Gail Shaw wrote:

> To quote a friend on SQL central. Cursors are RBAR (Row by agonising row)
> processing

I see. I think...

> SQL's a set-based language. It's supposed to process datasets, not
> individual rows.

Agreed.

> Here's a cursor syntax in T-SQL. My oracle's way too rusty
> for me to attempt to do the same in pl-sql.

I probably wouldn't recognise it if you did. *I* haven't done PL/SQL in 
ages either...

> DECLARE curSomething CURSOR FOR
> SELECT somecolumn FROM SomeTable
> 
> FETCH NEXT FROM curSomething INTO @AVariable
> 
> WHILE @@FETCH_STATUS = 0 -- there are rows in the cursor
> BEGIN
>   -- Do something with the variable @AVariable
>   FETCH NEXT FROM curSomething INTO @AVariable
> END

Right. So is it that cursors are inherantly evil? Or just that people 
tend to misuse them to do row-based processing when they could and 
should do set-based?

I was under the vague impression that a cursor is a thing that allows 
you to, say, show 1 page of results, and then fetch the next page a bit 
later...

-- 
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http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Orchid XP v7 wrote:
> 
> [Well, no, I'd say that once everything you want is configured, Linux is
> actually quite easy to use. But every time you want to plug something
> new in... hmm.]
> 

It (being "easy") depends *purely* on the frontends (window managers,
desktops, languages etc) you choose to install.

The Linux on my personal laptop is pretty highly-configured, still I
know less than 5 people who actually could say that it's easy.

Freedom of choice <3. I just can't get the usability of Afterstep on
Windows-desktop, unfortunately.

-- 
Eero "Aero" Ahonen
   http://www.zbxt.net
      aer### [at] removethiszbxtnetinvalid

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scott wrote:
> And you guys are trying to convince me my mum could use Linux .... ha!

you listening to a bunch of geek trying to show off their command-line 
skills.

Give you mom Ubuntu and she'll never ever touch a command-line, except 
for running "pppoeconf" and providing ADSL login and password on 
installation.

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Warp wrote:
> It was IE which
> introduced the concept of going to a website and getting your system
> infected with a trojan.

No it wasn't.

Netscape had code in their source that looked at a "telnet" link, moved 
past the "://" part, replaced the "://" with spaces, and passed the 
resulting string to the shell. Note the complete lack of checking for 
something like "telnet://127.0.0.1;rm -rf *"

I'm not disagreeing with the rest of your rant. Just with this bit of 
misinformation.

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

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Orchid XP v7 wrote:
> Er... Mono is an free reimplementation of M$ proprietry technology 

It's not proprietary any more. It's an ECMA standard. Certainly the part 
that Mono implements is.

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

Yeah, but people don't irrationally hate Sun. :-)

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

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Jeremy M. Praay wrote:

>> That should keep Microsoft-themed hyperboles (and the relevance of the 
>> software industry compared to the banana shipping industry) in check I 
>> guess.
> 
> Fine, but we all know Microsoft is The Most Evil corporation ever to have 
> existed in recorded human history.

Uh, dude, isn't that...

> Then perhaps comes Walmart

...ah. ;-)

[In all seriousness, why do people think this? I've heard it said often, 
but I don't actually know who Walmart are, so...]

> Exxon

I thought Exxon were stupid rather than actually evil? [Although I'll 
admit I don't actually know where I got that from...]

-- 
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Warp wrote:
> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>> On the other hand, Windows has been managing basic installs without user 
>> expertise for decades. :-)
> 
>   Yes, Windows is clearly superior.

Are you attempting to imply that a decade ago, it was easier to install 
Linux than it was to install Windows?

Why do you take every statement I make and try to overgeneralize it to 
something rediculous? That's called "straw man".

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

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Orchid XP v7 escribió:
> but I don't actually know who Walmart are, so...]

sigh.

Post a reply to this message

scott wrote:
> So when she plugs in the camera (without installing any drivers or 
> special software), a box will pop up asking her if she wants to view a 
> slide show, open the folder or print some of the photos?

Linux installs already generic device drivers for all common hardware. 
As long as the device comply with major standards, like USB, it's pretty 
much covered.

You don't need to install anything to test it out, most install CD/DVDs 
these days are LiveCDs which run from memory, without touching the disk 
unless you click on some "Install to disk" button and pressing a few Nexts.

Post a reply to this message

Darren New wrote:
> Orchid XP v7 wrote:
>> Er... Mono is an free reimplementation of M$ proprietry technology 
> 
> It's not proprietary any more. It's an ECMA standard. Certainly the part 
> that Mono implements is.

The way I heard it, the ECMA standard (ISO also? maybe?) doesn't cover 
everything in the M$ .NET framework implementation. But without knowing 
what is and isn't inside, it's hard to say how important that is...

>> Isn't that like complaining that including a free Java implementation 
>> is "crippling the system with Sun IP"?
> 
> Yeah, but people don't irrationally hate Sun. :-)

No - when people hate Sun it's completely rational. :-D Like the square 
root of the product of 3 distinct primes...

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

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Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
> Orchid XP v7 escribió:
>> but I don't actually know who Walmart are, so...]
> 
> sigh.

Well I don't live in America, do I? :-P

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

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nemesis wrote:
> Darren New wrote:
>> And why isn't Linux an alternative?  Why isn't Mac OS X an alternative?
> 
> Linux is cheap but doesn't run Windows software or ports of major 
> popular commercial software like Photoshop, AutoCAD or World of Warcraft 
> without Wine and crashes.

And this is why MS is a monopoly. Because they maintained backwards 
compatibility.

> The issue is that any word processor coming by should handle doc format 
> perfectly -- no matter how good it is at an open format like ODF -- 
> because that's what people send you and expect from you. 

MS made their money entirely on compatibility. Even MS-DOS was 
kinda-sorta-compatible with CP/M originally.

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

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Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
> It's not Linux's fault that they don't run.

I'm not really sure why people worry about "fault" when discussing such 
things. It doesn't run on Linux. Linux doesn't run them. What does 
"fault" have to do with your purchasing decision if you want to run 
those programs?

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

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nemesis wrote:
> Darren New wrote:
>> SUSE 10.1 would crash during install on my machine unless I managed to
>> interrupt it in the 0.75 seconds before it installed the buggy USB
>> driver that would take out the system.  It took me literally two days
>> of trying before I could get to a login prompt after an install.

What driver? What kernel does the system have?

I'm being curious. Yes, it can be a buggy driver. OTOH, USB is pretty
standardized system and AFAIK there hasn't been a lot of changes is USB
host systems, so I think I should have heard of such a problem, but I
never have.

> I understand that Linux just install everything automatically.  

Certain distributions install 'bout everything automatically. Yes, they
are the distributions normally hinted to people to be tried as "first
distribution", but I still don't think it should be generalized to be a
*Linux* -feature.

> Under
> Windows, you install the basic OS and then go on manually inserting
> driver CDs or downloading them and installing for yourself, with any
> luck.  There are pros and cons for each method.

Nope, you install NIC drivers and download the rest from the Internet ;).

-- 
Eero "Aero" Ahonen
   http://www.zbxt.net
      aer### [at] removethiszbxtnetinvalid

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Warp wrote:
>   You simply refuse to let go of the old myth, don't you?

They got a lot cheaper after they stared using more commodity hardware. 
I think my next machine is going to be one of the maxed-out 64-bit Macs.

It's funny - I go into the Apple stores around here and ask to see their 
64-bit machines, and the salesmen look at me like I have three heads or 
something. You'd think someone selling something even as user-friendly 
as Macs would know what that expression means.

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

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Warp wrote:
>   It's really scary that one company can have this kind of power.

indeed.  makes everyone blind and willing to defend and champion M$ from 
any criticism.

Post a reply to this message

Orchid XP v7 escribió:
> Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
>> Orchid XP v7 escribió:
>>> but I don't actually know who Walmart are, so...]
>>
>> sigh.
> 
> Well I don't live in America, do I? :-P
> 

I live in South America (Argentina). I have probably been to Walmart 
*once*, since it's not exactly the most popular store (heck maybe 
there's only one Walmart in the whole country). But I know what it is...

Wikipedia says: "In North America, Wal-Mart's primary competition 
includes department stores like Kmart, Target, ShopKo, Meijer, and 
Canada's Zellers, Winners, and Giant Tiger." I have never heard *any* of 
those.

Post a reply to this message

"Orchid XP v7" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message
news:47b2038c$1@news.povray.org...
>
> Right. So is it that cursors are inherantly evil? Or just that people
> tend to misuse them to do row-based processing when they could and
> should do set-based?

In order, no, yes.

They have their place. I often use them for mainenance stuff (run through
all the user databases on the server and do a consistency check on each)
It's when people use cursors for things that are better set based (run
through all rows in the table and update one column of each) that there's a
problem.

> I was under the vague impression that a cursor is a thing that allows
> you to, say, show 1 page of results, and then fetch the next page a bit
> later...

Nope. That's paging. Lots of set-based solutions to that (exact
implementation depending on the db engine you want to run it)

Post a reply to this message

Warp wrote:
> Orchid XP v7 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> 
>> Right. And the fact that the design of Unix is overly complex and 
>> incorporates several decades of backwards compatibility is unrelated? ;-)
> 
>   It's not like Windows is any better in that regard.

Hey come on, everything simply straight in the registry, so how hard can
it be?

Oh, wait...

>   At least Apple dares to break backwards compatibility with ancient
> software and architectures. It hasn't slowed them down much.

Yes. But one reason for that is that Apple was almost dying some years
ago and the userbase was *small*, so breaking backward compatibility
didn't piss of a lot of users (it couldn't, 'cause there wasn't).

Vista's getting a lot of angry comments now and it hasn't got it's
footprint out (yet). If MS broke backward compatibility totally now, how
would you think Vista would be selling?

-- 
Eero "Aero" Ahonen
   http://www.zbxt.net
      aer### [at] removethiszbxtnetinvalid

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Gail Shaw escribió:
> Nope. That's paging. Lots of set-based solutions to that (exact
> implementation depending on the db engine you want to run it)
> 

Like the LIMIT clause?

Post a reply to this message

Orchid XP v7 wrote:
> 
> I think it's not so much a case of "Linux isn't ready for the desktop",
> but rather "Linux is misplaced on the desktop". But I don't see anybody
> developing anything else currently...
> 

Linux is not displaced on desktop, but it's a great failure to say that
all desktops should be alike. Different desktops for different people
and for different jobs.

-- 
Eero "Aero" Ahonen
   http://www.zbxt.net
      aer### [at] removethiszbxtnetinvalid

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>>>> but I don't actually know who Walmart are, so...]
>>>
>>> sigh.
>>
>> Well I don't live in America, do I? :-P
>>
> 
> I live in South America (Argentina). I have probably been to Walmart 
> *once*, since it's not exactly the most popular store (heck maybe 
> there's only one Walmart in the whole country). But I know what it is...

Sure. And I vaguely know what it is. But I have no idea why it's 
considered "evil"...

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

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Orchid XP v7 wrote:
> Oh. Oh yeah. Closing the window on your PC doesn't *actually* make the 
> server stop processing the request. Duh. :-S

God!  well at least you learned it...

Post a reply to this message

nemesis wrote:
> The issue is that any word processor coming by should handle doc format
> perfectly -- no matter how good it is at an open format like ODF --
> because that's what people send you and expect from you.  Not an easy
> task reverse enginneering an obscure, undocumented format like that.

Especially while the format itself ain't compatible between its versions.

> OTOH, I've successfully opened older doc formats with OpenOffice while
> Word was complaining the format was too old. :)

Which was proven... ;)

-- 
Eero "Aero" Ahonen
   http://www.zbxt.net
      aer### [at] removethiszbxtnetinvalid

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Orchid XP v7 wrote:
> Just being curios... What's a 'cursor', and why is that bad?

well, at least you're now curious about things.  That's good, keep it 
up, Mr. Bean.

Post a reply to this message

nemesis wrote:
> Orchid XP v7 wrote:
>> Just being curios... What's a 'cursor', and why is that bad?
> 
> well, at least you're now curious about things.  That's good, keep it 
> up, Mr. Bean.

I've always been curios about technologies that interest me. It's just 
the politics and economics that don't interest me so much. ;-)

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

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Orchid XP v7 wrote:
> 
> I don't particularly. In fact I'm actually moderately tempted with a Mac
> Mini.

Plusadvantage - Mac Mini is laptop-technology, so it's more efficient on
electric usage than most PC's.

> OTOH, I have many hundreds of pounds worth of software that won't work
> on it. Which is fine I guess - I just keep *that* software on my PC
> instead. But then... what exactly am I going to use this shiny new Mac
> for? 

Desktop computing. You'll run 'bout everything you can on it and use VNC
session to hold the Windows -PC in touch. OR you can use Parallels and
install and use both OSX and WinXP on that MacMini.

> I guess there's a way to run POV-Ray on it

Certainly.

> , and it has a nice big
> dual-core CPU in there, so that looks good. But... I don't know... Do I
> really want to spend basically £400 just to find out what a Mac is like?

No, you'll first need to find out what's it like and then decide if it's
what you'll want.

-- 
Eero "Aero" Ahonen
   http://www.zbxt.net
      aer### [at] removethiszbxtnetinvalid

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Orchid XP v7 wrote:
> 
> They can't buy Linux. They can, however, pay the hardware guys to only
> supply new computers with M$ Windows preinstalled, make them sign
> agreements not to develop drivers for other platforms, and so forth.
> 

*That* would be a serious case of taking misadvantage of monopoly status.

-- 
Eero "Aero" Ahonen
   http://www.zbxt.net
      aer### [at] removethiszbxtnetinvalid

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"Nicolas Alvarez" <nic### [at] gmailisthebestcom> wrote in message
news:47b20953$1@news.povray.org...
> Gail Shaw escribió:
> > Nope. That's paging. Lots of set-based solutions to that (exact
> > implementation depending on the db engine you want to run it)
> >
>
> Like the LIMIT clause?

Is that Oracle? Not offhand familar with it. Is it the equivalent to TOP
(SELECT  top 10 SomeColumn FROM sometable)?

I was thinking the NTile or Row_Number in SQL Server 2005, or the identity
column. Top works, but needs various hoops jumped through to get the second
and subsequent pages.

Post a reply to this message

Eero Ahonen wrote:

>> OTOH, I have many hundreds of pounds worth of software that won't work
>> on it. Which is fine I guess - I just keep *that* software on my PC
>> instead. But then... what exactly am I going to use this shiny new Mac
>> for? 
> 
> Desktop computing. You'll run 'bout everything you can on it and use VNC
> session to hold the Windows -PC in touch. OR you can use Parallels and
> install and use both OSX and WinXP on that MacMini.

Most LOL-inducing moments: Standing in PC World and looking at the "Why 
Mac?" sticker on the shelf.

"#7: It runs Micro$oft Office."

Uh, dude, isn't the whole *point* of a Mac to get *away* from M$ 
products? :-P

Anyway, whatever. I doubt running highly compute-intensive applications 
in Parallels is a good idea...

>> But... I don't know... Do I
>> really want to spend basically £400 just to find out what a Mac is like?
> 
> No, you'll first need to find out what's it like and then decide if it's
> what you'll want.

Heh. Well. No obvious way to do that...

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

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"Eero Ahonen" <aer### [at] removethiszbxtnetinvalid> wrote in message
news:47b208fb$1@news.povray.org...
>
> Vista's getting a lot of angry comments now and it hasn't got it's
> footprint out (yet). If MS broke backward compatibility totally now, how
> would you think Vista would be selling?

Pretty much not at all.

Talking about Vista, word is that MS has written that off as a mistake and
is hard at work on its replacement (Windows 7). A full year or more ahead of
their plans....

Post a reply to this message

"Orchid XP v7" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message
news:47b2057c$1@news.povray.org...
> Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
> > Orchid XP v7 escribió:
> >> but I don't actually know who Walmart are, so...]
> >
> > sigh.
>
> Well I don't live in America, do I? :-P

Neither do I.
I still know what Walmart is and why people consider it an evil empire

Post a reply to this message

Gail Shaw escribió:
> "Nicolas Alvarez" <nic### [at] gmailisthebestcom> wrote in message
> news:47b20953$1@news.povray.org...
>> Gail Shaw escribi�:
>>> Nope. That's paging. Lots of set-based solutions to that (exact
>>> implementation depending on the db engine you want to run it)
>>>
>> Like the LIMIT clause?
> 
> Is that Oracle? Not offhand familar with it. 

No, I'm only familiar with MySQL.

LIMIT {[offset,] row_count | row_count OFFSET offset}

Goes after the WHERE clause.

Post a reply to this message

Orchid XP v7 wrote:
> Just being curios... What's a 'cursor', and why is that bad?

As for the "what is it", it's a structure that lets you loop through 
results inside a stored procedure. I.e., a cursor pointing into a table 
where you can do things like "get the next row".

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

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"Nicolas Alvarez" <nic### [at] gmailisthebestcom> wrote in message
news:47b20d36$1@news.povray.org...
> Gail Shaw escribió:
> > Is that Oracle? Not offhand familar with it.
>
> No, I'm only familiar with MySQL.
>
> LIMIT {[offset,] row_count | row_count OFFSET offset}
>
> Goes after the WHERE clause.

OK. Haven't done much MySQL either. That looks good for paging then, seeing
as it has an offset. That's one down side of top in SQL server. You can't
ask for the 'next' top 30 easily

Post a reply to this message

Darren New wrote:
> And no, it's not just something doing a global grab or something. Cursor 
> locks up, and it doesn't answer pings.

sorry to hear that.  Perhaps swap got full?...

Post a reply to this message

nemesis wrote:
> no, I'm simply saying that those "multiple operating systems" are using 
> the same old code from the same single company to handle old apps, so 
> that doesn't count as multiple operating systems.

Well, no, they're not. That's just factually incorrect. If that was the 
case, DOS programs couldn't write to files on NTFS partitions or access 
network shares, nor would software that writes directly to the screen 
work inside a window.

> A pure Java/Python/whatever program using standard interprocess 
> communication channels to deal with the underlying OS and using a 
> cross-platform GUI such as Swing/GTK+ will run in pretty much any major 
> OS unaltered. 

OK, that's a library.

> Blender the graphical modeller has its interface 
> implemented in OpenGL, which means little problem porting it everywhere. 
>  Coding a database using strict ISO SQL will make it pretty much 
> portable among many implementations.

I.e., you've pushed off the work of porting your stuff to the author of 
the interpreter.

Yet "mono" for some reason is "proprietary Microsoft code"?

>> The internet doesn't make programs run cross-platform. It just gives 
>> you a way to access them when they're running on someone else's platform.
> 
> It doesn't really matter where a web app is running as long as it does 
> what I mean.

That doesn't make it "cross-platform".

> 
>>> quite a few cross-platform development languages (Java, Python, Perl 
>>> etc)
>>
>> And BASIC. Which used to run everywhere. And was promoted and 
>> implemented by MS (amongst others).
> 
> Visual Basic is not plain Basic. 

Who put the word "visual" in there? You *are* aware that MS has been 
making BASIC interpreters since like Atari 800 days, right?

>> Except they don't provide executables.
> They sure do.  And they are truly cross-platform.

Python compiles down to an executable I can run on both Windows and 
Linux without installing a Python interpreter? Cool.

>> I agree that open source software is probably a better way to do 
>> stuff, as long as you aren't worried about making a living at it.
> 
> the folks at RedHat or Novell seem to be doing fine.

Yeah, much much better than Microsoft.

> 
>> Uh, so, how much Linux software runs without recompiling under 
>> Solaris? Does that actually work?
> 
> no, different executable format.  One of the areas that are not 
> standardized.

Bingo.

>  But the source is there 

... if you don't mind giving it away ...

> If you want truly cross-platform apps without recompiling, target a 
> programming language with a cross-platform runtime.  You won't need to 
> recompile your apps, but should install the proper runtime for your 
> system, which will be provided from the people who compiled them to your 
> system.

Yep. In other words, recompile.  As opposed to Microsoft, which manages 
to do it without recompiling and without a "cross-platform language".

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

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Orchid XP v7 wrote:
> Darren New wrote:
> 
>> Do you seriously think you can add support for VM, protected mode, 
>> networking, and lots of different kinds of hardware without making the 
>> OS more complicated?
> 
> I guess the killer question is "can you do it without making it buggy". 

It's a question of expense. I, personally, have never had my machine 
crash because of a bug in the VM code that Microsoft wrote. At least, as 
far as I know.

I think it's generally other parts of the code that crash.

> I was programming in Pascal - why?

Fair enough. Pascal can be fairly safe if you're not using too many 
dynamic structures.

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

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Orchid XP v7 wrote:
> Darren New wrote:
> 
>>> Only hyper-nerds are going to be able to get anything remotely useful 
>>> out of a dump file. To everybody else, it's just wasted disk space.
>>
>> Generally, the source code is sufficient.
> 
> Cool. Let me just contact the makers of every device driver I'm running 
> and we can see where th... no, wait, that won't work. ;-)

Or send them the core file.

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

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Orchid XP v7 wrote:
> I didn't realise there were *any*? 

Go look at the author information in the hardware manager.

> What I can do is get a graph of various things like number of processes 
> running, CPU usage per process, memory per process, memory free, etc.

I.e., performance information from one program, namely the scheduler. 
Not all that helpful in the real world.

> Integrating that with performance data from other apps? Well, that would 
> require the other apps to supply performance data.

Yep. And MS has an interface in the OS for doing that that everyone 
uses, and therefore it is available. Because it's damn useful in the 
real world.

> And some ARexx 
> scripting to link them together. And by the time you get there, you 
> might as well write the monitoring app yourself, at which point it 
> ceases to be about what the "OS" can do.

Monitoring app? What app are you going to write that's going to tell you 
the queries per second that the SQL server is using, and whether its 
disk I/Os are for indexes or data?

>> Fair enough. I haven't really used an Amiga since the 1000/500 days. 
>> Who is selling it nowadays?
> 
> Selling it? Heh. Last I heard [long time ago], "Amiga" is a 
> software-only company now. No, I have no idea how the hell that makes 
> any sense... IIRC, AmigaOS was ported to PPC or something. Whatever.

Ah, cool.

> The hardware hasn't been on sale for a while now, AFAIK. But then, would 
> *you* buy a "personal computer" powered by a 20 MHz 68030 with 2 MB RAM?

Maybe. Is the OLPC any more powerful?

>> If the file is corrupt on the disk, and a later update replaces that 
>> file, I'd expect that would fix it, yah.
> 
> Mmm, I guess. However, given how much everybody complained about XP 
> crashing when it first came out, and it's not *as bad* today, I think 
> it's a case of M$ actually fixing some of the more serious bugs...

Well, yeah. Hundreds. :)

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

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Warp wrote:
> scott <sco### [at] laptopcom> wrote:
>> And you guys are trying to convince me my mum could use Linux .... ha!
> 
>   I wouldn't not recommend Linux for your mother. I would recommend you
> buy her a Mac mini.

Yah. My mac-using co-worker got kind of twitchy when I told him he might 
have to use the command line to check out the software from subversion 
onto the server. :-) Yet OS X is a very unixy system.

I look forward to convincing my wife I need to buy a Mac. ;-)

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

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Darren New escribió:
>> The hardware hasn't been on sale for a while now, AFAIK. But then, 
>> would *you* buy a "personal computer" powered by a 20 MHz 68030 with 2 
>> MB RAM?
> 
> Maybe. Is the OLPC any more powerful?
> 

433 MHz, 256 MB of RAM, 1GB of Flash memory as storage.

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nemesis wrote:
> You don't need to install anything to test it out, most install CD/DVDs 
> these days are LiveCDs which run from memory, without touching the disk 
> unless you click on some "Install to disk" button and pressing a few Nexts.

It was nice being able to go to the local electronics store and boot up 
Linux on their machines, lookign for one t would run on.  Very handy.

(Oh, and I didn't have any trouble installing it on *this* machine. Just 
on my home machine was a nightmare.)

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

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nemesis wrote:
> indeed.  makes everyone blind and willing to defend and champion M$ from 
> any criticism.

Not everyone. I only defend them from blind bashing and stupid 
criticisms. ;-)


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

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Orchid XP v7 wrote:
> Darren New wrote:
>> Orchid XP v7 wrote:
>>> Er... Mono is an free reimplementation of M$ proprietry technology 
>>
>> It's not proprietary any more. It's an ECMA standard. Certainly the 
>> part that Mono implements is.
> 
> The way I heard it, the ECMA standard (ISO also? maybe?) doesn't cover 
> everything in the M$ .NET framework implementation.

Right. Nor does the Java standard cover everything in Sun's Java 
distributions. Nor does the POSIX standard cover everything that 
UNIX-like systems do.

But the part that Mono implements? It's the ECMA standard.

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

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nemesis wrote:
> Darren New wrote:
>> SUSE 10.1 would crash during install on my machine unless I managed to 
>> interrupt it in the 0.75 seconds before it installed the buggy USB 
>> driver that would take out the system.  It took me literally two days 
>> of trying before I could get to a login prompt after an install.
> 
> hmm, you interrupt it before it installs a "buggy" USB driver? 

I don't remember exactly what it was. It was one of the packages that 
was optional that didn't work with my machine. Then the next one, then 
the next one, etc etc etc.  One of which was some strange problem in the 
USB stuff.

 > It would
> crash without the interrupting?  what has you hooked to the USB port?

Well, I unplugged everything unnecessary.

> I understand that Linux just install everything automatically. 

Well, everything available, yah.

> Under Windows, you install the basic OS and then go on manually inserting 
> driver CDs or downloading them and installing for yourself, with any 
> luck. 

Unless the vendor gives the drivers to the central distribution site 
known as "Windows Update". :-)  I know lots of sysadmins of windows 
systems that won't purchase hardware whose device drivers need you to be 
at the machine to install.

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

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Eero Ahonen wrote:
> nemesis wrote:
>> Darren New wrote:
>>> SUSE 10.1 would crash during install on my machine unless I managed to
>>> interrupt it in the 0.75 seconds before it installed the buggy USB
>>> driver that would take out the system.  It took me literally two days
>>> of trying before I could get to a login prompt after an install.
> 
> What driver? What kernel does the system have?

I don't know. That was a while ago. It was apparently a known problem, 
not that it made it any easier to work around.  It sucks when youhave a 
bug in the software update software. :-)

> I'm being curious. Yes, it can be a buggy driver. OTOH, USB is pretty
> standardized system and AFAIK there hasn't been a lot of changes is USB
> host systems, so I think I should have heard of such a problem, but I
> never have.

Actually, I may be confused. The USB problem was the USB kernel thingie 
going compute-bound at high priority.  Fixed after an update.

There was soemthing else about the install.

> distribution", but I still don't think it should be generalized to be a
> *Linux* -feature.

I'm amused how whenever there's something good, it's a Linux thing, and 
whenever there's a problem, it's not Linux's fault but someone else's. ;-)

> Nope, you install NIC drivers and download the rest from the Internet ;).

And from one place!

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

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Warp wrote:
> Orchid XP v7 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
>>>> 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??"
>>>   Yes, it's clearly a problem with *linux* when some software you are
>>> trying to install is broken.
> 
>> Right. And the fact that the design of Unix is overly complex and 
>> incorporates several decades of backwards compatibility is unrelated? ;-)
> 
>   It's not like Windows is any better in that regard.

Actually, much of the *design* of Windows was pretty clean. It's the 
implementation and backwards compatibility of stuff that's ugly. (To a 
large extent, a lot of the backwards-compatibility uncleanness is for 
supporting people who didn't actually follow the APIs, and did stuff 
like wrote .ini files instead of using the ini system calls, and 
hard-coded paths instead of asking the OS where files should go, and so on.)

The original UNIX *design* was clean too, but the accumulation of 
historical file names is nasty. The other ugliness, IMO, is the number 
of places where an API is not provided but instead it's a file format, 
or a library, or something like that. Stuff like opening a directory as 
a file to read the directory (cured when BSD 4 forced a directory format 
changed), reading /etc/passwd and parsing it to get information (cured 
when shadow password files became common), etc.

>   At least Apple dares to break backwards compatibility with ancient
> software and architectures. It hasn't slowed them down much.

Yep.

>   Unix was never designed for people who don't know nor want to know
> anything about computers. It was designed for sysadmins and the like.

Well, yeah, I suppose that's true too. :-)  Good point.

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

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On Tue, 12 Feb 2008 19:12:54 +0000, Orchid XP v7 wrote:

> It's still not [yet] as easy to use.

Wrong.

> Most hardware companies don't supply drivers for it, and refuse to hand
> over the information required for anybody else to write those drivers.

Wrong; this used to be the case, but not any more.

> If you're into gaming, forget it. Almost no big developers target that
> platform.

Hmmm, Unreal Tournament III runs on it natively, and Cedega does a very 
nice job for non-Linux games.  Again, maybe 5 years ago this was the 
case, but these days there are plenty of game developers writing to 
Linux.  It's not on par with Windows, true.  But it's improved greatly.

Jim

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On Tue, 12 Feb 2008 19:53:37 +0000, Orchid XP v7 wrote:

> [Last I heard - and I don't have any hard data for this - the guys you
> named aren't exactly short of cash.]

They're not, but what does that have to do with hardware support?  Dell, 
HP, IBM/Lenovo all sell machines with Linux pre-installed on them.  It 
would see that this would be hard to do if hardware support "wasn't there 
yet".

Jim

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