Posts by CFWhitman

Re: XMPP?

Just as an observation. XMPP is fairly popular as an organizational chat standard. That is, there are a lot of organizations that use XMPP internally. It's ideal for that because both the standard and most of the software that implements the standard are open. It seems that the reason it's not popular as an Internet service is because there's not really any money in that.

Re: SourceFource

"Those of us that stopped using it are not aware if they changed their deceptive practice."

They've changed ownership since then, and the new ownership said none of that would be going on anymore. So far, that seems to be true. I no longer have to avoid Filezilla, for example.

I find Chrome/Chromium a much bigger resource hog than Firefox in general. There have been times that Firefox would have a memory leak and would use too many resources over the course of several days. Even now, I occasionally have to restart a Firefox session to combat choppiness if it's been up for a couple of weeks. However, it doesn't gobble up all your resources right away when you have multiple tabs open like Chrome does.

One thing I like about Firefox is that it has color management, while no browsers not based on Firefox seem to support that. Sure, your color will be pretty good with any browser if you have you session properly calibrated, but only Firefox based browsers seem to fully support color profiles.

Re: Haters gonna hate

Well, Vista was a problem to update at one point. If you could get it to update to the service pack version without destroying itself, then it was not so bad, but sometimes it would destroy itself in a very random manner trying to get the updates to apply.

That is, you could install Vista and let it run updates and see it end up destroying itself. Then you could repeat the procedure the exact same way and have it work out fine. More often than not, you could get it updated successfully, but it would destroy itself often enough to make you feel like you were playing Russian roulette with the install. I would always make sure of the updates before investing any more than necessary effort on anything else about the system.

Even after you got it installed, the network would often act strange in a domain environment, being outperformed by orders of magnitude by both XP and 7. I never noticed that issue with home versions on the Internet. Because the problems with Vista in a domain were addressed sooner by 7 than in Vista (if they ever were addressed in Vista), it never got out of the testing stage for use by the business I work for. That is, we were testing it until we were satisfied, and we became satisfied with 7 before Vista, so we passed Vista by.

Re: What?

Updating your kernel will basically never affect any of your existing software. It will rarely make it so any new software will run (perhaps there could be some software that relied on a particular new kernel feature). Kernel updates are much more likely to affect hardware compatibility than software compatibility, and that's most likely to mean a piece of hardware that didn't work will start working.

Updating your C library has the potential to affect your software, but between the software developers and the maintainers of glibc, they do a good job with backward compatibility. I've never had a program stop working after a kernel update or a glibc update. Even programs that you manually installed on your distribution will almost always continue to work after a distribution upgrade.

>How many people will now download an older version from the ESR line and disable updates because of this?

I'm guessing not very many other than the few who really want/need Java or Silverlight for some reason since very little else is affected. Remember that add-ons/extensions still work. This only applies to NPAPI plugins.

Re: It looks you're trying to use Windows as if it was Linux

"You can then redirect users folders to other locations (https://technet.microsoft.com/library/hh848267)"

Yes you can redirect selected folders (not just any folder) to other locations. This is both a lot more trouble and a lot less reliable than mounting a device/partition to a folder in Linux.

"Also it looks you don't know you can mount a partition in a mount point, no need to use links. You can mount a partition using Disk Manager or from the command line using diskpart."

On the outside this looks very similar to mounting a partition to a folder in Linux. However, mounting the Users directory in Windows on a separate partition is a magic trick (if it's possible at all). Also, again this is not reliable (so I wouldn't risk doing it with the Users directory anyway).

Yes, Linux is modeled after an OS that began to be designed in the late 60's, but with multiple users, directories, and network operation in mind from the beginning. Windows on the other hand is lugging around legacy cruft from an operating system from the 70's that had no users, no directories, and no network operation in mind. That could be part of the reason that some of these things come out looking like tacked on kludges that aren't reliable.

> "I've never cared (or even noticed, and I haven't checked even now) that 64-bit Linux doesn't support 32-bit binaries, but 64-bit Windows obviously still runs 32-bit apps."

Just for information's sake, 64 bit Linux runs 32 bit applications just fine as long as all the 32 bit libraries/dependencies are satisfied. I keep 32 bit libraries on most of my 64 bit machines for one reason or another (often the reason being 32 bit Wine support).

Re: N.W.O.

"The problem was with VirtualBox. It wants the 32 bit version of Mint and I had the 64 bit one. I would have thought it could handle 64 bits as win 7 and i5 processor are 64 bit."

VirtualBox can handle a 64 bit virtual machine, as long as it's the 64 bit version of VirtualBox. That is, your hardware, your operating system, and your VirtualBox installation all have to be 64 bit.

Re: Re:The FTC started looking at Microsoft's anti-competitive activities......

Actually, no this wouldn't be legally bigger for Microsoft than what they did in the nineties for a number of reasons, but primarily because they've clearly shown what their tactic is.

They have made it clear that don't intend to absolutely force users to only use Microsoft's store. They have allowed sideloading. That is, they think they can get away with using an Android type model for their store. You can sideload programs, after acknowledging the warnings that they may be malware, and you can even have another store if you want, but their hope is that the majority of people won't enable sideloading and won't install another store. It's a gradual guide toward their goal rather than a sudden push. They won't force users to use the store; they will frighten them away from doing anything else.

Re: Goodbye Mono

Well, technically, since Mono is open source, if Xamarin dropped it, development could be taken up by someone else. However, I think it is more likely that Xamarin will continue to develop Mono and tie it more closely to Microsoft, perhaps eventually making open source .Net and Mono into one project.

There are alternatives to Mono, though.

Better Linux drivers for AMD?

"Will this likely mean better Linux drivers for AMD?"

Theoretically, this will mean better open source drivers for Linux, possibly making them better than the proprietary ones at some point (in some ways they already are better, but they tend not to support the newest cards and newest features as quickly). Better collaboration between all the coders could even improve the proprietary driver. However, this is all theoretical. It doesn't mean it will necessarily work out that way in practice. AMD's previous efforts in the direction have certainly helped with the open source drivers, but it would be nice if this had a more dramatic effect. I'm not holding my breath, but I'm adopting a 'wait and see' attitude.

Re: Conclusions....

@Richard Plinston I agreed with you until you said, "It is the desktop itself that is a slow, lingering death, as evidenced by the sales figures."

Perhaps if you are referring specifically to the large box sitting on or underneath your desk, then that is supportable (though I still think there are reasons why some kind of easily customizable, upgradable, and powerful hardware will stick around for a while, even if it changes size and shape to some degree). However, the desktop in general is just much better than alternatives for certain things. It will take on a smaller less 'generally used for everything' type of role, but I can't see it dying in the forseeable future.

Of course, it's arguable that Microsoft has taken the first steps toward a "slow, lingering death." Of course, if it can make appropriate adjustments, this doesn't have to be the case. I don't think it's going in the right direction to prevent it at this point though. Still, even if it is headed that way, its momentum in the business world could make it take a really long time.

Re: The more they push

"They did this with W9x, Windows NT, 2000 and XP, where is the news here?"

With all those systems that you just mentioned, they didn't do this until they ended support for the operating system altogether. This is entirely different than that. This is partially ending support for people who expected it to go on until 2020 when they bought the product.

It's true that this doesn't mean that Windows 7 won't work on the new hardware. However, Windows 7 on the new hardware will basically be in the same boat that Windows XP is as far as hardware compatibility is concerned rather than what people expected.

Re: We don't need no steenking reading comprehension!

"It's dead, Jim. Dead, dead, dead."

Well, if you're only referring to phones, then let's say the life support has been removed and the prognosis is not good. However, since Firefox OS is still being promoted as a smart TV operating system, it's not altogether dead yet.

Re: On linux? Meh, I'll stick with vim

"The reason I can sort his stuff out quickly and the other Unix SAs can't? They insist on using vi and emacs to get at it and I use Scite, a styling editor that color codes great swaths of code based on the language you tell it you are looking at."

I like SciTE very well, but its syntax highlighting feature is hardly unique even among command line editors. Others have mentioned that most vi variations (such as vim and elvis) support this. It is also supported in Emacs, joe/jupp, etc. It is not always turned on by default in some of these editors, but you can change that. You can even get nano to do syntax highlighting, though it's implemented rather oddly.

Re: Titlebars, menus, scrollbars, icons!

"You want to do something stupid that nukes your whole setup? Go right ahead!."

For some reason, "She chose down!" comes to mind.

Re: Only yourselves to blame

"How about a device that simply doesn't work on Linux, period?"

How about a device that doesn't work in Windows, period? We have those now. I have a printer that doesn't have an identifiable correctly working driver for any version of Windows newer than XP, which is no longer supported. It works well for my Linux machines with it installed on my Linux server. In fact, I can now get it to work for a Windows machine on my network by having Linux serve it up as a Postscript printer (even though the printer itself doesn't understand Postscript) and setting Windows to print to it with a generic Postscript printer driver. This isn't the only piece of hardware I've seen that was obsoleted on Windows but still works on Linux.

"Or one where there are two or three drivers, but none of them work. One's too old and doesn't work properly (too slow) and the other two are too new and flat out refuse to work. And worst off, it's the GPU chip this is supposed to be supporting, which for a laptop means it's a flat bust. Same thing happened no matter what the distro, so it's back to Windows (which at least works)."

I've installed Linux on a lot of different hardware (dozens of different machines), and I have yet to encounter a GPU that fits that description. However, I will talk about the closest I've come. I have a Thinkpad from 2003 with Intel graphics. This particular graphics processor is universally considered to be buggy, which is why there have been problems running a GUI on it with various Linux distributions. I used to have to run an old distribution to get it to work with little problem (seems like I had an Ubuntu variation from 2009 or 2010 at one point), although it still acted a bit flaky if you dropped out of X-Window. Now, I just have to have one that's new enough to have the driver updated with a workaround (it's a workaround because the hardware itself has the issue, so you can't really fix it with software). Of course with Linux you sometimes get fixes for hardware that's ten years old.

Windows XP was the pre-install on that system, but after updating it, it would run very slowly with the 256 MB of RAM that were in it when it was given to me. Recently memory for it became so cheap that I maxxed it out at 1 GB just for kicks. Of course, by that time, Windows XP was unsupported. The Linux distribution (Salix OS 14.1 Fluxbox in this case because it's so lightweight) ran OK with the original RAM. The biggest thing I've noticed from the upgrade is that more Web pages will now load without the browser hanging or crashing.

Of course, if you have a bunch of Windows games, then you'll like likely have to run Windows to make them all work (especially if they're newer games). I don't have as much time for games as I once did, but I generally stick to Linux compatible ones, and they usually work well on my desktop machine.

Re: An how much ...

I think it's just the exaggeration that got you into trouble with that comment. If you had said:

'You are comparing an OS that has entrenched itself in [the] public consciousness since [near] the beginning of personal computing with an obscure OS that [most people haven't heard of, doesn't run their existing software], and requires [a bit] of technical understanding to [install vs. what they were prompted to automatically update to by the system that came on their machine]. It's not apples and oranges there, it's fruit and construction in Dubai.'

Then you wouldn't have caused such a negative reaction while essentially making the same points more accurately.

Re: The IoT Crowd

You could pare Linux down, but there's no good reason to do so. For certain applications you can just leave all the unnecessary modules out, and the kernel will be a lot smaller than it is in general purpose Linux distributions. When you need it smaller than that, there are alternatives, including open source ones like FreeRTOS, and in applications like that, a kernel that was designed for real time applications usually makes more sense anyway.

Re: a ha ha ha ha ha :(

"Windows already supports Arm, IA-32 and x64 which are by far the largest current market segments. And Windows has previously supported Alpha, MIPS, Itanium and PowerPC, so additional processor support is not a problem if there was a need for it..."

That's a rather rosy viewpoint to take of Windows cross-architecture support. Windows supports x86 and x86_64, yes. Support for anything else has to be qualified, and a lot of it was never very useful.

Windows has had some kind of ARM support for years. It's biggest success in this area was Windows CE/Windows Pocket PC. Of course Windows CE and company wasn't really the same operating system as Windows on the desktop. It had its own set of software and not much in common other than a standard approach to the UI. It fell into obscurity with the rise of the touch UI and the operating systems that relied on that scheme for mobile devices.

Now Windows supports ARM in a different way. It's approach this time is similar to that of Android to run common software on multiple architectures with a virtual machine or something like one. Of course that approach has its limits, but it has its advantages as well. The problem for Windows here is that there is not a lot of software that runs that way. Most of the applications for Windows, especially the popular ones, only run on X86 variants. Windows has ARM support, but not for the programs people think of when they think of Windows.

Windows used to have Apha, MIPS, and PowerPC support back in the late nineties. However, not that many apps were ever released for those architectures (and almost all of the few that did were server applications), and Microsoft ended support. Again, the Windows applications for x86 wouldn't run on those systems. A similar situation existed for Itanium later on.

So yes, Windows has nominally supported a number of architectures at different times, but none of them have had the applications available to make Windows a real success. At this point Windows has basically been stuck with x86 based architectures. Theoretically, if x86 based architectures were to be cancelled, then application vendors would port their applications to whatever Windows moved to. However, that is not likely to happen.

Of course open source software tends to adjust to different architectures more easily. Most Linux applications have been compiled for a number of architectures because they are open source. This makes is so Linux has been ready for ARM, MIPS, Power, or Itanium, etc. desktops and servers for a while.

However, this doesn't make Linux (as in GNU/Linux, the operating system) ideal for mobile devices. Right now, Android and iOS are the successes there. Will convergence ever actually happen (with Windows RT/Modern UI, Ubuntu Snappy, Android, or whatever)? I'm not sure. There are many issues to be dealt with. It seems to me that you would need to have either two sets of applications that ran on the same base, one for mobile interfaces and one for desktop interfaces, or you would need to have one set of applications that had dual interface modes.