Them darn Linux pirates

[Singapura]

Trying to subvert little kids into using something different then Microsoft... Good thing the teachers in Texas know when they need to step in 

http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/ignorant-teacher-linux-in-education.html

[danny_galaga]

"No software is free and spreading that misconception is harmful" 


"Mr. Starks, I along with many others tried Linux during college and I assure you"  that i didnt inhale 

edit: reading that letter though, i wonder about its authenticity. surely even a teacher in texas can spell 'conference' ?

[Malenko]

sounds extremely made up and not very well done either.
I could rewrite that story far more convincingly and with fewer typos

[Dartful Dodger]

It's obviously fake, unless she teaches at a nursing home, no one under 40 uses Linux.

[HaRuMaN]

It's obviously fake, unless she teaches at a nursing home, no one under 40 uses Linux.

Whaaa?

[danny_galaga]

It's obviously fake, unless she teaches at a nursing home, no one under 40 uses Linux.

Whaaa?

where would we be without dartfuls strangely deadpan humour 

[ark_ader]

If it wasn't for Micro$oft we would still be using 486 PCs.  If M$ suddenly stopped selling and supporting Windows from 3.1x and Linux stepped in we would be using 486 PCs right now.

Be grateful to Bill for your cheap hardware, and the ability to play Discs of Tron on your Quad Core PC.   

[HaRuMaN]

^^ proof positive that the Atkins diet damages your brain ^^

[ChadTower]

Yep.  It is not the home market driving processor development.  It's the enterprise market.  The home market is a secondary benefit to manufacturers.

[Justin Z]

If by "using 486 PCs" you mean we might have software that is efficient enough to run fine on 486s so there would be no need for faster hardware, then I guess I see what you're saying, lol

[hypernova]

"No software is free and spreading that misconception is harmful" 


"Mr. Starks, I along with many others tried Linux during college and I assure you"  that i didnt inhale 

edit: reading that letter though, i wonder about its authenticity. surely even a teacher in texas can spell 'conference' ?

My sister-in-law has a degree in teaching.  And she's an atrocious speller.  I'm surprised there aren't MORE typos in that letter.  Many teachers are morons, and shouldn't be teaching.

[ark_ader]

^^ proof positive that the Atkins diet damages your brain ^^

And your digestive system.

 

Yep.  It is not the home market driving processor development.  It's the enterprise market.  The home market is a secondary benefit to manufacturers.

Enterprise was not a driving force in those days Chad, not as much as it is now.  But it did have an knock on effect on pricing, as most corporations were still using VAX Pathworks and Data General mainframes.  Heck most of the Windows 3.x were used for mainframe access anyway.

If by "using 486 PCs" you mean we might have software that is efficient enough to run fine on 486s so there would be no need for faster hardware, then I guess I see what you're saying, lol

Yeah if that efficient software didn't have such an issue with upkeep.  I still have a 486 kicking about with NT4 on it with Slackware Linux.  Both still suitable for today's needs, yet we have to muddy the water with this multimedia crap and poorly written software. 

[ChadTower]

Enterprise was not a driving force in those days Chad, not as much as it is now.  But it did have an knock on effect on pricing, as most corporations were still using VAX Pathworks and Data General mainframes.  Heck most of the Windows 3.x were used for mainframe access anyway.

Not in the X86 world... but in the Sun/UNIX world, which is where all of the major progress at that time was made, that is where it happened.  Sun workstations, Sparcs, etc. 

[danny_galaga]

My sister-in-law has a degree in teaching.  And she's an atrocious speller.  I'm surprised there aren't MORE typos in that letter.  Many teachers are morons, and shouldn't be teaching.

thats a hell of a thing to say about your sister, hyper! did she do her degree in texas, perhaps   

my sister is a teacher too. she can spell. she got her degree in australia 

[lkench]

If by "using 486 PCs" you mean we might have software that is efficient enough to run fine on 486s so there would be no need for faster hardware, then I guess I see what you're saying, lol

Yeah if that efficient software didn't have such an issue with upkeep.  I still have a 486 kicking about with NT4 on it with Slackware Linux.  Both still suitable for today's needs, yet we have to muddy the water with this multimedia crap and poorly written software. 
[/quote]
Bah, I seem to remember someone saying, how could we ever need any more than 640K of memory?

It's all prodify's fault(heck, we could probably go all the way back to compuserve if we wanted to) - letting all the idiots on to our cool internet and then some joker came up with this crazy World Wide Web - with all it's fancy color movie pictures with synchronized sound.  Edlin.com was so much better than notepad.exe - if you haven't got it yet, the functionality we demand(and expect) today, requires more processing power.  If all computers had to do today still was just count votes, the Univac would still be fine, but someone decided computers didn't have to take up entire floors of buildings and could do a lot more interesting things than just count votes or calculate missile trajectories...stupid IBM for wanting to make computers "personal"  Say what you want about how inelegantly designedand full of bugs Windows is, but  it sure has made computers easier to use and more accessible to everyone.  Can you imagine the average grandparent trying to view pictures of thier grandkids in an email using Linux?
ok I'm done for now
-lkench
 PS, if anyone is from the st louis,MO area, I used to run a tiny BBS called The Electric Lamp... it was a 286 running WWIV on two 10MB hard drives(one if them washooked up RLL and formatted out closer to 15 if I remember right)....needless to say, I was never big into warez or pr0n back then....


-lkench

[ark_ader]

If by "using 486 PCs" you mean we might have software that is efficient enough to run fine on 486s so there would be no need for faster hardware, then I guess I see what you're saying, lol


Yeah if that efficient software didn't have such an issue with upkeep.  I still have a 486 kicking about with NT4 on it with Slackware Linux.  Both still suitable for today's needs, yet we have to muddy the water with this multimedia crap and poorly written software. 

Bah, I seem to remember someone saying, how could we ever need any more than 640K of memory?

It's all prodify's fault(heck, we could probably go all the way back to compuserve if we wanted to) - letting all the idiots on to our cool internet and then some joker came up with this crazy World Wide Web - with all it's fancy color movie pictures with synchronized sound.  Edlin.com was so much better than notepad.exe - if you haven't got it yet, the functionality we demand(and expect) today, requires more processing power.  If all computers had to do today still was just count votes, the Univac would still be fine, but someone decided computers didn't have to take up entire floors of buildings and could do a lot more interesting things than just count votes or calculate missile trajectories...stupid IBM for wanting to make computers "personal"  Say what you want about how inelegantly designedand full of bugs Windows is, but  it sure has made computers easier to use and more accessible to everyone.  Can you imagine the average grandparent trying to view pictures of thier grandkids in an email using Linux?
ok I'm done for now
-lkench
 PS, if anyone is from the st louis,MO area, I used to run a tiny BBS called The Electric Lamp... it was a 286 running WWIV on two 10MB hard drives(one if them washooked up RLL and formatted out closer to 15 if I remember right)....needless to say, I was never big into warez or pr0n back then....


-lkench

I remember AOL when it was a BBS.  Prodigy was very close to being an efficient use of bandwidth in the early 1990s.  And I had a 8088-12 with two MFM drives daisy chained 5mb full height and one 5 mb RLL Full height.

Those suckers were heavy, all 8 bit ISAs.  Ripped the floppy drive bays out of the desktop case.  It was the business.  Now most of my pics from my camera are 5mb....

One thing I can forget was building those 8088 and 286 clones from the back of my shop and selling them to clients.  The cuts I got from those crap cases wasn't funny, and those slices cannot be stitched either.   

Blood and motherboards do not mix. 

[FrizzleFried]

I've tinkered with Linux.  When they have the software base of Windows (or even close to it),  I'll budge...until then,  it seems like a fun toy to play with but that's about it.

[danny_galaga]

I've tinkered with Linux.  When they have the software base of Windows (or even close to it),  I'll budge...until then,  it seems like a fun toy to play with but that's about it.

x 2

That being said... 9 years ago, I played with QNX and was blown away by how much software you could cram onto a floppy disk.  I keep thinking I might grab one of those EEE notebooks and toss Ubuntu on it just to play around.

didnt they first come out with ubuntu?

[polaris]

I've tinkered with Linux.  When they have the software base of Windows (or even close to it),  I'll budge...until then,  it seems like a fun toy to play with but that's about it.

x 2

That being said... 9 years ago, I played with QNX and was blown away by how much software you could cram onto a floppy disk.  I keep thinking I might grab one of those EEE notebooks and toss Ubuntu on it just to play around.

didnt they first come out with ubuntu?

my 2 didn't, its xandros i think, i've tried ubuntu eee and was a bit disappointed as it didn't have wireless support but there's a new release due in january.
jim id certainly recommend them i think they're great, and there's some good support online from users, i do think the community is getting diluted because of the different versions of eee's and nuances between them but still lots of third party help out there.

[boykster]

Linux on the desktop will unlikely ever supplant windoze as the primary OS, but as a server OS, it's a powerhouse.  And as for processing power, there are many more driving factors behind the need for increased processing power than just M$ bloated OS code.  I run systems at work that are 99.9% cpu bound 24/7 and these are dual processor quad core 64bit athlon cpu's.....on a 486 platform I'd need 100 times the number of servers to run the same operations, and there's no way they could support the 32gigs of ram these servers have.

 

[daywane]

If by "using 486 PCs" you mean we might have software that is efficient enough to run fine on 486s so there would be no need for faster hardware, then I guess I see what you're saying, lol

Yeah if that efficient software didn't have such an issue with upkeep.  I still have a 486 kicking about with NT4 on it with Slackware Linux.  Both still suitable for today's needs, yet we have to muddy the water with this multimedia crap and poorly written software. 
[/quote]

I still have a Atari 800xl  going for a bunch of stuff 
I like what it can do for me and I keep it around for for fun

[ChadTower]

Linux on the desktop will unlikely ever supplant windoze as the primary OS, but as a server OS, it's a powerhouse.  And as for processing power, there are many more driving factors behind the need for increased processing power than just M$ bloated OS code.  I run systems at work that are 99.9% cpu bound 24/7 and these are dual processor quad core 64bit athlon cpu's.....on a 486 platform I'd need 100 times the number of servers to run the same operations, and there's no way they could support the 32gigs of ram these servers have.

Same here.  And these are servers with 8 CPUS each.  Takes a hell of a lot of horsepower to process the ongoing transactions for 6300+ stores nevermind warehouse all of that data and then process it out to be analyzed 65 ways from Sunday for targeted marketing and customer rewards programs.  And that's not factoring in the financial tracking requirements of Sarbanes Oxley or the patient confidentiality processing for HIPAA.  It's startling when you walk around some of these server rooms how much computing is going on.  Sarah Connor needs to stop looking for chess computers and start looking at retail backplanes   

[Justin Z]

It's all prodify's fault(heck, we could probably go all the way back to compuserve if we wanted to) - letting all the idiots on to our cool internet and then some joker came up with this crazy World Wide Web - with all it's fancy color movie pictures with synchronized sound.  Edlin.com was so much better than notepad.exe - if you haven't got it yet, the functionality we demand(and expect) today, requires more processing power.

For the record, my rant was about crap code that doesn't get optimized because programmers are lazy and figure "oh what the hell, they're probably running a quad core and have a cable modem anyway, who gives a crap."  Why in the world does some program like Winamp have to be 11 megs compressed?  It is beyond me.

I had a program in DOS for playing MOD files called DMP -- Dual Module Player.  I think it was about 300k zipped.  It played like eight different kinds of tracker files, and 300k only took about two minutes to download on a 2400 baud modem, so everyone was glad the author wrote tight code.

ETA and yes, you guys' examples are perfectly valid, but that's raw number crunching and not what I was talking about at all.  I run "SETI@Home" on my desktop, and download the most optimized versions of the software for exactly that reason.  I just think many modern programmers are lazy and don't look for the best ways to do things anymore because they don't have particularly stringent limitations to deal with.

The physics of Asteroids or the fractal planetary data used in Starflight are two excellent examples of the opposite mindset . . .

[lkench]

You ought to read Hackers by Steven Levy if you can find it...it's got some pretty good stuff about the "good old days" of programming.  The code bloat in my opinion is directly due to these fancy "high-level" languages like C, java, etc. and all thier fancy libraries.  If we could go back and talk to a device like the display directly in machine code and not have to through a bunch of layers of abstraction (including all the abstraction built into the processors to make them backwards compatible and still include modes to make them look like 8086's), we'd have a lot tighter code.  There's trade offs everywhere...if you want something usable, yet still affordable in terms of cost tio develop, we're stuck with "big" code.  If you want "tight" code, it's not going to be anywhere near as functional, take a "lot longer" to develop and require much more skilled developers, both of which translate to high cost somewhere...

-lkench

[RayB]

Cost of progress. Can you imagine coding an entire modern AAA video game in pure assembler? It would take 10 years.

(OHHH! That's why Duke Nukem Forever isn't out yet!)

[danny_galaga]

famous people dying (and Oscar Mayer), but our threads come back to live again 

[Dartful Dodger]

famous people dying (and Oscar Mayer), but our threads come back to live again 

Yesterday I was listening to a morning radio show and the news guy was talking about some very serious global event (I was only half listening so I don't remember what it was but it was affecting 1000s of people somewhere) and one of the DJs cut him off and asked, so how is this relevant to Michael Jackson's death?

[danny_galaga]

famous people dying (and Oscar Mayer), but our threads come back to live again 

Yesterday I was listening to a morning radio show and the news guy was talking about some very serious global event (I was only half listening so I don't remember what it was but it was affecting 1000s of people somewhere) and one of the DJs cut him off and asked, so how is this relevant to Michael Jackson's death?

 

[patrickl]

lkench is like a phenomenon that occurs only every 6 months?