Re: Dell pushing linux

On 31 Mar 2007, in the Usenet newsgroup alt.linux, in article
<1175398311.027984.183290@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, dorothydax@xxxxxxxxx
wrote:

It has gotten worst in the last five years. Around 1994 - Windows 3x
era. Dos Users would uninstall and delete software at command level.
Some of us would even use WordPerfect for DOS 5.1 to configure Win 3x.
We had a strong knowledge of admin commands.

Trying to remember what I was using back then - probably edlin or edit
although the word processor I had must have been able to save plain
ASCII files. Thing about _MS-DOS_ was that there wasn't much you
could do anyway. DOS-5.0 had a total of less than _70_ commands,
and only two configuration files that mattered - config.sys and
autoexec.bat. Most of the stuff you put in there was something like
the number of buffers, file handles, and similar. No one understood
those, but you put those lines in those files because that's what the
installation instructions told you to do. When you removed old stuff
you rarely altered config.sys and autoexec.bat because the changes
rarely had a detrimental effect.

With windoze 3.1 and 3.10, the install program took care of all this
crap, and who uninstalled stuff? Well, I'd go in and rm -rF^H^H^H^H^Hem
*.* all kinds of garbage - usually because the installer dropped all of
it's stuff in c:/name_of.app/ and below.

I left the Windows world after windows 9x.

1992. I didn't have anything useful to install on the PC until Soft
Landing Systems version 1.03 came out in 1993.

Next generation of Windows users' normally click uninstall to remove
any application. Uninstall doesn't remove all the files of an unwanted
software -- leaving as much as far as 1000MB of junk files. A common
problem with Games, and Multimedia suites.

A lot of people don't bother to keep the PC that long. I just picked
up two Celerons at the neighborhood garage sale from neighbors who are
going to upgrade to Vista. Cost me 20 bucks a piece.

Just now I was helping someone on the telephone, and we discovered
that she had 3Gig -- yes 3,000MB of junk files in C:\Windows\TEMP.

That's really nothing new, and isn't limited to windoze. Erik Troan (the
'ewt' you still see on some sunsite archives) created a program called
'tmpwatch' back in 1996 that some distributions still include. It sweeps
though your tmp directories (remember there are more than just /tmp) on
a regular basis can can be configured to delete files that haven't been
accessed in a settable amount of time. Before that, it was a regular
thing to be cleaning /tmp/ on boot, and /var/tmp or /usr/tmp on a
scheduled basis. I remember an early version of Red Hat - perhaps it
was 3.0.3 - that had a note in rc.sysinit about cleaning /tmp/ and how
it was disabled because "I keep stuff in /tmp". Sorry, that wouldn't
wash where I was trained.

The secondary Temp directory which usually store files from installing,
removing, or running applications. It never removes anything on its
own. There were also two copies of recycled swap files about 800MB
each! Wait... 420MB of cache junk in Internet Explorer temp
directories. I asked her to remove everything thing from these
"folders".

If you look through the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard
(http://www.pathname.com/fhs/) or the Linux Documentation Projects
document that explains the standard (Linux Filesystem Hierarchy at
http://tldp.org/guides.html), you'll see that they tend to waffle about
the requirements. There are _recommendations_ only that stuff be
deleted on a regular basis - /tmp at boot, but otherwise in a "site
specific" manner (meaning "your systems, your rules").

The original reason for deleting stuff in /tmp and friends was that
disk space was expensive. Heck, that's the same reason the disk quotas
came into being. Disk caches are used today because they'll always
be faster than reloading crap repeatedly over the Internet, and it gives
a place to stick cookies so that your users can be tracked for data
mining purposes. If your distribution comes with the tmpwatch program,
you can use that to sweep out the cookies and other crap - or do it from
a user's crontab.

Finally, we used Norton Registry Doctor, and few other 3rd party tools
to remove junks from registry. Her windows starting at a normal speed
before it was taking 3min during startup.

I find it more funny that microsoft has stayed out of that arena. I
suppose there are two reasons - if something goes wrong, you blame
the tool supplier, not microsoft, and they are quite happy to see you
buying new systems with more RAM and more CPU so they can add still
more *** that runs slowly. The classic quote comes from Bob Metcalfe
(inventor of Ethernet) in a speech at UofVirginia in 1996: "Grove giveth
and Gates taketh away." (Grove was Andy Grove, then president of Intel).
But the users retain most of the blame, because they refuse to learn
anything about their software, and how it _could_ be using those
resources far more efficiently.

It is ironic to note that Mac/Apple has added unix commands, and
Microsoft is moving away from DOS :)

But I wonder how much they are being used. Microsoft I can understand.
How many people can even _spell_ DOS - let alone have even the faintest
idea of what it might be/was?

PS: In few years I'll start saving college funds for my children, and
I consider myself teen ;) Gosh 90s were fun, I miss it.

Word to the wise from someone whose grand-kids are getting ready to
start college - you should have been setting it aside years ago. There
was a TV ad on during the last NFL football season for some financial
services/planning company - every time they got some extra money, they
saw the kid, and says "into the college fund". That worked until the
kid comes home and says "I got the scholarship", and the husband looks
at the wife and says "time for Plan B" - which in the next scene is the
name of a 50+ foot cabin cruiser (micro-yacht) they just bought.

Old guy
.