[d] mechanically expire much sooner (from the keyboard to the optical drive to the plastic shell)
Then I guess I must have been imagining my GRiD 1720 lasting almost fifteen years before it finally crashed back in '04. Now there's a machine you've got to admire – even with a 16MHz 286 and 4MB of RAM, it was still faster than most of the machines I own today.
By the time the thing finally died – the hard disk and floppy drive eventually just simultaneously failed – the only "problem" with the entire system was a single small block of the LCD that was unreadable. (Which had been like that since we got the thing back in '95; that's what you get when you close over the screen with one of those BallPoint mice still attached...)
And my two other laptops – a 1997 Micron XPE and a 1998-ish Dell Latitude CP – are also running just fine. The new one I'm still "breaking in", because I only got it about a month ago when my aunt upgraded to a new one, but that old one has survived being dropped, thrown, upgraded with stuff it isn't even supposed to support, taken everywhere from the Bahamas in the middle of summer [I still don't know why people like it so much...] to Pennsylvania in the middle of winter... and not to mention all the times I've wiped the thing to install yet another different operating system! (And that's not even counting the stuff that happened to it before I got the thing.)
The only problem I can think of with the thing is that you have to reset it four or five times before it will actually start, which is pretty good considering the abuse it's taken.
So I don't think laptops are going away any time soon...
Slackware-based distros are a lot faster, by the way – my laptop (233MHz, 96MB RAM) would likely choke on Red Hat, I know my old laptop (133MHz, 80MB RAM) did. But using Ultima Linux, my own Slack-based system, even running KDE, Enlightenment, Firefox, OOo, and even an NES emulator doesn't seem to break the system. Which is a good thing. I like NES games;-)
Over the summer I finally got around to building my own brand-new machine – after dealing with 566MHz + 256MB RAM for several years I figured it was finally upgrade time. I went on TigerDirect.com and grabbed everything I needed:
2.4GHz Celeron
512MB PC3200 SDRAM
80GB hard disk
52x32x52x CD-RW drive
Integrated video (i845GE)
Integraded 5.1-channel audio
Integrated 10/100 Ethernet
NETGEAR WG311v2 wireless
Übercool blue case w/keyboard and mouse
The entire thing came out at just $375. Obviously not the highest end system, but it's still pretty damn fast, and it can handle just about everything I need it to (including development of Ultima Linux).
Couple months ago I also got my hands on a used DVD drive for $5 at a local computer junk shop – it was marked as a CD-ROM drive, so I figured the hell with it. So now my machine can also play movies and stuff.
And considering that "typical work" for this machine consists of building a cloop or two, upgrading a few packages, running a couple different Web browsers to read/. or tweak my Web site, emulating some game console or other, playing a few rounds of SuperTux or Puzzle Pirates, testing the latest Ultima release in VMware or QEMU, and typing something in OpenOffice.org – and a lot of the time, all of those at once – I'd say that anything more's got to be overkill.
And I can say this with almost 100% certainty because right now we've got no less than two wireless routers, one on each side of our house, and there's no problem as far as I can see.
What strikes me as dangerous is cell phones – brain cancer in a box, I always call 'em. Don't know why you'd want a contract on the things, just ask your doctor to inject more stuff into your brain next time you see him and it has the same effect. And even if the brain cancer doesn't work, srly txt msgng n pix n ntm my fvrt rngtns wll ttyl bye
Let's see, brain cancer and features aimed at idiots... so what was the nice thing about cell phones again?
I'll give you one other tip: It's not the fact that you can call someone any time, anywhere; our home phones already ring way too much, cell phones are about ten times as bad because they follow you around. And the way people talk on the things right when you have a headache? Hiss.
OK, so I completely forgot about the obligatory Hitchhiker's Guide quote as well. I posted the first thing to come to mind. Besides, at least I can recite Vogon poetry off the top of my head.:-)
I'd have to say the biggest complication I can see is just people like me (and likely the rest of/. as well) who would insist on having their own machine with their own configuration. I don't care how many guns they hold to my head, I am NOT giving up my Latitude CP with a fully-loaded Linux installation. Or my Micron TransPort XPE with OpenBSD. Never!
Let's see, as a Linux developer I've got right now – and likely more coming, knowing the way people dump all their old machines on me –
(unless otherwise stated assume Ultima version 8)
Celeron 2.4GHz / 512MB, homebuilt – Ultima Linux (my distro) – main system, development machine, usually print server as well. Sometimes does NFS.
Epson Stylus CX4800 – nice people at Epson sent a free replacement/upgrade when my CX-4600 died after just ten months... even with the likes of me that's almost impossible.
Celeron 1.8GHz / 512MB, Dell Dimension 2300 – Ultima + WinXP Home – family machine, Windows partition is spyware-infested as usual;-)
Brother MFC-210C – yes, it does run on Linux now that they released the drivers.
Celeron 700MHz / 128MB, Dell OptiPlex GX100 – Ultima + Win98SE – $55 on eBay; more or less test box for all the dangerous stuff
Pentium III 650MHz / 256MB, Compaq DeskPro E6000 – Ultima + Win98SE – my brother's machine, also $55 (upgraded a little bit since then with parts from other boxes)
Celeron 566MHz / 128MB, Dell Dimension L566cx – Ultima + Win98SE (latter not yet installed) – first a family machine, then my dev machine, then my brother's, and now my sister's
Pentium 233MHz / 96MB, Dell Latitude CP – Ultima – my new laptop, still needs "breaking in"
Pentium 133MHz / 80MB, Micron TransPort XPE – Ultima 4 + OpenBSD – old laptop, been using for years, now dual-boots Ultima and OpenBSD. I (heart) OpenBSD
Duron 700MHz / 256MB – Ultima – full-time Web/SSH/FTP server that runs all the Ultima Linux sites, my homepage, and a few friends' blogs. Actually belongs to my friend, but I'm stuck running it. Lucky me.
Also have lying around a NEC PinWriter P2200 dot-matrix, HP DeskJet original (still functioning), a couple Palm Pilots, and probably my favorite machine of all time, a now-dead GRiD 1720 with a 16MHz 286 processor, 4MB RAM, and 60MB disk. Ran Windows 3.1 so beautifully... probably the only machine I could ever tolerate a Micro$oft product on.
Used to have a 486, and a few others. Got rid of them eventually after they either crashed or were just taking up too much space. Probably going to wind up back here this weekend anyway, since my friend (same guy who owns the server) is bringing all that stuff over here again.
Most of my machines (the 2.4GHz dev box, OptiPlex, Dimension 2300, and whichever laptop I'm currently using) are hardwired into the network with Ethernet, everything else is wireless. Except the GRiD of course;-) Runs off of a pair of NETGEAR WG612(?) routers – one v4, the other v6. Took an entire weekend wiring the two together with 100ft of cable and going through the attic...
But as far as my school district goes, the work seems to consist of spying on students who know more than them and blocking their perfectly innocent Web sites, locking down the computer settings to the point where you can't even lock your screen to keep people from messing with it if you're not at the machine, discovering that all the restrictions make it impossible to remote-install software without running into enough problems that any students and/or school people watching can't help but laugh, and yelling at students using SSH tunnels, Firefox, and anything else they don't understand.
Although then again, that's just what I know from my experience as the only student in the entire district who not only knows what Linux is, but also even has his own version.
AGP might be a one-way bus, but if you're planning to run a headless server like GP would suggest – assuming, of course, that most of what it does is sends rather than receives packets, what about having an AGP-based network card that could handle sending more bits at once? And since it's mostly a one-way, maybe a cheaper PCI card exclusively for receiving?
The only problems with that as far as I can see is that no such card exists, and that unless you have a really wicked high-speed connection (OC-6;-) such a thing would be useless anyway...
Reading this from a purely IB-English-student-analyzing-writing-style point of view, I'd have to say that just about the only thing I've read that's been worse is Doug Anglin. I know that's probably a bit harsh, even for a Linux techie, but quite honestly I think it's saying more against Microsoft than for. Let's take it point by point and see what we can come up with, shall we?
Unless you've been living under a rock for the past few months, you probably know that the latest version of Windows--called Vista--is due to hit store shelves later this year (in time for the holidays, Microsoft tells us). The successor to Windows XP offers a little something for everyone, from eye-catching graphics and new bundled applications to more-rigorous security. In fact, there is so much in the new operating system that it can be tough to get a handle on it all.
Well, the timing you can't argue with – but the features it's advertising strike me as familiar. "Eye-catching graphics" are already available for other systems, in the form of eg. the X compositing engine and not to mention Enlightenment. Bundled applications I can't help but laugh at, especially considering that most Linux distributions have more than Notepad, Paint, and Media Player – hell, almost all of them come with a free office suite, which Microsoft users usually have to pay several hundred dollars for!
As for more-rigorous security, well, there's the first place I think the article's going wrong. Just by virtue of the fact that the word "more" is in there, you can easily see why so many people suspect Microsoft intentionally cripples the system to force upgrades. Viruses, spyware, and worms galore – and yet I have yet to see that on any Linux distribution I've used. And besides, I refuse to consider anything secure that's anything less than OpenBSD.
I've been noodling around with a recent beta version of Windows Vista (Build 5270) and had a chance to make some observations. While the sleek new look and polished interface caught my eye, it's what's under the covers that impressed me most. Microsoft's done a great job of improving security across the board. Things like Windows and spyware library updates are streamlined, and I definitely appreciate the more robust Backup software.
Again, it's "improving". Which infers that the security was, well, not very good before. And again, I still won't consider even Linux to be secure when compared with OpenBSD. As for the "spyware library updates," I don't think that they would even be necessary if Microsoft didn't make it so easy to get loaded with spyware in the first place.
Backup software is another thing worth mentioning on Linux. While it's not directly related to the article text here, it's worth mentioning one particularly understated feature of UNIX systems – how easy it is to back them up. Whereas with a Microsoft box you have settings scattered all over the hard disk, I can typically back up all my Linux boxes and even transfer the configuration to another system just by tar'ing up three basic directories –/etc,/home, and/var.
OK, let's get on to the next paragraph. Continuing!
Still, there's plenty of unfinished work left to do. Internet Explorer 7 struggled to properly render some Web pages, and I found local network connectivity to be a hit-or-miss affair. And then there's the stuff that isn't even in there yet--like the intriguing Windows Sidebar, which will put real-time weather info, stock quotes, system status, RSS feeds, and other information on the display.
Now, what really puzzles me here is how Internet Explorer is
Obviously they came to that decision while wide awake – therefore, I refuse to believe any of this nonsense until they've let their unconscious mind think it over and make the "correct" decision!
...especially considering that I just deleted the account I never even signed up for in the first place. I hate those stupid sites. Besides, everyone knows that the only real site for all things Martin Ultima is http://ultima-inet.kicks-ass.org/~multima. So there!
(Replying to both at once, so don't flame me for "wrong thread";-)
I did try all of those – ibiblio I've attempted about a thousand times – but none of them meet my needs. Either they've got size limits, or they don't have X feature, or else (in ibiblio's case) they never respond to my messages. I think I like Madtux myself, they're nice guys who know what they're doing, and they contacted me not the other way around (definitely a nice thing).
OK, I've exaggerated a little bit since this isn't a Google-sponsored thing, but Blingo provides prizes for using them as your search engine (and the search engine is of course run through Google).
Now if you'll excuse me, I've just gotten the facts and need to convert my server that I've been running on Linux the past year or so for absolutely nothing to Windows Server 2003, since it's less expensive in the long run;-)
Yeah, but quite honestly I don't think anyone would waste their time (especially considering that all the real data's stored on another machine at home, and the only way to get to that machine outside of my home network is to SSH to the server, and from there SSH again to the other machine, and the server doesn't have any private keys on it).
From my understanding of this whole thing, the InfoCard system's nothing new. We already have the same thing going on with existing technologies such as Firefox's Password Manager, Opera's Magic Wand, and not to mention my favorite – SSH keys! The latter I've been using obsessively now, I just keep the master key on my laptop and all my other boxes are set to recognize it so that I can get into any of them without a password.
(Completely off-topic, but the laptop's heavily password-protected as well; randomized 16-character password to log in, a completely different one to boot the thing or to get to it after it's been in standby... just in case anyone's worried about and/or hoping for my system mysteriously "vanishing";-)
For all that stuff about innovation, I have yet to see anything coming out of Microsoft...
You've compiled the source code yourself. Quite possibly with GCC, itself compiled beforehand after reviewing the code, to ensure that the compiler you use to compile the source you're reviewed doesn't add in anything funny...
Slashdot Mirror
No, it's not going to evolve! It's going to be intelligently re-designed!
Then I guess I must have been imagining my GRiD 1720 lasting almost fifteen years before it finally crashed back in '04. Now there's a machine you've got to admire – even with a 16MHz 286 and 4MB of RAM, it was still faster than most of the machines I own today.
By the time the thing finally died – the hard disk and floppy drive eventually just simultaneously failed – the only "problem" with the entire system was a single small block of the LCD that was unreadable. (Which had been like that since we got the thing back in '95; that's what you get when you close over the screen with one of those BallPoint mice still attached...)
And my two other laptops – a 1997 Micron XPE and a 1998-ish Dell Latitude CP – are also running just fine. The new one I'm still "breaking in", because I only got it about a month ago when my aunt upgraded to a new one, but that old one has survived being dropped, thrown, upgraded with stuff it isn't even supposed to support, taken everywhere from the Bahamas in the middle of summer [I still don't know why people like it so much...] to Pennsylvania in the middle of winter... and not to mention all the times I've wiped the thing to install yet another different operating system! (And that's not even counting the stuff that happened to it before I got the thing.)
The only problem I can think of with the thing is that you have to reset it four or five times before it will actually start, which is pretty good considering the abuse it's taken.
So I don't think laptops are going away any time soon...
DAMMIT!! Right when I've just invested heavily in OpenBSD-based desktops, too!
How much would it cost me to paint every cell phone tower in the world?
No, the question is, does it run OpenBSD?
Slackware-based distros are a lot faster, by the way – my laptop (233MHz, 96MB RAM) would likely choke on Red Hat, I know my old laptop (133MHz, 80MB RAM) did. But using Ultima Linux, my own Slack-based system, even running KDE, Enlightenment, Firefox, OOo, and even an NES emulator doesn't seem to break the system. Which is a good thing. I like NES games ;-)
Over the summer I finally got around to building my own brand-new machine – after dealing with 566MHz + 256MB RAM for several years I figured it was finally upgrade time. I went on TigerDirect.com and grabbed everything I needed:
The entire thing came out at just $375. Obviously not the highest end system, but it's still pretty damn fast, and it can handle just about everything I need it to (including development of Ultima Linux).
Couple months ago I also got my hands on a used DVD drive for $5 at a local computer junk shop – it was marked as a CD-ROM drive, so I figured the hell with it. So now my machine can also play movies and stuff.
And considering that "typical work" for this machine consists of building a cloop or two, upgrading a few packages, running a couple different Web browsers to read /. or tweak my Web site, emulating some game console or other, playing a few rounds of SuperTux or Puzzle Pirates, testing the latest Ultima release in VMware or QEMU, and typing something in OpenOffice.org – and a lot of the time, all of those at once – I'd say that anything more's got to be overkill.
Phew! So I don't need Half Life to watch Anakin turn into Darth Vader! I was about to get worried! </intentionally missing point>
And I can say this with almost 100% certainty because right now we've got no less than two wireless routers, one on each side of our house, and there's no problem as far as I can see.
What strikes me as dangerous is cell phones – brain cancer in a box, I always call 'em. Don't know why you'd want a contract on the things, just ask your doctor to inject more stuff into your brain next time you see him and it has the same effect. And even if the brain cancer doesn't work, srly txt msgng n pix n ntm my fvrt rngtns wll ttyl bye
Let's see, brain cancer and features aimed at idiots... so what was the nice thing about cell phones again?
I'll give you one other tip: It's not the fact that you can call someone any time, anywhere; our home phones already ring way too much, cell phones are about ten times as bad because they follow you around. And the way people talk on the things right when you have a headache? Hiss.
I hate cell phones.
OK, so I completely forgot about the obligatory Hitchhiker's Guide quote as well. I posted the first thing to come to mind. Besides, at least I can recite Vogon poetry off the top of my head. :-)
I'd have to say the biggest complication I can see is just people like me (and likely the rest of /. as well) who would insist on having their own machine with their own configuration. I don't care how many guns they hold to my head, I am NOT giving up my Latitude CP with a fully-loaded Linux installation. Or my Micron TransPort XPE with OpenBSD. Never!
COMPUTER: "This is your onboard computer speaking. We are about to crash. What do you want to do?"
DRIVER: "Uh... I can't decide."
COMPUTER: "Steering prevents accidents."
DRIVER: "Well, yeah, but..."
COMPUTER: "Do you want to crash?"
DRIVER: "Well, not really..."
COMPUTER: "Then maybe you should steer."
DRIVER: "But I'm bad at that!"
COMPUTER: "Do you want to crash?"
DRIVER: "Well, not really, it's just that..." *crashes*
Let's see, as a Linux developer I've got right now – and likely more coming, knowing the way people dump all their old machines on me –
(unless otherwise stated assume Ultima version 8)
Celeron 2.4GHz / 512MB, homebuilt – Ultima Linux (my distro) – main system, development machine, usually print server as well. Sometimes does NFS.
Celeron 1.8GHz / 512MB, Dell Dimension 2300 – Ultima + WinXP Home – family machine, Windows partition is spyware-infested as usual
Celeron 700MHz / 128MB, Dell OptiPlex GX100 – Ultima + Win98SE – $55 on eBay; more or less test box for all the dangerous stuff
Pentium III 650MHz / 256MB, Compaq DeskPro E6000 – Ultima + Win98SE – my brother's machine, also $55 (upgraded a little bit since then with parts from other boxes)
Celeron 566MHz / 128MB, Dell Dimension L566cx – Ultima + Win98SE (latter not yet installed) – first a family machine, then my dev machine, then my brother's, and now my sister's
Pentium 233MHz / 96MB, Dell Latitude CP – Ultima – my new laptop, still needs "breaking in"
Pentium 133MHz / 80MB, Micron TransPort XPE – Ultima 4 + OpenBSD – old laptop, been using for years, now dual-boots Ultima and OpenBSD. I (heart) OpenBSD
Duron 700MHz / 256MB – Ultima – full-time Web/SSH/FTP server that runs all the Ultima Linux sites, my homepage, and a few friends' blogs. Actually belongs to my friend, but I'm stuck running it. Lucky me.
Also have lying around a NEC PinWriter P2200 dot-matrix, HP DeskJet original (still functioning), a couple Palm Pilots, and probably my favorite machine of all time, a now-dead GRiD 1720 with a 16MHz 286 processor, 4MB RAM, and 60MB disk. Ran Windows 3.1 so beautifully... probably the only machine I could ever tolerate a Micro$oft product on.
Used to have a 486, and a few others. Got rid of them eventually after they either crashed or were just taking up too much space. Probably going to wind up back here this weekend anyway, since my friend (same guy who owns the server) is bringing all that stuff over here again.
Most of my machines (the 2.4GHz dev box, OptiPlex, Dimension 2300, and whichever laptop I'm currently using) are hardwired into the network with Ethernet, everything else is wireless. Except the GRiD of course
Dammit, wrong link. This is the one I meant to post.
But as far as my school district goes, the work seems to consist of spying on students who know more than them and blocking their perfectly innocent Web sites, locking down the computer settings to the point where you can't even lock your screen to keep people from messing with it if you're not at the machine, discovering that all the restrictions make it impossible to remote-install software without running into enough problems that any students and/or school people watching can't help but laugh, and yelling at students using SSH tunnels, Firefox, and anything else they don't understand.
Although then again, that's just what I know from my experience as the only student in the entire district who not only knows what Linux is, but also even has his own version.
AGP might be a one-way bus, but if you're planning to run a headless server like GP would suggest – assuming, of course, that most of what it does is sends rather than receives packets, what about having an AGP-based network card that could handle sending more bits at once? And since it's mostly a one-way, maybe a cheaper PCI card exclusively for receiving?
;-) such a thing would be useless anyway...
The only problems with that as far as I can see is that no such card exists, and that unless you have a really wicked high-speed connection (OC-6
Well, the timing you can't argue with – but the features it's advertising strike me as familiar. "Eye-catching graphics" are already available for other systems, in the form of eg. the X compositing engine and not to mention Enlightenment. Bundled applications I can't help but laugh at, especially considering that most Linux distributions have more than Notepad, Paint, and Media Player – hell, almost all of them come with a free office suite, which Microsoft users usually have to pay several hundred dollars for!
As for more-rigorous security, well, there's the first place I think the article's going wrong. Just by virtue of the fact that the word "more" is in there, you can easily see why so many people suspect Microsoft intentionally cripples the system to force upgrades. Viruses, spyware, and worms galore – and yet I have yet to see that on any Linux distribution I've used. And besides, I refuse to consider anything secure that's anything less than OpenBSD.
Again, it's "improving". Which infers that the security was, well, not very good before. And again, I still won't consider even Linux to be secure when compared with OpenBSD. As for the "spyware library updates," I don't think that they would even be necessary if Microsoft didn't make it so easy to get loaded with spyware in the first place.
/etc, /home, and /var.
Backup software is another thing worth mentioning on Linux. While it's not directly related to the article text here, it's worth mentioning one particularly understated feature of UNIX systems – how easy it is to back them up. Whereas with a Microsoft box you have settings scattered all over the hard disk, I can typically back up all my Linux boxes and even transfer the configuration to another system just by tar'ing up three basic directories –
OK, let's get on to the next paragraph. Continuing!
Now, what really puzzles me here is how Internet Explorer is
Obviously they came to that decision while wide awake – therefore, I refuse to believe any of this nonsense until they've let their unconscious mind think it over and make the "correct" decision!
...especially considering that I just deleted the account I never even signed up for in the first place. I hate those stupid sites. Besides, everyone knows that the only real site for all things Martin Ultima is http://ultima-inet.kicks-ass.org/~multima. So there!
(Replying to both at once, so don't flame me for "wrong thread" ;-)
I did try all of those – ibiblio I've attempted about a thousand times – but none of them meet my needs. Either they've got size limits, or they don't have X feature, or else (in ibiblio's case) they never respond to my messages. I think I like Madtux myself, they're nice guys who know what they're doing, and they contacted me not the other way around (definitely a nice thing).
Sorry, typo in the URL – meant http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty
OK, I've exaggerated a little bit since this isn't a Google-sponsored thing, but Blingo provides prizes for using them as your search engine (and the search engine is of course run through Google).
;-)
Now if you'll excuse me, I've just gotten the facts and need to convert my server that I've been running on Linux the past year or so for absolutely nothing to Windows Server 2003, since it's less expensive in the long run
Yeah, but quite honestly I don't think anyone would waste their time (especially considering that all the real data's stored on another machine at home, and the only way to get to that machine outside of my home network is to SSH to the server, and from there SSH again to the other machine, and the server doesn't have any private keys on it).
From my understanding of this whole thing, the InfoCard system's nothing new. We already have the same thing going on with existing technologies such as Firefox's Password Manager, Opera's Magic Wand, and not to mention my favorite – SSH keys! The latter I've been using obsessively now, I just keep the master key on my laptop and all my other boxes are set to recognize it so that I can get into any of them without a password.
;-)
(Completely off-topic, but the laptop's heavily password-protected as well; randomized 16-character password to log in, a completely different one to boot the thing or to get to it after it's been in standby... just in case anyone's worried about and/or hoping for my system mysteriously "vanishing"
For all that stuff about innovation, I have yet to see anything coming out of Microsoft...
You've compiled the source code yourself. Quite possibly with GCC, itself compiled beforehand after reviewing the code, to ensure that the compiler you use to compile the source you're reviewed doesn't add in anything funny...