That was the same conclusion I came to. The big numbers make it look like a drug oversight crisis. If anything, it is a public health crisis and the real question is why are so many people in one area in such amounts of pain.
Those of us of a certain age may better know 0 degrees Latitude/0 degrees Longitude as the location of Zero Zero Island, the home of Colonel Bleep (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonel_Bleep).
Mr. Miller talks about the physical book metaphor used by the Mac OS X Address Book and iCal. This is nothing new, though, or confined to Apple. I can well remember using a few different "daily planner" apps back in the late 90s that used the same kind of visual, right down to little metal "rings" in the center of the window.
Remember, that prior to Minix, Linux or any of the x86 BSDs, the idea of a personal, affordable, up-to-date Unix platform was something of a Holy Grail. The basic options were either expensive (SCO XENIX), loosely compatible (Coherent, PC-Unix) or discontinued surplus (AT&T UnixPC). The stage was set for somebody to take over the world.
In the beginning, you had two choices for running BSD on a 386- BSD/386 or 386BSD. BSD/386 was an expensive commercial product. 386BSD was free, but initially flawed and slow to release updates. It was a project basically under the control of a single person, William Jolitz, and his wife.
Quoting from the Wikipedia entry for 386BSD:
"After the release of 386BSD 0.1, a group of users began collecting bug fixes and enhancements, releasing them as an unofficial patchkit. Due to differences of opinion between the Jolitzes and the patchkit maintainers over the future direction and release schedule of 386BSD, the maintainers of the patchkit founded the FreeBSD project in 1993 to continue their work.[2] Around the same time, the NetBSD project was founded by a different group of 386BSD users, with the aim of unifying 386BSD with other strands of BSD development into one multi-platform system. Both projects continue to this day."
In this case, the issue was not elitism so much as vested self-interest. (The Jolitzes has various ties to Dr. Dobbs Journal and the original 386BSD porting effort was documented in a series of articles.
The AT&T lawsuits did occur at this time, but is has been noted that 386BSD was never party to any of them.
My personal feeling is that the success of Linux was a combination of timing, personality and community response. Had Linus taken a more controlling stance (not a benevolent dictator), things might have gone very different.
Hatred towards Ubuntu seems to be focused on Unity and Gnome.
Unity is the rallying point for much of the hatred, but the core issue is Canonical's (at least Shuttleworth's) attitude of responding to user complaints with an attitude of "We're not changing it, so live with it."
I think the dissent really started when they moved the window control buttons from the right side to the left. At the time, the change was quietly introduced with no forewarning or discussion. It was a choice of the design team that, despite complaints and usability arguments from the community, has remained the default.
The reality is that Ubuntu is a distribution in transition. Like most distributions, it began with a community and a sense of response to the community. With recent releases, we see more of a trend toward a commercial distribution which responds more to factors such as product positioning. Visually, Lucid Lynx began the MacOSX-ification of Ubuntu, but it also began a spiritual change to an Apple-like model where a Jobs-like CEO tells the users what they really need or want, even if they don't know it yet.
Unfortunately, Ubuntu with Unity is Mac OSX 10.0 or 10.1 (Puma), when it really needs to have been 10.4 (Tiger) or 10.5 (Leopard).
One thing which I haven't seen mentioned is hobbyist usage, especially on surplus UltraSPARC hardware. I recently acquired a used Ultra 5 on which is now installed Solaris 11 Express. So far, my only issues have been getting a working X configuration and getting a Prism2-based WiFi card to work (PCI, supposedly supported by the pcwl(5) driver).
I'm an old Unix/Linux geek, but my last Solaris exposure was Sol9 on a Sparc 20. It has, so far, been interesting to learn about some of the newer innovations such as ZFS and the new service handling and administration.
The problem is that you are thinking of it as a general-purpose computer rather than an appliance.
Look at it this way- I go to Best Buy and purchase a particular model of wireless router; it is version 'n' of the hardware and runs a Linux core. The next week, I go to Staples and purchase another of the exact same brand and model of router, only to receive version 'n+1' which now runs VxWorks. Both meet the same functional specifications as outlined on the package and both have the same configuration GUI. Nowhere was I guaranteed that I would get a Linux-based router.
Its the same here. Each Africa may have different internal hardware, but that is all hidden by running different ports of the same OS and applications and only guaranteeing the same minimal functional level. The issue comes when a power user decides to move beyond the installed functionality by adding a software package which is not available for the archtecture of his specific Africa (ever try to find modern CE software for anything other than ARM?), but this is not the target audience of the device.
I'm reminded a bit of the classic WB cartoon where the elves describe mass production to the shoemaker. What people couldn't foresee what the idea of transportation becoming so cheap (or labor remaining so expensive) that you could actually make the product half-way around the world and still sell it cheaper than if you made it in the US.
Similarly, the 1960's cartoon "The Jetsons" envisioned a future with a 3-day work week, most of which involved having to periodically push "the button". By the 1980s, though, we began to see new office technologies such as the fax machine not as the means to decreasing work, but as the means of expanding the work day to having more time to do the same work. The same can be said or the Blackberry which provides such a level of connectivity that one never has to let an employee "stop" working for the day.
11:03AM Q: You've put a lot of work into the new touchpad, do touchscreens not make sense? A: Steve: so far it hasn't made a lot of sense to us.
I confess that I don't get this one. It seems like ever major manufacturer has at least one tablet or convertible. It there really that little call for the technology in the real world? I'd think that that class full of Macbook toting students would be well served by a tablet and the handwriting recognition that has already been in the OS for quite a while.
So can someone explain to me why US soldiers are buying illegal material (bootleg DVDs) and installing it on military equipment? I would think either one of these is worthy of a severe reprimand. I've been reading this thread and trying to figure that out, too.
I do software development on a Government network with a Government-supplied notebook. Based on what I've seen of the Information Assurance (IA) compliance here, I'd expect that if I tried to view porn on the notebook, I could expect to be *escorted* out of the building.
Is Schmedlap (generic soldier) really allowed (i.e., physically permitted) to take his ToughBook running MCS back to the barracks and view movies on it?
Is this really an issue of running servers or of licensing to the record labels? I'm thinking that it may be that a bunch of contracts are about to expire and it would be prohibitive to renegotiate/renew them without the now-defunct music store.
The fundamental difference is that engineers do tend to rely on things that are provably correct or experimentally verifiable, whereas religious extremists are predicating invisible omnipotent entities. But the point is: if you have people who have this engineering set of mechanisms and filters for dealing with the world, and who believe in invisible omnipotent entities, they're going to have similar behavior to people who are drawn to engineering. I think you captured it in a nutshell. For the fundamentalist (in any religous context), there is always a set of defined rules and codes of conduct. If everyone would just follow them, then the world would run like a well-oiled machine. The problem is just getting people to follow those rules.
Sounds a lot like engineering (or, at least, computer science).
I'm a little surprised that no one has jumped on the similarity to the premise of the movie Down Periscope(http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116130).
In that movie, Kelsey Grammar is assigned command of a Korea-era diesel/electric sub with the mission to infiltrate Norfolk harbor and destroy a simulated battleship as part of a military exercise. The purpose of the exercise being to test the capabilities of an enemy working with outdated and surplus weapon systems.
How can blocking Google Groups be seen as draconian. They have no place in a responsible workplace. They are only filled with warez requests, AOL Me Toos, kiddie porn and hentai anyway. For example as part of my job monitoring proxy logs I have reported a few people for browsing incest stories on groups before we just blocked it outright.
Better example, then... on the network at work, I can go to and read the Dell support forums (no bad stuff there), but can't post any requests for help because that gets blocked as "chat".
We also can not get on-line tech support from another major manufacturer since that requires an unauthorized IM client and allowing remote access to the system.
Heck, I can't even remotely administer our off-site system since the Windows RDP port is blocked for outgoing traffic!
But these days EVERYone has a PC. People do things like shop, bank, and communicate using PCs.
Funny, but you wouldn't think it if you've ever offered a PC on a Freecycle. The last time I did, I had about an 8:1 ratio of responses to available computers.
I would also say that the test points out something that the Gnome community, at least, is starting to recognize- that various inefficiencies in Gnome and underlying libs do cause it to perform less well on smaller/older hardware than Windows.
Personally, though, I would have liked to see an inverse of the test (i.e., answer the question of what is the best OS to run on that 1999-vintage system).
Now, excuse me while I wait for the custom kernel to finish compiling on my PIII-450 laptop.:-)
Let me begin by saying that I want to like OpenBSD 3.7, I really do, but I find that I can't... not enough to switch to it.
Last week, my dual-boot Win98/Ubuntu laptop (an Inspiron 3700) ate itself, so I decided to use the opportunity to try OpenBSD 3.7, given the allure of the new wireless drivers.
The install went well and I got X running as soon as I realized that I needed to use 'xorgconfig' rather than 'xf86config3'. I downloadeed a snapshot of the ports tree and did the obligatory builds of Gnome (2.8), Firefox (1.0.4), and Mozilla (1.7.8); the latter in an attempt at getting a Gecko SDK. I even built the native JDK.
After all that, though, I came back to the same issue which has always kept me from running a BSD as a fulltime OS- limited ports. I understand the licensing issue, but compared to the NetBSD package tree and the even-more vast FreeBSD ports tree, the OpenBSD ports tree is downright spartan. Many packages are not there (mplayerplug-in, w32codecs, OpenOffice)while others seem hopelessly out of date (Netatalk, Wine). While it is likely that many of the missing ones would build from source anyway, this removes most of the advantages of the package system.
As for the rest, this is perhaps the legacy of the Linux vs. BSD wars. In the old days, some software would run on BSD, some on System V, some on both. Back then, it always seemed like the "interesting" ones would run on BSD. Today, it seems most of the OpenSource development centers on Linux with BSD, at best, an afterthought.
That said, perhaps it's time to try a FreeBSD iso... I need to wipe the drive anyway.:-)
Just a namespace collision isn't evidence of trademark infringement. That requires (or should require -- I gave up on learning the details of IP law once I realized that it made no sense) one company to choose their name specifically to leech off another successful name.
Tigerdirect has been around since before Apple picked the name Tiger.
Interesting... but then, if I had gone out a year ago and opened a Mac-oriented store named "PantherDirect" would Apple (not to mention Tiger Direct) have had cause to sue me?
Anybody think Apple's attorneys would have even hesitated a moment to do so?
Slashdot Mirror
That was the same conclusion I came to. The big numbers make it look like a drug oversight crisis. If anything, it is a public health crisis and the real question is why are so many people in one area in such amounts of pain.
Those of us of a certain age may better know 0 degrees Latitude/0 degrees Longitude as the location of Zero Zero Island, the home of Colonel Bleep (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonel_Bleep).
Mr. Miller talks about the physical book metaphor used by the Mac OS X Address Book and iCal. This is nothing new, though, or confined to Apple. I can well remember using a few different "daily planner" apps back in the late 90s that used the same kind of visual, right down to little metal "rings" in the center of the window.
Having also lived through this....
Remember, that prior to Minix, Linux or any of the x86 BSDs, the idea of a personal, affordable, up-to-date Unix platform was something of a Holy Grail. The basic options were either expensive (SCO XENIX), loosely compatible (Coherent, PC-Unix) or discontinued surplus (AT&T UnixPC). The stage was set for somebody to take over the world.
In the beginning, you had two choices for running BSD on a 386- BSD/386 or 386BSD. BSD/386 was an expensive commercial product. 386BSD was free, but initially flawed and slow to release updates. It was a project basically under the control of a single person, William Jolitz, and his wife.
Quoting from the Wikipedia entry for 386BSD:
"After the release of 386BSD 0.1, a group of users began collecting bug fixes and enhancements, releasing them as an unofficial patchkit. Due to differences of opinion between the Jolitzes and the patchkit maintainers over the future direction and release schedule of 386BSD, the maintainers of the patchkit founded the FreeBSD project in 1993 to continue their work.[2] Around the same time, the NetBSD project was founded by a different group of 386BSD users, with the aim of unifying 386BSD with other strands of BSD development into one multi-platform system. Both projects continue to this day."
In this case, the issue was not elitism so much as vested self-interest. (The Jolitzes has various ties to Dr. Dobbs Journal and the original 386BSD porting effort was documented in a series of articles.
The AT&T lawsuits did occur at this time, but is has been noted that 386BSD was never party to any of them.
My personal feeling is that the success of Linux was a combination of timing, personality and community response. Had Linus taken a more controlling stance (not a benevolent dictator), things might have gone very different.
Hatred towards Ubuntu seems to be focused on Unity and Gnome.
Unity is the rallying point for much of the hatred, but the core issue is Canonical's (at least Shuttleworth's) attitude of responding to user complaints with an attitude of "We're not changing it, so live with it."
I think the dissent really started when they moved the window control buttons from the right side to the left. At the time, the change was quietly introduced with no forewarning or discussion. It was a choice of the design team that, despite complaints and usability arguments from the community, has remained the default.
The reality is that Ubuntu is a distribution in transition. Like most distributions, it began with a community and a sense of response to the community. With recent releases, we see more of a trend toward a commercial distribution which responds more to factors such as product positioning. Visually, Lucid Lynx began the MacOSX-ification of Ubuntu, but it also began a spiritual change to an Apple-like model where a Jobs-like CEO tells the users what they really need or want, even if they don't know it yet.
Unfortunately, Ubuntu with Unity is Mac OSX 10.0 or 10.1 (Puma), when it really needs to have been 10.4 (Tiger) or 10.5 (Leopard).
One thing which I haven't seen mentioned is hobbyist usage, especially on surplus UltraSPARC hardware. I recently acquired a used Ultra 5 on which is now installed Solaris 11 Express. So far, my only issues have been getting a working X configuration and getting a Prism2-based WiFi card to work (PCI, supposedly supported by the pcwl(5) driver).
I'm an old Unix/Linux geek, but my last Solaris exposure was Sol9 on a Sparc 20. It has, so far, been interesting to learn about some of the newer innovations such as ZFS and the new service handling and administration.
This week on MythBusters: 'Are full or empty beer bottles sturdier and does their fracture-threshold suffice to break the human skull?'
Cut to shots of a sprint-loaded arm smashing bottles on the head of poor Buster. Quick cut to reaction shot of Cary and Grant.
Later in the show... Adam and Jamie get to the bottom of our navel fluff mystery.
The problem is that you are thinking of it as a general-purpose computer rather than an appliance.
Look at it this way- I go to Best Buy and purchase a particular model of wireless router; it is version 'n' of the hardware and runs a Linux core. The next week, I go to Staples and purchase another of the exact same brand and model of router, only to receive version 'n+1' which now runs VxWorks. Both meet the same functional specifications as outlined on the package and both have the same configuration GUI. Nowhere was I guaranteed that I would get a Linux-based router.
Its the same here. Each Africa may have different internal hardware, but that is all hidden by running different ports of the same OS and applications and only guaranteeing the same minimal functional level. The issue comes when a power user decides to move beyond the installed functionality by adding a software package which is not available for the archtecture of his specific Africa (ever try to find modern CE software for anything other than ARM?), but this is not the target audience of the device.
I'm reminded a bit of the classic WB cartoon where the elves describe mass production to the shoemaker. What people couldn't foresee what the idea of transportation becoming so cheap (or labor remaining so expensive) that you could actually make the product half-way around the world and still sell it cheaper than if you made it in the US.
Similarly, the 1960's cartoon "The Jetsons" envisioned a future with a 3-day work week, most of which involved having to periodically push "the button". By the 1980s, though, we began to see new office technologies such as the fax machine not as the means to decreasing work, but as the means of expanding the work day to having more time to do the same work. The same can be said or the Blackberry which provides such a level of connectivity that one never has to let an employee "stop" working for the day.
11:03AM Q: You've put a lot of work into the new touchpad, do touchscreens not make sense?
A: Steve: so far it hasn't made a lot of sense to us.
I confess that I don't get this one. It seems like ever major manufacturer has at least one tablet or convertible. It there really that little call for the technology in the real world? I'd think that that class full of Macbook toting students would be well served by a tablet and the handwriting recognition that has already been in the OS for quite a while.
I do software development on a Government network with a Government-supplied notebook. Based on what I've seen of the Information Assurance (IA) compliance here, I'd expect that if I tried to view porn on the notebook, I could expect to be *escorted* out of the building.
Is Schmedlap (generic soldier) really allowed (i.e., physically permitted) to take his ToughBook running MCS back to the barracks and view movies on it?
Is this really an issue of running servers or of licensing to the record labels? I'm thinking that it may be that a bunch of contracts are about to expire and it would be prohibitive to renegotiate/renew them without the now-defunct music store.
I, for one , would love to see at traffic jam moving at 30,000 miles per hour!
Sounds a lot like engineering (or, at least, computer science).
In that movie, Kelsey Grammar is assigned command of a Korea-era diesel/electric sub with the mission to infiltrate Norfolk harbor and destroy a simulated battleship as part of a military exercise. The purpose of the exercise being to test the capabilities of an enemy working with outdated and surplus weapon systems.
It's exactly the same problem/scenario that Mac owners have had since 1984- extremely quiet area/loud startup bong/chord/chime.
The big difference is that on the Mac, it's a single chord. With Vista, it will be some vaguely annoying musical passage designed to evoke nostalgia.
(BTW, anyone else think that the Win2K/ME startup music sounds a bit like the Star Trek theme?)
I'd laugh at this one except that I actually had Slashdot cited in my last annual performance appraisal. :-(
Which leaves the even bigger question of where this all leaves Workstation?
Player makes sense... small run-only environment, embeddable, etc.
But if GSX goes free what would a pricy workstation offer?
Better example, then... on the network at work, I can go to and read the Dell support forums (no bad stuff there), but can't post any requests for help because that gets blocked as "chat".
We also can not get on-line tech support from another major manufacturer since that requires an unauthorized IM client and allowing remote access to the system.
Heck, I can't even remotely administer our off-site system since the Windows RDP port is blocked for outgoing traffic!
Funny, but you wouldn't think it if you've ever offered a PC on a Freecycle. The last time I did, I had about an 8:1 ratio of responses to available computers.
I would also say that the test points out something that the Gnome community, at least, is starting to recognize- that various inefficiencies in Gnome and underlying libs do cause it to perform less well on smaller/older hardware than Windows.
:-)
Personally, though, I would have liked to see an inverse of the test (i.e., answer the question of what is the best OS to run on that 1999-vintage system).
Now, excuse me while I wait for the custom kernel to finish compiling on my PIII-450 laptop.
Let me begin by saying that I want to like OpenBSD 3.7, I really do, but I find that I can't... not enough to switch to it.
:-)
Last week, my dual-boot Win98/Ubuntu laptop (an Inspiron 3700) ate itself, so I decided to use the opportunity to try OpenBSD 3.7, given the allure of the new wireless drivers.
The install went well and I got X running as soon as I realized that I needed to use 'xorgconfig' rather than 'xf86config3'. I downloadeed a snapshot of the ports tree and did the obligatory builds of Gnome (2.8), Firefox (1.0.4), and Mozilla (1.7.8); the latter in an attempt at getting a Gecko SDK. I even built the native JDK.
After all that, though, I came back to the same issue which has always kept me from running a BSD as a fulltime OS- limited ports. I understand the licensing issue, but compared to the NetBSD package tree and the even-more vast FreeBSD ports tree, the OpenBSD ports tree is downright spartan. Many packages are not there (mplayerplug-in, w32codecs, OpenOffice)while others seem hopelessly out of date (Netatalk, Wine). While it is likely that many of the missing ones would build from source anyway, this removes most of the advantages of the package system.
As for the rest, this is perhaps the legacy of the Linux vs. BSD wars. In the old days, some software would run on BSD, some on System V, some on both. Back then, it always seemed like the "interesting" ones would run on BSD. Today, it seems most of the OpenSource development centers on Linux with BSD, at best, an afterthought.
That said, perhaps it's time to try a FreeBSD iso... I need to wipe the drive anyway.
Interesting... but then, if I had gone out a year ago and opened a Mac-oriented store named "PantherDirect" would Apple (not to mention Tiger Direct) have had cause to sue me?
Anybody think Apple's attorneys would have even hesitated a moment to do so?