The earliest version that Linus put together was incomplete and immature.
Cripes, tell me about it. I remember when some exceedingly early version of something called "Linux" showed up on a local BBS. I spent a couple of evenings trying to get it to work, without success. Minix, on the other hand, worked like a charm, and at the time, it was more sophisticated and reliable than Linux. This alone argues against the idea that Linux was built on top of Minix.
Early versions of Linux were not worth a shit unless you were a bored programmer and wanted to help Linus with his project. I remember the sorry thing, for crying out loud -- it was a student project and not a very promising one at that. Oh sure, it's damn spiffy now, but it wasn't back then. The idea that Linus stole code from the likes of Ken Thompson or Andrew Tanenbaum is just silly if you actually compare the code. Of course, Brown isn't qualified to do that.
The thing that's really irritating about this is the notion that it's somehow a monumental task to write a simple operating system -- and let us remember, the first public release of Linux was a simple operating system. Simple operating systems are, at more than a few universities, the end product of a single semester class. It's the years of work by thousands of talented programmers that made it into a complex, full-featured, stable OS. Brown seems unable or unwilling to grasp this.
How many people does Brown thing wrote the original version of DOS? Microsoft wouldn't have gotten their big break were it not for Tim Paterson's SOLO coding effort.
Criminy, just check the OS section on DMOZ or Yahoo. It's amazing how many teenagers have written fairly sophisticated operating systems on their own. It's not easy, but it's not like sending men to the moon, either. Shit, *I* wrote one once, in 6502 assembly language, on a 8-bit microcomputer when I was sixteen. Mind you, it wasn't anything like Linux, but then I didn't have thousands of talented developers helping me out.
It's difficult to imagine any application that couldn't be written by a reasonably smart programmer given time and motivation. Arguably, it's having too many developers that will screw up a project.
I'm inclined to believe, often instantly and completely, a slashdot posting endorsing product X, because the poster seems unaffiliated and genuine and doesn't really have anything to gain from endorsing it.
I spent a lot of time thinking about this sentence, carefully formulating a well-reasoned, thoughtful response to it. Then I went back over it, polishing it and making it more concise, pruning away every superfluous word that might obscure the essential message I was trying to get across. It came down to one word:
In most of the slashdot penetrating world, we think of dogs primarily as companion animals, and find the thougt of them being blown to bits in mine clearance as "sad" (at least I certainly would)
I think of dogs as large, smelly, filthy animals with less intelligence than a Roomba. It's no wonder that rats would do a better job -- they're more intelligent.
Case in point: Put a dog in an enclosure with a simple latch, and it will bark endlessly to be released. Put a rat in the same enclosure, and it will eventually figure out how to open the latch.
Another case in point: Despite outnumbering dogs something like a trillion to one, which do you see more often dead in the middle of the road?
Yet another: Release dogs on a deserted island, and the odds of them being alive in a year's time are pretty damn low. Release rats on a deserted island, and in a year's time, their countless progeny will have driven most of the native wildlife into extinction.
Finally, if dogs are so smart, how come rats get all the lab jobs?
One thing which is rarely considered by astronomers, who tend to be a fairly optimistic bunch (as opposed, anyway, to cosmologists), is that humans will probably behave as badly to aliens as we do to each other. Science fiction writers have addressed the topic before, but more typically tend to focus on the possibility of hostile aliens.
Perhaps Word 97 and AbiWord would have been a more accurate comparison.
Ick. I haven't actually tried the Linux version of AbiWord, but I have tried the Win32 version. My experience ran like this: I loaded a 650 page MS Word document in AbiWord. Some of the formatting was mangled, but not irreparably. The trouble started when I changed from 100% zoom to 75% zoom. Fifteen minutes later, when it was finished resizing, I had pretty much decided AbiWord was not going to cut it for me.
Word 97 launches by itself, OpenOffice launches an integrated suite, so of course OO will take more memory.
This, IMHO, is a bizarre design choice for a free software package. The only real reason for integrated office suites was to lock out competition. Why can't I launch the word processor and the spreadsheet -- the only components I use -- as separate applications? Don't get me wrong, I think OpenOffice is a great product -- I am, after all, about to spend two grand to buy a laptop capable of running it -- but that does make it more expensive for me than continuing to run Word 97.
The reason I am comparing Word 97 and OpenOffice, incidentally, is because there have been no significant added features in subsequent releases of Word for individual users. Almost all of the new development in MS Word since Word 97 has been aimed at corporate groupware applications. Moreover, the OpenOffice word processor really doesn't offer anything Word 97 doesn't have, except for being free and based on open standards. Now, that matters a lot to me, and probably you as well, but odds are that we are a tiny, tiny minority.
This so-called 'paradigm shift' of spatial browsing should not be enforced on users. We like Linux. We like choice. Stop being fascists and give us a 'turn off spatial browsing' button.
It's questionable whether it should be offered, much less enforced. If you're so close to your code that twiddling the interface of a fnarking file browser strikes you as a paradigm shift, you really need to get out more.
Personally, I'd like to see at least one fast, tight file browser that mindlessly clones Windows Explorer. Sure, it's not a perfect design, but the overwhelming majority of the computer-using population has been using it for nearly a decade and they're comfortable with it. If you really want to lure users away from MS, that's the only thing that matters. It's not like you can't use the bloated horror of Nautilus instead if that's your deal.
Petreley's a bit off the mark, though. A much bigger problem for Linux is how bloated and inefficient the common GUI apps are compared to Microsoft's equivalents. (Oh sure, mod me down, but hear me out first.) I have an old 120MHz Thinkpad laptop with 48 megs of RAM. I can fire up Windows Explorer, Internet Explorer, and Word 97 simultaneously and have them run more than fast enough to be useful. Would you like to guess what happens when I boot over to Linux, start X, and try opening Nautilus, Mozilla, and Open Office? The amazing part is that they will eventually shoehorn themselves into memory and run at all, even if they are swapping madly and unusably slow.
And yes, I realize the most recent incarnations of these MS products are much more bloated, but the vital point is that Microsoft achieved a level of efficiency and functionality by 1997 that FOSS has yet to achieve. (Note: I am specifically talking about GUI apps here, not CLI apps, where Linux really shines.) The difference, I suspect, is that MS tests its apps on a wide variety of machines with an eye on the lowest common denominator, and FOSS developers tend to test on their own machines which are, of course, usually cutting edge. MS also lacks the ego problem that many FOSS developers have which prevents them from producing polished user interfaces because they perceive it as "dumbing down" the interface.
Personally, I hate MS enough that I'm going to shell out a couple thousand dollars to get a recent laptop so I can run Mozilla and Open Office, but the overwhelming majority of Windows users -- which you must bear in mind still includes tens of millions of people running Win98 on obsolete hardware -- are not going to see Linux as an option. To them, Linux offers a learning curve and an expensive hardware upgrade, and that's it. It's not exactly an appealing proposition.
BTW, there are allready tracking solutions in use that use GPS in conjuction with satellite comms. Users only need switch on devices when they want. When they do the device periodically sends an SMS like message giving the current coords read from the GPS. Likewise such devices can be used to send an SOS that includes the exact coords.
The problem there is that if, say, the hiker is somehow rendered unconscious (or dead), there's no one to push the SOS button. As far as I'm concerned, it would be fine to optionally issue GPS tracking devices that radio their current coordinates every hour or so. If I was climbing a mountain or something, I'd want one.
Mind you, I wouldn't want to be required to carry one, but if I got into a jam without one, I wouldn't be in a position to argue if the Park Service wanted to bill me for my six-digit rescue effort, either.
Do I have nowhere to turn except an expensive lawyer, armed with no information about the company?
No, you could always post an article on Slashdot with the actual 800 number, implicitly urging innumerable irritable geeks to inundate them with bizarre crank calls.
Wow, Dothan is a strange choice for the name of a processor. No offense intended to those who are condemned to live there, but Dothan, Alabama is by a wide margin the goddamned ugliest, most depressing industrial pit of hell in the entire South. It might be the ugliest town in the entire country, but for the existence of Cheyenne, Wyoming, which is appallingly unpleasant to look at even on a moonless night during a power outage.
Start with the Case - Aluminum is the best but really expensive a cheapo person would make a case out of wood (im sure your going to do this one).
This isn't cheap, it's smart. I've often wondered why no one seems to try building the case out of a relatively soft wood like pine or even particle board. Sure, it would be ugly, but it would also dampen the vibrations, especially from the hard drives. Now, mind you, I have seen wooden cases before, but they've mostly been fancy hardwood cases, which will only make things worse -- there's a reason that guitars and violins are made from hardwoods: they transmit vibrations better.
I think you are confusing "powerful" with "high level". C is an extremely powerful language, second only to assembly, in that you can write programs in C to do anything within the capabilities of the underlying hardware. The tradeoff you make when using a relatively low-level language is that many common tasks are a pain in the ass, memory management being one of the obvious examples. But the other side of that tradeoff is that higher level languages make common tasks trivial at the expense of rendering certain less-common tasks difficult or even impossible. The designers of high-level languages are quite conscious of this as is demonstrated by the near-universal provision for interfacing with code written in C.
Power and ease-of-use are not the same thing. Many people use different text editors for programming (vi, emacs) than they do for editing email (pico, joe). Languages are no different.
Okay, it looks cool, the price isn't too astronomical, and the underlying idea is great. That leaves only one question, and the answer to that question will be the same as, "Will I buy it?"
So, can I put my own content on it?
There are tens of thousands of free books in electronic form out there, and I'd like to read several hundred of them. I'm not particularly interested in renting DRM-protected books. If I want books that I have to give back, I'm perfectly content with the library.
Copyrighted doesn't always mean "undistributable". Someone may hold the copyright to something but may actually let people distribute it-- am I wrong there?
I hope not, because that's the principle the GPL rests upon.
All having copyright means is that you get to decide who, if anyone, gets to have a copy. How you parcel that out is up to you. You can grant copies in return for money, or in return for nothing. It's up to you.
You can also surrender your copyright by casting your work into the public domain, which basically gives everyone a collective copyright to the work.
In other words we were told that having the best software wasn't good enough [...]
That works out well, because BIND isn't anywhere near the best software, at least not for name serving. It is, however, an exceedingly reliable source of serious vulnerabilities, and considering how relatively simple DNS is, that's a monumental achievement in its own right.
People in that salary bracket are being paid hourly? I had always assumed that anywhere in the 50+ per year range is a salaried position, and overtime isn't an issue anyway, because you don't keep a time clock.
I've made considerably more than $50k at my last three jobs, and all of them have been paid hourly. The same has been true of all of my coworkers, with the exception of some of the higher-ranking managers. I actually prefer salaried positions, but there don't appear to be any non-managerial salaried positions that pay more than $30k in my area.
Windows doesn't actually support much more hardware than Linux. It's the hardware vendors who support their own hardware, and virtually all of them provide Windows drivers, while the Linux community has to write its own.
To hear this nabob tell it, there are hordes of Microsoft programmers slaving away, writing drivers for every last piece of oddball hardware out there. The truth in 99 cases out of 100 is that Microsoft publishes (or sells) an API specification, and hordes of programmers working for hardware vendors write drivers to interface with it. If the vendor doesn't believe it's worth the effort to write additional drivers for Linux (or MacOS, OS/2, DOS, NetWare, et cetera), the driver only gets written if some Linux programmer gets stuck with a piece of hardware he can't use and decides to spend many hours coding one instead of returning the hardware for something that is already supported. Needless to say, this doesn't happen very often.
For example, I have an HP scanner at home that I can use under Win2k but can't use under Linux, not because "Linux doesn't support it," but because Hewlett-Packard doesn't support it on non-Microsoft operating systems.
Linux's "Achilles heel", when examined rationally and without the desire to drive ad revenue through baiting the Slashdot crowd, boils down to the same problem every Microsoft competitor has: Microsoft is a monopoly enjoying the benefits of a massive network effect and ineffectual antitrust laws.
I don't know about everyone else, but my experience has been that Iomega magnetic disk drives and media are unreliable. I wouldn't trust my data to this even if it was 100GB/cart.
Personally, I never had any trouble with Zip drives. For the brief period of time that 100 meg removable disks were actually useful, I liked them. I eventually gave it to my father, who has been using it for the last six or seven years without any problem.
Jaz, on the other hand, was an unreliable piece of shit. The disks were overly expensive and prone to failure. I went through two drives and about six disks before giving up on the technology.
That being said, I wouldn't say tape was ever a reliable backup solution, though for many years it was the only available solution for high capacity backups. Tape was always an endless nightmare. I've replaced all my tape backup with an IDE RAID box full of big, cheap commodity drives and aside from having to replace a drive once or twice a year, it works just fine for the terabyte or so of data I'm responsible for.
Most people will drive a reasonable speed regardless of what's posted.
If there are any orbiting satellites that track this sort of thing, I expect CNN to be running a headline story about an unprecedented class X10 bullshit flare.
I don't know about where you live, but all I need to do to see "reasonable" speeds is to try to cross the five-lane road in front of my office. The posted speed limit is 40, but the average speed of traffic is around 55-60 mph. Now, considering this road passes through a densely populated mixed residential and commercial zone without a stop light for a mile in either direction, you'd think a reasonable speed might be at or below the posted speed limit, since the numerous pedestrians are forced to run for their lives in the absence of crosswalks and signals. I've had to jump out of the way of semi-conscious drivers who tore into the middle lane while I was stuck waiting for an opening on more occasions than I can count, and I've watched three people bounced off hoods in the past year.
People are, in general, self-absorbed assholes with no real concern for the well being of their fellow men. For some reason, being behind the wheel of a car seems to amplify these tendencies. Ignoring this reality in the name of some misguided dogmatic rejection of "social engineering" and paranoid conspiracy theories about traffic-laws-as-secret-taxation is just proof of my thesis.
Traffic accidents kill and maim people by the tens of thousands annually, next to which the trickle of casualties from even major wars are just a blip on the scope. Bitching and moaning about convenience and taxation is asinine in this context.
1. Um, the economy is in a slump, stupid. I'm not spending as much on anything I don't need because I don't want to be caught flat-footed in a layoff the way I was after the crash.
2. There hasn't been much new music in the last year that I've liked. What I have liked, I actually have bought.
3. I'm so disgusted by the RIAA that I've made a conscious effort to spend my spare change elsewhere. Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, and Borders have been the primary beneficiaries of this shift. They have these neat-o products called books that provide days and days of quality entertainment for less than the cost of a 74-minute CD. (Lately, for example, I've been rocking out to Ursula K. LeGuin in the cross-platform paperback format.)
4. CDs are still too expensive. For $15-$20, I expect to see the band live. In fact, I've been patronizing a lot more of the relatively unknown bands that roll through town because they're not regurgitating the same focus-group schlock as the big-name "artists".
Since four items is a bit much for the RIAA to absorb, let me summarize: "I don't have much money these days, your products suck, and I don't like you."
Please note that I did not say, "I am downloading MP3s happily," though that's what they will surely hear.
What they needed in this, and many other anti-trust cases, is to think outside the box: why not use the RICO statutes? What not have the Federal Trade Commission declare Microsoft OS defective and pull it from shelves? Why not go after Bill and Steve like they did with Enron's Skilling and Lay?
Actually, Cringley peripherally touches on that question, too, by noting that Microsoft has a lot of political allies. It is, of course, a matter of popular wisdom that money buys legislation, but that's not strictly true. You are, for example, not ever going to cough up enough dough to get Tom DeLay to advocate for same-sex marriage or to get Teddy Kennedy to sponsor a bill in favor of racial segregation. All but a few of these people really are ideologically driven, and all the money buys you is wiggle room, which is significant for most politicians, but not all-consuming.
The real problem is that there is an ideological faction in Congress -- which is primarily but hardly exclusively Republican -- which sees business and making money as a good thing, and which naively reasons, therefore, that bigger business and more money must be a better thing. These ideologues are not (especially) corrupt or stupid, but they are blinded by their own dogma. The libertarian wing of the faction is particularly blinded by their adherence to the doctrine of a self-correcting market because they refuse to recognize that, all other things being equal, wealth is itself a competitive advantage.
This will not change except at the ballot box, and it will not ever be the primary issue: the average person doesn't care enough about this to choose a candidate on the basis of their feelings about Microsoft or antitrust laws.
Now, mind you, I'm not arguing against being politically active by any means, but the best way to fight Microsoft (and Oracle, Adobe, Macromedia, etc., etc., ad nauseam) is to write excellent free end-user software. Sure, it's still necessary to fend off the more ridiculous legislative initiatives and vote wisely, but in the end, making the better product will win out.
(Now, by "better", I mean better in the eyes of the average consumer, not the average software engineer, but that's a rant for another occasion.)
I prefer to install everything from packages when I can. For stuff that I have to upgrade frequently -- usually server processes that need security patches -- I do it from source, partly because I prefer not to wait for a package to become available, but mostly because it saves me from the tangle of dependencies that come with packages. (The difference between RPM hell and DLL hell, as far as I'm concerned, is only that you don't have to pay for the privilege of RPM hell.)
In general, I haven't found that there is any real optimization benefit in compiling from source in most cases -- the kernel itself and Apache being the primary exceptions. I'm sure it's there, but it's small enough to be unnoticeable in most cases, and therefore not worth my hourly wage to futz with when I could be doing something that actually generates revenues.
Mind you, this is at work. At home, I tend to prefer compilation, but that's just because I like screwing around with the source.
I just don't get why it has to be such an "either or" choice here...
Money.
Though it really, really grieves me to say this, Apple got this right first, and Microsoft eventually learned from Apple and their own customer feedback. The only people who want a whole bunch of choice and configurability from computers are geeks like you and me who enjoy the computer as a thing-in-itself. Everyone else is just trying to use the computer to accomplish their jobs, a particular hobby, or something else where the machine is just a means to an end. And those people are where the money is. (There certainly isn't much money in folks like me who rejected the Macintosh because they preferred the joys of the Applesoft command prompt and 6502 machine language programming!)
It also means less expensive support if you don't have to train your support drones to answer questions about a million conceivable configuration possibilities.
This is no doubt what Novell is thinking. For all I know, the executives at Novell think free and open software is a great thing in and of itself, but at the end of the day, their jobs depend on making money, so reducing interface choice is an eminently rational route for them to choose.
Novell's efforts will go to whatever they decide is the "best" interface, period. If geeks like you and me want special feature X, we'll have to code it ourselves, because only we care. There is a sliding scale of preference for complexity in users, starting with zero for the general public and sliding all the way to infinity for Java development toolchains, in inverse proportion to the likelihood of profit.
Where issues of licensing, support, and future plans are concerned, corporate customers can in most cases get what they want by acting more like, um, customers. With the exception of a few hard-core ideologues like RMS and his camp, the overwhelming majority of open source developers would be only too happy to cut special licensing deals, commit to varying degrees of tech support, or implement special features if the interested parties would just cut them a check.
Now, I know that for many of us, our primary business isn't business as such, but most of us probably aren't averse to cutting a deal for a fair price. We're just not too interested in jumping through hoops for free.
Slashdot Mirror
The earliest version that Linus put together was incomplete and immature.
Cripes, tell me about it. I remember when some exceedingly early version of something called "Linux" showed up on a local BBS. I spent a couple of evenings trying to get it to work, without success. Minix, on the other hand, worked like a charm, and at the time, it was more sophisticated and reliable than Linux. This alone argues against the idea that Linux was built on top of Minix.
Early versions of Linux were not worth a shit unless you were a bored programmer and wanted to help Linus with his project. I remember the sorry thing, for crying out loud -- it was a student project and not a very promising one at that. Oh sure, it's damn spiffy now, but it wasn't back then. The idea that Linus stole code from the likes of Ken Thompson or Andrew Tanenbaum is just silly if you actually compare the code. Of course, Brown isn't qualified to do that.
The thing that's really irritating about this is the notion that it's somehow a monumental task to write a simple operating system -- and let us remember, the first public release of Linux was a simple operating system. Simple operating systems are, at more than a few universities, the end product of a single semester class. It's the years of work by thousands of talented programmers that made it into a complex, full-featured, stable OS. Brown seems unable or unwilling to grasp this.
How many people does Brown thing wrote the original version of DOS? Microsoft wouldn't have gotten their big break were it not for Tim Paterson's SOLO coding effort.
Criminy, just check the OS section on DMOZ or Yahoo. It's amazing how many teenagers have written fairly sophisticated operating systems on their own. It's not easy, but it's not like sending men to the moon, either. Shit, *I* wrote one once, in 6502 assembly language, on a 8-bit microcomputer when I was sixteen. Mind you, it wasn't anything like Linux, but then I didn't have thousands of talented developers helping me out.
It's difficult to imagine any application that couldn't be written by a reasonably smart programmer given time and motivation. Arguably, it's having too many developers that will screw up a project.
I'm inclined to believe, often instantly and completely, a slashdot posting endorsing product X, because the poster seems unaffiliated and genuine and doesn't really have anything to gain from endorsing it.
I spent a lot of time thinking about this sentence, carefully formulating a well-reasoned, thoughtful response to it. Then I went back over it, polishing it and making it more concise, pruning away every superfluous word that might obscure the essential message I was trying to get across. It came down to one word:
Boob.
In most of the slashdot penetrating world, we think of dogs primarily as companion animals, and find the thougt of them being blown to bits in mine clearance as "sad" (at least I certainly would)
I think of dogs as large, smelly, filthy animals with less intelligence than a Roomba. It's no wonder that rats would do a better job -- they're more intelligent.
Case in point: Put a dog in an enclosure with a simple latch, and it will bark endlessly to be released. Put a rat in the same enclosure, and it will eventually figure out how to open the latch.
Another case in point: Despite outnumbering dogs something like a trillion to one, which do you see more often dead in the middle of the road?
Yet another: Release dogs on a deserted island, and the odds of them being alive in a year's time are pretty damn low. Release rats on a deserted island, and in a year's time, their countless progeny will have driven most of the native wildlife into extinction.
Finally, if dogs are so smart, how come rats get all the lab jobs?
One thing which is rarely considered by astronomers, who tend to be a fairly optimistic bunch (as opposed, anyway, to cosmologists), is that humans will probably behave as badly to aliens as we do to each other. Science fiction writers have addressed the topic before, but more typically tend to focus on the possibility of hostile aliens.
Perhaps Word 97 and AbiWord would have been a more accurate comparison.
Ick. I haven't actually tried the Linux version of AbiWord, but I have tried the Win32 version. My experience ran like this: I loaded a 650 page MS Word document in AbiWord. Some of the formatting was mangled, but not irreparably. The trouble started when I changed from 100% zoom to 75% zoom. Fifteen minutes later, when it was finished resizing, I had pretty much decided AbiWord was not going to cut it for me.
Word 97 launches by itself, OpenOffice launches an integrated suite, so of course OO will take more memory.
This, IMHO, is a bizarre design choice for a free software package. The only real reason for integrated office suites was to lock out competition. Why can't I launch the word processor and the spreadsheet -- the only components I use -- as separate applications? Don't get me wrong, I think OpenOffice is a great product -- I am, after all, about to spend two grand to buy a laptop capable of running it -- but that does make it more expensive for me than continuing to run Word 97.
The reason I am comparing Word 97 and OpenOffice, incidentally, is because there have been no significant added features in subsequent releases of Word for individual users. Almost all of the new development in MS Word since Word 97 has been aimed at corporate groupware applications. Moreover, the OpenOffice word processor really doesn't offer anything Word 97 doesn't have, except for being free and based on open standards. Now, that matters a lot to me, and probably you as well, but odds are that we are a tiny, tiny minority.
This so-called 'paradigm shift' of spatial browsing should not be enforced on users. We like Linux. We like choice. Stop being fascists and give us a 'turn off spatial browsing' button.
It's questionable whether it should be offered, much less enforced. If you're so close to your code that twiddling the interface of a fnarking file browser strikes you as a paradigm shift, you really need to get out more.
Personally, I'd like to see at least one fast, tight file browser that mindlessly clones Windows Explorer. Sure, it's not a perfect design, but the overwhelming majority of the computer-using population has been using it for nearly a decade and they're comfortable with it. If you really want to lure users away from MS, that's the only thing that matters. It's not like you can't use the bloated horror of Nautilus instead if that's your deal.
Petreley's a bit off the mark, though. A much bigger problem for Linux is how bloated and inefficient the common GUI apps are compared to Microsoft's equivalents. (Oh sure, mod me down, but hear me out first.) I have an old 120MHz Thinkpad laptop with 48 megs of RAM. I can fire up Windows Explorer, Internet Explorer, and Word 97 simultaneously and have them run more than fast enough to be useful. Would you like to guess what happens when I boot over to Linux, start X, and try opening Nautilus, Mozilla, and Open Office? The amazing part is that they will eventually shoehorn themselves into memory and run at all, even if they are swapping madly and unusably slow.
And yes, I realize the most recent incarnations of these MS products are much more bloated, but the vital point is that Microsoft achieved a level of efficiency and functionality by 1997 that FOSS has yet to achieve. (Note: I am specifically talking about GUI apps here, not CLI apps, where Linux really shines.) The difference, I suspect, is that MS tests its apps on a wide variety of machines with an eye on the lowest common denominator, and FOSS developers tend to test on their own machines which are, of course, usually cutting edge. MS also lacks the ego problem that many FOSS developers have which prevents them from producing polished user interfaces because they perceive it as "dumbing down" the interface.
Personally, I hate MS enough that I'm going to shell out a couple thousand dollars to get a recent laptop so I can run Mozilla and Open Office, but the overwhelming majority of Windows users -- which you must bear in mind still includes tens of millions of people running Win98 on obsolete hardware -- are not going to see Linux as an option. To them, Linux offers a learning curve and an expensive hardware upgrade, and that's it. It's not exactly an appealing proposition.
BTW, there are allready tracking solutions in use that use GPS in conjuction with satellite comms. Users only need switch on devices when they want. When they do the device periodically sends an SMS like message giving the current coords read from the GPS. Likewise such devices can be used to send an SOS that includes the exact coords.
The problem there is that if, say, the hiker is somehow rendered unconscious (or dead), there's no one to push the SOS button. As far as I'm concerned, it would be fine to optionally issue GPS tracking devices that radio their current coordinates every hour or so. If I was climbing a mountain or something, I'd want one.
Mind you, I wouldn't want to be required to carry one, but if I got into a jam without one, I wouldn't be in a position to argue if the Park Service wanted to bill me for my six-digit rescue effort, either.
Do I have nowhere to turn except an expensive lawyer, armed with no information about the company?
No, you could always post an article on Slashdot with the actual 800 number, implicitly urging innumerable irritable geeks to inundate them with bizarre crank calls.
Wait, you already did that.
Wow, Dothan is a strange choice for the name of a processor. No offense intended to those who are condemned to live there, but Dothan, Alabama is by a wide margin the goddamned ugliest, most depressing industrial pit of hell in the entire South. It might be the ugliest town in the entire country, but for the existence of Cheyenne, Wyoming, which is appallingly unpleasant to look at even on a moonless night during a power outage.
Start with the Case - Aluminum is the best but really expensive a cheapo person would make a case out of wood (im sure your going to do this one).
This isn't cheap, it's smart. I've often wondered why no one seems to try building the case out of a relatively soft wood like pine or even particle board. Sure, it would be ugly, but it would also dampen the vibrations, especially from the hard drives. Now, mind you, I have seen wooden cases before, but they've mostly been fancy hardwood cases, which will only make things worse -- there's a reason that guitars and violins are made from hardwoods: they transmit vibrations better.
I think you are confusing "powerful" with "high level". C is an extremely powerful language, second only to assembly, in that you can write programs in C to do anything within the capabilities of the underlying hardware. The tradeoff you make when using a relatively low-level language is that many common tasks are a pain in the ass, memory management being one of the obvious examples. But the other side of that tradeoff is that higher level languages make common tasks trivial at the expense of rendering certain less-common tasks difficult or even impossible. The designers of high-level languages are quite conscious of this as is demonstrated by the near-universal provision for interfacing with code written in C.
Power and ease-of-use are not the same thing. Many people use different text editors for programming (vi, emacs) than they do for editing email (pico, joe). Languages are no different.
Okay, it looks cool, the price isn't too astronomical, and the underlying idea is great. That leaves only one question, and the answer to that question will be the same as, "Will I buy it?"
So, can I put my own content on it?
There are tens of thousands of free books in electronic form out there, and I'd like to read several hundred of them. I'm not particularly interested in renting DRM-protected books. If I want books that I have to give back, I'm perfectly content with the library.
Copyrighted doesn't always mean "undistributable". Someone may hold the copyright to something but may actually let people distribute it-- am I wrong there?
I hope not, because that's the principle the GPL rests upon.
All having copyright means is that you get to decide who, if anyone, gets to have a copy. How you parcel that out is up to you. You can grant copies in return for money, or in return for nothing. It's up to you.
You can also surrender your copyright by casting your work into the public domain, which basically gives everyone a collective copyright to the work.
In other words we were told that having the best software wasn't good enough [...]
That works out well, because BIND isn't anywhere near the best software, at least not for name serving. It is, however, an exceedingly reliable source of serious vulnerabilities, and considering how relatively simple DNS is, that's a monumental achievement in its own right.
People in that salary bracket are being paid hourly? I had always assumed that anywhere in the 50+ per year range is a salaried position, and overtime isn't an issue anyway, because you don't keep a time clock.
I've made considerably more than $50k at my last three jobs, and all of them have been paid hourly. The same has been true of all of my coworkers, with the exception of some of the higher-ranking managers. I actually prefer salaried positions, but there don't appear to be any non-managerial salaried positions that pay more than $30k in my area.
Windows doesn't actually support much more hardware than Linux. It's the hardware vendors who support their own hardware, and virtually all of them provide Windows drivers, while the Linux community has to write its own.
To hear this nabob tell it, there are hordes of Microsoft programmers slaving away, writing drivers for every last piece of oddball hardware out there. The truth in 99 cases out of 100 is that Microsoft publishes (or sells) an API specification, and hordes of programmers working for hardware vendors write drivers to interface with it. If the vendor doesn't believe it's worth the effort to write additional drivers for Linux (or MacOS, OS/2, DOS, NetWare, et cetera), the driver only gets written if some Linux programmer gets stuck with a piece of hardware he can't use and decides to spend many hours coding one instead of returning the hardware for something that is already supported. Needless to say, this doesn't happen very often.
For example, I have an HP scanner at home that I can use under Win2k but can't use under Linux, not because "Linux doesn't support it," but because Hewlett-Packard doesn't support it on non-Microsoft operating systems.
Linux's "Achilles heel", when examined rationally and without the desire to drive ad revenue through baiting the Slashdot crowd, boils down to the same problem every Microsoft competitor has: Microsoft is a monopoly enjoying the benefits of a massive network effect and ineffectual antitrust laws.
I don't know about everyone else, but my experience has been that Iomega magnetic disk drives and media are unreliable. I wouldn't trust my data to this even if it was 100GB/cart.
Personally, I never had any trouble with Zip drives. For the brief period of time that 100 meg removable disks were actually useful, I liked them. I eventually gave it to my father, who has been using it for the last six or seven years without any problem.
Jaz, on the other hand, was an unreliable piece of shit. The disks were overly expensive and prone to failure. I went through two drives and about six disks before giving up on the technology.
That being said, I wouldn't say tape was ever a reliable backup solution, though for many years it was the only available solution for high capacity backups. Tape was always an endless nightmare. I've replaced all my tape backup with an IDE RAID box full of big, cheap commodity drives and aside from having to replace a drive once or twice a year, it works just fine for the terabyte or so of data I'm responsible for.
Most people will drive a reasonable speed regardless of what's posted.
If there are any orbiting satellites that track this sort of thing, I expect CNN to be running a headline story about an unprecedented class X10 bullshit flare.
I don't know about where you live, but all I need to do to see "reasonable" speeds is to try to cross the five-lane road in front of my office. The posted speed limit is 40, but the average speed of traffic is around 55-60 mph. Now, considering this road passes through a densely populated mixed residential and commercial zone without a stop light for a mile in either direction, you'd think a reasonable speed might be at or below the posted speed limit, since the numerous pedestrians are forced to run for their lives in the absence of crosswalks and signals. I've had to jump out of the way of semi-conscious drivers who tore into the middle lane while I was stuck waiting for an opening on more occasions than I can count, and I've watched three people bounced off hoods in the past year.
People are, in general, self-absorbed assholes with no real concern for the well being of their fellow men. For some reason, being behind the wheel of a car seems to amplify these tendencies. Ignoring this reality in the name of some misguided dogmatic rejection of "social engineering" and paranoid conspiracy theories about traffic-laws-as-secret-taxation is just proof of my thesis.
Traffic accidents kill and maim people by the tens of thousands annually, next to which the trickle of casualties from even major wars are just a blip on the scope. Bitching and moaning about convenience and taxation is asinine in this context.
Here are the reasons I'm not buying as much:
1. Um, the economy is in a slump, stupid. I'm not spending as much on anything I don't need because I don't want to be caught flat-footed in a layoff the way I was after the crash.
2. There hasn't been much new music in the last year that I've liked. What I have liked, I actually have bought.
3. I'm so disgusted by the RIAA that I've made a conscious effort to spend my spare change elsewhere. Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, and Borders have been the primary beneficiaries of this shift. They have these neat-o products called books that provide days and days of quality entertainment for less than the cost of a 74-minute CD. (Lately, for example, I've been rocking out to Ursula K. LeGuin in the cross-platform paperback format.)
4. CDs are still too expensive. For $15-$20, I expect to see the band live. In fact, I've been patronizing a lot more of the relatively unknown bands that roll through town because they're not regurgitating the same focus-group schlock as the big-name "artists".
Since four items is a bit much for the RIAA to absorb, let me summarize: "I don't have much money these days, your products suck, and I don't like you."
Please note that I did not say, "I am downloading MP3s happily," though that's what they will surely hear.
...when amassing a huge collection of Ed, Edd, and Eddy episodes is outlawed, only outlaws will amass a huge collection of Ed, Edd, and Eddy episodes.
Gravy!
What they needed in this, and many other anti-trust cases, is to think outside the box: why not use the RICO statutes? What not have the Federal Trade Commission declare Microsoft OS defective and pull it from shelves? Why not go after Bill and Steve like they did with Enron's Skilling and Lay?
Actually, Cringley peripherally touches on that question, too, by noting that Microsoft has a lot of political allies. It is, of course, a matter of popular wisdom that money buys legislation, but that's not strictly true. You are, for example, not ever going to cough up enough dough to get Tom DeLay to advocate for same-sex marriage or to get Teddy Kennedy to sponsor a bill in favor of racial segregation. All but a few of these people really are ideologically driven, and all the money buys you is wiggle room, which is significant for most politicians, but not all-consuming.
The real problem is that there is an ideological faction in Congress -- which is primarily but hardly exclusively Republican -- which sees business and making money as a good thing, and which naively reasons, therefore, that bigger business and more money must be a better thing. These ideologues are not (especially) corrupt or stupid, but they are blinded by their own dogma. The libertarian wing of the faction is particularly blinded by their adherence to the doctrine of a self-correcting market because they refuse to recognize that, all other things being equal, wealth is itself a competitive advantage.
This will not change except at the ballot box, and it will not ever be the primary issue: the average person doesn't care enough about this to choose a candidate on the basis of their feelings about Microsoft or antitrust laws.
Now, mind you, I'm not arguing against being politically active by any means, but the best way to fight Microsoft (and Oracle, Adobe, Macromedia, etc., etc., ad nauseam) is to write excellent free end-user software. Sure, it's still necessary to fend off the more ridiculous legislative initiatives and vote wisely, but in the end, making the better product will win out.
(Now, by "better", I mean better in the eyes of the average consumer, not the average software engineer, but that's a rant for another occasion.)
I prefer to install everything from packages when I can. For stuff that I have to upgrade frequently -- usually server processes that need security patches -- I do it from source, partly because I prefer not to wait for a package to become available, but mostly because it saves me from the tangle of dependencies that come with packages. (The difference between RPM hell and DLL hell, as far as I'm concerned, is only that you don't have to pay for the privilege of RPM hell.)
In general, I haven't found that there is any real optimization benefit in compiling from source in most cases -- the kernel itself and Apache being the primary exceptions. I'm sure it's there, but it's small enough to be unnoticeable in most cases, and therefore not worth my hourly wage to futz with when I could be doing something that actually generates revenues.
Mind you, this is at work. At home, I tend to prefer compilation, but that's just because I like screwing around with the source.
I just don't get why it has to be such an "either or" choice here...
Money.
Though it really, really grieves me to say this, Apple got this right first, and Microsoft eventually learned from Apple and their own customer feedback. The only people who want a whole bunch of choice and configurability from computers are geeks like you and me who enjoy the computer as a thing-in-itself. Everyone else is just trying to use the computer to accomplish their jobs, a particular hobby, or something else where the machine is just a means to an end. And those people are where the money is. (There certainly isn't much money in folks like me who rejected the Macintosh because they preferred the joys of the Applesoft command prompt and 6502 machine language programming!)
It also means less expensive support if you don't have to train your support drones to answer questions about a million conceivable configuration possibilities.
This is no doubt what Novell is thinking. For all I know, the executives at Novell think free and open software is a great thing in and of itself, but at the end of the day, their jobs depend on making money, so reducing interface choice is an eminently rational route for them to choose.
Novell's efforts will go to whatever they decide is the "best" interface, period. If geeks like you and me want special feature X, we'll have to code it ourselves, because only we care. There is a sliding scale of preference for complexity in users, starting with zero for the general public and sliding all the way to infinity for Java development toolchains, in inverse proportion to the likelihood of profit.
This is, however, nothing new.
Where issues of licensing, support, and future plans are concerned, corporate customers can in most cases get what they want by acting more like, um, customers. With the exception of a few hard-core ideologues like RMS and his camp, the overwhelming majority of open source developers would be only too happy to cut special licensing deals, commit to varying degrees of tech support, or implement special features if the interested parties would just cut them a check.
Now, I know that for many of us, our primary business isn't business as such, but most of us probably aren't averse to cutting a deal for a fair price. We're just not too interested in jumping through hoops for free.