Unfortunately, several web servers still don't support Expires: headers (e.g. thttpd, which works very well for static data). Then again, browsers think they're smarter than the servers and proxies, since in the absence of Expires: headers they cache stuff depending on the type of data and the URL, AFAIK, so it's not absolutely necessary to set these headers.
But I don't think that they do even that. It's been said before that reverse-engineering for such purposes isn't illegal according to the Digital Millennium Act (I guess it must be so), and it also certainly isn't in some of the countries where the DeCSS mirrors are hosted.
Um, didn't Xerox first contact the Patent office about this nearly 3 years ago? It may be an unfortunate timing for 3Com, but it certainly doesn't look like it was a tactical lawsuit because of the pending IPO.
20 years ago a computer user would have to be pretty smart. Now, any old moron uses a computer, so the software is mostly designed for morons
I can't agree with this - software designed for morons would normally be easy to use and tolerant towards users' mistakes ("idiot-proof"), but it is exactly the opposite of that, i.e. extremely sensitive to wrong input, misinterpretation of options and so on. Then again, if you argue that programmers are so incompetent that they fail to make software safe for idiots, you've got a point...
The idea that programmers have just stopped paying attention to quality because other issues have become more important (showing-off features rather than making sure that there are no ugly surprises for the user after a few minutes of use), appeals much more to me, though.
The -biggest- bottleneck is the bus. PCI and (E)ISA are all way too slow. I believe there's an extended version of VME, which is a seriously nice bus system. A PC with a VME bus would get a serious performance boost.
That may be the bottleneck for particular applications, but it sure isn't a problem for a typical workstation user (workstation as in development system, not high-end graphics stuff where the bus is very important).
A third bottleneck is in the speed of devices. These are ALL controlled by the main processor, even today. =COMMODORE= were doing better than that, in the 70's!
You can buy intelligent network storage devices today. Putting memory and processors (I assume that you mean those to be user-programmable, because harddisks already contain memory and processors) in harddisks would just increase the complexity and price of the system. Modern OSes and chipsets can copy from one device to another pretty well (DMA transfers etc.), spending most of the time in code that has a good reason to be executed (file system overhead - you *do* want a choice, don't you?). As for printers, you can also buy some with ethernet interface. Just consider the network the modern replacement for the serial connections of the C64...
IMHO, the biggest problem today by far is the software - it's so amazingly bad in quality that anyone who has used computers 10-15 years ago must be getting nervous fits daily while watching the crashing, freezing, buggy, inconsistant and badly designed applications and OSes waste his/her time. I don't care whether a CPU runs at 800 MHz or 333 MHz, as long as the OS and applications I'm using run fine on it, and that is measured by the time I am forced to wait unproductively, and not using benchmarks (which explains why software is such a big problem).
I sure would like to blame the demise of software quality on one single reason, like the prevalence of the C language or the fact that Microsoft managed to train people to accept bad quality because compatibility with the rest of the monopolized market was more important, but it isn't that simple. It's obvious though that people don't hesitate to release crappy software as much as they used to, so... kudos to everyone who still pays attention to quality!
with the progress being made in GNOME and X-windows, the advantages of Mac OS X will not last many months.
That progress may be steady, but it's also unpredictable and - as history seems to prove - not very targeted, i.e. we don't really know what to expect or when to expect something specific, like a stable version of anything that won't break with future gtk/glib/gnome versions or versions of other programs. As it goes, it can take decades until we reach that point.
One of the reasons why *BSD is lagging behind in popularity is certainly the lack of a well-known commercial distribution with the advertising, support and non-proficient-user-friendliness. Red Hat FreeBSD or SuSE FreeBSD would make a difference...
The commercial closed-source software has and will always have strong competition from the Open Source community. Consider the advantages of XFree86 and other OSS efforts:
costs nothing
comes preinstalled with most distributions
Open Source hype
If XiG and other companies want to compete on this playground, they'll have to offer real advantages, such as better hardware support, and even that doesn't appeal enough to some people to justify a price higher than that of a full-blown Linux distribution.
The most dangerous threat to OSS I can see is that some of these companies are hiring away good OSS developers to work on closed-source products.
... at this time, they have other issues to worry about when they choose their software (other than small print in licenses). If there were competing products equivalent to MS's, but with a more user-friendly EULA and even with a slightly higher price, I'm sure that most people would choose those instead (as long as they knew about the differences).
... you can't blame the manufacturer. But if your car suddenly exploded because you put in the reverse while the radio was on (a good analogy to typical Windows behavior), then you would blame the auto maker - I hope.
I agree. Hopefully, at some point Microsoft will lose their grip on the customer to such an extent, that competing companies will be able to offer their equivalent products with an extended warranty as a value-enhancing feature, which will in turn put pressure on Microsoft to act similarly. Just because right now, people are used to the fact that there is no warranty on shrink-wrapped software products (as opposed to contract work), it doesn't mean that there is no market for it. It just means that so far, companies have got away with it (and some companies can get away with almost anything, like trojan horses spying out their customers illegally).
Of course there are workarounds for the Word 95 / Word 97 problems, but the typical manifestation of it is a situation where someone with Word 95 receives a document in Word 97 format and doesn't know what to do - his first thought it that he needs to upgrade to a newer version of Word. Very few people send their documents in RTF format.
I also doubt that Word 2000 documents always work perfectly with Word 97, but I've never used it.
Krusty, even if MS didn't have their record of pushing alternative, often superior technologies out of the market using their larger wallet, the adoption of a closed-source file format or protocol leads to all kinds of problems. Just look at what they've done with Microsoft Word - people are being forced to upgrade whenever a new version is released, because the older versions can't read the files produced by the newer ones. A similar power can be exercised through internet protocols.
The proven greater reliability of open-source solutions is also an issue.
The original poster didn't provide enough information about his "problem" for this to be considered a honest question. He was just whining about X.
Sure, X and Linux in general are still lacking in user-friendliness (I complain about it often enough), but in this case it's either complete ignorance or a not-so-honest attempt at making X look bad compared to Windows.
You can download SaX from SuSE's ftp server, the file is installed in/var/X11R6/sax/config/MonitorData. I don't see why it shouldn't be possible to make another tool to use it, it's just a simple matter of extracting the info from the (text) database and putting it in the XF86Config file.
Excellent idea, I was just going to suggest it myself.:-) The.INF files don't contain enough information for full modelines, but at least they can be used to determine a monitor's HF/VF ranges and suggested maximum resolutions. Indeed, it would be easy to build a database of existing (old) monitors and distribute it with XFree86. Then again, projects such as SaX (SuSE's X configurator) have a better monitor database than Windows already (SuSE 6.3's SaX monitor database is 2234 lines long, one monitor per line).
What you're forgetting is that proprietary OSes can also build on the knowledge gained from implementing an Open-Source OS, if not on the code itself (perhaps illegally, but who will care / prove it). Consider the OSes that are distributing gcc as the primary compiler.
Simple common sense suggests that a microkernel with as much hardware support as linux would hardly require less source code than the linux kernel, if you include the sources for drivers that don't go into the microkernel. You can distribute a linux kernel with little hardware support by removing some drivers, as you can have a microkernel with that support.
Nothing is forever, for that matter. However, the fact that Linux is an Open Source OS means, that parts of it and information gained from reading its source code will be used elsewhere, so even if one day it stops being popular, these things will still be around.
The funny thing about this is, that the german army uses Lotus Notes internally with its weak encryption routines (the NSA has part of the key).
The Scientology issue may sound odd, but as the government has found that they have been trying to infiltrate the state agencies to gain power and thus they have been considered a risk to the country's security, the decision not to use Windows 2000 would just be a side-effect of the politics of avoiding such threats.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, several web servers still don't support Expires: headers (e.g. thttpd, which works very well for static data). Then again, browsers think they're smarter than the servers and proxies, since in the absence of Expires: headers they cache stuff depending on the type of data and the URL, AFAIK, so it's not absolutely necessary to set these headers.
Forget statistics. Trust what you know. Do you know many techies who work less than 40 hours? I don't.
But I don't think that they do even that. It's been said before that reverse-engineering for such purposes isn't illegal according to the Digital Millennium Act (I guess it must be so), and it also certainly isn't in some of the countries where the DeCSS mirrors are hosted.
Um, didn't Xerox first contact the Patent office about this nearly 3 years ago? It may be an unfortunate timing for 3Com, but it certainly doesn't look like it was a tactical lawsuit because of the pending IPO.
I can't agree with this - software designed for morons would normally be easy to use and tolerant towards users' mistakes ("idiot-proof"), but it is exactly the opposite of that, i.e. extremely sensitive to wrong input, misinterpretation of options and so on. Then again, if you argue that programmers are so incompetent that they fail to make software safe for idiots, you've got a point...
The idea that programmers have just stopped paying attention to quality because other issues have become more important (showing-off features rather than making sure that there are no ugly surprises for the user after a few minutes of use), appeals much more to me, though.
That may be the bottleneck for particular applications, but it sure isn't a problem for a typical workstation user (workstation as in development system, not high-end graphics stuff where the bus is very important).
A third bottleneck is in the speed of devices. These are ALL controlled by the main processor, even today. =COMMODORE= were doing better than that, in the 70's!
You can buy intelligent network storage devices today. Putting memory and processors (I assume that you mean those to be user-programmable, because harddisks already contain memory and processors) in harddisks would just increase the complexity and price of the system. Modern OSes and chipsets can copy from one device to another pretty well (DMA transfers etc.), spending most of the time in code that has a good reason to be executed (file system overhead - you *do* want a choice, don't you?). As for printers, you can also buy some with ethernet interface. Just consider the network the modern replacement for the serial connections of the C64 ...
IMHO, the biggest problem today by far is the software - it's so amazingly bad in quality that anyone who has used computers 10-15 years ago must be getting nervous fits daily while watching the crashing, freezing, buggy, inconsistant and badly designed applications and OSes waste his/her time. I don't care whether a CPU runs at 800 MHz or 333 MHz, as long as the OS and applications I'm using run fine on it, and that is measured by the time I am forced to wait unproductively, and not using benchmarks (which explains why software is such a big problem).
I sure would like to blame the demise of software quality on one single reason, like the prevalence of the C language or the fact that Microsoft managed to train people to accept bad quality because compatibility with the rest of the monopolized market was more important, but it isn't that simple. It's obvious though that people don't hesitate to release crappy software as much as they used to, so ... kudos to everyone who still pays attention to quality!
That progress may be steady, but it's also unpredictable and - as history seems to prove - not very targeted, i.e. we don't really know what to expect or when to expect something specific, like a stable version of anything that won't break with future gtk/glib/gnome versions or versions of other programs. As it goes, it can take decades until we reach that point.
Commercial as in "free software backed by a company such as Red Hat".
One of the reasons why *BSD is lagging behind in popularity is certainly the lack of a well-known commercial distribution with the advertising, support and non-proficient-user-friendliness. Red Hat FreeBSD or SuSE FreeBSD would make a difference...
- costs nothing
- comes preinstalled with most distributions
- Open Source hype
If XiG and other companies want to compete on this playground, they'll have to offer real advantages, such as better hardware support, and even that doesn't appeal enough to some people to justify a price higher than that of a full-blown Linux distribution.The most dangerous threat to OSS I can see is that some of these companies are hiring away good OSS developers to work on closed-source products.
... at this time, they have other issues to worry about when they choose their software (other than small print in licenses). If there were competing products equivalent to MS's, but with a more user-friendly EULA and even with a slightly higher price, I'm sure that most people would choose those instead (as long as they knew about the differences).
... you can't blame the manufacturer. But if your car suddenly exploded because you put in the reverse while the radio was on (a good analogy to typical Windows behavior), then you would blame the auto maker - I hope.
I agree. Hopefully, at some point Microsoft will lose their grip on the customer to such an extent, that competing companies will be able to offer their equivalent products with an extended warranty as a value-enhancing feature, which will in turn put pressure on Microsoft to act similarly. Just because right now, people are used to the fact that there is no warranty on shrink-wrapped software products (as opposed to contract work), it doesn't mean that there is no market for it. It just means that so far, companies have got away with it (and some companies can get away with almost anything, like trojan horses spying out their customers illegally).
I also doubt that Word 2000 documents always work perfectly with Word 97, but I've never used it.
The proven greater reliability of open-source solutions is also an issue.
Make sure your motherboard supports 1.65V, some older ones only support 2.0V or more.
Sure, X and Linux in general are still lacking in user-friendliness (I complain about it often enough), but in this case it's either complete ignorance or a not-so-honest attempt at making X look bad compared to Windows.
You can download SaX from SuSE's ftp server, the file is installed in /var/X11R6/sax/config/MonitorData. I don't see why it shouldn't be possible to make another tool to use it, it's just a simple matter of extracting the info from the (text) database and putting it in the XF86Config file.
Excellent idea, I was just going to suggest it myself. :-) The .INF files don't contain enough information for full modelines, but at least they can be used to determine a monitor's HF/VF ranges and suggested maximum resolutions. Indeed, it would be easy to build a database of existing (old) monitors and distribute it with XFree86. Then again, projects such as SaX (SuSE's X configurator) have a better monitor database than Windows already (SuSE 6.3's SaX monitor database is 2234 lines long, one monitor per line).
Yeah, I guess they prefer having people who can be bribed or become foreign agents perform those tasks instead...
What you're forgetting is that proprietary OSes can also build on the knowledge gained from implementing an Open-Source OS, if not on the code itself (perhaps illegally, but who will care / prove it). Consider the OSes that are distributing gcc as the primary compiler.
Simple common sense suggests that a microkernel with as much hardware support as linux would hardly require less source code than the linux kernel, if you include the sources for drivers that don't go into the microkernel. You can distribute a linux kernel with little hardware support by removing some drivers, as you can have a microkernel with that support.
Nothing is forever, for that matter. However, the fact that Linux is an Open Source OS means, that parts of it and information gained from reading its source code will be used elsewhere, so even if one day it stops being popular, these things will still be around.
The Scientology issue may sound odd, but as the government has found that they have been trying to infiltrate the state agencies to gain power and thus they have been considered a risk to the country's security, the decision not to use Windows 2000 would just be a side-effect of the politics of avoiding such threats.
Why not just explain it to them one more time? It may be tiring, but it sometimes pays off to stay friendly.