nemesis wrote:
> Invisible wrote:
>> The box I was trying to set up as a print server doesn't have X 
>> installed. It's just a laptop that sits under the printer to allow it 
>> to be networked. So, when you've finished being smart... :-P
> 
> how are you attempting to setup a print server remotely when you don't 
> even know to use gzip?  Then don't come with those stories of Linux not 
> being ready for production because it crashes every time.

Er, hold on one sec... *WHERE* did I say that Linux crashes all the time 
and isn't production ready? I never said anything of the sort.

What I *actually* said that Linux is more reliable than Windows, just 
harder to set up. [It is after all *designed* for experts.] And, 
unfortunately, you often can't get hold of the necessary hardware 
drivers for things.

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

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Invisible wrote:
> KNOPPIX [which is based on Debian] and SUSE.
> 
> I have still yet to figure out how on Earth you make it so you can play 
> DVDs...

Knoppix is a LiveCD and while good, if on lower hardware it is indeed 
terribly slow.  Suse is now pretty much a property of M$.

try Ubuntu.  You won't be disappointed.  It's based on Debian too.

the DVD thing, I don't have a DVD drive to test it out, but I think all 
you need is some deCSS implementation and mplayer.  Or perhaps just 
mplayer...

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nemesis wrote:

> Suse is now pretty much a property of M$.

I'm not entirely sure that statement is actually correct.

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.

> try Ubuntu.  You won't be disappointed.  It's based on Debian too.

How do you even pronounce that? [Not that it matters I guess...]

> the DVD thing, I don't have a DVD drive to test it out, but I think all 
> you need is some deCSS implementation and mplayer.  Or perhaps just 
> mplayer...

Isn't DeCSS illegal?

Anyway, I'll have to check out the SuSE FAQ sometime. I'm *sure* it must 
be in there somewhere...

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

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Invisible wrote:
> So a company that transports a dirt-cheap commodity item that almost 
> nobody buys makes more money than the company that charges an absolute 
> fortune for it's products, which are used by the entire industrialised 
> world. How does *that* compute?! o_O

you know, that's the way geeks think.  But that's not how the world 
spins.  It's not because you feed yourself just with pizza and cheetos 
that nobody else in the world eats bananas... in fact, it's one of the 
most nutritive fruits out there.  Ask any athlete... if you know one, 
that is... :)

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Invisible escribió:
> nemesis wrote:
>> the DVD thing, I don't have a DVD drive to test it out, but I think 
>> all you need is some deCSS implementation and mplayer.  Or perhaps 
>> just mplayer...
> 
> Isn't DeCSS illegal?

Maybe it is. But it was made so you could play DVDs on Linux. Going 
illegal is the only way, thanks to DRM.

Post a reply to this message

Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
> Invisible escribió:
>> nemesis wrote:
>>> the DVD thing, I don't have a DVD drive to test it out, but I think 
>>> all you need is some deCSS implementation and mplayer.  Or perhaps 
>>> just mplayer...
>>
>> Isn't DeCSS illegal?
> 
> Maybe it is. But it was made so you could play DVDs on Linux. Going 
> illegal is the only way, thanks to DRM.

God damn you DRM!! >_<

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

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nemesis wrote:

>> So a company that transports a dirt-cheap commodity item that almost 
>> nobody buys makes more money than the company that charges an absolute 
>> fortune for it's products, which are used by the entire industrialised 
>> world. How does *that* compute?! o_O
> 
> you know, that's the way geeks think.  But that's not how the world 
> spins.  It's not because you feed yourself just with pizza and cheetos 
> that nobody else in the world eats bananas... in fact, it's one of the 
> most nutritive fruits out there.  Ask any athlete... if you know one, 
> that is... :)

Yeah, but... A copy of Vista costs, what, £800? And a bunch of bananas 
costs... £0.11. Obviously you don't buy Vista once a week, but even 
so... you'd have to eat A LOT of bananas to even approach the amount of 
money that M$ makes on a single transaction.

And these guys don't even *grow* bananas. They most *ship* them. They 
probably make, like, £0.03 per crate or something...

I mean, I guess the numbers must stack up somehow, but DAMN, that's far-out!

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

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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.

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

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Invisible wrote:
> nemesis wrote:
>> Suse is now pretty much a property of M$.
> 
> I'm not entirely sure that statement is actually correct.
> 
> M$ 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.

> 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...

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

>> the DVD thing, I don't have a DVD drive to test it out, but I think 
>> all you need is some deCSS implementation and mplayer.  Or perhaps 
>> just mplayer...
> 
> 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...

> Anyway, I'll have to check out the SuSE FAQ sometime. I'm *sure* it must 
> be in there somewhere...

sure, it's full of M$ IP, why not some RIAA licenses as well...

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Invisible wrote:

> Yeah, but... A copy of Vista costs, what, £800? And a bunch of bananas 
> costs... £0.11. Obviously you don't buy Vista once a week, but even 
> so... you'd have to eat A LOT of bananas to even approach the amount of 
> money that M$ makes on a single transaction.
> 
> And these guys don't even *grow* bananas. They most *ship* them. They 
> probably make, like, £0.03 per crate or something...

Do you have any idea the cost involved in making a major OS update like 
vista, including support and maintenance on the project versus plucking 
bananas from a tree?

Last I checked, banana plantation workers don't make $75,000+/year 
salaries.

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"Invisible" <voi### [at] devnull> a écrit dans le message de news: 
47b1cf6d$2@news.povray.org...

> I mean, I guess the numbers must stack up somehow, but DAMN, that's 
> far-out!

Well, it's well-established by now that you live in a parallel world, and 
that povray.off-topic is some kind of portal window into this amazing real 
world you keep hearing about. Nothing wrong with that of course, but you 
should definitely understand that the realities in your parallel world are 
far different from the realities in this world.

So, while in your world nobody eats bananas and Microsoft is the biggest 
company in the world, in this real world, people eat 70 million tons of 
bananas each year and Microsoft is a small outfit (relatively speaking).

1 ton of bananas = 1000 to 2000 $ so a rough estimate of the banana trade is 
about 70-140 billion dollars = more or less twice the revenue of Microsoft. 
And that's only for bananas. Look up the figures for wheat, maize or 
soybeans.

Of course, in the real world, food is actually more important that software, 
now how does *that* compute? :P

(Also, I said that the Maersk group shipped bananas, but that was a joke; 
indeed, they may ship more profitable stuff such as oil, cars and Chinese 
Christmas toys http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_M%C3%A6rsk; freight is a 
gigantic business that made billionaires such as 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onassis, who was more famous than Bill Gates in 
his time).

G.

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"nemesis" <nam### [at] nospamgmailcom> wrote in message
news:47b1d19d$1@news.povray.org...

> 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!

The video's also on wiki -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Experience_ubuntu.ogg

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Invisible wrote:
> Given time, you could probably integrate the entire thing into one giant 
> SQL statement. You'd probably find that you can actually simplify it 
> down to something rather smaller once it stated all in one operation. 
> And that the DB engine can do some pretty impressive optimisations after 
> that too.

Yeah, that's why I'm after it.

On the other hand, I've done SQL statements that I gave up on after 
they'd run for a couple of days, recoded it as a "SELECT *" without a 
where clause, calculated the new column, and wrote it back, and *that* 
ran in about 90 seconds.

(Basically, a bunch of streams, each with an event having a start time 
but no end time. Each event ends when the next event starts on the same 
stream. Assign the "duration" column to any row that doesn't have a 
duration and isn't the most recent record for that stream.)

> OTOH, if you haven't got enough time to do it... what can you do?

Post to p.o-t too much?

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

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didn't you have a counter somewhere on the number of crashes you 
experienced with it?

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nemesis wrote:
> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>> Because you had lots of OSes called UNIX that weren't compatible with
>> each other, even at the source level.  (See autoconf)
> 
> that only happens when you exchange a common API for platform-specific APIs that
> do the same thing faster or funkier.  It happens even in Java.
> 
> It doesn't really happen in M$ because there really is a single vendor with a
> single set of solutions and they can cram old APIs to handle old code in their
> newer products with newer incompatible APIs.

Yes. And how does that mean that MS didn't cause that to happen?

>>> Win9x did not support DOS programs: they simply had DOS included to handle
>>> those.
>> DOS programs ran in a window, just like they do now.
> 
> It runs in a window because that's how graphical ambients run console programs:
> by opening a window terminal and letting the console program do their job.  It
> doesn't magically transform them into full graphical programs with graphical
> drop-down menus.

Who said anything about graphics, let alone magic?

>  The OS calls such programs did were DOS calls and such calls
> are still supported these days by letting an emulated DOS handle those.

Yes. But there's also a whole bunch of things the old code did that 
didn't go through APIs, like writing directly to screen memory or 
invoking hardware INT calls. Those got caught and emulated too.

> So they can afford to provide their older APIs together with the new.  It's
> their own code, it's not really "2 different OSes"!

The program runs on two different OSes. Of course, to make this happen, 
the new OS has to support the old API. I'm not sure which of my 
statements you think you're disputing here.

>> So, different operating systems. You're making my point for me. :-)
> old code still handled by old code, not new.

Not true. What's the code in DOS that handles writing to screen memory? 
Where's the code in DOS that handles moving the cursor via IBM BIOS calls?

> last few years and while the bugs are certainly different than those of MS
> software, there doesn't seem to be as many or as little as those.

And Linux still isn't as big as MS. Yes, MS has more bugs per line of 
code than Linux.  About 2 or 3 times as many, last study I saw. But MS 
is a commercial concern.  The bugs that MS has don't seriously affect 
their profitability. (Well, before Vista, at least.)

> So, why is the single largest and richest developer in the world with so many
> bright minds and a single set of enforcement rules over their developers about
> code quality and API standards get rivalled by ad-hoc developers from around
> the world working on many different little pieces of software that eventually
> get assembled into a Linux distribution?

I'm not sure. I'd guess it's because the people working on Linux don't 
have nearly as much backward compatibility problems, and they don't have 
nearly as many cost concerns. I.e., if there's a bug in a popular Linux 
application, Linux kernel authors don't add code to the kernel to work 
around the bug - they fix the bug in the application. MS doesn't really 
have that option. Plus, if there's a problem with Linux, the person who 
fixes it is the person with the problem. With MS, the bug in the OS gets 
fixed for the customer only if it's worthwhile to MS, not if it's 
worthwhile to the customer. Economics is always skewed by having the 
benefits go to someone other than the person paying.

> It seems to me MS crappy, crippled software is such by design, so people have
> always a reason to update.

I'm sure there are decisions made to ship less-than-optimal products 
that can have an upgrade path. Every commercial company does this, 
monopoly or not.

On the other hand, I've been getting free updates and bugfixes from MS 
for years and years. So I'm not sure what incentive you think they'd 
have to ship buggy products if they're going to fix them for free.

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

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Gilles Tran wrote:
> "Invisible" <voi### [at] devnull> a écrit dans le message de news: 
> 47b1cf6d$2@news.povray.org...
> 
>> I mean, I guess the numbers must stack up somehow, but DAMN, that's 
>> far-out!
> 
> Well, it's well-established by now that you live in a parallel world, and 
> that povray.off-topic is some kind of portal window into this amazing real 
> world you keep hearing about. Nothing wrong with that of course, but you 
> should definitely understand that the realities in your parallel world are 
> far different from the realities in this world.
> 
> So, while in your world nobody eats bananas and Microsoft is the biggest 
> company in the world, in this real world, people eat 70 million tons of 
> bananas each year and Microsoft is a small outfit (relatively speaking).

ROTFLOL

you know deep inside you like the lil' guy, Gilles...

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Invisible wrote:
> Gail Shaw wrote:
> 
>> And how much software did you buy before MS was around? Don't confuse
>> correlation with causation.
> 
> Quite a lot. (Well, my parents anyway, not me personally. I didn't have 
> any money...)
> 
> We had premptive multitasking operating systems and large C compilers 
> and ray tracers and modellers and music sequencing software and complex 
> computer games and so on and so forth.

And what machine were you running this stuff on?

"""
After reading the January 1, 1975 issue of Popular Electronics that 
demonstrated the Altair 8800, Bill Gates called the creators of the new 
microcomputer, MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems), 
offering to demonstrate an implementation of the BASIC programming 
language for the system
"""

What large C compilers and music sequencing software was running before 
MS was writing software?

>> I'm emphasising small, because small software is 'easy' to write.
> 
> I don't really see how the software M$ writes is any "bigger" or "more 
> complex" than what existed before.

Uh... You don't think Windows XP is bigger or more complex than the 
mainframe OSes of the mid-70s? It's not bigger and more complex than CP/M?

> Similarly, have you *ever* seen Linux crash? 

Regularly. 3 or 4 times last week alone. On a machine where Windows 
never crashes. Sure, go ahead, blame the hardware.

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

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Darren New wrote:
> nemesis wrote:
>> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>>> Because you had lots of OSes called UNIX that weren't compatible with
>>> each other, even at the source level.  (See autoconf)
>>
>> that only happens when you exchange a common API for platform-specific 
>> APIs that
>> do the same thing faster or funkier.  It happens even in Java.
>>
>> It doesn't really happen in M$ because there really is a single vendor 
>> with a
>> single set of solutions and they can cram old APIs to handle old code 
>> in their
>> newer products with newer incompatible APIs.
> 
> Yes. And how does that mean that MS didn't cause that to happen?

because apps running in Windows don't magically run on Solaris, Mac OS, 
Linux or whatever.  What I'm trying to say is that W95, WNT or Vista, 
while not the same OS, continue using old API code to handle old user 
apps.  So, it's MS made cross-platform software possible.  The old apps 
are still relying on old API code, not new code from the new OS handling 
the old apps.

What really made cross-platform software a little more closer to reality 
were industry-strength standards, the internet, quite a few 
cross-platform development languages (Java, Python, Perl etc) and, yes, 
open-source software.  You have the source and it's compiled and running 
everywhere, so let's build more from there on and get done with it.  No 
more proprietary APIs, more portability across truly different OSes...

Post a reply to this message

Darren New wrote:
> Invisible wrote:
>> Similarly, have you *ever* seen Linux crash? 
> 
> Regularly. 3 or 4 times last week alone. On a machine where Windows 
> never crashes. Sure, go ahead, blame the hardware.

were you running as root?

desktop, server?  task?

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Invisible wrote:
> So what you're saying is that if hardware is complicated, it is 
> impossible to develop quality software?

Obviously not. But it's impossible to develop it for the same price in 
the same timeframe with the same quality.

>> Ha.  Compare what Windows XP does with your Amiga OS.  Think about 
>> hardware support, multi-processor support, multi-user support, 
>> multi-APIs for everything, wireless networking, and a million other 
>> things.
> 
> Why do we *need* multi-APIs for everything in the first place?

Because otherwise your older programs won't run. We need it because 
people don't give away the source for their commercial software.

> 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.

> 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?

> 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.

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

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Invisible wrote:
> Personally, I don't think so. People have created products like 
> OpenOffice and KOffice and so forth, and they work. Reliably.

Yet, funny enough, when I boot Linux, it screams "FAT support is ALPHA!" 
  Depends on your priorities. I haven't ever had Word actually crash on 
me, either.

> Interesing you should say that. You're aware of course that the fist 
> Amiga was a 16-bit machine, and the later ones were 32-bit?

If you're going to go along that line, the first Windows machine was 
8-bit, and now they're up to 64-bit. :-) The first Amiga was a 32-bit 
machine running on a 16-bit bus.

> And - most importantly - you can take an application written back when 
> we only had 6 bits per pixel, and run it on a screen operating at 8 bits 
> per pixel. And it can share the screen with other applications and 
> change parts of the colour table and so on and so forth, and WORK.

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

> [Assuming it does all this through the OS. The Big Problem the Amiga had 
> is that since the hardware is "always" the same, a lot of software 
> bypasses the OS. Obviously this breaks horribly when the hardware 
> changes...]

Yep. On the other hand, the original Amiga books described how to frob 
the hardware.

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

> So Windows is designed to do a bunch of unecessary stuff in the 
> background by default. I consider this a design flaw. What *useful* 
> stuff does Windows do that AmigaDOS doesn't?

It depends who you are. Aren't you the one complaining about lack of USB 
support in your NT machines?

> 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.

> If there were anything I could do to find out, I'd do it. Unfortunately, 
> there isn't.

There's lots you can do. You just don't know how. That's why they give 
you the stack dump and such.  "Wow, if only I could read a core file, 
I'd be able to tell which program is dumping core!" :-)

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

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Invisible wrote:
>> And you could use the same OS version with all these hardware 
>> configurations?
> 
> No - principly because much of the OS is in ROM. If it weren't, they'd 
> have probably designed it so you can.

Probably not.

>>> So Windows is designed to do a bunch of unecessary stuff in the 
>>> background by default. I consider this a design flaw. What *useful* 
>>> stuff does Windows do that AmigaDOS doesn't?
>>
>> Virtual memory
> 
> OK. The Amiga lacked the necessary hardware for that.

Unnecessary, obviously.


>> automatic updates
> 
> Which is only necessary because the software wasn't done right in the 
> first place.

Which is why only one version of Kickstart was ever released, yep yep.

>> protecting itself from nasty programs that try to access things they 
>> shouldn't
> 
> Hasn't UNIX been doing this for the last 40 years?

Lots of machines did. Amiga didn't. That's the point.  You didn't ask 
for what MS did that nobody else did. You asked for what MS did that 
Amiga didn't.

>> plug and play
> 
> The hardware for that didn't exist at the time.

Yes it did. It was called SOTS (Slap On The Side). And the Amiga even 
had a very clever mechanism for finding the drivers and initializing a 
change of devices. Few vendors used it, tho.

> (Although AmigaDOS does 
> support hot-swapping PCMCIA cards seemlessly.)

Not the A1000. Oh, wait, everything was perfect, so they couldn't have 
added that.

>> hibernating
> Doesn't really require much OS support, does it?

It requires a tremendous amount to do it right.

>> encryption
> Would be fairly trivial to add.

You would be surprised.  It requires, amongst other things, protected 
memory.

>> It is *not* normal behaviour, no matter what you might think of MS.
> 
> Ah, I see. So all PCs that use M$ products do this, but it's not 
> "normal"? Interesting definition. ;-)

But not all PCs that use MS products do this. Maybe all *yours* do, but 
there are global businesses that run on Windows machines. I'm working 
with one that actually abandoned Linux because it was too unreliable for 
their purposes, and they have something like 30,000 computers running 
24x7 scattered across the USA.

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

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Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
> DCOM launch, I can't disable this one,

That means you need it.

> Machine Debug Manager (C:\Program files\Common files\Microsoft 
> Shared\VS7DEBUG\MDM.EXE), which I don't need since I use gdb, not Visual 
> Studio debugger. Why is this even *installed*??

Because you asked it to be at one point. I think it's also a kernel 
debugger, btw.

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

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Invisible wrote:
> So why bother making a quality product when people will buy crap?

Right.

> Of course, if there were actually some viable competition, people would 
> realise that it is *not* "normal" for computer software to be buggy and 
> unreliable, and people would switch.

What's not "viable" about Linux et al?

> Unfortunately, thanks to M$, this 
> situation will never arise. If anybody starts making really good 
> software, they'll just get bought...

And how does MS "buy" Linux?


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

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Invisible wrote:
> No - but selling cars which you know are going to crash at least once 
> every 52 days... well, if a company tried to do that, they'd be shut 
> down. However, for software it seems it's OK to sell a malfunctioning 
> product.

I don't know what you're doing, but I've had production servers that ran 
for years on Windows without a problem.

> Well, sure, if there were an alternative,

And why isn't Linux an alternative?  Why isn't Mac OS X an alternative?

> But what about, say, Word? There's quite a few other word processors out 
> there - and in past times there were even more. And most of them were a 
> lot more reliable than Word...

So why aren't they alternatives? MS isn't buying every word processor 
company.

> Apple requires you to buy new hardware, so it's not purely a software 
> decision. Linux is nice, but... well, it's fundamentally designed for 
> UNIX nerds. So if you're not, good luck... Besides, I'm not convinced 
> that the whole UNIX design is particularly coherant. (E.g., autoconf 
> exists.)

Ding ding ding!  MS's product advantage is that it *can* be used by 
naive users without a lot of expense.

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

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Darren New wrote:
> Invisible wrote:
>> Personally, I don't think so. People have created products like 
>> OpenOffice and KOffice and so forth, and they work. Reliably.
> 
> Yet, funny enough, when I boot Linux, it screams "FAT support is ALPHA!" 

hi, I can't help but notice your timezone is wrong.  This is 2008.  We 
can write to NTFS partitions from LiveCDs, let alone simple FAT which 
BTW is the standard format in thumbdrives, which work just fine as well.

Perhaps it's time to test a new Linux distribution?  From the 2000's?

Post a reply to this message

Darren New wrote:
> Aren't you the one that's still using 10-year-old Word97?

yeah, he should update Word and you should install a decent modern Linux 
distro.

Post a reply to this message

Darren New wrote:

>> [Assuming it does all this through the OS. The Big Problem the Amiga 
>> had is that since the hardware is "always" the same, a lot of software 
>> bypasses the OS. Obviously this breaks horribly when the hardware 
>> changes...]
> 
> Yep. On the other hand, the original Amiga books described how to frob 
> the hardware.
> 
> Note that Windows supports DOS programs that bypass the OS in exactly 
> the same way, and it WORKS.

The PC has the hardware necessary to do this with sane performance 
levels. The Amiga didn't.

>> So Windows is designed to do a bunch of unecessary stuff in the 
>> background by default. I consider this a design flaw. What *useful* 
>> stuff does Windows do that AmigaDOS doesn't?
> 
> It depends who you are. Aren't you the one complaining about lack of USB 
> support in your NT machines?

OK, so USB support goes into the list of useful things Windows can do 
that AmigaDOS can't.

>> If there were anything I could do to find out, I'd do it. 
>> Unfortunately, there isn't.
> 
> There's lots you can do. You just don't know how. That's why they give 
> you the stack dump and such.  "Wow, if only I could read a core file, 
> I'd be able to tell which program is dumping core!" :-)

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.

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

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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.

Mac does run ports of most of them but is too expensive.

I'm still confident Linux will make more inroads in the desktop to the 
point of Adobe feeling an urge to port its major apps.

> So why aren't they alternatives? MS isn't buying every word processor 
> company.

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.

I've never had any trouble opening any doc, xls or ppt from email 
attachments friends mail me, but those are hardly office production 
examples, so I can't be 100% sure.

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

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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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nemesis wrote:
> Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
>> (And even Linux isn't that hard to work these days.
>> Damn hard to set up, but not that hard to operate once you eventually
>> get it working.)
> 
> hmm, what have you been running?  Linux from Scratch?

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.

On the other hand, Windows has been managing basic installs without user 
expertise for decades. :-)

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

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"Invisible" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message
news:47b1993e$1@news.povray.org...

> > It is *not* normal behaviour, no matter what you might think of MS.
>
> Ah, I see. So all PCs that use M$ products do this, but it's not
> "normal"? Interesting definition. ;-)


I've got 4 Windows PCs (one 2000, one 2003, one XP and one Vista) and none
of them have blue screened in so long, I can't remember the last crash.
I have a large number of servers ( all running windows OS, either 2000
server or 2003 server) with uptimes in months and the only reason we reboot
them at all is for patches or hardware reconfigs

I'd actually love to have a look in your system's event logs, see why
they're crashing so often. It's certainly not normal.

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Warp escribió:
>> 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.
> 

And also, I believe the list of DOS games that run on DOSBox is larger 
than the list of DOS games that run on current Windows.

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nemesis wrote:
> It's crippled with M$ tech and IP, like mono 

Mono is an implementation of an ECMA standard, just like Javascript is.

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

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Warp escribió:
> 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.
> 

Firefox indeed eats a lot of memory (it has been already identified to 
be memory fragmentation, and has improved lots in Firefox 3). But it 
only eats lots of CPU when Flash is running...

IE, on the other hand, has great performance and no standards 
compliance, and since it hasn't been updated much for years... it was 
made for older machines :P

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Phil Cook wrote:
> and yet prior to Windows 95 there were quite the number of competing OSs.

Afterwards, too. Just not on the same hardware. And not really offering 
a whole lot more.

>> Apple requires you to buy new hardware, so it's not purely a software 
>> decision.
> 
> Yet everyone loves their monopolistic ways :-)

And the software is subsidized by the hardware, which *would* be 
monopolistic if Apple split into two companies. And it *still* costs 
roughly the same for Apple software as MS software, in spite of the subsidy.

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

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Darren New wrote:

> What's not "viable" about Linux et al?

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

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

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

>> Unfortunately, thanks to M$, this situation will never arise. If 
>> anybody starts making really good software, they'll just get bought...
> 
> And how does MS "buy" Linux?

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.

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

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Invisible wrote:
> M$ is the largest and richest corporation ever to have existed in 
> recorded human history.

Only in today's dollars.

>> and yet prior to Windows 95 there were quite the number of competing OSs.
> Really? That's news.

That's why people take your opinions on the subject with a grain of 
salt. :-)

> BTW, have you ever used a Windows Live CD?

Yes.

> If you thought it was slow running from your HD then... you ain't seen 
> nothing yet! B-b-b-baby, you just ain't seen nothing yet!!

Yeah. Don't do that. :-)

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

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nemesis escribió:
> 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.

You got that backwards. "Photoshop, AutoCAD or World of Warcraft don't 
run on Linux". It's not "Linux doesn't run them". It's not Linux's fault 
that they don't run.

Post a reply to this message

>> Well, sure, if there were an alternative,
> 
> And why isn't Linux an alternative?  Why isn't Mac OS X an alternative?

Linux is designed for nerds, but Joe Average. Sure, they're trying to 
retarget it, but fundamentally that's not what it's about.

Mac OS X is an alternative - if you have several thousand pounds laying 
spare...

> Ding ding ding!  MS's product advantage is that it *can* be used by 
> naive users without a lot of expense.

So can products like Firefox and OpenOffice. And Apple stuff, actually, 
but that's very expensive...

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

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scott <sco### [at] laptopcom> wrote:
> And yet funnily enough since Vista/IE7, I've seen people who previously were 
> using FF now going back to IE - "well it has tabbed browsing already doesn't 
> it?"

  Sometimes it scares me the power Microsoft has over people.

  Back when Netscape was approximately the only web browser in existence,
with something like 99% of market share, Microsoft published their first
version of IE and in something like *one month* it surpassed Netscape's
marketshare.

  Netscape back then was rather horrid, but Microsoft's IE was even
more horrendeous. It broke about every possible standard and RFC in
existence and was completely full of security holes. It was IE which
introduced the concept of going to a website and getting your system
infected with a trojan.

  Microsoft made six versions of IE, yet they still failed to support
even the most basic of standards, such as CSS and PNG, and the list
of serious security holes is just endless.

  Yet, regarldess, IE became almost overnight the industry standard.
Because IE broke almost every single standard in existence, IE-only
websites started to spawn. IE was the measurement by which the correctness
of websites were measured. If something worked in IE but didn't work in
another browser, it was that another browser which was broken, not IE.
Nobody dared to make websites which wouldn't work with IE, no matter how
many hoops they had to jump through to achieve that. It was simply better
to have an IE-only website than a website which wouldn't work with IE.

  Yet IE was so horridly broken that even the US government advised
their citizens to use another browser. Any browser except IE.

  It took something like 5 years or more of complete cessation of the
development of IE before people finally started to slowly migrate to
other browsers. Many people wouldn't let go even then. IE was like
some kind of brainwashing, like some kind of addictive drug: They just
couldn't let it go.

  It's really scary that one company can have this kind of power.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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