Minor historical nitpick: Nazi Germany didn't take over Austria, the Austrians (who are ethnic Germans) held up a referendum and decided to on unification with Germany, which was nothing new, BTW. There had been previous German Reichen before. --
Mind you, I'm not talking about revisionists or David Duke types, the person I mentioned is a highly respected historian and historical fiction writer specialized in the study of ancient Egypt. He argues people were actually paid for their services and that at no time the classical Egyptian civilization relied on slave labour for even the most menial of tasks, in stark contrast to, e.g., classical Greece. Notice though, that slavery in Greece took a very different form from its analogous in the Americas.
And your contention that early industrial age labour conditions is akin to slavery is a very far stretch of historical facts, IMHO. An intellectual cousin of the beat out argument about H-1Bs being "indentured servants". --
Just so you know, some egyptolgists (like Christian Jacq) contend that there was never any slave labour in classical Egypt, in spite of what the Hebrew version is. They claim all those workers indeed received pay, perhaps not generous, granted, but they were salaried, or so they say. --
I fail to see what the duration of democratic rule in each country has to do with the subject at hand, which is, swiftness and accuraccy of the voting counting process. Would it help the argument if anyone stated that elections in Switzerland and Iceland, which have been democratic far before the Mayflower ever departed from England, are fully automated? Note to Swiss and Icelander readers: I have no idea if your elections are fully automated, I'm just trying to counter his point.
And I'm also not sure what leads you to believe that ink marks on paper are any more immune to fraud and tampering than cryptographically signed records on three redundant storage media. --
Electronic vote (at least Brazilian style) does not equal "voting from your armchair". Ballot stuffing in Brazil is damn near impossible for a single person to perform, you'd need "cooperation" from all people supervising the polling section, and a few experts as well. --
I think most other furriners will agree with with me that it wasn't Clinton's sexual escapades that made American politics the laughing stock of the world, but the obsession about it demonstrated by the Republican opposition and the mainstream media. --
Daniel, I didn't mean to dismiss aptitude in any way, I just pointed out the fact that it is a text-based app as a caveat emptor, for many people tend to associate ease of use with graphical interfaces, and are put off by text-based apps.
Mind you, I use aptitude myself and I think it is great! I just wished it went on to replace dselect as soon as possible... --
4) Because Debian uses xdm for X-based logins (assuming you didn't screw up the install!). Not nice like gdm like Storm does.
You might want try woody together with helix gnome, you will get the nice graphical login from gdm, and you get to apt-get upgrade your GNOME desktop!
5) Because Storm comes with reasonable versions of KDE and Gnome, already configured within
gdm.
Ditto, plus you can use KDE2 with woody.
6) Because Storm comes with Storm Package Manager, a friendlier version of dselect capability.
With dselect I've managed to screw up things, or not be able to prevent an installation of what I didn't want. Call it user error, but I don't make those errors or have those problems with SPM.
Actually, SPM doesn't buy you much compared to other modern frontends like aptitude (great, but text-based) or gnome-apt (needs some work, but is quite useful). I think many people here will agree with me when I advise you not to use dselect! It is evil, plain and simple.
Notice that most of the perceived advantages of Storm comes from you're comparing it to potato. You might have a different opinion if you try woody. --
Oh, BTW, Conectiva, a commercial Linux distro from Brazil, is working on a port of apt that uses RPM instead of dpkg as a backend. Check it out, the guy working on it is a friend of mine;-) --
There are (to my knowledge) two commercial Debian-based distros: Corel and Storm Linux. Both suck in a way, because their improvements are not free, and are not folded back into plain old Debian. This is what Ian is working to address with his venture.
As for your sound card blues, if you're not into manually configuring stuff, I suggest you apt-get sndconfig, courtesy from the fine folks at RedHat and use it like you used to do when you were wearing that old Hat. --
From what I could gather of the discussion so far, Progeny is working to address all the little things like installation and automatic setup that are better in RedHat (and other commercial distros) than in Debian, at least IMHO. The catch is, most Debian users (although I can speak only for myself) will not use it if:
it is not a standard part of Debian (i.e., fully apt-get-upgradeable);
it is not free software (in the good old fashioned Debian sense of the word);
Ian is vouching to keep it in accordance with these two guidelines, so I can only see it as a very good thing. --
Para um país em que a maioria vota em máquinas do tempo do onça, puxando alavancas, eles não têm nada do que se gabar...Mas isso não é novidade, certo;-)? --
Banjonardo, eu também não tenho idéia se as eleições na Índia são obrigatórias ou não (e se todos os estados e municípios as realizam no mesmo dia como no Salvelindo), mas todos os indianos que eu conheço se gabam de que a maior democracia do mundo tem as maiores eleições do mundo.
Agora, como Vc, tenho certeza quase absoluta de que as eleições brasileiras são as maiores totalmente informatizadas. O que é um motivo de sincero e patriótico orgulho para mim, ainda que este sentimento esteja fora de moda. --
Strictly speaking, the cost of hiring slave labour is zero dollars, but you can't get that sort of labour in the US marketplace. Of course, if you're still talking about H1-Bs, do a little research and find how many of those earn half than their American counterparts.
The suggestion that the H1-B status quo is akin to that of a slave (or even and indentured servant) is false and immoral. There are plenty of places in the world where people are exploited and made to work in slave conditions. The US IT marketplace is not one of those. --
I believe presidential elections, even with a turnout of 49%, is quite comparable to general elections in Brazil, considering the populations of both countries.
Also, I think parliamentary elections in India (which has a population six times greater than Brazil's) are definitely the largest in the world. That is, until China decides that is a wise move to hold elections, but I don't exepect it to happen in the near future. --
Notice he said "exclude" from your preferences, not "include", so your whole point is moot. Chech both the RedHat Software and Debian options and you'll not be notified of news concerning these systems.
Set your threshold level to -1, and you'll get plenty of Slackware news from experts, on an any thread that vaguely mentions something about the good distributions. --
Sauce code: vinegar, lemon juice, olive oil, plenty of garlic and pepper. Goes great with salads
I think you'll find a lot of those Protestant sects guilty of race related atrocities (in North America and Africa), conveniently overlooked by the religious powers that be.
Trying to associate Nazi officials with the Catholic Church will get you tangled in web of contradictory historical references, that may leave you embarassed quoting revisionists. Don't do it. --
You brilliantly glossed over my main point, with a nice bit of handwaving rhetoric. So to recap, what I said was: measure the quantity of software that is spun by RedHat the company (RPM, kudzu, various config apps, large bits of GNOME, Inti, gcc, libc etc) then measure the amount of software that churns out of Slackware the company (if three guys in a basement a company make) into a GNU/Linux system. Who comes out with more? Who comes out with the more important bits? Who revs their stuff more frequently? If you still conclude that Slackware comes out shining, you are not being intellectually honest.
Now for a good' ol point-by-point refutation of your argument:
Ideology: An operating system is an operating system. This is the identity property. Basic logic. An Operating System is NOT an office suite. An Operating System is NOT an mp3 player.
Yeah, yeah, whatever. Would you care to define what is an OS then? Where do you draw the line?
My point is that the concept of making an operating system is that you build the core on top of which applications run. Slackware does not follow this ideology the way I like it (OpenBSD-style), but they do MUCH better than RedHat.
My concept is that you provide all the tools the user may need to do his job: compilers, editors, programming tools, libraries, modern GUIs, programming tools. I think you'll agree with me that my "conceptual" OS is more useful than yours.
Quantity of software is also a null point. Firstly, the greater sludge of packages added by RedHat (same situation with debian) are rival programs striving to serve the same purpose. In fact, you may even end up with 3 packages that are just different versions of the same program!
Why, indeed:
afc@tonga:~$ dpkg -l \*forth\*
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Installed/Config-files/Unpacked/Failed- config/Half-installed
|/ Err?=(none)/Hold/Reinst-required/X=both-problems (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name Version Description
+++-===================-===================-====== ======================================== ========
ii gforth 0.5.0-1 GNU Forth Language Environment
ii kforth 1.0-3 Small Forth Interpreter Written in C++
ii pforth 21-6 portable Forth interpreter
ii yforth 0.1beta-13 A small freeware Forth environment in ANSI C.
You do realize some of us like to have more than one option available, right?
The ones that aren't duplicate are almost always outdated, oftentimes due to buffer overflows and other bugs. That is EXACTLY why RedHat distributions have so many security problems.
Why that is news to me! So Slackware's touted high reliability is due to it having more updated versions of the available software? That flies in the face of all the other pundit's opinions in this thread!
Follow the simple idea that you install your operating system and then get your application software from the proper sources. You end up with the latest releases (that work) and much fewer security problems.
What makes you think Debian (RedHat, SuSE, Caldera etc) don't get the software from their proper sources? What makes you think you don't get the latest versions with the other distros? Like I said, that contradicts all the other Slackware pundits out there!
It's a simple ideology issue. RedHat takes the AOL hodgepodge mentality. Slackware takes the erector-set mentality (a frame, get your own gear). I'll give you three guesses which the technically apt prefer.;>
Erector, schmector. I consider myself very apt, having been introduced to Linux in late '93 and having gone through SLS, Yggdrasil (ugh!), Slackware, RH, SuSE and settling down with Debian. You'll find the technically apt prefer to apt-get;-)
Furthermore, this concept that security should be one's major concern when installing a system is bogus. I am not (primarily) a sysadmin. I am a programmer. My workstations are pretty much immune to attacks from the outside world. I want the latest and greatest, ready or not, no matter how insecure or beta it is. In fact, I love beta software so much, that I use the latest beta of XEmacs, fresh from the CVS tree, as my development environment. If all the world was composed of responsible sysadmins that only use the most reliable, heavily-tested versions, free software development would proceed at a much slower pace.
Second, this notion that you can cast all RedHat users in a mold, stereotyping a huge crowd of users is ludicrous. Do you seriously think you or any other kid that maintains a Slackware web server is more of a wizard than Alan Cox? As far as stereotypes go, I prefer mine: RedHat tries to cater to all users, newbies, sysadmins and wizards, being partially effective in that endeavour. Slackware tries to cater to whatever whimsical notions Volkerding has about what a Linux system should be, and is totally effective at that. Debian caters to the wizards.
IMO, actual power users don't use packages. They are the ones who MAKE the packages.
Yeah, right. So Debian package maintainers and RedHat developers either are not power users, or they don't use package management...
As far as mechanical quality on BMW bikes, you're correct, but that was not the point of that
statement. My point was to illustrate the riders of such bikes. You have your BMW riders, who can't
quite hack it on their own, and then you have your harley riders. If you're familiar with the biking scene
this should be crystal clear.
Other than your analogy not being totally appropriate (Harley bikers generally ride vintage bikes which they must be able to fix on their own), you realize it is a bit of stereotyping, right? What makes you think every BMW biker is not able to hack his bike?
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Minor historical nitpick: Nazi Germany didn't take over Austria, the Austrians (who are ethnic Germans) held up a referendum and decided to on unification with Germany, which was nothing new, BTW. There had been previous German Reichen before.
--
And your contention that early industrial age labour conditions is akin to slavery is a very far stretch of historical facts, IMHO. An intellectual cousin of the beat out argument about H-1Bs being "indentured servants".
--
Just so you know, some egyptolgists (like Christian Jacq) contend that there was never any slave labour in classical Egypt, in spite of what the Hebrew version is. They claim all those workers indeed received pay, perhaps not generous, granted, but they were salaried, or so they say.
--
Not only were they the first to publicly declare distributors of KDE to be criminals (they have since retracted their allegations)
Where can one find those allegations, what were they exactly and who were they leveled against?
--
A bold statement that leads one to assume that you have lots of free time on your hands and very little imagination to use it wisely.
--
And I'm also not sure what leads you to believe that ink marks on paper are any more immune to fraud and tampering than cryptographically signed records on three redundant storage media.
--
Electronic vote (at least Brazilian style) does not equal "voting from your armchair". Ballot stuffing in Brazil is damn near impossible for a single person to perform, you'd need "cooperation" from all people supervising the polling section, and a few experts as well.
--
I think most other furriners will agree with with me that it wasn't Clinton's sexual escapades that made American politics the laughing stock of the world, but the obsession about it demonstrated by the Republican opposition and the mainstream media.
--
Mind you, I use aptitude myself and I think it is great! I just wished it went on to replace dselect as soon as possible...
--
4) Because Debian uses xdm for X-based logins (assuming you didn't screw up the install!). Not nice like gdm like Storm does.
You might want try woody together with helix gnome, you will get the nice graphical login from gdm, and you get to apt-get upgrade your GNOME desktop!
5) Because Storm comes with reasonable versions of KDE and Gnome, already configured within gdm.
Ditto, plus you can use KDE2 with woody.
6) Because Storm comes with Storm Package Manager, a friendlier version of dselect capability. With dselect I've managed to screw up things, or not be able to prevent an installation of what I didn't want. Call it user error, but I don't make those errors or have those problems with SPM.
Actually, SPM doesn't buy you much compared to other modern frontends like aptitude (great, but text-based) or gnome-apt (needs some work, but is quite useful). I think many people here will agree with me when I advise you not to use dselect! It is evil, plain and simple.
Notice that most of the perceived advantages of Storm comes from you're comparing it to potato. You might have a different opinion if you try woody.
--
Oh, BTW, Conectiva, a commercial Linux distro from Brazil, is working on a port of apt that uses RPM instead of dpkg as a backend. Check it out, the guy working on it is a friend of mine ;-)
--
As for your sound card blues, if you're not into manually configuring stuff, I suggest you apt-get sndconfig, courtesy from the fine folks at RedHat and use it like you used to do when you were wearing that old Hat.
--
Ian is vouching to keep it in accordance with these two guidelines, so I can only see it as a very good thing.
--
Para um país em que a maioria vota em máquinas do tempo do onça, puxando alavancas, eles não têm nada do que se gabar...Mas isso não é novidade, certo ;-)?
--
Agora, como Vc, tenho certeza quase absoluta de que as eleições brasileiras são as maiores totalmente informatizadas. O que é um motivo de sincero e patriótico orgulho para mim, ainda que este sentimento esteja fora de moda.
--
The suggestion that the H1-B status quo is akin to that of a slave (or even and indentured servant) is false and immoral. There are plenty of places in the world where people are exploited and made to work in slave conditions. The US IT marketplace is not one of those.
--
I think you meant Obelix, right?
--
Also, I think parliamentary elections in India (which has a population six times greater than Brazil's) are definitely the largest in the world. That is, until China decides that is a wise move to hold elections, but I don't exepect it to happen in the near future.
--
Make that Judeo-Christio-Islamic, please.
--
Not to mention Roxette, Aha, Abba, well you get the idea... I fully agree, Swedish pop sucks!
--
Set your threshold level to -1, and you'll get plenty of Slackware news from experts, on an any thread that vaguely mentions something about the good distributions.
--
I think you'll find a lot of those Protestant sects guilty of race related atrocities (in North America and Africa), conveniently overlooked by the religious powers that be.
Trying to associate Nazi officials with the Catholic Church will get you tangled in web of contradictory historical references, that may leave you embarassed quoting revisionists. Don't do it.
--
That should read 'Control-Shift', I presume?
--
I'm pretty much sure Bush also likes both types of music: Country and Western.
--
Now for a good' ol point-by-point refutation of your argument:
Ideology: An operating system is an operating system. This is the identity property. Basic logic. An Operating System is NOT an office suite. An Operating System is NOT an mp3 player.
Yeah, yeah, whatever. Would you care to define what is an OS then? Where do you draw the line?
My point is that the concept of making an operating system is that you build the core on top of which applications run. Slackware does not follow this ideology the way I like it (OpenBSD-style), but they do MUCH better than RedHat.
My concept is that you provide all the tools the user may need to do his job: compilers, editors, programming tools, libraries, modern GUIs, programming tools. I think you'll agree with me that my "conceptual" OS is more useful than yours.
Quantity of software is also a null point. Firstly, the greater sludge of packages added by RedHat (same situation with debian) are rival programs striving to serve the same purpose. In fact, you may even end up with 3 packages that are just different versions of the same program!
Why, indeed:
- config/Half-installed= ======================================== ========
afc@tonga:~$ dpkg -l \*forth\*
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Installed/Config-files/Unpacked/Failed
|/ Err?=(none)/Hold/Reinst-required/X=both-problems (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name Version Description
+++-===================-===================-=====
ii gforth 0.5.0-1 GNU Forth Language Environment
ii kforth 1.0-3 Small Forth Interpreter Written in C++
ii pforth 21-6 portable Forth interpreter
ii yforth 0.1beta-13 A small freeware Forth environment in ANSI C.
You do realize some of us like to have more than one option available, right?
The ones that aren't duplicate are almost always outdated, oftentimes due to buffer overflows and other bugs. That is EXACTLY why RedHat distributions have so many security problems.
Why that is news to me! So Slackware's touted high reliability is due to it having more updated versions of the available software? That flies in the face of all the other pundit's opinions in this thread!
Follow the simple idea that you install your operating system and then get your application software from the proper sources. You end up with the latest releases (that work) and much fewer security problems.
What makes you think Debian (RedHat, SuSE, Caldera etc) don't get the software from their proper sources? What makes you think you don't get the latest versions with the other distros? Like I said, that contradicts all the other Slackware pundits out there!
It's a simple ideology issue. RedHat takes the AOL hodgepodge mentality. Slackware takes the erector-set mentality (a frame, get your own gear). I'll give you three guesses which the technically apt prefer. ;>
Erector, schmector. I consider myself very apt, having been introduced to Linux in late '93 and having gone through SLS, Yggdrasil (ugh!), Slackware, RH, SuSE and settling down with Debian. You'll find the technically apt prefer to apt-get ;-)
Furthermore, this concept that security should be one's major concern when installing a system is bogus. I am not (primarily) a sysadmin. I am a programmer. My workstations are pretty much immune to attacks from the outside world. I want the latest and greatest, ready or not, no matter how insecure or beta it is. In fact, I love beta software so much, that I use the latest beta of XEmacs, fresh from the CVS tree, as my development environment. If all the world was composed of responsible sysadmins that only use the most reliable, heavily-tested versions, free software development would proceed at a much slower pace.
Second, this notion that you can cast all RedHat users in a mold, stereotyping a huge crowd of users is ludicrous. Do you seriously think you or any other kid that maintains a Slackware web server is more of a wizard than Alan Cox? As far as stereotypes go, I prefer mine: RedHat tries to cater to all users, newbies, sysadmins and wizards, being partially effective in that endeavour. Slackware tries to cater to whatever whimsical notions Volkerding has about what a Linux system should be, and is totally effective at that. Debian caters to the wizards.
IMO, actual power users don't use packages. They are the ones who MAKE the packages.
Yeah, right. So Debian package maintainers and RedHat developers either are not power users, or they don't use package management...
As far as mechanical quality on BMW bikes, you're correct, but that was not the point of that statement. My point was to illustrate the riders of such bikes. You have your BMW riders, who can't quite hack it on their own, and then you have your harley riders. If you're familiar with the biking scene this should be crystal clear.
Other than your analogy not being totally appropriate (Harley bikers generally ride vintage bikes which they must be able to fix on their own), you realize it is a bit of stereotyping, right? What makes you think every BMW biker is not able to hack his bike?
Disclaimer: IANAB (I am not a biker) :-)
--