...and you'll have to get into the habit of referring to DLLs as "shareable objects", but on the other hand it's kinda virus-proof, it's reliable for the first time evah, and you can install things using our fabulous new Redmond Package Manager system. But yeah, it's Windows 2000, stripped down and with a few replacements.
If you don't believe me, just pop a Konsole on it and type "uname -a"; there it is, right in front of you:
Windows xbox360 2000.4.22-29mdksecure #1 SMP Tue Mar 23 17:31:10 MST 2004 i686 unknown unknown GNU/Windows
...then it starts to run out the sides. Yes, even if you do tape over that silly hole. I'm using the model 52X coffee holder, if that matters.
The coffee holder doesn't keep it warm, either, and the fan-forcing on the only really warm bit blows it around too much and makes icky stains on the inside of my flouro-illuminated case window. If I turn the machine on its side, maybe I can use the second-warmest bit that my screen plugs into?
Sorry, maybe I should have started with a C|N>K warning?
I have a little sign in the back window of my car - about where people like to put their "My child is an honours student at..." stickers - saying in CAPS, slightly L33t5p0|<3|\|, dotmatrix font: "My leet hacker child owns your honour student's Windows box"
I've seen one guy on the freeway flip from bored-silly/screensaver-mode to laughing at it so hard that he drove over the cateyes on the lane markers several times. Frustrated admin, I guess.
BTW, that screenshot is eleven generations old now. The new ones are even better, but I wanted to make the point that Linux has had this facility since more than a year before OS X was even released.
If you want a piece of software which has not been diskimaged, you need to go through exactly the same rigmarole you posit for Linux, but without URPMI or apt-get or YAST or yum or whatever to help you find dependencies.
Unless you're after something from Fink - a third-party effort which exists because...? Anyone...? [distant chorus: Apple's packaging is deficient]
Same story for Wintendo, of course, only there ain't no WinFink (although CygWin is close) and it don't come with no useful build system at all 'coz Microsoft are really only interested in having dependants, not partners.
The implication behind the diskimage install is that either the Apple apps have no dependencies (interesting concept), or everything gets shipped statically linked. Do your DMGs automatically upgrade with the rest of your system?
For the few that do, Mandrake or Ubuntu will do the job just fine for them out of the box.
Your basic premise is silly. In Real Life(tm), someone who knows enough to want to set up any system by themselves is either going to be sensible enough to not stuff things up by idiocy like deleting random system files, or a random turkey who is going to butcher any system that falls under their hands.
The four different desktop machines (well, 3 dt and one laptop) in this household all run Mandrake Linux. Sound worked on all of them OOTB. Only this desktop has a special sound card (Yamaha 744), the rest are Intel or PC'97. Everything shares sound nicely through artsd.
Occasionally the Flash plugin goes wild, but VeryNice fixes that automagically after a few minutes (and later Konquerors also offer to fix it for you on the spot if set to do so).
OTOH my book-keeper plugged a Win2k-based laptop into his LAN yesterday, and after much farting around (nothing as neat as MCC here) finally managed to get the internal firewalling shut down, and Norton's internet security thing, and the laptop still won't read the shares on the one (98SE) machine he wants it to, and nor will any of the other machines (98SE, 95, XP) read the laptop - but Samba reads it just fine, both the old version on the gateway and the new version on his LOB server. None of the other machines have any problems with each other (including Samba, both ways). Yes, the workgroup, authentication etc are all correct and consistent. Yes, he did reboot them all. The laptop is happy to talk to the chosen machine using WinSCP and the CygWin SSH server.
That's my definition of "difficult to understand". And so much of Windows is like that. Case in point: all of the network settings for Win2k are in the network control panel - except for the machine identity, which is part of the properties on My [Bill's] Computer.
People only think it's normal because they're used to it. Linux is not difficult, just different.
Kopete looks way different from MSN Messenger but does the same job and without the dangerous crap that random idiots broadcast to you through it. The rest of the interface (web browser, email, office suite, games running under KDE) the 15yo just uses and couldn't care less what brand it was. She has said that KMail is easier for her to use than MS Outlook, but I don't think that's part of a pattern or anything.
The 4yo just wants to play the Polly Pockets online games, which she does in FireFox.
My enthusiastic 5.5yo son and fine collection of local nephews (3yo to 10yo) have no trouble either. We have Mac-only users and Wintendo-only users drop in all the time, and they have no problems.
There is no Windows here, only Linux. Sorry, but it's just the truth.
When was the last time you actually used a modern Linux GUI?
I don't like MySQL (I prefer PostgreSQL or ibFireBird) but at 100 tickets a second it does seem to cut the ice for large applications.
Arjen also routinely mentions "terabyte" databases, although he tends to speak more in terms of "billions of records". If in doubt, email him. You'll get an authoritative answer.
This article speaks of MySQL serving ~1TB in real life, and links to a benchmark which has MySQL scaling as well as Oracle (just one benchmark, but I think it makes the point).
MySQL has a number of features, restrictions and peculiarities which I find irritating, but in terms of raw performance, especially on reads, it doesn't seem to stop when your database gets seriously large. I find PostgreSQL much more pleasant to use, and this article speaks of Fujitsu helping to add Table Spaces to make management of data "into the hundreds of gigabyte" easier, with the implication being that people already have PostgreSQL databases that large, and the feature is basically a bonus. This article also mentions a PostgreSQL database of over a terabyte.
I think you'll find that the limitation is not the software, the limitation is that precious few MySQL DBAs are familiar with databases larger than you can squeeze into a desktop machine (the machine in front of me will take 4x250GB IDE disks for a total of 1TB of storage, for example, and if you had matching SATA drives as many controllers do, put in a new PSU and double that).
The developer.com article mentions that Oracle was harder to tune for larger databases than MySQL, so perhaps this is changing, perhaps we will see more people asking if it's worth spending the extra money for a database that's harder to operate, and no faster. Perhaps it would be cost-effective to spend the money on more servers instead (you can get a pair of jaw-droppingly impressive servers for the price of a single high-end Oracle licence), and rely on redundancy rather than expertise. PostgreSQL supports replication, and there are bolt-ons to do the same for MySQL, kinda-sorta, so it's not an unreasonable proposition and can only get more attractive as these features are improved.
...is that Microsoft have tried to diversify in a similar manner - in some fields, many times (think MSN and Blackbird) - and come a cropper regularly. Google seems to be getting it right first time every time.
I think one big difference is that Google don't try to shaft everyone else in sight as Job #1. MS seems to have a fixation on everyone else as competition to be smashed. It's the kind of broken bastard spawn of evolutionary philosophy which predominates in ghettos and I guess that at some level everyone recognises this and those who recognise it most clearly either try to join them (strength by association) at the top of their limited pecking order (which you would never do after stopping to think through all of the consequences of the philosophy) or run away screaming at the first opportunity.
...tends to leave the real farmers standing, and the city farmers sitting around looking queasy and trying to hear or see too much - or in some cases, looking for the lost lamb (leaning over a rail, calling out "Bert!").
The intrinsic ForTran array management sucks so much that they had to add lots of manual overrides. The manual overrides allow them to pull certain tricks with array management to make it all go fast again. If they know what they're doing.
In real life, you'd be far better off in performance terms if you simply used a rational array management system written in C, prototyped in Ruby or Python and reduced anything performance-critical in the prototype to C again. I have no idea why you'd attempt high performace in C++; it's just as pointless as trying it with Java.
God is REAL unless declared INTEGER*4, and all that.
Most people never take the trouble to figure out where the ends of their cars actually are. Go for a careful drive in some tall grass one day. With practice, it's not so hard.
I've avoided at least three catastrophic accidents through knowing exactly where the sides of my car (or tyres) were and routinely (daily) miss other cars by less than 5cm when parking and less than 10cm at speed. I place my tyres to within 2cm to avoid speed bumps, and routinely place my car in a gap less than 5cm wider than it in a single try when I park here at home. Admittedly, the road is not pitching and rolling at the time. Our local (Perth, WestOz) bus drivers pilot 8'6"-wide bendy-buses along 9'-wide lanes (not sure why lane and vehicle widths are imperial since practically everything else is metric). And so on. We're capable of a lot of stuff you might not think we are.
OTOH, I routinely meet drivers who have no clue, wouldn't know where the ends of their cars are to within 5m, let alone 5cm. Their response to wet weather is to travel at shopping trolley speeds (and crash anyway), and to unsealed roads is to either sink themselves to the axles (sand) or spin out and crash (gravel). When they start to lose traction on a corner, they brake! D'oh?
I'd love to see licensing rules here changed so that people were re-tested and had to re-qualify every 5 years. I'd also like to see the after-5-years and 10-years-and-on tests be considerably harder to pass than the first one, specifically to require the driver to demonstrate that after 5 (or 10) years on the road they had a clue about dimensions and basic physics and could recover lost traction. The only thing you could do which would have a bigger impact on road deaths would be to shoot drunk drivers on the second offence.
Slashdot Mirror
If you don't believe me, just pop a Konsole on it and type "uname -a"; there it is, right in front of you:
+1, Damn Straight
And in a big way. If Nokia can trust their IP to the GPL, why can't J Random PHB?
...then it starts to run out the sides. Yes, even if you do tape over that silly hole. I'm using the model 52X coffee holder, if that matters.
The coffee holder doesn't keep it warm, either, and the fan-forcing on the only really warm bit blows it around too much and makes icky stains on the inside of my flouro-illuminated case window. If I turn the machine on its side, maybe I can use the second-warmest bit that my screen plugs into?
Sorry, maybe I should have started with a C|N>K warning?
..."Bill Gates Wrong Again" is hardly newsworthy. (-:
I've seen one guy on the freeway flip from bored-silly/screensaver-mode to laughing at it so hard that he drove over the cateyes on the lane markers several times. Frustrated admin, I guess.
...you get a new copy of each installed with every set of MS-Windows updates.
I'm sure the originator of that little stroke of genius will be found staked across an anthill within hours of his name getting leaked.
...and lots of patience. Compare that with clicking on "delete" in RPMdrake or the like.
...RPMdrake to me.
BTW, that screenshot is eleven generations old now. The new ones are even better, but I wanted to make the point that Linux has had this facility since more than a year before OS X was even released.
If you want a piece of software which has not been diskimaged, you need to go through exactly the same rigmarole you posit for Linux, but without URPMI or apt-get or YAST or yum or whatever to help you find dependencies.
Unless you're after something from Fink - a third-party effort which exists because...? Anyone...? [distant chorus: Apple's packaging is deficient]
Same story for Wintendo, of course, only there ain't no WinFink (although CygWin is close) and it don't come with no useful build system at all 'coz Microsoft are really only interested in having dependants, not partners.
The implication behind the diskimage install is that either the Apple apps have no dependencies (interesting concept), or everything gets shipped statically linked. Do your DMGs automatically upgrade with the rest of your system?
right.
Yes, you were being sarcastic - but this is SlashDot. You need either to add the <sarcasm> tags or be as subtle as a haddock across the chops.
Hmm, amazing what a fairly innocent search will turn up.
Haven't tried it on any of my own grandparents yet, but daughters and the like seem happy.
For the few that do, Mandrake or Ubuntu will do the job just fine for them out of the box.
Your basic premise is silly. In Real Life(tm), someone who knows enough to want to set up any system by themselves is either going to be sensible enough to not stuff things up by idiocy like deleting random system files, or a random turkey who is going to butcher any system that falls under their hands.
The four different desktop machines (well, 3 dt and one laptop) in this household all run Mandrake Linux. Sound worked on all of them OOTB. Only this desktop has a special sound card (Yamaha 744), the rest are Intel or PC'97. Everything shares sound nicely through artsd.
Occasionally the Flash plugin goes wild, but VeryNice fixes that automagically after a few minutes (and later Konquerors also offer to fix it for you on the spot if set to do so).
OTOH my book-keeper plugged a Win2k-based laptop into his LAN yesterday, and after much farting around (nothing as neat as MCC here) finally managed to get the internal firewalling shut down, and Norton's internet security thing, and the laptop still won't read the shares on the one (98SE) machine he wants it to, and nor will any of the other machines (98SE, 95, XP) read the laptop - but Samba reads it just fine, both the old version on the gateway and the new version on his LOB server. None of the other machines have any problems with each other (including Samba, both ways). Yes, the workgroup, authentication etc are all correct and consistent. Yes, he did reboot them all. The laptop is happy to talk to the chosen machine using WinSCP and the CygWin SSH server.
That's my definition of "difficult to understand". And so much of Windows is like that. Case in point: all of the network settings for Win2k are in the network control panel - except for the machine identity, which is part of the properties on My [Bill's] Computer.
People only think it's normal because they're used to it. Linux is not difficult, just different.
Kopete looks way different from MSN Messenger but does the same job and without the dangerous crap that random idiots broadcast to you through it. The rest of the interface (web browser, email, office suite, games running under KDE) the 15yo just uses and couldn't care less what brand it was. She has said that KMail is easier for her to use than MS Outlook, but I don't think that's part of a pattern or anything.
The 4yo just wants to play the Polly Pockets online games, which she does in FireFox.
My enthusiastic 5.5yo son and fine collection of local nephews (3yo to 10yo) have no trouble either. We have Mac-only users and Wintendo-only users drop in all the time, and they have no problems.
There is no Windows here, only Linux. Sorry, but it's just the truth.
When was the last time you actually used a modern Linux GUI?
Now back it up with Real Life(tm) references.
I don't like MySQL (I prefer PostgreSQL or ibFireBird) but at 100 tickets a second it does seem to cut the ice for large applications.
Arjen also routinely mentions "terabyte" databases, although he tends to speak more in terms of "billions of records". If in doubt, email him. You'll get an authoritative answer.
This article speaks of MySQL serving ~1TB in real life, and links to a benchmark which has MySQL scaling as well as Oracle (just one benchmark, but I think it makes the point).
MySQL has a number of features, restrictions and peculiarities which I find irritating, but in terms of raw performance, especially on reads, it doesn't seem to stop when your database gets seriously large. I find PostgreSQL much more pleasant to use, and this article speaks of Fujitsu helping to add Table Spaces to make management of data "into the hundreds of gigabyte" easier, with the implication being that people already have PostgreSQL databases that large, and the feature is basically a bonus. This article also mentions a PostgreSQL database of over a terabyte.
I think you'll find that the limitation is not the software, the limitation is that precious few MySQL DBAs are familiar with databases larger than you can squeeze into a desktop machine (the machine in front of me will take 4x250GB IDE disks for a total of 1TB of storage, for example, and if you had matching SATA drives as many controllers do, put in a new PSU and double that).
The developer.com article mentions that Oracle was harder to tune for larger databases than MySQL, so perhaps this is changing, perhaps we will see more people asking if it's worth spending the extra money for a database that's harder to operate, and no faster. Perhaps it would be cost-effective to spend the money on more servers instead (you can get a pair of jaw-droppingly impressive servers for the price of a single high-end Oracle licence), and rely on redundancy rather than expertise. PostgreSQL supports replication, and there are bolt-ons to do the same for MySQL, kinda-sorta, so it's not an unreasonable proposition and can only get more attractive as these features are improved.
...is that Microsoft have tried to diversify in a similar manner - in some fields, many times (think MSN and Blackbird) - and come a cropper regularly. Google seems to be getting it right first time every time.
I think one big difference is that Google don't try to shaft everyone else in sight as Job #1. MS seems to have a fixation on everyone else as competition to be smashed. It's the kind of broken bastard spawn of evolutionary philosophy which predominates in ghettos and I guess that at some level everyone recognises this and those who recognise it most clearly either try to join them (strength by association) at the top of their limited pecking order (which you would never do after stopping to think through all of the consequences of the philosophy) or run away screaming at the first opportunity.
Where've the Insightful mods for the parent gone?
...tends to leave the real farmers standing, and the city farmers sitting around looking queasy and trying to hear or see too much - or in some cases, looking for the lost lamb (leaning over a rail, calling out "Bert!").
Yes, the squeaky toys are indeed cute. (-:
"Honesty means not having to remember stuff" (-:
...I can tell 'coz you didn't put a tarp or any hay on your roof. (-:
The intrinsic ForTran array management sucks so much that they had to add lots of manual overrides. The manual overrides allow them to pull certain tricks with array management to make it all go fast again. If they know what they're doing.
In real life, you'd be far better off in performance terms if you simply used a rational array management system written in C, prototyped in Ruby or Python and reduced anything performance-critical in the prototype to C again. I have no idea why you'd attempt high performace in C++; it's just as pointless as trying it with Java.
God is REAL unless declared INTEGER*4, and all that.
Most people never take the trouble to figure out where the ends of their cars actually are. Go for a careful drive in some tall grass one day. With practice, it's not so hard.
I've avoided at least three catastrophic accidents through knowing exactly where the sides of my car (or tyres) were and routinely (daily) miss other cars by less than 5cm when parking and less than 10cm at speed. I place my tyres to within 2cm to avoid speed bumps, and routinely place my car in a gap less than 5cm wider than it in a single try when I park here at home. Admittedly, the road is not pitching and rolling at the time. Our local (Perth, WestOz) bus drivers pilot 8'6"-wide bendy-buses along 9'-wide lanes (not sure why lane and vehicle widths are imperial since practically everything else is metric). And so on. We're capable of a lot of stuff you might not think we are.
OTOH, I routinely meet drivers who have no clue, wouldn't know where the ends of their cars are to within 5m, let alone 5cm. Their response to wet weather is to travel at shopping trolley speeds (and crash anyway), and to unsealed roads is to either sink themselves to the axles (sand) or spin out and crash (gravel). When they start to lose traction on a corner, they brake! D'oh?
I'd love to see licensing rules here changed so that people were re-tested and had to re-qualify every 5 years. I'd also like to see the after-5-years and 10-years-and-on tests be considerably harder to pass than the first one, specifically to require the driver to demonstrate that after 5 (or 10) years on the road they had a clue about dimensions and basic physics and could recover lost traction. The only thing you could do which would have a bigger impact on road deaths would be to shoot drunk drivers on the second offence.
...is called BeatriX.
That would make the virgin Ruby?