There is a big difference. Open source software developers rarely dish out patches. They can't, really. Windows software gets patched because they have complete control over the binary and know exactly what was shipped to customers. Open source software could be compiled on a dozen different platforms with who-knows-what kind of optimizations.
Instead, they release a new version with the bug fixed. Usually code patches are available, but how many people using KDE actually compiled their version?
Ok, so commercial software and open source software developers really want their users to use the most up to date versions. The difference is, MS wants their users to fork out a few hundred $$$ for their new fixes and gotta-have features. For KDE, you can just download the latest version or get it from a friend. That's why MS is evil for not patching '97. People paid a lot of money for it and expect MS to support it. I personally can't seen any feature worth paying several hundred dollars for an upgrade to Office 2000/XP over '97 and neither can millions of their customers.
Now you tell me who's looking out for their users.
If you want to know anything about physics fundamentals, check out http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/hframe. html
I've used it to get a good foundation on a few topics and am amazed at how much information it has, as well as how nicely layed out it is.
Along with almost every printer's ppm benchmark I've seen, manufacturers also include the time to first page. Printers consume a lot of power (my HP 4P laserjet sends my lights flickering every time it prints), so it rests in a power saving mode. When it gets a print job, it takes it a little while for it to heat up enought to burn the toner on the paper. This warm up time can often take 30 seconds or more. If the author wanted to give meaningful statistics on a printer's ppm, he would've started timing after the first page was printed, or include the initial warm up time.
There are a number of movies that I've heard a lot of good things about, and that I would be very interested in seeing. Well, at least I would if they just cut out some of the crap that really doesn't need to be there. If the fact that a couple has sex is really important to the plot development, you can convey that message without going into a 5 minute detailed scene, showing every aspect of how they do it.
I don't want to see it. My wife doesn't want to see it. And I sure don't want my kids to see it. It's not even worth it to fast forward through it, because you can't always get to the button fast enough. If the movie is rated R, you can almost guarantee there are sex scenes, excess language, or excess violence that I really don't care to have in my home (heck, there's a lot of PG-13 movies I won't watch either).
If I can't watch the movie without those scenes cut, I won't watch it. But if they offered a cleaned up version, that would be fantastic! Who could possibly be hurt by having a choice between a "smut" version and a "clean" version of the movie? How can anyone complain about giving the consumer the ability to see high quality movies and while following moral standards they set for themselves?
These companies are not trying to force movie makers from making movies with sleazy scenes, or prevent consumers from seeing what the directors intended (by the way, why do I have to see what the director intended? I'd much rather see what I like). They're just giving people the chance to see a movie that's been cleaned up a little, that they otherwise wouldn't be interested in seeing. They see a market, and they try to fill it. It sounds absolutely wonderful! It sounds like what capitalism is all about.
I can't figure out why so many people are complaining about having the choice to watch the original, uncut version and a cleaned up version of a movie. Get a life people.
My mom is probably the least computer inclined person I've ever met. I have to tell her over and over how to do things, explaining them as simply as I possibly can. She doesn't deal well with change. I started her with a dual-boot system using mandrake, and she really liked all the games that came with it.
Then around Christmas, she got some nasty virus and I had to reload her system. This time I decided she wasn't going to get any more virii, so I installed linux as the primary OS, and installed win4lin that she could use within linux as a crutch if she needed one. She previously did all of her email from netscape 4, so it was easy to switch her to netscape 6 on linux. I frequently evangelize all the benefits of linux, and warn her of the nasty things MS is trying to do to their customers, this helps keep the positive idea of her running linux.
The funny thing is, she's had a lot fewer problems now. Her computer works more consistantly, and I haven't gotten a call for help for months. It was a little rocky at first as she tried to adapt to the changes, but I was able to log in remotely to inspect her system and diagnose any problems. Try doing that with Windows.
All in all, she's quite happy with her system. She can use all the programs she's used to, her computer is a lot more stable, and she doesn't have to worry about virii.
I had opened my case and was swapping hard drives around while I worked on another computer. A few minutes after I turned it back on, I heard the computer mysteriously shut off. I looked over at it, and it started back up again and I saw smoke billowing out of the side. I rushed over to see these glowing wires inside the case and I about freaked out. I quickly turned the computer off, opened the windows and tried not to cuss loud enough to wake my daughter up.
After a few minutes, I went to inspect the damage, fearing my linux box had died! It turns out that one of those mini-fan power hookups (the ones with two prongs sticking out) had touch another piece of metal inside the case and shorted. The resulting powersurge heated up the wires, melting the protective rubber coating. Fortunately, that's all the damage that occured. I clipped the wires out, turned on the computer and all was good.
The moral of the story is, don't leave those fan power hookup cables floating free inside your case. I can just imagine what would've happened if I had already gone to work and my wife and daughter were still asleep when that happened.
This is called competition. If mozilla allows you to block bandwidth-sucking ads and prevent malicious pop-ups, that is a huge feature! I personally just visited the site to see how mozilla handled it. I was redirected a couple of times, but saw only the last page. When I hit back, I returned to slashdot.
Now go tell all your family and friends that Mozilla can protect them from having their web experience from being hijacked by malicious users, that they can save their precious bandwidth by blocking annoying ads and that it has beautiful tabs so they can multitask the web. No, they don't have to change browsers, but once they see all the neat things they can do with it, they'll want to change browsers. And then if Microsoft discovers they're losing customers because they don't have these features, only then will they change.
Wow, if I saw that a few years ago, I would've been so scared I would've never touched another programming language again! Slashdot, please think of the children before you post things like that.
This reminds me so much of the girls who break up with their abusive boyfriends. The boys apologize, say they've changed and the girls fall for it again and end up getting abused again.
I could never figure out why so many girls do this when it's so obvious what's going on. But I now see girls aren't the only ones susceptible to this type of behavior.
I believe the computer WOPR from the classic geek movie War Games said it best. After analyzing all the possible outcomes of a global thermonuclear war, he noticed it was a funny game. And that "the only way to win is not to play."
There are plenty of examples where trying to make new laws to deal with things that are already covered perfectly well by existing laws have really screwed things up. They are usually pushed by someone or some company/industry who stands to make a lot of money and gain a lot of power at the expense of others. The DMCA is a good example of legislation made for a good intent that really tipped the balance of power between consumer and business unfairly in favor of business at the expense of the consumer.
There are plenty of laws against piracy. Enforce those before making new laws that will majorly disrupt the entire computer industry. Legislation should be the last resort. It should be well thought out and be fair, just and reasonable. This is one case where less is more.
If you've read the experiences people posted about doing business with him, you have to wonder if he's really worried about losing business. One guy tried for a couple of years, ordering regularly and only got one order placed. It makes you wonder if he's really trying to make a profit off his business. From the sounds of it, he's driving people to complain about his business so he can spend more time with his self proclaimed hobby: filing lawsuits.
The aquatic plant growing community is fairly small and relatively easy to keep tabs on the entire community. All he has to do is give enough bad customer service and monitor all the message boards waiting for someone to complain. Then he can move in and start making some real money by filing lawsuits (notice that he doesn't use a lawyer, so he's not losing any money doing so).
He tries to post messages to defend his honor, but for some reason they were getting blocked. Note here that he is a regular poster to these message boards and is well aware of how to use them. But this time he decides to include MIME attachments to his posts, which I would assume he knows very well would bounce. Now he can claim that they're trying to censor him!! That's worth at least another couple of million dollars!
From the sounds of things this guy hides behind a pathetic business just to drum up people he can sue and make some real money from. Sounds like one of the lowest life forms out there. It's sad that he's making so many lives miserable, and that he seems to enjoy it. Heck, he's made a career out of it. He's probably riding high now, but it will all come back to haunt him in the end. He who lives by the lawsuit will die by the lawsuit. One way or another, he'll get the reward he so richly deserves.
Let's say the software timebomb is configurable, and the admin can change it. I can just imagine a BOFH admin who knows he's gonna get fired soon force himself to reset the expiration date. Shortly after he gets fired, *BAM* the system stops working (he'd get extra points if he was able to make it change the root passwd when that happens too).
Ok, lets say the configuring the expiration isn't available. You're just a poor guy out in the middle of Africa with no internet connection, and your friend mailed you a linux CD. The thing expires, and now you have no way to update your system. You have to wait a couple of months to get another CD from your friend.
Or, let's say you get owned by h4x0rs. They don't need to mess up your filesystem, or trojan your machine. They can just take things down by changing the date to some time in the future.
Warnings are fine. Heck, if you really wanted something useful, make some kind of update daemon. Register your software with the daemon, along with some site to look at. Every time you connect to the internet, or once every so often, it could cycle through all the sites and generate a report. Notices for feature updates, Warnings for potential problems or major bug fixes, and Critical Updates for major security flaws. Then the admin will have the choice to act on this information.
Smalltalk is a GUI/IDE/Runtime development all rolled into one. It's so object-oriented even the number '1' is an object! It compiles on the fly and runs in a fully cross-platform virtual machine that's been ported to almost every known architecture. Check out the Squeak implementation of Smalltalk, and see if that doesn't make you beg for a good ol' functional language like C.
The fascinating this about this is that it comes set up like that. How many home users have the technical know-how to set something up like that? This comes all set up with the bells and whistles, plus it's very light and easy to setup and maneuver.
Granted, I've got my two 19" monitors side by side, and I love it to death! But it wasn't something that normal people could do (of course, it didn't help that one was an old fixed frequency 1962b Sun monitor with a special adapter... if you want something similar and need the modelines, let me know and I'll send them to you).
Anyway, this just brings dual headed displays to the masses and that's what rocks.
The G4 is an amazing chip. We're using one as an embedded system where I work, and the thing doesn't even have a heat sink on it! If I recall correctly, it uses about 5W of power (but I guess that depends on which speed it runs at).
With many people searching for the perfect silent computer, I think the best way to go is with the G4. The only thing better than a quiet fan, is no fan at all.
I'm finally making the switch to DSL now. The current network state is very unreliable. Connectivity is off and on, and their DNS servers still suck. Of the three that are assigned via DHCP, one doesn't work at all, one will work about 20% of the time, and one works just fine. The problem arises when your system cycles through the three DNS servers. For a while I had to click on a link several times before it would work right (before I deleted the two flakey DNS servers from my configuration).
Overall, it sucks pretty bad and it hasn't gotten any better in the past few weeks. If you have a choice between DSL & cable modem, I highly recommend DSL.
I've got nothing but complaints since ATT took over. First there's the deal with the nameservers. My DHCP client was given three numbers. One doesn't work at all. One kind of works, but for some reason I get an 80% packet loss whenever I use it. And one seems to work pretty well. I had to test each one individually to find the good one, because when I set the DNS servers manually on my internal network, my linux box cycles between the three. It wasn't very fun having a website show up properly only 33% of the time.
I thought I'd try getting updated information from the DHCP server, hoping they'd have something better. When I restarted the network on my gateway, the DHCP request timed out. Their server was down. Fortunately, I had a copy of what I was given before so I could get my network back up. Otherwise I would've been AOL (SOL in internet terms;) until they finally got around to bringing up their DHCP server.
Overall, I must say I'm not impressed at all and am finally getting ready to switch to DSL.
The article fails to state how old the DMV records were, but it's very possible they could've been obtained
at this timewhen the records were a little easier to access. Of course, even records 5 years old contain enough data that there's still plenty of accurate info there.
There are two main types of threads, user threads and kernel threads. pthreads, or POSIX threads are an example of user threads, while the clone() call is a kernel level thread.
One of the main drawbacks to user level threads, is that when one thread makes an I/O call, the whole process is blocked from running until the I/O call has completed, even when other threads are available to run since the kernel isn't aware threads are really being used. However, since user level threads can be implemented with a cross platform library, using user level threads like pthreads makes your program very portable.
In kernel threads, when one thread is blocked on an I/O call, another thread can still be run. You can also have multiple threads running concurrently on multiple processors. However, since the application is written for that particular kernel, it is not portable at all.
So the original poster was trying to state that, although Linux has blazing fast kernel threads, its POSIX thread library kind of sucks. Since Mozilla makes heavy use of POSIX threads to maintain cross platform ability, it runs a little more sluggishly on Linux.
I've got a GlobalWin fan for my Athlon that runs about 7k RPM, and when that sucker is on, you know it! My computer didn't use to be nearly that loud, and the power supply noise doesn't come close to touching it (and I have 2 power supplies in my case).
I would just _love_ to tone down the noise a bit, especially because I have two computers with this fan in my living room. When company is over, the noise does get a little annoying when you're trying to have a conversation.
I made the mistake of trying to run a 1.2Ghz Athlon (not the MP/XP models) w/o a heatsink & fan. I wanted to test the brand new processor by pulling out my current Athlon and putting the new one in. Unfortunately, I broke the plastic piece the heatsink clamps onto while removing the old processor. I figured I only wanted to see if the machine could post, shouldn't take more than a couple of seconds, right? Well, lemme tell you, it took less than one second to turn that $150 processor into a $150 paperweight, not to mention it fried the board too.
I have a hard time believing AMD was able to run Quake for several minutes without one. I can't imagine the architecture has changed that much since the thunderbird.
Well, that depends on the pr0n site. Many sites want as many eyeballs as possible to get banner ad revenue. How many times have you crossed the web, accidently hit a pr0n link and were suddenly spammed with 10 windows, each of which pop up more windows when you close them? Do you really think these guys will set their ratings accordingly?
The 'big business' pr0n sites won't let you get to the pr0n without a credit card. It doesn't matter if there's a rating or not for these guys, 'cause you can't see if you don't have a card, so not much bandwidth is being lost.
The big business pr0n sites will use the ratings, and it probably won't affect them much either way. The sinister spam banner pr0n sites won't use the ratings and the innocent surfer will still be scarred for life.
The only way to make this work is to make it financially adventageous for the spam banner pr0n sites to use the ratings. We're not going to pay them to use ratings, and we can't fine them for not using the ratings (it's not a law). The only other option is to make a blacklist of abusers that makes it so no one can get to their site.
It could happen, and innocent users will be safe from pr0n, but this alone won't do it.
I would love to have gnome as my solaris desktop at work. I tolerate CDE at work, but I really dig my Gnome desktop at home. Unfortunately, my company just upgraded from SunOS 4 to Solaris 2.6 last year, so even if Solaris 9 does include Gnome, I probably won't see it at work in my lifetime:(
Be careful if you're upgrading from Star Office 5.2 to 6.0 beta. I had my own document directory tree I use, so I found soffice's work directory to be inconvenient. So I did what any logical thinking unix user would do, and created a symlink from within soffice's work directory to my document directory.
When 6.0beta came along, it asked if I wanted to import my settings from 5.2 into 6.0. Sure, sounds good. It worked great. Until I needed to retrieve my files from my personal doc directory. They were ALL GONE!!! The installer followed my symlink and "accidentally" deleted all my files in my document directory. It left the directories intact, but all the files were GONE!
Fortunately, I had just made a backup of my system a couple days before, but I still lost a bit of work. !@$#.
Moral of the story: backup early and often.
Moral #2 of the story: beware of using beta software on production machines.
You can read all the details of my experience on Sun's newsgroup that they collect bugs for star office on. It wasn't pretty.
Slashdot Mirror
Instead, they release a new version with the bug fixed. Usually code patches are available, but how many people using KDE actually compiled their version?
Ok, so commercial software and open source software developers really want their users to use the most up to date versions. The difference is, MS wants their users to fork out a few hundred $$$ for their new fixes and gotta-have features. For KDE, you can just download the latest version or get it from a friend. That's why MS is evil for not patching '97. People paid a lot of money for it and expect MS to support it. I personally can't seen any feature worth paying several hundred dollars for an upgrade to Office 2000/XP over '97 and neither can millions of their customers.
Now you tell me who's looking out for their users.
If you want to know anything about physics fundamentals, check out http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/hframe. html
I've used it to get a good foundation on a few topics and am amazed at how much information it has, as well as how nicely layed out it is.
Along with almost every printer's ppm benchmark I've seen, manufacturers also include the time to first page. Printers consume a lot of power (my HP 4P laserjet sends my lights flickering every time it prints), so it rests in a power saving mode. When it gets a print job, it takes it a little while for it to heat up enought to burn the toner on the paper. This warm up time can often take 30 seconds or more. If the author wanted to give meaningful statistics on a printer's ppm, he would've started timing after the first page was printed, or include the initial warm up time.
I don't want to see it. My wife doesn't want to see it. And I sure don't want my kids to see it. It's not even worth it to fast forward through it, because you can't always get to the button fast enough. If the movie is rated R, you can almost guarantee there are sex scenes, excess language, or excess violence that I really don't care to have in my home (heck, there's a lot of PG-13 movies I won't watch either).
If I can't watch the movie without those scenes cut, I won't watch it. But if they offered a cleaned up version, that would be fantastic! Who could possibly be hurt by having a choice between a "smut" version and a "clean" version of the movie? How can anyone complain about giving the consumer the ability to see high quality movies and while following moral standards they set for themselves?
These companies are not trying to force movie makers from making movies with sleazy scenes, or prevent consumers from seeing what the directors intended (by the way, why do I have to see what the director intended? I'd much rather see what I like). They're just giving people the chance to see a movie that's been cleaned up a little, that they otherwise wouldn't be interested in seeing. They see a market, and they try to fill it. It sounds absolutely wonderful! It sounds like what capitalism is all about.
I can't figure out why so many people are complaining about having the choice to watch the original, uncut version and a cleaned up version of a movie. Get a life people.
Then around Christmas, she got some nasty virus and I had to reload her system. This time I decided she wasn't going to get any more virii, so I installed linux as the primary OS, and installed win4lin that she could use within linux as a crutch if she needed one. She previously did all of her email from netscape 4, so it was easy to switch her to netscape 6 on linux. I frequently evangelize all the benefits of linux, and warn her of the nasty things MS is trying to do to their customers, this helps keep the positive idea of her running linux.
The funny thing is, she's had a lot fewer problems now. Her computer works more consistantly, and I haven't gotten a call for help for months. It was a little rocky at first as she tried to adapt to the changes, but I was able to log in remotely to inspect her system and diagnose any problems. Try doing that with Windows.
All in all, she's quite happy with her system. She can use all the programs she's used to, her computer is a lot more stable, and she doesn't have to worry about virii.
After a few minutes, I went to inspect the damage, fearing my linux box had died! It turns out that one of those mini-fan power hookups (the ones with two prongs sticking out) had touch another piece of metal inside the case and shorted. The resulting powersurge heated up the wires, melting the protective rubber coating. Fortunately, that's all the damage that occured. I clipped the wires out, turned on the computer and all was good.
The moral of the story is, don't leave those fan power hookup cables floating free inside your case. I can just imagine what would've happened if I had already gone to work and my wife and daughter were still asleep when that happened.
Now go tell all your family and friends that Mozilla can protect them from having their web experience from being hijacked by malicious users, that they can save their precious bandwidth by blocking annoying ads and that it has beautiful tabs so they can multitask the web. No, they don't have to change browsers, but once they see all the neat things they can do with it, they'll want to change browsers. And then if Microsoft discovers they're losing customers because they don't have these features, only then will they change.
Wow, if I saw that a few years ago, I would've been so scared I would've never touched another programming language again! Slashdot, please think of the children before you post things like that.
I could never figure out why so many girls do this when it's so obvious what's going on. But I now see girls aren't the only ones susceptible to this type of behavior.
There are plenty of examples where trying to make new laws to deal with things that are already covered perfectly well by existing laws have really screwed things up. They are usually pushed by someone or some company/industry who stands to make a lot of money and gain a lot of power at the expense of others. The DMCA is a good example of legislation made for a good intent that really tipped the balance of power between consumer and business unfairly in favor of business at the expense of the consumer.
There are plenty of laws against piracy. Enforce those before making new laws that will majorly disrupt the entire computer industry. Legislation should be the last resort. It should be well thought out and be fair, just and reasonable. This is one case where less is more.
The aquatic plant growing community is fairly small and relatively easy to keep tabs on the entire community. All he has to do is give enough bad customer service and monitor all the message boards waiting for someone to complain. Then he can move in and start making some real money by filing lawsuits (notice that he doesn't use a lawyer, so he's not losing any money doing so).
He tries to post messages to defend his honor, but for some reason they were getting blocked. Note here that he is a regular poster to these message boards and is well aware of how to use them. But this time he decides to include MIME attachments to his posts, which I would assume he knows very well would bounce. Now he can claim that they're trying to censor him!! That's worth at least another couple of million dollars!
From the sounds of things this guy hides behind a pathetic business just to drum up people he can sue and make some real money from. Sounds like one of the lowest life forms out there. It's sad that he's making so many lives miserable, and that he seems to enjoy it. Heck, he's made a career out of it. He's probably riding high now, but it will all come back to haunt him in the end. He who lives by the lawsuit will die by the lawsuit. One way or another, he'll get the reward he so richly deserves.
Ok, lets say the configuring the expiration isn't available. You're just a poor guy out in the middle of Africa with no internet connection, and your friend mailed you a linux CD. The thing expires, and now you have no way to update your system. You have to wait a couple of months to get another CD from your friend.
Or, let's say you get owned by h4x0rs. They don't need to mess up your filesystem, or trojan your machine. They can just take things down by changing the date to some time in the future.
Warnings are fine. Heck, if you really wanted something useful, make some kind of update daemon. Register your software with the daemon, along with some site to look at. Every time you connect to the internet, or once every so often, it could cycle through all the sites and generate a report. Notices for feature updates, Warnings for potential problems or major bug fixes, and Critical Updates for major security flaws. Then the admin will have the choice to act on this information.
Smalltalk is a GUI/IDE/Runtime development all rolled into one. It's so object-oriented even the number '1' is an object! It compiles on the fly and runs in a fully cross-platform virtual machine that's been ported to almost every known architecture. Check out the Squeak implementation of Smalltalk, and see if that doesn't make you beg for a good ol' functional language like C.
Granted, I've got my two 19" monitors side by side, and I love it to death! But it wasn't something that normal people could do (of course, it didn't help that one was an old fixed frequency 1962b Sun monitor with a special adapter ... if you want something similar and need the modelines, let me know and I'll send them to you).
Anyway, this just brings dual headed displays to the masses and that's what rocks.
With many people searching for the perfect silent computer, I think the best way to go is with the G4. The only thing better than a quiet fan, is no fan at all.
Overall, it sucks pretty bad and it hasn't gotten any better in the past few weeks. If you have a choice between DSL & cable modem, I highly recommend DSL.
I thought I'd try getting updated information from the DHCP server, hoping they'd have something better. When I restarted the network on my gateway, the DHCP request timed out. Their server was down. Fortunately, I had a copy of what I was given before so I could get my network back up. Otherwise I would've been AOL (SOL in internet terms;) until they finally got around to bringing up their DHCP server.
Overall, I must say I'm not impressed at all and am finally getting ready to switch to DSL.
The article fails to state how old the DMV records were, but it's very possible they could've been obtained at this timewhen the records were a little easier to access. Of course, even records 5 years old contain enough data that there's still plenty of accurate info there.
One of the main drawbacks to user level threads, is that when one thread makes an I/O call, the whole process is blocked from running until the I/O call has completed, even when other threads are available to run since the kernel isn't aware threads are really being used. However, since user level threads can be implemented with a cross platform library, using user level threads like pthreads makes your program very portable.
In kernel threads, when one thread is blocked on an I/O call, another thread can still be run. You can also have multiple threads running concurrently on multiple processors. However, since the application is written for that particular kernel, it is not portable at all.
So the original poster was trying to state that, although Linux has blazing fast kernel threads, its POSIX thread library kind of sucks. Since Mozilla makes heavy use of POSIX threads to maintain cross platform ability, it runs a little more sluggishly on Linux.
I've got a GlobalWin fan for my Athlon that runs about 7k RPM, and when that sucker is on, you know it! My computer didn't use to be nearly that loud, and the power supply noise doesn't come close to touching it (and I have 2 power supplies in my case).
I would just _love_ to tone down the noise a bit, especially because I have two computers with this fan in my living room. When company is over, the noise does get a little annoying when you're trying to have a conversation.
I have a hard time believing AMD was able to run Quake for several minutes without one. I can't imagine the architecture has changed that much since the thunderbird.
The 'big business' pr0n sites won't let you get to the pr0n without a credit card. It doesn't matter if there's a rating or not for these guys, 'cause you can't see if you don't have a card, so not much bandwidth is being lost.
The big business pr0n sites will use the ratings, and it probably won't affect them much either way. The sinister spam banner pr0n sites won't use the ratings and the innocent surfer will still be scarred for life.
The only way to make this work is to make it financially adventageous for the spam banner pr0n sites to use the ratings. We're not going to pay them to use ratings, and we can't fine them for not using the ratings (it's not a law). The only other option is to make a blacklist of abusers that makes it so no one can get to their site.
It could happen, and innocent users will be safe from pr0n, but this alone won't do it.
I would love to have gnome as my solaris desktop at work. I tolerate CDE at work, but I really dig my Gnome desktop at home. Unfortunately, my company just upgraded from SunOS 4 to Solaris 2.6 last year, so even if Solaris 9 does include Gnome, I probably won't see it at work in my lifetime :(
From the response I got on the news feed, they had no idea such a bug existed until I explained how I was able to reproduce it.
When 6.0beta came along, it asked if I wanted to import my settings from 5.2 into 6.0. Sure, sounds good. It worked great. Until I needed to retrieve my files from my personal doc directory. They were ALL GONE!!! The installer followed my symlink and "accidentally" deleted all my files in my document directory. It left the directories intact, but all the files were GONE!
Fortunately, I had just made a backup of my system a couple days before, but I still lost a bit of work. !@$#.
Moral of the story: backup early and often. Moral #2 of the story: beware of using beta software on production machines.
You can read all the details of my experience on Sun's newsgroup that they collect bugs for star office on. It wasn't pretty.