Anyone got a suggestion for a better newsreader than Pan? Like agent
ported to linux?

Gunner

In rec.crafts.metalworking on Tue, 03 Jan 2006 10:51:28 GMT
Gunner wrote:

Well..with the kind help of you good folks..I managed to bumble my way
into getting this bitch online..but its still not right. If I closed
etho0, it will allow me to go on line. The moment I start it..it cuts off
the internet. This after inputting the proper dns numbers. Ive got some
clues where to start looking..but this is still a whole new ball game to
me.
Many thanks so far G

Well, if you are going via dialup, you aren't using eth0. You are
using an ethernet device called ppp0. (if you are using ADSL not
dial up then everything changes...)

So don't bother messing about with eth0, ignore it. Do everything you
were thinking of doing with eth0 but do it with ppp0 instead.

Which includes your firewall....

What's going on is that eth0 is waking up and going "OK, I have been
told to set a default route of x. So I will tell all packets that are
going to the internet to go through me."

So if you need eth0 for something else, like an internal network, find
out where eth0 is setting the default route and tell it to stop.

How to do that is distro dependent.

You can see if this is the problem by starting an xterm or rootshell
and
netstat -rn

You are looking for aline like
0.0.0.0 192.168.1.124 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 eth1

The 4 zeroes on the left are the default route, they say "everything
that's not specifically mentioned elsewhere takes this route". So any
packet addressed to a host that isn't mentioned elsewhere in netstat
(meaning the whole internet) goes out that route.

You can see on mine there's eth1 on the right. If you have only eth0
and not ppp0 then eth0 has stolen the default and you have to tell it
not to.

If you have 2 such lines, one for ppp0 and one for eth0 then all the
packets are confused and don't know which one to use. So you have to
delete both and recreate one.

To save yourself that hassle, before you start ppp edit whatever it is
that starts eth0 and tell it not to set a default route. How you do
that is distro dependent, so unless you are using a redhat one I can't
help.

THen bring up ppp. Use netstat -rn to see if the default is going out
ppp0.

Next bring up eth0, and check that it isn't grabbing the default.

Zebee

Pete C. wrote:

Jon Elson wrote:

Cydrome Leader wrote:
In rec.crafts.metalworking Gunner wrote:

Ok..for all you Linux junkies...this has been driving me nuts for
months and months and ... well you get the idea.
Originally..I thought this issue was hardware....but now...


What are you trying to do that justifies all the time wasted on trying
to run anything but windows?
Umm, I've been running Linux systems here, where I have a web server
and a mail server online 24/7. I have not had a successful hacking
attack in over 2 years, but they try 20+ times a day. My (several)
systems are often up for 60 - 90 days before a power outage hits them.
I essentially have never had a real crash. Sometimes a particular
software component gets confused, and I need to manually reset it.
That happens maybe once or twice a year. I have never seen a
software system as reliable as Linux, in 35 years working with
computers. (DEC's VMS came pretty close.)

Yes, there are a few things that still need work, and network
configuration is one of the weak points. They expect you to be
a network guru. I think I did get a regular modem working once,
years ago, and it was a tricky bit of business to complete the
auto login with the scripts, automatically.

Jon

I've had VMS systems with uptimes in excess of 800 days.

I've seen a Novell system on a crap Taiwanese machine with an uptime of
2-1/2 years. My power's not that reliable anymore even with a UPS.

Pete C.

--
--John
to email, dial "usenet" and validate
(was jclarke at eye bee em dot net)

In article ,
"Pete C." wrote:

Joseph Gwinn wrote:

In article ,
"Pete C." wrote:

Joseph Gwinn wrote:

In article ,
Cydrome Leader wrote:

In rec.crafts.metalworking Gunner wrote:
Ok..for all you Linux junkies...this has been driving me nuts for
months and months and ... well you get the idea.
Originally..I thought this issue was hardware....but now...

What are you trying to do that justifies all the time wasted on
trying to
run anything but windows?

Huh? Compared to MacOS, Windows is a notorious timewaster, so clearly
you will be switching to MacOS immediately?

Joe Gwinn

Only for the clueless.

I made my living as an embedded realtime programmer for 20 or 30 years.

I use MacOS at home (where I'm the IT Department), and Windows plus UNIX
at work. MacOS is simply less trouble, by a lot.

I must say that I have little hands-on experience with MacOS as I find
the UI infuriating.

GUI preferences are very much a matter of opinion, being in the eye of
the beholder. There are some parts of the WinXP GUI I'd like to see in
MacOS, and vice versa. This cross-migration is happening, but slowly.

But in total I find the MacOS GUI less annoying than the Windows GUI.

That said, these both are still computers, and are very frustrating
until one has learned the basics, so one cannot judge either GUI from
ten minutes effort.


I do however have several friends that use Macs to
varying degrees and all have had plenty of problems. One friend is a
teacher who uses both Macs and PCs extensively and reports that the Macs
crash at least as often as the PCs.

With students messing with them? In education, that has been the prime
problem. Schools have always liked Macs because the teachers could keep
them running without needing an IT guy.


Another friend uses Macs almost
exclusively and in 5 years and like three Macs she had a ratio of about
20:1 to the Windoze problems I had during that time. I did not see any
decrease in the frequency of problems with the switch to OSX either.

My experience was and is the exact opposite.


MacOS was total crap up until Apple finally
realized they lacked the expertise to write an OS and put their UI over
someone else's Unix core. Now instead of being a crappy UI on top of a
crappy OS, it's a crappy UI on top of a so-so OS.

Don't mistake me for a Windoze bigot either, ...

Could have fooled me. Listen to yourself, listen to the music.

How do you figure that? Anyone with any technical knowledge knows that
the pre OSX versions of MacOS were hopelessly deficient in many areas,
particularly the lack of memory management. OSX fixed many of the core
problems, but the UI that I can't stand (I hated the UI on the first
Lisa as well) remains. If I wanted an alternative to Windoze it
certainly would not be Mac as there is simply no advantage whatsoever to
MacOS over Linux or another Unix variant.

I submit that your answer above proves my point in spades. Listen to
the tone of voice, and parse the implicit assumptions.


...I use Windoze for a lot of
things for two reasons:

1. When you have a clue, Windoze is perfectly stable. Over five
different systems, two of which run 24x7, I average one Windoze crash /
problem every couple years. I have also never had a virus on any of
these systems despite the fact they are on a cable modem connection full
time. People who have problems with Windoze primarily bring it on
themselves and will do the same regardless of the OS.

You are very fortunate. One wonders how long your luck will last. The
rest of the world must be pretty clueless, because they have all these
problems, in spades. and the computer mags are full of sad tales.

My "luck" has lasted for at least 15 years and I expect it will last a
lot longer. It does appear that the world at large is rather clueless as
it seems that they happily download the latest Napster variant or other
program from questionable sources and then wonder why they have
problems.

Ah. Now we come to the core. Keep your machine away from the internet,
and all is well. Well, Macs don't need to be protected against the web.


My machines that have essentially no problems are devoid of the Napsters
and their ilk. My machines have such things as TurboCAD, Mach3, WinIVR,
MPLAB, Deskengrave, Photoshop Elements, P-Touch utilities, WinZip and
the usual assortment of odds and ends like MS office, Netscape, etc. You
will note a lack of any "questionable" software.

Yep. And this is my plan for that planned Dell. Safety through
isolationism.

The poor Macs will have to carry the heavy burden of world travel, while
the PC toils away in the basement, in darkness and solitude, a drudge.


As for security problems, there are tens of thousands of viruses et al
for Windows, maybe ten for MacOS (none that still work), and essentially
zero for most flavors of UNIX.

There are many, many security problems that affect most flavors of Unix.

Yes and no. While it's true that no commonly used OS can long resist
knowing attack by experts, some are far harder than others, and the
first-order question is resistance to automated attack.

Simply put, viruses et al are practical problems only for Windows.
Because such malware spreads itself, the problem grows exponentially and
far faster than systems can be attacked manually.

And as a class, Macs and UNIX boxes are far harder to manually
compromise than Windows anything, but none are totally secure. Nothing
that complex ever will be.


If you want a secure OS, look at VMS or the Tandem and Stratus OSs.

Oh my, a blast from the past. True enough. VMS was my favorite
command-line OS of that era. If Ken Olsen had had a religious
conversion and had made VMS open in time, he might have killed UNIX in
the crib. But it didn't happen. So, now VMS has the security of the
dead.

Tandem and Stratus are still around I think, but sell into a very
specific niche, where perfect hardware reliability is needed. These
were used in some air traffic control systems, but have a key conceptual
flaw - the custom-built application software is the common cause of
failures, not hardware failures. So most ATC systems have total dual or
triple redundancy, and the hardware is just another (minor) cause of
failure and subsequent switchover (within one tenth of a second
typically).


Because MacOS is only for the clueless, it cannot be that the lack of
trouble on Macs is due to clued-in users. So there must be some other,
simpler explanation.

I have not seen this purported lack of trouble on Macs. Every single Mac
user I have known (dozens) has reported plenty of problems.

You need a better grade of Mac users. By your own analysis, the
clueless make their own trouble; this will be platform independent.


2. Many pieces of software I use are only for, or run best on Windoze
and they run without any problems whatsoever on my systems. In the Linux
world there are open source substitutes for some of these programs,
however they are inconsistent, are often missing important features and
have essentially no support.

I do have to run Windows to use some applications, but they are odd
ones, like FEMM. Not to mention many CAD-CAM apps, and the like.

CAD, CNC, IVR, development utilities for microcontrollers, etc.


Mainstream stuff is available on both MacOS and Windows, but less so on
Linux.

Exactly.

Yep.


I agree that lots of Linux applications require some fiddling to use,
but this is due more to their being open-source versus commercial.

Open source is the source of some of its own problems. One of the
largest problems in this area is the lack of consistency in UI structure
and documentation.

Yep.


With
the growth of Linux in the market, more commercial apps will support
Linux, so this advantage is likely to erode over time.

The upcoming homogenization of the hardware market will help this a lot.
The switch to OSX was one step towards Apple getting out of the hardware
business which they have never been very good at. Now they have
announced they are abandoning IBM's antiquated CPUs.

The PowerPC architecture is hardly "antiquated", and is about twice as
fast per CPU clock cycle than Intel.

The problem is that IBM is more interested in making large massively
multiprocessor servers the size of commercial refrigerators than little
desktop systems, and so IBM's direction increasingly deviated from what
Apple needed to win the CPU horsepower races.

This deviation was particularly acute in laptops.

Also, as part of their "fit in but stand out" strategy, Apple wanted
Macs to be able to run Windows apps at full speed, rather than in
emulation at a fraction of full speed.

The PowerPC architecture (from both IBM and Motorola) basically rules
the military and industrial embedded realtime markets, with something
like 70% market share.

The Intel architecture is actually older than the PowerPC architecture,
by many years, so by longevity alone, Intel is antiquated. So what
exactly do you mean by "antiquated"?


In the near future you will simply select a generic hardware platform
from the vendor of your choice and in the size / expandability / fault
tolerance for your application, and then select your favorite OS to run
on it from a field of dozens of variants that all run on the same
hardware platform.

For MacOS, it won't happen soon, as Apple makes far too much money on
hardware. Probably one will be able to run Windows on Mac intel
hardware, but will not be able to run MacOS on generic intel PCs.

Mac hardware is far less trouble to assemble and configure, and is far
more reliable than most PCs, largely because in Macs there is a single
design agent, Apple, ensuring that it all fits together and meets
minimum standards of design and implementation quality.

This is a major reason that people have been willing to pay somewhat
more for Apple hardware. It's simply less trouble.


If you want a rock solid, secure and reliable OS you will not find it in
Windoze, MacOS or Linux, you also will not find it for free.

Well, I agree that it won't be free. It will cost time and/or money,
one way or the other.

There are several out there, but they are in the "midrange" and
"mainframe" space and none are cheap. At least one (VMS) is now running
on three different hardware platforms including Itanium.

I don't think anyone is going to migrate to OpenVMS that isn't already
there.


MacOS is rock solid; this I know from direct personal experience.

Well, from indirect personal experience, my Mac using friend reports
problems on a weekly basis for one machine while my five Windoze
machines keep chugging along happily. I expect that with OSX (and
beyond) MacOS has the *potential* to be rock solid, just as Windoze
does, but it seems the ultimate determinant of stability is the
operator.

There may be a clue mismatch here.


The real reason for a metalworker to use Windows is that many of the
standard apps for metalworking and manufacturing are currently
Windows-only, but these are slowly picking up Linux support. I'm
planning to get a Dell PC at home for just this reason, but this PC will
be well-isolated from the Internet.

I got a stack of surplus Dell Optiplex systems for $100 ea and they are
great for quite a few things including CNC control. All my systems are
on a common network and have no problems. The firewall / router provides
a first line of defense and the only machine that has any inbound ports
mapped to it has a software firewall as well.

Yep. I'll probably get one of those $700 Dell boxes. Already got the
hardware firewall.

It will be interesting to see what happens in the market when Macs can
run all these Windows-only apps at full speed, so there is some real
competition between platforms.


The App developers and their customers would dearly love to have an
alternative to Windows, to regain control of their lives, to escape the
Treadmill.

That seems to depend on the app developer. It seems there are a large
number of folks out there pretending to be programmers by gluing
together (poorly) various chunks of purchased code libraries for Windoze
to create hopelessly bloated, unstable and inefficient monstrosities and
calling them applications.

I think we are mixing unlike things here. The desire for independence
and freedom from lock-in exists regardless of the skill of the
programmer, especially as the programmer becomes experienced (and has
been screwed when something he depended upon is made unavailable).
Freedom from lock-in and abuse by marketing-driven companies is its own
good.

Joe Gwinn

In rec.crafts.metalworking Joseph Gwinn wrote:
In article ,
Cydrome Leader wrote:

In rec.crafts.metalworking Gunner wrote:
Ok..for all you Linux junkies...this has been driving me nuts for
months and months and ... well you get the idea.
Originally..I thought this issue was hardware....but now...

What are you trying to do that justifies all the time wasted on trying to
run anything but windows?

Huh? Compared to MacOS, Windows is a notorious timewaster, so clearly
you will be switching to MacOS immediately?

Windows makes a fine workstation.


Joe Gwinn

In rec.crafts.metalworking Pete C. wrote:
Joseph Gwinn wrote:

In article ,
Cydrome Leader wrote:

In rec.crafts.metalworking Gunner wrote:
Ok..for all you Linux junkies...this has been driving me nuts for
months and months and ... well you get the idea.
Originally..I thought this issue was hardware....but now...

What are you trying to do that justifies all the time wasted on trying to
run anything but windows?

Huh? Compared to MacOS, Windows is a notorious timewaster, so clearly
you will be switching to MacOS immediately?

Joe Gwinn

Only for the clueless. MacOS was total crap up until Apple finally
realized they lacked the expertise to write an OS and put their UI over
someone else's Unix core. Now instead of being a crappy UI on top of a
crappy OS, it's a crappy UI on top of a so-so OS.

Don't mistake me for a Windoze bigot either, I use Windoze for a lot of
things for two reasons:

1. When you have a clue, Windoze is perfectly stable. Over five
different systems, two of which run 24x7, I average one Windoze crash /
problem every couple years. I have also never had a virus on any of
these systems despite the fact they are on a cable modem connection full
time. People who have problems with Windoze primarily bring it on
themselves and will do the same regardless of the OS.

2. Many pieces of software I use are only for, or run best on Windoze
and they run without any problems whatsoever on my systems. In the Linux
world there are open source substitutes for some of these programs,
however they are inconsistent, are often missing important features and
have essentially no support.

If you want a rock solid, secure and reliable OS you will not find it in
Windoze, MacOS or Linux, you also will not find it for free.

I've setup production free OS unix systems with uptimes all generally
exceeding 500 days between reboots. If they weren't secure, they'd never
have lasted that long, and if they were unreliable, the same thing
applies.


Pete C.

On Tue, 03 Jan 2006 02:06:02 GMT, "Pete C."
wrote:

zadoc wrote:

On Tue, 03 Jan 2006 00:32:56 GMT, "Pete C."
wrote:

[snip, see original]

Don't you hate those annoying little distractions? I've got the
potential threat of grass fires to contend with here in the Dallas area.

Pete C.

The fires in Texas and Oklahoma are even making the TV news in Sydney.
As it is midwinter there, isn't this a bit unusual?

Are people there starting to wonder about climatic changes and global
warming?

One wonders what midsummer will be like.

Cheers,


Dunno, it's apparently a bit warmer than normal. I bailed out of the
frozen northeast to come down here and I'm loving the weather. It's 57
at the moment, was near 70 today, and I just talked to my mother in CT
where it's 33 and snowing heavily. This past summer had a few 104 degree
days, but the humidity was like 20% so as long as you were in the shade
it was just fine.


The areas that are having problems are used to more moisture than
they got last year. As for temperature well it's staying warmer than
it unusually does. Normally we will get cold spells followed by warm
spells. This year there's been very few cold spells (at least that's
how the old timers would put it).

Up here it's slightly drier than it really should be but not
extremely so. We're used to being rather dry up here. As for the fires
well we had a pretty bad one right next to my house Sun during all the
wind. In fact it did a good job of trying to burn the whole town down
and controlling it was a bear with 40-50 mph winds. But we are no
strangers to that type of fire up here thus all the fire departments
have a mutual assistance pact and there's even a joint command
structure worked out already. Thus they can fight fires like this as
effectively as possible. What really mess them up though was the front
coming through right in the middle of the fire. When it started the
wind was out of the west in a pretty steady 30-40mph. This spread the
fire down the river where it was difficult to fight. Then the wind
turned out of the north and at times got even higher. This caused the
start and end of the first burn to take off in a southern direction
(fortunately the middle of the fire had been controlled enough that it
didn't take off, real fortunate for me since my house would of been
right in line for it). They managed to stop the west end of the fire
right at I-40. If it had managed to jump that it would of ended up in
town. Another good fortune was the rain that came after the front came
through (though it took hour after the wind changed for it to come).
If it hadn't of came then they would of had a much harder time of
getting the rather spread out (by that time) fire under control.

Wayne Cook
Shamrock, TX
http://members.dslextreme.com/users/waynecook/index.htm

Bill Schwab wrote:
Cydrome Leader wrote:
In rec.crafts.metalworking Gunner wrote:

Ok..for all you Linux junkies...this has been driving me nuts for
months and months and ... well you get the idea.
Originally..I thought this issue was hardware....but now...


What are you trying to do that justifies all the time wasted on trying to
run anything but windows?

There are many reasons to avoid Microsoft. It can be as simple as
having and old computer to view drawings in a shop (no reason to pay
$100-200 for that simple task) to running servers where Linux is faster,

$200 for what?

more stable, more secure, and less subject to the whim of a company that
churns the market at every opportunity and builds eye candy at the

What? I still run DOS apps just fine. Name 5 eye candies from microsoft.

expense of fixing defects and cleaning up their designs. Don't even get
me stated about what they did with the Pen Windows API in the late 90's
- in short, they had documented functions to be supported on Win32 for
all time, and then yanked them w/o warning. With the cross-posts to a

That might have to do with how tablets and pen computing died long ago.

survivalism group, I can also assume that having the source code to the
OS is of interest, and I certainly won't argue with that.

Bill

In rec.crafts.metalworking Gunner wrote:
On Mon, 2 Jan 2006 12:33:00 +0000 (UTC), Cydrome Leader
wrote:

In rec.crafts.metalworking Gunner wrote:
Ok..for all you Linux junkies...this has been driving me nuts for
months and months and ... well you get the idea.
Originally..I thought this issue was hardware....but now...

What are you trying to do that justifies all the time wasted on trying to
run anything but windows?



Run Linux..which pretty much justifies trying to run something besides
Winblows.

It's cute you can knock windows, but cannot handle anything else. How
come you called Linux Linux, not Linsux? You're apparently not able to get
it to web browse for more than 13 minutes, something WebTV users can pull
off.

Are you switching to 50Hz next?



But then..Ive been known to make my own parts, rather than go buy them
too.

Gunner


Installing a number of distros of Linux:

Simply Mepis
Knoppix
Knottix
Fedora
Damned small Linux
Beatrix

When configureing PPP for dialup..its simple..set up your account,
modem, comm port..do a query...let it check..ok..no problem

However..in each and every one of those distros..using 3 differnt
kinds of USR external modems, A Supra 56 external, a Speed modem and
even 2 differnt kinds of internal ISA and PCI modems...

I can dial out. The ISP connects, I get the proper password etc
etc..it says Ive connected at x speed, all the proper lights are lit
on the modem(s), I open my browsers (4)...and it just ****ing sits
there.

Eventually it times out and says Unable to connect to bla bla.com or
whatever I was trying to open..but thats all

I open the details window of the PPP prog...and in the Received
box..it (received) incriments higer every so often..but the transmit
window..normally shows it stalled at 148 packets. And there she stays.

I was thinking this was something unique to my box...but today, I
farted around with two completly different boxes..a Compaq 700, and a
CopperMine clone.

All do the same thing. Ive tried every browser configureation known
to me..etc etc

Every thing works just hunky dorey if I set up a proxy on another
Winblows machine, set the Linux browsers to the proper proxy
settings..then I can go whereever I want. Upload, down load,
newsgroups bla bla bla..

Ive run off of cds, done full hd installs..the freaking works... for
about 7 months now off and on. Id get ****ed, and use it for a
server..then curiosity gets me by the shorthairs..and I try again.

Sometimes..I do notice the activity light on the switch blinking a bit
more often than normal when Im trying to connect. Like its trying to
surf the local network rather than the internet..but not alll the
time.

What the hell am I doing wrong???????

Mommy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Gunner

"Pax Americana is a philosophy. Hardly an empire.
Making sure other people play nice and dont kill each other (and us)
off in job lots is hardly empire building, particularly when you give
them self determination under "play nice" rules.

Think of it as having your older brother knock the **** out of you
for torturing the cat." Gunner

"Pax Americana is a philosophy. Hardly an empire.
Making sure other people play nice and dont kill each other (and us)
off in job lots is hardly empire building, particularly when you give
them self determination under "play nice" rules.

Think of it as having your older brother knock the **** out of you
for torturing the cat." Gunner

On Tue, 3 Jan 2006 15:17:42 +0000 (UTC), Cydrome Leader
wrote:

In rec.crafts.metalworking Gunner wrote:
On Mon, 2 Jan 2006 12:33:00 +0000 (UTC), Cydrome Leader
wrote:

In rec.crafts.metalworking Gunner wrote:
Ok..for all you Linux junkies...this has been driving me nuts for
months and months and ... well you get the idea.
Originally..I thought this issue was hardware....but now...

What are you trying to do that justifies all the time wasted on trying to
run anything but windows?



Run Linux..which pretty much justifies trying to run something besides
Winblows.

It's cute you can knock windows, but cannot handle anything else. How
come you called Linux Linux, not Linsux? You're apparently not able to get
it to web browse for more than 13 minutes, something WebTV users can pull
off.

Are you switching to 50Hz next?

Shrug..I could fire up the OS2 box. Or the Dos box. But then on the
other hand..no one is born knowing how to run any operating
system..and folks have to learn them.

Simply because I know the various incarnations of Windoze well enough
to know their limitations and issues, is the reason Im now learning
Linux. When I get good at it..if I think it deserves the Linsux label,
I shall apply it.

Lets see...Ill bet you knock child molesters, yet you specialize in
visiting teen hookers, right?

Gunner




But then..Ive been known to make my own parts, rather than go buy them
too.

Gunner


Installing a number of distros of Linux:

Simply Mepis
Knoppix
Knottix
Fedora
Damned small Linux
Beatrix

When configureing PPP for dialup..its simple..set up your account,
modem, comm port..do a query...let it check..ok..no problem

However..in each and every one of those distros..using 3 differnt
kinds of USR external modems, A Supra 56 external, a Speed modem and
even 2 differnt kinds of internal ISA and PCI modems...

I can dial out. The ISP connects, I get the proper password etc
etc..it says Ive connected at x speed, all the proper lights are lit
on the modem(s), I open my browsers (4)...and it just ****ing sits
there.

Eventually it times out and says Unable to connect to bla bla.com or
whatever I was trying to open..but thats all

I open the details window of the PPP prog...and in the Received
box..it (received) incriments higer every so often..but the transmit
window..normally shows it stalled at 148 packets. And there she stays.

I was thinking this was something unique to my box...but today, I
farted around with two completly different boxes..a Compaq 700, and a
CopperMine clone.

All do the same thing. Ive tried every browser configureation known
to me..etc etc

Every thing works just hunky dorey if I set up a proxy on another
Winblows machine, set the Linux browsers to the proper proxy
settings..then I can go whereever I want. Upload, down load,
newsgroups bla bla bla..

Ive run off of cds, done full hd installs..the freaking works... for
about 7 months now off and on. Id get ****ed, and use it for a
server..then curiosity gets me by the shorthairs..and I try again.

Sometimes..I do notice the activity light on the switch blinking a bit
more often than normal when Im trying to connect. Like its trying to
surf the local network rather than the internet..but not alll the
time.

What the hell am I doing wrong???????

Mommy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Gunner

"Pax Americana is a philosophy. Hardly an empire.
Making sure other people play nice and dont kill each other (and us)
off in job lots is hardly empire building, particularly when you give
them self determination under "play nice" rules.

Think of it as having your older brother knock the **** out of you
for torturing the cat." Gunner

"Pax Americana is a philosophy. Hardly an empire.
Making sure other people play nice and dont kill each other (and us)
off in job lots is hardly empire building, particularly when you give
them self determination under "play nice" rules.

Think of it as having your older brother knock the **** out of you
for torturing the cat." Gunner

"Pax Americana is a philosophy. Hardly an empire.
Making sure other people play nice and dont kill each other (and us)
off in job lots is hardly empire building, particularly when you give
them self determination under "play nice" rules.

Think of it as having your older brother knock the **** out of you
for torturing the cat." Gunner

Joseph Gwinn wrote:

In article ,
"Pete C." wrote:

Joseph Gwinn wrote:

In article ,
"Pete C." wrote:

Joseph Gwinn wrote:

In article ,
Cydrome Leader wrote:

In rec.crafts.metalworking Gunner wrote:
Ok..for all you Linux junkies...this has been driving me nuts for
months and months and ... well you get the idea.
Originally..I thought this issue was hardware....but now...

What are you trying to do that justifies all the time wasted on
trying to
run anything but windows?

Huh? Compared to MacOS, Windows is a notorious timewaster, so clearly
you will be switching to MacOS immediately?

Joe Gwinn

Only for the clueless.

I made my living as an embedded realtime programmer for 20 or 30 years.

I use MacOS at home (where I'm the IT Department), and Windows plus UNIX
at work. MacOS is simply less trouble, by a lot.

I must say that I have little hands-on experience with MacOS as I find
the UI infuriating.

GUI preferences are very much a matter of opinion, being in the eye of
the beholder. There are some parts of the WinXP GUI I'd like to see in
MacOS, and vice versa. This cross-migration is happening, but slowly.

I haven't seen anything I liked in the Mac UI, and I saw nothing new to
like in the XP UI either. I rather prefer the "old" 2K UI, or better yet
the CDE on a "real" OS (like perhaps VMS).


But in total I find the MacOS GUI less annoying than the Windows GUI.

I find the opposite to be true and in particular I find that I can
readily disable the most annoying "features" of the Windoze UI where
this does not appear to be the case on the Mac UI.


That said, these both are still computers, and are very frustrating
until one has learned the basics, so one cannot judge either GUI from
ten minutes effort.

On that, you are fundamentally wrong. They are indeed both computers,
and regardless of the UI on top, any even remotely useable OS operates
on the same fundamentals. If you understand one OS, you understand
essentially any other, it is only the UI that really differs.

On every attempt to actually accomplish anything on a Mac (usually
trying to help a Mac user who couldn't figure it out either) I have
consistently found that the language, structure and in many cases simply
the existence of proper configuration options was a significant issue on
Macs. These were not simple UI differences.


I do however have several friends that use Macs to
varying degrees and all have had plenty of problems. One friend is a
teacher who uses both Macs and PCs extensively and reports that the Macs
crash at least as often as the PCs.

With students messing with them? In education, that has been the prime
problem. Schools have always liked Macs because the teachers could keep
them running without needing an IT guy.

This teacher *is* an IT guy and reports no difference in the frequency
of crashes between the PCs and Macs.


Another friend uses Macs almost
exclusively and in 5 years and like three Macs she had a ratio of about
20:1 to the Windoze problems I had during that time. I did not see any
decrease in the frequency of problems with the switch to OSX either.

My experience was and is the exact opposite.

Which only goes to show that the stability of either system is most
dependent on the operator, not the OS.


MacOS was total crap up until Apple finally
realized they lacked the expertise to write an OS and put their UI over
someone else's Unix core. Now instead of being a crappy UI on top of a
crappy OS, it's a crappy UI on top of a so-so OS.

Don't mistake me for a Windoze bigot either, ...

Could have fooled me. Listen to yourself, listen to the music.

How do you figure that? Anyone with any technical knowledge knows that
the pre OSX versions of MacOS were hopelessly deficient in many areas,
particularly the lack of memory management. OSX fixed many of the core
problems, but the UI that I can't stand (I hated the UI on the first
Lisa as well) remains. If I wanted an alternative to Windoze it
certainly would not be Mac as there is simply no advantage whatsoever to
MacOS over Linux or another Unix variant.

I submit that your answer above proves my point in spades. Listen to
the tone of voice, and parse the implicit assumptions.

Huh? Hardly. I find the Windoze UI vastly more tolerable than the Mac
UI, largely because I can customize the Windoze UI sufficiently to
eliminate the most annoying parts. This does not in any way indicate
that I am a Windoze fan or bigot, simply that I hate the Mac UI. My OS
preference is VMS, however there is a bit of a shortage of affordable
applications for the things I do.


...I use Windoze for a lot of
things for two reasons:

1. When you have a clue, Windoze is perfectly stable. Over five
different systems, two of which run 24x7, I average one Windoze crash /
problem every couple years. I have also never had a virus on any of
these systems despite the fact they are on a cable modem connection full
time. People who have problems with Windoze primarily bring it on
themselves and will do the same regardless of the OS.

You are very fortunate. One wonders how long your luck will last. The
rest of the world must be pretty clueless, because they have all these
problems, in spades. and the computer mags are full of sad tales.

My "luck" has lasted for at least 15 years and I expect it will last a
lot longer. It does appear that the world at large is rather clueless as
it seems that they happily download the latest Napster variant or other
program from questionable sources and then wonder why they have
problems.

Ah. Now we come to the core. Keep your machine away from the internet,
and all is well. Well, Macs don't need to be protected against the web.

Huh? Where did you come up with that idea? Every one of my machines has
Internet access. You belief that Macs don't need to be "protected" from
the 'net is also false.


My machines that have essentially no problems are devoid of the Napsters
and their ilk. My machines have such things as TurboCAD, Mach3, WinIVR,
MPLAB, Deskengrave, Photoshop Elements, P-Touch utilities, WinZip and
the usual assortment of odds and ends like MS office, Netscape, etc. You
will note a lack of any "questionable" software.

Yep. And this is my plan for that planned Dell. Safety through
isolationism.

That has nothing to do with "isolationism", it has to do with product
quality. Do you purchase brake shoes for your car from some guy in a
dark alley? Would you expect them to be safe? Why would you expect any
different if you get your software from equally questionable sources?


The poor Macs will have to carry the heavy burden of world travel, while
the PC toils away in the basement, in darkness and solitude, a drudge.

Huh? Exactly what ratio of Macs to PCs do you see on the plane when you
travel?


As for security problems, there are tens of thousands of viruses et al
for Windows, maybe ten for MacOS (none that still work), and essentially
zero for most flavors of UNIX.

There are many, many security problems that affect most flavors of Unix.

Yes and no. While it's true that no commonly used OS can long resist
knowing attack by experts, some are far harder than others, and the
first-order question is resistance to automated attack.

Er, please qualify that with "consumer" OS as there are a number of "non
consumer" OSs that do just fine against all attacks. Try my favorite VMS
which can give you C2 qualified security "out of the box".

As for the vulnerability of Macs, that is a false sense of security
simply based on the volume of attempted attacks. If the virus kiddies
decided there were enough Macs to be worth attacking on any scale that
sense of security would evaporate very quickly.


Simply put, viruses et al are practical problems only for Windows.
Because such malware spreads itself, the problem grows exponentially and
far faster than systems can be attacked manually.

See above. If Macs were more than a single digit percentage of the
computing world the issues would be vastly different. The perceived
security of a Mac is a function of their scarcity, not their security.


And as a class, Macs and UNIX boxes are far harder to manually
compromise than Windows anything, but none are totally secure. Nothing
that complex ever will be.

I can't recall the last time I heard of a VMS or Tandem or Stratus
system being compromised.


If you want a secure OS, look at VMS or the Tandem and Stratus OSs.

Oh my, a blast from the past. True enough. VMS was my favorite
command-line OS of that era. If Ken Olsen had had a religious
conversion and had made VMS open in time, he might have killed UNIX in
the crib. But it didn't happen. So, now VMS has the security of the
dead.

Digital, Compaq and now HP have had no clue how to market VMS, indeed
Comapq and HP have no concept whatsoever of the "enterprise class" world
outside the PC realm.


Tandem and Stratus are still around I think, but sell into a very
specific niche, where perfect hardware reliability is needed. These
were used in some air traffic control systems, but have a key conceptual
flaw - the custom-built application software is the common cause of
failures, not hardware failures. So most ATC systems have total dual or
triple redundancy, and the hardware is just another (minor) cause of
failure and subsequent switchover (within one tenth of a second
typically).

VMS is still around as well. You don't hear about it much (like Tandem
or Stratus) because it's in applications that don't get hyped, and it
also "just works".

Software is most often the cause of problems and it's only getting worse
as the software gets both more complex and more poorly engineered.


Because MacOS is only for the clueless, it cannot be that the lack of
trouble on Macs is due to clued-in users. So there must be some other,
simpler explanation.

I have not seen this purported lack of trouble on Macs. Every single Mac
user I have known (dozens) has reported plenty of problems.

You need a better grade of Mac users. By your own analysis, the
clueless make their own trouble; this will be platform independent.

Indeed, and this will likely be found in users who treat the machine as
a tool and not a toy. Since the Mac UI generally seems to appeal more to
the "creative" types vs. the "technical" types, presumably there are
plenty of writers and such that have Macs that are perfectly stable and
also devoid of questionable software. Presumably also if you gave these
same people the same applications on a PC and they treated it the same
(no questionable junk), they would likely see the same stability.


2. Many pieces of software I use are only for, or run best on Windoze
and they run without any problems whatsoever on my systems. In the Linux
world there are open source substitutes for some of these programs,
however they are inconsistent, are often missing important features and
have essentially no support.

I do have to run Windows to use some applications, but they are odd
ones, like FEMM. Not to mention many CAD-CAM apps, and the like.

CAD, CNC, IVR, development utilities for microcontrollers, etc.


Mainstream stuff is available on both MacOS and Windows, but less so on
Linux.

Exactly.

Yep.

I agree that lots of Linux applications require some fiddling to use,
but this is due more to their being open-source versus commercial.

Open source is the source of some of its own problems. One of the
largest problems in this area is the lack of consistency in UI structure
and documentation.

Yep.

With
the growth of Linux in the market, more commercial apps will support
Linux, so this advantage is likely to erode over time.

The upcoming homogenization of the hardware market will help this a lot.
The switch to OSX was one step towards Apple getting out of the hardware
business which they have never been very good at. Now they have
announced they are abandoning IBM's antiquated CPUs.

The PowerPC architecture is hardly "antiquated", and is about twice as
fast per CPU clock cycle than Intel.

The PPC architecture has been around for quite some time and was a
rehash of a retired workstation processor. Neither the Intel x86 nor PPC
CPUs are remotely as fast / efficient as the (DEC/Compaq/HP) Alpha and
indeed that's why Intel stole much of the Alpha design for the Itanium
before eventually reaching a "settlement" over the theft.


The problem is that IBM is more interested in making large massively
multiprocessor servers the size of commercial refrigerators than little
desktop systems, and so IBM's direction increasingly deviated from what
Apple needed to win the CPU horsepower races.

More importantly Apple has been realizing that they need to get off
proprietary hardware which regardless of any technical merit, they can
never be economically competitive with. OSX was the first step towards
making their OS portable to a generic hardware platform. The
announcement of the switch to Intel CPUs was the next step. In the not
too distant future will be the announcement of MacOS for the PC,
followed later by the announcement of the end of proprietary Mac
hardware.

When the consumer is able to select a "generic" computer platform of the
size, scalability and fault tolerance for their application, and then
independently select from a dozen of so OSes depending on their
preferences, the consumer will be well served.

The common hardware platform will both drive down the hardware cost and
also let each OS stand on it's own merits independent of hardware
differences.


This deviation was particularly acute in laptops.

Also, as part of their "fit in but stand out" strategy, Apple wanted
Macs to be able to run Windows apps at full speed, rather than in
emulation at a fraction of full speed.

The need for emulation / Windoze support of course being a function of
market share. Few companies can afford to write Mac only software and
ignore 95% of the market.


The PowerPC architecture (from both IBM and Motorola) basically rules
the military and industrial embedded realtime markets, with something
like 70% market share.

Not sure where you got that figure, I follow the embedded world to some
extent and I see very few PPCs. In fact, a flip through the Dec '05
Circuit Cellar magazine revealed -0- references to PPC.


The Intel architecture is actually older than the PowerPC architecture,
by many years, so by longevity alone, Intel is antiquated. So what
exactly do you mean by "antiquated"?

Antiquated in large part means weighed down by "compatibility barnacles"
which limit the ability to adopt significant architectural changes. This
problem has affected both the Intel x86 and the IBM PPC lines.


In the near future you will simply select a generic hardware platform
from the vendor of your choice and in the size / expandability / fault
tolerance for your application, and then select your favorite OS to run
on it from a field of dozens of variants that all run on the same
hardware platform.

For MacOS, it won't happen soon, as Apple makes far too much money on
hardware. Probably one will be able to run Windows on Mac intel
hardware, but will not be able to run MacOS on generic intel PCs.

I predict that MacOS will be available to run on generic PC hardware
within another 2 or 3 years. One of Apples big problems is that the have
to make large profits on the Mac hardware since they sell so little of
it compared to the PC world. This causes them to either have to price
the product too high relative to the competition and try to hype reasons
it's worth the extra money, or to try to compromise to cut manufacturing
cost and risk reliability problems. We've seen examples of both paths
from Apple.


Mac hardware is far less trouble to assemble and configure,

That's because it is largely non-assembleable and non-configurable. You
get saddled with a generic box, you have few choices for options and you
have to pay for included items you may never use.

and is far
more reliable than most PCs

I've not seen any hard data showing any greater hardware reliability for
a Mac vs. PC. All computer hardware these days is far more reliable than
any of the software that runs on it.

, largely because in Macs there is a single
design agent, Apple, ensuring that it all fits together and meets
minimum standards of design and implementation quality.

.... and incompatibility with the rest of the computing world.

Standards, quality and compatibility were issues in the PC world more
than a decade ago. These days quality and interoperability are quite
high. Only on the most complex systems do you run into any configuration
issues and that is infrequent and in areas where Macs simply aren't
applicable anyway.


This is a major reason that people have been willing to pay somewhat
more for Apple hardware. It's simply less trouble.

That's the myth, not the reality. These days very few problems on either
platform are a result of hardware problems. Come to think of it, my Mac
friend did have a 17" Powerbook replaced under warranty when it failed
after about 3 months use. I don't have details on what actually failed,
but I know the machine was not physically abused.


If you want a rock solid, secure and reliable OS you will not find it in
Windoze, MacOS or Linux, you also will not find it for free.

Well, I agree that it won't be free. It will cost time and/or money,
one way or the other.

There are several out there, but they are in the "midrange" and
"mainframe" space and none are cheap. At least one (VMS) is now running
on three different hardware platforms including Itanium.

I don't think anyone is going to migrate to OpenVMS that isn't already
there.

Probably not, but that isn't because of any technical reasons.



MacOS is rock solid; this I know from direct personal experience.

Well, from indirect personal experience, my Mac using friend reports
problems on a weekly basis for one machine while my five Windoze
machines keep chugging along happily. I expect that with OSX (and
beyond) MacOS has the *potential* to be rock solid, just as Windoze
does, but it seems the ultimate determinant of stability is the
operator.

There may be a clue mismatch here.

Indeed, as I noted, stability seems mostly dependent on the operator.
Either OS can be stable or unstable depending on the operator.


The real reason for a metalworker to use Windows is that many of the
standard apps for metalworking and manufacturing are currently
Windows-only, but these are slowly picking up Linux support. I'm
planning to get a Dell PC at home for just this reason, but this PC will
be well-isolated from the Internet.

I got a stack of surplus Dell Optiplex systems for $100 ea and they are
great for quite a few things including CNC control. All my systems are
on a common network and have no problems. The firewall / router provides
a first line of defense and the only machine that has any inbound ports
mapped to it has a software firewall as well.

Yep. I'll probably get one of those $700 Dell boxes. Already got the
hardware firewall.

An old Optiplex GX100 (P3/733) runs Mach3 just fine under W2K on a
machine that will do 60IPM or so. Nice and cheap used as well.


It will be interesting to see what happens in the market when Macs can
run all these Windows-only apps at full speed, so there is some real
competition between platforms.

I don't think that will cause any real competition. What it will mostly
do is remove a handicap from those who prefer the Mac UI. I don't think
there are any significant numbers of people wanting to migrate to a Mac
but being held back by a lack of apps. Those wishing to migrate away
from Windows are more likely to explore free options like Linux that
will run on their existing hardware.


The App developers and their customers would dearly love to have an
alternative to Windows, to regain control of their lives, to escape the
Treadmill.

That seems to depend on the app developer. It seems there are a large
number of folks out there pretending to be programmers by gluing
together (poorly) various chunks of purchased code libraries for Windoze
to create hopelessly bloated, unstable and inefficient monstrosities and
calling them applications.

I think we are mixing unlike things here. The desire for independence
and freedom from lock-in exists regardless of the skill of the
programmer, especially as the programmer becomes experienced (and has
been screwed when something he depended upon is made unavailable).
Freedom from lock-in and abuse by marketing-driven companies is its own
good.

Joe Gwinn

The pseudo-programmers I reference are not concerned with such things,
they exist to glue purchased MS code libraries into horrendous "business
apps" for just long enough for them to migrate into the "management"
world.

Pete C.

On 3 Jan 2006 11:11:16 GMT, Zebee Johnstone wrote:

In rec.crafts.metalworking on Tue, 03 Jan 2006 10:51:28 GMT
Gunner wrote:

Well..with the kind help of you good folks..I managed to bumble my way
into getting this bitch online..but its still not right. If I closed
etho0, it will allow me to go on line. The moment I start it..it cuts off
the internet. This after inputting the proper dns numbers. Ive got some
clues where to start looking..but this is still a whole new ball game to
me.
Many thanks so far G

Well, if you are going via dialup, you aren't using eth0. You are
using an ethernet device called ppp0. (if you are using ADSL not
dial up then everything changes...)

So don't bother messing about with eth0, ignore it. Do everything you
were thinking of doing with eth0 but do it with ppp0 instead.

Which includes your firewall....

What's going on is that eth0 is waking up and going "OK, I have been
told to set a default route of x. So I will tell all packets that are
going to the internet to go through me."

So if you need eth0 for something else, like an internal network, find
out where eth0 is setting the default route and tell it to stop.

How to do that is distro dependent.

You can see if this is the problem by starting an xterm or rootshell
and
netstat -rn

You are looking for aline like
0.0.0.0 192.168.1.124 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 eth1

The 4 zeroes on the left are the default route, they say "everything
that's not specifically mentioned elsewhere takes this route". So any
packet addressed to a host that isn't mentioned elsewhere in netstat
(meaning the whole internet) goes out that route.

You can see on mine there's eth1 on the right. If you have only eth0
and not ppp0 then eth0 has stolen the default and you have to tell it
not to.

If you have 2 such lines, one for ppp0 and one for eth0 then all the
packets are confused and don't know which one to use. So you have to
delete both and recreate one.

To save yourself that hassle, before you start ppp edit whatever it is
that starts eth0 and tell it not to set a default route. How you do
that is distro dependent, so unless you are using a redhat one I can't
help.

THen bring up ppp. Use netstat -rn to see if the default is going out
ppp0.

Next bring up eth0, and check that it isn't grabbing the default.

Zebee

I believe that is exactly what is happening. I just dont know exactly
where its happening. Im running under Simply Mepis...which is a
Denebian spin off. When I turned off the etho..in the resolv.config
file it showed the ppp0 thingy..and noted that eth0 was temporarily
off.

Ill play with it some more next weekend, Im on my way to LA to make
some service calls.

But many thanks so far. Im damned sure Ill have more questions

Gunner

"Pax Americana is a philosophy. Hardly an empire.
Making sure other people play nice and dont kill each other (and us)
off in job lots is hardly empire building, particularly when you give
them self determination under "play nice" rules.

Think of it as having your older brother knock the **** out of you
for torturing the cat." Gunner

On 2 Jan 2006 10:59:41 GMT, Zebee Johnstone wrote:

In rec.crafts.metalworking on Mon, 02 Jan 2006 10:02:57 GMT
Gunner wrote:

When configureing PPP for dialup..its simple..set up your account,
modem, comm port..do a query...let it check..ok..no problem

However..in each and every one of those distros..using 3 differnt
kinds of USR external modems, A Supra 56 external, a Speed modem and
even 2 differnt kinds of internal ISA and PCI modems...

I can dial out. The ISP connects, I get the proper password etc
etc..it says Ive connected at x speed, all the proper lights are lit
on the modem(s), I open my browsers (4)...and it just ****ing sits
there.


First job - open a terminal (called xterm or root shell or terminal)
and do
more /etc/resolv.conf

you should see something like
[zebee@tasma tmp]$ more /etc/resolv.conf
nameserver 220.233.0.4
nameserver 220.233.0.3

Earthlinks dns numbers are
207.217.77.82,
207.217.120.83,
207.217.126.81

The numbers that were in there..were completly different.

I did a kppp, entered the dns numbers from earthlink, dialed..it
connected, saild opened resolve..no ppp0: found




there may be other things, but you should have at least one nameserver
line.

If you don't, then your ISP isn't feeding you a nameserver with your
PPP, it might be that your linux distros aren't asking for it. (I"ve
always put 'em in by hand, so can't help with getting it via PPP)

On your ISP's help page they should list things like the mail server
to use, check if they give you a nameserver. If they do, then become
root on your linux box and edit the /etc/resolv.conf file, adding a
line like above, using your ISPs nameserver address.

If there is a nameserver in the resolv.conf, then try pinging it.
given the nameservers above you'd do
[zebee@tasma tmp]$ ping 220.233.0.4
and get something like
[zebee@tasma tmp]$ ping 220.233.0.4
PING 220.233.0.4 (220.233.0.4) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 220.233.0.4: icmp_seq=0 ttl=61 time=16.6 ms

if you don't, then the nameserver IP is likely wrong, ring your ISP
and ask them to tell you the right one.

If you have a nameserver and it pings, then try this:
[zebee@tasma tmp]$ ping www.google.com
PING www.l.google.com (66.102.7.104) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 66.102.7.104: icmp_seq=0 ttl=244 time=184 ms

If it can't get an IP for google, then the nameserver is bad, ring the
ISP.

IF you can ping and resolve names, then it's a browser setup problem.
Check your proxies.

Zebee



"Pax Americana is a philosophy. Hardly an empire.
Making sure other people play nice and dont kill each other (and us)
off in job lots is hardly empire building, particularly when you give
them self determination under "play nice" rules.

Think of it as having your older brother knock the **** out of you
for torturing the cat." Gunner

On Tue, 03 Jan 2006 00:32:56 GMT, with neither quill nor qualm, "Pete
C." quickly quoth:

Gunner wrote:
Lots of suggestions..and Ill work on them later today. Im busy trying
to repair my roof..of which a fair amount blew off in the the 70mph
winds we had Sunday. Damnit

Hey, Gunner, tried Linspire yet?


Don't you hate those annoying little distractions? I've got the
potential threat of grass fires to contend with here in the Dallas area.

We've had a bit of rain here. 13.65" in December, 7+ of them in the
last week of the year. I actually saw water puddle on my lawn for the
first time in nearly 4 years! The ground up here sucks up water like
it's going out of style.

Here's some of the fun we had: www.diversify.com/gpweather.html


--
REMEMBER: First you pillage, then you burn.
---
http://diversify.com NoteSHADES(tm) laptop privacy/glare guards

Cydrome Leader wrote:

In rec.crafts.metalworking Joseph Gwinn wrote:
In article ,
Cydrome Leader wrote:

In rec.crafts.metalworking Gunner wrote:
Ok..for all you Linux junkies...this has been driving me nuts for
months and months and ... well you get the idea.
Originally..I thought this issue was hardware....but now...

What are you trying to do that justifies all the time wasted on trying to
run anything but windows?

Huh? Compared to MacOS, Windows is a notorious timewaster, so clearly
you will be switching to MacOS immediately?

Windows makes a fine workstation.

It makes a better doorstop.

--
Ragheads - worthless pig **** eaters..
Illegal aliens - just as worthless as ragheads.

Wayne Cook wrote:

On Tue, 03 Jan 2006 02:06:02 GMT, "Pete C."
wrote:

zadoc wrote:

On Tue, 03 Jan 2006 00:32:56 GMT, "Pete C."
wrote:

[snip, see original]

Don't you hate those annoying little distractions? I've got the
potential threat of grass fires to contend with here in the Dallas area.

Pete C.

The fires in Texas and Oklahoma are even making the TV news in Sydney.
As it is midwinter there, isn't this a bit unusual?

Are people there starting to wonder about climatic changes and global
warming?

One wonders what midsummer will be like.

Cheers,


Dunno, it's apparently a bit warmer than normal. I bailed out of the
frozen northeast to come down here and I'm loving the weather. It's 57
at the moment, was near 70 today, and I just talked to my mother in CT
where it's 33 and snowing heavily. This past summer had a few 104 degree
days, but the humidity was like 20% so as long as you were in the shade
it was just fine.


The areas that are having problems are used to more moisture than
they got last year. As for temperature well it's staying warmer than
it unusually does. Normally we will get cold spells followed by warm
spells. This year there's been very few cold spells (at least that's
how the old timers would put it).

Up here it's slightly drier than it really should be but not
extremely so. We're used to being rather dry up here. As for the fires
well we had a pretty bad one right next to my house Sun during all the
wind. In fact it did a good job of trying to burn the whole town down
and controlling it was a bear with 40-50 mph winds. But we are no
strangers to that type of fire up here thus all the fire departments
have a mutual assistance pact and there's even a joint command
structure worked out already. Thus they can fight fires like this as
effectively as possible. What really mess them up though was the front
coming through right in the middle of the fire. When it started the
wind was out of the west in a pretty steady 30-40mph. This spread the
fire down the river where it was difficult to fight. Then the wind
turned out of the north and at times got even higher. This caused the
start and end of the first burn to take off in a southern direction
(fortunately the middle of the fire had been controlled enough that it
didn't take off, real fortunate for me since my house would of been
right in line for it). They managed to stop the west end of the fire
right at I-40. If it had managed to jump that it would of ended up in
town. Another good fortune was the rain that came after the front came
through (though it took hour after the wind changed for it to come).
If it hadn't of came then they would of had a much harder time of
getting the rather spread out (by that time) fire under control.

Wayne Cook
Shamrock, TX
http://members.dslextreme.com/users/waynecook/index.htm

I'm hoping it doesn't get to the Denison area, my pond / tank is a bit
low so it would make it a bit difficult for me to defend my place, not
that I wouldn't try anyway. If I can get a cover over it to control
evaporation I may try to build a water reserve.

Pete C.

Pete,

On that, you are fundamentally wrong. They are indeed both computers,
and regardless of the UI on top, any even remotely useable OS operates
on the same fundamentals. If you understand one OS, you understand
essentially any other, it is only the UI that really differs.

I disagree. Remember the Java installation flap of some years ago?
Sun/Unix guys failed to recognize the different way the Windows handles
time stamps, and they corrupted a bunch of machines. Is it VMS that
versions files as they are modified??? Windows goes nuts on just about
any change, but one can frequently simply restart a few services on
Linux and keep going. The point being there are fundamental differences
among operating systems, to which by comparison, the UI is simply a
source of small annoyances and missed opportunities.



I predict that MacOS will be available to run on generic PC hardware
within another 2 or 3 years. One of Apples big problems is that the have
to make large profits on the Mac hardware since they sell so little of
it compared to the PC world. This causes them to either have to price
the product too high relative to the competition and try to hype reasons
it's worth the extra money, or to try to compromise to cut manufacturing
cost and risk reliability problems. We've seen examples of both paths
from Apple.

I agree. In fact, I think that is why they moved to unix. If they ever
figure out how to put their UI on top of a generic Linux kernel (make
the window manger etc., sufficiently pluggable - shouldn't be hard) and
add a slick installer, then MS has a worthy competitor.

One caveat: if they make the move, they will have to run on the mutt
hardware that MS has been (barely??) running on for a long time. Apple
has done more than keep their hardware profit margin high: they have
controlled it to the benefit of their software. They would not be able
to do that on a generic PC.

Bill

Bill Schwab wrote:

Pete,

On that, you are fundamentally wrong. They are indeed both computers,
and regardless of the UI on top, any even remotely useable OS operates
on the same fundamentals. If you understand one OS, you understand
essentially any other, it is only the UI that really differs.

I disagree. Remember the Java installation flap of some years ago?

Not really, I haven't given Java a lot of attention.

Sun/Unix guys failed to recognize the different way the Windows handles
time stamps, and they corrupted a bunch of machines. Is it VMS that
versions files as they are modified???

VMS does indeed do file versions. Works very well as long as you make
sure you set a version limit on the file or directory.

Windows goes nuts on just about
any change, but one can frequently simply restart a few services on
Linux and keep going. The point being there are fundamental differences
among operating systems, to which by comparison, the UI is simply a
source of small annoyances and missed opportunities.

Those are really not fundamental differences, they are differences in
implementation. The fundamentals of what an OS is trying to do remain
essentially unchanged.


I predict that MacOS will be available to run on generic PC hardware
within another 2 or 3 years. One of Apples big problems is that the have
to make large profits on the Mac hardware since they sell so little of
it compared to the PC world. This causes them to either have to price
the product too high relative to the competition and try to hype reasons
it's worth the extra money, or to try to compromise to cut manufacturing
cost and risk reliability problems. We've seen examples of both paths
from Apple.

I agree. In fact, I think that is why they moved to unix. If they ever
figure out how to put their UI on top of a generic Linux kernel (make
the window manger etc., sufficiently pluggable - shouldn't be hard) and
add a slick installer, then MS has a worthy competitor.

MS already has a worthy competitor, adding the Apple UI on top of it
does nothing to improve it's worthiness. Pick a Unix version with the
CDE UI and there is your worthy competitor.


One caveat: if they make the move, they will have to run on the mutt
hardware that MS has been (barely??) running on for a long time. Apple
has done more than keep their hardware profit margin high: they have
controlled it to the benefit of their software. They would not be able
to do that on a generic PC.

The move away from proprietary hardware is pretty unstoppable. We're
largely past the point where people worry about not being able to run
their old apps on the new OS / hardware version. That worry largely
abated after we got past the NT compatibility worries years ago. Now,
both due to the new market where people are more willing to drop the old
apps, and due to much faster CPUs where the old stuff can be emulated as
fast as it ever ran before, it is possible to introduce significant
architectural changes to improve performance.

Pete C.

On Tue, 03 Jan 2006 18:41:26 GMT, Pete C. wrote:

The move away from proprietary hardware is pretty unstoppable. We're
largely past the point where people worry about not being able to run
their old apps on the new OS / hardware version. That worry largely
abated after we got past the NT compatibility worries years ago. Now,
both due to the new market where people are more willing to drop the old
apps, and due to much faster CPUs where the old stuff can be emulated as
fast as it ever ran before, it is possible to introduce significant
architectural changes to improve performance.

Well, I'm not sure. I think that, among the many other reasons, the
fact that Apple hardware is predictable is one reason why Mac's are so
stable. Now, throw a 5 dollar video card in with a cheapo hard drive,
next to a no-name motherboard, and yeah, you might have problems.
Hopefully this move to Intel will be done well. I have no reason to
doubt that it will, but if it starts meaning that developer's effort is
diverted from making good software, to making it work on crufty
hardware, I don't see that as a net-positive.

Then again, I'm not in charge of Apple, and ignroed them completely
until they went to Unix.

In rec.crafts.metalworking Gunner wrote:
On Tue, 3 Jan 2006 15:17:42 +0000 (UTC), Cydrome Leader
wrote:

In rec.crafts.metalworking Gunner wrote:
On Mon, 2 Jan 2006 12:33:00 +0000 (UTC), Cydrome Leader
wrote:

In rec.crafts.metalworking Gunner wrote:
Ok..for all you Linux junkies...this has been driving me nuts for
months and months and ... well you get the idea.
Originally..I thought this issue was hardware....but now...

What are you trying to do that justifies all the time wasted on trying to
run anything but windows?



Run Linux..which pretty much justifies trying to run something besides
Winblows.

It's cute you can knock windows, but cannot handle anything else. How
come you called Linux Linux, not Linsux? You're apparently not able to get
it to web browse for more than 13 minutes, something WebTV users can pull
off.

Are you switching to 50Hz next?

Shrug..I could fire up the OS2 box. Or the Dos box. But then on the
other hand..no one is born knowing how to run any operating
system..and folks have to learn them.

Simply because I know the various incarnations of Windoze well enough
to know their limitations and issues, is the reason Im now learning
Linux. When I get good at it..if I think it deserves the Linsux label,
I shall apply it.

So why does windows earn the winblows name? Windows 3.1 was functional
enough to be used to browse the web. I could understand if you tried all
these:

windows 3.0
windows 3.1
windows for workgroups
windows 95
windows 98
windows 2000
windows xp

and finally windows 2003 before you were finally able to look at a website
or, or type up and print a document. Why the dual standard in name
calling?


Lets see...Ill bet you knock child molesters, yet you specialize in
visiting teen hookers, right?

So- child molesters are linux users, or is it windows a teen hooker?



Gunner




But then..Ive been known to make my own parts, rather than go buy them
too.

Gunner


Installing a number of distros of Linux:

Simply Mepis
Knoppix
Knottix
Fedora
Damned small Linux
Beatrix

When configureing PPP for dialup..its simple..set up your account,
modem, comm port..do a query...let it check..ok..no problem

However..in each and every one of those distros..using 3 differnt
kinds of USR external modems, A Supra 56 external, a Speed modem and
even 2 differnt kinds of internal ISA and PCI modems...

I can dial out. The ISP connects, I get the proper password etc
etc..it says Ive connected at x speed, all the proper lights are lit
on the modem(s), I open my browsers (4)...and it just ****ing sits
there.

Eventually it times out and says Unable to connect to bla bla.com or
whatever I was trying to open..but thats all

I open the details window of the PPP prog...and in the Received
box..it (received) incriments higer every so often..but the transmit
window..normally shows it stalled at 148 packets. And there she stays.

I was thinking this was something unique to my box...but today, I
farted around with two completly different boxes..a Compaq 700, and a
CopperMine clone.

All do the same thing. Ive tried every browser configureation known
to me..etc etc

Every thing works just hunky dorey if I set up a proxy on another
Winblows machine, set the Linux browsers to the proper proxy
settings..then I can go whereever I want. Upload, down load,
newsgroups bla bla bla..

Ive run off of cds, done full hd installs..the freaking works... for
about 7 months now off and on. Id get ****ed, and use it for a
server..then curiosity gets me by the shorthairs..and I try again.

Sometimes..I do notice the activity light on the switch blinking a bit
more often than normal when Im trying to connect. Like its trying to
surf the local network rather than the internet..but not alll the
time.

What the hell am I doing wrong???????

Mommy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Gunner

"Pax Americana is a philosophy. Hardly an empire.
Making sure other people play nice and dont kill each other (and us)
off in job lots is hardly empire building, particularly when you give
them self determination under "play nice" rules.

Think of it as having your older brother knock the **** out of you
for torturing the cat." Gunner

"Pax Americana is a philosophy. Hardly an empire.
Making sure other people play nice and dont kill each other (and us)
off in job lots is hardly empire building, particularly when you give
them self determination under "play nice" rules.

Think of it as having your older brother knock the **** out of you
for torturing the cat." Gunner

"Pax Americana is a philosophy. Hardly an empire.
Making sure other people play nice and dont kill each other (and us)
off in job lots is hardly empire building, particularly when you give
them self determination under "play nice" rules.

Think of it as having your older brother knock the **** out of you
for torturing the cat." Gunner

"Pete C." wrote:

We're
largely past the point where people worry about not being able to run
their old apps on the new OS / hardware version. That worry largely
abated after we got past the NT compatibility worries years ago.

I don't think so.

Now,
both due to the new market where people are more willing to drop the old
apps,

IT isn't being "willing" when you don't have a choice.

and due to much faster CPUs where the old stuff can be emulated as
fast as it ever ran before, it is possible to introduce significant
architectural changes to improve performance.

jk

According to Larry Jaques :
On Tue, 03 Jan 2006 00:32:56 GMT, with neither quill nor qualm, "Pete
C." quickly quoth:

Gunner wrote:
Lots of suggestions..and Ill work on them later today. Im busy trying
to repair my roof..of which a fair amount blew off in the the 70mph
winds we had Sunday. Damnit

Hey, Gunner, tried Linspire yet?

I've missed a lot of this, as you started out with it
cross-posted to/from the survivalism newsgroup, which I have killfiled.

One thing which has occurred to me as to why your Windows system
has no problems but the linux one does not is that the Windows box uses
DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) to get both its IP address
and its DNS server.

I've seen suggestions that you get the DNS address and install
it in the /etc/resolv.conf file, which is one way to do it. However,
you might check out how to start up a dhcp client on your linux box to
let it pick up the information, since that is almost certainly the way
your ISP wants you to get this information.

I don't have a linux box around to check at the moment, but you
could check out what "man -k dhcp" turns up. (You may have to run
"catman" or something similar to build up the database that the "-k"
option uses.

Running it on Sun's Solaris 10, I get:


================================================== ====================
dhcp dhcp (5) - Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol
dhcp_inittab dhcp_inittab (4) - information repository for DHCP options
dhcp_modules dhcp_modules (5) - data storage modules for the DHCP service
dhcp_network dhcp_network (4) - DHCP network tables
dhcpagent dhcpagent (1m) - Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) client daemon
dhcpconfig dhcpconfig (1m) - DHCP service configuration utility
dhcpinfo dhcpinfo (1) - display values of parameters received through DHCP
dhcpmgr dhcpmgr (1m) - graphical interface for managing DHCP service
dhcpsvc.conf dhcpsvc.conf (4) - file containing service configuration parameters for the DHCP service
dhcptab dhcptab (4) - DHCP configuration parameter table
dhtadm dhtadm (1m) - DHCP configuration table management utility
dsvclockd dsvclockd (1m) - DHCP service lock daemon
in.dhcpd in.dhcpd (1m) - Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol server
pntadm pntadm (1m) - DHCP network table management utility
================================================== ====================

And on an OpenBSD system, I get:

================================================== ====================
dhclient (8) - Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) Client
dhclient-script (8) - DHCP client network configuration script
dhclient.conf (5) - DHCP client configuration file
dhclient.leases (5) - DHCP client lease database
dhcp (8) - configuring OpenBSD for DHCP
dhcp-options (5) - Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol options
dhcpd (8) - Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol Server
dhcpd.conf (5) - dhcpd configuration file
dhcpd.leases (5) - DHCP client lease database
================================================== ====================

The first one -- dhclient(8) -- is probably where you want to start. Or
perhaps just "dhcp(8)". See what your "man -k" offers, and dig through
there.

Good Luck,
DoN.
--
Email: | Voice (all times): (703) 938-4564
(too) near Washington D.C. | http://www.d-and-d.com/dnichols/DoN.html
--- Black Holes are where God is dividing by zero ---

Newsgroups: rec.crafts.metalworking
Subject: Linux is Driving me $#@!!!! nutz!!!
References: rs.com
Reply-To: (Donald Nichols)
Organization: D & D Data, Vienna, VA
X-Newsreader: trn 4.0-test76 (Apr 2, 2001)

According to Donnie Barnes :
On Tue, 03 Jan, DoN. Nichols wrote:
Various flavors of linux have various out-of-the-box security.
Some are quite secure, some are rather open.

You're changing the argument, AFAIC. Linux is itself inherently secure
because it *can* be secured quite well. Distributions, OTOH, are a
mechanism by which it can be rendered insecure (or not, depending).
Chosing your distribution of Linux can be just as important as the choice
was to use Linux in the first place.

Certainly.

My own favorite for security and stability is OpenBSD. Among
other things, it runs DNS servers, sendmail, and web servers in "chroot
jails", so if there is another security hole found in these, it severely
limits the damage which can be done.

Granted, the chroot jail for the web server requires a lot of
work-arounds for some common CGI programs.

And against some attacks can be utterly useless, which means to me that you
really just have a false sense of security with them combined with the
aggravation of having to make them work in every case, which is quite
annoying.

It at least limits the damage to the rest of the system, even if
it can't protect the individual server program. (And, of course, trying
to make some programs work within the chroot jail can reduce the
security if not done carefully. I prefer static linking to using shared
libs for example.)

[ ... ]

As for the mention elsewhere in this thread about security
problems with ftp, telnet, and some other services -- those are turned
off by default (they were not designed for real security, back when the
net was a much kinder and gentler place), and ssh is the preferred
alternative.

Those are turned off by default in most every Linux distribution as well.

They certainly did not used to be so.

I've actually kicked sendmail off of the system, and replaced it
with qmail, which I trust a lot more than I do sendmail. Qmail was
*designed* with security in mind.

Argh. Keep in mind that qmail isn't truly open source by most technically
accepted definitions.

I'm using an older version, from when it was a bit more open.

If you are simply an end user you can certainly use
it freely,

As I am.

so I'm being pedantic. The author and I share the same initials
and have shared several, err, heated debates about his software. The
confusion about our initials has caused me some grief, too, as he can be
much more of a jerk than I am generally known for (I have my moments as
well, but he seems to have many more) and people sometimes confuse me (on
the internet) for him.

I've watched his interactions in the past, and I can understand
that being mistaken for him could be a problem.

So I probably have a bias. Note that there is a
reason qmail isn't shipped with most Linux distributions, and it isn't
technical merits.

I used qmail back in the day when there were no other high performance
options to run high volume mailing lists on x86 hardware well and it served
that purpose. It was also terribly difficult to administer if a problem
*did* arise and I was very thankful when other options surfaced. But if it
works for you, great.

So -- what do you suggest as a good alternative?

Enjoy,
DoN.

--
Email: | Voice (all times): (703) 938-4564
(too) near Washington D.C. | http://www.d-and-d.com/dnichols/DoN.html
--- Black Holes are where God is dividing by zero ---

zadoc wrote:
On Tue, 03 Jan 2006 00:32:56 GMT, "Pete C."
wrote:

[snip, see original]


Don't you hate those annoying little distractions? I've got the
potential threat of grass fires to contend with here in the Dallas area.

Pete C.


The fires in Texas and Oklahoma are even making the TV news in Sydney.
As it is midwinter there, isn't this a bit unusual?

Not really. West Texas, where these fires are, typically has little
rain in the late autumn, early winter months. Added to periodic summer,
latew fall droughts, you have lots of dry grass and brush available.

Having said that, here in Houston (Southeastern/Coastal Texas) we're
having a heat spell (well, warm for winter). We're having tempertures
nearly 18 F (10 C) warmer than average, and have broken high temperature
records set 70 years ago (81 F (27 C)on 1/1, record was 80 in 1934).
Now, yesterday, 1/2, was 79 (26 C), and the record for 1/2 is 82(@ 28
C), set in 1965, so warm winters aren't too unusual.

Record lows for those days were 25 and 17 (-4 and -8 C), both set in
1979. Now, THAT was a cold spell for Houston.


Are people there starting to wonder about climatic changes and global
warming?

One wonders what midsummer will be like.

72 and 95% humidity at sunrise, mid 80's to low 90's at 2 pm, afternoon
scattered thunderstorms. Occasionally low 100's. (22,30-35,39 C,
respectively). Having the Gulf of Mexico nearby helps moderate the
weather, if you don't mind Hurricanes and Tropical Storms.


Cheers,



----== Posted via Newsfeeds.Com - Unlimited-Unrestricted-Secure Usenet News==----
http://www.newsfeeds.com The #1 Newsgroup Service in the World! 100,000 Newsgroups
---= East/West-Coast Server Farms - Total Privacy via Encryption =---

On Tue, 03 Jan 2006 18:29:46 GMT, "Pete C."
wrote:


I'm hoping it doesn't get to the Denison area, my pond / tank is a bit
low so it would make it a bit difficult for me to defend my place, not
that I wouldn't try anyway. If I can get a cover over it to control
evaporation I may try to build a water reserve.


It would be a good idea but even better is for everything near the
house to be mowed short. The less there is to burn the easier it'll be
to control.

Wayne Cook
Shamrock, TX
http://members.dslextreme.com/users/waynecook/index.htm

Zebee Johnstone wrote:

Well, if you are going via dialup, you aren't using eth0. You are
using an ethernet device called ppp0. (if you are using ADSL not
dial up then everything changes...)

So don't bother messing about with eth0, ignore it. Do everything you
were thinking of doing with eth0 but do it with ppp0 instead.

I'm wondering if he'd benefit from completely disabling eth0 for the time
being. As in putting something like 'alias eth0 off' in /etc/modules.conf
(assuming that's what he's got, and not /etc/modprobe.conf... I'm on a FC4
machine, which differs). At least then there'd be no chance of something
changing the default route to eth0, and the likelyhood of errors being
logged someplace that would help track down the offending process.

Back when I used to use PPP with Linux, there was an /etc/ppp directory
that contained startup and shutdown scripts, and those were what would set
the default route to what it should be. That was a while ago, though. It
has most likely changed, although I do still see that directory on my FC4
box. Still, it doesn't seem like devices ever alter the default route when
they come up. All they ever do is add a route to the network considered
local to their address. I would think that it would be sufficient to
statically assign a benign address (like 10.0.0.1) to eth0, and hopefully
there would be scripts smart enough to add/change the default route when
ppp0 comes up. That's certainly the way I had it working back in the days
before DSL.

Heck, Gunner, if you were going to be in the Pasadena area, I'd say just
drop it off and let me see if I can get it running some afternoon. I haven't
played with PPP in years, it'd be an interesting walk down memory lane.

According to Zebee Johnstone :
In rec.crafts.metalworking on Tue, 03 Jan 2006 10:51:28 GMT
Gunner wrote:

[ ... ]


You can see if this is the problem by starting an xterm or rootshell
and
netstat -rn

You are looking for aline like
0.0.0.0 192.168.1.124 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 eth1

The 4 zeroes on the left are the default route, they say "everything
that's not specifically mentioned elsewhere takes this route". So any
packet addressed to a host that isn't mentioned elsewhere in netstat
(meaning the whole internet) goes out that route.

That is somewhat different from the format on my Solaris 10 box:

================================================== ====================
default 10.0.0.50 UG 1 4097
================================================== ====================

Where 10.0.0.50 is the internal side of the firewall system.

And -- on OpenBSD, it displays:

================================================== ====================
default 10.0.0.50 UGS 0 5646 - rl0
================================================== ====================

If there is an existing default route, you will either need to
remove it first. For the above line, that would be done by:

route delete default 10.0.0.50

followed by adding the default route to your ppp interface.

route add default (IP-address of the other end of your PPP interface)

Anyway -- on both systems, there is an /etc/hostname.(interface-name)
file for each interface. In your case, you would need two. One for the
eth0 interface, and one for the ppp0 one. *Assuming that Linux does it
like Solaris and OpenBSD.

In Solaris, the contents of the file is the hostname to be
applied to that interface, which has to be present in the /etc/hosts
file to assign an IP address to the port.

In OpenBSD, the contents are somewhat different:

================================================== ====================
inet 10.0.0.23 255.255.255.0 NONE
================================================== ====================

and that is used to assign the information to the interface directly.

There is a lot to this, and it tends to vary between systems, so
I can only point out what works here for me and list the systems on
which it works.

Good Luck
DoN.
--
Email: | Voice (all times): (703) 938-4564
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--- Black Holes are where God is dividing by zero ---

In article , "Pete C."
wrote:

Joseph Gwinn wrote:

In article ,
"Pete C." wrote:

Joseph Gwinn wrote:

In article ,
"Pete C." wrote:

Joseph Gwinn wrote:

[snip]
I use MacOS at home (where I'm the IT Department), and Windows plus
UNIX at work. MacOS is simply less trouble, by a lot.

I must say that I have little hands-on experience with MacOS as I find
the UI infuriating.

GUI preferences are very much a matter of opinion, being in the eye of
the beholder. There are some parts of the WinXP GUI I'd like to see in
MacOS, and vice versa. This cross-migration is happening, but slowly.

I haven't seen anything I liked in the Mac UI, and I saw nothing new to
like in the XP UI either. I rather prefer the "old" 2K UI, or better yet
the CDE on a "real" OS (like perhaps VMS).


But in total I find the MacOS GUI less annoying than the Windows GUI.

I find the opposite to be true and in particular I find that I can
readily disable the most annoying "features" of the Windoze UI where
this does not appear to be the case on the Mac UI.

Clearly a matter of disputed opinion; no further discussion is needed or
is profitable.


That said, these both are still computers, and are very frustrating
until one has learned the basics, so one cannot judge either GUI from
ten minutes effort.

On that, you are fundamentally wrong. They are indeed both computers,
and regardless of the UI on top, any even remotely useable OS operates
on the same fundamentals. If you understand one OS, you understand
essentially any other, it is only the UI that really differs.

It's true that down deep they must all do the same thing, but this level
is quite remote from ordinary users, who tear their hair trying to
figure out under which GUI rock the needed control is hidden. Or even
which control or controls cause the current annoying misbehaviour. And
Microsoft has a different theory of rocks than Apple, so if you have
spent too little time with such a GUI, it will all be so very
frustrating.


On every attempt to actually accomplish anything on a Mac (usually
trying to help a Mac user who couldn't figure it out either) I have
consistently found that the language, structure and in many cases simply
the existence of proper configuration options was a significant issue on
Macs. These were not simple UI differences.

Um. I have no idea why you have such problems, but theorize that it's
simple lack of sufficient experience with the Mac GUI.


I do however have several friends that use Macs to
varying degrees and all have had plenty of problems. One friend is a
teacher who uses both Macs and PCs extensively and reports that the Macs
crash at least as often as the PCs.

With students messing with them? In education, that has been the prime
problem. Schools have always liked Macs because the teachers could keep
them running without needing an IT guy.

This teacher *is* an IT guy and reports no difference in the frequency
of crashes between the PCs and Macs.

My point was that most teachers are *not* IT guys, and are happy that
way.


Another friend uses Macs almost
exclusively and in 5 years and like three Macs she had a ratio of about
20:1 to the Windoze problems I had during that time. I did not see any
decrease in the frequency of problems with the switch to OSX either.

My experience was and is the exact opposite.

Which only goes to show that the stability of either system is most
dependent on the operator, not the OS.

I don't know what she was doing, but clearly you are far more the IT
guru than she. An aggressive or merely clumsy user with admin privilege
can make themselves lots of trouble.


MacOS was total crap up until Apple finally
realized they lacked the expertise to write an OS and put their UI over
someone else's Unix core. Now instead of being a crappy UI on top of
a crappy OS, it's a crappy UI on top of a so-so OS.

Don't mistake me for a Windoze bigot either, ...

Could have fooled me. Listen to yourself, listen to the music.

How do you figure that? Anyone with any technical knowledge knows that
the pre OSX versions of MacOS were hopelessly deficient in many areas,
particularly the lack of memory management. OSX fixed many of the core
problems, but the UI that I can't stand (I hated the UI on the first
Lisa as well) remains. If I wanted an alternative to Windoze it
certainly would not be Mac as there is simply no advantage whatsoever to
MacOS over Linux or another Unix variant.

I submit that your answer above proves my point in spades. Listen to
the tone of voice, and parse the implicit assumptions.

Huh? Hardly. I find the Windoze UI vastly more tolerable than the Mac
UI, largely because I can customize the Windoze UI sufficiently to
eliminate the most annoying parts. This does not in any way indicate
that I am a Windoze fan or bigot, simply that I hate the Mac UI. My OS
preference is VMS, however there is a bit of a shortage of affordable
applications for the things I do.

You really don't hear it, do you? OK, I'll parse it a little:

We'll set the stage with such dispassionate, value neutral statements
like "MacOS was total crap until Apple finally realized they lacked the
expertise to write an OS" - It may be crap, but 25 million users rather
like it, and were known to say similarly unemotional things about DOS
and Windows.

And will end with "Anyone with any technical knowledge knows that...".
In other words, anyone who disagrees by definition cannot have any
technical knowledge. Aside from the implicit ad hominem attack, this
assumes the truth of the very thing to be demonstrated, and thus is
circular.


...I use Windoze for a lot of
things for two reasons:

1. When you have a clue, Windoze is perfectly stable. Over five
different systems, two of which run 24x7, I average one Windoze crash
/ problem every couple years. I have also never had a virus on any of
these systems despite the fact they are on a cable modem connection
full time. People who have problems with Windoze primarily bring it on
themselves and will do the same regardless of the OS.

You are very fortunate. One wonders how long your luck will last. The
rest of the world must be pretty clueless, because they have all these
problems, in spades. and the computer mags are full of sad tales.

My "luck" has lasted for at least 15 years and I expect it will last a
lot longer. It does appear that the world at large is rather clueless as
it seems that they happily download the latest Napster variant or other
program from questionable sources and then wonder why they have
problems.

Ah. Now we come to the core. Keep your machine away from the internet,
and all is well. Well, Macs don't need to be protected against the web.

Huh? Where did you come up with that idea? Every one of my machines has
Internet access.

Downloading stuff (including napster) is very much a part of the net.
It shouldn't be possible for this to cause such problems, even if some
users are naive and some people out there are evil, because such people
have always existed, and always will.


Your belief that Macs don't need to be "protected" from
the 'net is also false.

Most Macs do not run with any virus protection whatsoever, and are none
the worse for it.


My machines that have essentially no problems are devoid of the Napsters
and their ilk. My machines have such things as TurboCAD, Mach3, WinIVR,
MPLAB, Deskengrave, Photoshop Elements, P-Touch utilities, WinZip and
the usual assortment of odds and ends like MS office, Netscape, etc. You
will note a lack of any "questionable" software.

Yep. And this is my plan for that planned Dell. Safety through
isolationism.

That has nothing to do with "isolationism", it has to do with product
quality. Do you purchase brake shoes for your car from some guy in a
dark alley? Would you expect them to be safe? Why would you expect any
different if you get your software from equally questionable sources?

I don't see the analogy. Are you claiming that Macs are bought only
with small unmarked bills from junkies in dark and fetid alleys? This
is quite the scoop - I always wondered about them.

If you read the PC magazines (yes, PC magazines), you will see that they
consistently rate the reliability and quality of Macs at the top, with
Dell close behind. Apple beats all PC makers on quality of user
support. Consumer Reports backs these findings up.


The poor Macs will have to carry the heavy burden of world travel, while
the PC toils away in the basement, in darkness and solitude, a drudge.

Huh? Exactly what ratio of Macs to PCs do you see on the plane when you
travel?

You missed my joke.


As for security problems, there are tens of thousands of viruses et al
for Windows, maybe ten for MacOS (none that still work), and
essentially zero for most flavors of UNIX.

There are many, many security problems that affect most flavors of Unix.

Yes and no. While it's true that no commonly used OS can long resist
knowing attack by experts, some are far harder than others, and the
first-order question is resistance to automated attack.

Er, please qualify that with "consumer" OS as there are a number of "non
consumer" OSs that do just fine against all attacks. Try my favorite VMS
which can give you C2 qualified security "out of the box".

Um. It's true that most consumer OSs lack Orange-Book (DoD 5200.28-STD)
certification while most server platforms do have such certs, but why is
that important? Nor do I see the relevance of VMS in this discussion.

Actually, the old DoD 5200.28 family of standards have been withdrawn by
the DoD, replaced by Common Criteria and DoD 5200.1 and 5200.2. The
formal equivalent to 5200.25 C2-Level is CAPP (Controlled Access
protection level) EAL (Evaluated Assurance Level) 3 or better.

Recent versions of Windows have CAPP EAL3 certs, as do two Linux
distributions. All the major UNIX platforms have EAL3 or EAL4. I
haven't checked MacOS, but I imagine that Apple will get or has gotten
the certs, just so they can sell to DoD. With a BSD base, it won't be
hard.


As for the vulnerability of Macs, that is a false sense of security
simply based on the volume of attempted attacks. If the virus kiddies
decided there were enough Macs to be worth attacking on any scale that
sense of security would evaporate very quickly.

While it's true that Macs are less of a target because they are a
fraction of the market, it's also true that Macs are harder to
compromise, especially by script kiddies. A lot of this is due to the
the fact that the security base of MacOS is BSD UNIX, and a lot is due
to the fact that most dangerous things in MacOS are locked down by
default, and/or require an administrator password to access. Windows
has just started to implement this, with fanfare.


Simply put, viruses et al are practical problems only for Windows.
Because such malware spreads itself, the problem grows exponentially and
far faster than systems can be attacked manually.

See above. If Macs were more than a single digit percentage of the
computing world the issues would be vastly different. The perceived
security of a Mac is a function of their scarcity, not their security.

Not quite; see above. And below.


And as a class, Macs and UNIX boxes are far harder to manually
compromise than Windows anything, but none are totally secure. Nothing
that complex ever will be.

I can't recall the last time I heard of a VMS or Tandem or Stratus
system being compromised.

By your own logic, this must be only because with their miniscule market
share compared to Windows (and the Mac for that matter), they just were
not worth the trouble to break.


If you want a secure OS, look at VMS or the Tandem and Stratus OSs.

Oh my, a blast from the past. True enough. VMS was my favorite
command-line OS of that era. If Ken Olsen had had a religious
conversion and had made VMS open in time, he might have killed UNIX in
the crib. But it didn't happen. So, now VMS has the security of the
dead.

Digital, Compaq and now HP have had no clue how to market VMS, indeed
Comapq and HP have no concept whatsoever of the "enterprise class" world
outside the PC realm.

I'd have to agree here. But it's also true that the whole idea of
"OpenVMS" arrived about ten years too late, so it's not clear that
Compaq and HP could do anything to reverse DEC's blunder.


Tandem and Stratus are still around I think, but sell into a very
specific niche, where perfect hardware reliability is needed. These
were used in some air traffic control systems, but have a key conceptual
flaw - the custom-built application software is the common cause of
failures, not hardware failures. So most ATC systems have total dual or
triple redundancy, and the hardware is just another (minor) cause of
failure and subsequent switchover (within one tenth of a second
typically).

VMS is still around as well. You don't hear about it much (like Tandem
or Stratus) because it's in applications that don't get hyped, and it
also "just works".

Software is most often the cause of problems and it's only getting worse
as the software gets both more complex and more poorly engineered.

Yes, but reliability is still a problem even if well engineered. It
usually takes a few years of intense post-delivery bug fixing to achieve
reliability.


Because MacOS is only for the clueless, it cannot be that the lack of
trouble on Macs is due to clued-in users. So there must be some other,
simpler explanation.

I have not seen this purported lack of trouble on Macs. Every single Mac
user I have known (dozens) has reported plenty of problems.

You need a better grade of Mac users. By your own analysis, the
clueless make their own trouble; this will be platform independent.

Indeed, and this will likely be found in users who treat the machine as
a tool and not a toy. Since the Mac UI generally seems to appeal more to
the "creative" types vs. the "technical" types, presumably there are
plenty of writers and such that have Macs that are perfectly stable and
also devoid of questionable software. Presumably also if you gave these
same people the same applications on a PC and they treated it the same
(no questionable junk), they would likely see the same stability.

This is a bit self contradictory. Those flighty non-technical creative
types love the Mac but are clueless about IT, have no internet
discipline whatsoever, and yet they prosper. Just think what stolid
uncreative technical types could do with such a tool.


With the growth of Linux in the market, more commercial apps will support
Linux, so this advantage is likely to erode over time.

The upcoming homogenization of the hardware market will help this a lot.
The switch to OSX was one step towards Apple getting out of the hardware
business which they have never been very good at. Now they have
announced they are abandoning IBM's antiquated CPUs.

The PowerPC architecture is hardly "antiquated", and is about twice as
fast per CPU clock cycle than Intel.

The PPC architecture has been around for quite some time and was a
rehash of a retired workstation processor. Neither the Intel x86 nor PPC
CPUs are remotely as fast / efficient as the (DEC/Compaq/HP) Alpha and
indeed that's why Intel stole much of the Alpha design for the Itanium
before eventually reaching a "settlement" over the theft.

Be careful about who you call a "rehash" (nice neutral word that):
Intel processors are by the same token an absolute hash, retaining
compatibility with every past version, with bits encrusted upon bits.
Just like every ancient architecture. Did you ever write assembly on a
Univac 1100-series computer? They never threw anything away; every
instruction bit had three meanings, controlled by the current state of
the processor.

The PowerPC is a clean new (in relative terms) design, with no
encrustations of prior architectures. That's why it's able to do twice
the computational work per clock cycle.


The problem is that IBM is more interested in making large massively
multiprocessor servers the size of commercial refrigerators than little
desktop systems, and so IBM's direction increasingly deviated from what
Apple needed to win the CPU horsepower races.

More importantly Apple has been realizing that they need to get off
proprietary hardware which regardless of any technical merit, they can
never be economically competitive with. OSX was the first step towards
making their OS portable to a generic hardware platform. The
announcement of the switch to Intel CPUs was the next step. In the not
too distant future will be the announcement of MacOS for the PC,
followed later by the announcement of the end of proprietary Mac
hardware.

When the consumer is able to select a "generic" computer platform of the
size, scalability and fault tolerance for their application, and then
independently select from a dozen of so OSes depending on their
preferences, the consumer will be well served.

It's true that Apple is arranging things so they can take advantage of
the whole PC hardware ecosystem, but it does not follow that Apple will
allow the MacOS to run on generic PCs.


The common hardware platform will both drive down the hardware cost and
also let each OS stand on it's own merits independent of hardware
differences.


This deviation was particularly acute in laptops.

Also, as part of their "fit in but stand out" strategy, Apple wanted
Macs to be able to run Windows apps at full speed, rather than in
emulation at a fraction of full speed.

The need for emulation / Windoze support of course being a function of
market share. Few companies can afford to write Mac only software and
ignore 95% of the market.

Almost true. There are a few Mac only companies, but a common pattern
has been to develop their first product on the Mac (where the smaller
market means less competition and greater margins), and use the profits
from the Mac market to fund the launch into the much larger Windows
market.


The PowerPC architecture (from both IBM and Motorola) basically rules
the military and industrial embedded realtime markets, with something
like 70% market share.

Not sure where you got that figure, I follow the embedded world to some
extent and I see very few PPCs. In fact, a flip through the Dec '05
Circuit Cellar magazine revealed -0- references to PPC.

Um. Circuit Cellar is for hobbiests, not the military industrial
complex. If you look through magazines like Embedded Systems
Programming, you'll get a far different picture. For instance, the bulk
of the VMEbus SBC (single-board computers) sold are made by Motorola and
use the PowerPC processor. The runner-up is Intel processors, and DOS
isn't dead.


The Intel architecture is actually older than the PowerPC architecture,
by many years, so by longevity alone, Intel is antiquated. So what
exactly do you mean by "antiquated"?

Antiquated in large part means weighed down by "compatibility barnacles"
which limit the ability to adopt significant architectural changes. This
problem has affected both the Intel x86 and the IBM PPC lines.

Yes, the Intel is very much encrusted by backward compatibility. The
PPC is not yet encrusted, but give them time.


In the near future you will simply select a generic hardware platform
from the vendor of your choice and in the size / expandability / fault
tolerance for your application, and then select your favorite OS to run
on it from a field of dozens of variants that all run on the same
hardware platform.

For MacOS, it won't happen soon, as Apple makes far too much money on
hardware. Probably one will be able to run Windows on Mac intel
hardware, but will not be able to run MacOS on generic intel PCs.

I predict that MacOS will be available to run on generic PC hardware
within another 2 or 3 years. One of Apple's big problems is that the have
to make large profits on the Mac hardware since they sell so little of
it compared to the PC world. This causes them to either have to price
the product too high relative to the competition and try to hype reasons
it's worth the extra money, or to try to compromise to cut manufacturing
cost and risk reliability problems. We've seen examples of both paths
from Apple.

It won't happen anytime soon. This has been suggested for years, and
Steve Jobs (a founder and the current CEO of Apple) always says that
allowing MacOS to run on generic PC hardware would put Apple out of
business. I see no reason not to take him at his word.


Mac hardware is far less trouble to assemble and configure,

That's because it is largely non-assembleable and non-configurable. You
get saddled with a generic box, you have few choices for options and you
have to pay for included items you may never use.

Macs are about as configurable as Dell PCs, right down to configuring
and ordering from the Apple website. If you like, go to
http://www.apple.com/ and click on the Store tab. You can walk
through the entire chose and configure and price process without having
to register or provide a credit card. (What's in the stores is a
fraction of the configurations available from Apple.)

All products are packaged in some manner, so you always get more than
you absolutely wanted or needed. I guess I don't see your point.


and is far
more reliable than most PCs

I've not seen any hard data showing any greater hardware reliability for
a Mac vs. PC. All computer hardware these days is far more reliable than
any of the software that runs on it.

Look into Consumer Reports and also the PC (not Mac) magazines. The Mac
magazines also say this, but what else would they say - they must be
True Believers.


, largely because in Macs there is a single
design agent, Apple, ensuring that it all fits together and meets
minimum standards of design and implementation quality.

... and incompatibility with the rest of the computing world.

If that's another way of saying that Macs are not Windows, OK. But both
are able to perform the same tasks, just like there are many brands of
truck, but they all use the public roads.


Standards, quality and compatibility were issues in the PC world more
than a decade ago. These days quality and interoperability are quite
high. Only on the most complex systems do you run into any configuration
issues and that is infrequent and in areas where Macs simply aren't
applicable anyway.

Well, the PCs have gotten far better it's true, but the Macs were always
there.

And Windows interoperates well only with Windows. There have been a
number of court cases on this issue, and Microsoft is slowly yielding
ground.


This is a major reason that people have been willing to pay somewhat
more for Apple hardware. It's simply less trouble.

That's the myth, not the reality. These days very few problems on either
platform are a result of hardware problems. Come to think of it, my Mac
friend did have a 17" Powerbook replaced under warranty when it failed
after about 3 months use. I don't have details on what actually failed,
but I know the machine was not physically abused.

Even the best of laptops have about a 10% failure rate, according to
Consumer Reports, so one can always find someone with a dead laptop.

My kid sister just switched from Windows to MacOS. She is a Graphic
Artist, and that field is dominated by Macs, but her first husband was a
self-described DOS Bigot. Anyway, she got the big FedX box just after
Christmas, and called to tell me how easy it was to get set up and
running. (Her current husband is not a computer guy at all.) It took
all of an hour.


The real reason for a metalworker to use Windows is that many of the
standard apps for metalworking and manufacturing are currently
Windows-only, but these are slowly picking up Linux support. I'm
planning to get a Dell PC at home for just this reason, but this PC
will
be well-isolated from the Internet.

I got a stack of surplus Dell Optiplex systems for $100 ea and they are
great for quite a few things including CNC control. All my systems are
on a common network and have no problems. The firewall / router provides
a first line of defense and the only machine that has any inbound ports
mapped to it has a software firewall as well.

Yep. I'll probably get one of those $700 Dell boxes. Already got the
hardware firewall.

An old Optiplex GX100 (P3/733) runs Mach3 just fine under W2K on a
machine that will do 60IPM or so. Nice and cheap used as well.

Yes, but my heart is set on a Dell. For one thing, I want one company
to yell at.


It will be interesting to see what happens in the market when Macs can
run all these Windows-only apps at full speed, so there is some real
competition between platforms.

I don't think that will cause any real competition. What it will mostly
do is remove a handicap from those who prefer the Mac UI. I don't think
there are any significant numbers of people wanting to migrate to a Mac
but being held back by a lack of apps. Those wishing to migrate away
from Windows are more likely to explore free options like Linux that
will run on their existing hardware.

It will certainly remove that handicap. But it will also expose lots of
people to the Mac, and comparisons will be made.

Microsoft itself does not agree that lack of applications is what
prevents migration away from Windows. This came out in spades in the
antitrust case, where they were caught doing all manner of illegal
things to preserve this barrier. It's all in the opinion handed down by
the Federal Appeals Court.

Anyway, when barriers are removed, migration happens. Some will go to
Linux (if they like that unpolished an environment), and some will go to
MacOS (polished exterior, real UNIX available below).


The App developers and their customers would dearly love to have an
alternative to Windows, to regain control of their lives, to escape the
Treadmill.

That seems to depend on the app developer. It seems there are a large
number of folks out there pretending to be programmers by gluing
together (poorly) various chunks of purchased code libraries for Windoze
to create hopelessly bloated, unstable and inefficient monstrosities and
calling them applications.

I think we are mixing unlike things here. The desire for independence
and freedom from lock-in exists regardless of the skill of the
programmer, especially as the programmer becomes experienced (and has
been screwed when something he depended upon is made unavailable).
Freedom from lock-in and abuse by marketing-driven companies is its own
good.

Joe Gwinn

The pseudo-programmers I reference are not concerned with such things,
they exist to glue purchased MS code libraries into horrendous "business
apps" for just long enough for them to migrate into the "management"
world.

OK.

Joe Gwinn

On Wed, 04 Jan, DoN. Nichols wrote:
[ chroot jail discussion ]
And against some attacks can be utterly useless, which means to me that you
really just have a false sense of security with them combined with the
aggravation of having to make them work in every case, which is quite
annoying.

It at least limits the damage to the rest of the system, even if
it can't protect the individual server program. (And, of course, trying
to make some programs work within the chroot jail can reduce the
security if not done carefully. I prefer static linking to using shared
libs for example.)

But a jail is only so good. Once you are *in* it, getting *around* the
bars using other known holes can be easy. chroot was never intended as a
security device and shouldn't really be treated as such since most kernels
aren't designed to truly enforce it anyway. It can certainly stop a true
script kiddie, but on most systems will only slow a true thief down.

In case you didn't know this, chroot was originally intended simply as a
tool to simplify doing things like re-creating *nix installations on a
running system for the purposes of building distributions or testing. But
every *nix kernel seems to care to implement the "jail" hardness to varying
degrees. I'm not sure any claim the jail is even very *hard* to break out
of.

Also note that once into the jail it's *very* easy in most cases to simply
wreak havoc on said running system with DoS type attacks from within. My
personal opinion is the extra security they provide isn't worth the
additional inconvenience of using them in places they weren't really
intended to be used. YMMV.

Those are turned off by default in most every Linux distribution as well.

They certainly did not used to be so.

No, but that was now *years* ago when these type things were left on by
default on most popular Linux distributions. Heck, Fedora (and thus RH)
now defaults to installing SELinux, the protocol developed by the NSA.

I've actually kicked sendmail off of the system, and replaced it
with qmail, which I trust a lot more than I do sendmail. Qmail was
*designed* with security in mind.

Argh. Keep in mind that qmail isn't truly open source by most technically
accepted definitions.

I'm using an older version, from when it was a bit more open.

I don't know that it was ever *more* open. It used to be worse, and he
kept making half hearted attempts to make it "more" open and then would
send me email wanting it included in RHL. I'd politely say no and point
out why it still wasn't open (which would generally be the same reasons as
before) and then he'd curse me, privately and sometimes publicly. *shrug*

So -- what do you suggest as a good alternative?

On modern hardware most any will do. It seems almost personal preference
at this point as to whether you use postfix or exim. I use postfix.


--Donnie

--
Donnie Barnes http://www.donniebarnes.com 879. V.

On Tue, 03 Jan, Gunner wrote:
Anyone got a suggestion for a better newsreader than Pan? Like agent
ported to linux?

I will only read Usenet with slrn under Linux.


--Donnie

--
Donnie Barnes http://www.donniebarnes.com 879. V.

On Tue, 3 Jan 2006 20:48:22 +0000 (UTC), Cydrome Leader
wrote:

In rec.crafts.metalworking Gunner wrote:
On Tue, 3 Jan 2006 15:17:42 +0000 (UTC), Cydrome Leader
wrote:

In rec.crafts.metalworking Gunner wrote:
On Mon, 2 Jan 2006 12:33:00 +0000 (UTC), Cydrome Leader
wrote:

In rec.crafts.metalworking Gunner wrote:
Ok..for all you Linux junkies...this has been driving me nuts for
months and months and ... well you get the idea.
Originally..I thought this issue was hardware....but now...

What are you trying to do that justifies all the time wasted on trying to
run anything but windows?



Run Linux..which pretty much justifies trying to run something besides
Winblows.

It's cute you can knock windows, but cannot handle anything else. How
come you called Linux Linux, not Linsux? You're apparently not able to get
it to web browse for more than 13 minutes, something WebTV users can pull
off.

Are you switching to 50Hz next?

Shrug..I could fire up the OS2 box. Or the Dos box. But then on the
other hand..no one is born knowing how to run any operating
system..and folks have to learn them.

Simply because I know the various incarnations of Windoze well enough
to know their limitations and issues, is the reason Im now learning
Linux. When I get good at it..if I think it deserves the Linsux label,
I shall apply it.

So why does windows earn the winblows name? Windows 3.1 was functional
enough to be used to browse the web. I could understand if you tried all
these:

windows 3.0
windows 3.1
windows for workgroups
windows 95
windows 98
windows 2000
windows xp

and finally windows 2003 before you were finally able to look at a website
or, or type up and print a document. Why the dual standard in name
calling?


You left out Windows 3.11

And Ive run them all. What are you babbling about 2003 about? I was
posting on a bbs long before you heard of the internet.

Lets see...Ill bet you knock child molesters, yet you specialize in
visiting teen hookers, right?

So- child molesters are linux users, or is it windows a teen hooker?

Neither. See section a-11

Gunner




Gunner




But then..Ive been known to make my own parts, rather than go buy them
too.

Gunner


Installing a number of distros of Linux:

Simply Mepis
Knoppix
Knottix
Fedora
Damned small Linux
Beatrix

When configureing PPP for dialup..its simple..set up your account,
modem, comm port..do a query...let it check..ok..no problem

However..in each and every one of those distros..using 3 differnt
kinds of USR external modems, A Supra 56 external, a Speed modem and
even 2 differnt kinds of internal ISA and PCI modems...

I can dial out. The ISP connects, I get the proper password etc
etc..it says Ive connected at x speed, all the proper lights are lit
on the modem(s), I open my browsers (4)...and it just ****ing sits
there.

Eventually it times out and says Unable to connect to bla bla.com or
whatever I was trying to open..but thats all

I open the details window of the PPP prog...and in the Received
box..it (received) incriments higer every so often..but the transmit
window..normally shows it stalled at 148 packets. And there she stays.

I was thinking this was something unique to my box...but today, I
farted around with two completly different boxes..a Compaq 700, and a
CopperMine clone.

All do the same thing. Ive tried every browser configureation known
to me..etc etc

Every thing works just hunky dorey if I set up a proxy on another
Winblows machine, set the Linux browsers to the proper proxy
settings..then I can go whereever I want. Upload, down load,
newsgroups bla bla bla..

Ive run off of cds, done full hd installs..the freaking works... for
about 7 months now off and on. Id get ****ed, and use it for a
server..then curiosity gets me by the shorthairs..and I try again.

Sometimes..I do notice the activity light on the switch blinking a bit
more often than normal when Im trying to connect. Like its trying to
surf the local network rather than the internet..but not alll the
time.

What the hell am I doing wrong???????

Mommy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Gunner

"Pax Americana is a philosophy. Hardly an empire.
Making sure other people play nice and dont kill each other (and us)
off in job lots is hardly empire building, particularly when you give
them self determination under "play nice" rules.

Think of it as having your older brother knock the **** out of you
for torturing the cat." Gunner

"Pax Americana is a philosophy. Hardly an empire.
Making sure other people play nice and dont kill each other (and us)
off in job lots is hardly empire building, particularly when you give
them self determination under "play nice" rules.

Think of it as having your older brother knock the **** out of you
for torturing the cat." Gunner

"Pax Americana is a philosophy. Hardly an empire.
Making sure other people play nice and dont kill each other (and us)
off in job lots is hardly empire building, particularly when you give
them self determination under "play nice" rules.

Think of it as having your older brother knock the **** out of you
for torturing the cat." Gunner

"Pax Americana is a philosophy. Hardly an empire.
Making sure other people play nice and dont kill each other (and us)
off in job lots is hardly empire building, particularly when you give
them self determination under "play nice" rules.

Think of it as having your older brother knock the **** out of you
for torturing the cat." Gunner

On Wed, 04 Jan 2006 03:38:49 GMT, The Hurdy Gurdy Man
wrote:

Zebee Johnstone wrote:

Well, if you are going via dialup, you aren't using eth0. You are
using an ethernet device called ppp0. (if you are using ADSL not
dial up then everything changes...)

So don't bother messing about with eth0, ignore it. Do everything you
were thinking of doing with eth0 but do it with ppp0 instead.

I'm wondering if he'd benefit from completely disabling eth0 for the time
being. As in putting something like 'alias eth0 off' in /etc/modules.conf
(assuming that's what he's got, and not /etc/modprobe.conf... I'm on a FC4
machine, which differs). At least then there'd be no chance of something
changing the default route to eth0, and the likelyhood of errors being
logged someplace that would help track down the offending process.

Back when I used to use PPP with Linux, there was an /etc/ppp directory
that contained startup and shutdown scripts, and those were what would set
the default route to what it should be. That was a while ago, though. It
has most likely changed, although I do still see that directory on my FC4
box. Still, it doesn't seem like devices ever alter the default route when
they come up. All they ever do is add a route to the network considered
local to their address. I would think that it would be sufficient to
statically assign a benign address (like 10.0.0.1) to eth0, and hopefully
there would be scripts smart enough to add/change the default route when
ppp0 comes up. That's certainly the way I had it working back in the days
before DSL.

Heck, Gunner, if you were going to be in the Pasadena area, I'd say just
drop it off and let me see if I can get it running some afternoon. I haven't
played with PPP in years, it'd be an interesting walk down memory lane.


I go through there at least twice a week. If I cant muddle through
it..Id love to have you look it over.

Gunner

The aim of untold millions is to be free to do exactly as they choose
and for someone else to pay when things go wrong.

In the past few decades, a peculiar and distinctive psychology
has emerged in England. Gone are the civility, sturdy independence,
and admirable stoicism that carried the English through the war years
.. It has been replaced by a constant whine of excuses, complaints,
and special pleading. The collapse of the British character has been
as swift and complete as the collapse of British power.

Theodore Dalrymple,

On Tue, 03 Jan 2006 09:24:55 -0800, Larry Jaques
wrote:

On Tue, 03 Jan 2006 00:32:56 GMT, with neither quill nor qualm, "Pete
C." quickly quoth:

Gunner wrote:
Lots of suggestions..and Ill work on them later today. Im busy trying
to repair my roof..of which a fair amount blew off in the the 70mph
winds we had Sunday. Damnit

Hey, Gunner, tried Linspire yet?
No..I sure havent. Tell me a bit about it?



Don't you hate those annoying little distractions? I've got the
potential threat of grass fires to contend with here in the Dallas area.

We've had a bit of rain here. 13.65" in December, 7+ of them in the
last week of the year. I actually saw water puddle on my lawn for the
first time in nearly 4 years! The ground up here sucks up water like
it's going out of style.

Here's some of the fun we had: www.diversify.com/gpweather.html

The aim of untold millions is to be free to do exactly as they choose
and for someone else to pay when things go wrong.

In the past few decades, a peculiar and distinctive psychology
has emerged in England. Gone are the civility, sturdy independence,
and admirable stoicism that carried the English through the war years
.. It has been replaced by a constant whine of excuses, complaints,
and special pleading. The collapse of the British character has been
as swift and complete as the collapse of British power.

Theodore Dalrymple,

In rec.crafts.metalworking Gunner wrote:
On Tue, 3 Jan 2006 20:48:22 +0000 (UTC), Cydrome Leader
wrote:

In rec.crafts.metalworking Gunner wrote:
On Tue, 3 Jan 2006 15:17:42 +0000 (UTC), Cydrome Leader
wrote:

In rec.crafts.metalworking Gunner wrote:
On Mon, 2 Jan 2006 12:33:00 +0000 (UTC), Cydrome Leader
wrote:

In rec.crafts.metalworking Gunner wrote:
Ok..for all you Linux junkies...this has been driving me nuts for
months and months and ... well you get the idea.
Originally..I thought this issue was hardware....but now...

What are you trying to do that justifies all the time wasted on trying to
run anything but windows?



Run Linux..which pretty much justifies trying to run something besides
Winblows.

It's cute you can knock windows, but cannot handle anything else. How
come you called Linux Linux, not Linsux? You're apparently not able to get
it to web browse for more than 13 minutes, something WebTV users can pull
off.

Are you switching to 50Hz next?

Shrug..I could fire up the OS2 box. Or the Dos box. But then on the
other hand..no one is born knowing how to run any operating
system..and folks have to learn them.

Simply because I know the various incarnations of Windoze well enough
to know their limitations and issues, is the reason Im now learning
Linux. When I get good at it..if I think it deserves the Linsux label,
I shall apply it.

So why does windows earn the winblows name? Windows 3.1 was functional
enough to be used to browse the web. I could understand if you tried all
these:

windows 3.0
windows 3.1
windows for workgroups
windows 95
windows 98
windows 2000
windows xp

and finally windows 2003 before you were finally able to look at a website
or, or type up and print a document. Why the dual standard in name
calling?


You left out Windows 3.11
You mean windows for workgroups


And Ive run them all. What are you babbling about 2003 about? I was
posting on a bbs long before you heard of the internet.

Why did you list 47,000 linux distributions? I was probably using the
internet while you were still posting to a bbs.



Lets see...Ill bet you knock child molesters, yet you specialize in
visiting teen hookers, right?

So- child molesters are linux users, or is it windows a teen hooker?

Neither. See section a-11

Sure, why don't you fax that to me?


Gunner




Gunner




But then..Ive been known to make my own parts, rather than go buy them
too.

Gunner


Installing a number of distros of Linux:

Simply Mepis
Knoppix
Knottix
Fedora
Damned small Linux
Beatrix

When configureing PPP for dialup..its simple..set up your account,
modem, comm port..do a query...let it check..ok..no problem

However..in each and every one of those distros..using 3 differnt
kinds of USR external modems, A Supra 56 external, a Speed modem and
even 2 differnt kinds of internal ISA and PCI modems...

I can dial out. The ISP connects, I get the proper password etc
etc..it says Ive connected at x speed, all the proper lights are lit
on the modem(s), I open my browsers (4)...and it just ****ing sits
there.

Eventually it times out and says Unable to connect to bla bla.com or
whatever I was trying to open..but thats all

I open the details window of the PPP prog...and in the Received
box..it (received) incriments higer every so often..but the transmit
window..normally shows it stalled at 148 packets. And there she stays.

I was thinking this was something unique to my box...but today, I
farted around with two completly different boxes..a Compaq 700, and a
CopperMine clone.

All do the same thing. Ive tried every browser configureation known
to me..etc etc

Every thing works just hunky dorey if I set up a proxy on another
Winblows machine, set the Linux browsers to the proper proxy
settings..then I can go whereever I want. Upload, down load,
newsgroups bla bla bla..

Ive run off of cds, done full hd installs..the freaking works... for
about 7 months now off and on. Id get ****ed, and use it for a
server..then curiosity gets me by the shorthairs..and I try again.

Sometimes..I do notice the activity light on the switch blinking a bit
more often than normal when Im trying to connect. Like its trying to
surf the local network rather than the internet..but not alll the
time.

What the hell am I doing wrong???????

Mommy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Gunner

"Pax Americana is a philosophy. Hardly an empire.
Making sure other people play nice and dont kill each other (and us)
off in job lots is hardly empire building, particularly when you give
them self determination under "play nice" rules.

Think of it as having your older brother knock the **** out of you
for torturing the cat." Gunner

"Pax Americana is a philosophy. Hardly an empire.
Making sure other people play nice and dont kill each other (and us)
off in job lots is hardly empire building, particularly when you give
them self determination under "play nice" rules.

Think of it as having your older brother knock the **** out of you
for torturing the cat." Gunner

"Pax Americana is a philosophy. Hardly an empire.
Making sure other people play nice and dont kill each other (and us)
off in job lots is hardly empire building, particularly when you give
them self determination under "play nice" rules.

Think of it as having your older brother knock the **** out of you
for torturing the cat." Gunner

"Pax Americana is a philosophy. Hardly an empire.
Making sure other people play nice and dont kill each other (and us)
off in job lots is hardly empire building, particularly when you give
them self determination under "play nice" rules.

Think of it as having your older brother knock the **** out of you
for torturing the cat." Gunner

Joseph Gwinn wrote:


snipped


On that, you are fundamentally wrong. They are indeed both computers,
and regardless of the UI on top, any even remotely useable OS operates
on the same fundamentals. If you understand one OS, you understand
essentially any other, it is only the UI that really differs.

It's true that down deep they must all do the same thing, but this level
is quite remote from ordinary users, who tear their hair trying to
figure out under which GUI rock the needed control is hidden. Or even
which control or controls cause the current annoying misbehaviour. And
Microsoft has a different theory of rocks than Apple, so if you have
spent too little time with such a GUI, it will all be so very
frustrating.

It's more a function of Apple having an incorrect theory that rocks
don't matter. When you know what is causing the problem, but the Mac UI
won't let you fix it 'cause Apple doesn't think anyone needs to adjust
that "rock" then there is a fundamental problem with the UI.


On every attempt to actually accomplish anything on a Mac (usually
trying to help a Mac user who couldn't figure it out either) I have
consistently found that the language, structure and in many cases simply
the existence of proper configuration options was a significant issue on
Macs. These were not simple UI differences.

Um. I have no idea why you have such problems, but theorize that it's
simple lack of sufficient experience with the Mac GUI.

Experience with the Mac UI doesn't explain their mangling of the english
language or their complete mislabeling of some configuration items (I
seem to recall them calling encryption keys "passwords"), or having
certain settings that are part of a standard completely missing.


I do however have several friends that use Macs to
varying degrees and all have had plenty of problems. One friend is a
teacher who uses both Macs and PCs extensively and reports that the Macs
crash at least as often as the PCs.

With students messing with them? In education, that has been the prime
problem. Schools have always liked Macs because the teachers could keep
them running without needing an IT guy.

This teacher *is* an IT guy and reports no difference in the frequency
of crashes between the PCs and Macs.

My point was that most teachers are *not* IT guys, and are happy that
way.

That's nice, however it has nothing to do with the fact that an IT
literate teacher with significant experience with both Macs and PCs
reported no difference in the rate of crashes between the two.


Another friend uses Macs almost
exclusively and in 5 years and like three Macs she had a ratio of about
20:1 to the Windoze problems I had during that time. I did not see any
decrease in the frequency of problems with the switch to OSX either.

My experience was and is the exact opposite.

Which only goes to show that the stability of either system is most
dependent on the operator, not the OS.

I don't know what she was doing, but clearly you are far more the IT
guru than she. An aggressive or merely clumsy user with admin privilege
can make themselves lots of trouble.

Indeed that is what I've concluded. The myth that Macs are more stable
than PCs is simply that, a myth. I've also noticed that many Mac users
seem to under report the number of system issues, somehow not counting
the need to reinstall an application to get it to work properly as a
system problem.


MacOS was total crap up until Apple finally
realized they lacked the expertise to write an OS and put their UI over
someone else's Unix core. Now instead of being a crappy UI on top of
a crappy OS, it's a crappy UI on top of a so-so OS.

Don't mistake me for a Windoze bigot either, ...

Could have fooled me. Listen to yourself, listen to the music.

How do you figure that? Anyone with any technical knowledge knows that
the pre OSX versions of MacOS were hopelessly deficient in many areas,
particularly the lack of memory management. OSX fixed many of the core
problems, but the UI that I can't stand (I hated the UI on the first
Lisa as well) remains. If I wanted an alternative to Windoze it
certainly would not be Mac as there is simply no advantage whatsoever to
MacOS over Linux or another Unix variant.

I submit that your answer above proves my point in spades. Listen to
the tone of voice, and parse the implicit assumptions.

Huh? Hardly. I find the Windoze UI vastly more tolerable than the Mac
UI, largely because I can customize the Windoze UI sufficiently to
eliminate the most annoying parts. This does not in any way indicate
that I am a Windoze fan or bigot, simply that I hate the Mac UI. My OS
preference is VMS, however there is a bit of a shortage of affordable
applications for the things I do.

You really don't hear it, do you? OK, I'll parse it a little:

We'll set the stage with such dispassionate, value neutral statements
like "MacOS was total crap until Apple finally realized they lacked the
expertise to write an OS" - It may be crap, but 25 million users rather
like it, and were known to say similarly unemotional things about DOS
and Windows.

How is an OS that had -no- memory management until the entire OS core
was scrapped and replaced with a Unix core not crap? Windows was
evolving memory management (which I consider to be a fundamental concept
for an OS) in the Win 3.1 days and had it working reasonably well long
before Apple gave up on their OS core.


And will end with "Anyone with any technical knowledge knows that...".
In other words, anyone who disagrees by definition cannot have any
technical knowledge. Aside from the implicit ad hominem attack, this
assumes the truth of the very thing to be demonstrated, and thus is
circular.

Huh? It doesn't take a lot of technical knowledge to realize the
significant failings of pre OSX MacOS. While people complained about
Windoze bloat and the need to throw more CPU and memory at Windows, the
Mac world somehow accepted the need to throw more memory at a Mac, not
because of bloat, but because there was no memory management.


...I use Windoze for a lot of
things for two reasons:

1. When you have a clue, Windoze is perfectly stable. Over five
different systems, two of which run 24x7, I average one Windoze crash
/ problem every couple years. I have also never had a virus on any of
these systems despite the fact they are on a cable modem connection
full time. People who have problems with Windoze primarily bring it on
themselves and will do the same regardless of the OS.

You are very fortunate. One wonders how long your luck will last. The
rest of the world must be pretty clueless, because they have all these
problems, in spades. and the computer mags are full of sad tales.

My "luck" has lasted for at least 15 years and I expect it will last a
lot longer. It does appear that the world at large is rather clueless as
it seems that they happily download the latest Napster variant or other
program from questionable sources and then wonder why they have
problems.

Ah. Now we come to the core. Keep your machine away from the internet,
and all is well. Well, Macs don't need to be protected against the web.

Huh? Where did you come up with that idea? Every one of my machines has
Internet access.

Downloading stuff (including napster) is very much a part of the net.
It shouldn't be possible for this to cause such problems, even if some
users are naive and some people out there are evil, because such people
have always existed, and always will.

That is perhaps one of the most absurd statements I have ever heard.
Nowhere else in life do people have such an absurd expectation that they
should be magically protected against their reckless actions.

Go walking through a dark alley in the bad part of town at night and you
will probably be mugged and nobody will say that shouldn't be possible.
Hop in your car and go careening down the road ignoring safety rules and
you're going to get in an accident and nobody will say that shouldn't be
possible.

To say that it shouldn't be possible for a users careless actions to
cause problems on a computer is utterly absurd. If you want that level
of "big brother" protection, then your Mac would simply prevent you from
downloading programs like Napster that had not been certified by Apple.

The fact is that whether you are using a Mac or a PC, downloading (and
running) questionable junk such as Napster *will* cause problems and I
have seen plenty of examples of this on both platforms. The Mac provides
no more protection from these careless user actions than Windoze does.


Your belief that Macs don't need to be "protected" from
the 'net is also false.

Most Macs do not run with any virus protection whatsoever, and are none
the worse for it.

Ant that is simply a function of threat volume and statistics, not a
function of platform security. Because PCs running Windoze outnumber
Macs 20:1 the volume of viruses targeting Windoze outnumbers those
targeting Macs by an even larger ratio and the probability of a
particular Windoze user being hit by one of those viruses is
consequently higher.

Do you not wear a seat belt in a Volvo because they are perceived as
safer? Do you not follow traffic safety rules because your Volvo will
protect you? You might get away that false sense of security for a while
just due to statistics, but you *will* get nailed eventually.


My machines that have essentially no problems are devoid of the Napsters
and their ilk. My machines have such things as TurboCAD, Mach3, WinIVR,
MPLAB, Deskengrave, Photoshop Elements, P-Touch utilities, WinZip and
the usual assortment of odds and ends like MS office, Netscape, etc. You
will note a lack of any "questionable" software.

Yep. And this is my plan for that planned Dell. Safety through
isolationism.

That has nothing to do with "isolationism", it has to do with product
quality. Do you purchase brake shoes for your car from some guy in a
dark alley? Would you expect them to be safe? Why would you expect any
different if you get your software from equally questionable sources?

I don't see the analogy. Are you claiming that Macs are bought only
with small unmarked bills from junkies in dark and fetid alleys? This
is quite the scoop - I always wondered about them.

Load garbage software (Napster et al) from suspect sources onto a
computer (Mac or Windows or any other OS for that matter) and you *will*
have problems just as surely as putting cheap counterfeit parts on your
car *will* cause problems. Even a top grade ultra secure OSs such as VMS
will have problems if a privileged user were to execute malicious code
on them.


If you read the PC magazines (yes, PC magazines), you will see that they
consistently rate the reliability and quality of Macs at the top, with
Dell close behind. Apple beats all PC makers on quality of user
support. Consumer Reports backs these findings up.

Consumer Reports has -zero- credibility with me in -any- subject area.
As for reliability and quality, the PC magazines use some questionable
criteria and also exclude many PC lines from their comparisons. The same
goes for support as the comparisons typically exclude the "business"
lines from the PC manufacturers.

Additionally it is very difficult to perform a valid comparison between
platforms where the hardware and OS are from a single source and
platforms where the hardware and OS are from different sources. The old
comparing apples and oranges?



The poor Macs will have to carry the heavy burden of world travel, while
the PC toils away in the basement, in darkness and solitude, a drudge.

Huh? Exactly what ratio of Macs to PCs do you see on the plane when you
travel?

You missed my joke.

Guess so.



As for security problems, there are tens of thousands of viruses et al
for Windows, maybe ten for MacOS (none that still work), and
essentially zero for most flavors of UNIX.

There are many, many security problems that affect most flavors of Unix.

Yes and no. While it's true that no commonly used OS can long resist
knowing attack by experts, some are far harder than others, and the
first-order question is resistance to automated attack.

Er, please qualify that with "consumer" OS as there are a number of "non
consumer" OSs that do just fine against all attacks. Try my favorite VMS
which can give you C2 qualified security "out of the box".

Um. It's true that most consumer OSs lack Orange-Book (DoD 5200.28-STD)
certification while most server platforms do have such certs, but why is
that important? Nor do I see the relevance of VMS in this discussion.

The relevance is that you indicated that no commonly used OS can resist
attacks by experts which is not true. There are many commonly used OSs
that withstand attacks quite well and VMS is one of them (although it is
unfortunately slowly becoming less common).


Actually, the old DoD 5200.28 family of standards have been withdrawn by
the DoD, replaced by Common Criteria and DoD 5200.1 and 5200.2. The
formal equivalent to 5200.25 C2-Level is CAPP (Controlled Access
protection level) EAL (Evaluated Assurance Level) 3 or better.

Recent versions of Windows have CAPP EAL3 certs, as do two Linux
distributions. All the major UNIX platforms have EAL3 or EAL4. I
haven't checked MacOS, but I imagine that Apple will get or has gotten
the certs, just so they can sell to DoD. With a BSD base, it won't be
hard.

The fact that Apple had to scrap their entire OS core speaks volumes to
their software expertise. I can't see the DoD buying Macs for what
essentially is nothing more than a UI.


As for the vulnerability of Macs, that is a false sense of security
simply based on the volume of attempted attacks. If the virus kiddies
decided there were enough Macs to be worth attacking on any scale that
sense of security would evaporate very quickly.

While it's true that Macs are less of a target because they are a
fraction of the market, it's also true that Macs are harder to
compromise, especially by script kiddies.

Simply because the folks who write the Windoze attack utilities for the
script kiddies aren't spending much time writing attack utilities
targeting Macs.

A lot of this is due to the
the fact that the security base of MacOS is BSD UNIX, and a lot is due
to the fact that most dangerous things in MacOS are locked down by
default, and/or require an administrator password to access. Windows
has just started to implement this, with fanfare.

This is nothing recent to Windoze, it has been common for a long time to
"lock down" Windows in business environments so that the users are less
able to compromise the systems.

As I noted earlier, careless users will cause problems on both platforms
and unless the Mac prevents the user from loading the non certified junk
(Napster et al) than the Mac is not going to "protect" the user. I think
even the Mac users would have a fit if their beloved Macs gave them the
"I can't let you do that" response when they tried to load the latest
music piracy tools.


Simply put, viruses et al are practical problems only for Windows.
Because such malware spreads itself, the problem grows exponentially and
far faster than systems can be attacked manually.

See above. If Macs were more than a single digit percentage of the
computing world the issues would be vastly different. The perceived
security of a Mac is a function of their scarcity, not their security.

Not quite; see above. And below.

And as a class, Macs and UNIX boxes are far harder to manually
compromise than Windows anything, but none are totally secure. Nothing
that complex ever will be.

I can't recall the last time I heard of a VMS or Tandem or Stratus
system being compromised.

By your own logic, this must be only because with their miniscule market
share compared to Windows (and the Mac for that matter), they just were
not worth the trouble to break.

Hardly, since those three OSs control a sizable portion of the financial
world.


If you want a secure OS, look at VMS or the Tandem and Stratus OSs.

Oh my, a blast from the past. True enough. VMS was my favorite
command-line OS of that era. If Ken Olsen had had a religious
conversion and had made VMS open in time, he might have killed UNIX in
the crib. But it didn't happen. So, now VMS has the security of the
dead.

Digital, Compaq and now HP have had no clue how to market VMS, indeed
Comapq and HP have no concept whatsoever of the "enterprise class" world
outside the PC realm.

I'd have to agree here. But it's also true that the whole idea of
"OpenVMS" arrived about ten years too late, so it's not clear that
Compaq and HP could do anything to reverse DEC's blunder.

I think Compaq could have if they had understood what they had and the
enterprise world. HP was hopelessly screwed up with Carley running
around hyping every low margin consumer toy while selling off or
otherwise destroying the diverse underpinnings of the company.


Tandem and Stratus are still around I think, but sell into a very
specific niche, where perfect hardware reliability is needed. These
were used in some air traffic control systems, but have a key conceptual
flaw - the custom-built application software is the common cause of
failures, not hardware failures. So most ATC systems have total dual or
triple redundancy, and the hardware is just another (minor) cause of
failure and subsequent switchover (within one tenth of a second
typically).

VMS is still around as well. You don't hear about it much (like Tandem
or Stratus) because it's in applications that don't get hyped, and it
also "just works".

Software is most often the cause of problems and it's only getting worse
as the software gets both more complex and more poorly engineered.

Yes, but reliability is still a problem even if well engineered. It
usually takes a few years of intense post-delivery bug fixing to achieve
reliability.

Indeed, and this is something that MacOS is just as subject to as
Windoze.


Because MacOS is only for the clueless, it cannot be that the lack of
trouble on Macs is due to clued-in users. So there must be some other,
simpler explanation.

I have not seen this purported lack of trouble on Macs. Every single Mac
user I have known (dozens) has reported plenty of problems.

You need a better grade of Mac users. By your own analysis, the
clueless make their own trouble; this will be platform independent.

Indeed, and this will likely be found in users who treat the machine as
a tool and not a toy. Since the Mac UI generally seems to appeal more to
the "creative" types vs. the "technical" types, presumably there are
plenty of writers and such that have Macs that are perfectly stable and
also devoid of questionable software. Presumably also if you gave these
same people the same applications on a PC and they treated it the same
(no questionable junk), they would likely see the same stability.

This is a bit self contradictory. Those flighty non-technical creative
types love the Mac but are clueless about IT, have no internet
discipline whatsoever, and yet they prosper.

I think the ones that "prosper" are the ones that keep work and personal
machines separate.

Just think what stolid
uncreative technical types could do with such a tool.

Nothing, absolutely nothing, because the whole Mac concept is to prevent
anyone from doing anything technical.


With the growth of Linux in the market, more commercial apps will support
Linux, so this advantage is likely to erode over time.

The upcoming homogenization of the hardware market will help this a lot.
The switch to OSX was one step towards Apple getting out of the hardware
business which they have never been very good at. Now they have
announced they are abandoning IBM's antiquated CPUs.

The PowerPC architecture is hardly "antiquated", and is about twice as
fast per CPU clock cycle than Intel.

The PPC architecture has been around for quite some time and was a
rehash of a retired workstation processor. Neither the Intel x86 nor PPC
CPUs are remotely as fast / efficient as the (DEC/Compaq/HP) Alpha and
indeed that's why Intel stole much of the Alpha design for the Itanium
before eventually reaching a "settlement" over the theft.

Be careful about who you call a "rehash" (nice neutral word that):
Intel processors are by the same token an absolute hash, retaining
compatibility with every past version, with bits encrusted upon bits.

They had been until the infusion of stolen Alpha technology.

Just like every ancient architecture. Did you ever write assembly on a
Univac 1100-series computer? They never threw anything away; every
instruction bit had three meanings, controlled by the current state of
the processor.

Nope, I don't go back that far. I did write assembler on VIC-20s and
II+s though. These days it's just the occasional stuff on something
small in the PIC family. I'm not a programmer and only write a little
assembler now and then to go with some hardware I built.


The PowerPC is a clean new (in relative terms) design, with no
encrustations of prior architectures. That's why it's able to do twice
the computational work per clock cycle.

The stolen Alpha technology is bringing that to the Intel line.


The problem is that IBM is more interested in making large massively
multiprocessor servers the size of commercial refrigerators than little
desktop systems, and so IBM's direction increasingly deviated from what
Apple needed to win the CPU horsepower races.

More importantly Apple has been realizing that they need to get off
proprietary hardware which regardless of any technical merit, they can
never be economically competitive with. OSX was the first step towards
making their OS portable to a generic hardware platform. The
announcement of the switch to Intel CPUs was the next step. In the not
too distant future will be the announcement of MacOS for the PC,
followed later by the announcement of the end of proprietary Mac
hardware.

When the consumer is able to select a "generic" computer platform of the
size, scalability and fault tolerance for their application, and then
independently select from a dozen of so OSes depending on their
preferences, the consumer will be well served.

It's true that Apple is arranging things so they can take advantage of
the whole PC hardware ecosystem, but it does not follow that Apple will
allow the MacOS to run on generic PCs.

I guess we'll have to wait and see, but my Apple predictions so far have
come true. I was predicting many years ago that Apple would eventually
have to face the fact that they did not have the expertise to write a
good OS core and would have to take their UI elsewhere and this has
happened. I was predicting years ago that Apple would have to abandon
their hardware platforms where they were typically behind and this has
happened in stages (first PPC now Intel).


The common hardware platform will both drive down the hardware cost and
also let each OS stand on it's own merits independent of hardware
differences.


This deviation was particularly acute in laptops.

Also, as part of their "fit in but stand out" strategy, Apple wanted
Macs to be able to run Windows apps at full speed, rather than in
emulation at a fraction of full speed.

The need for emulation / Windoze support of course being a function of
market share. Few companies can afford to write Mac only software and
ignore 95% of the market.

Almost true. There are a few Mac only companies, but a common pattern
has been to develop their first product on the Mac (where the smaller
market means less competition and greater margins), and use the profits
from the Mac market to fund the launch into the much larger Windows
market.

True for the Mac-centric companies. For the Windoze-centric companies
it's (unfortunately for the Mac users) quite easy for them to stick with
the Windoze versions and ignore the small Mac base.


The PowerPC architecture (from both IBM and Motorola) basically rules
the military and industrial embedded realtime markets, with something
like 70% market share.

Not sure where you got that figure, I follow the embedded world to some
extent and I see very few PPCs. In fact, a flip through the Dec '05
Circuit Cellar magazine revealed -0- references to PPC.

Um. Circuit Cellar is for hobbiests, not the military industrial
complex.

Hardly. Circuit Cellar is for the embedded engineering world, but uses a
format with the hobby projects of those embedded engineers to highlight
a lot of the new stuff and keep the magazine interesting. As a useless
side note, I've provided some of the props and ideas for the covers in
recent years.

If you look through magazines like Embedded Systems
Programming, you'll get a far different picture. For instance, the bulk
of the VMEbus SBC (single-board computers) sold are made by Motorola and
use the PowerPC processor. The runner-up is Intel processors, and DOS
isn't dead.

Been quite a while since I've looked at those magazines.


The Intel architecture is actually older than the PowerPC architecture,
by many years, so by longevity alone, Intel is antiquated. So what
exactly do you mean by "antiquated"?

Antiquated in large part means weighed down by "compatibility barnacles"
which limit the ability to adopt significant architectural changes. This
problem has affected both the Intel x86 and the IBM PPC lines.

Yes, the Intel is very much encrusted by backward compatibility. The
PPC is not yet encrusted, but give them time.

With the hardware abstraction trends the backward compatibility
barnacles should slowly evaporate across all the processor lines.


In the near future you will simply select a generic hardware platform
from the vendor of your choice and in the size / expandability / fault
tolerance for your application, and then select your favorite OS to run
on it from a field of dozens of variants that all run on the same
hardware platform.

For MacOS, it won't happen soon, as Apple makes far too much money on
hardware. Probably one will be able to run Windows on Mac intel
hardware, but will not be able to run MacOS on generic intel PCs.

I predict that MacOS will be available to run on generic PC hardware
within another 2 or 3 years. One of Apple's big problems is that the have
to make large profits on the Mac hardware since they sell so little of
it compared to the PC world. This causes them to either have to price
the product too high relative to the competition and try to hype reasons
it's worth the extra money, or to try to compromise to cut manufacturing
cost and risk reliability problems. We've seen examples of both paths
from Apple.

It won't happen anytime soon. This has been suggested for years, and
Steve Jobs (a founder and the current CEO of Apple) always says that
allowing MacOS to run on generic PC hardware would put Apple out of
business. I see no reason not to take him at his word.

Given Apple's various product duds and reversals of concepts like open
architecture to closed architecture and back to semi-open architecture,
I see no reason they won't eventually decide to exit the hardware arena.


Mac hardware is far less trouble to assemble and configure,

That's because it is largely non-assembleable and non-configurable. You
get saddled with a generic box, you have few choices for options and you
have to pay for included items you may never use.

Macs are about as configurable as Dell PCs, right down to configuring
and ordering from the Apple website. If you like, go to
http://www.apple.com/ and click on the Store tab. You can walk
through the entire chose and configure and price process without having
to register or provide a credit card. (What's in the stores is a
fraction of the configurations available from Apple.)

And exactly how much of that is *user* configurable?


All products are packaged in some manner, so you always get more than
you absolutely wanted or needed. I guess I don't see your point.

In the PC world (regardless of OS), I have far greater flexibility to
configure a hardware platform to my exact needs.


and is far
more reliable than most PCs

I've not seen any hard data showing any greater hardware reliability for
a Mac vs. PC. All computer hardware these days is far more reliable than
any of the software that runs on it.

Look into Consumer Reports and also the PC (not Mac) magazines. The Mac
magazines also say this, but what else would they say - they must be
True Believers.

As noted, Consumer Reports is *not* a credible source for anything. Also
as noted, the magazine comparisons tend to leave out entire lines of PC
hardware making them inaccurate. And again, all hardware is pretty damn
reliable these days so a quality PC and a quality Mac should have little
difference in hardware reliability.


, largely because in Macs there is a single
design agent, Apple, ensuring that it all fits together and meets
minimum standards of design and implementation quality.

... and incompatibility with the rest of the computing world.

If that's another way of saying that Macs are not Windows, OK. But both
are able to perform the same tasks, just like there are many brands of
truck, but they all use the public roads.

Yes and no, Macs could do the same tasks as PCs, but in some cases they
lack the available options (both hardware and software) to do so. It
also too Apple quite a while to join that "public road" and abandon
their proprietary networks and busses (SCSI being the only notable
exception).


Standards, quality and compatibility were issues in the PC world more
than a decade ago. These days quality and interoperability are quite
high. Only on the most complex systems do you run into any configuration
issues and that is infrequent and in areas where Macs simply aren't
applicable anyway.

Well, the PCs have gotten far better it's true, but the Macs were always
there.

Um, there have been plenty of problems with Macs along the way as well.


And Windows interoperates well only with Windows. There have been a
number of court cases on this issue, and Microsoft is slowly yielding
ground.

That's not interoperability, that's openness to third party software.
Interoperability is working with established standards, something that
Macs have been loathe to do.


This is a major reason that people have been willing to pay somewhat
more for Apple hardware. It's simply less trouble.

That's the myth, not the reality. These days very few problems on either
platform are a result of hardware problems. Come to think of it, my Mac
friend did have a 17" Powerbook replaced under warranty when it failed
after about 3 months use. I don't have details on what actually failed,
but I know the machine was not physically abused.

Even the best of laptops have about a 10% failure rate, according to
Consumer Reports, so one can always find someone with a dead laptop.

I think Apple is the only one who had melting laptops though.


My kid sister just switched from Windows to MacOS. She is a Graphic
Artist, and that field is dominated by Macs, but her first husband was a
self-described DOS Bigot. Anyway, she got the big FedX box just after
Christmas, and called to tell me how easy it was to get set up and
running. (Her current husband is not a computer guy at all.) It took
all of an hour.

Macs have been loosing some ground in parts of the graphic world, due to
a number of factors. Since most of the same software is available for
Windoze and works just as well there, and the fact that Windoze is still
a business essential and less expensive per-seat than Macs has led some
companies to ditch Macs in favor of PCs / Windoze (CCI did this).

At a previous job we had one advertising / PR / graphics person who used
a Mac. It was a pain for us to support since it was the only Mac in an
office of several hundred PCs. We eventually got a decent PC, loaded it
with all the same applications that she used on the Mac and put it on
her desk next to the Mac with the hopes that she would give it a try and
eventually switch to it.

The end result is that after a few months with no extra prodding or
support other than instruction on how to access the same work files from
either platform, this user switched to the PC. Obviously she knew that's
what we were hoping for, but she did indicate that she found that some
tasks were easier on the PC and none were more difficult.


The real reason for a metalworker to use Windows is that many of the
standard apps for metalworking and manufacturing are currently
Windows-only, but these are slowly picking up Linux support. I'm
planning to get a Dell PC at home for just this reason, but this PC
will
be well-isolated from the Internet.

I got a stack of surplus Dell Optiplex systems for $100 ea and they are
great for quite a few things including CNC control. All my systems are
on a common network and have no problems. The firewall / router provides
a first line of defense and the only machine that has any inbound ports
mapped to it has a software firewall as well.

Yep. I'll probably get one of those $700 Dell boxes. Already got the
hardware firewall.

An old Optiplex GX100 (P3/733) runs Mach3 just fine under W2K on a
machine that will do 60IPM or so. Nice and cheap used as well.

Yes, but my heart is set on a Dell. For one thing, I want one company
to yell at.

The old Optiplex GX100 *is* a Dell. Just one I got used from a corporate
surplus source. Since most large companies cycle PCs out every three
years to coincide with the 3 yr warranty that is standard on most
manufacturers "business" lines, there is a steady stream of good cheap
PCs that are plenty capable for all but the most intensive applications.


It will be interesting to see what happens in the market when Macs can
run all these Windows-only apps at full speed, so there is some real
competition between platforms.

I don't think that will cause any real competition. What it will mostly
do is remove a handicap from those who prefer the Mac UI. I don't think
there are any significant numbers of people wanting to migrate to a Mac
but being held back by a lack of apps. Those wishing to migrate away
from Windows are more likely to explore free options like Linux that
will run on their existing hardware.

It will certainly remove that handicap. But it will also expose lots of
people to the Mac, and comparisons will be made.

Comparisons will be interesting as I see the Mac in it's current OSX
form as nothing more than another UI shell available for a standard Unix
base.


Microsoft itself does not agree that lack of applications is what
prevents migration away from Windows. This came out in spades in the
antitrust case, where they were caught doing all manner of illegal
things to preserve this barrier. It's all in the opinion handed down by
the Federal Appeals Court.

Any successful, dominant company is going to be attacked and for some of
the most bogus reasons. Yes Microsquish has done a few things that were
wrong, but they have also been bashed for doing things that they have
every right to do as far as I'm concerned.

How can you possibly justify forcing Microsquish to include competitors
products with their distributions? Is GM required to include Ford
products with the cars they sell just because some users may prefer to
put a Ford dashboard in their GM car? That's about on par with some of
the stuff pushed on Microsquish.


Anyway, when barriers are removed, migration happens. Some will go to
Linux (if they like that unpolished an environment), and some will go to
MacOS (polished exterior, real UNIX available below).

Yep, Apple might reach 8% market share while Windows drops to 67% and
Linux/Unix rises to 25%.


The App developers and their customers would dearly love to have an
alternative to Windows, to regain control of their lives, to escape the
Treadmill.

That seems to depend on the app developer. It seems there are a large
number of folks out there pretending to be programmers by gluing
together (poorly) various chunks of purchased code libraries for Windoze
to create hopelessly bloated, unstable and inefficient monstrosities and
calling them applications.

I think we are mixing unlike things here. The desire for independence
and freedom from lock-in exists regardless of the skill of the
programmer, especially as the programmer becomes experienced (and has
been screwed when something he depended upon is made unavailable).
Freedom from lock-in and abuse by marketing-driven companies is its own
good.

Joe Gwinn

The pseudo-programmers I reference are not concerned with such things,
they exist to glue purchased MS code libraries into horrendous "business
apps" for just long enough for them to migrate into the "management"
world.

OK.

I've seen the headaches the poor "real" programmers who come along later
have trying to fix and maintain these horrible apps. It's not pretty and
makes me happy I'm on the systems end of things.

Pete C.

What I would do at this point, once you connect to your ISP, open a
command prompt (terminal window) and "ping yahoo.com" if it times out, try
to "ping 66.94.234.13" (yahoo), if it works then you have a problem with
DNS lookup, Look at /etc/resolv.conf, should have your ISP DNS servers
listed,

i.e.

nameserver xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
nameserver xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

substitute your ISP DNS servers for xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

It should of updated this /etc/reslov.conf once connected. You could also
look in /etc/ppp for the config files for ppp

Good Luck..




On Mon, 02 Jan 2006 10:02:57 +0000, Gunner wrote:

Ok..for all you Linux junkies...this has been driving me nuts for
months and months and ... well you get the idea.
Originally..I thought this issue was hardware....but now...

Installing a number of distros of Linux:

Simply Mepis
Knoppix
Knottix
Fedo
Damned small Linux
Beatrix

When configureing PPP for dialup..its simple..set up your account,
modem, comm port..do a query...let it check..ok..no problem

However..in each and every one of those distros..using 3 differnt
kinds of USR external modems, A Supra 56 external, a Speed modem and
even 2 differnt kinds of internal ISA and PCI modems...

I can dial out. The ISP connects, I get the proper password etc
etc..it says Ive connected at x speed, all the proper lights are lit
on the modem(s), I open my browsers (4)...and it just ****ing sits
there.

Eventually it times out and says Unable to connect to bla bla.com or
whatever I was trying to open..but thats all

I open the details window of the PPP prog...and in the Received
box..it (received) incriments higer every so often..but the transmit
window..normally shows it stalled at 148 packets. And there she stays.

I was thinking this was something unique to my box...but today, I
farted around with two completly different boxes..a Compaq 700, and a
CopperMine clone.

All do the same thing. Ive tried every browser configureation known
to me..etc etc

Every thing works just hunky dorey if I set up a proxy on another
Winblows machine, set the Linux browsers to the proper proxy
settings..then I can go whereever I want. Upload, down load,
newsgroups bla bla bla..

Ive run off of cds, done full hd installs..the freaking works... for
about 7 months now off and on. Id get ****ed, and use it for a
server..then curiosity gets me by the shorthairs..and I try again.

Sometimes..I do notice the activity light on the switch blinking a bit
more often than normal when Im trying to connect. Like its trying to
surf the local network rather than the internet..but not alll the
time.

What the hell am I doing wrong???????

Mommy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Gunner

"Pax Americana is a philosophy. Hardly an empire.
Making sure other people play nice and dont kill each other (and us)
off in job lots is hardly empire building, particularly when you give
them self determination under "play nice" rules.

Think of it as having your older brother knock the **** out of you
for torturing the cat." Gunner

--
A7N8X-Deluxe, AMD XP2500+ (Un-locked)
2x256mb Crucial PC3200 DDR ram
Palit-Daytona Ti4200/64M AGP

I was enjoying this until you started ranting about "stolen alpha
technology". At that point you started coming across as a loon.

Pete C. wrote:

Joseph Gwinn wrote:


snipped


On that, you are fundamentally wrong. They are indeed both computers,
and regardless of the UI on top, any even remotely useable OS operates
on the same fundamentals. If you understand one OS, you understand
essentially any other, it is only the UI that really differs.

It's true that down deep they must all do the same thing, but this level
is quite remote from ordinary users, who tear their hair trying to
figure out under which GUI rock the needed control is hidden. Or even
which control or controls cause the current annoying misbehaviour. And
Microsoft has a different theory of rocks than Apple, so if you have
spent too little time with such a GUI, it will all be so very
frustrating.

It's more a function of Apple having an incorrect theory that rocks
don't matter. When you know what is causing the problem, but the Mac UI
won't let you fix it 'cause Apple doesn't think anyone needs to adjust
that "rock" then there is a fundamental problem with the UI.


On every attempt to actually accomplish anything on a Mac (usually
trying to help a Mac user who couldn't figure it out either) I have
consistently found that the language, structure and in many cases
simply the existence of proper configuration options was a significant
issue on Macs. These were not simple UI differences.

Um. I have no idea why you have such problems, but theorize that it's
simple lack of sufficient experience with the Mac GUI.

Experience with the Mac UI doesn't explain their mangling of the english
language or their complete mislabeling of some configuration items (I
seem to recall them calling encryption keys "passwords"), or having
certain settings that are part of a standard completely missing.


I do however have several friends that use Macs to
varying degrees and all have had plenty of problems. One friend is
a teacher who uses both Macs and PCs extensively and reports that
the Macs crash at least as often as the PCs.

With students messing with them? In education, that has been the
prime
problem. Schools have always liked Macs because the teachers could
keep them running without needing an IT guy.

This teacher *is* an IT guy and reports no difference in the frequency
of crashes between the PCs and Macs.

My point was that most teachers are *not* IT guys, and are happy that
way.

That's nice, however it has nothing to do with the fact that an IT
literate teacher with significant experience with both Macs and PCs
reported no difference in the rate of crashes between the two.


Another friend uses Macs almost
exclusively and in 5 years and like three Macs she had a ratio of
about 20:1 to the Windoze problems I had during that time. I did
not see any decrease in the frequency of problems with the switch
to OSX either.

My experience was and is the exact opposite.

Which only goes to show that the stability of either system is most
dependent on the operator, not the OS.

I don't know what she was doing, but clearly you are far more the IT
guru than she. An aggressive or merely clumsy user with admin privilege
can make themselves lots of trouble.

Indeed that is what I've concluded. The myth that Macs are more stable
than PCs is simply that, a myth. I've also noticed that many Mac users
seem to under report the number of system issues, somehow not counting
the need to reinstall an application to get it to work properly as a
system problem.


MacOS was total crap up until Apple finally
realized they lacked the expertise to write an OS and put their
UI over someone else's Unix core. Now instead of being a crappy
UI on top of a crappy OS, it's a crappy UI on top of a so-so
OS.

Don't mistake me for a Windoze bigot either, ...

Could have fooled me. Listen to yourself, listen to the music.

How do you figure that? Anyone with any technical knowledge knows
that the pre OSX versions of MacOS were hopelessly deficient in
many areas, particularly the lack of memory management. OSX fixed
many of the core problems, but the UI that I can't stand (I hated
the UI on the first Lisa as well) remains. If I wanted an
alternative to Windoze it certainly would not be Mac as there is
simply no advantage whatsoever to MacOS over Linux or another Unix
variant.

I submit that your answer above proves my point in spades. Listen to
the tone of voice, and parse the implicit assumptions.

Huh? Hardly. I find the Windoze UI vastly more tolerable than the Mac
UI, largely because I can customize the Windoze UI sufficiently to
eliminate the most annoying parts. This does not in any way indicate
that I am a Windoze fan or bigot, simply that I hate the Mac UI. My OS
preference is VMS, however there is a bit of a shortage of affordable
applications for the things I do.

You really don't hear it, do you? OK, I'll parse it a little:

We'll set the stage with such dispassionate, value neutral statements
like "MacOS was total crap until Apple finally realized they lacked the
expertise to write an OS" - It may be crap, but 25 million users rather
like it, and were known to say similarly unemotional things about DOS
and Windows.

How is an OS that had -no- memory management until the entire OS core
was scrapped and replaced with a Unix core not crap? Windows was
evolving memory management (which I consider to be a fundamental concept
for an OS) in the Win 3.1 days and had it working reasonably well long
before Apple gave up on their OS core.


And will end with "Anyone with any technical knowledge knows that...".
In other words, anyone who disagrees by definition cannot have any
technical knowledge. Aside from the implicit ad hominem attack, this
assumes the truth of the very thing to be demonstrated, and thus is
circular.

Huh? It doesn't take a lot of technical knowledge to realize the
significant failings of pre OSX MacOS. While people complained about
Windoze bloat and the need to throw more CPU and memory at Windows, the
Mac world somehow accepted the need to throw more memory at a Mac, not
because of bloat, but because there was no memory management.


...I use Windoze for a lot of
things for two reasons:

1. When you have a clue, Windoze is perfectly stable. Over five
different systems, two of which run 24x7, I average one Windoze
crash / problem every couple years. I have also never had a
virus on any of these systems despite the fact they are on a
cable modem connection full time. People who have problems with
Windoze primarily bring it on themselves and will do the same
regardless of the OS.

You are very fortunate. One wonders how long your luck will
last. The rest of the world must be pretty clueless, because
they have all these problems, in spades. and the computer mags
are full of sad tales.

My "luck" has lasted for at least 15 years and I expect it will
last a lot longer. It does appear that the world at large is rather
clueless as it seems that they happily download the latest Napster
variant or other program from questionable sources and then wonder
why they have problems.

Ah. Now we come to the core. Keep your machine away from the
internet,
and all is well. Well, Macs don't need to be protected against the
web.

Huh? Where did you come up with that idea? Every one of my machines has
Internet access.

Downloading stuff (including napster) is very much a part of the net.
It shouldn't be possible for this to cause such problems, even if some
users are naive and some people out there are evil, because such people
have always existed, and always will.

That is perhaps one of the most absurd statements I have ever heard.
Nowhere else in life do people have such an absurd expectation that they
should be magically protected against their reckless actions.

Go walking through a dark alley in the bad part of town at night and you
will probably be mugged and nobody will say that shouldn't be possible.
Hop in your car and go careening down the road ignoring safety rules and
you're going to get in an accident and nobody will say that shouldn't be
possible.

To say that it shouldn't be possible for a users careless actions to
cause problems on a computer is utterly absurd. If you want that level
of "big brother" protection, then your Mac would simply prevent you from
downloading programs like Napster that had not been certified by Apple.

The fact is that whether you are using a Mac or a PC, downloading (and
running) questionable junk such as Napster *will* cause problems and I
have seen plenty of examples of this on both platforms. The Mac provides
no more protection from these careless user actions than Windoze does.


Your belief that Macs don't need to be "protected" from
the 'net is also false.

Most Macs do not run with any virus protection whatsoever, and are none
the worse for it.

Ant that is simply a function of threat volume and statistics, not a
function of platform security. Because PCs running Windoze outnumber
Macs 20:1 the volume of viruses targeting Windoze outnumbers those
targeting Macs by an even larger ratio and the probability of a
particular Windoze user being hit by one of those viruses is
consequently higher.

Do you not wear a seat belt in a Volvo because they are perceived as
safer? Do you not follow traffic safety rules because your Volvo will
protect you? You might get away that false sense of security for a while
just due to statistics, but you *will* get nailed eventually.


My machines that have essentially no problems are devoid of the
Napsters and their ilk. My machines have such things as TurboCAD,
Mach3, WinIVR, MPLAB, Deskengrave, Photoshop Elements, P-Touch
utilities, WinZip and the usual assortment of odds and ends like MS
office, Netscape, etc. You will note a lack of any "questionable"
software.

Yep. And this is my plan for that planned Dell. Safety through
isolationism.

That has nothing to do with "isolationism", it has to do with product
quality. Do you purchase brake shoes for your car from some guy in a
dark alley? Would you expect them to be safe? Why would you expect any
different if you get your software from equally questionable sources?

I don't see the analogy. Are you claiming that Macs are bought only
with small unmarked bills from junkies in dark and fetid alleys? This
is quite the scoop - I always wondered about them.

Load garbage software (Napster et al) from suspect sources onto a
computer (Mac or Windows or any other OS for that matter) and you *will*
have problems just as surely as putting cheap counterfeit parts on your
car *will* cause problems. Even a top grade ultra secure OSs such as VMS
will have problems if a privileged user were to execute malicious code
on them.


If you read the PC magazines (yes, PC magazines), you will see that they
consistently rate the reliability and quality of Macs at the top, with
Dell close behind. Apple beats all PC makers on quality of user
support. Consumer Reports backs these findings up.

Consumer Reports has -zero- credibility with me in -any- subject area.
As for reliability and quality, the PC magazines use some questionable
criteria and also exclude many PC lines from their comparisons. The same
goes for support as the comparisons typically exclude the "business"
lines from the PC manufacturers.

Additionally it is very difficult to perform a valid comparison between
platforms where the hardware and OS are from a single source and
platforms where the hardware and OS are from different sources. The old
comparing apples and oranges?



The poor Macs will have to carry the heavy burden of world travel,
while the PC toils away in the basement, in darkness and solitude, a
drudge.

Huh? Exactly what ratio of Macs to PCs do you see on the plane when you
travel?

You missed my joke.

Guess so.



As for security problems, there are tens of thousands of viruses
et al for Windows, maybe ten for MacOS (none that still work),
and essentially zero for most flavors of UNIX.

There are many, many security problems that affect most flavors of
Unix.

Yes and no. While it's true that no commonly used OS can long resist
knowing attack by experts, some are far harder than others, and the
first-order question is resistance to automated attack.

Er, please qualify that with "consumer" OS as there are a number of
"non consumer" OSs that do just fine against all attacks. Try my
favorite VMS which can give you C2 qualified security "out of the box".

Um. It's true that most consumer OSs lack Orange-Book (DoD 5200.28-STD)
certification while most server platforms do have such certs, but why is
that important? Nor do I see the relevance of VMS in this discussion.

The relevance is that you indicated that no commonly used OS can resist
attacks by experts which is not true. There are many commonly used OSs
that withstand attacks quite well and VMS is one of them (although it is
unfortunately slowly becoming less common).


Actually, the old DoD 5200.28 family of standards have been withdrawn by
the DoD, replaced by Common Criteria and DoD 5200.1 and 5200.2. The
formal equivalent to 5200.25 C2-Level is CAPP (Controlled Access
protection level) EAL (Evaluated Assurance Level) 3 or better.

Recent versions of Windows have CAPP EAL3 certs, as do two Linux
distributions. All the major UNIX platforms have EAL3 or EAL4. I
haven't checked MacOS, but I imagine that Apple will get or has gotten
the certs, just so they can sell to DoD. With a BSD base, it won't be
hard.

The fact that Apple had to scrap their entire OS core speaks volumes to
their software expertise. I can't see the DoD buying Macs for what
essentially is nothing more than a UI.


As for the vulnerability of Macs, that is a false sense of security
simply based on the volume of attempted attacks. If the virus kiddies
decided there were enough Macs to be worth attacking on any scale that
sense of security would evaporate very quickly.

While it's true that Macs are less of a target because they are a
fraction of the market, it's also true that Macs are harder to
compromise, especially by script kiddies.

Simply because the folks who write the Windoze attack utilities for the
script kiddies aren't spending much time writing attack utilities
targeting Macs.

A lot of this is due to the
the fact that the security base of MacOS is BSD UNIX, and a lot is due
to the fact that most dangerous things in MacOS are locked down by
default, and/or require an administrator password to access. Windows
has just started to implement this, with fanfare.

This is nothing recent to Windoze, it has been common for a long time to
"lock down" Windows in business environments so that the users are less
able to compromise the systems.

As I noted earlier, careless users will cause problems on both platforms
and unless the Mac prevents the user from loading the non certified junk
(Napster et al) than the Mac is not going to "protect" the user. I think
even the Mac users would have a fit if their beloved Macs gave them the
"I can't let you do that" response when they tried to load the latest
music piracy tools.


Simply put, viruses et al are practical problems only for Windows.
Because such malware spreads itself, the problem grows exponentially
and far faster than systems can be attacked manually.

See above. If Macs were more than a single digit percentage of the
computing world the issues would be vastly different. The perceived
security of a Mac is a function of their scarcity, not their security.

Not quite; see above. And below.

And as a class, Macs and UNIX boxes are far harder to manually
compromise than Windows anything, but none are totally secure.
Nothing that complex ever will be.

I can't recall the last time I heard of a VMS or Tandem or Stratus
system being compromised.

By your own logic, this must be only because with their miniscule market
share compared to Windows (and the Mac for that matter), they just were
not worth the trouble to break.

Hardly, since those three OSs control a sizable portion of the financial
world.


If you want a secure OS, look at VMS or the Tandem and Stratus OSs.

Oh my, a blast from the past. True enough. VMS was my favorite
command-line OS of that era. If Ken Olsen had had a religious
conversion and had made VMS open in time, he might have killed UNIX
in
the crib. But it didn't happen. So, now VMS has the security of the
dead.

Digital, Compaq and now HP have had no clue how to market VMS, indeed
Comapq and HP have no concept whatsoever of the "enterprise class"
world outside the PC realm.

I'd have to agree here. But it's also true that the whole idea of
"OpenVMS" arrived about ten years too late, so it's not clear that
Compaq and HP could do anything to reverse DEC's blunder.

I think Compaq could have if they had understood what they had and the
enterprise world. HP was hopelessly screwed up with Carley running
around hyping every low margin consumer toy while selling off or
otherwise destroying the diverse underpinnings of the company.


Tandem and Stratus are still around I think, but sell into a very
specific niche, where perfect hardware reliability is needed. These
were used in some air traffic control systems, but have a key
conceptual flaw - the custom-built application software is the common
cause of
failures, not hardware failures. So most ATC systems have total dual
or triple redundancy, and the hardware is just another (minor) cause
of failure and subsequent switchover (within one tenth of a second
typically).

VMS is still around as well. You don't hear about it much (like Tandem
or Stratus) because it's in applications that don't get hyped, and it
also "just works".

Software is most often the cause of problems and it's only getting
worse as the software gets both more complex and more poorly
engineered.

Yes, but reliability is still a problem even if well engineered. It
usually takes a few years of intense post-delivery bug fixing to achieve
reliability.

Indeed, and this is something that MacOS is just as subject to as
Windoze.


Because MacOS is only for the clueless, it cannot be that the
lack of
trouble on Macs is due to clued-in users. So there must be some
other, simpler explanation.

I have not seen this purported lack of trouble on Macs. Every
single Mac user I have known (dozens) has reported plenty of
problems.

You need a better grade of Mac users. By your own analysis, the
clueless make their own trouble; this will be platform independent.

Indeed, and this will likely be found in users who treat the machine as
a tool and not a toy. Since the Mac UI generally seems to appeal more
to the "creative" types vs. the "technical" types, presumably there are
plenty of writers and such that have Macs that are perfectly stable and
also devoid of questionable software. Presumably also if you gave these
same people the same applications on a PC and they treated it the same
(no questionable junk), they would likely see the same stability.

This is a bit self contradictory. Those flighty non-technical creative
types love the Mac but are clueless about IT, have no internet
discipline whatsoever, and yet they prosper.

I think the ones that "prosper" are the ones that keep work and personal
machines separate.

Just think what stolid
uncreative technical types could do with such a tool.

Nothing, absolutely nothing, because the whole Mac concept is to prevent
anyone from doing anything technical.


With the growth of Linux in the market, more commercial apps will
support Linux, so this advantage is likely to erode over time.

The upcoming homogenization of the hardware market will help this a
lot. The switch to OSX was one step towards Apple getting out of
the hardware business which they have never been very good at. Now
they have announced they are abandoning IBM's antiquated CPUs.

The PowerPC architecture is hardly "antiquated", and is about twice
as fast per CPU clock cycle than Intel.

The PPC architecture has been around for quite some time and was a
rehash of a retired workstation processor. Neither the Intel x86 nor
PPC CPUs are remotely as fast / efficient as the (DEC/Compaq/HP) Alpha
and indeed that's why Intel stole much of the Alpha design for the
Itanium before eventually reaching a "settlement" over the theft.

Be careful about who you call a "rehash" (nice neutral word that):
Intel processors are by the same token an absolute hash, retaining
compatibility with every past version, with bits encrusted upon bits.

They had been until the infusion of stolen Alpha technology.

Just like every ancient architecture. Did you ever write assembly on a
Univac 1100-series computer? They never threw anything away; every
instruction bit had three meanings, controlled by the current state of
the processor.

Nope, I don't go back that far. I did write assembler on VIC-20s and
II+s though. These days it's just the occasional stuff on something
small in the PIC family. I'm not a programmer and only write a little
assembler now and then to go with some hardware I built.


The PowerPC is a clean new (in relative terms) design, with no
encrustations of prior architectures. That's why it's able to do twice
the computational work per clock cycle.

The stolen Alpha technology is bringing that to the Intel line.


The problem is that IBM is more interested in making large massively
multiprocessor servers the size of commercial refrigerators than
little desktop systems, and so IBM's direction increasingly deviated
from what Apple needed to win the CPU horsepower races.

More importantly Apple has been realizing that they need to get off
proprietary hardware which regardless of any technical merit, they can
never be economically competitive with. OSX was the first step towards
making their OS portable to a generic hardware platform. The
announcement of the switch to Intel CPUs was the next step. In the not
too distant future will be the announcement of MacOS for the PC,
followed later by the announcement of the end of proprietary Mac
hardware.

When the consumer is able to select a "generic" computer platform of
the size, scalability and fault tolerance for their application, and
then independently select from a dozen of so OSes depending on their
preferences, the consumer will be well served.

It's true that Apple is arranging things so they can take advantage of
the whole PC hardware ecosystem, but it does not follow that Apple will
allow the MacOS to run on generic PCs.

I guess we'll have to wait and see, but my Apple predictions so far have
come true. I was predicting many years ago that Apple would eventually
have to face the fact that they did not have the expertise to write a
good OS core and would have to take their UI elsewhere and this has
happened. I was predicting years ago that Apple would have to abandon
their hardware platforms where they were typically behind and this has
happened in stages (first PPC now Intel).


The common hardware platform will both drive down the hardware cost and
also let each OS stand on it's own merits independent of hardware
differences.


This deviation was particularly acute in laptops.

Also, as part of their "fit in but stand out" strategy, Apple wanted
Macs to be able to run Windows apps at full speed, rather than in
emulation at a fraction of full speed.

The need for emulation / Windoze support of course being a function of
market share. Few companies can afford to write Mac only software and
ignore 95% of the market.

Almost true. There are a few Mac only companies, but a common pattern
has been to develop their first product on the Mac (where the smaller
market means less competition and greater margins), and use the profits
from the Mac market to fund the launch into the much larger Windows
market.

True for the Mac-centric companies. For the Windoze-centric companies
it's (unfortunately for the Mac users) quite easy for them to stick with
the Windoze versions and ignore the small Mac base.


The PowerPC architecture (from both IBM and Motorola) basically rules
the military and industrial embedded realtime markets, with something
like 70% market share.

Not sure where you got that figure, I follow the embedded world to some
extent and I see very few PPCs. In fact, a flip through the Dec '05
Circuit Cellar magazine revealed -0- references to PPC.

Um. Circuit Cellar is for hobbiests, not the military industrial
complex.

Hardly. Circuit Cellar is for the embedded engineering world, but uses a
format with the hobby projects of those embedded engineers to highlight
a lot of the new stuff and keep the magazine interesting. As a useless
side note, I've provided some of the props and ideas for the covers in
recent years.

If you look through magazines like Embedded Systems
Programming, you'll get a far different picture. For instance, the bulk
of the VMEbus SBC (single-board computers) sold are made by Motorola and
use the PowerPC processor. The runner-up is Intel processors, and DOS
isn't dead.

Been quite a while since I've looked at those magazines.


The Intel architecture is actually older than the PowerPC
architecture,
by many years, so by longevity alone, Intel is antiquated. So what
exactly do you mean by "antiquated"?

Antiquated in large part means weighed down by "compatibility
barnacles" which limit the ability to adopt significant architectural
changes. This problem has affected both the Intel x86 and the IBM PPC
lines.

Yes, the Intel is very much encrusted by backward compatibility. The
PPC is not yet encrusted, but give them time.

With the hardware abstraction trends the backward compatibility
barnacles should slowly evaporate across all the processor lines.


In the near future you will simply select a generic hardware
platform from the vendor of your choice and in the size /
expandability / fault tolerance for your application, and then
select your favorite OS to run on it from a field of dozens of
variants that all run on the same hardware platform.

For MacOS, it won't happen soon, as Apple makes far too much money on
hardware. Probably one will be able to run Windows on Mac intel
hardware, but will not be able to run MacOS on generic intel PCs.

I predict that MacOS will be available to run on generic PC hardware
within another 2 or 3 years. One of Apple's big problems is that the
have to make large profits on the Mac hardware since they sell so
little of it compared to the PC world. This causes them to either have
to price the product too high relative to the competition and try to
hype reasons it's worth the extra money, or to try to compromise to cut
manufacturing cost and risk reliability problems. We've seen examples
of both paths from Apple.

It won't happen anytime soon. This has been suggested for years, and
Steve Jobs (a founder and the current CEO of Apple) always says that
allowing MacOS to run on generic PC hardware would put Apple out of
business. I see no reason not to take him at his word.

Given Apple's various product duds and reversals of concepts like open
architecture to closed architecture and back to semi-open architecture,
I see no reason they won't eventually decide to exit the hardware arena.


Mac hardware is far less trouble to assemble and configure,

That's because it is largely non-assembleable and non-configurable. You
get saddled with a generic box, you have few choices for options and
you have to pay for included items you may never use.

Macs are about as configurable as Dell PCs, right down to configuring
and ordering from the Apple website. If you like, go to
http://www.apple.com/ and click on the Store tab. You can walk
through the entire chose and configure and price process without having
to register or provide a credit card. (What's in the stores is a
fraction of the configurations available from Apple.)

And exactly how much of that is *user* configurable?


All products are packaged in some manner, so you always get more than
you absolutely wanted or needed. I guess I don't see your point.

In the PC world (regardless of OS), I have far greater flexibility to
configure a hardware platform to my exact needs.


and is far
more reliable than most PCs

I've not seen any hard data showing any greater hardware reliability
for a Mac vs. PC. All computer hardware these days is far more reliable
than any of the software that runs on it.

Look into Consumer Reports and also the PC (not Mac) magazines. The Mac
magazines also say this, but what else would they say - they must be
True Believers.

As noted, Consumer Reports is *not* a credible source for anything. Also
as noted, the magazine comparisons tend to leave out entire lines of PC
hardware making them inaccurate. And again, all hardware is pretty damn
reliable these days so a quality PC and a quality Mac should have little
difference in hardware reliability.


, largely because in Macs there is a single
design agent, Apple, ensuring that it all fits together and meets
minimum standards of design and implementation quality.

... and incompatibility with the rest of the computing world.

If that's another way of saying that Macs are not Windows, OK. But both
are able to perform the same tasks, just like there are many brands of
truck, but they all use the public roads.

Yes and no, Macs could do the same tasks as PCs, but in some cases they
lack the available options (both hardware and software) to do so. It
also too Apple quite a while to join that "public road" and abandon
their proprietary networks and busses (SCSI being the only notable
exception).


Standards, quality and compatibility were issues in the PC world more
than a decade ago. These days quality and interoperability are quite
high. Only on the most complex systems do you run into any
configuration issues and that is infrequent and in areas where Macs
simply aren't applicable anyway.

Well, the PCs have gotten far better it's true, but the Macs were always
there.

Um, there have been plenty of problems with Macs along the way as well.


And Windows interoperates well only with Windows. There have been a
number of court cases on this issue, and Microsoft is slowly yielding
ground.

That's not interoperability, that's openness to third party software.
Interoperability is working with established standards, something that
Macs have been loathe to do.


This is a major reason that people have been willing to pay somewhat
more for Apple hardware. It's simply less trouble.

That's the myth, not the reality. These days very few problems on
either platform are a result of hardware problems. Come to think of it,
my Mac friend did have a 17" Powerbook replaced under warranty when it
failed after about 3 months use. I don't have details on what actually
failed, but I know the machine was not physically abused.

Even the best of laptops have about a 10% failure rate, according to
Consumer Reports, so one can always find someone with a dead laptop.

I think Apple is the only one who had melting laptops though.


My kid sister just switched from Windows to MacOS. She is a Graphic
Artist, and that field is dominated by Macs, but her first husband was a
self-described DOS Bigot. Anyway, she got the big FedX box just after
Christmas, and called to tell me how easy it was to get set up and
running. (Her current husband is not a computer guy at all.) It took
all of an hour.

Macs have been loosing some ground in parts of the graphic world, due to
a number of factors. Since most of the same software is available for
Windoze and works just as well there, and the fact that Windoze is still
a business essential and less expensive per-seat than Macs has led some
companies to ditch Macs in favor of PCs / Windoze (CCI did this).

At a previous job we had one advertising / PR / graphics person who used
a Mac. It was a pain for us to support since it was the only Mac in an
office of several hundred PCs. We eventually got a decent PC, loaded it
with all the same applications that she used on the Mac and put it on
her desk next to the Mac with the hopes that she would give it a try and
eventually switch to it.

The end result is that after a few months with no extra prodding or
support other than instruction on how to access the same work files from
either platform, this user switched to the PC. Obviously she knew that's
what we were hoping for, but she did indicate that she found that some
tasks were easier on the PC and none were more difficult.


The real reason for a metalworker to use Windows is that many of
the standard apps for metalworking and manufacturing are
currently
Windows-only, but these are slowly picking up Linux support. I'm
planning to get a Dell PC at home for just this reason, but this
PC will
be well-isolated from the Internet.

I got a stack of surplus Dell Optiplex systems for $100 ea and
they are great for quite a few things including CNC control. All my
systems are on a common network and have no problems. The firewall
/ router provides a first line of defense and the only machine that
has any inbound ports mapped to it has a software firewall as well.

Yep. I'll probably get one of those $700 Dell boxes. Already got
the hardware firewall.

An old Optiplex GX100 (P3/733) runs Mach3 just fine under W2K on a
machine that will do 60IPM or so. Nice and cheap used as well.

Yes, but my heart is set on a Dell. For one thing, I want one company
to yell at.

The old Optiplex GX100 *is* a Dell. Just one I got used from a corporate
surplus source. Since most large companies cycle PCs out every three
years to coincide with the 3 yr warranty that is standard on most
manufacturers "business" lines, there is a steady stream of good cheap
PCs that are plenty capable for all but the most intensive applications.


It will be interesting to see what happens in the market when Macs
can run all these Windows-only apps at full speed, so there is some
real competition between platforms.

I don't think that will cause any real competition. What it will mostly
do is remove a handicap from those who prefer the Mac UI. I don't think
there are any significant numbers of people wanting to migrate to a Mac
but being held back by a lack of apps. Those wishing to migrate away
from Windows are more likely to explore free options like Linux that
will run on their existing hardware.

It will certainly remove that handicap. But it will also expose lots of
people to the Mac, and comparisons will be made.

Comparisons will be interesting as I see the Mac in it's current OSX
form as nothing more than another UI shell available for a standard Unix
base.


Microsoft itself does not agree that lack of applications is what
prevents migration away from Windows. This came out in spades in the
antitrust case, where they were caught doing all manner of illegal
things to preserve this barrier. It's all in the opinion handed down by
the Federal Appeals Court.

Any successful, dominant company is going to be attacked and for some of
the most bogus reasons. Yes Microsquish has done a few things that were
wrong, but they have also been bashed for doing things that they have
every right to do as far as I'm concerned.

How can you possibly justify forcing Microsquish to include competitors
products with their distributions? Is GM required to include Ford
products with the cars they sell just because some users may prefer to
put a Ford dashboard in their GM car? That's about on par with some of
the stuff pushed on Microsquish.


Anyway, when barriers are removed, migration happens. Some will go to
Linux (if they like that unpolished an environment), and some will go to
MacOS (polished exterior, real UNIX available below).

Yep, Apple might reach 8% market share while Windows drops to 67% and
Linux/Unix rises to 25%.


The App developers and their customers would dearly love to have
an alternative to Windows, to regain control of their lives, to
escape the Treadmill.

That seems to depend on the app developer. It seems there are a
large number of folks out there pretending to be programmers by
gluing together (poorly) various chunks of purchased code libraries
for Windoze to create hopelessly bloated, unstable and inefficient
monstrosities and calling them applications.

I think we are mixing unlike things here. The desire for
independence and freedom from lock-in exists regardless of the skill
of the programmer, especially as the programmer becomes experienced
(and has been screwed when something he depended upon is made
unavailable). Freedom from lock-in and abuse by marketing-driven
companies is its own good.

Joe Gwinn

The pseudo-programmers I reference are not concerned with such things,
they exist to glue purchased MS code libraries into horrendous
"business apps" for just long enough for them to migrate into the
"management" world.

OK.

I've seen the headaches the poor "real" programmers who come along later
have trying to fix and maintain these horrible apps. It's not pretty and
makes me happy I'm on the systems end of things.

Pete C.

--
--John
to email, dial "usenet" and validate
(was jclarke at eye bee em dot net)

In article ,
"Pete C." wrote:

Joseph Gwinn wrote:


snipped


On that, you are fundamentally wrong. They are indeed both computers,
and regardless of the UI on top, any even remotely useable OS operates
on the same fundamentals. If you understand one OS, you understand
essentially any other, it is only the UI that really differs.

It's true that down deep they must all do the same thing, but this level
is quite remote from ordinary users, who tear their hair trying to
figure out under which GUI rock the needed control is hidden. Or even
which control or controls cause the current annoying misbehaviour. And
Microsoft has a different theory of rocks than Apple, so if you have
spent too little time with such a GUI, it will all be so very
frustrating.

It's more a function of Apple having an incorrect theory that rocks
don't matter. When you know what is causing the problem, but the Mac UI
won't let you fix it 'cause Apple doesn't think anyone needs to adjust
that "rock" then there is a fundamental problem with the UI.

This isn't a problem I've encountered. Could you give some specific
examples?

Apple's usual strategy is the make the technical controls invisible to
the ordinary user, but one can do damn pretty much anything from a
terminal window. Or, if one enables it, the root console.


On every attempt to actually accomplish anything on a Mac (usually
trying to help a Mac user who couldn't figure it out either) I have
consistently found that the language, structure and in many cases simply
the existence of proper configuration options was a significant issue on
Macs. These were not simple UI differences.

Um. I have no idea why you have such problems, but theorize that it's
simple lack of sufficient experience with the Mac GUI.

Experience with the Mac UI doesn't explain their mangling of the english
language or their complete mislabeling of some configuration items (I
seem to recall them calling encryption keys "passwords"), or having
certain settings that are part of a standard completely missing.

In other words, Apple jargon differs from Microsoft jargon? This is
sort of like complaining that Americans don't use quite the same words
as Brits.


I do however have several friends that use Macs to
varying degrees and all have had plenty of problems. One friend is a
teacher who uses both Macs and PCs extensively and reports that the
Macs
crash at least as often as the PCs.

With students messing with them? In education, that has been the
prime
problem. Schools have always liked Macs because the teachers could
keep
them running without needing an IT guy.

This teacher *is* an IT guy and reports no difference in the frequency
of crashes between the PCs and Macs.

My point was that most teachers are *not* IT guys, and are happy that
way.

That's nice, however it has nothing to do with the fact that an IT
literate teacher with significant experience with both Macs and PCs
reported no difference in the rate of crashes between the two.

It that teacher isn't the only one mucking with the computers, one would
see just this pattern. In fact, students mucking things up is *the*
problem that even university IT shops live with, never mind grade school.


Another friend uses Macs almost
exclusively and in 5 years and like three Macs she had a ratio of
about
20:1 to the Windoze problems I had during that time. I did not see
any
decrease in the frequency of problems with the switch to OSX either.

My experience was and is the exact opposite.

Which only goes to show that the stability of either system is most
dependent on the operator, not the OS.

I don't know what she was doing, but clearly you are far more the IT
guru than she. An aggressive or merely clumsy user with admin privilege
can make themselves lots of trouble.

Indeed that is what I've concluded. The myth that Macs are more stable
than PCs is simply that, a myth. I've also noticed that many Mac users
seem to under report the number of system issues, somehow not counting
the need to reinstall an application to get it to work properly as a
system problem.

So we return to the mainstream problem, that Windows systems are far
more fragile in practice than Macs, once one removes the effects of
clumsy meddling. PCs isolated from the world actually work tolerably
well these days, once correctly set up, but how many people want to be
isolated, or to spend their time managing multiple anti-virus and
anti-spyware programs?


MacOS was total crap up until Apple finally
realized they lacked the expertise to write an OS and put their
UI over
someone else's Unix core. Now instead of being a crappy UI on top
of
a crappy OS, it's a crappy UI on top of a so-so OS.

Don't mistake me for a Windoze bigot either, ...

Could have fooled me. Listen to yourself, listen to the music.

How do you figure that? Anyone with any technical knowledge knows
that
the pre OSX versions of MacOS were hopelessly deficient in many
areas,
particularly the lack of memory management. OSX fixed many of the
core
problems, but the UI that I can't stand (I hated the UI on the first
Lisa as well) remains. If I wanted an alternative to Windoze it
certainly would not be Mac as there is simply no advantage whatsoever
to
MacOS over Linux or another Unix variant.

I submit that your answer above proves my point in spades. Listen to
the tone of voice, and parse the implicit assumptions.

Huh? Hardly. I find the Windoze UI vastly more tolerable than the Mac
UI, largely because I can customize the Windoze UI sufficiently to
eliminate the most annoying parts. This does not in any way indicate
that I am a Windoze fan or bigot, simply that I hate the Mac UI. My OS
preference is VMS, however there is a bit of a shortage of affordable
applications for the things I do.

You really don't hear it, do you? OK, I'll parse it a little:

We'll set the stage with such dispassionate, value neutral statements
like "MacOS was total crap until Apple finally realized they lacked the
expertise to write an OS" - It may be crap, but 25 million users rather
like it, and were known to say similarly unemotional things about DOS
and Windows.

How is an OS that had -no- memory management until the entire OS core
was scrapped and replaced with a Unix core not crap? Windows was
evolving memory management (which I consider to be a fundamental concept
for an OS) in the Win 3.1 days and had it working reasonably well long
before Apple gave up on their OS core.

Because neither original Windows (pre NT) nor original MacOS (pre 10)
had memory management.

Microsoft solved the problem by stealing VMS technology form DEC,
yielding the original NT core. Books were written about this deathmarch.

Apple solved the problem by buying NeXT (getting Jobs back as part of
the package deal). NeXT was built from scratch by Jobs after he was
tossed out of Apple some ten years earlier. The OS core of NeXT was BSD
UNIX, from which Jobs and company built a through object oriented
software platform. When NeXT came back, the solution was obvious -
replace the NeXT GUI with a Mac-like GUI, retaining the UNIX core from
NeXT.



And will end with "Anyone with any technical knowledge knows that...".
In other words, anyone who disagrees by definition cannot have any
technical knowledge. Aside from the implicit ad hominem attack, this
assumes the truth of the very thing to be demonstrated, and thus is
circular.

Huh? It doesn't take a lot of technical knowledge to realize the
significant failings of pre OSX MacOS. While people complained about
Windoze bloat and the need to throw more CPU and memory at Windows, the
Mac world somehow accepted the need to throw more memory at a Mac, not
because of bloat, but because there was no memory management.

I give up. The above response is not relevant to the issue raised. You
don't seem to be able to separate technical issues from emotional issues.


Ah. Now we come to the core. Keep your machine away from the internet,
and all is well. Well, Macs don't need to be protected against the web.

Huh? Where did you come up with that idea? Every one of my machines has
Internet access.

Downloading stuff (including napster) is very much a part of the net.
It shouldn't be possible for this to cause such problems, even if some
users are naive and some people out there are evil, because such people
have always existed, and always will.

That is perhaps one of the most absurd statements I have ever heard.
Nowhere else in life do people have such an absurd expectation that they
should be magically protected against their reckless actions.

Go walking through a dark alley in the bad part of town at night and you
will probably be mugged and nobody will say that shouldn't be possible.
Hop in your car and go careening down the road ignoring safety rules and
you're going to get in an accident and nobody will say that shouldn't be
possible.

Bad analogy. A better analogy would be to ask if you expect the Police
to keep bad people from coming to your town and mugging people, or
breaking into their homes.


To say that it shouldn't be possible for a users careless actions to
cause problems on a computer is utterly absurd. If you want that level
of "big brother" protection, then your Mac would simply prevent you from
downloading programs like Napster that had not been certified by Apple.

No way do I want some company, especially Microsoft but even Apple, from
deciding what software I can and cannot run.

Most users are experts at something other than the computers that they
must use as a tool. It's expecting far too much to think that this will
ever change, if for no other reason that by definition the clueless
vastly outnumber the priesthood. But the money from vast unwashed
clueless masses folds and spends pretty good, and keeps the priesthood
in beer.

The fact is that whether you are using a Mac or a PC, downloading (and
running) questionable junk such as Napster *will* cause problems and I
have seen plenty of examples of this on both platforms. The Mac provides
no more protection from these careless user actions than Windoze does.

Tell me, would using a VMS host to download stuff from even the worst
sites cause any danger? If not, why can't Windows do that too?

For whatever reason, Macs are immune to this stuff. You can argue that
it's mere insignificance that protects the Macs, but the fact remains
that Macs are immune.


Your belief that Macs don't need to be "protected" from
the 'net is also false.

Most Macs do not run with any virus protection whatsoever, and are none
the worse for it.

And that is simply a function of threat volume and statistics, not a
function of platform security. Because PCs running Windoze outnumber
Macs 20:1 the volume of viruses targeting Windoze outnumbers those
targeting Macs by an even larger ratio and the probability of a
particular Windoze user being hit by one of those viruses is
consequently higher.

Whatever. See above.


Do you not wear a seat belt in a Volvo because they are perceived as
safer? Do you not follow traffic safety rules because your Volvo will
protect you? You might get away that false sense of security for a while
just due to statistics, but you *will* get nailed eventually.

I wear a seat belt because they demonstrably reduce injuries, regardless
of the make and model of car in question. It's still a car, and an
unbelted person will collide with something in a crash.

But how does this analogy apply to computers? In Macs, no such "seat
belt" is needed.



That has nothing to do with "isolationism", it has to do with product
quality. Do you purchase brake shoes for your car from some guy in a
dark alley? Would you expect them to be safe? Why would you expect any
different if you get your software from equally questionable sources?

I don't see the analogy. Are you claiming that Macs are bought only
with small unmarked bills from junkies in dark and fetid alleys? This
is quite the scoop - I always wondered about them.

Load garbage software (Napster et al) from suspect sources onto a
computer (Mac or Windows or any other OS for that matter) and you *will*
have problems just as surely as putting cheap counterfeit parts on your
car *will* cause problems. Even a top grade ultra secure OSs such as VMS
will have problems if a privileged user were to execute malicious code
on them.

Rehash. See above.


If you read the PC magazines (yes, PC magazines), you will see that they
consistently rate the reliability and quality of Macs at the top, with
Dell close behind. Apple beats all PC makers on quality of user
support. Consumer Reports backs these findings up.

Consumer Reports has -zero- credibility with me in -any- subject area.
As for reliability and quality, the PC magazines use some questionable
criteria and also exclude many PC lines from their comparisons. The same
goes for support as the comparisons typically exclude the "business"
lines from the PC manufacturers.

So, who do you believe?

Consumer Reports sends out a survey to their subscribers every year. In
this survey, the subscribers report their experience with all manner of
products, and this experience is summarized and reported.

Specifically, on page 35 of the December 2005 issue of Consumer Reports
appears the "Brand Repair History" (based on 85,000 desktop systems and
49,000 laptops) and "Tech Support" (based on 6,500 responses for
desktops and 4,200 responses for laptops).

There is no better publically available source of by-brand reliability
data. And the scores don't vary that much from year to year, as
reliability and tech support don't just happen, they are achieved if and
only if the company management thinks them important.


As for security problems, there are tens of thousands of viruses et al
for Windows, maybe ten for MacOS (none that still work), and
essentially zero for most flavors of UNIX.

There are many, many security problems that affect most flavors of
Unix.

Yes and no. While it's true that no commonly used OS can long resist
knowing attack by experts, some are far harder than others, and the
first-order question is resistance to automated attack.

Er, please qualify that with "consumer" OS as there are a number of "non
consumer" OSs that do just fine against all attacks. Try my favorite VMS
which can give you C2 qualified security "out of the box".

Um. It's true that most consumer OSs lack Orange-Book (DoD 5200.28-STD)
certification while most server platforms do have such certs, but why is
that important? Nor do I see the relevance of VMS in this discussion.

The relevance is that you indicated that no commonly used OS can resist
attacks by experts which is not true. There are many commonly used OSs
that withstand attacks quite well and VMS is one of them (although it is
unfortunately slowly becoming less common).

There is a big difference between "quite well" and perfection. No CAPP
certified system has failed to yield to knowing attack by experts,
although in some cases they had to work at it. Nor are 5200.28 B-level
machines completely safe. If you read DoD 5200.28-STD, you will see
that it does not promise that penetration will be impossible, it instead
implicitly promises that penetration will take a lot of specific OS
knowledge, time, and general expertise. The levels in 5200.28 basically
specify the level of penetration effort to be thrown at the system under
test.


Actually, the old DoD 5200.28 family of standards have been withdrawn by
the DoD, replaced by Common Criteria and DoD 5200.1 and 5200.2. The
formal equivalent to 5200.25 C2-Level is CAPP (Controlled Access
protection level) EAL (Evaluated Assurance Level) 3 or better.

Recent versions of Windows have CAPP EAL3 certs, as do two Linux
distributions. All the major UNIX platforms have EAL3 or EAL4. I
haven't checked MacOS, but I imagine that Apple will get or has gotten
the certs, just so they can sell to DoD. With a BSD base, it won't be
hard.

The fact that Apple had to scrap their entire OS core speaks volumes to
their software expertise. I can't see the DoD buying Macs for what
essentially is nothing more than a UI.

Microsoft scrapped their entire Windows 3.x OS core as well, in favor of
NT.

Apple would seek certification to be able to sell to DoD. If this will
work or not is quite another matter. But don't dismiss it out of hand:

There was a big flurry a few years ago when the US Army (at Ft. Monmouth
if I recall) dumped all their Windows webservers in favor of Mac
servers, mainly because the Army was tired of being hacked despite their
heroic efforts to keep the WinNT servers patched and running.


As for the vulnerability of Macs, that is a false sense of security
simply based on the volume of attempted attacks. If the virus kiddies
decided there were enough Macs to be worth attacking on any scale that
sense of security would evaporate very quickly.

While it's true that Macs are less of a target because they are a
fraction of the market, it's also true that Macs are harder to
compromise, especially by script kiddies.

Simply because the folks who write the Windoze attack utilities for the
script kiddies aren't spending much time writing attack utilities
targeting Macs.

Rehash. See above.


A lot of this is due to the
the fact that the security base of MacOS is BSD UNIX, and a lot is due
to the fact that most dangerous things in MacOS are locked down by
default, and/or require an administrator password to access. Windows
has just started to implement this, with fanfare.

This is nothing recent to Windoze, it has been common for a long time to
"lock down" Windows in business environments so that the users are less
able to compromise the systems.

The problem has been that a fully locked down Windows system is close to
useless, as many Windows apps won't run as anything other than admin.
This has just now started to change, but will take years to achieve what
MacOS now has.


As I noted earlier, careless users will cause problems on both platforms
and unless the Mac prevents the user from loading the non certified junk
(Napster et al) than the Mac is not going to "protect" the user. I think
even the Mac users would have a fit if their beloved Macs gave them the
"I can't let you do that" response when they tried to load the latest
music piracy tools.

See above.


Simply put, viruses et al are practical problems only for Windows.
Because such malware spreads itself, the problem grows exponentially
and far faster than systems can be attacked manually.

See above. If Macs were more than a single digit percentage of the
computing world the issues would be vastly different. The perceived
security of a Mac is a function of their scarcity, not their security.

Not quite; see above. And below.

And as a class, Macs and UNIX boxes are far harder to manually
compromise than Windows anything, but none are totally secure. Nothing
that complex ever will be.

I can't recall the last time I heard of a VMS or Tandem or Stratus
system being compromised.

By your own logic, this must be only because with their miniscule market
share compared to Windows (and the Mac for that matter), they just were
not worth the trouble to break.

Hardly, since those three OSs control a sizable portion of the financial
world.

Ah. A new issue emerges.

So, we should use only these machines for web surfing. And if they can
achieve safety despite naive users, why can't Windows do the same?


If you want a secure OS, look at VMS or the Tandem and Stratus OSs.

Oh my, a blast from the past. True enough. VMS was my favorite
command-line OS of that era. If Ken Olsen had had a religious
conversion and had made VMS open in time, he might have killed UNIX in
the crib. But it didn't happen. So, now VMS has the security of the
dead.

Digital, Compaq and now HP have had no clue how to market VMS, indeed
Comapq and HP have no concept whatsoever of the "enterprise class" world
outside the PC realm.

I'd have to agree here. But it's also true that the whole idea of
"OpenVMS" arrived about ten years too late, so it's not clear that
Compaq and HP could do anything to reverse DEC's blunder.

I think Compaq could have if they had understood what they had and the
enterprise world. HP was hopelessly screwed up with Carley running
around hyping every low margin consumer toy while selling off or
otherwise destroying the diverse underpinnings of the company.

I suspect that you are right.


Tandem and Stratus are still around I think, but sell into a very
specific niche, where perfect hardware reliability is needed. These
were used in some air traffic control systems, but have a key
conceptual
flaw - the custom-built application software is the common cause of
failures, not hardware failures. So most ATC systems have total dual
or
triple redundancy, and the hardware is just another (minor) cause of
failure and subsequent switchover (within one tenth of a second
typically).

VMS is still around as well. You don't hear about it much (like Tandem
or Stratus) because it's in applications that don't get hyped, and it
also "just works".

Software is most often the cause of problems and it's only getting worse
as the software gets both more complex and more poorly engineered.

Yes, but reliability is still a problem even if well engineered. It
usually takes a few years of intense post-delivery bug fixing to achieve
reliability.

Indeed, and this is something that MacOS is just as subject to as
Windoze.

Yes, they are still computers. But Apple seems to push it much farther
than Microsoft, and Apple has better control of the Mac ecosystem than
MS has of the Windows ecosystem.


Because MacOS is only for the clueless, it cannot be that the lack
of
trouble on Macs is due to clued-in users. So there must be some
other,
simpler explanation.

I have not seen this purported lack of trouble on Macs. Every single
Mac
user I have known (dozens) has reported plenty of problems.

You need a better grade of Mac users. By your own analysis, the
clueless make their own trouble; this will be platform independent.

Indeed, and this will likely be found in users who treat the machine as
a tool and not a toy. Since the Mac UI generally seems to appeal more to
the "creative" types vs. the "technical" types, presumably there are
plenty of writers and such that have Macs that are perfectly stable and
also devoid of questionable software. Presumably also if you gave these
same people the same applications on a PC and they treated it the same
(no questionable junk), they would likely see the same stability.

This is a bit self contradictory. Those flighty non-technical creative
types love the Mac but are clueless about IT, have no internet
discipline whatsoever, and yet they prosper.

I think the ones that "prosper" are the ones that keep work and personal
machines separate.

Should not be necessary, as mentioned above in multiple places.


Just think what stolid
uncreative technical types could do with such a tool.

Nothing, absolutely nothing, because the whole Mac concept is to prevent
anyone from doing anything technical.

Not so. The technical controls are at the terminal window (and root
console) level, and many controls are only at that level. One can argue
that this or that control should or should not be GUI accessible, and
I'm sure that there will be some migration in the coming years, but the
controls are there, but mostly kept away from naive users.


With the growth of Linux in the market, more commercial apps will
support
Linux, so this advantage is likely to erode over time.

The upcoming homogenization of the hardware market will help this a
lot.
The switch to OSX was one step towards Apple getting out of the
hardware
business which they have never been very good at. Now they have
announced they are abandoning IBM's antiquated CPUs.

The PowerPC architecture is hardly "antiquated", and is about twice as
fast per CPU clock cycle than Intel.

The PPC architecture has been around for quite some time and was a
rehash of a retired workstation processor. Neither the Intel x86 nor PPC
CPUs are remotely as fast / efficient as the (DEC/Compaq/HP) Alpha and
indeed that's why Intel stole much of the Alpha design for the Itanium
before eventually reaching a "settlement" over the theft.

Be careful about who you call a "rehash" (nice neutral word that):
Intel processors are by the same token an absolute hash, retaining
compatibility with every past version, with bits encrusted upon bits.

They had been until the infusion of stolen Alpha technology.

Not exactly. IBM invented the RISK processor architecture, and the
first RISC CPU was the IBM P801.

Nor is the Alpha really a RISC machine, as it had to execute the VMS
instruction set. I no longer recall the details of what was done in
silicon and what was done by the compilers, but the VMS instruction set
is pretty big and complex, even if it is nicely designed. My
recollection is that DEC implemented all the one and two address
instructions in Alpha silicon, and everything else was emulated.


Just like every ancient architecture. Did you ever write assembly on a
Univac 1100-series computer? They never threw anything away; every
instruction bit had three meanings, controlled by the current state of
the processor.

Nope, I don't go back that far. I did write assembler on VIC-20s and
II+s though. These days it's just the occasional stuff on something
small in the PIC family. I'm not a programmer and only write a little
assembler now and then to go with some hardware I built.

My first computer language was Basic, my second was Fortran, and my
third was Univac 1100 assembler. And embedded programmers almost
universally used assembly in those days, although C (not C++) is real
common nowdays.


The PowerPC is a clean new (in relative terms) design, with no
encrustations of prior architectures. That's why it's able to do twice
the computational work per clock cycle.

The stolen Alpha technology is bringing that to the Intel line.

Not exactly. See above.

And one part of the Alpha one would not wish to steal is the power
demand. I recall an effort to use Alpha chips in a line of MIL-SPEC
single board computers that failed because it was too hard to get that
much heat off the board and out of the cabinet. The comment of the day
was that we would have to cool the thing with boiling seawater.


The problem is that IBM is more interested in making large massively
multiprocessor servers the size of commercial refrigerators than little
desktop systems, and so IBM's direction increasingly deviated from what
Apple needed to win the CPU horsepower races.

More importantly Apple has been realizing that they need to get off
proprietary hardware which regardless of any technical merit, they can
never be economically competitive with. OSX was the first step towards
making their OS portable to a generic hardware platform. The
announcement of the switch to Intel CPUs was the next step. In the not
too distant future will be the announcement of MacOS for the PC,
followed later by the announcement of the end of proprietary Mac
hardware.

When the consumer is able to select a "generic" computer platform of the
size, scalability and fault tolerance for their application, and then
independently select from a dozen of so OSes depending on their
preferences, the consumer will be well served.

It's true that Apple is arranging things so they can take advantage of
the whole PC hardware ecosystem, but it does not follow that Apple will
allow the MacOS to run on generic PCs.

I guess we'll have to wait and see, but my Apple predictions so far have
come true. I was predicting many years ago that Apple would eventually
have to face the fact that they did not have the expertise to write a
good OS core and would have to take their UI elsewhere and this has
happened. I was predicting years ago that Apple would have to abandon
their hardware platforms where they were typically behind and this has
happened in stages (first PPC now Intel).

OK. The market will tell, soon enough.


The common hardware platform will both drive down the hardware cost and
also let each OS stand on it's own merits independent of hardware
differences.


This deviation was particularly acute in laptops.

Also, as part of their "fit in but stand out" strategy, Apple wanted
Macs to be able to run Windows apps at full speed, rather than in
emulation at a fraction of full speed.

The need for emulation / Windoze support of course being a function of
market share. Few companies can afford to write Mac only software and
ignore 95% of the market.

Almost true. There are a few Mac only companies, but a common pattern
has been to develop their first product on the Mac (where the smaller
market means less competition and greater margins), and use the profits
from the Mac market to fund the launch into the much larger Windows
market.

True for the Mac-centric companies. For the Windoze-centric companies
it's (unfortunately for the Mac users) quite easy for them to stick with
the Windoze versions and ignore the small Mac base.

Yes and no. There are people switching. Like my kid sister. And
frustrated Windows users ask me from time to time, but it's more often
an initial choice than a later choice.


The PowerPC architecture (from both IBM and Motorola) basically rules
the military and industrial embedded realtime markets, with something
like 70% market share.

Not sure where you got that figure, I follow the embedded world to some
extent and I see very few PPCs. In fact, a flip through the Dec '05
Circuit Cellar magazine revealed -0- references to PPC.

Um. Circuit Cellar is for hobbiests, not the military industrial
complex.

Hardly. Circuit Cellar is for the embedded engineering world, but uses a
format with the hobby projects of those embedded engineers to highlight
a lot of the new stuff and keep the magazine interesting. As a useless
side note, I've provided some of the props and ideas for the covers in
recent years.

A lot of embedded projects are for microwave ovens and the like. These
are very small systems, and typically use very slow CPUs (because they
don't need anything faster). The Military Industrial Complex is solving
a very different set of problems.


If you look through magazines like Embedded Systems
Programming, you'll get a far different picture. For instance, the bulk
of the VMEbus SBCs (single-board computers) sold are made by Motorola and
use the PowerPC processor. The runner-up is Intel processors, and DOS
isn't dead.

Been quite a while since I've looked at those magazines.

OK. Some libraries have them.


The Intel architecture is actually older than the PowerPC architecture,
by many years, so by longevity alone, Intel is antiquated. So what
exactly do you mean by "antiquated"?

Antiquated in large part means weighed down by "compatibility barnacles"
which limit the ability to adopt significant architectural changes. This
problem has affected both the Intel x86 and the IBM PPC lines.

Yes, the Intel is very much encrusted by backward compatibility. The
PPC is not yet encrusted, but give them time.

With the hardware abstraction trends the backward compatibility
barnacles should slowly evaporate across all the processor lines.

Um. Hardware abstraction layers are another form of barnacle, and kill
performance. We live with the performance cost for practical reasons,
but there is nonetheless a cost. Look into the history of microkernels
in operating-system design.


In the near future you will simply select a generic hardware platform
from the vendor of your choice and in the size / expandability /
fault
tolerance for your application, and then select your favorite OS to
run
on it from a field of dozens of variants that all run on the same
hardware platform.

For MacOS, it won't happen soon, as Apple makes far too much money on
hardware. Probably one will be able to run Windows on Mac intel
hardware, but will not be able to run MacOS on generic intel PCs.

I predict that MacOS will be available to run on generic PC hardware
within another 2 or 3 years. One of Apple's big problems is that the have
to make large profits on the Mac hardware since they sell so little of
it compared to the PC world. This causes them to either have to price
the product too high relative to the competition and try to hype reasons
it's worth the extra money, or to try to compromise to cut manufacturing
cost and risk reliability problems. We've seen examples of both paths
from Apple.

It won't happen anytime soon. This has been suggested for years, and
Steve Jobs (a founder and the current CEO of Apple) always says that
allowing MacOS to run on generic PC hardware would put Apple out of
business. I see no reason not to take him at his word.

Given Apple's various product duds and reversals of concepts like open
architecture to closed architecture and back to semi-open architecture,
I see no reason they won't eventually decide to exit the hardware arena.

You mean like the iPod?

Anyway, let's wait and see.


Mac hardware is far less trouble to assemble and configure,

That's because it is largely non-assembleable and non-configurable. You
get saddled with a generic box, you have few choices for options and you
have to pay for included items you may never use.

Macs are about as configurable as Dell PCs, right down to configuring
and ordering from the Apple website. If you like, go to
http://www.apple.com/ and click on the Store tab. You can walk
through the entire chose and configure and price process without having
to register or provide a credit card. (What's in the stores is a
fraction of the configurations available from Apple.)

And exactly how much of that is *user* configurable?

I don't get your point. The Apple store cannot tell if you are a
unwashed user or an administrator, so long as your money spends good.


All products are packaged in some manner, so you always get more than
you absolutely wanted or needed. I guess I don't see your point.

In the PC world (regardless of OS), I have far greater flexibility to
configure a hardware platform to my exact needs.

If this is simply another way to observe that the Windows ecosystem is a
factor larger than the Mac ecosystem, I agree. But the question was
adequacy for a purpose, not ecosystem size per se.


and is far
more reliable than most PCs

I've not seen any hard data showing any greater hardware reliability for
a Mac vs. PC. All computer hardware these days is far more reliable than
any of the software that runs on it.

Look into Consumer Reports and also the PC (not Mac) magazines. The Mac
magazines also say this, but what else would they say - they must be
True Believers.

As noted, Consumer Reports is *not* a credible source for anything. Also
as noted, the magazine comparisons tend to leave out entire lines of PC
hardware making them inaccurate. And again, all hardware is pretty damn
reliable these days so a quality PC and a quality Mac should have little
difference in hardware reliability.

See above. Better yet, get the December 2005 issue and look, so we can
debate from the same page.


, largely because in Macs there is a single
design agent, Apple, ensuring that it all fits together and meets
minimum standards of design and implementation quality.

... and incompatibility with the rest of the computing world.

If that's another way of saying that Macs are not Windows, OK. But both
are able to perform the same tasks, just like there are many brands of
truck, but they all use the public roads.

Yes and no, Macs could do the same tasks as PCs, but in some cases they
lack the available options (both hardware and software) to do so. It
also too Apple quite a while to join that "public road" and abandon
their proprietary networks and busses (SCSI being the only notable
exception).

And Firewire. And ethernet.


Standards, quality and compatibility were issues in the PC world more
than a decade ago. These days quality and interoperability are quite
high. Only on the most complex systems do you run into any configuration
issues and that is infrequent and in areas where Macs simply aren't
applicable anyway.

Well, the PCs have gotten far better it's true, but the Macs were always
there.

Um, there have been plenty of problems with Macs along the way as well.

In absolute terms perhaps, but Macs are far less trouble in total.


And Windows interoperates well only with Windows. There have been a
number of court cases on this issue, and Microsoft is slowly yielding
ground.

That's not interoperability, that's openness to third party software.
Interoperability is working with established standards, something that
Macs have been loathe to do.

Um. Have you been following Microsoft's tangles with the EU antitrust
regulators? They are proposing fines of a million dollars a day.


This is a major reason that people have been willing to pay somewhat
more for Apple hardware. It's simply less trouble.

That's the myth, not the reality. These days very few problems on either
platform are a result of hardware problems. Come to think of it, my Mac
friend did have a 17" Powerbook replaced under warranty when it failed
after about 3 months use. I don't have details on what actually failed,
but I know the machine was not physically abused.

Even the best of laptops have about a 10% failure rate, according to
Consumer Reports, so one can always find someone with a dead laptop.

I think Apple is the only one who had melting laptops though.

True, but lots of PC laptops get too hot to have on one's lap. In any
event, Consumer Reports shows that Apple desktops are by far more
reliable than any PC, but that Apple laptops are in the middle of the PC
range (which isn't that wide).


My kid sister just switched from Windows to MacOS. She is a Graphic
Artist, and that field is dominated by Macs, but her first husband was a
self-described DOS Bigot. Anyway, she got the big FedX box just after
Christmas, and called to tell me how easy it was to get set up and
running. (Her current husband is not a computer guy at all.) It took
all of an hour.

Macs have been loosing some ground in parts of the graphic world, due to
a number of factors. Since most of the same software is available for
Windoze and works just as well there, and the fact that Windoze is still
a business essential and less expensive per-seat than Macs has led some
companies to ditch Macs in favor of PCs / Windoze (CCI did this).

Macs are something like 60-70% of the Graphics Arts world.


At a previous job we had one advertising / PR / graphics person who used
a Mac. It was a pain for us to support since it was the only Mac in an
office of several hundred PCs. We eventually got a decent PC, loaded it
with all the same applications that she used on the Mac and put it on
her desk next to the Mac with the hopes that she would give it a try and
eventually switch to it.

The end result is that after a few months with no extra prodding or
support other than instruction on how to access the same work files from
either platform, this user switched to the PC. Obviously she knew that's
what we were hoping for, but she did indicate that she found that some
tasks were easier on the PC and none were more difficult.

The social pressure must have been immense.

I was the sole holdout at work for many years, long enough to have
managed to miss all the Windows 3.x and NT dramas my coworkers told me
about over lunch. It was a lot of fun, at least for me. After a while,
someone would notice that I had been uncommonly quiet, and would ask me
a question. I would reply with some variant of "I have a Mac, and it
just works, so I have nothing to report". Getting Windows to support
CD/ROM drives was a leading cause of wasted weekends.



Yep. I'll probably get one of those $700 Dell boxes. Already got the
hardware firewall.

An old Optiplex GX100 (P3/733) runs Mach3 just fine under W2K on a
machine that will do 60IPM or so. Nice and cheap used as well.

Yes, but my heart is set on a Dell. For one thing, I want one company
to yell at.

The old Optiplex GX100 *is* a Dell. Just one I got used from a corporate
surplus source. Since most large companies cycle PCs out every three
years to coincide with the 3 yr warranty that is standard on most
manufacturers "business" lines, there is a steady stream of good cheap
PCs that are plenty capable for all but the most intensive applications.

OK.


It will be interesting to see what happens in the market when Macs can
run all these Windows-only apps at full speed, so there is some real
competition between platforms.

I don't think that will cause any real competition. What it will mostly
do is remove a handicap from those who prefer the Mac UI. I don't think
there are any significant numbers of people wanting to migrate to a Mac
but being held back by a lack of apps. Those wishing to migrate away
from Windows are more likely to explore free options like Linux that
will run on their existing hardware.

It will certainly remove that handicap. But it will also expose lots of
people to the Mac, and comparisons will be made.

Comparisons will be interesting as I see the Mac in its current OSX
form as nothing more than another UI shell available for a standard Unix
base.

The standard retort is that by the same token there is no difference
between a Porche and a Chevy; they are both cars.


Microsoft itself does not agree that lack of applications is what
prevents migration away from Windows. This came out in spades in the
antitrust case, where they were caught doing all manner of illegal
things to preserve this barrier. It's all in the opinion handed down by
the Federal Appeals Court.

Any successful, dominant company is going to be attacked and for some of
the most bogus reasons. Yes Microsquish has done a few things that were
wrong, but they have also been bashed for doing things that they have
every right to do as far as I'm concerned.

More than a few things. It's all there in the court rulings.


How can you possibly justify forcing Microsquish to include competitors
products with their distributions? Is GM required to include Ford
products with the cars they sell just because some users may prefer to
put a Ford dashboard in their GM car? That's about on par with some of
the stuff pushed on Microsquish.

Any company that achieves ~90% market share in an important industry
will find its freedom of action curtailed. The classic example is AT&T,
which achieved a similar market share by methods that are now illegal,
but were common back then. The solution was to turn telephones into a
regulated utility. This is probably one of Microsoft's biggest fears,
but their current conduct makes such an outcome more and more likely.

Datapoint: At its peak, IBM had only a 70% market share.


Anyway, when barriers are removed, migration happens. Some will go to
Linux (if they like that unpolished an environment), and some will go to
MacOS (polished exterior, real UNIX available below).

Yep, Apple might reach 8% market share while Windows drops to 67% and
Linux/Unix rises to 25%.

Truth is, Apple (and Mac users) would be perfectly happy with ~10%
market share.


I think we are mixing unlike things here. The desire for independence
and freedom from lock-in exists regardless of the skill of the
programmer, especially as the programmer becomes experienced (and has
been screwed when something he depended upon is made unavailable).
Freedom from lock-in and abuse by marketing-driven companies is its own
good.

The pseudo-programmers I reference are not concerned with such things,
they exist to glue purchased MS code libraries into horrendous "business
apps" for just long enough for them to migrate into the "management"
world.

OK.

I've seen the headaches the poor "real" programmers who come along later
have trying to fix and maintain these horrible apps. It's not pretty and
makes me happy I'm on the systems end of things.

True enough, but it will never change.

Joe Gwinn