Re: Explaining FreeBSD features
That is so cool it's unbelievable! Ted - Original Message - From: Robert Watson [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Ted Mittelstaedt [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, March 01, 2007 1:52 PM Subject: RE: Explaining FreeBSD features On Thu, 23 Jun 2005, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: And I can tell you that absolutely nothing that I have EVER read here or on USENET has EVER held a candle to the power and majesty of the flames I used to read a decade ago the old WWIV network. (that software is available http://wwiv.sourceforge.net/ if you are interested) If you are put off by the tone of what you see here, you would become catatonic if you read 5 minutes of that. Those flamers were so good that they could cause temporary blindness to their victims. Ted, As an apparent ex-WWIV user, you might be amused by this: http://www.watson.org/~robert/star-lit/wwiv/ (ex-WWIV BBS Sysop from the early 1990's) Robert N M Watson Computer Laboratory University of Cambridge ___ freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-advocacy To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: FreeBSD's Visual Identity: Outdated?
-Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Roger 'Rocky' Vetterberg Sent: Monday, December 27, 2004 4:57 PM To: Simon Burke Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; freebsd-questions@freebsd.org; freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD's Visual Identity: Outdated? Simon Burke wrote: [snip] 2. If it wasn't for the interesting content and structure of the FreeBSD website, it would be among the less beautiful. Yes, it serves its purpose well by being simple and straight to the point. But a redesign could offer just the same -- simplicity and accuracy -- without being ugly. Aesthetics are not everything, the web site does what its supposed to do. Also i actually like how it looks. A lot of people have strong feelings about all these all singing all dancing webistes. There is just no need. Keep it simple and easy to navigate around thats all thats really important. If the aesthetics really matter more than function to such people who use BSD then they would probably be not using BSD but either windows or linux, where you have a nice pretty GUI to look at all the nice pretty sites. This is where I think a lot of people simply does not understand the problem. Roger I understand the problem, I wrote a book on FreeBSD integration in 2000. The problem is I think you don't understand the problem. Im a FreeBSD user. I like FreeBSD because it does not have all the flashy installers and pretty GUI's that many linux distros seems to have today. That frankly isn't the reason you should like it. You should like it because it works better than most commercial operating systems let alone most operating systems. But still, Ive been screaming for years for someone to improve the website. Why? Anyone that has stood in front of a boardroom full of CEO's or similar and tried to promote the use of FreeBSD in a big organisation knows why. They might like all the facts about the os, the rock-solid stability, the lightning-fast performance and its solid reputation as a server os, but one look at the website and they will run screaming towards the nearest linux advocate instead. Most of the CEO's I've dealt with don't give a shit on a shingle about a product website. What they care about is: 'can what I need done be done in a way that is a) cheap and b) works and c) won't lock me in to you' FreeBSD meets criteria A and B really well but it does not meet C. Linux meets A and B but BARELY meets C. Windows definitely meets C and usually meets B and doesen't usually meet A. The problem of course is that A and C are related. If I am a CEO and I sign a FreeBSD or Linux deal - and you are a sole-source provider, then once I have all my business processes into you, I'm locked into you. Once that happens my thought processes are that your going to become very expensive to me - why, because there's no competition to you out there. I'm not going to do that unless I trust you implicitly. And there's very few business people I am ever going to trust implicitly, save perhaps unless your a son or daughter, and even then I may not. You have to understand of course that this is old-school knee-jerk thinking. The CEO's are scared to death of you Roger. They don't understand what your selling, they don't understand how to integrate technology into their systems, they don't even understand their current system. CEO's choose Windows because they think that there's enough Windows guys out there that if they don't like the one they have they can boot him out and get another. They only will give up choosing Windows if they either absolutely cannot afford it, or if Windows simply won't do what they need done. If they cannot afford it, what they will then do is keep dragging Windows consultant after Windows consultant in to present to them, until they stumble over an ignoramus (which is not hard) who over commits himself and promises the world. They will then burn up this guy, threatening lawsuits and everything else until they have extracted the last drop of free work they can, then they will jettison him. If they simply cannot find any ignoramuses then I've seen them try deputizing some sales guy or secretary to manage their Windows deployment, and finally a year afterwards when they have a house full of Windows XP Home edition and no server, and a giant workgroup that's falling apart, and they have lost some critical files because they wern't backing up Sally Sue's workstation and her disk crashed, then they will panic and overspend on a Windows installation. The CEO's that choose FreeBSD or Linux are the ones where even the Windows consultants they drag in all tell them I can't do that either because Windows cannot do it, or because the price they want it done at is so unbelievably cheap that even the ignoramus Windows consultants can see that it's impossible. My take on it is that about 90% of the FreeBSD
RE: Explaining FreeBSD features
-Original Message- From: Erich Dollansky [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, June 21, 2005 5:57 PM To: Ted Mittelstaedt Cc: Fafa Hafiz Krantz; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Explaining FreeBSD features I do not think that it the design of Windows which makes it target. It is the kind of support people with no knowledge get which makes it. People pay for Windows, not for FreeBSD. The support structures are totally different because of this. If support is what hinges on getting the no knowledge people on board, then you may as well give up now because your never going to be able to fund the kind of support structure Windows has from FreeBSD. This gives rise to a rather serious Catch-22 with FreeBSD: You need to really understand intimately how FreeBSD works and how computer software that runs on it works in order to get it to work well enough for you to learn intimately how it works. I do not think so. If people with no knowledge would get proper answers when they run into problems instead of the hint to read the manual would help a lot here. Why should they? If they were paying someone for FreeBSD support that is one thing. Nobody is getting paid to answer questions on the mailing list and on Usenet, if a no-knowledge person asks a question that is answered in the manual, then it is going overboard already, to even tell them to RTFM. They really shouldn't be asking questions if they haven't RTFMed. What is the difference to FreeBSD if the system is running once? Bringing a large number of ignoramuses on board who are dedicated to continuing to be ignoramuses, does not help the FreeBSD project at all. It may help some people making money off servicing those people, but otherwise they are deadweight. You know, even raw newbies who have RTFM can help the FreeBSD project by answering posts on the support forums with pointers to the manual!! There is no need for an interface like this if the people starting with no computer knowledge would get proper help just to get the machine up and running. Proper help is in the manual, it is in my book, and in Greg Lehey's book, and in several other books written by a number of people. My book is in the local public library, check it out! So, I believe, is Greg's. The official manual is online. There are hundreds of web pages that people have setup regarding FreeBSD installation that come up with Google. I am sorry you are going to have to do better than that. The proper help is out there, you just have to spend a little effort looking for it. Let it tell me this way. I have a neighbour who has a Ph.D. in biology. If she would give me the same answer when it comes to gardening, I would stop gardening as I do not want to know the background. All I want to know is how I can get rid of a special kind of pest. I can only ask why do you bother to garden in the first place? Without that background, you don't know why the pesticide that she recommends works. And next season if it doesen't work, you don't know why either. It's like the saying give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach him to fish and you feed him for a lifetime You just want the fish - I want to feed myself for the rest of my life. Sadly, your attitude is one of the reasons that the United States is being run into the ground by a bunch of religious conservatives these days. Those people are just like you - they don't want to know anything about Stem Cell research, they just want to be told whether it's bad or not. Honestly, before you knock it, you should try to understand how the world works sometime. It's really a better way to live. Do you really want to die like your distant ancestors did - not knowing why the rain falls, or the wind blows, or the sun and moon rise and set? Should the human species strive for an advanced technological society where all the members have absolutely no clue as to how anything they use in their daily life even works? Are we to become a society of infants, with the machines taking care of us because we do not understand how they operate? Ted ___ freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-advocacy To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Explaining FreeBSD features
-Original Message- From: Erich Dollansky [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, June 21, 2005 9:37 PM To: Vulpes Velox Cc: Ted Mittelstaedt; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Explaining FreeBSD features Hi, Vulpes Velox wrote: Ignorant useless users should be supported by commercial ventures, not community ones. They will just drag the community down with their weight if they don't help out. This would be the real tough one. There should also be a way to write some kind of descripton for the people between. I found the handbook to be useful in this area. Yes, if you understand it. It is written be serious IT professionals for serious IT professionals. Even a serious none IT professional has problems understanding it. Then read one of the many FreeBSD books. The one by Annelise Anderson is most certainly not written for serious IT professionals. I know because I have read it. Our problem is that we all do not know the people who would speak the language none IT professionals understand. No, your problem is that you are confusing TRAINING with INSTRUCTION. The FreeBSD project has an obligation to provide instructions with the system. That, they do. But they do not have an obligation to provide training, nor does any company for their product. Even Microsoft charges extra for that. Ted ___ freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-advocacy To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Explaining FreeBSD features
-Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Fafa Hafiz Krantz Sent: Monday, June 20, 2005 12:56 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Explaining FreeBSD features Hello. Thank you all for everything so far. But I am not looking for comparisons. I am looking for stuff that has been written so that people can understand. Let's say this: Multi-threaded SMP architecture capable of executing the kernel in parallel on multiple processors, and with kernel preemption, allowing high priority kernel tasks to preempt other kernel activity, reducing latency. This includes a multi-threaded network stack and a multi-threaded virtual memory subsystem. With FreeBSD 6.x, support for a fully parallel VFS allows the UFS file system to run on multiple processors simultaneously, permitting load sharing of CPU-intensive I/O optimization. In the real world, that ought to sound more like: FreeBSD includes support for symmetric multiprocessing and multithreading. This makes the kernel lock down levels of interfaces and buffers, minimizing the chance of threads on different processors blocking each other, to give maximum performance on multiprocessor systems. Fafa, I've seen these kinds of efforts before and they are all generally doomed to failure. You see, the problem is that FreeBSD is not a general computer operating system product. It is a very specific product in fact. Now, the USES that FreeBSD can be put to are VERY general. BUT, do NOT make the mistake of confusing the fact that just because FreeBSD can be put to general use, that somehow it is a general product. It is not. FreeBSD is targeted at 2 main groups of people: 1) Very knowledgeable people who are using it for personal, or in-house corporate projects. 2) Very knowledgeable people who are using it to construct turnkey systems for customers who couldn't care less what is under the hood. By contrast, Windows and Linux are in fact, general computer operating system products. They are targeted at groups #1 and #2, but they are also targeted at group #3 which are: 3) People who barely know how to push a button who have a problem they need to fix with a computer operating system, and they really don't care if they understand how the fix works as long as it works. This gives rise to a rather serious Catch-22 with FreeBSD: You need to really understand intimately how FreeBSD works and how computer software that runs on it works in order to get it to work well enough for you to learn intimately how it works. Windows and Linux solved this Catch-22 by dumbing-down the interface to their operating systems. Thus, an ignoramus can get up and running with both of these systems, and that person can remain fat, dumb, and happy, completely ignorant of what he is doing, and those systems will still work enough to get the job done. It may be a half-assed fix, but it is better than nothing. FreeBSD by contrast, long ago decided not to do this. For starters, if you dumbed-down the FreeBSD interface, then to most people FreeBSD wouldn't be any different than Linux or Windows, so why mess with it? But, most importantly, a dumbed-down interface gets in the way of a knowledgeable person, and over time becomes a tremendous liability. With FreeBSD, the only way that a newbie can break the Catch-22 is old-fashioned mental elbow grease. In short, by learning a bit at a time, expanding on that, and repeating the process. It is a long slow way to get to know anything, but once you get there, you really do know everything in intimate detail. This isn't a popular thing to tell newbies. Ted Thanks. -- Fafa Hafiz Krantz Research Designer @ http://www.home.no/barbershop Enlightened @ http://www.home.no/barbershop/smart/sharon.pdf -- ___ Sign-up for Ads Free at Mail.com http://promo.mail.com/adsfreejump.htm ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-advocacy To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
