Date: Wed, 21 Nov 2001 03:27:55 +0100 From: "Anthony Atkielski" <anthony@atkielski.com> To: "Mike Meyer" <mwm@mired.org> Cc: <questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: home pc use Message-ID: <01e201c17234$24bc2360$0a00000a@atkielski.com> References: <15354.60877.44081.17515@guru.mired.org><019701c17224$013e6520$0a00000a@atkielski.com> <15355.2770.644343.846234@guru.mired.org>
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Mike writes: > [Begin rant] They died because users want to > "own" their things. They don't want to have to > trust their data to some central server controlled > by the IT staff, though they expect the IT > staff to back up their machines. [end rant] Since the advent of the PC, there has been a huge shift away from central systems in general. This is most unfortunate, because a great many types of business are best facilitated with simple terminals and a large central system, instead of expensive and volatile desktop computers at every workstation. But perhaps the pendulum will swing back someday. It seems to me that an X terminal could very much simulate a personal computer for the average end user in an office, anyway. > There are those who claim that XP is going to > shake out all the people who don't want to pay > for an OS. The problem is that there might not be enough people left to make the OS profitable. > On the other hand, I've already been offered a > copy of XP Professional that supposedly had > the code that enforces the "pay forever" model > ripped out. I read that cracks for the Product Activation stuff have been on the Web for weeks now. > Money isn't the crucial resource, programmer > time is. Same thing. Programmers have to pay the rent, too. Just be glad that software isn't managed like pop music or movies on DVD. > Some of it goes to marketing, but that's because > more programmers using FreeBSD means more programmers > working on keeping the product alive. I don't know about that. One of the problems with open source is that everyone wants to use the product for free, but hardly anyone is willing to contribute to maintaining or developing or supporting it. > There are *lots* of other options. Let's see ... plain text, a GUI ... and what else? > You mean inside the company. Or anywhere. > If you've got sufficiently good - or stupid - > management, you *can* tell them you're waiting on > an answer from the support list. If they are stupid, I'd agree. If they are good, then either you won't be using open-source freeware, or you will know the freeware you are using so well that you don't have to wait on a response from a support list--you're more likely to be _answering_ questions on the support list. > You do know you can buy tech support for FreeBSD > if you really want it, don't you? So I've heard. Is it any good? Even vendor-supplied support is often dismal. > I agree - the chances of a typical user having > a use for an application that is only available > under Windows is about one in one hundred million. There are quite a few commonly-used applications that exist only under Windows. > Does it have to be an integrated tool? I'd like it to have a simple way to maintain the directory structure for the site, although I guess I could do that by hand with FTP or something. It would also be nice to have a good source editor. The editor is more important than the file maintenance stuff. I never use any of the other "features" of Visual InterDev, which is a mess overall. > I have as yet to find a point-n-clicky html or > xml editor that was as nice as psgml mode in > emacs. Does it also work for C code and Perl and so on? I like something that handles indents automagically, in particular. > Sounds like things have improved radically since > I got sick of dealing with it. Version 3.x was at least equal to Netscape 4.x; from version 4.x on, MSIE was the leader, and remains so today. > From the looks of the web, MS still supports > their extensions, as that's what people are using. Which ones? I see a rare marquee extension now and then, but that's about it. > For one thing, Sun supports their product, > instead of palming support off on resellers > so they don't have to deal with bugs. So does MS, if you pay for it. It's not cost-effective to provide unlimited support for products that are sold at the consumer prices that MS often charges. If you pay $600 for a Microsoft product, for example, and you make three support calls on it, MS is already losing money on the sale. > That latter is the real difference. Writing an > application that works in a GUI environment on > both Windows and other platforms is a PITA, > and MS is doing everything they can to keep > it that way. What choice do they have? Making the Windows GUI compatible with UNIX would be no easier than making the various UNIX GUIs compatible with Windows. > If someone power cycled the thing or some such, > it won't have a dump. My impression was that this was a very hard reboot, like pressing the reset button. I almost thought it might have been a power failure, but the UPS would beep loudly if the line power dropped. > All traps in kernel mode go through a procedure > that does a core dump before rebooting the > machine. Maybe I missed the dump. Where does it go by default? I looked in what seemed like likely places, like / and /tmp and what-not, but I didn't see anything that ended in .core. > If you've got a problem that's causing a hard > reboot without creating a trap in kernel mode, > you've got a *nasty* problem. Possibly, unless it was a very bizarre hardware glitch. > Since it's not repeatable, it's hard to tell. As long as it's not repeating, I'm happy. > Are you sufficiently confused yet? Yes, you've done very well, thanks. I'm sure I'll have X-rated dreams this evening. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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