU HURD/GNU Mach is an attempt at duplication of the kernel that worked in NeXTSTEP. WindowMaker is the official window manager.. etc. Stallman is trying to be like steve jobs people!
I disagree completely. Compared to the lame intel video cards found in most low end laptops from other vendors, i think a radeon 9200 32mb card is nice. Plus, unlike pcs macs don't need as good of cards for gaming. The limitation is the cpu speed and memory actually. My system's video card is supported by world of warcraft, enemy territory, etc. I have a first gen iBook G4 with the same card they ship now. I wouldn't mind a memory bump, but in laptop territory its not bad.
You are right, but i think the other fueling factor is the comments us Mac users get about the PPC processors. I took an engineering class at my university two semesters back. I had my nifty ibook g4 booted up and the whole time the professor insulted me because i picked a losing processor/company. Apple's are bad he said.. because they have outdated, slow, sub standard processors and their os hasn't changed in 20 years.
I happen to be a pc and Mac user, but I still felt angry. I've always thought risc processors were a cool idea. Without getting into that, I'll finish my story.
The last week of the semester, I looked at him and pointed out how misinformed he was. My mac does not run the tired old operating system that you claim it does, but rather a unix derivative based on NeXTSTEP called Mac OS X. You engineers don't know anything about software. As for your argument about the chip, I'm sure Intel, AMD and IBM can all make decent chips. If not, surely apple would have died years ago like you suggest. In the mean time, i'll watch my stock price go up.
Idiots like that cause the problem. Those same idiots might switch because they believe in Intel and not Microsoft. So I guess there is a positive to this processor following thing.. for anyone that apple loses, there will be an intel peon who wants to be free from viruses and is too stupid to install Linux.
I think the real problem is the ISPs. Internet service providers have these spammers as customers. Not only the spammers themselves but also the companies they spam for. There is no law that says you have to take a customer. It would be cheaper to not take these customers and save their bandwith.
DDOS attacking is not the answer; taking their network connection is!
Here's the deal. The new versions of KDE or gnome require some real hardware. You can't run them on old machines typically. Open source is just like closed source software. As newer versions come out, they get bigger. Now KDE and gnome deveropers are trying to fix some performance problems, but as of now its not worth your effort to use them.
Unforutnetely, they are the most user friendly desktop environments for linux and unix. Ease of use someone equals bloat.
Ubuntu only comes with Gnome. There is another project called kubuntu (spelling?) that uses KDE instead of gnome.
For beginners i tend to recommend KDE if they have a fast enough computer. Its the most like windows, and contains applications that emulate everything you would do in windows. (cd burning, word processing, browsing, etc)
The linux kernel is very fast on older hardware. (even 2.6 kernels usually) The problem lies with all the stuff you put on top of it.
Lastly, it might not be bad to use Windows 2000 or even NT4 SP6 on older hardware. Windows is only 1 cd and not 4 cds like many modern Linux distors.. fedora and suse come to mind... granted you can run some smaller distors but they tend to be hard to use. (ubuntu is probably the exception) I think ubuntu is hard to install for a beginner though. For example, the default action is to delete everything on the computer. Someone who wants to try linux doesn't want to delete windows.
Also, to help with the KDE and gnome confusion: 1. fedora == gnome (maybe kde with it but not recommended) 2. ubuntu == gnome 3. kubuntu == KDE 4. suse == KDE (think gnome is there too) 5. gentoo == NONE (you have to manually install everything from a text environment)...
Also, a window manager is just a program that runs on top of X11 to help you manage windows. it lets you close them, maybe view a list of them in some way, controls the appearance of the close and minimize buttons, etc. There are a lot of these types of programs and many people feel strongly about what they use. I've used KDE, Gnome, windowmaker, xfce (briefly), enlightenment, twm, and fvwm. I've also used CDE in solaris.
KDE and Gnome are good for beginners because you can easily get help with them on the internet and they include a bunch of software to get you started. Its hard for some to install software in linux or unix. xfce has potential and its not to hard to use. I wouldn't recommend any of the others for beginners.
Actually nvidia has binary drivers for freebsd. I've been seriously considering purchasing one of their older chipsets (5500 or so). I figure its probably supported ok with the binary drivers. I do have linux compatibility enabled using the redhat 9 libraries.
This is very interesting because I never realized the parallels between RSS and HTML standards. Consider all the changes between the various HTML standards. Considering this is slashdot, I won't go into extreme detail. A little reading on w3.org, etc. will clarify for those that do no know.
The w3 refactored HTML 4.01 into XHTML 1.0 using XML instead of SGML. This is similar to the RDF to standard XML change in RSS. Then, the w3 modularized XHTML 1.0 Strict into XHTML 1.1, similar to the back and forth element changes between the.9x versions of RSS. Next, the w3 released XTHML 2.0 which is not HTML any longer. They try yet again to get rid of the image tag, and it hasn't worked before why now? You can't have web pages without images, and browsers don't support XHTML 2 yet. This change is like the RSS 1.0 spec in RDF.
Personally, I'd like to see an RDF feed because the idea of RDF is neat. I currently use the RSS 2 feed because I figured it was popular, and out of confusion didn't know what else to do. I may look at atom. I need this for open source blogging software i'm writing.
The various streams of RSS feeds in different formats make writing an RSS feed parser like a browser. You have to deal with a ton of different formats. Its the authors fault and individuals faults for wanting a popular standard enhanced for their special cases. I still know people that author in HTML 2.0 or that ISO version of HTML.
Lastly, while the short answer is that we don't have compatible standards, I'd like to point out its XML. Maybe the standards people could create some XSLT documents to convert their bastardized RSS formats into bastardized XHTML/HTML format. 2 bastards are better than one.:)
In all seriousness, I think the father of the iPod is the Newton. There are definite similarities. Look at some of the newer features that have been added over time via firmware upgrades. My iPod has notes, books in text format, addresses and my calendar! Now if apple could find away to let me edit them, I would not need my 20 dollar palm zire anymore.:)
Well i don't know about Mac machines (i have one but its os x), but both my ati cards are VERY broken with xorg. Short answer.. any recent ati radeon card will not be accelerated with 3d at all and little with 2d (if any). There's a reason linux users on pcs try to get the awful ati binary driver to work. I'm effected badly because i happen to use FreeBSD so i'm in the same boat you're in.. no binary driver.
Every release of xorg has brought in more bugs and now my firegl card actually freezes the machine with 6.82 xorg. (its a radeon 8800 chipset) My radeon 9600 xt all in wonder isn't even detected automatically, and i've tried to get them to add the pci id.. they refuse. On the up side, the recent version seems to work well with windowmaker.91 and gnome 2.10 (i dont use them together)
The only other "advantage" is the font rendering system seems to be rather good in xorg. They have done some work in that area.
My opinion is that xFree86 is more stable and xorg is bleeding edge. Most BSD and linux distors have switched or are in the process of it though. If you don't come on board, you'll have compatibility issues down the road. I don't care about the license issue, but i do care about the software working.
Thats how microsoft thinks. You can't move content to another computer because in their mind its like software. You have to have a license for each device (computer,etc) that you want to play it on. Its not like a CD that i can put into a new cd player when my old one breaks.
I disagree with DRM in general, but in this case we need Apple style drm where you can use it in up to 5 computers at a time. I don't even care if it goes on the internet to check i'm not using it in two places at once.
This issue brings up two points. Whats fair use for content and whats technically possible. Most people have a problem with fair use.
Example. I pre ordered Jewel's last cd which included a few tracks only available on windows media player. My main computer was a mac. I couldn't use the mac windows media player because of drm missing features. My windows pc hard drive died two weeks later and upon reparing/reinstalling i found i could not play the files. (i did have backups) The server was taken down and they wouldn't let you acquire another license. Limited time only is right. I had planned on recording the audio with my sound card to a mp3 file but hadn't had time. I lost the advantage of my pre-order. This is why people hate drm.
Yeah but what about people like me that use normal PC monitors on macs. Its a lot cheaper. The new monitors will have the DRM stuff built in. The up side is if i dual boot those new Mactel boxes with xp, i'll be set. The down side is that a 3rd party could add software to macs to detect those monitors and then add software to quicktime to downsample just like microsoft is doing!
You are right to a degree. End users don't use linux and therefore the idiots who click on sites and emails to install spyware (or download kazaa etc) don't get access to linux.
I bet if linux was the number one platform, you'd see linux at 80%. Why? Users must be able to install software on their own machines (home). Its like the Macintosh problem. My ibook makes me type in my account password to sudo (as i have admin) to install a package. If i were an idiot or typical user i would blindly install game x or screensaver Y and i'd type my password to do it. Maybe the ie auto install bs would be stopped.. but patching fixes that problem.
What i'd like to see is all open source systems with binary patching of kernel and userland software. I think the linux community is overall better in this regard than many other OSS systems, but its not user friendly enough. One or two distros have a lamer friendly system.. but others do not. The bsd systems are by far the worst in this regard. The only reliable solution is to cvsup and rebuild your OS from scratch to stay current. The only advantage is that you know the world is safe then.
Swap microsoft and ANY os and you'd see spyware for the platform at the highest level. All systems have holes! I think this is why we need better permissions models for file systems, applications, and even kernel modules. There should be multiple levels of security layered to prevent attacks. (least privledge principles)
Obviously the key problem from my rambling is the users, and education is the only answer. If abc, fox news, bbc and any other news soure ran regular pieces about computers and personal responsiblility i think some users would conform and patch! They sure point fingers during worms.. why not tell people kazaa contains spyware? I think thats worth noting.
I don't care if it adds "options". I want my games to run that I bought today! I had to upgrade to a g4 processor to run newer games and software. Now apple tells me i can't run them anymore on a new mac!
In the Mac market, this breaks the "it just works" philosophy that Mac users expect.
My rule of thumb is to buy games for my Mac instead of my pc so that more games are ported to the Mac. I've found that during OS upgraded my games are less likely to break. Its like buying a game for a console because you know a hardware revision won't break it. (except xbox, early genesis consoles and the super nes with super street fighter 2)
From a user perspective, its unacceptible that the new systems can't emulate support for our software. I understand from a developer perspective.
Look at it this way, if apple's claims that Intel chips are truely superior in every way are true, then PPC G4 emulation should be trivial. I don't buy it though. My dual xeon 2.0 ghz vs my wife's dual 867mhz g4 don't show a huge difference. Both perform better in certain tasks/uses. I'm not talking about using windows per se either.. i mean a linux or bsd test. Flat out my box wins on integer number crunching or video compression but gaming.. huh. World of warcraft is much more responsive on her machine. (ping, rendering, etc) She's got an aftermarket radeon 9800 128mb 4x agp and i have a AIW radeon 9600 xt 128mb at 8x agp. Sure its not a precise test, but its certainly what end users would care about. Same holds true for enemy territory, RTCW, and several other games. The video cards aren't that different.
I buy hp inkjets for the fact the print head was replaced each time! I had two canon's die from bad print heads.. the first one i had repaired for over 100 dollars (1995). This is terrible!
If only that would work... i have to fight with users to remove spyware and adware at work. Why? Because they think the crap gives added value. I've been half tempted to write an open source weather checker / sticky note / calendar / whatever for windows just to give them something free thats not spyware ridden!
People don't care if others know their credit card, email address, what websites they go to. Its sad.
It all depends on your experiences with dell. We just purchased 55 new gx280 systems (tiny models.. not mid towers). In two days of use, we've had our first causality of war. Our laptops usually get 2-3 new motherboards on a 2-3 year contract along with at least 1 new hard drive. This is a univeristy environment and i work for the division of student affairs which includes hall directors, student works, dean of students, etc.
We do have some dell desktops that have been in service 4-5 years, but anything bought in the last 2-3 years has already died or needed a serious repair (motherboard, hard drive, power supply, etc). By serious, i mean it took the box down where it was unusable by the user for a few days.
We buy optiplex, latitude and a few inspiron systems only.
In contrast, if you buy a precision workstation product they tend to last 5 years. The computer labs at the engineering college have great boxes and some are easily 5 years old still kicking away. It depends if you buy high end, low end, experimental or something like those mini 280s that don't have enough vents!
Overall i'd say dell is better than most pc vendors, but not as good as apple. The macs in the newspaper at my university are very reliable and many are blue and white g3's still! Our macs are always retired for speed reasons.
Its not windows fud either, its PC fud! In reality its irrelivent because we are all stuck with Intel's crappy heritage. Long live intel:( Die amd.. you try to innovate. Die ibm.. apple doesn't want your superior chip... die Sun.. you outsourced your chips to fujitsu. You can say all day long that pcs are faster, and maybe its true but i can tell if unix/linux is running on a risc chip.. and i'll take it any day of the week.
As for your software comments, i think the issue is that most mac users will sit on an OS version for as long as possible. You can't buy new mac software if you don't upgrade. Look at all the requires mac os 10.4 products already! Read system requirements on new mac stuff.. 10.3.x or better at least. Thats not a lot of upgrade room. Sure its the last major version, but windows 2000 is the last major version and its 5 years old! There's still software for it thats new. Personally i always like to run the latest OS on my systems possible.. OS X, Windows, Linux (kernel) or FreeBSD.
Hmm.. NeXT vs OSX. I think the NEXTSTEP user interface was cleaner, and allowed the user to focus on the task at hand. When using a NeXT machine, I don't think about the operating system. Everything is exactly where I think it would be. I realize that is quite a bold statement, consider how nice OS X (especially tiger) is.
I've never used an amiga, but I've used every OS you mentioned. I'll try to explain based on your experience. On a NeXT system, the file system resembles OS X to some degree. You actually have an applications folder in your home directory as well as the root file system. ( as i recall it was named different) Everything is centered around your home directory. Granted, you could do this in OS X or Linux but it doesn't feel natural.
You mentioned linux, but I don't know if you used X11 and what window manager you used. If you tried windowmaker or afterstep then you have a vague idea what NEXTSTEP was like. WindowMaker feels hollow. I've actually found several apps with GNUstep addons that don't fit together but give you finder, desktop, terminal and other ports of the NeXT system at least. Finder is not what you think it is.. its actually more like spotlight + sherlock in its own way.
The NeXT machine I used had several modifications to the system so I don't know what came with the OS. The box had gcc, netscape, and several other apps on it. (even Lotus) It felt like a BSD more than OS X does. OS X feels like a bastardized linux under the hood. Too much GNU stuff. I'm installing Linux right now, so don't take it that way.. i just linux to be linux and everything else not to be.
I'm rambling.. bad slashdot user!
To be consise: 1. NeXT had a simple look and feel. The gui did not attract your attention more than data. (OS X is a bit flashy)
2. NeXT was FAST! I'm writing this on a Ibook G4 and this this is dog slow with Tiger. The NeXT machine i used was like 33 mhz (or 25?) and had 24mb of ram and a 600mb scsi disk. For the time, it was amazing but it is actually faster than my ibook in terms of ui responsiveness.
3. NeXT was simple. For example, the login screen acted a lot like gnome's. No buttons, etc. The last version was more like OS X from my understanding.
I've gone on to long to talk about specific apps, etc. I do like the networking better in NeXTSTEP. It suppored several network protocols including netware. I'd love to have that at work. I also like the fact it had the ability to interact with any database product of the time. You could write a database app fast.. similar to WebObjects Enterprise modeler stuff. Programming was simple!
That being said, I love two things about OS X better than any other OS.. spotlight and the dock. (it just works is always nice too)
Yeah the WAF is annoying. In my case, I got lucky and married a computer geek. She's a mac user so the idea of buying a NeXT or even a Sparc isn't a big deal to her. Now convincing her to let me buy a new PC is rather difficult. She doesn't understand why I want to run BSD, Linux or Windows. I guess the WAF is a constant.. just what the wife deems acceptible changes by circumstance. Someone should study this from a safe distance...
You can.. its called Ebay. I bought a sparcstation 2 for 30 dollars including shipping last year. (keyboard and mouse included) It has one of those early sun laser mice that required the special mouse pad.:)
Now a next system on ebay runs at least 99 dollars and shipping is expensive. I did find a site (forgot uri) that sells refurb next machines.
I've also got a chance to play with one at my university. Seems the bought a lab full and one of the professors had been saving one in the electrical engineering department. They wouldn't let him use it on the network anymore so he donated it to the visualization group. My wife is a member and I got a chance to play with it and actually i hacked into it. Seems he had forgotten the password. We didn't have the install media anymomre.
A NeXT machine is amazing. Even though OS X is based on it, i'd rather have a next any day of the week. Now if only i could get the 99 dollars for ebay...
You may not need video drivers, but some people are legally blind but can still see a little. I had a history professor who could not drive and had mr. magoo glasses. He had to hold up tests and quizes up to his face to read them, but he still functioned. He would have great difficulty using a screen most of the time, but it would still be useful to have video for certain things.
Also, I do a website for a blind business owner. He has his secretary look at the site, etc. Sometimes she looks at his computer to help him. In that case, basic VESA video support would be nice. Interesting thing is that he actually coded his original website before i took over. He still does updates. Not to bad at html actually. He has some trouble with css properties but i think thats understandable! In this case, he lost his sight during his teens so he has an idea what a box is or colors.
I personally think a linux or bsd would be a great base and then a totally customized X11 system with a specialized window manager would do the trick. The real time would need to be put into the navigation system, web browser, text editor and word processing software. It would be nice if someone thought outside the box and made other types of software like accounting software (quickbooks type stuff) etc. I'm amazed what a blind person can do.
The guy uses windows with some very expensive software. He told me it was 20,000 dollars for a dell customzied with the software. The reason is that the software isn't expensive, but customizing it for the setup need by that person is. If someone could design an interface that allowed the blind person to migrate settings or do it themselves it would save them a lot of money!!!!!
Re:This really was a pointless act by the EU
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Windows XP N a Bust
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I'd like to remove components from xp completely like outlook express. Sure it "removes" the icon but its still there.
On the flip side though, one could argue that you should use another "clean" operating system like gentoo.
It all comes down to choice. I don't like my windows install's extras very much, but I love them on my mac. And I wish there was a bsd that had a destkop install out of the box without installing 600 ports. (PC-BSD might be an option once its out of beta)
You must not have an Apple Macintosh then. Run top sometime in OSX.. trust me.. it uses a lot of swap. My computer (ibook g4) uses a lot of swap because it does not have enough ram (256mb is not enough for 10.4...) Apple never puts enough ram in any of their products and therefore these products will need swap. My wife has 1.25 gb of ram in her dual g4 and even that uses swap space. Its how modern operating systems work!
Its NOT a freebsd kernel.. thats the most common mistake people make. Its a freebsd userland but its a Mach kernel! FreeBSD is a monolithic kernel! I know because i have machines running both here now. Look at the source code to darwin and you'll see C++ code in the kernel.. now look at the freebsd kernel.. note its C code (well assembly in both too). Its not the same kernel. They did use some freebsd code in their kernel for memory management and network related things. Thats different than being the SAME kernel.
After these mistakes its hard to believe your other stats at face value. I'll certainly research flash drives, and i'm sure their better now than in the past. Hard drives are better than in the past. As many have pointed out, i'm not sure about speed though.
Also, don't ask why i'm on slashdot.. thats silly. Just because I dont' believe that flash drives are glorious pieces of engineering doesn't mean i dont' belong on slashdot.. thats a serious Troll comment.
Seriously, its possible for a hard drive to have a lot of writes. Log files, swap space, patches, virus patch updates, etc. A lot of writes happen on modern computers. I've even read articles about people booting computers with flash memory as routers but they had to make sure/var and/tmp were memory disks because it would kill the flash memory in 3 months. (logs alone!)
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You are right, but at the same time I think companies should offer plans for people to get a decent upload speed and static ips. I want to run a server at home, but can't! I currently pay 50 dollars a month just for a dedicated server to run Enemy Territory and a few websites. I'd love to throw that on hardware in my home. It would certainly speed up my ping rate! Now if the hosting company can make money on me at 50 dollars a month, why can't charter? 50 dollars plus the 100 i pay them for cable and internet should certainly cover 3mb down and even 512kb upstream with the 1 static ip i would need. I can nat out the rest from my freebsd machine.
Geeks have special requirements and i'm tired of getting the same packages and treatment as my mother in law.
Maybe you could add a usb ethernet device to it.. it wouldn't make it a super fast router, but if that was just connected to a cable modem or dsl model it would work good enough for casual use.
I dont' think the palm was that revolutionary. There were several pdas before the palm with similar features. Ever looked at the apple newton?
I think NeXT did a lot of things in a new way. It was a succesful Mach based kernel. It has the most useful user interface i've ever used on a computer. It was fast! We've got a NeXT system at my university that was donated to the visualization group. Its only got a 33mhz processor and 24mb ram, but it blows my iBook G4 out of the water running essentially the same programs. Now if you try to compile code on it, thats very slow. If you don't believe me, look at the influence of NeXT on computing. We have Mac OS X, WindowMaker and Afterstep, GNUStep, and even GNU HURD/GNU Mach is an attempt at duplication of the kernel that worked in NeXTSTEP. WindowMaker is the official window manager.. etc. Stallman is trying to be like steve jobs people!
I disagree completely. Compared to the lame intel video cards found in most low end laptops from other vendors, i think a radeon 9200 32mb card is nice. Plus, unlike pcs macs don't need as good of cards for gaming. The limitation is the cpu speed and memory actually. My system's video card is supported by world of warcraft, enemy territory, etc. I have a first gen iBook G4 with the same card they ship now. I wouldn't mind a memory bump, but in laptop territory its not bad.
You are right, but i think the other fueling factor is the comments us Mac users get about the PPC processors. I took an engineering class at my university two semesters back. I had my nifty ibook g4 booted up and the whole time the professor insulted me because i picked a losing processor/company. Apple's are bad he said.. because they have outdated, slow, sub standard processors and their os hasn't changed in 20 years.
I happen to be a pc and Mac user, but I still felt angry. I've always thought risc processors were a cool idea. Without getting into that, I'll finish my story.
The last week of the semester, I looked at him and pointed out how misinformed he was. My mac does not run the tired old operating system that you claim it does, but rather a unix derivative based on NeXTSTEP called Mac OS X. You engineers don't know anything about software. As for your argument about the chip, I'm sure Intel, AMD and IBM can all make decent chips. If not, surely apple would have died years ago like you suggest. In the mean time, i'll watch my stock price go up.
Idiots like that cause the problem. Those same idiots might switch because they believe in Intel and not Microsoft. So I guess there is a positive to this processor following thing.. for anyone that apple loses, there will be an intel peon who wants to be free from viruses and is too stupid to install Linux.
I think the real problem is the ISPs. Internet service providers have these spammers as customers. Not only the spammers themselves but also the companies they spam for. There is no law that says you have to take a customer. It would be cheaper to not take these customers and save their bandwith.
DDOS attacking is not the answer; taking their network connection is!
Here's the deal. The new versions of KDE or gnome require some real hardware. You can't run them on old machines typically. Open source is just like closed source software. As newer versions come out, they get bigger. Now KDE and gnome deveropers are trying to fix some performance problems, but as of now its not worth your effort to use them.
...
Unforutnetely, they are the most user friendly desktop environments for linux and unix. Ease of use someone equals bloat.
Ubuntu only comes with Gnome. There is another project called kubuntu (spelling?) that uses KDE instead of gnome.
For beginners i tend to recommend KDE if they have a fast enough computer. Its the most like windows, and contains applications that emulate everything you would do in windows. (cd burning, word processing, browsing, etc)
The linux kernel is very fast on older hardware. (even 2.6 kernels usually) The problem lies with all the stuff you put on top of it.
Lastly, it might not be bad to use Windows 2000 or even NT4 SP6 on older hardware. Windows is only 1 cd and not 4 cds like many modern Linux distors.. fedora and suse come to mind... granted you can run some smaller distors but they tend to be hard to use. (ubuntu is probably the exception) I think ubuntu is hard to install for a beginner though. For example, the default action is to delete everything on the computer. Someone who wants to try linux doesn't want to delete windows.
Also, to help with the KDE and gnome confusion:
1. fedora == gnome (maybe kde with it but not recommended)
2. ubuntu == gnome
3. kubuntu == KDE
4. suse == KDE (think gnome is there too)
5. gentoo == NONE (you have to manually install everything from a text environment)
Also, a window manager is just a program that runs on top of X11 to help you manage windows. it lets you close them, maybe view a list of them in some way, controls the appearance of the close and minimize buttons, etc. There are a lot of these types of programs and many people feel strongly about what they use. I've used KDE, Gnome, windowmaker, xfce (briefly), enlightenment, twm, and fvwm. I've also used CDE in solaris.
KDE and Gnome are good for beginners because you can easily get help with them on the internet and they include a bunch of software to get you started. Its hard for some to install software in linux or unix. xfce has potential and its not to hard to use. I wouldn't recommend any of the others for beginners.
Actually nvidia has binary drivers for freebsd. I've been seriously considering purchasing one of their older chipsets (5500 or so). I figure its probably supported ok with the binary drivers. I do have linux compatibility enabled using the redhat 9 libraries.
This is very interesting because I never realized the parallels between RSS and HTML standards. Consider all the changes between the various HTML standards. Considering this is slashdot, I won't go into extreme detail. A little reading on w3.org, etc. will clarify for those that do no know.
.9x versions of RSS. Next, the w3 released XTHML 2.0 which is not HTML any longer. They try yet again to get rid of the image tag, and it hasn't worked before why now? You can't have web pages without images, and browsers don't support XHTML 2 yet. This change is like the RSS 1.0 spec in RDF.
:)
The w3 refactored HTML 4.01 into XHTML 1.0 using XML instead of SGML. This is similar to the RDF to standard XML change in RSS. Then, the w3 modularized XHTML 1.0 Strict into XHTML 1.1, similar to the back and forth element changes between the
Personally, I'd like to see an RDF feed because the idea of RDF is neat. I currently use the RSS 2 feed because I figured it was popular, and out of confusion didn't know what else to do. I may look at atom. I need this for open source blogging software i'm writing.
The various streams of RSS feeds in different formats make writing an RSS feed parser like a browser. You have to deal with a ton of different formats. Its the authors fault and individuals faults for wanting a popular standard enhanced for their special cases. I still know people that author in HTML 2.0 or that ISO version of HTML.
Lastly, while the short answer is that we don't have compatible standards, I'd like to point out its XML. Maybe the standards people could create some XSLT documents to convert their bastardized RSS formats into bastardized XHTML/HTML format. 2 bastards are better than one.
In all seriousness, I think the father of the iPod is the Newton. There are definite similarities. Look at some of the newer features that have been added over time via firmware upgrades. My iPod has notes, books in text format, addresses and my calendar! Now if apple could find away to let me edit them, I would not need my 20 dollar palm zire anymore. :)
Well i don't know about Mac machines (i have one but its os x), but both my ati cards are VERY broken with xorg. Short answer.. any recent ati radeon card will not be accelerated with 3d at all and little with 2d (if any). There's a reason linux users on pcs try to get the awful ati binary driver to work. I'm effected badly because i happen to use FreeBSD so i'm in the same boat you're in.. no binary driver.
.91 and gnome 2.10 (i dont use them together)
Every release of xorg has brought in more bugs and now my firegl card actually freezes the machine with 6.82 xorg. (its a radeon 8800 chipset) My radeon 9600 xt all in wonder isn't even detected automatically, and i've tried to get them to add the pci id.. they refuse. On the up side, the recent version seems to work well with windowmaker
The only other "advantage" is the font rendering system seems to be rather good in xorg. They have done some work in that area.
My opinion is that xFree86 is more stable and xorg is bleeding edge. Most BSD and linux distors have switched or are in the process of it though. If you don't come on board, you'll have compatibility issues down the road. I don't care about the license issue, but i do care about the software working.
Thats how microsoft thinks. You can't move content to another computer because in their mind its like software. You have to have a license for each device (computer,etc) that you want to play it on. Its not like a CD that i can put into a new cd player when my old one breaks.
I disagree with DRM in general, but in this case we need Apple style drm where you can use it in up to 5 computers at a time. I don't even care if it goes on the internet to check i'm not using it in two places at once.
This issue brings up two points. Whats fair use for content and whats technically possible. Most people have a problem with fair use.
Example. I pre ordered Jewel's last cd which included a few tracks only available on windows media player. My main computer was a mac. I couldn't use the mac windows media player because of drm missing features. My windows pc hard drive died two weeks later and upon reparing/reinstalling i found i could not play the files. (i did have backups) The server was taken down and they wouldn't let you acquire another license. Limited time only is right. I had planned on recording the audio with my sound card to a mp3 file but hadn't had time. I lost the advantage of my pre-order. This is why people hate drm.
Yeah but what about people like me that use normal PC monitors on macs. Its a lot cheaper. The new monitors will have the DRM stuff built in. The up side is if i dual boot those new Mactel boxes with xp, i'll be set. The down side is that a 3rd party could add software to macs to detect those monitors and then add software to quicktime to downsample just like microsoft is doing!
You are right to a degree. End users don't use linux and therefore the idiots who click on sites and emails to install spyware (or download kazaa etc) don't get access to linux.
I bet if linux was the number one platform, you'd see linux at 80%. Why? Users must be able to install software on their own machines (home). Its like the Macintosh problem. My ibook makes me type in my account password to sudo (as i have admin) to install a package. If i were an idiot or typical user i would blindly install game x or screensaver Y and i'd type my password to do it. Maybe the ie auto install bs would be stopped.. but patching fixes that problem.
What i'd like to see is all open source systems with binary patching of kernel and userland software. I think the linux community is overall better in this regard than many other OSS systems, but its not user friendly enough. One or two distros have a lamer friendly system.. but others do not. The bsd systems are by far the worst in this regard. The only reliable solution is to cvsup and rebuild your OS from scratch to stay current. The only advantage is that you know the world is safe then.
Swap microsoft and ANY os and you'd see spyware for the platform at the highest level. All systems have holes! I think this is why we need better permissions models for file systems, applications, and even kernel modules. There should be multiple levels of security layered to prevent attacks. (least privledge principles)
Obviously the key problem from my rambling is the users, and education is the only answer. If abc, fox news, bbc and any other news soure ran regular pieces about computers and personal responsiblility i think some users would conform and patch! They sure point fingers during worms.. why not tell people kazaa contains spyware? I think thats worth noting.
I don't care if it adds "options". I want my games to run that I bought today! I had to upgrade to a g4 processor to run newer games and software. Now apple tells me i can't run them anymore on a new mac!
In the Mac market, this breaks the "it just works" philosophy that Mac users expect.
My rule of thumb is to buy games for my Mac instead of my pc so that more games are ported to the Mac. I've found that during OS upgraded my games are less likely to break. Its like buying a game for a console because you know a hardware revision won't break it. (except xbox, early genesis consoles and the super nes with super street fighter 2)
From a user perspective, its unacceptible that the new systems can't emulate support for our software. I understand from a developer perspective.
Look at it this way, if apple's claims that Intel chips are truely superior in every way are true, then PPC G4 emulation should be trivial. I don't buy it though. My dual xeon 2.0 ghz vs my wife's dual 867mhz g4 don't show a huge difference. Both perform better in certain tasks/uses. I'm not talking about using windows per se either.. i mean a linux or bsd test. Flat out my box wins on integer number crunching or video compression but gaming.. huh. World of warcraft is much more responsive on her machine. (ping, rendering, etc) She's got an aftermarket radeon 9800 128mb 4x agp and i have a AIW radeon 9600 xt 128mb at 8x agp. Sure its not a precise test, but its certainly what end users would care about. Same holds true for enemy territory, RTCW, and several other games. The video cards aren't that different.
I buy hp inkjets for the fact the print head was replaced each time! I had two canon's die from bad print heads.. the first one i had repaired for over 100 dollars (1995). This is terrible!
:(
Maybe i'll have to use laserjets now.
If only that would work... i have to fight with users to remove spyware and adware at work. Why? Because they think the crap gives added value. I've been half tempted to write an open source weather checker / sticky note / calendar / whatever for windows just to give them something free thats not spyware ridden!
People don't care if others know their credit card, email address, what websites they go to. Its sad.
It all depends on your experiences with dell. We just purchased 55 new gx280 systems (tiny models.. not mid towers). In two days of use, we've had our first causality of war. Our laptops usually get 2-3 new motherboards on a 2-3 year contract along with at least 1 new hard drive. This is a univeristy environment and i work for the division of student affairs which includes hall directors, student works, dean of students, etc.
:( Die amd.. you try to innovate. Die ibm.. apple doesn't want your superior chip... die Sun.. you outsourced your chips to fujitsu. You can say all day long that pcs are faster, and maybe its true but i can tell if unix/linux is running on a risc chip.. and i'll take it any day of the week.
We do have some dell desktops that have been in service 4-5 years, but anything bought in the last 2-3 years has already died or needed a serious repair (motherboard, hard drive, power supply, etc). By serious, i mean it took the box down where it was unusable by the user for a few days.
We buy optiplex, latitude and a few inspiron systems only.
In contrast, if you buy a precision workstation product they tend to last 5 years. The computer labs at the engineering college have great boxes and some are easily 5 years old still kicking away. It depends if you buy high end, low end, experimental or something like those mini 280s that don't have enough vents!
Overall i'd say dell is better than most pc vendors, but not as good as apple. The macs in the newspaper at my university are very reliable and many are blue and white g3's still! Our macs are always retired for speed reasons.
Its not windows fud either, its PC fud! In reality its irrelivent because we are all stuck with Intel's crappy heritage. Long live intel
As for your software comments, i think the issue is that most mac users will sit on an OS version for as long as possible. You can't buy new mac software if you don't upgrade. Look at all the requires mac os 10.4 products already! Read system requirements on new mac stuff.. 10.3.x or better at least. Thats not a lot of upgrade room. Sure its the last major version, but windows 2000 is the last major version and its 5 years old! There's still software for it thats new. Personally i always like to run the latest OS on my systems possible.. OS X, Windows, Linux (kernel) or FreeBSD.
Hmm.. NeXT vs OSX. I think the NEXTSTEP user interface was cleaner, and allowed the user to focus on the task at hand. When using a NeXT machine, I don't think about the operating system. Everything is exactly where I think it would be. I realize that is quite a bold statement, consider how nice OS X (especially tiger) is.
I've never used an amiga, but I've used every OS you mentioned. I'll try to explain based on your experience. On a NeXT system, the file system resembles OS X to some degree. You actually have an applications folder in your home directory as well as the root file system. ( as i recall it was named different) Everything is centered around your home directory. Granted, you could do this in OS X or Linux but it doesn't feel natural.
You mentioned linux, but I don't know if you used X11 and what window manager you used. If you tried windowmaker or afterstep then you have a vague idea what NEXTSTEP was like. WindowMaker feels hollow. I've actually found several apps with GNUstep addons that don't fit together but give you finder, desktop, terminal and other ports of the NeXT system at least. Finder is not what you think it is.. its actually more like spotlight + sherlock in its own way.
The NeXT machine I used had several modifications to the system so I don't know what came with the OS. The box had gcc, netscape, and several other apps on it. (even Lotus) It felt like a BSD more than OS X does. OS X feels like a bastardized linux under the hood. Too much GNU stuff. I'm installing Linux right now, so don't take it that way.. i just linux to be linux and everything else not to be.
I'm rambling.. bad slashdot user!
To be consise:
1. NeXT had a simple look and feel. The gui did not attract your attention more than data. (OS X is a bit flashy)
2. NeXT was FAST! I'm writing this on a Ibook G4 and this this is dog slow with Tiger. The NeXT machine i used was like 33 mhz (or 25?) and had 24mb of ram and a 600mb scsi disk. For the time, it was amazing but it is actually faster than my ibook in terms of ui responsiveness.
3. NeXT was simple. For example, the login screen acted a lot like gnome's. No buttons, etc. The last version was more like OS X from my understanding.
I've gone on to long to talk about specific apps, etc. I do like the networking better in NeXTSTEP. It suppored several network protocols including netware. I'd love to have that at work. I also like the fact it had the ability to interact with any database product of the time. You could write a database app fast.. similar to WebObjects Enterprise modeler stuff. Programming was simple!
That being said, I love two things about OS X better than any other OS.. spotlight and the dock. (it just works is always nice too)
Yeah the WAF is annoying. In my case, I got lucky and married a computer geek. She's a mac user so the idea of buying a NeXT or even a Sparc isn't a big deal to her. Now convincing her to let me buy a new PC is rather difficult. She doesn't understand why I want to run BSD, Linux or Windows. I guess the WAF is a constant.. just what the wife deems acceptible changes by circumstance. Someone should study this from a safe distance...
You can.. its called Ebay. I bought a sparcstation 2 for 30 dollars including shipping last year. (keyboard and mouse included) It has one of those early sun laser mice that required the special mouse pad. :)
Now a next system on ebay runs at least 99 dollars and shipping is expensive. I did find a site (forgot uri) that sells refurb next machines.
I've also got a chance to play with one at my university. Seems the bought a lab full and one of the professors had been saving one in the electrical engineering department. They wouldn't let him use it on the network anymore so he donated it to the visualization group. My wife is a member and I got a chance to play with it and actually i hacked into it. Seems he had forgotten the password. We didn't have the install media anymomre.
A NeXT machine is amazing. Even though OS X is based on it, i'd rather have a next any day of the week. Now if only i could get the 99 dollars for ebay...
You may not need video drivers, but some people are legally blind but can still see a little. I had a history professor who could not drive and had mr. magoo glasses. He had to hold up tests and quizes up to his face to read them, but he still functioned. He would have great difficulty using a screen most of the time, but it would still be useful to have video for certain things.
Also, I do a website for a blind business owner. He has his secretary look at the site, etc. Sometimes she looks at his computer to help him. In that case, basic VESA video support would be nice. Interesting thing is that he actually coded his original website before i took over. He still does updates. Not to bad at html actually. He has some trouble with css properties but i think thats understandable! In this case, he lost his sight during his teens so he has an idea what a box is or colors.
I personally think a linux or bsd would be a great base and then a totally customized X11 system with a specialized window manager would do the trick. The real time would need to be put into the navigation system, web browser, text editor and word processing software. It would be nice if someone thought outside the box and made other types of software like accounting software (quickbooks type stuff) etc. I'm amazed what a blind person can do.
The guy uses windows with some very expensive software. He told me it was 20,000 dollars for a dell customzied with the software. The reason is that the software isn't expensive, but customizing it for the setup need by that person is. If someone could design an interface that allowed the blind person to migrate settings or do it themselves it would save them a lot of money!!!!!
I'd like to remove components from xp completely like outlook express. Sure it "removes" the icon but its still there.
On the flip side though, one could argue that you should use another "clean" operating system like gentoo.
It all comes down to choice. I don't like my windows install's extras very much, but I love them on my mac. And I wish there was a bsd that had a destkop install out of the box without installing 600 ports. (PC-BSD might be an option once its out of beta)
You must not have an Apple Macintosh then. Run top sometime in OSX.. trust me.. it uses a lot of swap. My computer (ibook g4) uses a lot of swap because it does not have enough ram (256mb is not enough for 10.4...) Apple never puts enough ram in any of their products and therefore these products will need swap. My wife has 1.25 gb of ram in her dual g4 and even that uses swap space. Its how modern operating systems work!
Its NOT a freebsd kernel.. thats the most common mistake people make. Its a freebsd userland but its a Mach kernel! FreeBSD is a monolithic kernel! I know because i have machines running both here now. Look at the source code to darwin and you'll see C++ code in the kernel.. now look at the freebsd kernel.. note its C code (well assembly in both too). Its not the same kernel. They did use some freebsd code in their kernel for memory management and network related things. Thats different than being the SAME kernel.
After these mistakes its hard to believe your other stats at face value. I'll certainly research flash drives, and i'm sure their better now than in the past. Hard drives are better than in the past. As many have pointed out, i'm not sure about speed though.
Also, don't ask why i'm on slashdot.. thats silly. Just because I dont' believe that flash drives are glorious pieces of engineering doesn't mean i dont' belong on slashdot.. thats a serious Troll comment.
So you must not use swap space?
/var and /tmp were memory disks because it would kill the flash memory in 3 months. (logs alone!)
Seriously, its possible for a hard drive to have a lot of writes. Log files, swap space, patches, virus patch updates, etc. A lot of writes happen on modern computers. I've even read articles about people booting computers with flash memory as routers but they had to make sure