So wait - you're saying that the ULV version takes *less* battery power and runs for *longer*, right?
Yes.
Which would mean there's a bigger disparity in between the AMD and Intel chips in terms of battery power?
Yes and no. Of course there is big disparity between Intel 1.2GHz (fastest available) ULV chip and AMD 2.0GHz "normal" chip, but there isn't disparity between Intel 2.0GHz and AMD 2.0GHz chips.
In other words, AMD may not ship a product suitable for ultra portables or low-end tablets, but competes quite nicely in the regular notebook market.
I don't see why the kernel NTFS driver would have legal problems
Patents.
I agree that RH Legal can sometimes seem bit to be bit overcareful, but as the saying goes, better safe than sorry...
Be as it may, ntfs (and mp3, and other things that are "questionable" but not outright illegal) support is in rpm.livna.org, so it's just a matter of adding one repository and yumming away.
So one might ask: will distros like Redhat/Fedora change the package manager in the future?
No. Because deb isn't superior to rpm there is no reason to change. Both can do few things that the other can't, but mostly offer equal functionality.
Days of apt being the only capable automatic dependency handler are long past, and the only issue left with yum+rpm is basically not having quite as large official repository as debian.
Answer: Officially, none, unofficially, more than likely GTK1.2 because of the *killer* apps that still use it (XMMS anyone)
You managed to find _ONE_ application that is still widely used that uses GTK1. And that makes it a "default"?
Majority of Linux users probably use recent GNOME or KDE, which makes the "default" toolkit either Qt3 or GTK2, even those that don't, run quite a bit of apps that use GTK2 (Mozilla, Evolution, Gaim...) or Qt. Just because some of them run XMMS too, doesn't change the fact that vast majority of the applications they use do use more recent toolkit.
Anatomically modern humans have been on the planet for AT LEAST 100000 years, possibly even double, and hominids for several million. That is clearly long enough time for foodchain to adapt to presence of humans, to a level that abruptly removing them from equation would cause huge changes.
How did you think "animals clearly took care of themselves"? Herbivores decided that their population got too large and dropped dead? Well, Sherlock, they were killed, much more brutally, by other animals. Other large predators, be it wolves or cave lions or sabertooth tigers were dealing with the population problems of herbivores, we have diminished their number to so low as to be irrelevant in that role any more, and taken the place they previously inhabited as the top of the foodchain, which clearly includes keeping populations manageable as well.
No. It's not. It's a matter of your number being totally different than those of anyone else with any methods. Are you sure you're reading outer tracks? You know that the "logical" beginning of disk is in outer tracks, not inner?
My 40MB/s numbers come from unbuffered sequential reads of the outter track in a SATA 7200RPM 160GB drive (that is about 3 months old)... I used sandra to do the benchmarks...
Sandra is not a good benchmark, but if that's what you use, let's try the same to get "matter of benchmark methods" dealt with. As for the database, Sandra isn't capable of testing zones of a drive, only partitions, given that the db doesn't mention anything except the drive, we can't know ANYTHING about what zone(s) those readings are for.
My 40MB/s numbers come from unbuffered sequential reads of the outter track in a SATA 7200RPM 160GB drive (that is about 3 months old)...
My number come from unbuffered sequential reads of the outer track in a ATA 7200RPM 120GB drive (that is about 16 months old). AVG read speeds across all zones 49MB/s. Hitachi 7K250, 80GB/platter, 2 platters. Just like yours, just older, and much faster.
39MB/s outer zones, 35.8MB/s average on some years old Maxtor D740DX (7200RPM), 60GB, 40GB platters.
I've only got one partition on my laptop so Sandra can't tell anything about it for specific zones, but the speeds of the two other discs have mirrored HD tach results very closely so this one probably will to. 30-32MB/s outer 26.3MB/s average. Samsung Spinpoint M, about two months old, 80GB, 40GB platters, 5400 RPM.
You may get 60MB/s in sequential buffered reads if they are shorter bursts, etc..
I'm not stupid, sequential unbuffered is what was talked about and sequential unbuffered is what I give you. 57MB/s. Sequential. Unbuffered. Sandra. Got it? (Buffered around ~90M/s, btw)
In the end, You all have points about my data being "wrong" in the circumstances you give...
No. Not just in the circumstances I give, _any_ circumstances. 2.5" drives, whether similar size or not, are slower than desktop drives.
namely, the ones i give in my (1) paragraph with equivilently sized desktop vs laptop drives, my data is correct and conclusive.
Unfortunately your data is in question, and even if it's correct (which I doubt) it certainly doesn't seem to represent vast majority of drives out there, and you haven't provided data for a notebook drive that is faster than even that relatively slow desktop drive. That's not conclusive.
1) drive density and RPM speed are directly proportional to sustained sequential read speed.
Agreed.
2) platter radious and RPM speed is directly proportional to seek time.
Agreed.
3) Multiple platters in the same drive read in parallel while accessing data, thus doubling the density of a single platter
False. Reading data from multiple platters may yield a small speed boost, but it's nowhere as large as actual doubling of single platter density would be. For example, 250GB drive with three 80GB platters performs almost identifically to my 120GB version with 1½.
4) Knowing the above, and working the numbers in the specific instances I am claiming in my origional post (namely, 5400RPM 2.5in disk vs 7200RPM 80gb disk) you can determine that the 5400RPM 2.5in disk will have faster sequential read speeds on the outter track of said disk.
And this is where we disagree. Based on overwhelming evidence of all benchmarks ever published and my own testing, 5400RPM 2.5" disk can't beat even several generations older 7200RPM 3.5" disk, can do absolutely NOTHING against current generation 7200RPM
I don't know if that WD drive you got the numbers from is just old (relative to the laptop drive your putting it against), or if your system has some issues, but I've got to agree with the others here, you're wrong.
And yes, the age does make _huge_ difference. I've got 1½ years old Hitachi that does about 60MB/s, few years older Maxtor gets about the same as you do, ~40'ish.
Fastest 7200RPM IDE/SATA 3.5" drives do about 65MB/s sustained outer zone transfer rates, 30-40 on inner zones. Fastest 2.5" drives reach bit under 40 on outer zones and the very best barely reach 25 on inner.
I believe you're wrong on the very first point, and since all the rest rest upon it... Laptop drives don't have higher platter densities than desktop drives, I wouldn't be surprised if they're actually lower in most cases, but at the very best it's same. How did you think they can stuff 3x more data on desktop drives even though physical size difference isn't all that large?
There are also several other significant factors that make desktop drives faster - they can add more platters and heads since there's more space, and read them in parallel, larger platters also lead into faster outer zone spinning speed with same RPM, and last but not least, notebook drives just haven't been optimized for performance.
Yes, removed things most beginners are better without, eg. made it more user friendly.
Airbrush is something most gimp users use, often. Stay on top button is something most people never use. See the difference?
How would you feel it they took up the gimp and added _every operation it can do_, no matter how rarely needed, from the menus to the tool palette? That's what you're asking them to do.
Gnome pisses me off because its menu editing is so friggin' stupid. FWIW FC3 dropped the Gnome menue editor because it was too buggy.
Well, it pissed off gnome developers too, and now there is no more menu editing. They moved the backend to freedesktop standard, but didn't have time to implement editor on top of it.
And RH actually dropped Gnome menu editing in _RH8_ because it was too buggy, so it's been absent from last five of their distros, not just FC3.
Installing menu items is very simple. You drop _one file_ in a directory, and that's it. It works in KDE, it works in GNOME, and it takes about five seconds to create it and ensure it goes to right place.
Not doing that when it's so easy is a distro problem. I can understand why someone would blame "linux desktop" for issues like this if it took enormous amount of work to create that one menu icon, and few years ago it was a pain, but it doesn't any more, it's not a problem.
Why would a user even need to know what Gnome is, let alone that it's starting up?
The reason why splash screens are there, is that there's whole bunch of these "building blocks" and just like "some of the larger applications" they take long enough to start that if there wasn't a splash screen to show that something is happening, users would think it has crashed because it's not responding and (as far as they can see) not doing anything.
you don't see Windows or Mac OS putting up a second splash screen for the thing that does the taskbar and puts the icons on the background.
I don't see GNOME or KDE putting up a splash screen for any of those things either, they put up one that covers the loading of whole desktop - just like Windows. Besides, distro maintainers can and do replace it with something that doesn't talk about this "gnome" thingy they don't know about.
i don't do two clicks i do one click - previously a window bar button
Too bad. If that's how you (and the another person thinking same, in Siberia), feel, good riddance, KDE with it's millions "in your face" controls is clearly the right one for you.
GNOME developers won't cave in and make the desktop unnecessarily cluttered for MILLIONS of people because one person somewhere thinks his need for one mouse click instead of 2 once every five years overrides all those other folks. And they should feel haunted over it? Bullshit, they should, and probably are, proud.
is it the user-base or just their own selves they've been developing for?
User-base. One that you clearly don't represent. Not all users want the same things you want.
And in my limited experience pygtk is much nicer to use than wxpython.
See how these anecdotes aren't helping? Seriously, though, pygtk has come a long way and you might want to update your experience. It's one of the nicest GUI toolkits to develop for that I've ever encountered.
Feels much more "pythonic" than wx, too and doesn't have nearly as many evil constants and functions that look like C macros ported over without further thinking.
an idiot. I've probable been trolled, though. But just in case you're just ignorant beyond belief...
Red Hat, Also sells propietary software, but they don't develop it.
Red Hat does not sell proprietary software. You're accidentally right about them not developing it, though, since RH only develops free software. Plenty of it.
also, they make bad publicity for GNU, since they bash most distributions in favor of their own, they spread FUD about Free Software having no support
Right. Developing lots of free software to make it better creates bad publicity. You'd be hard pressed to find Red Hat spreading any FUD, unlike you, they don't need to. For anyone with more than two brain cells and their eyes open, their position with Ubuntu, for example, is friendly competition. Only animosity with competitors that I can remember was with Sun, and not all that surprisingly, started by Sun. As for support... Red Hat's business model consists of selling support for Free Software, no need to say more.
But redhat, doesn't develop anything
You mean aside from employing top kernel hackers, top gcc hackers and top gnome hackers? RH has also invested heavily on gcj to help us gain a Free Java implementation. I'm sure those people would still contribute whatever scraps of free time they had from they day job to FOSS if they hadn't got a job at RH, now, they have a change to do so fulltime without worrying about their jobs. Not to mention purchasing several companies and releasing their previously proprietary applications for free, what an evil thing to do!
Red Hat's contributions to FOSS are among the greatest of any company, ever, and they continue to do that despite your drivel.
They also use our name (Free Software and Open Source Software) as a selling point.
They have every right in the world to describe their stuff as Free Software, since that's precisely what it is.
I'd also be careful about using forms of word "we" when talking about Free Software, since I happen to think you haven't ever contributed one line of code, or anything else for that matter, in your life. Anyone who had, wouldn't be so ignorant as to spread this kind of baseless FUD. Jumped from Windows last week probably, and now you think you know everything there is to know about Free Software? Well, here's the newsflash: you don't.
I don't know about you, but watching advertisements isn't one of my favourite pastimes, and I'd much rather pay reasonable amount - say, bit under $CHEAP_DVD_BOX / $NUMBER_OF_EPISODES, which boils down to maybe $1 - than be forced to watch ads.
but shouldn't it be less than or equal to to the $4.00 or $5.00 Blockbuster charges for a movie rental?
Maybe that's possibly, but at that price range there's no point any more, better just to forget the whole thing, because nobody will buy them. Most DVD box sets are lot cheaper per episode, and probably more convenient for almost everyone.
Also, wouldn't it be possible for a new series to be developed that bypasses the studio altogether?
In theory, perhaps.
What would prevent Bad Robot (production house behind Alias and Lost) from maintaining the production rights and distributing via Tivo or DirectTV without going through one of the traditional networks?
The fact that they wouldn't make enough with just this, and traditional networks, being rightly scared of the erosion of their business model would probably not be nice enough to give good parallel distribution deals for someone who's trying to undermine them.
I have to agree with the AC that $120 is pretty insane price for a full season, even in smaller chunks. Most shows seem to be something between 30-70 EUR, with many quite popular ones in low-end of that range.
That'd be about 1-3e per episode for DVD, shave off packaging, distribution, and resellers cutting off the middle, plus lower quality and $1 sounds very reasonable. $5 on the other hand does sound like bankruptcy for anyone trying. I know I wouldn't pay more than 2e for episode.
I have been using Fedora since version 1.0 and it works well.
Right on. Even FC1 was better than RHL9, and it's been steadily getting better.
The one thing I like about Fedora 3 is that all the system utilities have nicely designed UI's designed in Python-GTK. The UI's work nicely and help people migrating to linux from windows.
I agree. To boot, system-config-* tools also have good text mode ncurses based UI's, and the best of all is despite all that, they still don't hide the actual config files and command line tools under layers of obscurity. Best of all worlds.
I, for one, never understood what the fuss among desktop users was, since Fedora is technically the same distro RHL was, even though I can understand why people with cheap'ish support contracts might get upset.
You really don't know a fuck about what you're talking about, do you?
If A.rpm depends on B.rpm, and B.rpm depends on A.rpm, you can install neither A nor B.
Another poster helpfully corrected you on this.
>There's nothing that says a modern package management system has to be wrapped up in a single tool, in this case RPM. Well, nothing except, say all your competition. But you want to ignore that? Fine. Try this on for size...
You're the one who ignored what he said. None, except gentoo, of those you mention has "a package management system that is wrapped up in a single tool". Mandrake urpmi has RPM underneath. Debian apt has DPKG underneath. If you want to get your hands greasy, you can use rpm/dpkg there too and get those very same problems. What apt and urpmi do is ask rpm/dpkg the dependencies for given package, and then automatically fetch them, they're a layer ON TOP OF the "primitive" package management system, not replacement for it.
Fortunately, Fedora (and the last two RH versions) also DO HAVE such a system. Yum from FC1 onward, and up2date in RH8 & 9. They work exactly like apt and uprmi, ask it to install or update a package, and it gets all the dependencies too, cyclic ones included.
Gentoo has never once stomped on a config file.
RPM only "stomps on" a config file if a) you haven't modified the original or b) the packager expicitly told it to do so, in which case he probably had a good reason to do so. Even then, the old config file is saved so you can easily copy it, or the changes, back. Automatically merging changes sounds all good and nice, until it screws up.
Slashdot Mirror
So wait - you're saying that the ULV version takes *less* battery power and runs for *longer*, right?
Yes.
Which would mean there's a bigger disparity in between the AMD and Intel chips in terms of battery power?
Yes and no. Of course there is big disparity between Intel 1.2GHz (fastest available) ULV chip and AMD 2.0GHz "normal" chip, but there isn't disparity between Intel 2.0GHz and AMD 2.0GHz chips.
In other words, AMD may not ship a product suitable for ultra portables or low-end tablets, but competes quite nicely in the regular notebook market.
I don't see why the kernel NTFS driver would have legal problems
Patents.
I agree that RH Legal can sometimes seem bit to be bit overcareful, but as the saying goes, better safe than sorry...
Be as it may, ntfs (and mp3, and other things that are "questionable" but not outright illegal) support is in rpm.livna.org, so it's just a matter of adding one repository and yumming away.
So one might ask: will distros like Redhat/Fedora change the package manager in the future?
No. Because deb isn't superior to rpm there is no reason to change. Both can do few things that the other can't, but mostly offer equal functionality.
Days of apt being the only capable automatic dependency handler are long past, and the only issue left with yum+rpm is basically not having quite as large official repository as debian.
In addition to 1-1/3 != 1/3, he's comparing to ultra low voltage version of P-M, eg. doing the same thing he accuses AMD of!
1.6GHz system isn't ULV (which are only available in =1.2GHz, and eat lot less power).
So there is no comparison whatsoever you can draw from that to your X31.
Answer: Officially, none, unofficially, more than likely GTK1.2 because of the *killer* apps that still use it (XMMS anyone)
You managed to find _ONE_ application that is still widely used that uses GTK1. And that makes it a "default"?
Majority of Linux users probably use recent GNOME or KDE, which makes the "default" toolkit either Qt3 or GTK2, even those that don't, run quite a bit of apps that use GTK2 (Mozilla, Evolution, Gaim...) or Qt. Just because some of them run XMMS too, doesn't change the fact that vast majority of the applications they use do use more recent toolkit.
Anatomically modern humans have been on the planet for AT LEAST 100000 years, possibly even double, and hominids for several million. That is clearly long enough time for foodchain to adapt to presence of humans, to a level that abruptly removing them from equation would cause huge changes.
How did you think "animals clearly took care of themselves"? Herbivores decided that their population got too large and dropped dead? Well, Sherlock, they were killed, much more brutally, by other animals. Other large predators, be it wolves or cave lions or sabertooth tigers were dealing with the population problems of herbivores, we have diminished their number to so low as to be irrelevant in that role any more, and taken the place they previously inhabited as the top of the foodchain, which clearly includes keeping populations manageable as well.
naa.. It is just a matter of benchmark methods...
No. It's not. It's a matter of your number being totally different than those of anyone else with any methods. Are you sure you're reading outer tracks? You know that the "logical" beginning of disk is in outer tracks, not inner?
My 40MB/s numbers come from unbuffered sequential reads of the outter track in a SATA 7200RPM 160GB drive (that is about 3 months old)... I used sandra to do the benchmarks...
Sandra is not a good benchmark, but if that's what you use, let's try the same to get "matter of benchmark methods" dealt with. As for the database, Sandra isn't capable of testing zones of a drive, only partitions, given that the db doesn't mention anything except the drive, we can't know ANYTHING about what zone(s) those readings are for.
My 40MB/s numbers come from unbuffered sequential reads of the outter track in a SATA 7200RPM 160GB drive (that is about 3 months old)...
My number come from unbuffered sequential reads of the outer track in a ATA 7200RPM 120GB drive (that is about 16 months old). AVG read speeds across all zones 49MB/s. Hitachi 7K250, 80GB/platter, 2 platters. Just like yours, just older, and much faster.
39MB/s outer zones, 35.8MB/s average on some years old Maxtor D740DX (7200RPM), 60GB, 40GB platters.
I've only got one partition on my laptop so Sandra can't tell anything about it for specific zones, but the speeds of the two other discs have mirrored HD tach results very closely so this one probably will to. 30-32MB/s outer 26.3MB/s average. Samsung Spinpoint M, about two months old, 80GB, 40GB platters, 5400 RPM.
Transfer graphs for all three drives http://www.cc.puv.fi/~e0000274/hdtach.png here, just in case you're interested.
You may get 60MB/s in sequential buffered reads if they are shorter bursts, etc..
I'm not stupid, sequential unbuffered is what was talked about and sequential unbuffered is what I give you. 57MB/s. Sequential. Unbuffered. Sandra. Got it? (Buffered around ~90M/s, btw)
In the end, You all have points about my data being "wrong" in the circumstances you give...
No. Not just in the circumstances I give, _any_ circumstances. 2.5" drives, whether similar size or not, are slower than desktop drives.
namely, the ones i give in my (1) paragraph with equivilently sized desktop vs laptop drives, my data is correct and conclusive.
Unfortunately your data is in question, and even if it's correct (which I doubt) it certainly doesn't seem to represent vast majority of drives out there, and you haven't provided data for a notebook drive that is faster than even that relatively slow desktop drive. That's not conclusive.
1) drive density and RPM speed are directly proportional to sustained sequential read speed.
Agreed.
2) platter radious and RPM speed is directly proportional to seek time.
Agreed.
3) Multiple platters in the same drive read in parallel while accessing data, thus doubling the density of a single platter
False. Reading data from multiple platters may yield a small speed boost, but it's nowhere as large as actual doubling of single platter density would be. For example, 250GB drive with three 80GB platters performs almost identifically to my 120GB version with 1½.
4) Knowing the above, and working the numbers in the specific instances I am claiming in my origional post (namely, 5400RPM 2.5in disk vs 7200RPM 80gb disk) you can determine that the 5400RPM 2.5in disk will have faster sequential read speeds on the outter track of said disk.
And this is where we disagree. Based on overwhelming evidence of all benchmarks ever published and my own testing, 5400RPM 2.5" disk can't beat even several generations older 7200RPM 3.5" disk, can do absolutely NOTHING against current generation 7200RPM
I don't know if that WD drive you got the numbers from is just old (relative to the laptop drive your putting it against), or if your system has some issues, but I've got to agree with the others here, you're wrong.
And yes, the age does make _huge_ difference. I've got 1½ years old Hitachi that does about 60MB/s, few years older Maxtor gets about the same as you do, ~40'ish.
Fastest 7200RPM IDE/SATA 3.5" drives do about 65MB/s sustained outer zone transfer rates, 30-40 on inner zones. Fastest 2.5" drives reach bit under 40 on outer zones and the very best barely reach 25 on inner.
I believe you're wrong on the very first point, and since all the rest rest upon it... Laptop drives don't have higher platter densities than desktop drives, I wouldn't be surprised if they're actually lower in most cases, but at the very best it's same. How did you think they can stuff 3x more data on desktop drives even though physical size difference isn't all that large?
There are also several other significant factors that make desktop drives faster - they can add more platters and heads since there's more space, and read them in parallel, larger platters also lead into faster outer zone spinning speed with same RPM, and last but not least, notebook drives just haven't been optimized for performance.
Yes, removed things most beginners are better without, eg. made it more user friendly.
Airbrush is something most gimp users use, often. Stay on top button is something most people never use. See the difference?
How would you feel it they took up the gimp and added _every operation it can do_, no matter how rarely needed, from the menus to the tool palette? That's what you're asking them to do.
although I doubt that Google can index something that got released today
h tml
Yeah, it's beta 1. About a month old.
The "mold" is theme. It isn't the default one, either.
Bunch of better screenshots here http://www.gnome.org/~davyd/gnome-2-10/ and here http://www.gnome.org/start/2.10/notes/rnwhatsnew.
The LiveCD is ubuntu based.
I brought it up because the full "integrated" experience is important to me. Firefox uses Gnome's mime handler but naught else.
Firefox / GNOME integration has been moving in leaps and bounds lately, 1.0 feels very much at home on my gnome desktop.
If I were to switch to Gnome I would be more likely to stay if the browser were nicely integrated with the environment.
What is there in Firefox that you feel doesn't fit well into gnome environment? And please try recent release before answering.
Gnome pisses me off because its menu editing is so friggin' stupid. FWIW FC3 dropped the Gnome menue editor because it was too buggy.
Well, it pissed off gnome developers too, and now there is no more menu editing. They moved the backend to freedesktop standard, but didn't have time to implement editor on top of it.
And RH actually dropped Gnome menu editing in _RH8_ because it was too buggy, so it's been absent from last five of their distros, not just FC3.
The global config files are usually in /usr/share/applications, and per-user ones in ~/.local/share/applications.
And since the menu uses freedesktop standards now, other editors should work with GNOME, I've heard XFCE one does at least.
My point was that this is a Linux desktop problem
Installing menu items is very simple. You drop _one file_ in a directory, and that's it. It works in KDE, it works in GNOME, and it takes about five seconds to create it and ensure it goes to right place.
Not doing that when it's so easy is a distro problem. I can understand why someone would blame "linux desktop" for issues like this if it took enormous amount of work to create that one menu icon, and few years ago it was a pain, but it doesn't any more, it's not a problem.
Why would a user even need to know what Gnome is, let alone that it's starting up?
The reason why splash screens are there, is that there's whole bunch of these "building blocks" and just like "some of the larger applications" they take long enough to start that if there wasn't a splash screen to show that something is happening, users would think it has crashed because it's not responding and (as far as they can see) not doing anything.
you don't see Windows or Mac OS putting up a second splash screen for the thing that does the taskbar and puts the icons on the background.
I don't see GNOME or KDE putting up a splash screen for any of those things either, they put up one that covers the loading of whole desktop - just like Windows. Besides, distro maintainers can and do replace it with something that doesn't talk about this "gnome" thingy they don't know about.
i don't do two clicks
i do one click - previously a window bar button
Too bad. If that's how you (and the another person thinking same, in Siberia), feel, good riddance, KDE with it's millions "in your face" controls is clearly the right one for you.
GNOME developers won't cave in and make the desktop unnecessarily cluttered for MILLIONS of people because one person somewhere thinks his need for one mouse click instead of 2 once every five years overrides all those other folks. And they should feel haunted over it? Bullshit, they should, and probably are, proud.
is it the user-base or just their own selves they've been developing for?
User-base. One that you clearly don't represent. Not all users want the same things you want.
I am sure there is a way to get it solved
There is, and it's quite simple too. Hold shift.
And in my limited experience pygtk is much nicer to use than wxpython.
See how these anecdotes aren't helping? Seriously, though, pygtk has come a long way and you might want to update your experience. It's one of the nicest GUI toolkits to develop for that I've ever encountered.
Feels much more "pythonic" than wx, too and doesn't have nearly as many evil constants and functions that look like C macros ported over without further thinking.
an idiot. I've probable been trolled, though. But just in case you're just ignorant beyond belief...
Red Hat, Also sells propietary software, but they don't develop it.
Red Hat does not sell proprietary software. You're accidentally right about them not developing it, though, since RH only develops free software. Plenty of it.
also, they make bad publicity for GNU, since they bash most distributions in favor of their own, they spread FUD about Free Software having no support
Right. Developing lots of free software to make it better creates bad publicity. You'd be hard pressed to find Red Hat spreading any FUD, unlike you, they don't need to. For anyone with more than two brain cells and their eyes open, their position with Ubuntu, for example, is friendly competition. Only animosity with competitors that I can remember was with Sun, and not all that surprisingly, started by Sun. As for support... Red Hat's business model consists of selling support for Free Software, no need to say more.
But redhat, doesn't develop anything
You mean aside from employing top kernel hackers, top gcc hackers and top gnome hackers? RH has also invested heavily on gcj to help us gain a Free Java implementation. I'm sure those people would still contribute whatever scraps of free time they had from they day job to FOSS if they hadn't got a job at RH, now, they have a change to do so fulltime without worrying about their jobs. Not to mention purchasing several companies and releasing their previously proprietary applications for free, what an evil thing to do!
Red Hat's contributions to FOSS are among the greatest of any company, ever, and they continue to do that despite your drivel.
They also use our name (Free Software and Open Source Software) as a selling point.
They have every right in the world to describe their stuff as Free Software, since that's precisely what it is.
I'd also be careful about using forms of word "we" when talking about Free Software, since I happen to think you haven't ever contributed one line of code, or anything else for that matter, in your life. Anyone who had, wouldn't be so ignorant as to spread this kind of baseless FUD. Jumped from Windows last week probably, and now you think you know everything there is to know about Free Software? Well, here's the newsflash: you don't.
I don't know about you, but watching advertisements isn't one of my favourite pastimes, and I'd much rather pay reasonable amount - say, bit under $CHEAP_DVD_BOX / $NUMBER_OF_EPISODES, which boils down to maybe $1 - than be forced to watch ads.
but shouldn't it be less than or equal to to the $4.00 or $5.00 Blockbuster charges for a movie rental?
Maybe that's possibly, but at that price range there's no point any more, better just to forget the whole thing, because nobody will buy them. Most DVD box sets are lot cheaper per episode, and probably more convenient for almost everyone.
Also, wouldn't it be possible for a new series to be developed that bypasses the studio altogether?
In theory, perhaps.
What would prevent Bad Robot (production house behind Alias and Lost) from maintaining the production rights and distributing via Tivo or DirectTV without going through one of the traditional networks?
The fact that they wouldn't make enough with just this, and traditional networks, being rightly scared of the erosion of their business model would probably not be nice enough to give good parallel distribution deals for someone who's trying to undermine them.
I have to agree with the AC that $120 is pretty insane price for a full season, even in smaller chunks. Most shows seem to be something between 30-70 EUR, with many quite popular ones in low-end of that range.
That'd be about 1-3e per episode for DVD, shave off packaging, distribution, and resellers cutting off the middle, plus lower quality and $1 sounds very reasonable. $5 on the other hand does sound like bankruptcy for anyone trying. I know I wouldn't pay more than 2e for episode.
I have been using Fedora since version 1.0 and it works well.
Right on. Even FC1 was better than RHL9, and it's been steadily getting better.
The one thing I like about Fedora 3 is that all the system utilities have nicely designed UI's designed in Python-GTK. The UI's work nicely and help people migrating to linux from windows.
I agree. To boot, system-config-* tools also have good text mode ncurses based UI's, and the best of all is despite all that, they still don't hide the actual config files and command line tools under layers of obscurity. Best of all worlds.
I, for one, never understood what the fuss among desktop users was, since Fedora is technically the same distro RHL was, even though I can understand why people with cheap'ish support contracts might get upset.
You really don't know a fuck about what you're talking about, do you?
If A.rpm depends on B.rpm, and B.rpm depends on A.rpm, you can install neither A nor B.
Another poster helpfully corrected you on this.
>There's nothing that says a modern package management system has to be wrapped up in a single tool, in this case RPM.
Well, nothing except, say all your competition. But you want to ignore that? Fine. Try this on for size...
You're the one who ignored what he said. None, except gentoo, of those you mention has "a package management system that is wrapped up in a single tool". Mandrake urpmi has RPM underneath. Debian apt has DPKG underneath. If you want to get your hands greasy, you can use rpm/dpkg there too and get those very same problems. What apt and urpmi do is ask rpm/dpkg the dependencies for given package, and then automatically fetch them, they're a layer ON TOP OF the "primitive" package management system, not replacement for it.
Fortunately, Fedora (and the last two RH versions) also DO HAVE such a system. Yum from FC1 onward, and up2date in RH8 & 9. They work exactly like apt and uprmi, ask it to install or update a package, and it gets all the dependencies too, cyclic ones included.
Gentoo has never once stomped on a config file.
RPM only "stomps on" a config file if a) you haven't modified the original or b) the packager expicitly told it to do so, in which case he probably had a good reason to do so. Even then, the old config file is saved so you can easily copy it, or the changes, back. Automatically merging changes sounds all good and nice, until it screws up.