.... would be a better term. The number of people who think they are a 'technician' because they've successfully built a PC clone using only their bare hands and a phillips screwdriver is huge.
Granted, it is an 'empowering' experience, but in the old-school a Technician knows how to solder, hand code little diagnostic tests in Assembly language, troubleshoot the problem down to a component on the circuit board, and more.
If you've never handled a wirewrap gun, and you have no idea of the relative advantages of a totem-pole versus an open-collector output, you're not a technician, you're a dilentante from the coffeehouse who ordered a 'PC Tool Set' off ThinkGeek and copped an attitude.
Indeed the arguements made by people who advocated the ERA can be turned around and used 'on' them now, since their assertion that discrimination is legal unless the amendment is passed can be taken at face value.
Does a TiVo really become an overpriced doorstop? It runs Linux, right? So you can probably dig in there and make it a stand-alone recorder/player if you want.
My dad was a 'road warrior' for IBM back when it meant something, in the 1970's. His desk was in Chicago, his work site was in Knoxville/New Orleans/Atlanta, etc. We lived in Minneapolis.
He brought home an IBM 5100 a few times and we got to play StarTrek on it. Life was good event though all I could afford, for my programming fix, was a TI Programmable calculator.
I like (still) my HP Omnibook 300 (from before 'Omnibook' was just the model name on a lot of crap at HP.) Designed and made by the HP Corvalis division (the business unit that made all the HP Calculators). It has a little 386sx-16 processor and 4 megs of RAM, but has a permanent version of Windows 3.1, Excel 4, and Word 2.0 burned onto a PCMCIA ROM card. Mine has a 10 meg flash card doublespaced to 20 megs. The real 'feature' of the thing, besides the nice keyboard and one of the best reflective grayscale VGAs ever made, is that it runs for hours on four AA alkaline batteries. Built in IRDA, too, so I can just hold it up to my LaserJet 5P to print.
It's very, very dated technology today, but it's the best-of-class from when it was new, and it contains HP technology that they essentially abandoned. I think it's the only ROMable Windows 3 ever created.
So you're saying the amorphous mess that the Internet is pretty much acknowledged by everybody to be is the fault of government? The loose unmanagable protocols and conventions that deliver spam into everybody's home daily is the fault of Al Gore?
Very well. That isn't such a bad concept to spread wide to the public.
The alternative to Von Neuman (Code and Data in the same memory) is to have code and data in seperate memory areas. This makes it very difficult to make computers where the code can change.
Why do you assert something that ridiculous? Of course the code can change. Either through bank switching or some form of I/O. ROMS can be socketed, and flash can be programmed in-circuit through seperate data paths, if and when updating is necessary. There's nothing at all inherently un-changable about such a design. And as you admit, it would do a hell of a lot to improve security and stability.
It sounds very much like your position is one grounded mostly in conservatism (not wanting things to change) than anything else. It requires getting beyond the 'general purpose' approach to recognize that Information Appliances are the future.
Umm, I was using Linux ten years ago, or trying to use it, anyway. It had a lot of power, but to claim that it 'far surpassed with I was using on the desktop' is presumtuous and plain wrong.
And with that, I have to agree with your second paragraph. It's improved quite a bit. I don't run KDE or Gnome, though, so that isn't where I'd say it's improved. FVWM2 is better than FVWM, of course.
The temptation to say 'get an iLife, then' is very compelling, but I won't do it.
That sounds like a rather closed 'busy box' solution. Apple is very good at integrating a closed-off world for their customers to live in. They've been doing it for years. As somebody else said in the thread, if you don't choose to use the Apple built-ins you are very limited on the Mac.
But this is drifting off topic, and I came into this discussion hoping for some real info on DVD and VCD (more my level of participation, being I am so cheap) authoring stuff.
But heaven help you if you want to use a component that was made by a company that has gone out of business (3Dfx, etc.). Linux is much better there.
This is true, and it's nice to continue to use old parts that have long since been abandoned by Microsoft.
It's important, however, not to let Linux get a reputation as being the OS that's always a year out of date, i.e. 'anything you can plug into your PC that's been on the market a year or so should be supported.' Also, 'the OS for hardware from dead vendors' doesn't sound too great.
I'm wondering why there isn't more of an aggressive effort to reverse-engineer the drives that manufacturers put out for Linux.
I mean, when people complain about a binary-only driver from a vendor that is only released for, as someone else in this thread mentioned, RedHat 7.2, it should be a lot easier (given that the interface and underlying OS is much more 'revealed') to reverse engineer that driver and produce an 'open source' support for said hardware.
Are people afraid to offend vendors who release broken (yes, if it won't run on what a user wants to run it on, it's _broken_ support, even if there is lip-service to Linux in the form of an obsolete binary kernel module) drivers?
He's probably a register-hacking freeware-installing twink.
As long as you install a basic set of the things you want/need without going overboard, and aren't a weird control-freak about details (i.e. people who insist on overriding defaults and installing everything in their custom directories, etc.) Windows gets the job done well.
Linux is better, though, if you've got the time and experience to tweak. I'd say it's about time for all the tweaks, control-freaks, and computer enthusiasts to bail off their Windows system and to something that gives them power. Leave Windows for grandma and the typical AOL customer.
I installed Slackware 9.1 on two boxes earlier this week. One of them is a PPro 200 desktop and the other is a quad PPro server.
I didn't install the Gnome or KDE sets, the desktop is nicely responsive and usable with FVWM2 running.
Perhaps that's part of the advantage of Linux that (with Slackware, anyway) you can skip the desktop bloat and get a usable system, on a machine that sells for about $5 at auction these days. (the quad PPRo server was $15, though)
I was noticing (since I picked up a roll in an auction lot that I now have to find a buyer for) that Player Pianos aren't very expensive on eBay. One person had one listed that said 'if nobody bids on this, get in touch with us about taking it for free.'
So listen to 'real' music instead of recordings of music.
Apple had a whole version of 'Linux' for the Mac, which ran in a sort of a sandbox on top of a 'Mach' kernel. Essentially to shield their hardware from the hackers, who would have dug in and reverse engineered the Apple hardware to make Linux run right on the Mac. So now there's a dead-end bunch of code called mklinux, and there's no native Mac support in the main Linux kernel.
That's hardly anything more than lip service to the Open Source process.
It's 'silly reasoning' to state the fact that Apple is reduced to just another commodity hardware company if and when Linux becomes the dominant platform?
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Thank goodness the Pascal on Macintosh has finally (mostly) faded away.
Not everybody's lives, or their gameplay, revolve around twitch-response games.
.... would be a better term. The number of people who think they are a 'technician' because they've successfully built a PC clone using only their bare hands and a phillips screwdriver is huge.
Granted, it is an 'empowering' experience, but in the old-school a Technician knows how to solder, hand code little diagnostic tests in Assembly language, troubleshoot the problem down to a component on the circuit board, and more.
If you've never handled a wirewrap gun, and you have no idea of the relative advantages of a totem-pole versus an open-collector output, you're not a technician, you're a dilentante from the coffeehouse who ordered a 'PC Tool Set' off ThinkGeek and copped an attitude.
Indeed the arguements made by people who advocated the ERA can be turned around and used 'on' them now, since their assertion that discrimination is legal unless the amendment is passed can be taken at face value.
Why would I be more or less 'proud' of it now?
Make some sense.
Does a TiVo really become an overpriced doorstop? It runs Linux, right? So you can probably dig in there and make it a stand-alone recorder/player if you want.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
Imperialist illusions?
Apparently it wasn't post WWII occupation currency, but rather Imperialist Japanese currency. Hmmm. Imperialist Illusions...
My Powerbook 165c is gonna last forever.
I have a TRS-80 Model 100.
Can you get replacement batteries for your gear (when the old ones burn out, which is about every 20 hours of use) at any convenience store?
My dad was a 'road warrior' for IBM back when it meant something, in the 1970's. His desk was in Chicago, his work site was in Knoxville/New Orleans/Atlanta, etc. We lived in Minneapolis.
He brought home an IBM 5100 a few times and we got to play StarTrek on it. Life was good event though all I could afford, for my programming fix, was a TI Programmable calculator.
I like (still) my HP Omnibook 300 (from before 'Omnibook' was just the model name on a lot of crap at HP.) Designed and made by the HP Corvalis division (the business unit that made all the HP Calculators). It has a little 386sx-16 processor and 4 megs of RAM, but has a permanent version of Windows 3.1, Excel 4, and Word 2.0 burned onto a PCMCIA ROM card. Mine has a 10 meg flash card doublespaced to 20 megs. The real 'feature' of the thing, besides the nice keyboard and one of the best reflective grayscale VGAs ever made, is that it runs for hours on four AA alkaline batteries. Built in IRDA, too, so I can just hold it up to my LaserJet 5P to print.
It's very, very dated technology today, but it's the best-of-class from when it was new, and it contains HP technology that they essentially abandoned. I think it's the only ROMable Windows 3 ever created.
During the years right after the end of WWII the United States Military issued money for the Japanese to use.
I have some of the currency. I have a 'Japanese Government 20 Pesos' bill.
I bet you could piss off someone in Japan by pulling that out and trying to pay with it these days, eh?
So you're saying the amorphous mess that the Internet is pretty much acknowledged by everybody to be is the fault of government? The loose unmanagable protocols and conventions that deliver spam into everybody's home daily is the fault of Al Gore?
Very well. That isn't such a bad concept to spread wide to the public.
The alternative to Von Neuman (Code and Data in the same memory) is to have code and data in seperate memory areas. This makes it very difficult to make computers where the code can change.
Why do you assert something that ridiculous? Of course the code can change. Either through bank switching or some form of I/O. ROMS can be socketed, and flash can be programmed in-circuit through seperate data paths, if and when updating is necessary. There's nothing at all inherently un-changable about such a design. And as you admit, it would do a hell of a lot to improve security and stability.
It sounds very much like your position is one grounded mostly in conservatism (not wanting things to change) than anything else. It requires getting beyond the 'general purpose' approach to recognize that Information Appliances are the future.
Umm, I was using Linux ten years ago, or trying to use it, anyway. It had a lot of power, but to claim that it 'far surpassed with I was using on the desktop' is presumtuous and plain wrong.
And with that, I have to agree with your second paragraph. It's improved quite a bit. I don't run KDE or Gnome, though, so that isn't where I'd say it's improved. FVWM2 is better than FVWM, of course.
The temptation to say 'get an iLife, then' is very compelling, but I won't do it.
That sounds like a rather closed 'busy box' solution. Apple is very good at integrating a closed-off world for their customers to live in. They've been doing it for years. As somebody else said in the thread, if you don't choose to use the Apple built-ins you are very limited on the Mac.
But this is drifting off topic, and I came into this discussion hoping for some real info on DVD and VCD (more my level of participation, being I am so cheap) authoring stuff.
But heaven help you if you want to use a component that was made by a company that has gone out of business (3Dfx, etc.). Linux is much better there.
This is true, and it's nice to continue to use old parts that have long since been abandoned by Microsoft.
It's important, however, not to let Linux get a reputation as being the OS that's always a year out of date, i.e. 'anything you can plug into your PC that's been on the market a year or so should be supported.' Also, 'the OS for hardware from dead vendors' doesn't sound too great.
I'm wondering why there isn't more of an aggressive effort to reverse-engineer the drives that manufacturers put out for Linux.
I mean, when people complain about a binary-only driver from a vendor that is only released for, as someone else in this thread mentioned, RedHat 7.2, it should be a lot easier (given that the interface and underlying OS is much more 'revealed') to reverse engineer that driver and produce an 'open source' support for said hardware.
Are people afraid to offend vendors who release broken (yes, if it won't run on what a user wants to run it on, it's _broken_ support, even if there is lip-service to Linux in the form of an obsolete binary kernel module) drivers?
You consider a 'found new' dialogue to be an instance of 'confusion'??
He's probably a register-hacking freeware-installing twink.
As long as you install a basic set of the things you want/need without going overboard, and aren't a weird control-freak about details (i.e. people who insist on overriding defaults and installing everything in their custom directories, etc.) Windows gets the job done well.
Linux is better, though, if you've got the time and experience to tweak. I'd say it's about time for all the tweaks, control-freaks, and computer enthusiasts to bail off their Windows system and to something that gives them power. Leave Windows for grandma and the typical AOL customer.
I installed Slackware 9.1 on two boxes earlier this week. One of them is a PPro 200 desktop and the other is a quad PPro server.
I didn't install the Gnome or KDE sets, the desktop is nicely responsive and usable with FVWM2 running.
Perhaps that's part of the advantage of Linux that (with Slackware, anyway) you can skip the desktop bloat and get a usable system, on a machine that sells for about $5 at auction these days. (the quad PPRo server was $15, though)
I was noticing (since I picked up a roll in an auction lot that I now have to find a buyer for) that Player Pianos aren't very expensive on eBay. One person had one listed that said 'if nobody bids on this, get in touch with us about taking it for free.'
So listen to 'real' music instead of recordings of music.
Apple had a whole version of 'Linux' for the Mac, which ran in a sort of a sandbox on top of a 'Mach' kernel. Essentially to shield their hardware from the hackers, who would have dug in and reverse engineered the Apple hardware to make Linux run right on the Mac. So now there's a dead-end bunch of code called mklinux, and there's no native Mac support in the main Linux kernel.
That's hardly anything more than lip service to the Open Source process.
It's 'silly reasoning' to state the fact that Apple is reduced to just another commodity hardware company if and when Linux becomes the dominant platform?
I like the RFD network. Horse Training shows are fun to watch.