No doubt he'd be among the first to call any alternate OS zealots "religious nutcases", but if you read his articles he's consistently exemplifying exactly that kind of mindless "its-not-one-of-our-teams-so-it-must-be-bad" attitude that he claims for his opponents. No data here folks, move along.
XP doesn't have a task-based interface, it has a chore-based interface: it makes many otherwise simple things a chore to do. The reason we're seeing Longhorn betas now but no real product for maybe 3 years is because the bits that are important to Microsoft have nothing to do with the shiny new flavour-of-the-year (in particular, last year) blue plastic interface. What Microsoft see as most necessary is the sheaf of bondageware going in behind it. Once the shackles are welded firmly in place, we'll see an official release.
Three months later, passport.com (and so your Longhorn machine) will be 0wn3d by a Brazilian/Russian/Korean cracker collective who will be running it from their satellite-connected PDA while they blitz around in their shiny new Hummer all funded in part by your credit card - if Microsoft remember to renew the domain registration, that is. By which time all of Asia, Africa, South America and much of Europe will be running Linux anyway, and won't care.
It was only discovered when some important person rebooted his box just before going on holidays, the box had nothing to do while he was away and had frozen when he returned, which got his goat.
Here's a quote WRT the 32-bit counter (it's basically Unix's "Y2.038k bug" but happens a thousand times faster, one of the few things in Windows which does):
Why is uptime reset after 49.7 days?
This happens because a 32-bit variable is being used to store the tick count which is incremented every millisecond. A 32-bit variable can store numbers up to 4,294,967,295 which equals to 49.7 days (4,294,967,295/1000/3600/24). When this variable overflows it will start over from 0 again.
Here's the 95/98/ME uptime issue straight from the horse's mouth:
After 49.7 days of continuous operation, your Windows-based computer may stop responding (hang).
Things to note:
That news was posted in late April 1999
When they say "may" stop responding, they mean that all unpatched 9X machines lock up repeatably
So it took four years before anyone noticed that their machine had a fifty-day curfew (it would take many Unix admins about 100 days: "Two crashes in the same decade? Head for the lists!")
That support article was last reviewed on 22 April 2003, but it doesn't say why
I find the Windows 2000 Explorer, with the folder tree and folder contents in separate windows, more useful.
You're going to just adore Konqueror in file-manager mode, then!
The OS X Save As feature is horrible!
OS X doesn't have one, it's implemented by each app. Perhaps OS X should develop a set of convenience libraries which provide this and a few other things in a wrapper library to help in making them more consistent across the board? File functions like import, export and quit ("quit?" think: "what needs saving or save-as-ing before I do this?") could be wrapped too.
I cannot install some games on the network drive in Windows
So install a TSR (or run a wrapper) that intercepts the installer's DLL calls and turns some or all drives into "local" drives. End of problem.
Call me a maniac, but you might also want to try installing the game under WINE. If it actually plays, that's a bonus, but meanwhile *some* of the installers can be conveniently lied to, and the installer might work under WINE even if the game doesn't. Then just copy the changed files and registery entries across, and Bob's your uncle.
$ host 149.156.96.35 35.96.156.149.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer hell.pl.
Never thought of PERL programming as being that painful... (-:
There's also this Wiki to contribute to. It seems to assume that you've already got a specific institution to talk to, so it could probably use a section entitled "finding your audience" or something like that.
Your sole commercial supplier, who knows that it will now be too expensive to convert all of your systems to a competing application, and who has no clue what's really going on inside the applications he's flogging. And he's probably a David Hannum fan.
With an Open Source app you could pick almost whatever support company you liked, and they'd know that their longevity with you was a function of their performance. But that could be considered boat-rocking. )-:
linux has kind of a complex about turning everything into a filesystem
It's a generally useful thing to do. It makes a lot of stuff more accessible than a binary API would, and therefore scriptable without much effort, and also manageable using the same tools that you would use for any other file. A follow-through on the UNIX "everything is a file" philosophy. For complete geeky goodness you can use a file stream such as the virtual terminal associated with an ssh connection to run a PPP session and build a complete ad-hoc VPN in seconds, then automatically publish all of the MS-Windows shares accessible from the other end of the link using sambafs, which allows tar (or whatever) to back them up en bloc. All standard tools, no special application needed.
the best data you have for #3 is netcraft stuff ?
No, but it's a good place to start. Feel free to post better sources. (-:
"Once I smoked... a dynamite* cigar... and drove a foreign car... but baby that was years ago..." I don't think we'd need dynamite, a blasting cap should be enough.
* The real Chisel lyrics say "Tournament cigar" but it doesn't sound as good, and turns the quote into a non-sequitur for me. (-:
BayStar is betting that SCO will be able to collect license fees from Linux users. "We think this licensing initiative is going to work," says Lawrence Goldfarb, managing partner. "We spent a lot of time calling around to potential licensees, and we believe SCO is going to sign enough companies to make this an interesting growth story."
Big money on the wrong side, backing a bunch of whackers making exhorbitant claims and trying to "kill" innocents... what fits that?
Blue Thunder? (how do you park a legal system across the train tracks?)
Your Suggestion Here
Either way, D'ohl and his crew of vultures stand about as much real legal chance of succeeding as an insect in IBM's headlights. If any of the studios are challenged, they'll either push SCO's brains through their collective rear or say "we're waiting on the outcome of the IBM case" and sit. It's a lose, lose, lose situation.
Except for Microsoft.
How many people will foolishly turn back to Microsoft simply because there's corporate headcases loose in Linux land? "I'm not playing with that bunch, there's a kid with wild, staring eyes who keeps kicking the others and demanding their milk money."
Want to make sense of what's happening? Simply follow the money. Who stands to profit the most? "For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil." Sounds trite but it's absolutely true. Money is a game counter that lets the power-hungry keep score, and power hungry people aren't in the game for your benefit.
The combination of iptables and iproute2, even without any user-side extensions, is amazingly more selective and flexible than NT's firewall. Want a simple twenty-questions mode? Rate limiting, proxying, DNAT, the works? Pull down monmotha or any one of fifty other examples and use that.
You also (in 1) seem to have ignored CODA, GlobalFS and a whole passel of networking FSes. You don't mention any of the layer, cacheing or other FSes, devfs, usbfs, built-in loopback capability, yadda yadda yadda. I'm left wondering when you last actually used a Linux kernel in anger.
Micro-ironies abound. For example, Linux can create and use a valid NTFS CD (ISO), but NT won't read it because it "knows" that NTFS CDs don't exist. <thwack>
WRT 3, it's called NetCraft. The article on "what webserver does that candidate use" was a good, er, representative example.
Lotsa other stuff, I could spend hours on it, but would it get read?
...but alas, it'll be a while before the litigation nukes from IBM range in and fix the problem. And what a surprise when it turns out that the scam wasn't being run from Utah after all, but from Redmond!
Until then its just amateurs making crappy, buggy mods.
That's the whole point. Until now, it's mainly been the professionals making crappy, buggy mods. When you open the field, there's scope for natural selection to operate.
I note that a user-done Linux port of Homeworld followed within weeks of that release. I wonder how long it is before game developers can just supply a script and artwork, then stand back and watch their app being written. (-:
Either way, it's too late to prod the genie back into the bottle now. Open Source is well and truly coming to commercial gaming.
This kind of practice might also make the WINE developers' jobs easier, because they don't have to guess at what a game is trying to accomplish with a given weird set of system calls, which means that they don't have to cover all of the possible uses for a call when implementing it, only the actual uses.
Is there a special prize for 1st post and karma whore in one?
Here goes my entry:
These folks are some of the same great people who are supposed to be working for you anyway, plus a smattering of teenagers too young to work at Redmond, hackers, virus creators, and a menagerie of others with whom you will feel great pride in entrusting your IT infrastructure.
Tridge (defined here and here), the smartest man in Australian IT, obviously qualifies and Bill Gates does not (except in his own humble eyes). The only problem remaining is, where does Tridge fit in Howard's categories? Is he your employee? No. Is he a teenager, albeit a smattered one? Not for a long time, to Susan's immense relief. I must mention in defense of teenagers, though, that at least one well-known project has been managed by a 13-year-old, and managed well. A hacker? Since Howard evidently means "cracker", that's a resounding "no". Virus creators? No, although I'm sure SaMBa has transported and safely stored quite a few viruses in its day. I guess he fits in "menagerie of others", which is to say, no category at all. I could run up a list of another hundred or so such people in one day.
Not to put too fine a point on it, Howard Strauss is talking out of his rear, so has evidently forgotten that magic rule: "'tis better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt."
The big sources of greenhouse gasses aren't power plants so much as factories, the ones that make the things than we use to maintain our standard of living.
Not quite. The biggest sources are herd animals bred largely for meat, and the land that they're run on can no longer support the dense and biodiverse foliage that once bound up those gasses. If you are simply after low greenhouse emissions, mandate strict vegetarianism. No meat, no dairy.
IRL, you also want to go after outright poisons. Good luck shutting down Monsanto and getting all of the farmers to revert to hardier and seed-savable but less productive crops so they don't need so many poisonous fertilisers and *icides. After that, you can start in on getting people to abandon their cars by doing stuff like arranging accomodation so that almost all workers can live near their factories and/or offices.
But before that, you'll have to shoot all of the economists, because 99.9% of them confuse chewing up resources and generally "doing stuff" with being productive and producing lasting, functional goods. Their idea of a healthy economy is one that's producing mountains of useless and disposable crap instead of one twenty times smaller that's carefully producing stuff that lasts forever.
Picture a man. He's standing in (Vietnam | insert random low-income nation here), and his annual income is USD$500 because he's better than average there.
Picture another man, also standing in (Vietnam | IRL-INH), also earning USD$500 a year. They read about an offer of 250 years' wages for both of them all in one go if one of them spends five years in the slammer because the other turned him in. A bargain is struck.
Picture a network. It's a busy network, and traffic is humming across it. Let the scene drift closer, and note that the busy workers aren't so much busy as frantic. Frown, and focus on the traffic itself. Outlook has a virus. See the virus flow. Flow, virus, flow.
Hello, says the virus, I eat hard drives wholesale. If you ask Man Number One he will tell you who wrote me. For a fee.
Picture the neighbours of Man Number One, considering their own family incomes and contrasting them with his.
...and if you run out of ground - one of the multi-kilometer drops at the edge of Valles Marineris would be spectacular (being American, the craft would explode when it hit) but even a six-foot edge or hole would probably do - it's too late to stop even if there was no transmission lag. Oh, well.
...at least until they bring out a PPC64 version of retail MS-Windows (IIRC, the x86 XboX runs a severely mangled Win2k natively), and that'll probably have its wings clipped so it's-a-no-run on a PPC64 XboX until somebody effectively cracks it.
Why do I say that? If you RTFA it says...
By buying a heavily subsidized $200 game machine from Microsoft, and then adding a pirated disk drive [intermission: er... what? How can you pirate* a disk drive?], the Xbox can be used as a "poor man's PC, turning a $200 game machine into a $600 personal computer, which Microsoft doesn't like at all," Doherty said.
Here in Oz, an XboX is AUD$330. Add in the cost of a keyboard ($10) and mouse ($30), bigger RAM ($60) and it comes to $420, which is in the same range as new PCs clocking at five times the speed, starting with five times the hard disk space and built with plenty of room for expansion. I think the "turning it into a PC" effect is being overblown by Microsoft both for "poor little me" abuse/sympathy points and to subtly assert that an XboX is as powerful as a PC when it ain't (weeeelll... possibly modulo the graphic card unless you shell out for a good one).
I predict that one effect of this CPU change will be to give Linux an even wider road into the XboX market. One has to wonder whether XboX will get zero, one or two subarchitectures in the kernel tree. (-:
.
* "Piracy" is a major misnomer. So you publish a program, and it gets "pirated". Well? Nobody sails up, shoots you and your crew, pushes the bodies over the side and makes off with a multimillion dollar vessel and its cargo, do they? So it's not piracy - although it is criminally illegal copying. But wait 'till somebody publishes SLPWA's open letter to Vietnam's Science and Technology ministry.
So if Bill were running for Homecoming King, than he wouldnt have your vote.
If Bill were running a lemonade stand, I'd want to see him have a good gulp before I tasted it, and I'd want to taste it before I'd buy any. He's about as truthful and reliable as a bamboo watch where money or power are concerned.
Now how about responding to any of the other three points I listed instead of depending on the flippant one for a snappy-looking reply?
Slashdot Mirror
XP doesn't have a task-based interface, it has a chore-based interface: it makes many otherwise simple things a chore to do. The reason we're seeing Longhorn betas now but no real product for maybe 3 years is because the bits that are important to Microsoft have nothing to do with the shiny new flavour-of-the-year (in particular, last year) blue plastic interface. What Microsoft see as most necessary is the sheaf of bondageware going in behind it. Once the shackles are welded firmly in place, we'll see an official release.
Three months later, passport.com (and so your Longhorn machine) will be 0wn3d by a Brazilian/Russian/Korean cracker collective who will be running it from their satellite-connected PDA while they blitz around in their shiny new Hummer all funded in part by your credit card - if Microsoft remember to renew the domain registration, that is. By which time all of Asia, Africa, South America and much of Europe will be running Linux anyway, and won't care.
Here's a quote WRT the 32-bit counter (it's basically Unix's "Y2.038k bug" but happens a thousand times faster, one of the few things in Windows which does):
Here's the 95/98/ME uptime issue straight from the horse's mouth:
Things to note:
You're going to just adore Konqueror in file-manager mode, then!
OS X doesn't have one, it's implemented by each app. Perhaps OS X should develop a set of convenience libraries which provide this and a few other things in a wrapper library to help in making them more consistent across the board? File functions like import, export and quit ("quit?" think: "what needs saving or save-as-ing before I do this?") could be wrapped too.
...amd steals OS call vectors so it can fiddle with the answers, yes.
I don't care whether it's done with a DLL or .so, or by pulling memory tricks and hand-overwriting vectors, it's still a TSR. (-:
So install a TSR (or run a wrapper) that intercepts the installer's DLL calls and turns some or all drives into "local" drives. End of problem.
Call me a maniac, but you might also want to try installing the game under WINE. If it actually plays, that's a bonus, but meanwhile *some* of the installers can be conveniently lied to, and the installer might work under WINE even if the game doesn't. Then just copy the changed files and registery entries across, and Bob's your uncle.
$ host 149.156.96.35
35.96.156.149.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer hell.pl.
Never thought of PERL programming as being that painful... (-:
There's also this Wiki to contribute to. It seems to assume that you've already got a specific institution to talk to, so it could probably use a section entitled "finding your audience" or something like that.
Google has another list of likely targets.
Your sole commercial supplier, who knows that it will now be too expensive to convert all of your systems to a competing application, and who has no clue what's really going on inside the applications he's flogging. And he's probably a David Hannum fan.
With an Open Source app you could pick almost whatever support company you liked, and they'd know that their longevity with you was a function of their performance. But that could be considered boat-rocking. )-:
It's a generally useful thing to do. It makes a lot of stuff more accessible than a binary API would, and therefore scriptable without much effort, and also manageable using the same tools that you would use for any other file. A follow-through on the UNIX "everything is a file" philosophy. For complete geeky goodness you can use a file stream such as the virtual terminal associated with an ssh connection to run a PPP session and build a complete ad-hoc VPN in seconds, then automatically publish all of the MS-Windows shares accessible from the other end of the link using sambafs, which allows tar (or whatever) to back them up en bloc. All standard tools, no special application needed.
No, but it's a good place to start. Feel free to post better sources. (-:
* The real Chisel lyrics say "Tournament cigar" but it doesn't sound as good, and turns the quote into a non-sequitur for me. (-:
Big money on the wrong side, backing a bunch of whackers making exhorbitant claims and trying to "kill" innocents... what fits that?
Either way, D'ohl and his crew of vultures stand about as much real legal chance of succeeding as an insect in IBM's headlights. If any of the studios are challenged, they'll either push SCO's brains through their collective rear or say "we're waiting on the outcome of the IBM case" and sit. It's a lose, lose, lose situation.
Except for Microsoft.
How many people will foolishly turn back to Microsoft simply because there's corporate headcases loose in Linux land? "I'm not playing with that bunch, there's a kid with wild, staring eyes who keeps kicking the others and demanding their milk money."
Want to make sense of what's happening? Simply follow the money. Who stands to profit the most? "For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil." Sounds trite but it's absolutely true. Money is a game counter that lets the power-hungry keep score, and power hungry people aren't in the game for your benefit.
In many places attempted suicide is a crime.
He told an Indian crowd that he was the smartest man in the world. Modest, I thought. He didn't even mention parachutes.
The combination of iptables and iproute2, even without any user-side extensions, is amazingly more selective and flexible than NT's firewall. Want a simple twenty-questions mode? Rate limiting, proxying, DNAT, the works? Pull down monmotha or any one of fifty other examples and use that.
You also (in 1) seem to have ignored CODA, GlobalFS and a whole passel of networking FSes. You don't mention any of the layer, cacheing or other FSes, devfs, usbfs, built-in loopback capability, yadda yadda yadda. I'm left wondering when you last actually used a Linux kernel in anger.
Micro-ironies abound. For example, Linux can create and use a valid NTFS CD (ISO), but NT won't read it because it "knows" that NTFS CDs don't exist. <thwack>
WRT 3, it's called NetCraft. The article on "what webserver does that candidate use" was a good, er, representative example.
Lotsa other stuff, I could spend hours on it, but would it get read?
...but alas, it'll be a while before the litigation nukes from IBM range in and fix the problem. And what a surprise when it turns out that the scam wasn't being run from Utah after all, but from Redmond!
That's the whole point. Until now, it's mainly been the professionals making crappy, buggy mods. When you open the field, there's scope for natural selection to operate.
I note that a user-done Linux port of Homeworld followed within weeks of that release. I wonder how long it is before game developers can just supply a script and artwork, then stand back and watch their app being written. (-:
Either way, it's too late to prod the genie back into the bottle now. Open Source is well and truly coming to commercial gaming.
This kind of practice might also make the WINE developers' jobs easier, because they don't have to guess at what a game is trying to accomplish with a given weird set of system calls, which means that they don't have to cover all of the possible uses for a call when implementing it, only the actual uses.
Here goes my entry:
Tridge (defined here and here), the smartest man in Australian IT, obviously qualifies and Bill Gates does not (except in his own humble eyes). The only problem remaining is, where does Tridge fit in Howard's categories? Is he your employee? No. Is he a teenager, albeit a smattered one? Not for a long time, to Susan's immense relief. I must mention in defense of teenagers, though, that at least one well-known project has been managed by a 13-year-old, and managed well. A hacker? Since Howard evidently means "cracker", that's a resounding "no". Virus creators? No, although I'm sure SaMBa has transported and safely stored quite a few viruses in its day. I guess he fits in "menagerie of others", which is to say, no category at all. I could run up a list of another hundred or so such people in one day.
Not to put too fine a point on it, Howard Strauss is talking out of his rear, so has evidently forgotten that magic rule: "'tis better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt."
Not quite. The biggest sources are herd animals bred largely for meat, and the land that they're run on can no longer support the dense and biodiverse foliage that once bound up those gasses. If you are simply after low greenhouse emissions, mandate strict vegetarianism. No meat, no dairy.
IRL, you also want to go after outright poisons. Good luck shutting down Monsanto and getting all of the farmers to revert to hardier and seed-savable but less productive crops so they don't need so many poisonous fertilisers and *icides. After that, you can start in on getting people to abandon their cars by doing stuff like arranging accomodation so that almost all workers can live near their factories and/or offices.
But before that, you'll have to shoot all of the economists, because 99.9% of them confuse chewing up resources and generally "doing stuff" with being productive and producing lasting, functional goods. Their idea of a healthy economy is one that's producing mountains of useless and disposable crap instead of one twenty times smaller that's carefully producing stuff that lasts forever.
Picture a man. He's standing in (Vietnam | insert random low-income nation here), and his annual income is USD$500 because he's better than average there.
Picture another man, also standing in (Vietnam | IRL-INH), also earning USD$500 a year. They read about an offer of 250 years' wages for both of them all in one go if one of them spends five years in the slammer because the other turned him in. A bargain is struck.
Picture a network. It's a busy network, and traffic is humming across it. Let the scene drift closer, and note that the busy workers aren't so much busy as frantic. Frown, and focus on the traffic itself. Outlook has a virus. See the virus flow. Flow, virus, flow.
Hello, says the virus, I eat hard drives wholesale. If you ask Man Number One he will tell you who wrote me. For a fee.
Picture the neighbours of Man Number One, considering their own family incomes and contrasting them with his.
...Trafalgar Square?
Will they end up looking like Rincewind's Luggage?
...and if you run out of ground - one of the multi-kilometer drops at the edge of Valles Marineris would be spectacular (being American, the craft would explode when it hit) but even a six-foot edge or hole would probably do - it's too late to stop even if there was no transmission lag. Oh, well.
Why do I say that? If you RTFA it says...
Here in Oz, an XboX is AUD$330. Add in the cost of a keyboard ($10) and mouse ($30), bigger RAM ($60) and it comes to $420, which is in the same range as new PCs clocking at five times the speed, starting with five times the hard disk space and built with plenty of room for expansion. I think the "turning it into a PC" effect is being overblown by Microsoft both for "poor little me" abuse/sympathy points and to subtly assert that an XboX is as powerful as a PC when it ain't (weeeelll... possibly modulo the graphic card unless you shell out for a good one).
I predict that one effect of this CPU change will be to give Linux an even wider road into the XboX market. One has to wonder whether XboX will get zero, one or two subarchitectures in the kernel tree. (-:
.
* "Piracy" is a major misnomer. So you publish a program, and it gets "pirated". Well? Nobody sails up, shoots you and your crew, pushes the bodies over the side and makes off with a multimillion dollar vessel and its cargo, do they? So it's not piracy - although it is criminally illegal copying. But wait 'till somebody publishes SLPWA's open letter to Vietnam's Science and Technology ministry.
If Bill were running a lemonade stand, I'd want to see him have a good gulp before I tasted it, and I'd want to taste it before I'd buy any. He's about as truthful and reliable as a bamboo watch where money or power are concerned.
Now how about responding to any of the other three points I listed instead of depending on the flippant one for a snappy-looking reply?