Linux-Advocacy Digest #283, Volume #26 Thu, 27 Apr 00 09:13:08 EDT
Contents:
Re: i cant blieve you people!! (Donal K. Fellows)
Re: which OS is best? ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Re: which OS is best? ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Re: Linux v. BeOS (Donal K. Fellows)
Re: Backdoors in Windows 2000? (JFW)
Re: Terry Porter is an asshole (Terry Porter)
Re: Time for the MS-rats to desert (bill davidsen)
Re: i cant blieve you people!! (rj friedman)
Re: IBM DUMPS REDHAT!!! WhY diD it TaKE them SO lung? (John Travis)
Re: Where is PostScript support?? (Donal K. Fellows)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Donal K. Fellows)
Crossposted-To: comp.sys.mac.advocacy,comp.os.os2.advocacy
Subject: Re: i cant blieve you people!!
Date: 27 Apr 2000 12:03:50 GMT
In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
Bobby D. Bryant <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I'd rather sent $10 to the next person that sends me a Make Money
> Fast!!!! e-msg. It works quite as well as the stock market -- so
> long as you aren't the last one to pay out before the game folds.
I thought that *was* how the stock market worked...
Donal (TIC)
--
Donal K. Fellows http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~fellowsd/ [EMAIL PROTECTED]
-- I may seem more arrogant, but I think that's just because you didn't
realize how arrogant I was before. :^)
-- Jeffrey Hobbs <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Crossposted-To:
comp.os.ms-windows.advocacy,comp.sys.mac.advocacy,comp.os.ms-windows.nt.advocacy,alt.flame.macintosh
Subject: Re: which OS is best?
Date: Thu, 27 Apr 2000 07:18:32 -0500
On Wed, 26 Apr 2000 19:50:46 -0600, Subpop <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
>in article
>[EMAIL PROTECTED],
>[EMAIL PROTECTED] at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote on 4/26/00 4:52 PM:
>
>>> Of course, that is assuming that all CDs have an autostart feature on them..
>>> (rhetorical statement: No, most CDs DON'T have autostart - usually only game
>>> CDs do)
>> Absolutely incorrect.
>
>From what standpoint?.. I know this from experience.. I routinely either
>perform or oversee installations of hundreds of different titles of software
>and hardware on computer systems every day.. Believe me, I'm not uttering a
>falsity when I say that MOST CDs lack an autostart program.
Can you name some of those CDs, then? Of what most offices use today
(NT4, Office 97 + Outlook 98, plus half a dozen other apps) most of
those have the full autostart application. And if it's MS, of course
it has the full autostart bit - and guess who's the dominant vendor in
applications? Yep - MS.
>> That depends. IBM, for one, does have the "Test CD before booting
>> from HD" and I suspect it's far more common than you suggest.
>
>Not out of the box they don't - most Aptivas and Thinkpads are set to check
>HD before CD-ROM most of the time out of the box... unless they smartened up
>in the last month.
I've looked at several Aptivas recently, and out of the box, they do
indeed boot from the CD first if a bootable CD is present. Have you
actually tried this?
>>> In this case it is "Okay, what make is your computer again?.. Oh, reboot,
>>> press F1... no the key at the top of your computer that says F1.. Now that
>>> you're in BIOS settings, try to find where the start up sequence is.. "
>> ...if they need to do this.
>
>The point isn't whether they need to.. The point is why it is even a
>question.. Your whole thread is about ease of doing an installation on a
>Windows machine.. I'm simply stating a fact - it is a heck of a lot easier
>on a Mac - this is mainly due to smart software vendors who seem to get
>stupid when looking at a Windows machine... (case in point, check out an
>installation of Photoshop or Illustrator on a PC and compare it to a Mac -
>night and day)
How so? I don't install either, so tell me how it's different,
please.
>> Apple is 3% of the market, give or take. If you can learn it for a
>> computer maker that has a 3% market, why can't you do so for a maker
>> that has a 5% or 8% market?
>
>First off that 3% number is circa 1997 - get some updated stats.. Secondly,
Of the ENTIRE market (not the home market) Apple's pretty low -
whether it's 3% or 4% isn't terribly material.
>since when does market share make a difference to the usability of a
>computer interface.. We weren't saying anything about the popularity of Macs
>over PCs or vise-versa..
No, we said "If you can learn it for 3% of the market.... " - and it's
true - why can't you?
>Learning isn't the point - 95% of modern computer users don't know anything
>about computers.. When you have to coach someone over the phone, a typical
>Windows install will take a technician at least 3 times as long as a Mac
>install of the same product (provided, of course, it is a Mac product)..
>That is just stupid because it is a simple interface flaw that PCs have had
>since the dawn of time.
3x longer with a Mac technician trying to help a person do something
in Windows I can believe; 3x longer with a PC tech that knows what
he's doing? I don't think so.
>>> Of course, also, some people don't feel like erasing their hard drives -
>>> they just want to install components.. Good luck with a run-of-the-mill
>>> restore CD..
>>
>> That varies; if that's important, buy from a maker that does this - or
>> better yet, run an OS (Linux, Unix, NT, Win2k) that doesn't require
>> reinstalls like MacOS does.
>How can that vary..?
They're all different vendors with different software and methods of
reinstalling that software, perhaps?
>Tell me how many people you know of who would not
>benefit from a software restore CD that would be smart enough to give a
>person a choice of whether or not to completely wipe the HD clean to do a
>re-install or to simply re-install missing/damaged components.. I know of
>none and I deal with an average of 35 different users a day - most of them
>business clients using Windows PCs who do not have this option available to
>them.. (of the big 3, IBM, Compaq, and HP, none offer this option)..
Business clients naturally couldn't. They'd have a very customized
image - the NT domain structure alone would prevent that,
unfortunately. However, fortunately you shouldn't need to do this.
>NT and Win2k..? geez, that's almost too funny..
It's not, actually. Once it's installed you shouldn't need to
reinstall.
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Crossposted-To:
comp.os.ms-windows.advocacy,comp.sys.mac.advocacy,comp.os.ms-windows.nt.advocacy,alt.flame.macintosh
Subject: Re: which OS is best?
Date: Thu, 27 Apr 2000 07:23:52 -0500
On Thu, 27 Apr 2000 04:59:27 GMT, [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Jim Richardson)
wrote:
>>Helix-modified-Gnome isn't all bad, but it's still a far cry from the
>>ease-of-use of Windows/MacOS's GUI.
>
><rant of the day>
>
>So can someone explain why it is I have to open a pdf file in windows in
>order to print it? I mean, under linux, dragging the file to the printer
>icon, or typing lpr file.pdf prints it just fine. Why does windows feel
>it is neccessary to open it up with adobe acrobat first? It takes a long
>time compared to simply dragging it to the printer icon in KDE. I mean,
>if I drag it to the printer icon in windows, windows asks me for a file
>association, I don't want to open it, just print it.
Why would it ask for a file association? Acrobat automatically
registers itself at installation. It sounds like you didn't install
Acrobat Reader - you only copied the installation from another
machine, without adding the correct entries in the registry (which
normally happens for you at installation time). When I drag a PDF
onto a printer, it prints for me perfectly. (I just did it.)
> Another thing, why is it that windows can't seem to deal with
>postscript files, under linux, there's ghost script and the like, all
>set up and easy as click to use, from the command line or gui. Sure, I
>can go to the effort of grabbing GS and GV for windows, but why doesn't
>it come with something similar?
You'd have to tell me what those are before I can tell you what NT
does in their place.
>Ymmv, but for me, linux is easier to use, and with the exception of
>games, has better and more apps.
In some ways yes, in some no.
>To top it all off, the W95 machine I was using briefly today froze, I had
>tried running telnet from the "Run" menu item, (have done so before with
>no prob) and the system froze, a few minutes later, it was rebooting, except
>it had somehow trashed the C: drive, which it no longer recognized as a
>bootable disk.
I don't think anyone here seriously defends 95 as the 'be-all' machine
for work.
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Donal K. Fellows)
Subject: Re: Linux v. BeOS
Date: 27 Apr 2000 12:24:02 GMT
In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
Ben <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Does anyone know how BeOS has set up its OS so that when you add a
> processor in SMP you get near double the performance without having to
> rewrite the applications or having to reinstall the OS? I've asked
> around, and from what I can tell, Linux does not have this
> capabilility. Is there anything fundamental stopping Linux from having
> this type of functionality? Are there any plans to add this
> functionality to Linux? Thanks for the input.
It depends on how you structure your OS and applications, and some
apps gain far more from a second processor than others. In general
this is a rather deep topic, but I could hunt down a few references if
you are interested.
Looking more specifically at what you're asking about, I'd say that it
really depends on a great deal of things. The fewer locks you have in
the OS kernel, the faster that can operate though only apps that are
mostly kernel-bound would be greatly affected - you need some locks in
any case, since you are eventually accessing resources that can only
do a limited amount of things at a time (like disk space, memory,
network interfaces, etc.) With applications themselves, it depends
quite strongly on what the app is doing. A text editor spends most of
its time waiting for you to type something, so adding a second
processor will make very little difference there.
Of course, there is also a down-side in that in order to be able to
scale to a second processor (or more) you need to put in extra
communications to handle the passing of shared info between the two
(if the processes have nothing in common, pretty much any OS should
be able to schedule them to separate CPUs and give them both a full
processor's worth of computation power) and that *slows down* the app
when running on a single processor. Unless you do the nasty trick of
concealing the IPC in a library and use a different library depending
on the number of processors being used. But in that case it is a good
question as to whether you are running the same program, or just one
that happens to produce the same results[*]...
It seems likely to me that the difference in performance between BeOS
and Linux depends very much on what you are doing. Some ways of using
the system will do better on one, and some on the other. This is a
natural consequence of the fact that the two have been performance
optimised for different normal-use situations.
I do know for sure that there are people working on improving the
performance of the kernel in a multi-processor environment. I have no
idea if this boost in performance will be particularly visible to you,
given your preferred application mix seems to be multimedia oriented.
*shrugs* People's Mileage Really Does Vary...
Donal.
[* For that matter, what do we mean by "the same program" anyway?
This topic is *way* deeper than I care to put in a footnote... ]
--
Donal K. Fellows http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~fellowsd/ [EMAIL PROTECTED]
-- I may seem more arrogant, but I think that's just because you didn't
realize how arrogant I was before. :^)
-- Jeffrey Hobbs <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
------------------------------
From: JFW <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Crossposted-To:
comp.os.ms-windows.nt.advocacy,comp.os.os2.advocacy,comp.sys.mac.advocacy,alt.conspiracy.area51
Subject: Re: Backdoors in Windows 2000?
Date: Thu, 27 Apr 2000 04:41:09 -0700
On 27 Apr 2000 08:45:42 GMT, [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Rob S. Wolfram)
wrote:
>Drestin Black <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>If there is a backdoor in W2K - show it to us, if not, shut up.
>
>Well, I'm not sure if it also concerns W2K, but it does concern Windows:
>http://www.counterpane.com/crypto-gram-0004.html#MicrosoftActiveSetup"Backdoor"
>
>Sufficient?
Not really. The case Carlos noted doesn't actually demonstrate a
hole. It misses a couple of details, for starters.
1. The Cryptogram description implies the potential threat would be
the ability to force incompatible revisions of MS-signed code onto a
system, but there's no indication that's actually possible. Given
that version-checking is part of the ActiveX system, there's no
substantiation to show that just because something is MS-signed it can
break version dependencies, or for that matter, not alert the user.
2. An MS-signed null item is a far sight different from an actual
ActiveX control. It's true that MS-signed controls don't appear to
have to follow the rules of other controls, but OTOH, lacking an
actual example, it's only a theory that one could maliciously
construct anything useful. See next item for a reason why MS probably
needs to be able to do updates without restriction.
3. MS having install rights for ActiveX controls which are securely
signed by them is not a backdoor. That they chose to make exceptions
to their policies for updates verifiably from them isn't surprising,
since otherwise it would be intrinsically difficult for them to update
IE's policy code itself. That said, it doesn't in any way prove there
is a security hole that is actually _usable_ by others. You cannot
just slap an MS signature on any bundle of ActiveX code, after all.
jfw
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Terry Porter)
Subject: Re: Terry Porter is an asshole
Reply-To: No-Spam
Date: 27 Apr 2000 20:30:05 +0800
On Wed, 26 Apr 2000 21:45:21 -0400,
[EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>What a
......
(Various terms of endearment)
Hey thanks Jethro, all fan mail greatfully received :)
Basically I don't care what your saying about me, as long as your *talking*
about me.
>
>JETHRO BODINE
>
Cheers.
Kind Regards
Terry
--
**** To reach me, use [EMAIL PROTECTED] ****
My Desktop is powered by GNU/Linux, and has been
up 7 hours 52 minutes
** Registration Number: 103931, http://counter.li.org **
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (bill davidsen)
Crossposted-To:
comp.os.linux.development.system,comp.os.ms-windows.advocacy,comp.os.ms-windows.nt.advocacy,comp.os.linux.networking,comp.os.linux.security,comp.os.ms-windows.networking.tcp-ip,alt.conspiracy.area51
Subject: Re: Time for the MS-rats to desert
Date: 27 Apr 2000 12:28:31 GMT
In article <8e7bns$jr2$[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
Chad Myers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
|
| "John Unekis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]...
|
| [SNIP: Hateful ignorant blathering]
Sorry to disagree, but when management is protected against the
financial losses caused by management mistakes, and the workers are left
to take the loss, it's not illogical to think that some of them will
bail. Sort of like the Civil War, where officers who lost a leg were
fitted with a prothesis (such as it was those days), and the enlisted
men were assurred that they would get used to their crutches.
| Is this what anti-MS people think? No real logical foundation, it's just
| "hip" to hate MS because they're a big bad corporation? They're the
| big-bad-corporation-to-hate-d'jour?
For years, not d'jour. That whole series of Doonesbury cartoons about
MS first offering to buy the little software company and then reverse
engineering the product and giving it away. This isn't new, MS cloned
new applications and "sold" them, except that every copy of PC-DOS
seemed to come with free coupons for the MS version. That's the same
level playing field at a Tomcat killing all the male kittens in a litter
to keep them from getting big and competing.
I could tell you a few other stories, but they would be in violation
of NDA. About MS telling people that if their application used Netscape
by default MS would not give them prerelease info on Win98, and would
endorse their competitors who agreed to make Explorer the browser. And
how about the applications which suddenly don't work with Win2k,
requiring expensive upgrades, while the MS competing application from
Win95 still works? See the Metcalf colums on the _InfoWorld_ web site.
Every business which had to spend money compensating for MS "normal
business practices" has a reason to dislike MS, it's not some irrational
reaction, but a reaction to being bullied for several decades.
--
bill davidsen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> CTO, TMR Associates, Inc
"Having first claimed that it did not shoot the victim, then that
everyone does it, and then that the victim would have died anyway,
Microsoft now argues that the victim is unharmed."
Government brief, Microsoft antitrust 1999
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (rj friedman)
Crossposted-To: comp.os.os2.advocacy,comp.sys.mac.advocacy
Subject: Re: i cant blieve you people!!
Date: 27 Apr 2000 12:45:17 GMT
On Thu, 27 Apr 2000 10:21:59
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Darren
Winsper) wrote:
�> 5. Presenting falsified evidence to the court - TWICE.
�Twice? I know of the falsified video, what was the other thing?
The "redone" video.
________________________________________________________
[RJ] OS/2 - Live it, or live with it.
rj friedman Team ABW
Taipei, Taiwan [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To send email - remove the `yyy'
________________________________________________________
------------------------------
From: John Travis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: IBM DUMPS REDHAT!!! WhY diD it TaKE them SO lung?
Date: Thu, 27 Apr 2000 07:27:45 -0500
Actually yes I noticed the header in his first post and so did several
others.
>And why did you post your message from linux with a name like linonut
instead of from win2000
It was just too damn blatant and funny to not reply 8^)
jt
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Donal K. Fellows)
Subject: Re: Where is PostScript support??
Date: 27 Apr 2000 12:54:33 GMT
In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
Stephen Cornell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> As I said in the original post, my next presentation will be done
> using pdflatex/acrobat. It's not as fast, powerful, or easy to use as
> Powerpoint, though I would agree that it looks better. Xdvi and
> ghostscript are too slow.
It depends a lot on what fonts you're using (xdvi is much faster if it
doesn't have to rebuild the glyphs you're using :^) and modern systems
are so beefy they can cope with running xdvi and gs at a reasonable
speed.
> However, LaTeX's forte is in producing paper documents with a uniform,
> professional look, whereas the requirements for presentation slides
> are somewhat different. Sometimes you want to add arrows between your
> text and your graphics; sometimes you just want to resize the text box
> so that the words wrap a little differently or to allow just a little
> more text on one particular slide; sometimes you want to add a photo,
> or position a picture or two by hand. Doing any of these things under
> Latex has me reaching for the text book and spending the next half
> hour or more tinkering.
I've never felt it necessary to do such stuff. As far as I'm
concerned, once the presentation has got the title slide and a few
slides of bullet points and/or pictures, that's it. Fancy animated
graphics add nothing worthwhile to any presentation I've seen, and
random arrows just seem to make everything untidy.
In fact, I've only ever seen one use of presentation graphics that was
truly effective and that was very subtle. All it was was slightly
toning down the bullet points that were not actively being discussed.
It helped to keep both the talk and discussion focussed, and yet it
didn't draw attention to itself. Very nice, very effective. And
utterly the exception to the rule (misusing the phrase horribly. :^)
I don't go to talks to look at animations, people. If I wanted that,
I'll play a game, watch TV or go to the cinema! When I go to a talk,
I expect to find something out about what is being talked about, and I
do not expect to have to fight my way to the meaning past the window
dressing...
Donal.
--
Donal K. Fellows http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~fellowsd/ [EMAIL PROTECTED]
-- I may seem more arrogant, but I think that's just because you didn't
realize how arrogant I was before. :^)
-- Jeffrey Hobbs <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
------------------------------
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