[Not referring to the article] Therein lies the problem. Windows users expect a GUI installer that requires no intellect, or action beyond clicking "Yes" "Yes" "Yes." And that's fine by me if we're talking software that we pay good money for.
But just because in the *nix world things are done differently, and at the same time Windows users are to damn lazy to learn anything new, this automatically mean that Linux is difficult to use? Just because Windows users find it difficult?
My point-n-shoot camera's viewfinder got dirty. I opened it to clean it out, and touched the capacitor for the flash light (12v). It knocked me unconcious and burned my hand.
Yeah, 12v can bite.
I also got shocked by a TV tube (36000v, if I'm not mistaken) - wasn't as bad as the camera.
Well, considering how many Athlons and Durons have been sold in recent years, I wouldn't think Dell would have a problem selling AMD based machines. Conpaq seem so sell enough to sustain their AMD lines.
I think a lot of people would be happy to pay Celeron prices to get a Duron based notebook, even if the Duron is actually cheaper per CPU. Same goes for the Sempron. It's a matter of choice, really.
I also don't why training shoud be an issue. Anyone who can assemble a PC/server in a professional way, already has the skill to do exactly the same thing with an AMD instead of an Intel. The work/care/know-how is no different.
Someone else in this discussion mentioned that Dell probably has some sort of deal with Intel that forbids them to use competing products (does that remind us of anyone?) - that's most likely the reason for not using AMD.
"A 1.5-gigahertz Intel Pentium 4 chip or AMD Athlon 1500."
They should really say in who's terms they're recommending 1.5ghz. If it's 1.5 P4 then a 1.x ghz P-III with enough RAM and a good graphics card would prabably run it playable too.
Can't say what the figures are, but I've replaced more Intel CPUs than AMDs. Not that that means anything. CPUs fail every now and then for various reasons, regardless of their perceived "quality." If you put an AMD chip on a quality motherboard you won't have problems with it. If you put an Intel chip on a crap motherboard your chances of having trouble increases dramatically.
"quality is measured in #/% defects"
While we're on the subject of "quality" let's not forget the pentium bug, shall we?
http://support.intel.com/support/processors/pent iu m/ppiie/ http://kuhttp.cc.ukans.edu/cwis/units/IP PBR/pentiu m_fdiv/pentgrph.html
I was talking about Passport. But the same applies, just on a different scale. Having only one password to different services, and having the password stored in or changed from one place is a security hazard as far as I'm concerned.
To use a simple anology, I have two bank accounts and a credit card. I have different pin numbers for each card. If I lose my wallet, and say I don't realise this for a couple of hours, someone might somehow figure out my pin and access one account. But he'll have to figure out the other pin numbers too before he can access the others. Now if I used the same number for all my cards, a person who figured out my one pin, will have access to all my accounts.
I couln't care less about who's hosting/providing it. With companies not even trusting their employees to bring in USB storage devices, why the hell should I trust my employer with anything?
Then again, I just reset a user's password. She couldn't remember her password (even after choosing it herself and using it the whole of yesterday). Guess what it was? Her maiden name.
Well I certainly don't want one password for everything, much less a very server which has the names of all the services that I use in. Right now I *can* have the same password for everything I use, and who would know. If someone breaks into my hotmail account, then that's about it, they broke into my hotmail account. They still don't know squat about any other services I might use.
Let users choose for themselves. But having one password and links to all the services I log into, stored by the company who almost only ever make news when another of their security vulnerabilites is discoverd, or they get sued over improper business practises, or they're trying to lie themselves out of loosing more market share, that's not for me.
Well, see, that's the only problem with WINE. If your app of choice is not completely supported, it might run slower or not at all.
In all fairness, it wasn't Steinberg's intention to have Cubase run on Linux, nor was it Linus' intention to write a kernel that would run Windows apps.
As for speed, some completely supported apps are really much faster. When Return to Castle Wolfenstein just came out, I couldn't play it in Windows (Celeron 500, 256mb, TNT2 16mb) - only got about 3-5 fps. Playing the windows binary in linux under WINE (the linux binary wasn't out yet) gave me a bout 9 fps on avarage, which made it *barely just* playable.
" yeah my 2.6 ghz Pentium 4 is really showing its age. Join Team Mozilla #38050 Folding@home"
Maybe if you switch off Folding@home you'll actually be able to experience the power of that CPU.
With enough memory there's no need for KDE to be slow. My housemate's P-II 300 with 256MB runs KDE quite nicely, even with OpenOffice and Mozilla both open. Definitely no "slower" than the Windows 2000 GUI
"Imagine that it's a bathtub overflowing, and the tap is in a locked metal box. Some of us could disassemble it and make a patch I'm sure, but I don't really trust any 1337 h4xx0r out there to modify my core OS components. It's easier to just make the bath bigger."
I didn't mean to say the Mozilla guys shouldn't plug the hole, but if the Mozilla guys have to keep pluggin holes by disabling stuff in Mozilla, don't you think that would end up affecting Mozilla in a negative way (aside from the bad publicity)?
"This situation is worse, in one big way, than the Internet Explorer issues; Mozilla users 'feel' safe. Non-techies that use Mozilla assume it's 'safe' because a geek once told them that this is the case."
Non-techies using IE, like my mother, feel safe too, just because Microsoft said it's OK. Such a big company with so many users can't be wrong, after all.
Despite the fact that her computer's gotten infected a couple of times already. Despite the fact that she refuses to do her Windows update (it takes so damn long over the modem). Despite the fact that her son (me) who works for an IT security company, have told her repeatedly not to use IE, and have made sure that she always has the latest Mozilla/FireFox and Opera installed.
On a slightly different but related topic. I am not a programmer, so this is just a guess. The same vulnerability that was discovered in Firefox and Mozilla, was discovered in IE too. Would the fact the vulnerability in Firefox and Mozilla only affected the Windows 2000/XP versions, and not the ones on other platforms, suggest that it might have been a vulnerability in windows rather than Mozilla? Sure, preventitive maintainance on Mozilla's side would prevent it from being expoited.
I just find it to be a bit like mopping the floor because the bathtub is overflowing, instead of closing the tap.
"Macs threaten the livelihood of IT staffs. If you recommend purchasing a computer that requires only half the support of the machine it is replacing, aren't you putting your job in danger? Exactly."
This is such rubbish. The company I work for are convincing our clients, one by one, to upgrade their Windows9x PCs to Windows2000/XP. Why? Because it doesn't break so easily, which means we're out there less often to fix it, which means they save money. And this has proven successful. We've cut the time we spend supporting in half in most cases.
So our clients save money, and don't loose anywhere as much time to computer related problems. And what about us? We have more time on hands, so we're supporting almost twice as many clients as before.
If I had my way all my clients would be running Macs with OSX. Considering how little trouble they give, and with each client signing a support contract, I'd barely have to work at all.
Well, for what it's worth, the ME installations we had wasn't OEM installations, they were full retail, I installed and configured them myself.
Windows ME is not any different from 98 except that they took away the boot into DOS option to make it look like it wasn't still running on DOS, added system restore (which didn't do much else but fill up your drive and seldom worked properly when you needed it to), and added a new skin.
I think a lot of the perceived problems with Windows ME is due to people expecting it to be the Windows 2000 for home users, not realising that it's still a completely different family of operating system.
As for drivers, I do not agree with you. Windows ME supports (like 98SE I think) WDM drivers, which, in my experience based opinion, tend to be more reliable than the old style 9x drivers. Most of the time the WDM driver will work both on Windows ME and 2000 all the same, except when there's a reason why the hardware won't work in 2000 to start with (like my Zoltrix TV-MAX*). I won't say *always* because I can't remember having run into any such trouble, so I don't know, because I can't remember.
"Earlier posters have ridiculed the idea that access to the internet can be useful to people in rural areas, since they don't speak English."
That's because they don't know what they talking about. Almost every person I've met, even in the rural areas, where one of my previous jobs took me all the time, could speak, or understand at least a little bit of English or Afrikaans. This is because English and Afrikaans have always been (and still is to a large extent, although that's changing) the dominant languages to do business in. Even if that business is buying a loaf of bread, or standing in line for an ID book or to register to vote in the election.
And for what it's worth, a look on the KDE website will teach you that translations are available for a number of languages spoken in South Africa: Afrikaans, Venda, Xhosa and Zulu. I'm sure more are at least under early development at our universities. This is enough to get someone going on a computer.
As for the internet, there are a many websites available in local languages. Even google provides support for Afrikaans, Sesotho, Xhosa and Zulu. And that covers a very large percentage of the population.
The idea of bringing internet to rural areas is not so that poor hungry unschooled people can check their stocks or CNN or whatever. It's rather to aid communication and provide access to educational facilities like UNISA (www.unisa.ac.za). Education is really what it's about.
"Seriously, wouldn't it be more pertinant to get most of the continent to the point where they have food and water and can farm, rather than get them wired?"
And have those who have already progressed past that stage leaving forever? Not everybody has both the will and the capability of progressing past basic survival.
No. chmod changes the permissions of files/directories. chown changes ownership. So he became root and changed to root's home directory at the same time (thanks to the - ). Then he changed ownership of all root's files to his normal user ID. Then he made all of root's (now his) files read,write,execute ONLY by him (under his normal ID) - although root should still be able to access it, being root.
Which is why I'm asking if something's vastly different in HPUX than Linux and the other *nix I've used. Like, root not having a home directory, and defaulting to / or something like that. OP, please elaborate!
Well, even most of the MS deciples agree that Windows ME wasn't all that. But strangely enough, two PCs in our family came with it, and on both WinME lasted about three years, before it was replaced with Win2k so that the family could use Skype. And both family members started out not knowing how to hold the mouse, let alone being smart about what not breaking Windows.
What's even more impressive is that, for the first three years, the one PC sat on power from a generator without any protection inbetween!
Both machines are identical though - Duron, Gigabyte board, Seagate disc, nVidia graphics, Creative sound, LG CD-ROMs, ect. All that's different really are the screens.
I guess good hardware does make a difference after all.
I've done the same thing when losing track of which server I'm working in (having multiple ssh connections to various machines to compare config files, ect.)
Knoppix would. Not the full on version with KDE 3.x, but some of the smaller knoppix projects would. Especially if it has mmx working for it too, even at 100mz.
Smallinux is a 50mb image - I use it on a 486DX2-66 with 16mb ram. Works fine with blackbox, I can listen to wav files, but I haven't tried mp3 and ogg - not sure if it would be fast enough. I remember my old DX4-100 16mb could just do mp3, but only if I wasn't trying to do anything at the same time.
We also have a 100mhz Pentium (no mmx there yet) notebook running vector linux with XFCE desktop (32mb RAM though). It can play mp3s and oggs fine with about 50% CPU usage while XFCE is running.
Here's a good way to prevent the virus from spreading through you whole network should one of your Windows PCs get compromised. We do this at all our clients, and we haven't had any trouble for a long time.
Install a personal firewall that allow you to define rules. They often come with antivirus packages (www.bitdefender.com has a nice one). Specify the following rules, in this order:
1. allow all outbound traffic on port 25 to your smtp server(s). If your firewall allows, and if everybody is using the same e-mail client, you can restrict it to that e-mail client.
2. Block all outbound traffic on port 25
3. Block all incoming traffic (unless there's some service running on this perticular PC, but that's seldom the case for office PCs)
4. Allow all outgoing traffic.
The beauty of this is, that if a Windows get infected with a virus/worm that uses its own smtp engine to send itself out, it won't be able to, so that infection is contained. Unless the virus/worm has the presence of mind to check your outlook settings and use your smtp settings - I haven't found one that does though.
Your clients will be able to surf/im/e-mail ect. without any trouble, and worms that come around looking for open ports, won't find any.
At home we have an old Toshiba Pentium 100 notebook with 40mb RAM. FireFox runs beautifully and fast enough for comfortable usage, even with 10 tabs open. Two instances of IE and that poor booklet grinds too a halt...
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[Not referring to the article] Therein lies the problem. Windows users expect a GUI installer that requires no intellect, or action beyond clicking "Yes" "Yes" "Yes." And that's fine by me if we're talking software that we pay good money for.
But just because in the *nix world things are done differently, and at the same time Windows users are to damn lazy to learn anything new, this automatically mean that Linux is difficult to use? Just because Windows users find it difficult?
My point-n-shoot camera's viewfinder got dirty. I opened it to clean it out, and touched the capacitor for the flash light (12v). It knocked me unconcious and burned my hand.
Yeah, 12v can bite.
I also got shocked by a TV tube (36000v, if I'm not mistaken) - wasn't as bad as the camera.
Well, considering how many Athlons and Durons have been sold in recent years, I wouldn't think Dell would have a problem selling AMD based machines. Conpaq seem so sell enough to sustain their AMD lines.
I think a lot of people would be happy to pay Celeron prices to get a Duron based notebook, even if the Duron is actually cheaper per CPU. Same goes for the Sempron. It's a matter of choice, really.
I also don't why training shoud be an issue. Anyone who can assemble a PC/server in a professional way, already has the skill to do exactly the same thing with an AMD instead of an Intel. The work/care/know-how is no different.
Someone else in this discussion mentioned that Dell probably has some sort of deal with Intel that forbids them to use competing products (does that remind us of anyone?) - that's most likely the reason for not using AMD.
If Dell had put AMD chips in their notebooks, I would have bought a Dell notebook a long time ago.
I don't see why a manufacturer like Dell should stick to only one CPU. If they offer their customers the choice, they would have many more customers
"A 1.5-gigahertz Intel Pentium 4 chip or AMD Athlon 1500."
They should really say in who's terms they're recommending 1.5ghz. If it's 1.5 P4 then a 1.x ghz P-III with enough RAM and a good graphics card would prabably run it playable too.
Can't say what the figures are, but I've replaced more Intel CPUs than AMDs. Not that that means anything. CPUs fail every now and then for various reasons, regardless of their perceived "quality." If you put an AMD chip on a quality motherboard you won't have problems with it. If you put an Intel chip on a crap motherboard your chances of having trouble increases dramatically.
t iu m/ppiie/P PBR/pentiu m_fdiv/pentgrph.html
"quality is measured in #/% defects"
While we're on the subject of "quality" let's not forget the pentium bug, shall we?
http://support.intel.com/support/processors/pen
http://kuhttp.cc.ukans.edu/cwis/units/I
Intel have quality issues from time to time too.
"AMD = poor quality."
Yeah, quality does tend to drop dramatically if you're stupid enough to remove the heatsink from a running CPU.
I was talking about Passport. But the same applies, just on a different scale. Having only one password to different services, and having the password stored in or changed from one place is a security hazard as far as I'm concerned.
To use a simple anology, I have two bank accounts and a credit card. I have different pin numbers for each card. If I lose my wallet, and say I don't realise this for a couple of hours, someone might somehow figure out my pin and access one account. But he'll have to figure out the other pin numbers too before he can access the others. Now if I used the same number for all my cards, a person who figured out my one pin, will have access to all my accounts.
I couln't care less about who's hosting/providing it. With companies not even trusting their employees to bring in USB storage devices, why the hell should I trust my employer with anything?
Then again, I just reset a user's password. She couldn't remember her password (even after choosing it herself and using it the whole of yesterday). Guess what it was? Her maiden name.
Some people need this sort of system.
Well I certainly don't want one password for everything, much less a very server which has the names of all the services that I use in. Right now I *can* have the same password for everything I use, and who would know. If someone breaks into my hotmail account, then that's about it, they broke into my hotmail account. They still don't know squat about any other services I might use.
Let users choose for themselves. But having one password and links to all the services I log into, stored by the company who almost only ever make news when another of their security vulnerabilites is discoverd, or they get sued over improper business practises, or they're trying to lie themselves out of loosing more market share, that's not for me.
Well, see, that's the only problem with WINE. If your app of choice is not completely supported, it might run slower or not at all.
In all fairness, it wasn't Steinberg's intention to have Cubase run on Linux, nor was it Linus' intention to write a kernel that would run Windows apps.
As for speed, some completely supported apps are really much faster. When Return to Castle Wolfenstein just came out, I couldn't play it in Windows (Celeron 500, 256mb, TNT2 16mb) - only got about 3-5 fps. Playing the windows binary in linux under WINE (the linux binary wasn't out yet) gave me a bout 9 fps on avarage, which made it *barely just* playable.
" yeah my 2.6 ghz Pentium 4 is really showing its age.
Join Team Mozilla #38050 Folding@home"
Maybe if you switch off Folding@home you'll actually be able to experience the power of that CPU.
With enough memory there's no need for KDE to be slow. My housemate's P-II 300 with 256MB runs KDE quite nicely, even with OpenOffice and Mozilla both open. Definitely no "slower" than the Windows 2000 GUI
"Imagine that it's a bathtub overflowing, and the tap is in a locked metal box. Some of us could disassemble it and make a patch I'm sure, but I don't really trust any 1337 h4xx0r out there to modify my core OS components. It's easier to just make the bath bigger."
I didn't mean to say the Mozilla guys shouldn't plug the hole, but if the Mozilla guys have to keep pluggin holes by disabling stuff in Mozilla, don't you think that would end up affecting Mozilla in a negative way (aside from the bad publicity)?
"This situation is worse, in one big way, than the Internet Explorer issues; Mozilla users 'feel' safe. Non-techies that use Mozilla assume it's 'safe' because a geek once told them that this is the case."
Non-techies using IE, like my mother, feel safe too, just because Microsoft said it's OK. Such a big company with so many users can't be wrong, after all.
Despite the fact that her computer's gotten infected a couple of times already. Despite the fact that she refuses to do her Windows update (it takes so damn long over the modem). Despite the fact that her son (me) who works for an IT security company, have told her repeatedly not to use IE, and have made sure that she always has the latest Mozilla/FireFox and Opera installed.
On a slightly different but related topic. I am not a programmer, so this is just a guess. The same vulnerability that was discovered in Firefox and Mozilla, was discovered in IE too. Would the fact the vulnerability in Firefox and Mozilla only affected the Windows 2000/XP versions, and not the ones on other platforms, suggest that it might have been a vulnerability in windows rather than Mozilla? Sure, preventitive maintainance on Mozilla's side would prevent it from being expoited.
I just find it to be a bit like mopping the floor because the bathtub is overflowing, instead of closing the tap.
"Macs threaten the livelihood of IT staffs. If you recommend purchasing a computer that requires only half the support of the machine it is replacing, aren't you putting your job in danger? Exactly."
This is such rubbish. The company I work for are convincing our clients, one by one, to upgrade their Windows9x PCs to Windows2000/XP. Why? Because it doesn't break so easily, which means we're out there less often to fix it, which means they save money. And this has proven successful. We've cut the time we spend supporting in half in most cases.
So our clients save money, and don't loose anywhere as much time to computer related problems. And what about us? We have more time on hands, so we're supporting almost twice as many clients as before.
If I had my way all my clients would be running Macs with OSX. Considering how little trouble they give, and with each client signing a support contract, I'd barely have to work at all.
Win-win situation I would say.
Well, for what it's worth, the ME installations we had wasn't OEM installations, they were full retail, I installed and configured them myself.
Windows ME is not any different from 98 except that they took away the boot into DOS option to make it look like it wasn't still running on DOS, added system restore (which didn't do much else but fill up your drive and seldom worked properly when you needed it to), and added a new skin.
I think a lot of the perceived problems with Windows ME is due to people expecting it to be the Windows 2000 for home users, not realising that it's still a completely different family of operating system.
As for drivers, I do not agree with you. Windows ME supports (like 98SE I think) WDM drivers, which, in my experience based opinion, tend to be more reliable than the old style 9x drivers. Most of the time the WDM driver will work both on Windows ME and 2000 all the same, except when there's a reason why the hardware won't work in 2000 to start with (like my Zoltrix TV-MAX*). I won't say *always* because I can't remember having run into any such trouble, so I don't know, because I can't remember.
"Earlier posters have ridiculed the idea that access to the internet can be useful to people in rural areas, since they don't speak English."
That's because they don't know what they talking about. Almost every person I've met, even in the rural areas, where one of my previous jobs took me all the time, could speak, or understand at least a little bit of English or Afrikaans. This is because English and Afrikaans have always been (and still is to a large extent, although that's changing) the dominant languages to do business in. Even if that business is buying a loaf of bread, or standing in line for an ID book or to register to vote in the election.
And for what it's worth, a look on the KDE website will teach you that translations are available for a number of languages spoken in South Africa: Afrikaans, Venda, Xhosa and Zulu. I'm sure more are at least under early development at our universities. This is enough to get someone going on a computer.
As for the internet, there are a many websites available in local languages. Even google provides support for Afrikaans, Sesotho, Xhosa and Zulu. And that covers a very large percentage of the population.
The idea of bringing internet to rural areas is not so that poor hungry unschooled people can check their stocks or CNN or whatever. It's rather to aid communication and provide access to educational facilities like UNISA (www.unisa.ac.za). Education is really what it's about.
"Seriously, wouldn't it be more pertinant to get most of the continent to the point where they have food and water and can farm, rather than get them wired?"
And have those who have already progressed past that stage leaving forever? Not everybody has both the will and the capability of progressing past basic survival.
No. chmod changes the permissions of files/directories. chown changes ownership. So he became root and changed to root's home directory at the same time (thanks to the - ). Then he changed ownership of all root's files to his normal user ID. Then he made all of root's (now his) files read,write,execute ONLY by him (under his normal ID) - although root should still be able to access it, being root.
Which is why I'm asking if something's vastly different in HPUX than Linux and the other *nix I've used. Like, root not having a home directory, and defaulting to / or something like that. OP, please elaborate!
Well, even most of the MS deciples agree that Windows ME wasn't all that. But strangely enough, two PCs in our family came with it, and on both WinME lasted about three years, before it was replaced with Win2k so that the family could use Skype. And both family members started out not knowing how to hold the mouse, let alone being smart about what not breaking Windows.
What's even more impressive is that, for the first three years, the one PC sat on power from a generator without any protection inbetween!
Both machines are identical though - Duron, Gigabyte board, Seagate disc, nVidia graphics, Creative sound, LG CD-ROMs, ect. All that's different really are the screens.
I guess good hardware does make a difference after all.
The - after su? Why would that affect the other users. Or does the - do something different on HPUX?
I never do su - if su on it's own would suffice - learned that the hard way!
I've done the same thing when losing track of which server I'm working in (having multiple ssh connections to various machines to compare config files, ect.)
Learned to rename my konsoles....
Knoppix would. Not the full on version with KDE 3.x, but some of the smaller knoppix projects would. Especially if it has mmx working for it too, even at 100mz.
Smallinux is a 50mb image - I use it on a 486DX2-66 with 16mb ram. Works fine with blackbox, I can listen to wav files, but I haven't tried mp3 and ogg - not sure if it would be fast enough. I remember my old DX4-100 16mb could just do mp3, but only if I wasn't trying to do anything at the same time.
We also have a 100mhz Pentium (no mmx there yet) notebook running vector linux with XFCE desktop (32mb RAM though). It can play mp3s and oggs fine with about 50% CPU usage while XFCE is running.
Here's a good way to prevent the virus from spreading through you whole network should one of your Windows PCs get compromised. We do this at all our clients, and we haven't had any trouble for a long time.
Install a personal firewall that allow you to define rules. They often come with antivirus packages (www.bitdefender.com has a nice one). Specify the following rules, in this order:
1. allow all outbound traffic on port 25 to your smtp server(s). If your firewall allows, and if everybody is using the same e-mail client, you can restrict it to that e-mail client.
2. Block all outbound traffic on port 25
3. Block all incoming traffic (unless there's some service running on this perticular PC, but that's seldom the case for office PCs)
4. Allow all outgoing traffic.
The beauty of this is, that if a Windows get infected with a virus/worm that uses its own smtp engine to send itself out, it won't be able to, so that infection is contained. Unless the virus/worm has the presence of mind to check your outlook settings and use your smtp settings - I haven't found one that does though.
Your clients will be able to surf/im/e-mail ect. without any trouble, and worms that come around looking for open ports, won't find any.
At home we have an old Toshiba Pentium 100 notebook with 40mb RAM. FireFox runs beautifully and fast enough for comfortable usage, even with 10 tabs open. Two instances of IE and that poor booklet grinds too a halt...
That's what spyware is there for :-)