I agree on the 'lack of respect' thing. We have chosen not to have any children, but when we go to family events, the way the nephews and one niece in particular 'mouth off' to the adults is appalling. I would have NEVER spoken to an Uncle the way they do to me.
It's as if 'freedom' is the main imparative, and that kids need to be 'free' to do whatever they want.
Agreed, but speaking as somebody who remembers watching the Walt Disney show on television on Sunday evenings, the show where Walt himself always spoke at the beginning to introduce that night's programming, it's been a LONG time since the Disney name stood for quality.
Some of us leapfrogged over the whole last two decades of film and television (too busy doing interesting things with electronics and computers to sit and watch TeeVee I guess,) and really can't understand what could possibly be sacred, or even respected, about the Disney company at this point in history.
Marc Andreesen is sort of a Steve Jobs sort. He uses charisma to talk other people into doing the work, then tries to take all the credit.
Further, his pompous 'we will take over the desktop' grandstanding was the red cloth that riled up the Microsoft bull. The man is an egotistical ass. Unfortunately, egotistical asses like him are sometimes necessary to kickstart a project. But there's no need to distort history to give him more credit than warranted after-the-fact. The man is a dud, tech-wise. Perfect middle-manager material.
Further, Netscape's business plan involved introducing proprietary browser tags that were only fully supported by their server technology. They wanted to become another Microsoft.
The praise heaped on the Netscape corporation by some people who see all evil emanating only from Microsoft is disappointing. That people insist on distorting the real history to make Microsoft the ONLY villan is even more disappointing. There isn't even a shallow profit-driven business case for distorting the history anymore.
Don't forget that Mozilla also has a Composer component.
In a world, seemingly the one that the 'Firefox Community' wants, where content creation is restricted to vi hackers and people who buy FrontPage, the 'web browser' becomes a pretty-button-clicky consumer-only thing. Which is really disappointing.
It's a good thing with classic Netscape, and classic Mozilla, that a WYSIWYG HTML editor is installed by default. It's a simple step to point out to someone that a program they can use to easily CREATE web content is right down there on a tab they can click.
Yeah, yeah. There's still a composer you can use with Firefox, and it's simply a matter of downloading and installing it. That's a big leap from 'installed by default' however. Do telephones come by default with just an earpiece? Should any communications device be by default a one-way channel? Should a 'community' that hopefully believes in open two-way communication be promoting a 'browser-only' worldview?
Another reason it's a non-story is that this is basically just consumer veneer over top of an environmental chamber. And environmental chambers that can chill or heat by remote control are trivial and have been around for years. Where I work one of our bigger environmental chambers is big enough to put a full sized refrigerator in, and at your option chill it to -40 degrees C or 85 degrees C. So it can be a refrigerator big enough to put your oven in, or an oven big enough to put your refrigerator in. And you could operate said oven or refrigerator inside of it, too.
It's also big enough to flash freeze an entire meeting room full of middle managers, but we try not to think about things like that at work...
Most people on Slashdot are probably IT or related, right?
Depends on how you use the terminology. I consider 'IT' to be the data janitors. People who are product developers and engineers who write software are not 'IT' anymore than the mechanical engineers who design a carpet sweeper are janitors. But people who
I bristle when an HR type refers to me as being an 'IT' type person.
It does support the legacy sofware in a sort of emulation mode, but slower than any comparable machine from AMD.
People said the same thing about the Pentium Pro. It didn't run 16 bit software as fast as a regular Pentium.
Nobody cared, anything important was updated to be native 32 bits.
Really, all AMD has going for it in many regards is 'legacy.' It used to be that people here on Slashdot respected legacy, but didn't see legacy compatability as the end-all issue.
Or, it could be making them nervous. Really, if all AMD can do is cling to something (the x86 'clone' architecture) then they should be getting nervous. The industry needs a clean break from x86. It has for years.
The opinions of a bunch of people who buy bare motherboards and consider themselves 'hardware wizards' because they know how to spin a phillips screwdriver is irrelevant.
There is always a performance cost in running 32 bit software on a 64 bit platform. No amount of handwaving will make that not the case. Saying 'it is faster than running the 32 bit software on 32 bit hardware' is ridiculous. You're comparing 'the new stuff' to 'old stuff.' And you sound more like someone from marketing than anything else.
The point may be, that a lot of children watched it live.
The rest of us were at work. I think in my case that was when we were working in what got called 'siberia' at that point in time: a small office suite away from the rest of the company where those of us developing actual product (electronic medical devices) would be free of the 'suits' and other distractions.
No, I wasn't a damn kid at the time. Seems like a lot of people in this disucssion were. We spent more time understanding what a massive screwup it was, and feeling embarassed (and saddened) for the incompetents at NASA.
Alas, Linux (and it's collection of cool features like boot splash screens, polished user interfaces and installers, good binary OpenGL video drivers, great hardware detection utilities, commercial support on the server side, native Sun Java support, etc.) enjoys ubiquity while well architected systems like NetBSD languish in relative obscurity.
NetBSD isn't 'languishing in obscurity.' If you shoveled in all that croft and crud on top of NetBSD, it would be just as ugly and baroque as an OS ('Distro') based on the Linux kernel is.
NetBSD just is, and for the people who use it, that's what they want it to be. You head down a path to convergence when you run a BSD. Everything stays consistent over the long term, so instead of continually re-learning the latest python-based gui-goop config utility, you gradually learn what each and every line in the important files in/etc is for.
Do they even bother to produce Manpages for Linux anymore, or do people just follow the 'recipies' in HOWTO documents and/or click at pretty buttons?
We owe much of that situation to zombies, and we all pay the price for the cheapness, stupidity, and laziness of the leechers who want to use the Internet, but don't want to put forth any effort to help it succeed.
Wow. So you're saying that anybody who doesn't happily flash plastic every few years at a superstore to get the latest chrome and croft hardware is 'lazy and stupid?'
Does your income depend on the suckers in line at Best Buy or something???
Slashdot Mirror
Plough in massive amounts of cash and resources.
Ummm, maybe twenty billion dollars or so. Hmmm...
Don't bring up the topic of twenty billion dollars, however.
and my favorite Burroughs chestnut: "Language is a virus from outer space."
I agree on the 'lack of respect' thing. We have chosen not to have any children, but when we go to family events, the way the nephews and one niece in particular 'mouth off' to the adults is appalling. I would have NEVER spoken to an Uncle the way they do to me.
It's as if 'freedom' is the main imparative, and that kids need to be 'free' to do whatever they want.
Read Brunner's _The Shockwave Rider_ next. It's the original archetypical cyber/hacker novel.
Wonderful. Is the cargo bay big enough, though?
The Disney name should stand for quality.
Agreed, but speaking as somebody who remembers watching the Walt Disney show on television on Sunday evenings, the show where Walt himself always spoke at the beginning to introduce that night's programming, it's been a LONG time since the Disney name stood for quality.
Some of us leapfrogged over the whole last two decades of film and television (too busy doing interesting things with electronics and computers to sit and watch TeeVee I guess,) and really can't understand what could possibly be sacred, or even respected, about the Disney company at this point in history.
They seem to be doing just fine managing their own assets and continued box office success stories.
Well, good enough to be bought out by Disney, anyway. For better or for worse (or is that _and_ instead of _or_?)
Marc Andreesen is sort of a Steve Jobs sort. He uses charisma to talk other people into doing the work, then tries to take all the credit.
Further, his pompous 'we will take over the desktop' grandstanding was the red cloth that riled up the Microsoft bull. The man is an egotistical ass. Unfortunately, egotistical asses like him are sometimes necessary to kickstart a project. But there's no need to distort history to give him more credit than warranted after-the-fact. The man is a dud, tech-wise. Perfect middle-manager material.
Yes. Microsoft started from the same codebase as Netscape.
They, however, paid for it, instead of just stealing the developer team, like Netscape.
Further, Netscape's business plan involved introducing proprietary browser tags that were only fully supported by their server technology. They wanted to become another Microsoft.
The praise heaped on the Netscape corporation by some people who see all evil emanating only from Microsoft is disappointing. That people insist on distorting the real history to make Microsoft the ONLY villan is even more disappointing. There isn't even a shallow profit-driven business case for distorting the history anymore.
Don't forget that Mozilla also has a Composer component.
In a world, seemingly the one that the 'Firefox Community' wants, where content creation is restricted to vi hackers and people who buy FrontPage, the 'web browser' becomes a pretty-button-clicky consumer-only thing. Which is really disappointing.
It's a good thing with classic Netscape, and classic Mozilla, that a WYSIWYG HTML editor is installed by default. It's a simple step to point out to someone that a program they can use to easily CREATE web content is right down there on a tab they can click.
Yeah, yeah. There's still a composer you can use with Firefox, and it's simply a matter of downloading and installing it. That's a big leap from 'installed by default' however. Do telephones come by default with just an earpiece? Should any communications device be by default a one-way channel? Should a 'community' that hopefully believes in open two-way communication be promoting a 'browser-only' worldview?
Another reason it's a non-story is that this is basically just consumer veneer over top of an environmental chamber. And environmental chambers that can chill or heat by remote control are trivial and have been around for years. Where I work one of our bigger environmental chambers is big enough to put a full sized refrigerator in, and at your option chill it to -40 degrees C or 85 degrees C. So it can be a refrigerator big enough to put your oven in, or an oven big enough to put your refrigerator in. And you could operate said oven or refrigerator inside of it, too.
It's also big enough to flash freeze an entire meeting room full of middle managers, but we try not to think about things like that at work...
Most people on Slashdot are probably IT or related, right?
Depends on how you use the terminology. I consider 'IT' to be the data janitors. People who are product developers and engineers who write software are not 'IT' anymore than the mechanical engineers who design a carpet sweeper are janitors. But people who
I bristle when an HR type refers to me as being an 'IT' type person.
It does support the legacy sofware in a sort of emulation mode, but slower than any comparable machine from AMD.
People said the same thing about the Pentium Pro. It didn't run 16 bit software as fast as a regular Pentium.
Nobody cared, anything important was updated to be native 32 bits.
Really, all AMD has going for it in many regards is 'legacy.' It used to be that people here on Slashdot respected legacy, but didn't see legacy compatability as the end-all issue.
Sounds like a new soft drink for snowboarders.
Or, it could be making them nervous. Really, if all AMD can do is cling to something (the x86 'clone' architecture) then they should be getting nervous. The industry needs a clean break from x86. It has for years.
The opinions of a bunch of people who buy bare motherboards and consider themselves 'hardware wizards' because they know how to spin a phillips screwdriver is irrelevant.
PowerPC archietecture is alive and well in true big iron. It will even find its way into IBM mainframe technology.
I think you mean the POWER architecture. 'Power Pee Cee' is Apple marketing jargon.
There is always a performance cost in running 32 bit software on a 64 bit platform. No amount of handwaving will make that not the case. Saying 'it is faster than running the 32 bit software on 32 bit hardware' is ridiculous. You're comparing 'the new stuff' to 'old stuff.' And you sound more like someone from marketing than anything else.
The point may be, that a lot of children watched it live.
The rest of us were at work. I think in my case that was when we were working in what got called 'siberia' at that point in time: a small office suite away from the rest of the company where those of us developing actual product (electronic medical devices) would be free of the 'suits' and other distractions.
No, I wasn't a damn kid at the time. Seems like a lot of people in this disucssion were. We spent more time understanding what a massive screwup it was, and feeling embarassed (and saddened) for the incompetents at NASA.
Alas, Linux (and it's collection of cool features like boot splash screens, polished user interfaces and installers, good binary OpenGL video drivers, great hardware detection utilities, commercial support on the server side, native Sun Java support, etc.) enjoys ubiquity while well architected systems like NetBSD languish in relative obscurity.
/etc is for.
NetBSD isn't 'languishing in obscurity.' If you shoveled in all that croft and crud on top of NetBSD, it would be just as ugly and baroque as an OS ('Distro') based on the Linux kernel is.
NetBSD just is, and for the people who use it, that's what they want it to be. You head down a path to convergence when you run a BSD. Everything stays consistent over the long term, so instead of continually re-learning the latest python-based gui-goop config utility, you gradually learn what each and every line in the important files in
Do they even bother to produce Manpages for Linux anymore, or do people just follow the 'recipies' in HOWTO documents and/or click at pretty buttons?
Any Mac that will run OS X 10.2 is a perfect candidate for Darwin. I'd run NetBSD on it, of course, but Darwin will run fine, too.
Wow. So you're saying that anybody who doesn't happily flash plastic every few years at a superstore to get the latest chrome and croft hardware is 'lazy and stupid?'
Does your income depend on the suckers in line at Best Buy or something???
So design your pages using the existing defacto HTML standard. It's easy, and you can even do it using a plaintext editor like vi.
Or does that 'take all the fun out of it' for you? If so, is the 'fun' a bunch of bells and whistles you can't manage to do without?
Television, of course, is heading towards digital-only, and good riddance.
Good riddance to television? Because, if so, I heartily agree.