Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Yet, funny enough, when I boot Linux, it screams "FAT support is ALPHA!" 

  I must have missed that. Where does it say it?

  I have never had any problems with FAT support. Maybe it's just me.

> Yeah. Better than X-Windows used to be at the same time.

  Yes, Unix sucks big time. You should never use it. Demand your money
back immediately.

> Note that Windows supports DOS programs that bypass the OS in exactly 
> the same way, and it WORKS.

  I believe the list of DOS games which don't work anymore in current hardware
with the current Windows is larger than the list of DOS games which do.

> > I mean, sure, it tells you what was happening at the exact instant the 
> > crash happened, but how do you find out what the actual problem is?

> Same way you do for Linux errors. You google the text of the error 
> message, or search for it on MSDN.

  Yes, like once I tried to install some modem drivers into a WinXP
system, and at the end of the installation it said "failed to install
driver", nothing more, nothing less. Not a single hint about why it
failed.

  Now, try to google without an internet connection because you just
failed to install the driver necessary for the internet connection.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Invisible wrote:
> OK. The Amiga lacked the necessary hardware for that.

I do find it interesting that you ask what Windows does that the Amiga 
doesn't, and when given an extensive list, everything is dismissed as 
either "The Amiga didn't have the hardware for that" or "I don't use 
that so it doesn't count."

> The STOP messages give generic error codes.

Fortunately, the Amiga was far superior in this regard. ;-)

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     On what day did God create the body thetans?

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Darren New wrote:

>> Leaving aside hardware [bad drivers can screw up any OS], what does 
>> Windoze actually do that AmigaDOS doesn't? Well, let's see now. It has 
>> networking. It's multi-user and has access permissions.
> 
> Remote desktop. USB. Networking. 3D accelerated graphics. Memory 
> protection. Virtual memory. 64-bit OS support. Remote management. Access 
> control policies. Performance monitoring. Clustered drives. RAID. 
> Multi-OS boot. Support for about 63,417 different chunks of hardware.

OK then. Most of what you just listed is *hardware*, not *software*. Let 
us examine what's actually software...

Networking, and anything that requires networking. AmigaDOS can't really 
do this. (There is a facility to do some primitive thing with the 
parallel port to set up a sort of 2-node NFS. And it works 
transparently.) If the hardware had existed, you could probably set up 
real networking. But, out of the box, there is no TCP/IP. So that's a 
useful thing that AmigaDOS doesn't have.

Multiple users and access control is missing.

Hardware support is... down to 3rd parties. If they write the drivers, 
you can use it. If they don't, you can't.

Performance monitoring? I can do that. Oh, wait, aren't you the guy who 
claimed that AmigaDOS doesn't have premptive multitasking?

Multi-OS boot? Strange - I also run Debian Linux on my Amiga. :-P

>> It... uh... no, I'm struggling to think of anything else new it has. 
>> That seems to be able it, really. (Unless you count IE as part of the 
>> OS.)
> 
> You're struggling to think of something *you* use.
> 
>> The point is, some bugs are more serious than others. Where I work, 
>> Word is constantly crashing.
> 
> Aren't you the one that's still using 10-year-old Word97?

We were using Word 97. We're now [mostly] using Word 2003. [At least, 
certainly the report writers are - and nobody else uses it very much.] 
Still crash-happy. Mainly due to our customer's corrupted document 
templates, but that's no excuse; software should NOT crash just because 
you fed it bad data. Graceful failure, anyone?

>> Interesting. When I got my laptop, it crashed within 14 *seconds* of 
>> being turned on.
> 
> One would think that would be either a misinstalled OS or a hardware 
> problem.

If that were the case, visiting Windows Update a few times presumably 
wouldn't have fixed it...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Invisible wrote:
> It's not like FF is 98% more efficient

You're right. It isn't. FF is the number one sucker-up-of-useless-memory 
-and-cycles on my machines.

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     On what day did God create the body thetans?

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nemesis wrote:
> "scott" <sco### [at] laptopcom> wrote:
>> And when my mum tries to plug in her new camera...?  I was actually very
>> impressed that my mum managed to install the software for her camera and get
>> it working without even a single phone call to me :-)
> 
> On Linux she wouldn't need to install any software on CD whatsoever.

You don't on Windows either. The extra software provides extra 
functionality, like printing picture albums, or marking the pictures on 
the chip to be printed, so you can hand the chip to the folks at Costco 
and say "here, print the ones I marked."

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     On what day did God create the body thetans?

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>> M$ doesn't *own* Novell. They merely agreed in principle to cooperate 
>> in their design strategies. That's all. SuSE is still powered by OSS 
>> and so on and so forth.
> 
> It's crippled with M$ tech and IP, like mono and all tools which more 
> and more depend on it.  That's what Ballmer meant by Linux using M$ IP.

Er... Mono is an free reimplementation of M$ proprietry technology to 
allow people to use it without being tied to M$?

Isn't that like complaining that including a free Java implementation is 
"crippling the system with Sun IP"?

>> How do you even pronounce that? [Not that it matters I guess...]
> 
> there's an ogg video of Nelson Mandela -- as if you would know who is he 
> -- in the Examples directory.  He speaks about the ancient Ubuntu 
> african concept...

Uh, yes, I think I *might* have slightly heard of Mr Mandela. :-P

> (Ooboontoo, emphasis on middle syllable, t pronounced kinda like in 
> "bottle")

OK.

>> Isn't DeCSS illegal?
> 
> is it legal to make backup copies of stuff you buy?  Is it legal to get 
> rid of stupid mechanisms that don't play well with OSes that don't act 
> according to the RIAA and others best interests?
> 
> You can make up your own mind or just follow their rules...

Fact: The law is the law, regardless of what it "right" or not.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Gail Shaw wrote:

>> there's an ogg video of Nelson Mandela -- as if you would know who is he
>> -- in the Examples directory.  He speaks about the ancient Ubuntu
>> african concept...
> 
> If he doesn't, I'm contemplating shooting him!

Uh, that won't be necessary.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Invisible wrote:
>  [It is after all *designed* for experts.]

"It is not so much user friendly as it is expert tolerant."


-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     On what day did God create the body thetans?

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> You're right. It isn't. FF is the number one sucker-up-of-useless-memory 
> -and-cycles on my machines.

  Yes, everything not made by Microsoft is by definition bad, horrid,
heavy, a memory-hog and a CPU-hog. Everything made by Microsoft is
just perfect.

  You must have a different version of Firefox, as mine is taking 0%
of CPU time right now.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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nemesis wrote:
> Phil Cook wrote:
>> Depends on what you want to run. Again, as has been pointed out 
>> before, for basic clerical work Linux works. The problems can be 
>> summed up with Nicholas's "That's the *basic* installation method on 
>> Linux. If you don't even know how to unpack a .tar.gz... you don't 
>> know Linux."
> 
> no, this is just plain wrong.  Unless Nicolas is running Slackware, the 
> Linux community as a whole has moved from basic 
> tarball-source-compile-install to automated dependency-tracking 
> repository packages installs.  There's no command-line involved, unless 
> you want to.

And if you do, it's usually something like "emerge povray" or whatever 
the distro in question uses.

> What I think Nicolas means is that gzip is the *nix standard packing 
> format, which it's always been indeed.

The best part is when you say "make configure", and it says 
"Unrecognised arch 'i586/SuSE 10.3'". And you're like "WTF? Now what do 
I do??"

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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