This is really kinda dumb, but I was looking for some of that awesome slashdot insight.
Mail apps that are heavily HTML-ified (like Mozilla), and FTM most X11 ones, don't ever allow me to insert text from a file. Why is that? NO ONE at Netscape ever wants to keep their journal, notes, whatever in a file? Its something about "the modern era" that must be eluding me.
I just want a button (menu item, whatever) that says "Insert from file..." and have that be the end of it. That way I can work offline, so to speak, rather than using their crocked "drafts" stuff.
Are you installing RH7 on production machines the day it comes out? Are you INSANE? Look, its a bug. They have a fix. So patch the TEST MACHINES you're running RH7 on, so you can work out the bugs, migration path, and eratta, and get on with your life! You ARE running this on test machines, right? You are planning a migration to RH7, not just popping the CD into your mission-critical servers, right? You are following good sysadmin practices, right?
Just because they rushed the release doesn't mean you have to take it. Take your time and be smart.
A few months ago, Xybernaut (whose offices are down the street from mine; do they call asking for testers? NOOOOO....) was featured on (IIRC) CNBC. They showed off the geegaws and gear and you could literally watch their stock price on the ticker at the bottom of the screen rise in relation to the buzzwords. I think a few days later it had settled down to what it was before the interview...
My last machine was purchased from a small local shop. I went in with my little list, and they looked over it. When he got to "No OS - and I won't buy here if there is a charge for the OS anyway" he looked at me and said "Linux user, huh. Want to use our T1 to burn an ISO?" and offered some nominal charge (talkin Cheapbytes cost, here). I was puzzled - does this happen often? The answer is yes, with the qualifier that its due to his close proximity to a college, and lots of people want Linux boxes to run small servers on, do CS homework, etc. He also showed me the huge pile of Windows CDs that he apparently can't move, legally, because of the way the licensing agreements work, when people buy "naked" machines.
But anyway, isn't it odd that they say a PC without an OS is like a house without a roof, but they charge for it? What I mean is, when I build a house, the roof is built into the cost (like the Windows "tax"). But they also sell roofs stand-alone at Best Buy, and make builders buy N roofs at a time, even if they aren't slated to build N houses. Doesn't make sense to me: the guy in the above bit doesn't want to deal with all this stuff. He wants to sell computers. That's all he cares about. Since you go to him to get things custom-built, he lets you put your own roof on, since its your house.
Is it just me, or is their site a candidate for entry to Ghost Sites? I mean, they have their 1995 distro on display, without a touch of irony. Maybe I am missing something...
I doubt the maintainers of, say,
Pine and Mutt see themselves as rivals. They are just merrily going about their business and scratching their own itch.
I would argue that Pine and mutt, for instance, are scratching a single itch: an email program. KDE and GNOME comprise dozens and dozens (hundreds?) of individual programs, not to mention the core components (themselves programs). There's dozen of itches, and each team must do all the same work over, in a sense. This kinda thing bothers RMS (ever read the Xemacs schism?), apparently.
As a matter of fact, I just put Storm on a few machines. Pretty slick, but the stuff needs a lot of work in places. Its rough, like RH5.0 era. It tries very hard, and lulls you into a false sense of contentment - "What? It configured this! It insists it did! AGH".
Don't get me wrong, I like the "Debian + more recent stuff" better than, say, Corel. I'm quite happy with Stormix.
In keeping with the "its not our fault" ethic, there seem to be no real tools for hardware debugging. I encountered this in a W2k/Dell laptop, which seems to have a faulty PCMCIA card, controller, or driver (can't tell which). I was very suprised, that under such harsh conditions, it managed to stay alive for as long as it did, and rarely locked totally: it tried very, very hard to stay alive, and sometimes succeeded. My Debian laptop is the same way.
I also noticed that when IE dies, it tends to bring things down, depending on what you were doing. I can only assume this is due to the high level of integration.
Get a phone bank, have people call in. Then, for the first 20 minutes of the show, people can call in and say "First Call!" and hang up. This is fabulously interesting and exciting if you're in the 'First Post' crowd, and a guaranteed ratings grabber.
But seriously, although I'm sure that the delicate interplay of personalities was brought about by having everyone there, physically, can't you all just call in and record that way?
I love Loki, because to me, they're the perfect business model to follow for an Open Source/Free Software company.
The games are themselves closed. Whats cool is how they open up every other piece of tech and have a great support system in place - I've had usenet conversations with their developers about installation problems, Mesa compilation/optimization, and so forth. Thats sure worth my $, as opposed to "Well, did you download the latest drivers? It still doesn't work? Sorry, wait for the patch".
Doesn't work for me - nmap doesn't see it, I can't get any response from telnet or via another browser session on the same subnet or over the internet.
>No virtual screens: - You can get this working quite easily
YMMV but I was less than thrilled with the various "Litestep" and similar addons. IMHO, anytime you go about mucking with the guts of Windows, you're asking for trouble. THe whole freaking REASON to use Windows, I think, is because its a "standard" platform!
>DLL Hell -.SO Hell - how many times you downloaded binary package just to find out it needs 4.523.2 version of particular library ? You install it and then all the >other programs break
Slackware user? I'm quite happy with both RPM and DEB, although I do sometimes run into unexpected dependencies with RPM. Be that as it may, you can often work some minor mojo, build the libs along and keep them without the app portion, or whatever. Any reasonably competent Linux user rarely runs into these problems, if I may be so bold.
1. It will fail miserably, and the BSD community will cry *SEE! WE'RE BETTER!* and it will disappear in the mists of time. How many MCSE's do you know that talk openly about the previous Hotmail efforts? None, that I know, anyway. Or, 2. It will succeed, tremendously, and then MS will use it as a massive PR campaign, how they replaced the "superior" BSD. The other side (thats us, I guess) will grumble "yeah, with double the number of machines/many times the cost/lots of effort/etc" and we'll go back to telling the boss that its NT and not Samba. Or, 3. It will be a partial success, MS will Service Pack and Hotfix away, and both sides will claim victory, anyway.
>You are either dealing with a buggy OS Red Hat 6.2 >some buggy apps GNOME, Netscape, Enlightenment, EFM.... Also a LOT of VMWare use. >some seriously stupid user behavior Probably.
I have had much more luck pumping my machine full of fast RAM, rather than jumping up the CPU every 8 months. At 512MB, there is a VERY noticable increase (for me, YMMV of course) in stability with apps like Netscape, that are known to crash. I got better performance out of Quake, I think, but I haven't clocked it. Overall, my machine works better. I keep thinking if I had spent the money on a new CPU, and kept it at 128MB RAM, I would have seen Netscape just load faster between constant crashes.
Bottom line, which has been said here already, is that its all about marketing and "prick waving", look at us, we have the fastest CPU.
Everyone who asks me about what to upgrade, I tell them "Aim for 500Mhz, and spend the extra dough on RAM and a fast HD and good video card". I agree that I just don't see the need for that much speed when good RAM and good video makes all the difference, IMHO.
I guess I'm lucky, cause I have never had any problems with RPM.
My problem, though, is this: I have been using Red Hat forever, it seems like. I know how it works, I know what it does, and I am, believe it or not, happy. I keep wanting to play with Debian, to see if apt-get is really what everyone says.
But my Red Hat machines run well, have never been cracked, and I know the system. My stuff is nicely customized, and I'm happy.
Now, I know, the answer here is "Fine, you're happy, shut up then" but that isn't exactly what I am looking for. What I am asking is, what then is the "migration path" (sorry) if I wanted to use Debian? My first impulse was buy a new hard drive, move hda to hdc, make the new one hda, and install. Then just after I'm done, copy things as needed. Then the happy-fun time of downloading 8 zillion things, over and over, to get it all, since I am using Qt and other things that make some Debian types I know really, really cross. If something goes really, really bad, I can just put the old hda back, and reboot.
Thats going to take a weekend, I guess. There *has* to be a shorter path, I can't be the first person to want to do this, and I can't believe that droves of people are going to Debian and manually reinstalling their machines after using Red Hat, Slackware, or SuSE. "Wade through" doens't inspire me. I've been using Linux for years now, and I don't wade through anything. If I wanted to wade, I'd use NT (although thats more like drowning, isn't it?).
(Unix/Mac) Click and hold the back button until the list of previously visited urls appears. Select one. (IE/Win32)RIght click to select previously visited URLS.
If you don't know this, its time to give up and become a Luddite.
Seriously, though, I was so glad when Mozilla added this, as I almost can't live without it, to deal with "lock-in".
The things that are most interesting to me are the military facets of this story. It mentions, for instance, that Prince Roy fired a warning shot at a British warship; with what, I ask? Does Prince Roy have a 5" cannon? Did he restore the AAA that was left since the war, then manage to get ahold of 20mm shells? I can't imagine him standing there with his Webley, making some inane "show of force".
Likewise, the HavenCo site mentions that only people connected with the project can get physical access to the island. Does that mean they'll back it up with firepower? Where are they obtaining weapons? Are they going to the local Wal-Mart, buying AR-15's, and then trying to defend the island with 30-rnd, pre-ban mags they bought off Ebay? Do they actually have a security force? How much force are they willing to exert to keep their island physically secure? Willl anyone actually sell them real guns? You'll need Stingers to keep helis from landing, or a mess of AAA, not to mention at the very least a cannon (or several) and some Harpoons for dealing with surface ships. All the well-preserved WWII AAA is, shall we say, useless.
Its immaterial, of course, since a real nation-state has real firepower, even if its only conventional. A good shelling, maybe a reasonably skilled UDT team, could render their little project moot.
to Snow Crash. Get this working right and now you have a way for Hiro to have sword duels in the U-Stor-It while goggled into the Metaverse.
Then you can go visit your pals, the poor wage-slaves at Micronation, the first franchulate (they moved to escape the government, back when the government still mattered).
It sounds to me like he's saying "cassidy" or a variation thereupon. Doesn't work for me. (thats cassidy.blackstackers.com/navi/pics I think, or pics/navi, or something. but it doesn't work for me)
The only way you you will become successful is by having a publicity and promotion campaign behind you that elevates what you're doing above what your competition is doing. funny, as a longtime metallica fan, I thought it was cause you guys played your asses off, wrote kickass songs, and worked harder than anyone else.
i disagree that they should be anything different. IE is IE, or at least it should be, so InternetExplorer Inc should produce IE for Windows, Mac, Solaris, and HPUX (and IMHO Linux, BSD, BeOS, and everything else).
My reasoning is that adobe, for instance, supports the same product line over several platforms; they don't have some other company work on the ports. An app is an app, regardless of platform.
... then you know a lot of people that aren't computer saavy, or are just plain stupid.
The news has been out there. Pundits are talking about everything. MS, the AV shops, and every admin worth his salt is taking steps to stop it.
In other words, unless it defeats all known AV and sensible security precautions (ie, disable most of Outlook's functionality) then I say, lets drop the issue.
Slashdot Mirror
This is really kinda dumb, but I was looking for some of that awesome slashdot insight.
Mail apps that are heavily HTML-ified (like Mozilla), and FTM most X11 ones, don't ever allow me to insert text from a file. Why is that? NO ONE at Netscape ever wants to keep their journal, notes, whatever in a file? Its something about "the modern era" that must be eluding me.
I just want a button (menu item, whatever) that says "Insert from file..." and have that be the end of it. That way I can work offline, so to speak, rather than using their crocked "drafts" stuff.
Does anyone else wish this existed?
I think somethings nutty, my comment disappeared.
Anyway, my whole "-1, Flamebait" comment was:
Are you installing RH7 on production machines the day it comes out? Are you INSANE? Look, its a bug. They have a fix. So patch the TEST MACHINES you're running RH7 on, so you can work out the bugs, migration path, and eratta, and get on with your life! You ARE running this on test machines, right? You are planning a migration to RH7, not just popping the CD into your mission-critical servers, right? You are following good sysadmin practices, right?
Just because they rushed the release doesn't mean you have to take it. Take your time and be smart.
A few months ago, Xybernaut (whose offices are down the street from mine; do they call asking for testers? NOOOOO....) was featured on (IIRC) CNBC. They showed off the geegaws and gear and you could literally watch their stock price on the ticker at the bottom of the screen rise in relation to the buzzwords. I think a few days later it had settled down to what it was before the interview...
My last machine was purchased from a small local shop. I went in with my little list, and they looked over it. When he got to "No OS - and I won't buy here if there is a charge for the OS anyway" he looked at me and said "Linux user, huh. Want to use our T1 to burn an ISO?" and offered some nominal charge (talkin Cheapbytes cost, here). I was puzzled - does this happen often? The answer is yes, with the qualifier that its due to his close proximity to a college, and lots of people want Linux boxes to run small servers on, do CS homework, etc. He also showed me the huge pile of Windows CDs that he apparently can't move, legally, because of the way the licensing agreements work, when people buy "naked" machines.
But anyway, isn't it odd that they say a PC without an OS is like a house without a roof, but they charge for it? What I mean is, when I build a house, the roof is built into the cost (like the Windows "tax"). But they also sell roofs stand-alone at Best Buy, and make builders buy N roofs at a time, even if they aren't slated to build N houses. Doesn't make sense to me: the guy in the above bit doesn't want to deal with all this stuff. He wants to sell computers. That's all he cares about. Since you go to him to get things custom-built, he lets you put your own roof on, since its your house.
Is it just me, or is their site a candidate for entry to Ghost Sites? I mean, they have their 1995 distro on display, without a touch of irony. Maybe I am missing something...
I doubt the maintainers of, say,
Pine and Mutt see themselves as rivals. They are just merrily going about their business and scratching their own itch.
I would argue that Pine and mutt, for instance, are scratching a single itch: an email program. KDE and GNOME comprise dozens and dozens (hundreds?) of individual programs, not to mention the core components (themselves programs). There's dozen of itches, and each team must do all the same work over, in a sense. This kinda thing bothers RMS (ever read the Xemacs schism?), apparently.
As a matter of fact, I just put Storm on a few machines. Pretty slick, but the stuff needs a lot of work in places. Its rough, like RH5.0 era. It tries very hard, and lulls you into a false sense of contentment - "What? It configured this! It insists it did! AGH".
Don't get me wrong, I like the "Debian + more recent stuff" better than, say, Corel. I'm quite happy with Stormix.
In keeping with the "its not our fault" ethic, there seem to be no real tools for hardware debugging. I encountered this in a W2k/Dell laptop, which seems to have a faulty PCMCIA card, controller, or driver (can't tell which). I was very suprised, that under such harsh conditions, it managed to stay alive for as long as it did, and rarely locked totally: it tried very, very hard to stay alive, and sometimes succeeded. My Debian laptop is the same way.
I also noticed that when IE dies, it tends to bring things down, depending on what you were doing. I can only assume this is due to the high level of integration.
Get a phone bank, have people call in. Then, for the first 20 minutes of the show, people can call in and say "First Call!" and hang up. This is fabulously interesting and exciting if you're in the 'First Post' crowd, and a guaranteed ratings grabber.
But seriously, although I'm sure that the delicate interplay of personalities was brought about by having everyone there, physically, can't you all just call in and record that way?
I love Loki, because to me, they're the perfect business model to follow for an Open Source/Free Software company.
The games are themselves closed. Whats cool is how they open up every other piece of tech and have a great support system in place - I've had usenet conversations with their developers about installation problems, Mesa compilation/optimization, and so forth. Thats sure worth my $, as opposed to "Well, did you download the latest drivers? It still doesn't work? Sorry, wait for the patch".
Doesn't work for me - nmap doesn't see it, I can't get any response from telnet or via another browser session on the same subnet or over the internet.
in fact, none of the links work.
Am I doing something wrong?
>No virtual screens: - You can get this working quite easily .SO Hell - how many times you downloaded binary package just to find out it needs 4.523.2 version of particular library ? You install it and then all the >other programs break
YMMV but I was less than thrilled with the various "Litestep" and similar addons. IMHO, anytime you go about mucking with the guts of Windows, you're asking for trouble. THe whole freaking REASON to use Windows, I think, is because its a "standard" platform!
>DLL Hell -
Slackware user? I'm quite happy with both RPM and DEB, although I do sometimes run into unexpected dependencies with RPM. Be that as it may, you can often work some minor mojo, build the libs along and keep them without the app portion, or whatever. Any reasonably competent Linux user rarely runs into these problems, if I may be so bold.
1. It will fail miserably, and the BSD community will cry *SEE! WE'RE BETTER!* and it will disappear in the mists of time. How many MCSE's do you know that talk openly about the previous Hotmail efforts? None, that I know, anyway.
Or,
2. It will succeed, tremendously, and then MS will use it as a massive PR campaign, how they replaced the "superior" BSD. The other side (thats us, I guess) will grumble "yeah, with double the number of machines/many times the cost/lots of effort/etc" and we'll go back to telling the boss that its NT and not Samba.
Or,
3. It will be a partial success, MS will Service Pack and Hotfix away, and both sides will claim victory, anyway.
But you already knew that.
>You are either dealing with a buggy OS
Red Hat 6.2
>some buggy apps
GNOME, Netscape, Enlightenment, EFM.... Also a LOT of VMWare use.
>some seriously stupid user behavior
Probably.
I have had much more luck pumping my machine full of fast RAM, rather than jumping up the CPU every 8 months. At 512MB, there is a VERY noticable increase (for me, YMMV of course) in stability with apps like Netscape, that are known to crash. I got better performance out of Quake, I think, but I haven't clocked it. Overall, my machine works better. I keep thinking if I had spent the money on a new CPU, and kept it at 128MB RAM, I would have seen Netscape just load faster between constant crashes.
Bottom line, which has been said here already, is that its all about marketing and "prick waving", look at us, we have the fastest CPU.
Everyone who asks me about what to upgrade, I tell them "Aim for 500Mhz, and spend the extra dough on RAM and a fast HD and good video card". I agree that I just don't see the need for that much speed when good RAM and good video makes all the difference, IMHO.
So now the jargon will be "He's gone Postal Sysadmin".
I guess I'm lucky, cause I have never had any problems with RPM.
My problem, though, is this: I have been using Red Hat forever, it seems like. I know how it works, I know what it does, and I am, believe it or not, happy. I keep wanting to play with Debian, to see if apt-get is really what everyone says.
But my Red Hat machines run well, have never been cracked, and I know the system. My stuff is nicely customized, and I'm happy.
Now, I know, the answer here is "Fine, you're happy, shut up then" but that isn't exactly what I am looking for. What I am asking is, what then is the "migration path" (sorry) if I wanted to use Debian? My first impulse was buy a new hard drive, move hda to hdc, make the new one hda, and install. Then just after I'm done, copy things as needed. Then the happy-fun time of downloading 8 zillion things, over and over, to get it all, since I am using Qt and other things that make some Debian types I know really, really cross. If something goes really, really bad, I can just put the old hda back, and reboot.
Thats going to take a weekend, I guess. There *has* to be a shorter path, I can't be the first person to want to do this, and I can't believe that droves of people are going to Debian and manually reinstalling their machines after using Red Hat, Slackware, or SuSE. "Wade through" doens't inspire me. I've been using Linux for years now, and I don't wade through anything. If I wanted to wade, I'd use NT (although thats more like drowning, isn't it?).
Thanks in advance.
(Unix/Mac) Click and hold the back button until the list of previously visited urls appears. Select one.
(IE/Win32)RIght click to select previously visited URLS.
If you don't know this, its time to give up and become a Luddite.
Seriously, though, I was so glad when Mozilla added this, as I almost can't live without it, to deal with "lock-in".
What about the bachelor party? Why wasn't this discussed?
Talk about getting slashdotted....
Congrats, I hope to be entering the ranks of the institutionalized (marriage is, they say, an institution) before long...
The things that are most interesting to me are the military facets of this story. It mentions, for instance, that Prince Roy fired a warning shot at a British warship; with what, I ask? Does Prince Roy have a 5" cannon? Did he restore the AAA that was left since the war, then manage to get ahold of 20mm shells? I can't imagine him standing there with his Webley, making some inane "show of force".
Likewise, the HavenCo site mentions that only people connected with the project can get physical access to the island. Does that mean they'll back it up with firepower? Where are they obtaining weapons? Are they going to the local Wal-Mart, buying AR-15's, and then trying to defend the island with 30-rnd, pre-ban mags they bought off Ebay? Do they actually have a security force? How much force are they willing to exert to keep their island physically secure? Willl anyone actually sell them real guns? You'll need Stingers to keep helis from landing, or a mess of AAA, not to mention at the very least a cannon (or several) and some Harpoons for dealing with surface ships. All the well-preserved WWII AAA is, shall we say, useless.
Its immaterial, of course, since a real nation-state has real firepower, even if its only conventional. A good shelling, maybe a reasonably skilled UDT team, could render their little project moot.
to Snow Crash. Get this working right and now you have a way for Hiro to have sword duels in the U-Stor-It while goggled into the Metaverse.
Then you can go visit your pals, the poor wage-slaves at Micronation, the first franchulate (they moved to escape the government, back when the government still mattered).
It sounds to me like he's saying "cassidy" or a variation thereupon. Doesn't work for me. (thats cassidy.blackstackers.com/navi/pics I think, or pics/navi, or something. but it doesn't work for me)
The only way you you will become successful is by having a publicity and promotion campaign behind you that elevates what you're doing above what your competition is doing. funny, as a longtime metallica fan, I thought it was cause you guys played your asses off, wrote kickass songs, and worked harder than anyone else.
i disagree that they should be anything different. IE is IE, or at least it should be, so InternetExplorer Inc should produce IE for Windows, Mac, Solaris, and HPUX (and IMHO Linux, BSD, BeOS, and everything else).
My reasoning is that adobe, for instance, supports the same product line over several platforms; they don't have some other company work on the ports.
An app is an app, regardless of platform.
... then you know a lot of people that aren't computer saavy, or are just plain stupid.
The news has been out there. Pundits are talking about everything. MS, the AV shops, and every admin worth his salt is taking steps to stop it.
In other words, unless it defeats all known AV and sensible security precautions (ie, disable most of Outlook's functionality) then I say, lets drop the issue.