To my knowledge, NetZero isn't providing wireless network services. I am not in SF, so I don't have any firsthand knowledge, though.
But I don't think there's anything preventing the government from working with private companies in setting up these wireless networks. Whether the government provides subsidies to the providers, or whether the government turns management of the networks totally over to the private sector, there isn't really anything that prevents this from being a profitable, private enterprise.
We aren't talking about communism here. Government policies do not necessarily have to restrict private enterprise.
But you're looking at some serious changes to your wireless hub. If you are asking, I doubt you'd be able to do it.
That's not meant as a slight, but just the truth. It's a very difficult thing to set this up. It requires more than just running some daemon. It also requires authenticated sessions on the servers. If you aren't Ericsson, you aren't getting into the network.
That isn't to say that you couldn't implement this yourself. Skype, for example, doesn't run across the traditional long distance network, but it provides long distance phone service over the Internet. If you are willing to dive headlong into a long and arduous development plan, sure, you could implement this.
Don't hold it against me that I'm not holding my breath for this, though.
Whether or not a politician's actions are based on his desire to get re-elected, I think it is imperative that we support initiatives that are what we would like. In the long run, giving credit for a certain thing to a politician is just part of how history works.
It's not the engineers who get the credit for bringing forth new technologies, it's the managers who do. So too do the politicians get credit for the work of their underlings. The main point is that the benefits are realized, not that someone who had a leadership role gets all the credit.
So yeah, let's get San Francisco unwired up (is that the right way to say it?)! If it works there, at a reasonable cost, maybe we can get initiatives moving in other big cities. The internet is one of those utilities that ought to be available to anyone looking for it. Putting the government in charge of distribution may not be the best choice, but it is a quick fix until private enterprise can compete.
Doesn't this depend on the problem domain, though? Sure, Windows and MacOS are easier to use for everyday desktop usage, but when it comes to running a backbone of servers, is the ease of use that Windows gives you really making it simpler to manage the network? I'm going to say (from my non-sysadmin perspective) that it would be easier to lock down a Unix network than to be stuck constantly chasing the latest service pack patches from Microsoft.
I will be the first to admit that I run Windows almost exclusively, but I am willing to accept that running a network on Linux/Unix is easier and safer than running it on a Windows-based server network. Does anyone have any stories either in support or in contrast to that opinion?
I don't doubt the ability of Linux to be everything a company needs to run their software. After all, it is based on Unix, which was designed for ease of use, and has been standardized upon across many industries. Linux is absolutely a useful operating system, a great, working cog in the networks across the world.
But support is one of those things that ought not be something that ought to be sought "hard". Support should be easily purchased from service companies dedicated to the task. Support should be available from any number of certified engineers who have made it a priority to understand the system. Support should not be intricately tied to Google (though it certainly has its place there), but rather it should be supported by professionals.
And really, in all but the most remote locations, it is. Linux isn't difficult to put into place because support is difficult to find. On the contrary, it is easy to find companies willing to provide support. The drawback is that typically these services come at a price higher than similar service contracts with Microsoft support professionals.
Whether or not these dilute the current holdings, the company has a very nice financial profile. It will be interesting to see if they can keep profits up while they start to expand.
Case in point, I'm watching real police arresting real people who are protesting the real pullout of the Israelis from the Gaza Strip. Nowhere online will you find anyone so attached to items, parcels of land, or characters that they are willing to risk their real lives to protect them.
It is foolish to think that anything online is in any way reflective of real life. There is an offensive, yet quite insightful comic strip which shows a normal guy+anonymity+audience= a troll. Put someone in a video game where there is no real punishment for actions which would get them in trouble in real life, and you'll end up with a bunch of people willing to kill, rob, join gangs, and a host of other activities that are frowned on in real life. It doesn't help that the games themselves promote this sort of activity.
One of the obvious concepts that arises from that view is that online "crime" ought not be policed with real life authorities. This arrest is wrong, and sets a bad precedent. The game companies themselves ought to be up in arms against this action. It takes away their authority to enforce in-game rules, and gives excessive power to the police.
Doesn't it all go hand in hand, though? If power, water, and phone service are uninterruptible, even if there were a significant disaster, those things would still function as expected. If those things are made impervious, or at the least significantly resistant to damage, won't the internet service riding on top of that also going to reap the benefits of that?
Isn't there something wrong when a tree branch falling down in a rain storm can knock out your power? I think that this type of thing ought to be remedied as much as possible. But I'm not an electrical engineer, nor a civil engineer, so my perspective is only as a concerned user of those services.
It's an interesting technology, for sure. According to the article, the signals are sent over a fiber optic network, whereas I would have expected that the signals would piggyback on the main electrical signal. If this is true, I'm not sure how it is different from the fiber optic lines available from the phone company. Maybe the power company has more lines available?
But I think that the most significant hurdle to all of these broadband technologies is keeping the network running even in a disaster like an earthquake or hurricane. Power lines fall down, are torn off the poles by falling trees, and generally succumb to events that they should not encounter everyday. In a lot of places, power lines are run underground, which gives them added protection from above-ground disasters.
Phone lines, too, are affected by such disasters, though in many places the lines are laid under the earth. However, in a large earthquake like is expected in the Bay Area, shifting land could easily sever those lines, stranding thousands of people.
If my satellite television is any indication, satellite internet is at the mercy of storm clouds. A heavily-clouded storm will typically knock out my satellite reception for a while.
Hopefully we can come up with some way to provide uninterruptible broadband service. Better yet, several ways of providing such a service. I think we are only scratching the surface as to getting ubiquitous broadband service to the entire country.
Under the thumbnail picture there is an arrow pointing at the picture encouraging the reader to enlarge the photo. Maybe they ought to point an arrow back at the inventors and tell them to reduce the size of the device. It is enormous compared to any typical wearable wristwatch.
For many years there have been watches that will track heartbeat. Runners and bicyclists have, for a long time, used these to their training advantage by tracking their physical exertion with these light, unobtrusive wristwatches. Granted, it didn't send realtime data to a server which was monitored by doctors, but it had its uses.
I think that increasing the ability of doctors to have access to such vital information is a huge step forward if it means reducing the number of cumbersome machines surrounding the patient in the hospital. So, it would great to have patients fitted with these in the waiting room so that their metabolic status can be monitored over the course of several minutes rather than just the few seconds before the doctor sees them.
Reduce the size and improve the styling, and you could have everyone who was concerned about their health wearing these. I'd do it, if I was so concerned.
The first and most obvious question is how Google would manage to support a huge wireless network without charging for service. Perhaps they'd sell ad space and coffee near the hubs?
The second question I had was how much damage such a network would do to existing local internet companies. If Google moves in and essentially gives their product away, how can the current ISPs cope?
As a user, I'd be glad to have reliable, free wireless service available. A country where the service was ubiquitous, much like the electrical system and water system, would be a dream (probably the network administrator's worst nightmare, though).
I have a big problem with "protest form letters". On the surface it seems like a pretty good idea. Get a lot of people mobilized using an easy to duplicate form and get your collective voice heard by those in power. However, the reality is more likely to favor individually written letters that express original sentiment, or at the very least an original statement of a widely-held sentiment.
Yes, it's bad that the copyright office wants to make the website IE-only. But look at their reasons, try to address their reasons without sounding condescending and elitist or like a victim of some huge crime. Better yet, get involved in your local politics and make a real difference in your government.
There are many ways to make political hay. Sending form letters to your representatives is, in my opinion, one of the least productive methods of making your voice heard.
A lot of these devices already run Linux or sometimes BSD as it allows for straightforward debugging and troubleshooting, not to mention easy programming.
I was wondering what OS it currently runs. What if it already runs Linux?
First, I'd rather Microsoft come out on top than spammers.
But I am interested and baffled by the concept of "punitive damages" and how they are paid to the litigating party rather than to the general tax revenue base. If a company or person is to be punished for doing something wrong, shouldn't the government be the one to mete out that punishment? Why should a private citizen or company be allowed to reap the windfall of punitive damages? I think the justice system turns the court into a lottery by allowing such huge awards to be paid to offended parties.
In a sense, Microsoft is doing what I think ought to be done with punitive damages. That is, 1) to pay the winner's court expenses, and 2) to have the government receive the punishment money. Not that I don't think that Microsoft isn't doing this out of self-serving long term planning, but I do agree with the action (perhaps not their guiding principle).
I would like to see more spammers put out of business. However, as long as there are people willing to buy their products, spammers will be out there trying to bilk them.
Sluggishness is not a speed issue, it's a response time issue.
The specific thing I can point to is how it takes a moment before the mouse pointer starts reacting to the mouse movement interrupt. Also, keystrokes are slow within the GUI.
On the CLI, there is no significant delay, but within the GUI (KDE or Gnome) there is a split second delay before things start reacting to user input. Contrast that with either Windows or MacOS where the response time to device events is unnoticeable.
It's not a matter of running things faster, which I'm sure BSD is able to do. It's a matter of handling interrupts quickly enough that there is no perceived sluggishness.
You can blame the window manager for FreeBSD all you want, but if you consider the GUI to be part of a "Desktop OS", then this is an issue that should be dealt with.
I'm not saying that we don't need more storage. I'm saying that it is not a revolutionary step in technology to have massive amounts of storage.
Lawyers have such a tool. Doctors have such a tool. These tools already exist. Yes, they will expand as information and knowledge grows.
But the question is not whether information will accumulate. It is whether we will have the tools to gather from that data the information that is relevant to us personally.
Yes, in a sense you can have access to any movie or TV episode you want to watch. Currently that information is out on the Internet. If your device is able to access that, download it, and decompress it in a reasonable manner, you'd be able to watch it anywhere you went. The storage medium is just not local to your device.
So what happens when it is? Well, things will be more convenient, for one. But fundamentally the things that you will do with that data is the same as what you do with it now.
But also consider this, information is always growing. So in order to have your stored data be up to date, it would need a constant uplink to some central database server to handle every change in information that happens every minute of every day. Why not just revert (Internet style) to data on demand? With sufficient bandwidth, it would be essentially the same as unlimited storage.
He likens terabyte storage to the numerous technological revolutions of the past. His opinion is that at some point storage will become so plentiful in personal devices that the concept of "having it all" will be a reality. His first example is loading all recorded media onto a personal device. His second is storing photo-realistic images in car navigation systems. This is his revolution?
Having infinite storage is interesting, but if you consider the Internet to be the same type of thing, there are already limitations. First, you need to realize that 90% of everything is garbage. The other 10% may be useful, but to whom? The tiny fraction of a percent of all information that may be useful to you personally needs to be able to find its way to you. So we have tools like search engines to help us. They are slowly getting better, but the tide of information only comes in, so though the engines are getting better, the quality of results is increasingly getting worse.
What would I do with all recorded music? I couldn't possibly listen to it all in my lifetime. I'd need some sort of intelligent agent to find things that I'd like and play those so that I don't waste time listening to things I'm not interested in.
This isn't some future revolution. It's reality now, and for the most part it works okay.
What will we do with infinite storage? Probably just hoard more data, I think. There's only a small amount of data that is actually usable to any one person, expanding storage capacity isn't going to change that.
quote We give you KDE and you give us this hogwash about our installer./quote
I thought I also gave some other opinions besides that.
But if this is "Desktop BSD", why would you want your users to see the bootloader? Jump as quickly as possible to the GUI and let your users have at it. When I boot my WinXP box I don't see a long string of boot messages, I see a splash screen. Yes, I can get Windows to boot to the Safe Mode selection screen, and if I was so inclined I could even have the bootloader come up with multiple OS boot options. But I don't need that because I am running as a single user on this Desktop Machine.
Let me figure out what I want to do. Just dump me to the OS in a usable state and I can figure out what to do from there.
It's great how the fancy graphical installation screen crashes back to an ugly terminal font in Screen10. It kind of throws off the whole good vibe that I'd been getting during the previous steps. Also, why is there a Next button active when the installation script obviously wants me to press Reboot? Strange, to say the least.
But when it comes down to it, installation is only the gateway to the system. It isn't the system itself. MacOS could have the world's worst installation system, but the OS itself runs so nicely that people just love to be running it.
There should be no "Configure my Installation" step. It should choose a default "best-fit" confiuration based on the detected hardware (mostly screen resolution) and leave any further customization to the user to do later. It is more important to have the system up and running than to have it customized just so.
And in the end, you're still dealing with BSD, which is great if you're running a server, but sluggish (response times to system interrupts is slow, compared to Windows and MacOS) when running in a user-centric scenario.
I installed FreeBSD previously and didn't have any trouble there. The questions were just as straightforward as this installer and within an hour I had a full BSD installation with graphical interface to boot. It wasn't "ready for the desktop" in any sense of the term, though, unfortunately.
Heh. I was actually more interested in it because of the possible resemblance of tiny cells connected via electrical pathways and the human nervous system which is made up of tiny cells connected via electrical and chemical pathways. Plants also seem to exhibit emergent behavior, such as following the path of the sun or blooming at certain times of the day.
Little patterns beget bigger patterns beget complex patterns.
I'll have to be on the lookout for those two episodes. I haven't seen the show in a long time. Probably on UPN?
Slashdot Mirror
To my knowledge, NetZero isn't providing wireless network services. I am not in SF, so I don't have any firsthand knowledge, though.
But I don't think there's anything preventing the government from working with private companies in setting up these wireless networks. Whether the government provides subsidies to the providers, or whether the government turns management of the networks totally over to the private sector, there isn't really anything that prevents this from being a profitable, private enterprise.
We aren't talking about communism here. Government policies do not necessarily have to restrict private enterprise.
But you're looking at some serious changes to your wireless hub. If you are asking, I doubt you'd be able to do it.
That's not meant as a slight, but just the truth. It's a very difficult thing to set this up. It requires more than just running some daemon. It also requires authenticated sessions on the servers. If you aren't Ericsson, you aren't getting into the network.
That isn't to say that you couldn't implement this yourself. Skype, for example, doesn't run across the traditional long distance network, but it provides long distance phone service over the Internet. If you are willing to dive headlong into a long and arduous development plan, sure, you could implement this.
Don't hold it against me that I'm not holding my breath for this, though.
Whether or not a politician's actions are based on his desire to get re-elected, I think it is imperative that we support initiatives that are what we would like. In the long run, giving credit for a certain thing to a politician is just part of how history works.
It's not the engineers who get the credit for bringing forth new technologies, it's the managers who do. So too do the politicians get credit for the work of their underlings. The main point is that the benefits are realized, not that someone who had a leadership role gets all the credit.
So yeah, let's get San Francisco unwired up (is that the right way to say it?)! If it works there, at a reasonable cost, maybe we can get initiatives moving in other big cities. The internet is one of those utilities that ought to be available to anyone looking for it. Putting the government in charge of distribution may not be the best choice, but it is a quick fix until private enterprise can compete.
Doesn't this depend on the problem domain, though? Sure, Windows and MacOS are easier to use for everyday desktop usage, but when it comes to running a backbone of servers, is the ease of use that Windows gives you really making it simpler to manage the network? I'm going to say (from my non-sysadmin perspective) that it would be easier to lock down a Unix network than to be stuck constantly chasing the latest service pack patches from Microsoft.
I will be the first to admit that I run Windows almost exclusively, but I am willing to accept that running a network on Linux/Unix is easier and safer than running it on a Windows-based server network. Does anyone have any stories either in support or in contrast to that opinion?
I don't doubt the ability of Linux to be everything a company needs to run their software. After all, it is based on Unix, which was designed for ease of use, and has been standardized upon across many industries. Linux is absolutely a useful operating system, a great, working cog in the networks across the world.
But support is one of those things that ought not be something that ought to be sought "hard". Support should be easily purchased from service companies dedicated to the task. Support should be available from any number of certified engineers who have made it a priority to understand the system. Support should not be intricately tied to Google (though it certainly has its place there), but rather it should be supported by professionals.
And really, in all but the most remote locations, it is. Linux isn't difficult to put into place because support is difficult to find. On the contrary, it is easy to find companies willing to provide support. The drawback is that typically these services come at a price higher than similar service contracts with Microsoft support professionals.
Then again, you get what you pay for.
Rhoda Island
Google is profitable. Can they remain so?
Whether or not these dilute the current holdings, the company has a very nice financial profile. It will be interesting to see if they can keep profits up while they start to expand.
Case in point, I'm watching real police arresting real people who are protesting the real pullout of the Israelis from the Gaza Strip. Nowhere online will you find anyone so attached to items, parcels of land, or characters that they are willing to risk their real lives to protect them.
It is foolish to think that anything online is in any way reflective of real life. There is an offensive, yet quite insightful comic strip which shows a normal guy+anonymity+audience= a troll. Put someone in a video game where there is no real punishment for actions which would get them in trouble in real life, and you'll end up with a bunch of people willing to kill, rob, join gangs, and a host of other activities that are frowned on in real life. It doesn't help that the games themselves promote this sort of activity.
One of the obvious concepts that arises from that view is that online "crime" ought not be policed with real life authorities. This arrest is wrong, and sets a bad precedent. The game companies themselves ought to be up in arms against this action. It takes away their authority to enforce in-game rules, and gives excessive power to the police.
Doesn't it all go hand in hand, though? If power, water, and phone service are uninterruptible, even if there were a significant disaster, those things would still function as expected. If those things are made impervious, or at the least significantly resistant to damage, won't the internet service riding on top of that also going to reap the benefits of that?
Isn't there something wrong when a tree branch falling down in a rain storm can knock out your power? I think that this type of thing ought to be remedied as much as possible. But I'm not an electrical engineer, nor a civil engineer, so my perspective is only as a concerned user of those services.
It's an interesting technology, for sure. According to the article, the signals are sent over a fiber optic network, whereas I would have expected that the signals would piggyback on the main electrical signal. If this is true, I'm not sure how it is different from the fiber optic lines available from the phone company. Maybe the power company has more lines available?
But I think that the most significant hurdle to all of these broadband technologies is keeping the network running even in a disaster like an earthquake or hurricane. Power lines fall down, are torn off the poles by falling trees, and generally succumb to events that they should not encounter everyday. In a lot of places, power lines are run underground, which gives them added protection from above-ground disasters.
Phone lines, too, are affected by such disasters, though in many places the lines are laid under the earth. However, in a large earthquake like is expected in the Bay Area, shifting land could easily sever those lines, stranding thousands of people.
If my satellite television is any indication, satellite internet is at the mercy of storm clouds. A heavily-clouded storm will typically knock out my satellite reception for a while.
Hopefully we can come up with some way to provide uninterruptible broadband service. Better yet, several ways of providing such a service. I think we are only scratching the surface as to getting ubiquitous broadband service to the entire country.
Under the thumbnail picture there is an arrow pointing at the picture encouraging the reader to enlarge the photo. Maybe they ought to point an arrow back at the inventors and tell them to reduce the size of the device. It is enormous compared to any typical wearable wristwatch.
For many years there have been watches that will track heartbeat. Runners and bicyclists have, for a long time, used these to their training advantage by tracking their physical exertion with these light, unobtrusive wristwatches. Granted, it didn't send realtime data to a server which was monitored by doctors, but it had its uses.
I think that increasing the ability of doctors to have access to such vital information is a huge step forward if it means reducing the number of cumbersome machines surrounding the patient in the hospital. So, it would great to have patients fitted with these in the waiting room so that their metabolic status can be monitored over the course of several minutes rather than just the few seconds before the doctor sees them.
Reduce the size and improve the styling, and you could have everyone who was concerned about their health wearing these. I'd do it, if I was so concerned.
How many people reading this are planning on buying an XBox 360? What sold you on it?
I am genuinely curious as to the anticipation level here. The last game that I anticipated was Master of Orion 2, but that was years and years ago.
The first and most obvious question is how Google would manage to support a huge wireless network without charging for service. Perhaps they'd sell ad space and coffee near the hubs?
The second question I had was how much damage such a network would do to existing local internet companies. If Google moves in and essentially gives their product away, how can the current ISPs cope?
As a user, I'd be glad to have reliable, free wireless service available. A country where the service was ubiquitous, much like the electrical system and water system, would be a dream (probably the network administrator's worst nightmare, though).
I have a big problem with "protest form letters". On the surface it seems like a pretty good idea. Get a lot of people mobilized using an easy to duplicate form and get your collective voice heard by those in power. However, the reality is more likely to favor individually written letters that express original sentiment, or at the very least an original statement of a widely-held sentiment.
Yes, it's bad that the copyright office wants to make the website IE-only. But look at their reasons, try to address their reasons without sounding condescending and elitist or like a victim of some huge crime. Better yet, get involved in your local politics and make a real difference in your government.
There are many ways to make political hay. Sending form letters to your representatives is, in my opinion, one of the least productive methods of making your voice heard.
A lot of these devices already run Linux or sometimes BSD as it allows for straightforward debugging and troubleshooting, not to mention easy programming.
I was wondering what OS it currently runs. What if it already runs Linux?
First, I'd rather Microsoft come out on top than spammers.
But I am interested and baffled by the concept of "punitive damages" and how they are paid to the litigating party rather than to the general tax revenue base. If a company or person is to be punished for doing something wrong, shouldn't the government be the one to mete out that punishment? Why should a private citizen or company be allowed to reap the windfall of punitive damages? I think the justice system turns the court into a lottery by allowing such huge awards to be paid to offended parties.
In a sense, Microsoft is doing what I think ought to be done with punitive damages. That is, 1) to pay the winner's court expenses, and 2) to have the government receive the punishment money. Not that I don't think that Microsoft isn't doing this out of self-serving long term planning, but I do agree with the action (perhaps not their guiding principle).
I would like to see more spammers put out of business. However, as long as there are people willing to buy their products, spammers will be out there trying to bilk them.
Bingo! It's not any different. So what's the revolution?
It's a USB mouse routed through a USB keyboard, if that makes any difference. I thought it might be visual effects, so I removed any that were set.
Nothing helped. So I went back to Windows, old reliable, so to speak.
Sluggishness is not a speed issue, it's a response time issue.
The specific thing I can point to is how it takes a moment before the mouse pointer starts reacting to the mouse movement interrupt. Also, keystrokes are slow within the GUI.
On the CLI, there is no significant delay, but within the GUI (KDE or Gnome) there is a split second delay before things start reacting to user input. Contrast that with either Windows or MacOS where the response time to device events is unnoticeable.
It's not a matter of running things faster, which I'm sure BSD is able to do. It's a matter of handling interrupts quickly enough that there is no perceived sluggishness.
You can blame the window manager for FreeBSD all you want, but if you consider the GUI to be part of a "Desktop OS", then this is an issue that should be dealt with.
A data scrape of an info amalgamation. Mmm.. sounds like it should be treated with some Bactine and a bandage.
This seemed like an easy and logical step for Google News. They've already got something similar for their blogspot service.
Check out their in-string wildcard searches, though. Cool!
I'm not saying that we don't need more storage. I'm saying that it is not a revolutionary step in technology to have massive amounts of storage.
Lawyers have such a tool. Doctors have such a tool. These tools already exist. Yes, they will expand as information and knowledge grows.
But the question is not whether information will accumulate. It is whether we will have the tools to gather from that data the information that is relevant to us personally.
Yes, in a sense you can have access to any movie or TV episode you want to watch. Currently that information is out on the Internet. If your device is able to access that, download it, and decompress it in a reasonable manner, you'd be able to watch it anywhere you went. The storage medium is just not local to your device.
So what happens when it is? Well, things will be more convenient, for one. But fundamentally the things that you will do with that data is the same as what you do with it now.
But also consider this, information is always growing. So in order to have your stored data be up to date, it would need a constant uplink to some central database server to handle every change in information that happens every minute of every day. Why not just revert (Internet style) to data on demand? With sufficient bandwidth, it would be essentially the same as unlimited storage.
He likens terabyte storage to the numerous technological revolutions of the past. His opinion is that at some point storage will become so plentiful in personal devices that the concept of "having it all" will be a reality. His first example is loading all recorded media onto a personal device. His second is storing photo-realistic images in car navigation systems. This is his revolution?
Having infinite storage is interesting, but if you consider the Internet to be the same type of thing, there are already limitations. First, you need to realize that 90% of everything is garbage. The other 10% may be useful, but to whom? The tiny fraction of a percent of all information that may be useful to you personally needs to be able to find its way to you. So we have tools like search engines to help us. They are slowly getting better, but the tide of information only comes in, so though the engines are getting better, the quality of results is increasingly getting worse.
What would I do with all recorded music? I couldn't possibly listen to it all in my lifetime. I'd need some sort of intelligent agent to find things that I'd like and play those so that I don't waste time listening to things I'm not interested in.
This isn't some future revolution. It's reality now, and for the most part it works okay.
What will we do with infinite storage? Probably just hoard more data, I think. There's only a small amount of data that is actually usable to any one person, expanding storage capacity isn't going to change that.
quote /quote
We give you KDE and you give us this hogwash about our installer.
I thought I also gave some other opinions besides that.
But if this is "Desktop BSD", why would you want your users to see the bootloader? Jump as quickly as possible to the GUI and let your users have at it. When I boot my WinXP box I don't see a long string of boot messages, I see a splash screen. Yes, I can get Windows to boot to the Safe Mode selection screen, and if I was so inclined I could even have the bootloader come up with multiple OS boot options. But I don't need that because I am running as a single user on this Desktop Machine.
Let me figure out what I want to do. Just dump me to the OS in a usable state and I can figure out what to do from there.
It's great how the fancy graphical installation screen crashes back to an ugly terminal font in Screen10. It kind of throws off the whole good vibe that I'd been getting during the previous steps. Also, why is there a Next button active when the installation script obviously wants me to press Reboot? Strange, to say the least.
But when it comes down to it, installation is only the gateway to the system. It isn't the system itself. MacOS could have the world's worst installation system, but the OS itself runs so nicely that people just love to be running it.
There should be no "Configure my Installation" step. It should choose a default "best-fit" confiuration based on the detected hardware (mostly screen resolution) and leave any further customization to the user to do later. It is more important to have the system up and running than to have it customized just so.
And in the end, you're still dealing with BSD, which is great if you're running a server, but sluggish (response times to system interrupts is slow, compared to Windows and MacOS) when running in a user-centric scenario.
I installed FreeBSD previously and didn't have any trouble there. The questions were just as straightforward as this installer and within an hour I had a full BSD installation with graphical interface to boot. It wasn't "ready for the desktop" in any sense of the term, though, unfortunately.
Heh. I was actually more interested in it because of the possible resemblance of tiny cells connected via electrical pathways and the human nervous system which is made up of tiny cells connected via electrical and chemical pathways. Plants also seem to exhibit emergent behavior, such as following the path of the sun or blooming at certain times of the day.
Little patterns beget bigger patterns beget complex patterns.
I'll have to be on the lookout for those two episodes. I haven't seen the show in a long time. Probably on UPN?