With that release, the GUI looked better than Windows and the system was usable by the general public.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!!
Sorry, let me expand on that.
In 1999 when I first tried *desktop* Linux (having used it as a server before), it was a piece of crap. A complete piece of crap. It shipped with NS4, which was a piece of crap. The font system was crap. The tools were crap (in the sense that very few of them had GUIs). The installer was crap. The hardware detection was crap. The video support was crap. Networking with Windows machines was impossible (Windows 2000 and NT4). The repository system was starting to take shape, but installing new software was a crapshoot at best (at least I learned how to install from source tarballs). Did you want sound? No problem, just download and compile ALSA!
Unless all you needed was Emacs, bash and the GNU toolchain, everything about desktop Linux was crap compared to Windows and MacOS. Crap.
It has certainly come a long way since then. By early 2004 when I tried RH9 (I think, before it was Fedora) and later that same year when I installed Ubuntu I could see that it was starting to be in a position to give Apple and Microsoft a run for their money. But in 1998? Please.
And remember, by 2000 Apple was already showing public betas of what was essentially an advanced, working GUI on top of a UNIX kernel. So in reality it took almost 5 more years for Linux to catch up to that.
Don't be a revisionist, or a fanboy. Especially here. People don't forget what a piece of crap "Official RedHat Linux 5.2" was just because Fedora 10 happens to be wonderful. It was a small, necessary step in a long road, but it was still crap compared to what was available back then.
I'll take my mods now. But damn, someone had to say this.
Oh - and which disk drive manufacturer used to print their defect list on a label affixed to the top of the drive and had to send dealers and distributors a note telling them not to photocopy the list by putting the drives on the copier as this was killing the drives with static!?
I seem to remember Micropolis (remember them!) used to do something like that. But I might be wrong.
They used to make some sweet disks though. And I think they were the first ones to release a standalone, stackable SCSI RAID product.
Well, compared to anything nowadays it was crap, but back then if you wanted to network DOS/Win3x machines, it was the cat's meow, especially if you didn't want to shell out $$$ for Netware.
That's one of the reasons it was also very popular in the 3rd world. It was a low-cost alternative. Windows NT eventually did it in.
Agreed. There was nothing wrong with IPX at all. The standardization on TCP/IP and the death of other packet protocols is not so much going for something "better", but rather for the least common denominator. Not that that's particularly bad, since it's important for a more open internet and better interop, but it doesn't take away anything from the technical value of other implementations.
Anyone remember LANtastic? As long as you didn't use Token Ring it was pretty good as well.
The quality of a piece of software has no bearing on the license it's released under. There are enough quality BSD/MIT bits out there (and enough crappy GPL ones) to dispel that myth.
And I'm not sure what you're specifically referring to, but Microsoft has enough quality software (.NET/Visual Studio/BizTalk/Server 2003|2008/SharePoint/Office/etc/etc/etc) to also void your point. And last time I looked they were still shoveling money. Unlike, say, Sun, which is down to $3 or whatever and had to lay off thousands. Getting delisted from NASDAQ is a real possibility for them at this point.
the fact is that the basic MySQL dominates the low to mid range server DB market in Open Source
A market which has little to no profit attached to it, and is dominated mostly by way of inertia.
If there was a profit to turn there (other than mindshare), MySQL wouldn't have been so intent to compete in the enterprise space along with Oracle, Sybase, MSSQL and DB2/x86. They'd be happy with the enormous profits they get from hosting providers and the like.
See, the key here is whether or not these developers are good developers. Experienced and responsible.
If they are, the best advice I'd give you is to stay the hell out of their way. They will deliver. The best developers need a set of requirements, a deadline, a good working environment and caffeinated drinks. Not much more.
But on the other hand, if they're not, then you need to stay on top of them. But how are you going to figure out if they are, given that you're a business guy? That's a difficult situation.
If you do know that at least one of them is the kind of person that can lead, work through him/her to make sure you can identify any potential problems.
There's nothing better than a good developer who can design, code, document and communicate, and does not need constant supervision. On the other hand, there's nothing worse than one that pretends to do those things and turns out to be a disaster for the project.
trollboy is just pissed because he got caught gaming the firehose and someone's posting all over his new haunt telling people what kind of insufferable liar he is. I guess it sucks when you're trying to start over, and I'm happy to see less of him here, but he should have thought of that before deciding to shit all over Slashdot. There are a lot of people who are pissed about that.
On the other hand, maybe he's just angry at this or this. Having your ass handed to you in a silver platter with trimmings and gravy on the side hurts sometimes. Of course not posting stupid lies like those to begin with would help.
The amusing part here is that this has come about mostly because of Cisco's dedication to using as much H1-B/L1 labor as possible. It's been those guys who have mostly (not entirely) done this work in order to get things done quickly.
This is an interesting statement. If my experience with on/offshoring at large companies is any indication (and I assure you it is), the H1-B guys were simply taking orders from a US-based manager or director. Those kinds of decisions are not made in Pune or Gurgaon.
You're taking the Mickey right? It's based on BSD.
That's irrelevant. Taking something and making it a thousand times better (for your particular purposes) is still a leap, no matter how you look at it. If someone builds something like OS X on top of the Linux kernel, that's a great leap forward as well, regardless of how it came about.
Meanwhile people who buy based on the recommendations of friends are screwed and superior solutions die off as they become unprofitable.
Well, that's market forces and word of mouth at work for you. If *most* of Apple's products were crap, then there's precious little they would be able to do to prop them up. The fact that you don't like some aspect of the iPod or whatever does not mean there aren't 10 million people out there who are happy with their purchasing decisions.
It's no different than any competitive situation between products on the free market. I hate to seem like I'm defending Apple, but don't make it sound like they are somehow especially evil because they cater to what people want and spend money to make sure their products are on everyone's faces all the time.
I think Reebok makes better running shoes than Nike, but I'm not crying because I see more Nike commercials and more people wearing them. I'm just happy that in our economic model, Reebok has enough room to thrive and operate so I can buy what I consider to their superior implementation of a product and ignore the mainstream.
Other than credential caching, I don't see what the problem is with UAC. Most of the "problems" people claim it has are related to crappy software that thinks it has control of the entire computer. It's not a technical issue, it's a legacy and culture one, and given the circumstances I think UAC is the best possible worst solution.
*shrug* I'm not an Apple user or customer in any sense of the word, and I don't particularly like the company or its proponents, but even I'm capable of recognizing the enormity of the technological leap they made from MacOS to OS X, the popular appeal of their hardware and the enormous amount of money they've made since then.
As to the rest of their products, I'm not impressed by shiny objects or "cool" hardware that's expensive only because it's cool (and for which cheaper/better alternatives exist), so I'm not exactly a prospective client there, either. But for some people, "cool" and "hip" carry a certain monetary value, and who am I to argue with that. If some people want to give Steve Jobs their hard-earned dollars then more power to them. Steve can laugh all the way to the bank, his customers can be happy (at least a large majority of them) and I'll be happy I can buy a Sansa player or a Toshiba notebook for my own use.
No, it must be a buffer overflow that results from reading the file. Applications can't be made to do things they were not designed to do, but they can be used as tangential attack vectors by forcing them to interact with malicious data.
Don't open email unrequested attachments from strangers and stop running Windows under an admin account and you'll effectively eliminate the chances of being hit by something like this. These "attacks" are mostly social engineering anyway.
Wordpad does not have the capability to execute those macros, because it does not have an embedded VBA interpreter. The macros are binary gibberish without the VBA runtime, much like a Perl file is just text without the Perl interpreter.
People talk about how Apple changed when Steve Jobs came back but I don't see much change.
C'mon, let's be fair here. They did change, and they did get a hell of a lot better.
It seems to me that Apple have always been more about marketing and hype than about empowering their users.
That has nothing to do with whether or not you create good products, which I will admit some of Apple's are. Can you use a Zune or a Sansa MP3 player instead of an iPod? Sure you can. Can you use a normal cell phone instead of an iPhone? Of course. That doesn't mean that the iPod and iPhone (or OS X or whatever) are not good products, whether they're hyped or not. Look past the hype and make up your own mind.
If you believe the hype everything they do is stylish, bugs are rare, rare events, and the hardware is so reliable that if you have a problem you must be misusing it. The reality I have experienced has been very different.
That's just the deranged fanboys fapping it up. It's no different than the perception that Windows is some sort of existential nightmare and Linux is perfect and has no problem. It's all in the context. Everybody cheers their platform on.
Eventually you'll piss off the wrong fool, and then your crusade will take one step forward and fifteen back.
My grandfather once said something along the lines of "in business and politics, be nice to everybody, even if they're not nice to you". I'm sure that's a common maxim everywhere. It should be followed religiously, especially when you're supposed to be the underdog bent on fighting the "system".
Slashdot Mirror
I was running betas of W2K in 1999.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!!
Sorry, let me expand on that.
In 1999 when I first tried *desktop* Linux (having used it as a server before), it was a piece of crap. A complete piece of crap. It shipped with NS4, which was a piece of crap. The font system was crap. The tools were crap (in the sense that very few of them had GUIs). The installer was crap. The hardware detection was crap. The video support was crap. Networking with Windows machines was impossible (Windows 2000 and NT4). The repository system was starting to take shape, but installing new software was a crapshoot at best (at least I learned how to install from source tarballs). Did you want sound? No problem, just download and compile ALSA!
Unless all you needed was Emacs, bash and the GNU toolchain, everything about desktop Linux was crap compared to Windows and MacOS. Crap.
It has certainly come a long way since then. By early 2004 when I tried RH9 (I think, before it was Fedora) and later that same year when I installed Ubuntu I could see that it was starting to be in a position to give Apple and Microsoft a run for their money. But in 1998? Please.
And remember, by 2000 Apple was already showing public betas of what was essentially an advanced, working GUI on top of a UNIX kernel. So in reality it took almost 5 more years for Linux to catch up to that.
Don't be a revisionist, or a fanboy. Especially here. People don't forget what a piece of crap "Official RedHat Linux 5.2" was just because Fedora 10 happens to be wonderful. It was a small, necessary step in a long road, but it was still crap compared to what was available back then.
I'll take my mods now. But damn, someone had to say this.
I seem to remember Micropolis (remember them!) used to do something like that. But I might be wrong.
They used to make some sweet disks though. And I think they were the first ones to release a standalone, stackable SCSI RAID product.
Well, compared to anything nowadays it was crap, but back then if you wanted to network DOS/Win3x machines, it was the cat's meow, especially if you didn't want to shell out $$$ for Netware.
That's one of the reasons it was also very popular in the 3rd world. It was a low-cost alternative. Windows NT eventually did it in.
Agreed. There was nothing wrong with IPX at all. The standardization on TCP/IP and the death of other packet protocols is not so much going for something "better", but rather for the least common denominator. Not that that's particularly bad, since it's important for a more open internet and better interop, but it doesn't take away anything from the technical value of other implementations.
Anyone remember LANtastic? As long as you didn't use Token Ring it was pretty good as well.
Not Netware so much as they use Novell's Linux-based enterprise stack (SLES, ZenWorks, etc).
And the opnSUSE community is very much alive. They released a new version a few days ago.
But some companies still do use Netware to some extent. I know a few in Canada that do.
No, UAC shifts the responsibility to the user and the burden to the application developers.
It's not the perfect solution, but it's the best one considering the amount of legacy crap for Windows that's out there.
Dementia can't be far behind, then <g>
Did I read your comment wrong? Sorry.
The quality of a piece of software has no bearing on the license it's released under. There are enough quality BSD/MIT bits out there (and enough crappy GPL ones) to dispel that myth.
And I'm not sure what you're specifically referring to, but Microsoft has enough quality software (.NET/Visual Studio/BizTalk/Server 2003|2008/SharePoint/Office/etc/etc/etc) to also void your point. And last time I looked they were still shoveling money. Unlike, say, Sun, which is down to $3 or whatever and had to lay off thousands. Getting delisted from NASDAQ is a real possibility for them at this point.
A market which has little to no profit attached to it, and is dominated mostly by way of inertia.
If there was a profit to turn there (other than mindshare), MySQL wouldn't have been so intent to compete in the enterprise space along with Oracle, Sybase, MSSQL and DB2/x86. They'd be happy with the enormous profits they get from hosting providers and the like.
See, the key here is whether or not these developers are good developers. Experienced and responsible.
If they are, the best advice I'd give you is to stay the hell out of their way. They will deliver. The best developers need a set of requirements, a deadline, a good working environment and caffeinated drinks. Not much more.
But on the other hand, if they're not, then you need to stay on top of them. But how are you going to figure out if they are, given that you're a business guy? That's a difficult situation.
If you do know that at least one of them is the kind of person that can lead, work through him/her to make sure you can identify any potential problems.
There's nothing better than a good developer who can design, code, document and communicate, and does not need constant supervision. On the other hand, there's nothing worse than one that pretends to do those things and turns out to be a disaster for the project.
trollboy is just pissed because he got caught gaming the firehose and someone's posting all over his new haunt telling people what kind of insufferable liar he is. I guess it sucks when you're trying to start over, and I'm happy to see less of him here, but he should have thought of that before deciding to shit all over Slashdot. There are a lot of people who are pissed about that.
On the other hand, maybe he's just angry at this or this. Having your ass handed to you in a silver platter with trimmings and gravy on the side hurts sometimes. Of course not posting stupid lies like those to begin with would help.
This is an interesting statement. If my experience with on/offshoring at large companies is any indication (and I assure you it is), the H1-B guys were simply taking orders from a US-based manager or director. Those kinds of decisions are not made in Pune or Gurgaon.
Hope that helps.
That's irrelevant. Taking something and making it a thousand times better (for your particular purposes) is still a leap, no matter how you look at it. If someone builds something like OS X on top of the Linux kernel, that's a great leap forward as well, regardless of how it came about.
Well, that's market forces and word of mouth at work for you. If *most* of Apple's products were crap, then there's precious little they would be able to do to prop them up. The fact that you don't like some aspect of the iPod or whatever does not mean there aren't 10 million people out there who are happy with their purchasing decisions.
It's no different than any competitive situation between products on the free market. I hate to seem like I'm defending Apple, but don't make it sound like they are somehow especially evil because they cater to what people want and spend money to make sure their products are on everyone's faces all the time.
I think Reebok makes better running shoes than Nike, but I'm not crying because I see more Nike commercials and more people wearing them. I'm just happy that in our economic model, Reebok has enough room to thrive and operate so I can buy what I consider to their superior implementation of a product and ignore the mainstream.
haha, yes, I suppose I should have used Python as the example instead <g>
Other than credential caching, I don't see what the problem is with UAC. Most of the "problems" people claim it has are related to crappy software that thinks it has control of the entire computer. It's not a technical issue, it's a legacy and culture one, and given the circumstances I think UAC is the best possible worst solution.
Yes, it does. Last time I looked OS X was a substantially different operating system than a FreeBSD Live CD.
Not to belittle Linux (which I use as a server), but freeloading off 25 years of Unix history is not exactly a technological leap, either.
*shrug* I'm not an Apple user or customer in any sense of the word, and I don't particularly like the company or its proponents, but even I'm capable of recognizing the enormity of the technological leap they made from MacOS to OS X, the popular appeal of their hardware and the enormous amount of money they've made since then.
As to the rest of their products, I'm not impressed by shiny objects or "cool" hardware that's expensive only because it's cool (and for which cheaper/better alternatives exist), so I'm not exactly a prospective client there, either. But for some people, "cool" and "hip" carry a certain monetary value, and who am I to argue with that. If some people want to give Steve Jobs their hard-earned dollars then more power to them. Steve can laugh all the way to the bank, his customers can be happy (at least a large majority of them) and I'll be happy I can buy a Sansa player or a Toshiba notebook for my own use.
No, it must be a buffer overflow that results from reading the file. Applications can't be made to do things they were not designed to do, but they can be used as tangential attack vectors by forcing them to interact with malicious data.
Don't open email unrequested attachments from strangers and stop running Windows under an admin account and you'll effectively eliminate the chances of being hit by something like this. These "attacks" are mostly social engineering anyway.
Wordpad does not have the capability to execute those macros, because it does not have an embedded VBA interpreter. The macros are binary gibberish without the VBA runtime, much like a Perl file is just text without the Perl interpreter.
C'mon, let's be fair here. They did change, and they did get a hell of a lot better.
That has nothing to do with whether or not you create good products, which I will admit some of Apple's are. Can you use a Zune or a Sansa MP3 player instead of an iPod? Sure you can. Can you use a normal cell phone instead of an iPhone? Of course. That doesn't mean that the iPod and iPhone (or OS X or whatever) are not good products, whether they're hyped or not. Look past the hype and make up your own mind.
That's just the deranged fanboys fapping it up. It's no different than the perception that Windows is some sort of existential nightmare and Linux is perfect and has no problem. It's all in the context. Everybody cheers their platform on.
Eventually you'll piss off the wrong fool, and then your crusade will take one step forward and fifteen back.
My grandfather once said something along the lines of "in business and politics, be nice to everybody, even if they're not nice to you". I'm sure that's a common maxim everywhere. It should be followed religiously, especially when you're supposed to be the underdog bent on fighting the "system".
I like where your head's at.