Is RPM working yet, or does it still just tell you the.so or.o that it needs, without telling you the last known name and version number of the RPM in which the library can be found?
RPM is working, and has always been - the package format and manager support both kinds of dependencies, files or packages. Most of the packagers are just too lazy (or have other reasons) to craft their spec files with the latter, and instead when building packages let the automated system to check what they're linked against, which results in file dependencies.
Why it does that, I would assume is because it's somewhat more flexible, after all, it'd be quite simple to check at compile time what package the file(s) belong to and make that a dependency instead of the file itself, but there are several cases when that wouldn't work as intended - what if I'm building third party RPM's that work in RH/Fedora, SuSE and Mandrake? I made my software so it works with multiple versions of library, but now all those distros have different names for the package, and my rpm can't be installed even though it would work - but the way it's automated now does let it work in them all, because it doesn't care about package names, only about the library file I actually need being there.
I don't understand your aversion with needing a "remote server", okay, so what if you need to fetch a small bit of metadata. Debs including the name or no, apt has connected to remote server for aeons to work it's magic and has always been touted as the BIG THING for Debian, now that RPM has nigh itentical systems (yum, apt, yast) it's suddenly a BAD THING instead? Are you really saying that you'd prefer to use dpkg over apt in Debian because latter needs to use remote server?
If the stupid and offtopic Apple fanboyism isn't enough, LOL's everywhere are a surefire way of recognizing an idiot, or a thirteen year old. In this case, probably both.
Really, every last one of your comments could be made about any of the "bleeding edge" distros, and that covers pretty much EVERY desktop distribution out there - Ubuntu is bleeding edge, they have the same twice a year release schedule as fedora, mandriva and suse don't release quite as often, but they're still very recent and potentially unstable compared to their "enterprise" editions. I don't even go to non-release based debian testing/unstable, gentoo and the likes. But that's not a bad thing, quite to the contrary, "bleeding edge" software is a good thing, as long as we stay in certain limits - these distros may include recent releases of software, but they ARE still releases, nobody is packaging stuff from CVS - since while it may occasionally be bit more unstable, it also has the latest and niftest features everyone has been craving for ages.
I hate to be the devils advocate, but fedora is being used as a test bed by redhat for stuff it wants to add to RHEL.
Nobody would deny that Fedora is beneficial to RHEL, but it's not ONLY a test bed, and that doesn't make it any less usable. They just have very different focus and user group, RHEL is a server distro, and it absolutely needs to be stable, and can't afford to include anything that hasn't been tested for years, Fedora is a desktop distro, and while stability is still important, it's less so, so they can important things that are only few months old and can be deemed reasonably stable.
Basically, you are all testing potentially buggy software
I'm doing that whatever distro I'm running if I want to keep newest shiny toys.
and redhat benfit from it.
I don't see anything wrong with they benefiting from it, it's only fair to help whoever went to the trouble of making the thing, if for nothing else to get the thing fixed in the next release - and it will get fixed upstream too, and help benefit EVERYONE, not just redhat. Beside, I WANT them to benefit, if RH ever goes out of business, Free software loses a major contributor and plenty of hackers who can now concentrate on what they like will be forced to find a new day job and only work on whatever scraps of free time they have left. If someone doesn't care a jack about that... well, don't file bug reports, RH won't even know you're using it, hardly benefits anyone much.
I used to use RH9, but when they started the fedora thing I went looking else where...
Well, that's your loss. RHL was a testbed for the enterprise release too, you know, why did you use them? You might want to consider for a moment if anything has really changed, and if you're just having a bad case of kneep jerk reaction.
if you like fedora why not get white linux (I think that's the name), its basically RHEL rebranded and given out for free.
Why not? Well, how about because Fedora is better for home user than RHEL. I don't care if it crashes few times a year if that's balanced by having much all the new features that won't be in RHEL clones until after several years.
Personally I don't think fedora is that great for regular desktop use, ubuntu or mandriva or suse are IMHO have more of the users intrest in mind.
Really, why's that? Again, everything you said is true for those as well.
(please don't flame me, I realize redhat contribute a lot of code and time and funds)
You just made a flamebait, why shouldn't you be flamed for that? But I'll try and not to, everything in that has been given reasons for, unlike your rant.
Problem. You have to fix a program. You have 2 hours to fix it, if you are over 2 hours you are fired.
If you spend to much time then you go over budget, when you are over budget then your job quality is in question, when your job quality is in question there is a hire chance of getting fired.
See, that why KDE people don't need to do that. They can't get fired no matter how long it takes, because they never got paid in the first place.
The another poster is correct, the installer requests a reboot if some files that are in use need to be updated. And yes, it does happen some times.
Also, at least some - although I think not the most common ones - office applications need IE > 5.0 (which ships with w2k), and IE updates need a reboot.
Just because you install 100000000000000000000000 offices in identifical machines in identifical situations doesn't mean you've covered all the quadzillion possible combinations. In other words, YOU, while at the same time accusing others of it, were the one lying here, not AC.
So we've established that the version of Open Office referenced in the comparison is of a more recent patch level.
More recent patch level, perhaps, assuming Office wasn't updated, but not as much more recent version as you suggested.
You don't know? Neither do I. Yet another piece of vital info the author failed to specify.
No, I don't, and yes, this "review" isn't much to write home about, I never claimed it was, just pointed out the few specific errors YOU made. Just because someone else is wrong doesn't mean you can sprout bullshit too.
Well, they were probably already working on Maemo / Nokia 770 back then, and did it primarily for it.
"Silly"? I really, really doubt Nokia just spinned a dice that decided to take one, and then build not just one product but entire platform on top of that. In addition to the whole GPL/LGPL/Commercial mess, they probably wanted flexibility, and then again, why not? The ARM monsters mobiles tend to have these days should be more than capable of running X.
Well, not really. While they've probably collaborated with their gtk-webcore project to a large extent, Symbian doesn't have gtk+, so it's not quite the same and this is yet another and new port.
Re:the mirrors are populated long time ago...
on
Fedora Core 4 Available
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The mirrors were populated quite a while ago because the original release for FC4 was supposed to be a week ago.
They were NOT open until today 14:00 UTC however, because there were some stupid legal issues, something to do with legal team needing to check the release name "Stentz".
And are you saying it required a restart? I just want to be clear on this, since if that is what you are saying, that makes you a liar.
Are you saying that everyone that hasn't had the same experience with MS Office installer than you is a liar? That's pretty rich. Considering how complex piece of software it is, it's entirely possible that it does sometimes require reboot, but not always.
OpenOffice.org 1.1.4 Downloads Updated 2004-12
1.1.x releases are minor bugfix updates, you don't count office as having a new version every time a patch comes out, do you? 1.1 was first released in 2003-10-01.
Once again? That's impossible with a first reply, you know. But hey, no matter. Although if you don't even bother to check who you're talking with...
You try and make a case that comments are an integral part of the source code by exaggerating the use of "preferred".
I don't claim anything about comments, or any specific little detail. I'm saying that the most useful form of the source code is also the preferred form. Do you have any arguments to the contrary? Why would non-useful form be preferred to anyone?
When the very meaning of the word depicts an expression of choice.
Choice or no, you'd be very hard pressed to find any programmer who prefers the less useful form. But, considering it's up to the distributor, not me, then their preferred form is the one their programmers work with.
And you didn't answer the questions: in your twisted interpretation of the "preferred" and "machine readable" clauses, where is the line drawn? Why isn't 010010010001... or disassembled listing of compiled program perfectly valid "source code"? They are machine readable after all, and can be modified, they just happen to be the least useful and thus least preferred by everyone. But that shouldn't matter, after all, it's expression of choice and there might be one lunatic somewhere in the world who chooses to prefer them, good enough, eh?
No matter how much you want it to be true, your straw man argument falls over all by itself.
So whose argument did I twist before attacking that? Why don't you see what those words mean before spouting them.
You might want to read it again. The article didn't say anything of the sort.
Well, yes it did. Granted, lot of the performance issues were with GCC and OS X, but not all code can be vectorized even if GCC was absolutely perfect, and they did conclude the normal FPU in G5 isn't all that great.
And pure integer performance, while not awful, was not match for Opteron either.
So this vaccine is probably on track to save millions of people, and will probably be used as an agent to eradicate ebola.
It would be nigh impossible to eradicate ebola, because it has non-human carrier, each of which would also need to be vaccinated, and we don't even know the species (assuming there is only one) for certain!
I suggest you re-read the post you replied to. The guy quotes from the GPL, where it explicitly states "machine-readable" in paragraph 3a. No fabrication on my part.
Paragraph 3a is clearly meant to prevent people from mailing the code in printouts, not to allow simy morons to crawl trough it claiming disassembled binaries, or heck, the binaries themselves - after all, there's the machine code string of 01001001 in there allright - instead of the original C++ code is enough. Which is why the "preferred form" statement is there.
Well I read that twice, and I don't see the word "comments" anywhere in that definition. Would you like to try again ?
Well, try reading it third time, then. It's obvious for anything with more than one brain cell that if you have three different forms of same code, one being machine, second more or less human readable without comments, and the last human readable code with comments that the last one is the preferred form for _making modifications_ which is generally done _by humans_.
Because now the Macintosh will just be a PC with a ROM. Once someone figures out how to run Mac OS X on a whitebox (and they will) there will be no compelling reason to buy Apple hardware.
Just because someone can no doubt figure out the voodoo magic needed to run OSX on a whitebox DOESN'T mean that everyone can do it.
In case you haven't noticed it, Apple prides itself by being the easiest "just works" system there is, their target group are brainless drones and people who don't want to hack around, the first groups absolutely DOES NOT have what it takes to hack an OS, and the second doesn't want to do it because, hey, it takes work they'd rather avoid.
Sometimes, but usually not. We'd still be living in caves if we would have erred on the side of caution everytime there is a very, very slight chance something _might_ have bad consequences.
Yes, there have probably been huge objects hitting the planet in the past, volcanic eruptions, etc., but some of these events may have also caused mass extinctions.
True, but the events that have done so have also been _BIG_, not just someone pushing pipe few meters wide deeper than before.
I guess I am more worried about us than about the planet!
That's a good point, we're still much more fragile than the planet. Global warming etc, for example don't do anything to the planet, or, on the long term, much at all to nature, but if things go awry enough we're not around to see it when they finally recover.
But it's still not particularly wise to not do something just because it hasn't been done before either, unless there's very good reason to believe something bad will happen.
True, they're testing platforms as whole, not only the underlying hardware.
Which is all right, because that's real-world testing, nobody, and I mean NOBODY, runs OpenDarwin on x86 production server, nor more than few "workstations" in someones basement. And almost nobody runs Linux/PPC on their new and shiny 2.7GHz Dual G5.
So while doing that might give slightly better (it's impossible to get good, if nothing else, compiler backends always differ) comparison of hardware, the test as done now reflects real-world usage of both systems much more closely.
Apparently, the Earth's core is hotter than the surface of the Sun, so if ever they drilled down to the core, it would heat up the planet.
It wouldn't have time to "heat up the planet (surface)", even if it was significant, which it isn't, since volcanoes already do the same job on much larger scale. Any such drill hole that isn't actively kept open would instantly close either because pressure pushed the rock walls together, or if they go deep enough, magma would go up, cool, and form a cork.
The solid crust not only prevents such convection events, but is also a poor thermal conductor.
There's a reason the solid crust is where it is, just drilling a small hole in it doesn't cause a permanent dent in it.
I don't know how Mother Earth is going to like this one.
Yes, that's the problem, you don't know. It's generally good idea to think about perhaps gaining the knowledge before you open your mouth and start gabbling nonsense.
She's not going to like it one way or another, she won't even notice. We're talking about 7.5km hole (that's also very small width-vise) in a planet with radius of almost 6400km, that's just about 0.1% way down to the core.
The thing is over 4 billion years old - is it really a good idea to start punching holes in it now?
The thing is indeed over 4 billion years old. That should tell you something about how much she can handle, think this is the first time she feels a pinprick? Are you aware of the theory explaining how Moon got there? Earth once collided with Mars-sized object and survived. Oh, and guess what volcanoes are, much larger channels going much deeper.
512MB RS-MMC cards are cheap and enough for everything expect video, and you can still have the gig, it currently costs bit more than $100, but the prices will come down soon enough.
CF/PCMCIA is electrically ancient, and takes ton of the most valuable resource you have - circuit board space. Who knows how much larger it would have to be to accommodate that monster. You don't even have ISA bus that these things basically are in your PC any more, why on earth would anyone want them in a handheld.
As for feeling burned, well, you're free to be burned by every time someone comes up with a product that doesn't include you in the target category, but that just makes you an idiot.
we have the right to anything beyond life, liberty and the persuit of happiness (i.e. the right to lead a life without oppression...
There are no great document granting you any of that either. Nature couldn't care less about your liberty and pursuit of happiness, or even life, as long as you breed before you die.
I am also quite sure that unless they back the fuck off, I won't buy products from the companies mentioned in TFA anymore.
I really hope you remember that next time Apple comes up with some semi-nifty gadget that has bit more candy paper wrapped around it than the competitors' version.
Slashdot Mirror
Is RPM working yet, or does it still just tell you the .so or .o that it needs, without telling you the last known name and version number of the RPM in which the library can be found?
RPM is working, and has always been - the package format and manager support both kinds of dependencies, files or packages. Most of the packagers are just too lazy (or have other reasons) to craft their spec files with the latter, and instead when building packages let the automated system to check what they're linked against, which results in file dependencies.
Why it does that, I would assume is because it's somewhat more flexible, after all, it'd be quite simple to check at compile time what package the file(s) belong to and make that a dependency instead of the file itself, but there are several cases when that wouldn't work as intended - what if I'm building third party RPM's that work in RH/Fedora, SuSE and Mandrake? I made my software so it works with multiple versions of library, but now all those distros have different names for the package, and my rpm can't be installed even though it would work - but the way it's automated now does let it work in them all, because it doesn't care about package names, only about the library file I actually need being there.
I don't understand your aversion with needing a "remote server", okay, so what if you need to fetch a small bit of metadata. Debs including the name or no, apt has connected to remote server for aeons to work it's magic and has always been touted as the BIG THING for Debian, now that RPM has nigh itentical systems (yum, apt, yast) it's suddenly a BAD THING instead? Are you really saying that you'd prefer to use dpkg over apt in Debian because latter needs to use remote server?
LOL!
Kids, take heed of this sad example.
If the stupid and offtopic Apple fanboyism isn't enough, LOL's everywhere are a surefire way of recognizing an idiot, or a thirteen year old. In this case, probably both.
Really, every last one of your comments could be made about any of the "bleeding edge" distros, and that covers pretty much EVERY desktop distribution out there - Ubuntu is bleeding edge, they have the same twice a year release schedule as fedora, mandriva and suse don't release quite as often, but they're still very recent and potentially unstable compared to their "enterprise" editions. I don't even go to non-release based debian testing/unstable, gentoo and the likes. But that's not a bad thing, quite to the contrary, "bleeding edge" software is a good thing, as long as we stay in certain limits - these distros may include recent releases of software, but they ARE still releases, nobody is packaging stuff from CVS - since while it may occasionally be bit more unstable, it also has the latest and niftest features everyone has been craving for ages.
I hate to be the devils advocate, but fedora is being used as a test bed by redhat for stuff it wants to add to RHEL.
Nobody would deny that Fedora is beneficial to RHEL, but it's not ONLY a test bed, and that doesn't make it any less usable. They just have very different focus and user group, RHEL is a server distro, and it absolutely needs to be stable, and can't afford to include anything that hasn't been tested for years, Fedora is a desktop distro, and while stability is still important, it's less so, so they can important things that are only few months old and can be deemed reasonably stable.
Basically, you are all testing potentially buggy software
I'm doing that whatever distro I'm running if I want to keep newest shiny toys.
and redhat benfit from it.
I don't see anything wrong with they benefiting from it, it's only fair to help whoever went to the trouble of making the thing, if for nothing else to get the thing fixed in the next release - and it will get fixed upstream too, and help benefit EVERYONE, not just redhat. Beside, I WANT them to benefit, if RH ever goes out of business, Free software loses a major contributor and plenty of hackers who can now concentrate on what they like will be forced to find a new day job and only work on whatever scraps of free time they have left. If someone doesn't care a jack about that... well, don't file bug reports, RH won't even know you're using it, hardly benefits anyone much.
I used to use RH9, but when they started the fedora thing I went looking else where...
Well, that's your loss. RHL was a testbed for the enterprise release too, you know, why did you use them? You might want to consider for a moment if anything has really changed, and if you're just having a bad case of kneep jerk reaction.
if you like fedora why not get white linux (I think that's the name), its basically RHEL rebranded and given out for free.
Why not? Well, how about because Fedora is better for home user than RHEL. I don't care if it crashes few times a year if that's balanced by having much all the new features that won't be in RHEL clones until after several years.
Personally I don't think fedora is that great for regular desktop use, ubuntu or mandriva or suse are IMHO have more of the users intrest in mind.
Really, why's that? Again, everything you said is true for those as well.
(please don't flame me, I realize redhat contribute a lot of code and time and funds)
You just made a flamebait, why shouldn't you be flamed for that? But I'll try and not to, everything in that has been given reasons for, unlike your rant.
Problem. You have to fix a program. You have 2 hours to fix it, if you are over 2 hours you are fired.
If you spend to much time then you go over budget, when you are over budget then your job quality is in question, when your job quality is in question there is a hire chance of getting fired.
See, that why KDE people don't need to do that.
They can't get fired no matter how long it takes, because they never got paid in the first place.
The another poster is correct, the installer requests a reboot if some files that are in use need to be updated. And yes, it does happen some times.
Also, at least some - although I think not the most common ones - office applications need IE > 5.0 (which ships with w2k), and IE updates need a reboot.
Just because you install 100000000000000000000000 offices in identifical machines in identifical situations doesn't mean you've covered all the quadzillion possible combinations. In other words, YOU, while at the same time accusing others of it, were the one lying here, not AC.
So we've established that the version of Open Office referenced in the comparison is of a more recent patch level.
More recent patch level, perhaps, assuming Office wasn't updated, but not as much more recent version as you suggested.
You don't know? Neither do I. Yet another piece of vital info the author failed to specify.
No, I don't, and yes, this "review" isn't much to write home about, I never claimed it was, just pointed out the few specific errors YOU made. Just because someone else is wrong doesn't mean you can sprout bullshit too.
Well, they were probably already working on Maemo / Nokia 770 back then, and did it primarily for it.
"Silly"? I really, really doubt Nokia just spinned a dice that decided to take one, and then build not just one product but entire platform on top of that. In addition to the whole GPL/LGPL/Commercial mess, they probably wanted flexibility, and then again, why not? The ARM monsters mobiles tend to have these days should be more than capable of running X.
This has been out for a while
Well, not really. While they've probably collaborated with their gtk-webcore project to a large extent, Symbian doesn't have gtk+, so it's not quite the same and this is yet another and new port.
The mirrors were populated quite a while ago because the original release for FC4 was supposed to be a week ago.
They were NOT open until today 14:00 UTC however, because there were some stupid legal issues, something to do with legal team needing to check the release name "Stentz".
And are you saying it required a restart? I just want to be clear on this, since if that is what you are saying, that makes you a liar.
Are you saying that everyone that hasn't had the same experience with MS Office installer than you is a liar? That's pretty rich. Considering how complex piece of software it is, it's entirely possible that it does sometimes require reboot, but not always.
OpenOffice.org 1.1.4 Downloads Updated 2004-12
1.1.x releases are minor bugfix updates, you don't count office as having a new version every time a patch comes out, do you? 1.1 was first released in 2003-10-01.
Once again you completely miss the point.
Once again? That's impossible with a first reply, you know. But hey, no matter. Although if you don't even bother to check who you're talking with...
You try and make a case that comments are an integral part of the source code by exaggerating the use of "preferred".
I don't claim anything about comments, or any specific little detail. I'm saying that the most useful form of the source code is also the preferred form. Do you have any arguments to the contrary? Why would non-useful form be preferred to anyone?
When the very meaning of the word depicts an expression of choice.
Choice or no, you'd be very hard pressed to find any programmer who prefers the less useful form. But, considering it's up to the distributor, not me, then their preferred form is the one their programmers work with.
And you didn't answer the questions: in your twisted interpretation of the "preferred" and "machine readable" clauses, where is the line drawn? Why isn't 010010010001... or disassembled listing of compiled program perfectly valid "source code"? They are machine readable after all, and can be modified, they just happen to be the least useful and thus least preferred by everyone. But that shouldn't matter, after all, it's expression of choice and there might be one lunatic somewhere in the world who chooses to prefer them, good enough, eh?
No matter how much you want it to be true, your straw man argument falls over all by itself.
So whose argument did I twist before attacking that? Why don't you see what those words mean before spouting them.
You might want to read it again. The article didn't say anything of the sort.
Well, yes it did. Granted, lot of the performance issues were with GCC and OS X, but not all code can be vectorized even if GCC was absolutely perfect, and they did conclude the normal FPU in G5 isn't all that great.
And pure integer performance, while not awful, was not match for Opteron either.
So this vaccine is probably on track to save millions of people, and will probably be used as an agent to eradicate ebola.
It would be nigh impossible to eradicate ebola, because it has non-human carrier, each of which would also need to be vaccinated, and we don't even know the species (assuming there is only one) for certain!
I suggest you re-read the post you replied to. The guy quotes from the GPL, where it explicitly states "machine-readable" in paragraph 3a. No fabrication on my part.
Paragraph 3a is clearly meant to prevent people from mailing the code in printouts, not to allow simy morons to crawl trough it claiming disassembled binaries, or heck, the binaries themselves - after all, there's the machine code string of 01001001 in there allright - instead of the original C++ code is enough. Which is why the "preferred form" statement is there.
Well I read that twice, and I don't see the word "comments" anywhere in that definition. Would you like to try again ?
Well, try reading it third time, then. It's obvious for anything with more than one brain cell that if you have three different forms of same code, one being machine, second more or less human readable without comments, and the last human readable code with comments that the last one is the preferred form for _making modifications_ which is generally done _by humans_.
Because now the Macintosh will just be a PC with a ROM. Once someone figures out how to run Mac OS X on a whitebox (and they will) there will be no compelling reason to buy Apple hardware.
Just because someone can no doubt figure out the voodoo magic needed to run OSX on a whitebox DOESN'T mean that everyone can do it.
In case you haven't noticed it, Apple prides itself by being the easiest "just works" system there is, their target group are brainless drones and people who don't want to hack around, the first groups absolutely DOES NOT have what it takes to hack an OS, and the second doesn't want to do it because, hey, it takes work they'd rather avoid.
Isn't not knowing better than presuming to know?
Sometimes, but usually not. We'd still be living in caves if we would have erred on the side of caution everytime there is a very, very slight chance something _might_ have bad consequences.
Yes, there have probably been huge objects hitting the planet in the past, volcanic eruptions, etc., but some of these events may have also caused mass extinctions.
True, but the events that have done so have also been _BIG_, not just someone pushing pipe few meters wide deeper than before.
I guess I am more worried about us than about the planet!
That's a good point, we're still much more fragile than the planet. Global warming etc, for example don't do anything to the planet, or, on the long term, much at all to nature, but if things go awry enough we're not around to see it when they finally recover.
But it's still not particularly wise to not do something just because it hasn't been done before either, unless there's very good reason to believe something bad will happen.
True, they're testing platforms as whole, not only the underlying hardware.
Which is all right, because that's real-world testing, nobody, and I mean NOBODY, runs OpenDarwin on x86 production server, nor more than few "workstations" in someones basement. And almost nobody runs Linux/PPC on their new and shiny 2.7GHz Dual G5.
So while doing that might give slightly better (it's impossible to get good, if nothing else, compiler backends always differ) comparison of hardware, the test as done now reflects real-world usage of both systems much more closely.
Of course they do, just like all the previous generations did.
Oh, wait.
Apparently, the Earth's core is hotter than the surface of the Sun, so if ever they drilled down to the core, it would heat up the planet.
It wouldn't have time to "heat up the planet (surface)", even if it was significant, which it isn't, since volcanoes already do the same job on much larger scale. Any such drill hole that isn't actively kept open would instantly close either because pressure pushed the rock walls together, or if they go deep enough, magma would go up, cool, and form a cork.
The solid crust not only prevents such convection events, but is also a poor thermal conductor.
There's a reason the solid crust is where it is, just drilling a small hole in it doesn't cause a permanent dent in it.
I don't know how Mother Earth is going to like this one.
Yes, that's the problem, you don't know. It's generally good idea to think about perhaps gaining the knowledge before you open your mouth and start gabbling nonsense.
She's not going to like it one way or another, she won't even notice. We're talking about 7.5km hole (that's also very small width-vise) in a planet with radius of almost 6400km, that's just about 0.1% way down to the core.
The thing is over 4 billion years old - is it really a good idea to start punching holes in it now?
The thing is indeed over 4 billion years old. That should tell you something about how much she can handle, think this is the first time she feels a pinprick? Are you aware of the theory explaining how Moon got there? Earth once collided with Mars-sized object and survived. Oh, and guess what volcanoes are, much larger channels going much deeper.
40 GB hard drive would double the size of this thing, and 16h battery life is impossible, ESPECIALLY with the hard drive.
But keep on waiting, maybe in fifty years.
512MB RS-MMC cards are cheap and enough for everything expect video, and you can still have the gig, it currently costs bit more than $100, but the prices will come down soon enough.
CF/PCMCIA is electrically ancient, and takes ton of the most valuable resource you have - circuit board space. Who knows how much larger it would have to be to accommodate that monster. You don't even have ISA bus that these things basically are in your PC any more, why on earth would anyone want them in a handheld.
As for feeling burned, well, you're free to be burned by every time someone comes up with a product that doesn't include you in the target category, but that just makes you an idiot.
IZArc is pretty good, it's not Free, but it's free, and much easier to use than the open source alternative 7-zip.
we have the right to anything beyond life, liberty and the persuit of happiness (i.e. the right to lead a life without oppression...
There are no great document granting you any of that either. Nature couldn't care less about your liberty and pursuit of happiness, or even life, as long as you breed before you die.
THERE ARE NO NATURAL RIGHTS
The only right evolution grants to you, and every other living being, is the right to try to survive as best you see fit.
Everything else is an illusion
I am also quite sure that unless they back the fuck off, I won't buy products from the companies mentioned in TFA anymore.
I really hope you remember that next time Apple comes up with some semi-nifty gadget that has bit more candy paper wrapped around it than the competitors' version.