Bad example. Nobody would need to look beyond MS branded products. A better example would be a "Month of Java Bugs" where half of the bugs were from Azureus and Eclipse.
While I agree that MOAB is not doing particularly well, VLC, Omniweb, and APE are all extremely common. The PDF bug is very dangerous, because PDF is so pervasive to the Aqua UI that almost any application could be the entry point.
Binary size can make a difference for people with Celeron machines: small cache and not much ram. For most apps, reducing the binary size does a lot more for improving performance than do fancy optimizations. Whenever I've used gentoo, the only optimazations I've used were to set the cpu type and set a default of optimizing for size. Obviously not all apps will compile or run with size optimizations, but most will. I haven't benchmarked, but I would bet that having a size optimized coreutils makes shell scripts quicker. I do agree, though, that being able to throw out extras is the biggest advantage of Gentoo.
While samba's stability probably does not depend much on ldap support, the binaries will be measurably smaller, which is nice. Gentoo is frequently the only distribution where you can easily have an unusual software or hardware configuration without breaking the package management system.
For example, my previous computer had a Voodoo 3, which requires the glide libraries to get accelerated 3d on linux. Gentoo is the only modern distro I know of that lets me use glide, and it is trivial to enable it. It is pretty neat seeing cairo and glitz running so smoothly on such an old box.
Even if Debian x86 was compiled on a sparc, they would still be able to produce the same binaries with a cross compiler. Incidentally, Gentoo is a great environment for working with cross compilers.
Most of your points are good, but #2 is a valid concern. Last I checked, you can't install Nautilus in Fedora without installing CD burning software, because of the silly dependencies. People without CD burners shouldn't have to install CD burning software just to get a GNOME desktop.
Gentoo can be very good for putting together a disk image with a very specific set of software, and no extra baggage. Having control over compile time settings gives you a lot more flexibility compared with RPM packages.
What part of
Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door! do you not understand?
I doubt the GPP can actually compare RH9 with Vista (especially since not all boxed RH9 installs had the same isos) but it is only a little bit unfair to dismiss Vista as insecure. The last release candidates did contain major security flaws, and there is no particular reason to think that they were all fixed before Vista shipped to corporate clients. On top of that, it is reasonable to assume that no drastic changes were put in place post-RC to make it harder for average users to install trojans.
Since every publicly availible version of Vista has so far had the typical windows [in]security, the retail versions will probably continue the trend.
People with severe disabilities don't expect to be able to use something out of the box. It is always necessary to tailor things to get around your specific disability - be it training a voice recognition engine or adjusting the colors to something that is both readable and not headache inducing.
As for the secretaries, they fall into two groups - those who can use the options dialog box and those who are rendered unproductive by ANY software upgrade or change. Apple can't do much for either group.
People stop being noobs by exploring the options and prefs dialogs, not by fumbling around. I doubt many people are able to figure out which random keypress triggered the action they wanted. But with something as complex as Windows or OS X, you can always discover new features by digging through the preference panes. THat is the experimentation that really helps.
Dell can count on not having to field software problems because they wouldn't have provided any of the software! Dell can also count on the fact that people who know how to install their own OS can probably debug simple hardware problems. The only issue will be when some hardware truly breaks under warranty. Dell's tech support people will be too stupid to understand the problem, and users will have a hard time convincing them that the hardware is the problem.
While I agree that most slashdotters are not worried about Wyoming, I think "hits" is the better choice of words. Whenever I have heard or been part of any discourse on the subject of ballistic objects, the projectile has always "hit' or "missed" the target, as opposed to "landing on" the target. Any connotations of weapons or violence are themselves relics of the cold war.
It is necessary because Java 5 changed things enough that it broke some compatibility with previous versions. They needed to do it to fix some bad designs in the original language. This is no worse than an updated C++ library changing the abi. Deprecated apis exist for almost all large code bases. On almost all systems, it is very easy to have and use both 1.5 and 1.4.2.
Wheel of Time does have a lot of similarities to Dune, on the surface. But everybody I know who has read both agrees that the stories they tell are fundamentally different, and that Dune is more interesting.
I know of a very large university that recently made a large portion of their employees switch to iMacs. The second busiest building (after the library) now has only about 20 windows machines, all in one lab. They were helped by the fact that most of their servers were already UNIX/Linux, and the only windows servers were for the windows clients. I'm pretty sure nobody minded the fact that iMacs are AIO machines. in fact, it was probably seen as an advantage. There are fewer cables to mess with, setup is much easier, and when one malfunctions, another can be swapped into place like with thin clients. (Home directories are of course stored on the server.) Those factors almost certainly outweigh the fact that the whole unit must be shipped back to apple when it dies. Apple simply refurbishes the broken one and ships the university a new one.
It seems to me that all of the disadvantages of an All-in-One machine apply only to the individual consumer. Can you perhaps explain why AIOs are shunned by large corporations?
For most applications, the core functionality can and should be separated from the front end. Having an Aqua front end does not preclude the option of a windows or X11 front end.
Dell (or their contracted system builders) is the one who images the hard drives. The drives come from the manufacturer blank. With Dell already having to filter which drives get XP Home, Pro, and MCE, it shouldn't cost them any more to allow drives to skip the imaging process.
Systems built with blank hard drives can probably skip some of the testing, and Dell can count on the purchasers of those systems to not call tech support for software problems. That probably adds up to a net savings for Dell to offer the option.
The fact that Dell does not offer the option of buying a computer with a blank hard drive implies the existence of some incentive not to. Considering Microsoft's history and the fact that you can buy a Dell workstation with FreeDOS, of all things, the incentive probably comes from Microsoft. Such an incentive is probably illegal in the EU, and may also be illegal in California, New York, or the entire US.
Slashdot Mirror
I figure, if I'm not going to read the documentation, why am I even installing it?
Bad example. Nobody would need to look beyond MS branded products. A better example would be a "Month of Java Bugs" where half of the bugs were from Azureus and Eclipse.
While I agree that MOAB is not doing particularly well, VLC, Omniweb, and APE are all extremely common. The PDF bug is very dangerous, because PDF is so pervasive to the Aqua UI that almost any application could be the entry point.
Binary size can make a difference for people with Celeron machines: small cache and not much ram. For most apps, reducing the binary size does a lot more for improving performance than do fancy optimizations. Whenever I've used gentoo, the only optimazations I've used were to set the cpu type and set a default of optimizing for size. Obviously not all apps will compile or run with size optimizations, but most will. I haven't benchmarked, but I would bet that having a size optimized coreutils makes shell scripts quicker. I do agree, though, that being able to throw out extras is the biggest advantage of Gentoo.
While samba's stability probably does not depend much on ldap support, the binaries will be measurably smaller, which is nice. Gentoo is frequently the only distribution where you can easily have an unusual software or hardware configuration without breaking the package management system.
For example, my previous computer had a Voodoo 3, which requires the glide libraries to get accelerated 3d on linux. Gentoo is the only modern distro I know of that lets me use glide, and it is trivial to enable it. It is pretty neat seeing cairo and glitz running so smoothly on such an old box.
Even if Debian x86 was compiled on a sparc, they would still be able to produce the same binaries with a cross compiler. Incidentally, Gentoo is a great environment for working with cross compilers.
Most of your points are good, but #2 is a valid concern. Last I checked, you can't install Nautilus in Fedora without installing CD burning software, because of the silly dependencies. People without CD burners shouldn't have to install CD burning software just to get a GNOME desktop.
Gentoo can be very good for putting together a disk image with a very specific set of software, and no extra baggage. Having control over compile time settings gives you a lot more flexibility compared with RPM packages.
And, since it is said to run OS X, it should be able to run LAME.
Your user name would seem to disqualify you from making such comments.
Like this?
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door! do you not understand?
I'd much rather get the reminders when I'm in the wrong place! If I'm already in the meeting room, I probably don't need to be interrupted.
I doubt the GPP can actually compare RH9 with Vista (especially since not all boxed RH9 installs had the same isos) but it is only a little bit unfair to dismiss Vista as insecure. The last release candidates did contain major security flaws, and there is no particular reason to think that they were all fixed before Vista shipped to corporate clients. On top of that, it is reasonable to assume that no drastic changes were put in place post-RC to make it harder for average users to install trojans.
Since every publicly availible version of Vista has so far had the typical windows [in]security, the retail versions will probably continue the trend.
People with severe disabilities don't expect to be able to use something out of the box. It is always necessary to tailor things to get around your specific disability - be it training a voice recognition engine or adjusting the colors to something that is both readable and not headache inducing.
As for the secretaries, they fall into two groups - those who can use the options dialog box and those who are rendered unproductive by ANY software upgrade or change. Apple can't do much for either group.
People stop being noobs by exploring the options and prefs dialogs, not by fumbling around. I doubt many people are able to figure out which random keypress triggered the action they wanted. But with something as complex as Windows or OS X, you can always discover new features by digging through the preference panes. THat is the experimentation that really helps.
Dell can count on not having to field software problems because they wouldn't have provided any of the software! Dell can also count on the fact that people who know how to install their own OS can probably debug simple hardware problems. The only issue will be when some hardware truly breaks under warranty. Dell's tech support people will be too stupid to understand the problem, and users will have a hard time convincing them that the hardware is the problem.
Most machines involved in P2P do not have DNS addresses. Foe example, with bittorrent, the only dns names invloved are for the tracker.
If stopping distance is a problem on a sandy road, you are going too fast for that surface.
If you RTFA, you can see that he has already dealt with the corrosion problem.
Nah - TurboVision is open source! It has been ported to linux.
While I agree that most slashdotters are not worried about Wyoming, I think "hits" is the better choice of words. Whenever I have heard or been part of any discourse on the subject of ballistic objects, the projectile has always "hit' or "missed" the target, as opposed to "landing on" the target. Any connotations of weapons or violence are themselves relics of the cold war.
It is necessary because Java 5 changed things enough that it broke some compatibility with previous versions. They needed to do it to fix some bad designs in the original language. This is no worse than an updated C++ library changing the abi. Deprecated apis exist for almost all large code bases. On almost all systems, it is very easy to have and use both 1.5 and 1.4.2.
Wheel of Time does have a lot of similarities to Dune, on the surface. But everybody I know who has read both agrees that the stories they tell are fundamentally different, and that Dune is more interesting.
I know of a very large university that recently made a large portion of their employees switch to iMacs. The second busiest building (after the library) now has only about 20 windows machines, all in one lab. They were helped by the fact that most of their servers were already UNIX/Linux, and the only windows servers were for the windows clients. I'm pretty sure nobody minded the fact that iMacs are AIO machines. in fact, it was probably seen as an advantage. There are fewer cables to mess with, setup is much easier, and when one malfunctions, another can be swapped into place like with thin clients. (Home directories are of course stored on the server.) Those factors almost certainly outweigh the fact that the whole unit must be shipped back to apple when it dies. Apple simply refurbishes the broken one and ships the university a new one.
It seems to me that all of the disadvantages of an All-in-One machine apply only to the individual consumer. Can you perhaps explain why AIOs are shunned by large corporations?
For most applications, the core functionality can and should be separated from the front end. Having an Aqua front end does not preclude the option of a windows or X11 front end.
Dell (or their contracted system builders) is the one who images the hard drives. The drives come from the manufacturer blank. With Dell already having to filter which drives get XP Home, Pro, and MCE, it shouldn't cost them any more to allow drives to skip the imaging process.
Systems built with blank hard drives can probably skip some of the testing, and Dell can count on the purchasers of those systems to not call tech support for software problems. That probably adds up to a net savings for Dell to offer the option.
The fact that Dell does not offer the option of buying a computer with a blank hard drive implies the existence of some incentive not to. Considering Microsoft's history and the fact that you can buy a Dell workstation with FreeDOS, of all things, the incentive probably comes from Microsoft. Such an incentive is probably illegal in the EU, and may also be illegal in California, New York, or the entire US.