So I know JonKatz bashing is the style and the rage, and I'm being a hopeless/. peon by doing it. But damn it, there are some issues that need to be addressed:
A vigilant Clotho would design her site along the sancrosanct principles spelled out in O'Reilly's landmark guide, "Information Architecture for the World Wide Web," a book Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville. It should be the Web designer's Bible, if it isn't already, since it challenges us to put users, not makers, foremost when we think of the Web and the Net.
This paragraph demonstrates both the lack of concern for grammar that JonKatz regularly maintains (this is a mistake that Grammatik would probably catch, and possibly even something in MS Word) that demonstrates that either a) he doesn't really care about his/. articles, or b) he's just too lazy to concern himself with correct language use anywhere. This has been beaten to death many times over, however, so I'm just mentioning it because it showed up again.
More annoying is the presence of the paragraph in question at all in this article. It's a barely relevant product plug, although I would bet money he didn't receive money to do it.
Other people have, of course, already mentioned that Clotho.org would be Orwellian, and I think it also bears mentioning that the people who did not have access to it (i.e., poor people, people in other poorer nations, etc.) would probably develop far greater resistance to future shock (to use Toffler's term) and end up superior people.
I am further concerned with some of the criteria JonKatz says would be good (like ``product support'' and ``out-of-dateness''). Suffice to say good products are less concerned with support than things being correct to begin with (and if you think there's an overload on quality, well...), and good products are timeless (I've got computers from the 80's and early 90's that I still do a lot of work on). While this is trivial, I think it once again shows how sadly out of touch JonKatz is with real facts. sigh
No joke (this is probably a bit old, but I didn't initially follow this thread). WotC has done a lot of nasty things, including
Screwing around with Ars Magica
Significantly improving and then dumping Talislanta (I grew up on Talislanta, how could they try to kill it!?)
Buying, or rather nearly buying, a game from me very own brother -- and then when they stopped publishing RPG's, not telling him so that (if he didn't act himself) they would still keep rights to sell it (although they wouldn't sell it)
I think it's obvious that last one pissed me off more, but they managed to piss on a lot of games I liked and bought one of the games I most greatly despise. Oh well.
Meaning that you can't add SCSI or IDE hard drives, or FireWire or USB peripherals, or in terms of SMP? The G4 is the first PPC chip in a while that actually does support SMP in a non-trivial way.
the os blows
Mac OS X.
...works really well except when u cant upgrade...
What can't you upgrade? The RAM, the SCSI/USB/FireWire/IDE (did I miss anything?) peripherals? Oh! Just the CPU, I guess?
Please. Aside from the fact that x86 is the ugliest architecture in any sort of wide use today*, and PPC is a very nice RISC one, the G4 is simply better. Apple is simply better at building good computers. And, of course, Mac OS X has a strong UNIX engine under the hood.
I can't imagine any reason except compatibility for sticking with x86, for those that haven't already left it. All you get is Windows NT and decades of baggage.
i.e. are all the gnu utilities easy to port over, do we get a bash prompt? can we compile ssh,gcc??
> Take a look over at http://www.peanuts.org/peanuts/MacOSX/ for stuff that's already been ported, and replace MacOSX with NEXTSTEP and OpenStep for software written for or ported to NeXTstep and OPENSTEP. On my NeXTstation at home I have ssh and bash running just fine, and when I get around to it egcs 1.1.2 will be installed.br>
Oh it sucks that it won't run 'carbon' tho.:(
Well, it may once Carbon is done, but it wasn't released with Carbon. Subtle difference:)
No. The difference between Mac OS X Server and Client is, essentially, what is bundled.
Last I heard, there was some question whether even a terminal application would ship with Client, much less apache or the NetInfo server stuff, and Server doesn't have Carbon (allowing Mac OS X Client to run prior Mac OS apps in a window).
There will be some differences, but it's a unified code base.
Well, I personally don't give a flying FUD about buzzwords. However, for a good while MacOS felt unusable to me, due to things like unprotected memory, cooperative multi-tasking, etc. Although MacOS has some great ideas all through it, it also has 80's corner-cutting that simply doesn't make sense any more (and now, 5-7 years after it's really really clear that it's outdated, it's getting fixed with Mac OS X), and that, further, undermine or backtrack against the advances they made.
Two steps forward, three steps back has been my experience with Mac OS prior to OS X; but it looks like Apple is finally just walking straight forward.
Also, as to their prices: IMO, the PowerBook is worth every penny, as is the PowerMac G3, and Mac OS X Server is a steal.
This sort of thing just makes me feel better about trusting the big bad former monopolies with their specialties:)
Just goes to show one reason why AT&T and IBM have stuck around this long after having their monopolies broken up -- they realized that they could no longer compete with the same old "kill the competition" practices, and went ahead and started providing service. Of course, I also like IBM and (what used to be Bell Labs) Lucent for their significant outlay for R&D. That sort of thing can't be over-estimated in the value it gives a company that can afford it.
What is the meaning of this ramble? Not much, except to maybe provide some food for thought towards what Microsoft might be like it gets its ass kicked by the DoJ:)
... Or the use of 'to' when 'too' would do better. Perhaps he's trying to save electrons, but it seems to me that his grammar and spelling are as good as CmdrTaco, but with a spell checker (perhaps he should try writing his articles in WordPerfect, and use Grammatik; I don't like its solutions, but it shows most of the grammatical errors in documents so the author can fix them himself).
In my oh-so humble opinion as a math (and previously computer science) major who has no editorial training past the requisite college classes, good content without form is as bad as good form without content. As someone intimately familiar with the ways different people think, I don't expect everyone to be precise grammaticians and spellers, but computers and friends can go a long way to shoring up our own weaknesses:)
I know a lot of people harp on this, but damnit he's a professional writer; why is his writing worse than mine?!?! I don't expect CmdrTaco to get his spelling and grammar right (since until recently this wasn't his job, and by now it's part of his style;), but Jon Katz I do.
As for what the words mean, I submit that it's a review of a somewhat interesting-sounding book. It sounds like I'd like the book, and the review seemed pretty good, giving me enough background on the book and information from the book that now I'd like to read it. What's more, I bet that it's a book that, if I had been aware of it previously and known nothing more than the subject matter, I'd still liked to have read it, so it's actually not an Op-Ed piece masquerading as a review (as some have perhaps argued).
No, it's different. That is, there are things that don't exist in the Linux development tree in the Red Hat kernel. After four years of using Slackware and two of using Debian, I can't figure out how to install a new kernel in Red Hat -- the standard process appears broken, and I'm not interested in working a way around it.
Besides, as far as binaries can tell, OpenBSD can be Linux. Or SCO, or any of a number of other operating systems.
eXceed provides virtual desktops, and it even (if I recall correctly) is kind enough to keep them all listed in the taskbar. It also , as a minor side benefit, provides a full X server for those times (rare though they may be ) that you want to run something on a Unix machine and have it display locally.
Well, when you consider that originally, Slashdot was used as a way to avoid doing school work... it makes sense that more work went into quick posts and such at all times.
If you consider the volume of mail they get now (no stats but I can't imagine it being a small amount), it's a little bit harder to do constant updates.
Just some speculation from someone who's been around/. for a loooong time...
NIS, of course, the venerable; I remember reading that NetInfo was ported to Linux, but I haven't been able to find it; I think Kerberos counts here as well, sorta.
Overall, they're nice for some things, but also sometimes a PITA. As a sysadmin, I like being able to add users manually using vi, and I've had some unpleasant experiences with NetInfo (and NIS is insecure compared to/etc/passwd).
Of course, I'm not too experienced with NetInfo, NIS, or Kerberos. So YMMV, but rest assured that the inconveniences of dealing with a particular database authentication system pay for themselves with the convenience of managing large sites with a database in general.
Sure, people will leave Linux because it's no longer 'elite.' But then, I'd rather have one clueless user just poking along getting things done that one hundred people using Linux because it makes them cool. So the people that leave Linux for the next big thing -- great, glad you were here. I'll probably follow the next big thing too, but I doubt I'll leave my roots of Solaris and Linux behind:)
Like I said, they're against certain business plans, not anti-business. If the business plan just happens to be the traditional way, too bad; but it's not targetting business , but certain business plans.
Anyone who posts major content articles that get lead slots
Care to explain what "that get lead slots" means? And while I agree that it is not being professional, the day I expect Slashdot to be run in a professional, rather than casual and comfortable, manner, is probably the day I stop relading the main page every half hour:)
The GPL and the FSF are completely anti-commercial.
This claim is as annoying as it is common. They are not; they are against certain business plans. They are against, for instance, Intellectual Property laws (not necessarily all of them, I'm not sure, but certainly the current ones), and hence don't much care for business plans that rely on those laws.
If a company invests a million bucks developing software, Richard considers them *immoral* if they do not allow someone else to get a million bucks of benefit for someone else work for free.
Would you mind clarifying that sentence? All of the 'the[ym]'s and 'someone else's and the grammar makes it a little confusing.
As for the whole "open source" thing, I notice you didn't mention Bruce Perens -- regardless of whether he supports it now, he helped start it. Give credit where it is due:) Further, also thanks to the "open source," we have software that is "open source" but can't be used in typical "free software" ways, like code re-use or project merging. So end users can fix bugs if they want to (which is great), but the vendor also doesn't provide any service to the community (which free software does, and which is also obviously great).
The difference is that, as someone else said, NASA would exist without Linux. Red Hat wouldn't.
I'm not going to bother with the same terminology (symbiote/symbiont), since I don't know the words to use for all parties in a symbiotic relationship (parasite/host is a better known relationship, sadly).
But, to explain, Red Hat lives because of Linux, and to large extent, Linux is what it is because of Red Hat (Gnome, big money contributors, jobs for so many kernel hackers, etc.). That, I think, is the relationship Bruce Perense means by calling Red Hat a symbiote (rather that term is accurate or not).
Walnut Creek, on the other hand, can probably be considered to be a benefactor to Linux by Bruce Perens' system, by (for instance) hosting the Slackware distribution, selling the official CD's, and mirroring so many Linux-focused or Linux-related FTP sites. They certainly do gain money from selling Slackware CD's, but that's not their business. If Patrick Volkerding stopped putting together Slackware tomorrow, Walnut Creek would go on. Ditto with NASA.
I count one spelling error, "earler," by Roblimo; and that one, you can miss by reading for content rather than grammar. Perhaps the questioners and Bruce Perens made spelling errors, but I doubt Roblimo typed that all out rather than using the [X,Windows] clipboard. And never mind that it is a rather long article to write error-free without editing or the use of spell-checker, which I doubt anyone uses for articles (although keeping errors to a minimum for readability is always appreciated).
When was Final Fantasy not mainstream? Most of the video gamers I know that played video games when the Nintendo was big remember FFI fondly. If not that, I seem to recall FFIV and FFVI being quite popular. And of course, William Gibson and J.R.R. Tolkien are considered 'must reads' or 'good authors' by most people who bother to read books. Looks like you're more interested in being part of a particular subculture than avoiding the mass market.
Besides, if'ns ya bother to ask me, the person you happen to be is defined not by how you are different from the crowd, or how you are the same. Such caricatures of personality are shallow and only relative.
To be honest, I feel similar twinges when I see all the people posting to/. But then, these things happen; ideas and forums and objects rise and sink in popularity, and the good old days and the bad old days will never be repeated.
Ahem. Sorry. That whole deal with visors and what-not... or beliebability -- a mutant Aleut is the most dangerous man in the world? There were plenty of technical errors -- errors where Neal Stephenson bothered to go into exacting detail, only to get the details wrong. *sheesh*
Neal Stephenson spends a lot of time making an interesting world, it seems to me, but William Gibson seemed to have a better grasp of humanity; a better grasp of what's important to the story.
I actually get better font sizes by giving control back to other web sites. Probably something to do with . Which is annoying, especially since for one of my jobs my monitor is constantly about 30 inches away from me (so I need larger fonts all the time). sigh
Slashdot Mirror
This paragraph demonstrates both the lack of concern for grammar that JonKatz regularly maintains (this is a mistake that Grammatik would probably catch, and possibly even something in MS Word) that demonstrates that either a) he doesn't really care about his
More annoying is the presence of the paragraph in question at all in this article. It's a barely relevant product plug, although I would bet money he didn't receive money to do it.
Other people have, of course, already mentioned that Clotho.org would be Orwellian, and I think it also bears mentioning that the people who did not have access to it (i.e., poor people, people in other poorer nations, etc.) would probably develop far greater resistance to future shock (to use Toffler's term) and end up superior people.
I am further concerned with some of the criteria JonKatz says would be good (like ``product support'' and ``out-of-dateness''). Suffice to say good products are less concerned with support than things being correct to begin with (and if you think there's an overload on quality, well...), and good products are timeless (I've got computers from the 80's and early 90's that I still do a lot of work on). While this is trivial, I think it once again shows how sadly out of touch JonKatz is with real facts. sigh
- Screwing around with Ars Magica
- Significantly improving and then dumping Talislanta (I grew up on Talislanta, how could they try to kill it!?)
- Buying, or rather nearly buying, a game from me very own brother -- and then when they stopped publishing RPG's, not telling him so that (if he didn't act himself) they would still keep rights to sell it (although they wouldn't sell it)
I think it's obvious that last one pissed me off more, but they managed to piss on a lot of games I liked and bought one of the games I most greatly despise. Oh well.Please. Aside from the fact that x86 is the ugliest architecture in any sort of wide use today*, and PPC is a very nice RISC one, the G4 is simply better. Apple is simply better at building good computers. And, of course, Mac OS X has a strong UNIX engine under the hood.
I can't imagine any reason except compatibility for sticking with x86, for those that haven't already left it. All you get is Windows NT and decades of baggage.
Well, it may once Carbon is done, but it wasn't released with Carbon. Subtle difference
Whoops, you are of course correct, I was just throwing data out quick before I left work :)
No. The difference between Mac OS X Server and Client is, essentially, what is bundled.
Last I heard, there was some question whether even a terminal application would ship with Client, much less apache or the NetInfo server stuff, and Server doesn't have Carbon (allowing Mac OS X Client to run prior Mac OS apps in a window).
There will be some differences, but it's a unified code base.
Scott, you're a mean one :)
Wanna try to buy one of these PPC boxes when they're out?
Well, I personally don't give a flying FUD about buzzwords. However, for a good while MacOS felt unusable to me, due to things like unprotected memory, cooperative multi-tasking, etc. Although MacOS has some great ideas all through it, it also has 80's corner-cutting that simply doesn't make sense any more (and now, 5-7 years after it's really really clear that it's outdated, it's getting fixed with Mac OS X), and that, further, undermine or backtrack against the advances they made.
Two steps forward, three steps back has been my experience with Mac OS prior to OS X; but it looks like Apple is finally just walking straight forward.
Also, as to their prices: IMO, the PowerBook is worth every penny, as is the PowerMac G3, and Mac OS X Server is a steal.
And besides, there's even a beta of a driver for the thing, if you happen to be running OS/2
This sort of thing just makes me feel better about trusting the big bad former monopolies with their specialties :)
:)
Just goes to show one reason why AT&T and IBM have stuck around this long after having their monopolies broken up -- they realized that they could no longer compete with the same old "kill the competition" practices, and went ahead and started providing service. Of course, I also like IBM and (what used to be Bell Labs) Lucent for their significant outlay for R&D. That sort of thing can't be over-estimated in the value it gives a company that can afford it.
What is the meaning of this ramble? Not much, except to maybe provide some food for thought towards what Microsoft might be like it gets its ass kicked by the DoJ
... Or the use of 'to' when 'too' would do better. Perhaps he's trying to save electrons, but it seems to me that his grammar and spelling are as good as CmdrTaco, but with a spell checker (perhaps he should try writing his articles in WordPerfect, and use Grammatik; I don't like its solutions, but it shows most of the grammatical errors in documents so the author can fix them himself).
:)
;), but Jon Katz I do.
In my oh-so humble opinion as a math (and previously computer science) major who has no editorial training past the requisite college classes, good content without form is as bad as good form without content. As someone intimately familiar with the ways different people think, I don't expect everyone to be precise grammaticians and spellers, but computers and friends can go a long way to shoring up our own weaknesses
I know a lot of people harp on this, but damnit he's a professional writer; why is his writing worse than mine?!?! I don't expect CmdrTaco to get his spelling and grammar right (since until recently this wasn't his job, and by now it's part of his style
As for what the words mean , I submit that it's a review of a somewhat interesting-sounding book. It sounds like I'd like the book, and the review seemed pretty good, giving me enough background on the book and information from the book that now I'd like to read it. What's more, I bet that it's a book that, if I had been aware of it previously and known nothing more than the subject matter, I'd still liked to have read it, so it's actually not an Op-Ed piece masquerading as a review (as some have perhaps argued).
No, it's different. That is, there are things that don't exist in the Linux development tree in the Red Hat kernel. After four years of using Slackware and two of using Debian, I can't figure out how to install a new kernel in Red Hat -- the standard process appears broken, and I'm not interested in working a way around it.
Besides, as far as binaries can tell, OpenBSD can be Linux. Or SCO, or any of a number of other operating systems.
eXceed provides virtual desktops, and it even (if I recall correctly) is kind enough to keep them all listed in the taskbar. It also , as a minor side benefit, provides a full X server for those times (rare though they may be ) that you want to run something on a Unix machine and have it display locally.
Then again, you can pay an arm and a leg for it.
Well, when you consider that originally, Slashdot was used as a way to avoid doing school work... it makes sense that more work went into quick posts and such at all times.
/. for a loooong time...
If you consider the volume of mail they get now (no stats but I can't imagine it being a small amount), it's a little bit harder to do constant updates.
Just some speculation from someone who's been around
To quote the topic, "It's funny. Laugh."
NIS, of course, the venerable; I remember reading that NetInfo was ported to Linux, but I haven't been able to find it; I think Kerberos counts here as well, sorta.
/etc/passwd).
Overall, they're nice for some things, but also sometimes a PITA. As a sysadmin, I like being able to add users manually using vi, and I've had some unpleasant experiences with NetInfo (and NIS is insecure compared to
Of course, I'm not too experienced with NetInfo, NIS, or Kerberos. So YMMV, but rest assured that the inconveniences of dealing with a particular database authentication system pay for themselves with the convenience of managing large sites with a database in general.
Sure, people will leave Linux because it's no longer 'elite.' But then, I'd rather have one clueless user just poking along getting things done that one hundred people using Linux because it makes them cool. So the people that leave Linux for the next big thing -- great, glad you were here. I'll probably follow the next big thing too, but I doubt I'll leave my roots of Solaris and Linux behind :)
Like I said, they're against certain business plans, not anti-business. If the business plan just happens to be the traditional way, too bad; but it's not targetting business , but certain business plans.
Learn to read, and maybe even to think.
As for the whole "open source" thing, I notice you didn't mention Bruce Perens -- regardless of whether he supports it now, he helped start it. Give credit where it is due
The difference is that, as someone else said, NASA would exist without Linux. Red Hat wouldn't.
I'm not going to bother with the same terminology (symbiote/symbiont), since I don't know the words to use for all parties in a symbiotic relationship (parasite/host is a better known relationship, sadly).
But, to explain, Red Hat lives because of Linux, and to large extent, Linux is what it is because of Red Hat (Gnome, big money contributors, jobs for so many kernel hackers, etc.). That, I think, is the relationship Bruce Perense means by calling Red Hat a symbiote (rather that term is accurate or not).
Walnut Creek, on the other hand, can probably be considered to be a benefactor to Linux by Bruce Perens' system, by (for instance) hosting the Slackware distribution, selling the official CD's, and mirroring so many Linux-focused or Linux-related FTP sites. They certainly do gain money from selling Slackware CD's, but that's not their business. If Patrick Volkerding stopped putting together Slackware tomorrow, Walnut Creek would go on. Ditto with NASA.
I count one spelling error, "earler," by Roblimo; and that one, you can miss by reading for content rather than grammar. Perhaps the questioners and Bruce Perens made spelling errors, but I doubt Roblimo typed that all out rather than using the [X,Windows] clipboard. And never mind that it is a rather long article to write error-free without editing or the use of spell-checker, which I doubt anyone uses for articles (although keeping errors to a minimum for readability is always appreciated).
When was Final Fantasy not mainstream? Most of the video gamers I know that played video games when the Nintendo was big remember FFI fondly. If not that, I seem to recall FFIV and FFVI being quite popular. And of course, William Gibson and J.R.R. Tolkien are considered 'must reads' or 'good authors' by most people who bother to read books. Looks like you're more interested in being part of a particular subculture than avoiding the mass market.
/. But then, these things happen; ideas and forums and objects rise and sink in popularity, and the good old days and the bad old days will never be repeated.
Besides, if'ns ya bother to ask me, the person you happen to be is defined not by how you are different from the crowd, or how you are the same. Such caricatures of personality are shallow and only relative.
To be honest, I feel similar twinges when I see all the people posting to
Sorry to get so off-topic.
"Technical Details"?
Hee hee haw haw ho ho ho hahahahahahaha
Ahem. Sorry. That whole deal with visors and what-not... or beliebability -- a mutant Aleut is the most dangerous man in the world? There were plenty of technical errors -- errors where Neal Stephenson bothered to go into exacting detail, only to get the details wrong. *sheesh*
Neal Stephenson spends a lot of time making an interesting world, it seems to me, but William Gibson seemed to have a better grasp of humanity; a better grasp of what's important to the story.
Although I liked both Snow Crash and Neuromancer.
I actually get better font sizes by giving control back to other web sites. Probably something to do with . Which is annoying, especially since for one of my jobs my monitor is constantly about 30 inches away from me (so I need larger fonts all the time). sigh