OT: redhat

[Fairlight]

With neither thought nor caution, Bill Vermillion blurted:
> 
> And X seems to grow larger faster than the base OS :-)

Debatable, but close.

> What your system is going to be used for is something you NEED to
> know at installation time - as a system with lots of small files
> needs to be set up differently from a system with large files.

Then there are machines where the role changes...  :)

> Now that large HD's exist many seem to think that it's just fine
> to have on / for everything.  But that reasoning goes along the
> same line of 'ram is cheap so we don't have to worry about program
> size/efficieny'.
> 
> That latter approach is why we have to have 3Ghz CPUs with
> 2GB of RAM in many of todays systems to keep the performance
> as expected levels.

Speaking of which, I've officially had my first outing with WinXP.  Setting
up a system for my in-laws.  Dear me.  The system is a Celeron 2.66GHz.  We
have a Celeron 2.4GHz with Win2K.  The main difference is probably that we
have 512MB and they have 256MB of RAM, but XP -is- slower on the "faster"
system.

That new massively parallel computer that Spain just installed (the one
that surpasses the Earth Model supercomputer) might actually be able to
boot Longhorn in under 10min whenever Longhorn materialises, at this rate.

To say I am underwhelmed by XP is an understatement.  It's -marginally-
bearable -if- you tone down the interface to classic mode.  There is more
clutter, cruft, and utter crap on the screen at any given time in the later
versions that I can believe.  It seems that in trying to make things more
user friendly, they've only suceeded in creating something that will
probably overwhelm most anyone who's at all technophobic.

Got SP2 installed and turned off the stupid Windows firewall immediately,
since this system will sit behind a firewalling router anyway.  But what
was amusing was that I had ping on my linux box going from the time I
started the reboot process to the time it came up...-figuring- I'd never
see another ping.  The strange thing is that I -did- get -one- packet
through on the reboot before the firewall actually activated.  2s latency,
which means it was still under heavy load while booting, but that firewall
isn't actually on from the word "go"...it's turned on during boot -after-
the network stack is raised.  There -is- a very fractional unsafe period,
no matter how slight.  Talk about a tack-on piece of crud.

Aside from the added clutter onscreen, "It's just another 'doze." *shrug*
It reminds me of the SNL skit with the infomercial taping for some fabulous
glorified doorstop-type wedge, and there's one dissenter (Adam Sandler,
actually) in the audience that keeps standing up and shouting, "It's a
piece of wood!" while everyone else is cheering like it's the Second
Coming.  They eventually drag him out of the studio in that skit.

But yeah, XP feels like "a piece of wood" inasfar as any benefit over
win2k.  I'd take win2k over XP any day of the week.  Not impressed.  And I
surely notice the resource/speed hit.  No bang for the buck improvement
AFAICT.

What's more absurd is that when my wife went with her dad to buy the
system, the sales drone (after saying like 10x he's not on commission) kept
trying to get them to buy Norton AV.  They didn't, of course, as we planned
on going with AVG from the start.  But the hilarity kicked in at about 1am
when I looked at it and found that Norton was preinstalled (and sucking
the life out of file operations, as usual).  He either didn't know what
was actually bundled, or he was trying to screw them over.  He's -really,
REALLY- lucky I wasn't there.  I have a habit of shutting down people like
that very fast, and not quite gently.  And I'd have gone back today to talk
to his boss, if I'd been there the first time.  The job market being what
it is, you'd think they'd fire the incompetants to make room for someone
with a clue.

mark->
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