Posts by Golgafrinch 45 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Nov 2013
And why did other distributions so readily adopt it?
25 years ago we nicknamed Suse "The Windows from Nuremberg", and Redhat was being referred to as a 'job creation program' (not a bad thing in itself, but): 'for anyone who shouldn't be let anywhere near a keyboard'. It begat a new cohort of Linux 'experts'. And don't get me started about the Debianauts or the Ubuntans.
Short of rolling your own (if you have the time), Slackware is the only one I can think of which still leaves you in control. (But there you have to actually know what you're doing - and if you do, it makes for happy users, and also means that when your phone rings, it is only for a change request.)
(Just in case: I've worked - not just used - with Minix, Coherent, A/UX, Irix(MIPS), Almos tImitating uniX,SunOs4.1 and upwards, various BSD flavours, and of course, various Linux distributions (where I still have fond memories of Yggdrasil - the sole reason I learned Tcl/Tk))..
I sure as hell hope that you ain't gonna plan on retiring any time soon. There's a whole cohort we'll have to outlive. (Mouse to the left of me, ashtray to the right, here I am stuck with my keyboard and you ;-)
Unfortunately, once you work for a company which has "adopted" Linux, you're stuck with something unbearable determined by the packager they've chosen, and then have to try and make the best of it. And the various Linux packagers - which is why I gave AIX a favourable mention - have never given us even the slightest indication of a roadmap, let alone target dates. It's just the same me-too-ism that MS practised and is still practising. I can assure you that life was easier in the 70s - and, BTW, rock music was much more interesting to listen to. At that time.
Thanks for the link - to be perfectly honest, at that time I wouldn't even have dreamt of using Linux as a fileserver on an industrial scale, for a number of reasons (no journalling for starters) ... most of that stuff was still in it's infancy at the time. And SMP support was rather patchy. But when it came to supporting small offices who needed internet access and were on a tight budget, users storing their files on their own PCs/Macs anyway, it was unbeatable. Plus Samba and Netatalk (on SunOs CAP was preferred) 'n all that.
Quoth VoiceofTruth:
"Re Linux v NT4. Linux was more stable, but in networking performance tests NT4 crushed Linux."
Thanks to the efforts of a certain Alain Cox, this was no longer the case by the late 90s. In the end, Multiple Sclerosis had to swallow the bitter pill and adopt the BSD stack (hence. NT5). All their old stuff was geared towards X.400, (they'd never understood anything beyond LANs and WindowsforWorkgroups - reading the first edition of "The Road Ahead" might get you into your paces) and apart from that, NT4 was, just about, useful as a muliprotocol print server. The reason why it became somewhat useable for office work was Citrix.
I can tell you how much fun I had with this crap: remember 'winnuke'? NT 3.1 was a bit of a pretentious joke, and NT4 was absolute shite.
The same goes for their officeware (Microserfs is a nice book to read): because they think it works for them, they think the rest of the world needs it - or rather must have it shoved down their throats; I can't think of a bigger productivity killer. We have similar problems with SAP, Atlassian, and (I think I better stop here)
@Snake:
(Fascinating animals, by the way)
Anyone who quotes both R.E.M and the original Fleetwood Mac (as in "I ain't pretty and my legs are thin", which applies to me - oh well!) must be slightly bemused, though not amused, by all the developments (or frankly put, regressions) that have occured in the last 25 years.)
Thank you for your considerate reply.
Hope springs eternal, and maybe we can get Linux back on track. Gnome, as you rightly state, is a disaster (again, did anyone ask for this? We've had better.).
What has changed since them there days is that, starting with Yggdrasil, Linux had become user-friendly and also encouraged users to learn something and turn it into their own.
This has completely changed by now (ever had the displeasure of having to work with AWS?)
When it comes to Linux proper (i.e. the kernel) certain things have definitely improved (e.g. SMP which was less of an issue in the 90s), but in most other respects I can no longer recommend it, because what Linux once gave you was the freedom not to be chained to a particular supplier. Since the packagers have begun to run the market, it no longer makes a bleedin' bit of a diffenrence wether you go for Microsnot or what not (there's commoditizatin for you). At least with AIX I've still got something resembling a roadmap, Snoracle being a price-gauging nuisance, and HPox no longer worth talking about. (BTW, I don't work for IBM.)
So what's left? On the Linux side I'd say Slackware - but the guy needs all the help he can get - apart from that there's FreeBSD and OpenBSD, both suffering from an extreme lack of device drivers, plus some objecting to their license models (isn't life strange?).
To be honest, I don't care a fig about Redhat nor anything they produce, and here's why:
In '96 I found myself in a far-off land and, trying to set up a workable PC for myself, all I could get hold off was a Rehat 4.8 CD (you needed an intenet connection before you can download anything from sunsite). I took me three effing days to sort out what the heck had been installed (when you're used to Slackware, which leaves you perfectly in control, you have every reason to be peeved.)
Having returned to the Sceptered Isle, I had no such problems, and managed to create (WABI had by then become quite affordable) setups for others, knowing that I'd never receive a support call. Linux was by then stable, libc5 had been thoroughly debugged, XFree86 no longer spontaneously froze, SANE was pretty good, Hylafax worked flawlessly, and Ghostscript had vastly improved. And when it comes to stability, Linux ran rings around NT4. Life was good.
What happened next? Redhat 5.0: five years of hard-earned reputation blown to dust. Rickety as hell.
Than came Drepper. Torvalds futzing around with virtual memory management. The fileystem wars. And, if that's not bad enough, Poettershite - did anyone of us ask for systemd? Did anyone of us ever need this?
There once was a time when Linux provided a degree of freedom - but with the preponderence of Shithead and Ucuntu - Debian being the eternal retards (openssl anyone?) I've called it quits. (My private and professional obligations are such that I no longer have the time to fix others' code.)
If ever you want to see a global success made in the UK ... but then again, they were pretty good at what they were doing. Under Snatcher the cowboy economy began to take root (what I got to witness from the mid-eighties onwards still breaks my heart - ex-barrow boys in pin-stripes.) Will we ever recover from that?
Gamers are lamers.
Most of us work for companies that actually have to make money - where you get conditioned to work the Microsnot/Snoracle/SAP way (COBOL almost makes me nostalgic).
The Java/XML/somethingScript/Json crowd is so full of stack it makes me want to vomit. (Oh, I forgot to mention Agile and DevSecOps. Sorry.)
So I got two thumbs-down. Cute. I guess that there must be at least two people who have no business being in the business. Although, from personal experience, I'd propose a rather larger figure, by several orders of magnitude. All the Javascript Jockeys for starters ... and the Javanesians, nevermind the Perl jerks, and the Powershell addicts and the Pythonites, the Csharpies, who tend to be DaF and arrogant as hell ... need I go on?
As for my time at the Oops, I once had to save my manager's neck (on two occasions, actually), as he'd brought in a "consultant" who didn't know his armpit from his elbow but delivered a little (and, BTW) completely superfluous program, written in TurboC (no less) on MS-Dross (what else) which I then duly "ported" to SunOs and AIX ... seventy lines of crappy code for which a one-liner shell script invoking the 'tr' commmand would have been perfectly sufficient. The other occasion involved the same "consultant" who was clearly unaware of the iconv library (EBCDIC->ASCI - catch my drift?) Oh, and then we had Management Consultants who didn't know dick about the business, but sent us a bunch of brash kids (the boys in pin-stripes, the girls, depending on their build, wearing either beige twin sets or black jackets and trousers)
IT(C) these days employs (i.e. keeps them off the streets) and thereby feeds (now, that's nice) a lot of people whom I quite frankly would let nowhere near a keyboard.
When I worked for them, many moons ago, as a result of a mega-merger -- please don't tell me anything about migrations -- they were referred to (in Swinglish) as Oops! Apart from that, they were known as "an electronics shop which runs a bank on the side". And now this. Maybe they've run out of outsourcing options. This being said, they're doing one heck of a lot better than CS. But let's see what tomorrow b[r]ings. My own experience with anything Microsnot, or Snoracle for that matter (not to mention various 'service providers' - where you're really scraping the bottom of the barrel, but they're all Big Names) explains to me why we haven't had any IT-related productivity increases since the 1980s. Graeber (of Bullshit Jobs fame) was right after all. As was Tom Landauer a few years before.
The main appeal of openlook was that it was dead easy to create your own menus.
As for icon handling - yes, that worked great on my Sun4/110 with a 19" monitor, but less so on a poxy Linux PC, where it turned out to be a complete waste of screen estate (as, BTW, all 'modern' window managers are - when I had my last aesthetic and ergonomic clash, I sang "I really don't like it, fuck the task bar".)
I don't consider this an improvement by any stretch of the imagination, and would like to know what drove them to it.
Or is it that after two years of COVID-induced teleworking, programmers - pardon, developers - are now in such poor physical shape that they can no longer carry a P17?
BTW, where I Iive we have trains that come with 240V sockets at every seat and WiFi connections, so while you may be travelling for eight hours, you're not losing a day's work. Beats flying.
Spring is sprung,
The cloud is ris,
I wonder where
My data is.
As regards the 'business consultancies' (what a word - the number of companies I've witnessed going belly-up whilst said "consultancies" would walk away, cheque in hand, claiming that their 'advice had not been properly implemented') "Gartner rated consultants claiming to help out in business transformation related to moving applications to the cloud. Deloitte, Acc[id]enture, PwC and KPMG were the top four, in that order."
I'd like to see them all at the bottom of a lake - adorned by Ronald Reagan's coffin, because that's when the rot set in.
... someone at Gartner, with little else to do, flips through her Rolodex (the electronic - pardon, digital - version, of course: 'A' is for archer, which we can plainly see), makes twenty phone calls, and spends the next two days writing a 14-page "report" including a 'quadrant' and a line graph, which is subsequently [pr]offered to a self-selected audience for $1295.
Its readers will then use this report to justify a corporate ICT strategy - 'coz that's what everone else is doing, and we mustn't fall behind - while some of those who have to implement it will tear their hair out and/or quit, whereas others (devops, anyone?) merrily implement and deploy ("He wants it? He gets it!") whilst polishing their LinkedIn profiles; meanwhile the main culprits either eventually manage to abseil themselves or stubbornly persist in a manner which only confirms Festinger's research findings (you might want to peruse the archives of FuckedCompany and SatireWire, for instance)
But hope springs eternal: I am looking forward to the day when the last MBA has been strangled with the intestines of the last IT consultant.
Where exactly does "Free Speech" come in?
You write a letter to the editor of your newspaper of choice, and if it is within range of their agenda, chances are that they will publish it. If it's somehere in between deranged and psychotic, there are sufficient outlets to disseminate yourself (many of them Murdoch-owned, but not all of them). And if you are totally off the wall, you can always start your own website.
In short, if Twitter decides that your contributions don't quite cut it, this can hardly be considered as a curtailment of Free Speech.
Elon Musk is of course perfectly free to relaunch the Weekly World News - where, I believe, he'd feel perfectly @home.
The only lesson I learned from Poptastic Bomb is that morons have a predilection for UPPERCASE.
This being said:
1) residents of Ottawa - not the easiest city to live in - hardly appreciated some overzealous out-of-towner truckwits making their lives even more difficult
2) the Canadian economy, trying to recover from the the consequences of Sars-Cov-2, does not need supply chains to be disrupted by subliterate zealots blocking cross-border traffic
3) some people appear to have suffered from a massive overdose of talk-radio (not to mention some ridiculous cable channels)
4) P.B. does like to comment on all and sundry - i.e. Jack of all trades, master of none
5) From your own comment history I surmise that you don't know dick about Canada (as your obsession with IR35 and the NHS would suggest). I guess you spent some time on holiday there, no more, no less; or maybe you're a sockpuppet of Letitia Montana, the hysterical Toronto tart.
All of which reminds me of Michael Moore, decades ago, walking around the streets asking people "If you had to choose between freedom and liberty, which would you pick?"
@poptastic bob a.k.a spEak You’re bRanes:
I was close to giving you an upvote, in spite of your use of "cancel culture" - if that existed why would Turdspurt Carlson be given airtime? - but your "Canajun truckers" mention blew it. Any idea what kind of fecking idjits with no two brain cells to rub together they are?
Quoth Keshlam: "... on Internet timescales, diving in without a plan doesn't produce results fast enough, especially when you start marketing before you actually have successful prototypes, or have reverb fully defined the question (as noted above). From inside, I saw a _lot_ of poorly defined goals, duplication of effort, and applying the wrong tools because someone in management had latched onto a concept as their salvation and didn't listen when the engineers told them it wasn't."
That's what it comes to when everyone wants to go Agile.
Forty years ago the price for a reprint was between $1.50 and $3.50, depending on the journal. Nowadays it averages out to about thirty bucks. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I notice that Elsevier is more profitable than Novartis' pharma division. Houston, we have a problem. And all the power to Sci-Hub.
The mere mention of someone as insignificant as RB --- remember, we're nowhere near the Peter Cook league here --- is in itself puzzling enough.
But anyone confusing Nena with Nico must have been truly out of it at the time --- and, judging by the rest of the rant/article, I wonder whether the author still is ... or maybe he's just a glorious victim of all those wonderful educational reforms we've had since then. Which pretty much amounts to the same. O Register, why doest thou let thy standards sink so low?
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
