Re: [tlug] Speaking of computer usage ....

["SL Baur" <steve@example.com>]

On 2/29/08, Attila Kinali <attila@example.com> wrote:

>  On Thu, 28 Feb 2008 20:26:32 -0800
>  "SL Baur" <steve@example.com> wrote:
>
>  > Just about *everyone* is missing the point why Linux rocks.  Free as
>  > in beer?  Who cares?  I'd rather buy a CD/DVD of the distro or pay to
>  > have it as a preinstall.  Free as in liberty?
>
>
> Well.. how about "let me tell what the computer does instead of the
>  computer telling me what i should do"?

Yes, quite valid but that's not a reason to like Linux, per se.  The BSDs
have that feature too. If it weren't for a slightly bad L1 cache chip, I might
have ended up a total BSD guy.  I don't think I've ever posted why I
ended up with Linux instead of one of our brothers, so ...

Autumn 1995 the boss came up to me and said I'm tired of paying SCO
license fees.  Will one of the free Unixes do what we need?  He had two
CDs, one slackware and the other FreeBSD.  I told him we really, really
want BSD.  The FreeBSD CD always crashed on installation.  The
Slackware CD installed and appeared to work like a charm.  I couldn't
argue with that and I was happy to get us off of SCO.  (Months later and
many odd crashes later and with personal attention from Linus including
patches mailed to me to try out, the problem was debugged as a bad L1
cache chip).

Considering the time frame, it is likely that the BSD kernel was so much
faster than the Linux 1.2 kernel that it drove the slightly bad chip beyond
its limits faster.  It wasn't until I started running the (much faster) 1.3
kernels that the problem showed up under Linux.

I had only dealt with limited proprietary Unixes before and the first
thing I went to do when I finally had that new Linux box on my desk
was to go out and get my favorite free software that never ever came
with the O/S before and found to my amazement ... it was already installed.

> I'm not surprised. A damn lot of professionals who do comptuer
>  related stuff for a living live with the attitude that the computer
>  is a tool with severe limitations and that one has to adapt to it.
>  Not to mention that even professionals often do not know the
>  capabilities of their computers/OS and stick with the working style
>  they have learned years ago from their friends friend who showed them
>  win 3.11 for the first time.

A computer is a tool for getting things done.   Once upon a time, the
general attitude was the more one learned about different ways to
enhance your computer environment, the better.  That's not true any
more.

> Hmm.. (here at work)
>  Desktops: 10
>  Eterms: 30
>  Firefox: 12
>  Sylpheed: 2
>  (X)Emacs: 0 (common! i'm a vi guy! ;-)

I forgive you, my son.  Go forth and sin no more.  :-)

>  misc: 5

/cheer

>  I think record i ever counted was 70 windows open, of which 50 were Eterms
>  on my desktop at home.

Yowza.  I *am* impressed.  I don't think I've ever intentionally had that
many windows open ever.

>  > I logged in 45 days ago, the system has an uptime of 83 days (I
>  > don't have a UPS in my cube), I have only 1GB of memory and I'm
>  > slightly over 1GB into swap.
>
> I beat that: 512MB RAM 1.8GB swap (300MB used). Uptime is just
>  13 days because i had to reboot for some hardware tests.
>  (this also explains the low number of open windows)

Heh, "low" number of open windows ...  My all time record on Linux
uptime by the way was the notebook computer I had at ETL in Tsukuba.
When Handa-san rebooted it after installing the PCMCIA drivers it
needed, I never once rebooted it.  Not once.

>  > Everything runs with acceptable
>  > performance except the Firefox running over the network on a
>  > Solaris workstation. Oh and this all with the older, piggier and slower
>  > KDE 3 *and* this is an "old" HP workstation that isn't likely to be
>  > "Vista Capable".

The KDE comments aren't intended to reflect bad on KDE, just to highlight
that I'm not yet using the light and fast KDE 4.

> I couldn't run KDE or far less gnome on this machine. I'd be constantly
>  waiting for it to do something usefull. I used to use KDE 1 back
>  when i first got linux, but dropped it after 3 months because it
>  was too slow (on my newly bought PC). And for a few years now,
>  i keep my computer even gnome-clean (ie not even libraries installed).

Yes, and that's a feature.  If you don't like it you can uninstall it.
I'm sorry KDE hasn't gone well for you.  I was hooked from the first
time I got it fully built and installed sometime in late 1998, whatever
version that was.  That was on the workstation I was doing primary
XEmacs development on so it was definitely not underpowered for its
time.

> I had to work on windows 4 years back, when i was in Japan.
>  Heck! I was astonished how the "mother of all GUIs" sucked so
>  much at handling multiple windows. While one window worked ok,
>  having a second one open that didn't overlap was kind of iffy.
>  Having more than 3 windows, all higly overlapping was a total
>  pain. I'm astonished that people can work like this.
>  And it explains why so many windows applications have their
>  own window managment (that totaly sucks too, but at least
>  somehow works for this specific app).

Focus warping is a crime against mankind.  It deserves the death
penalty.  The Mac (and sadly, XEmacs) is guilty of that too.  I was
forced to do a document in Microsoft Word last summer (thankfully
on CrossOver Office at least) and I haven't sworn at software like
that for ages.  The mouse handling in menus is attrocious.  With
the touchpad, I could successfully hit a menu item in a nested menu
about 1 every 3 tries.  Kind of cool in a sad way that they embed a
game like that in a tool that's supposed to save you time.  Way to
go Microsoft!

>  Oh yes, i haven't been working with unix for the last 20years. :-)

I've had Unix and its decendents _at home_ for about 20 years.  I've
been working with Unix for a bit longer than that ... :-)

Good comments and I'm glad to see someone even more hardcore
than me.

-sb