Ubuntu, from my own experiences and from everything I've read, is meant to be a beginner level distro. Sure you could use it as a server, but you can also use Windows as a server. Doesn't make it a good choice.
Do you have anything more substantial behind that reasoning?
The Ubuntu Server Edition is basically just Debian with Postfix instead of Exim, and more support from commercial software packages (eg VMWare etc).
Another notable difference (and possible advantage for some users) is that Ubuntu has defined support lifecycles, and the Server LTS editions will get longer support than Debian stable normally will (ie 5 years).
And Ubuntu tends to have slightly more updates for non security related bugs than Debian.
The base install is about as bare boned as a base Debian install is. An Ubuntu server will also generally not have any of the typically troublesome desktop packages istalled (eg audio, latest graphics drivers, wireless etc). The patches for the same vulnerabilities are usually released for both Debian and Ubuntu within a day of each other.
While I personally prefer Debian servers a bit more, I really don't see any problems with using Ubuntu LTS Server editions. Especially if you need guaranteed security support for more than 2 years between upgrades.
As far as I understand this squabble, this isn't about Flash vs HTML 5 - that's a different squabble.
The current controversy is about Apple dictating to developers what programming languages and tools/libraries they can and can't use to code their native apps (ie not web apps) if they want to get them into the store. It has far wider ramifications than Adobes new version of Flash.
So it is actually about the policies of the store, and how the iPhone is moving even further away from having an "open architecture".
And then there are smaller projects with less resources that are just combinations of the above list who can find packaging for Windows a real pain eg:
The Python Qt bindings The Perl Qt bindings The Ruby Qt bindings The Python gtk bindings The Perl gtk bindings The Ruby gtk bindings The Python MySQL module The Perl MySQL module The Ruby MySQL module The Python Postgres module The Perl Postgres module The Ruby Postgres module etc etc etc
I reckon the smaller open source projects are the ones that will potentially benefit the most from this if it works out. And it can only be a good thing for everyone if the devs can spend less time packaging and more time working on the actual code.
As an admin that maintains both Linux and Windows systems, this sounds really cool. Hopefully the guys writing the Tomcat AJP connectors for IIS will use it (that stuff can be a nightmare).
To me though the initial setup is never the main problem (except with AJP/IIS hehe), it's the ongoing maintenance and patching of 3rd party stuff that suffers the most on Windows.
Sure Windows Update / WSUS make all the MS stuff easy, but 3rd party Windows apps are a nightmare to keep up to date network wide. They all have their own separate update mechanisms that mostly require an admin being logged on to work.
I've love to see Windows Update and WSUS allow 3rd party repos (eg the equivalent of adding stuff to/etc/apt/sources.list) so that practically everything could be patched via Windows Update / WSUS without admin intervention on each machine.
I don't know if your work will end up tackling all that, or one day get incorporated by the existing patch mechanisms, but I can still dream:)
Since KVM is in the mainline and redhat is now supporting that 100% this seems like a bad time to start anything on Xen.
To which I say good riddance, virtualization is just another app and kvm gets this right.
They explain that in their FAQ and architecture PDF. One of the reason is that KVM doesn't allow the moving of (eg) networking and I/O drivers into separate unprivileged guests.
What? Talking about physicists not being invited to parties on a Slashdot article titled "A Users Guide to the Universe" and (so far) there are no references to the logic circuits of a Bambleweeny 57 Sub-Meson Brain?
A COBOL programmer in the 1950s would be dumbstruck by what we have today. Actually, I'm dumstruck as well; cell phones, flat screen computers, and self-opening doors in Star Trek were impossible; science fiction.
Hehe, in the 50's just having TV shows like Star Trek probably seemed like impossible science fiction:)
I use an editor that can understand Python indentation. This is easier than you think, as the editors not capable of this are too limited to do much coding in anyway.
Then all you do is go to the end of the line before where you want to insert your new line, create a new line and hey presto the next line starts off correctly indented.
Any decent coder is going to configure their editor to automatically indent anyway no matter what language they use, so it isn't really any extra work. Except for trivial edits, I find I need the same kind of indenting features when coding in PHP too.
I'll add another variable to consider when pondering this question: the upper atmosphere is way thinner than the lower atmosphere, so would it's capacity to absorb IR radiation be a lot less than the lower atmosphere?
I don't think anyone *denies* that climate is changing. What the skeptics think is that the "A" part of AGW does not apply, i.e. is is NOT caused primarily by man.
It has been demonstrated time and time again that in the past the earth was also hotter and contained more carbon dioxide. Who caused that, the bloody dinosaurs ?
Well duh.
Where did all that carbon go in the meantime? And where are WE putting it now?
Hehe, I did a non degree civil (ie not electrical) engineering certificate nearly 20 yrs ago and even I knew about half the answers to those questions.
Apart from the professional/ethical/liability requirements of being an engineer, I regard an engineer as someone who can quantify how a design is going to perform under different circumstances before it has actually been built.
A lot of programming is build something and see how it works then tune/tweak/fix it if it doesn't work well enough - ie how I work now that I've switched careers (I don't regard myself as an engineer any more). And to be completely fair, this is probably the best approach for a lot of programming work. Most software projects don't have the money or time to actually be 'engineered'.
Engineering is what you are doing when you really only get one shot to get it right beforehand - eg most civil engineering projects are so big and the materials inflexible enough that having to redo something during or after it is built is at best extremely expensive and case career limiting or at worst case criminally negligent.
In the same way, using a debug tool to determine whether a webpage is working correctly is a crapshoot. Should I go with the best browser (Opera)? How about the most wide-spread browser (IE)? Or should I target the browser most likely to gain the most marketshare (Webkit, aka Chrome and Safari)? Or what about the old stalwart (Netscape)?
They all purport to do the same thing, provide great debugging tools. But how can I trust them when they work so differently from each other and have such different levels of standards support?
I think you're missing the point. These tools aren't entirely for debugging as such - there are validators for finding the actual bugs in your own HTML/CSS.
These tools are more for inspecting how that particular browser is working with and interpreting your code, letting you manipulate that on the fly, and identifying the exact parts of your (hopefully already valid) code that the browser is having trouble with rendering or running. They need to work inside the browser as each browser has its own set of bugs or quirks you need to work around and/or learn to avoid in the first place.
Whether a web page is working properly or not to an end user can't really be judged from outside that users browser - they are using their web browsers interpretation of the web page rather than some absolute objective measure.
Oh Come on. This is ridiculous, you can't go around calling countries "tax happy tree hugging commie states". This has no basis in reality at all. I'm going to take a WILD guess and say that you're American.
Heh, I'm not American (nor European either).
I was just using the language of certain irrational reactionaries that share your position to emphasise my point somewhat sarcastically, yet it seems that it might still have been a bit too subtle for you.
Note that I also think that the other side of the debate has its own fair share of irrational reactionaries too.
So two decades after this thing started hitting the radar and one decade after some major UN agreement was signed, the EC is actually starting to enforce something and dismissing many member states plans for being too loose? And these are the tax happy tree hugging commie states to boot. What jack booted carbon thuggery has the rest of the world been doing to "exercise power over the people"?
That first decade was spent ignoring the issue, the second was spent bitching about how it would kill everyones economies. And now some limp wristed pinko countries have just implemented namby pamby trading schemes for large emitters because taxes ended up seeming a bit too harsh in the end.
Wow, you'd think if (as you claim) those nasty governments really had been salivating over their power trips that whole time they could've easily come up with something properly draconian by now. After all, the third reich came and went in less time than that.
Why would they want to bother with this complicated unpopular science stuff, when they can be more popular by using the terrorist bogeyman to get all the draconian power they want over ordinary people anyway?
Also, I think you are completely missing the real big money and big power interests behind pushing global warming. Governments are SALIVATING at the proposition of a new way to exercise power over people with all the new carbon regulations.
Yeah right. How many governments have actually done this so far? Even those commie pinko liberal hippy tax happy eurotrash ones seem to be a bit tardy about this.
Come on, they've had over 20 years so far to actually do this. It only took a fraction of that time for Warsaw Pact countries to shift from communism to democracies, or the UK to shift from a democracy to a surveillance based police state, or South Africa to dismantle aparthied, or the Chinese to transform into raving captialists etc.
So far, the main responses from governments seem to be along the lines of pretending it doesn't exist, hoping it goes away, stalling, waiting for everyone else to do something instead, rejecting it outright, or talking big but doing nothing etc etc.
The weak typing is your main concern with PHP? You can make arguments that strong/explicit typing is better, but weak typing is NOT php's problem. The behaviour of array keys is completely consistent with the type system everywhere else in the language, any scalar value can be an array key. By the way, later in your own post you point at dynamic typing as an advantage. Please make up your mind
Regarding the "make up your mind bit"
Weak typing doesn't have to mean dynamic typing. The weak <-> strong axis is somewhat orthogonal to the dynamic <-> static axis.
Dynamically typed languages can still be weakly or strongly typed. eg PHP lets you compare or add different types and (for example) Python doesn't.
I'm less familiar with statically typed languages but I'm sure there are examples of weak and strong with statically typed languages too.
The best approach is to have a decoy basement between your actual basement and the street. Maybe two decoys - just in case the first one fills up with cars.
I'm trying to figure out the what context you are talking about - when you say "we" you're also including empire building, the US economy, US politics, bombs in Irag and Afganistan etc. By "we" do you mean humanity or Americans?
It almost seems as though you're advocating that moving Americans off the planet would save humanity. The scary part is that it does have a certain perverse logic to it.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, my first experience with annoyingly buggy MS software was AmigaBASIC.
Do you have anything more substantial behind that reasoning?
The Ubuntu Server Edition is basically just Debian with Postfix instead of Exim, and more support from commercial software packages (eg VMWare etc).
Another notable difference (and possible advantage for some users) is that Ubuntu has defined support lifecycles, and the Server LTS editions will get longer support than Debian stable normally will (ie 5 years).
And Ubuntu tends to have slightly more updates for non security related bugs than Debian.
The base install is about as bare boned as a base Debian install is. An Ubuntu server will also generally not have any of the typically troublesome desktop packages istalled (eg audio, latest graphics drivers, wireless etc). The patches for the same vulnerabilities are usually released for both Debian and Ubuntu within a day of each other.
While I personally prefer Debian servers a bit more, I really don't see any problems with using Ubuntu LTS Server editions. Especially if you need guaranteed security support for more than 2 years between upgrades.
As far as I understand this squabble, this isn't about Flash vs HTML 5 - that's a different squabble.
The current controversy is about Apple dictating to developers what programming languages and tools/libraries they can and can't use to code their native apps (ie not web apps) if they want to get them into the store. It has far wider ramifications than Adobes new version of Flash.
So it is actually about the policies of the store, and how the iPhone is moving even further away from having an "open architecture".
And then there are smaller projects with less resources that are just combinations of the above list who can find packaging for Windows a real pain eg:
The Python Qt bindings
The Perl Qt bindings
The Ruby Qt bindings
The Python gtk bindings
The Perl gtk bindings
The Ruby gtk bindings
The Python MySQL module
The Perl MySQL module
The Ruby MySQL module
The Python Postgres module
The Perl Postgres module
The Ruby Postgres module
etc etc etc
I reckon the smaller open source projects are the ones that will potentially benefit the most from this if it works out. And it can only be a good thing for everyone if the devs can spend less time packaging and more time working on the actual code.
As an admin that maintains both Linux and Windows systems, this sounds really cool. Hopefully the guys writing the Tomcat AJP connectors for IIS will use it (that stuff can be a nightmare).
To me though the initial setup is never the main problem (except with AJP/IIS hehe), it's the ongoing maintenance and patching of 3rd party stuff that suffers the most on Windows.
Sure Windows Update / WSUS make all the MS stuff easy, but 3rd party Windows apps are a nightmare to keep up to date network wide. They all have their own separate update mechanisms that mostly require an admin being logged on to work.
I've love to see Windows Update and WSUS allow 3rd party repos (eg the equivalent of adding stuff to /etc/apt/sources.list) so that practically everything could be patched via Windows Update / WSUS without admin intervention on each machine.
I don't know if your work will end up tackling all that, or one day get incorporated by the existing patch mechanisms, but I can still dream :)
Best of luck anyway.
They explain that in their FAQ and architecture PDF. One of the reason is that KVM doesn't allow the moving of (eg) networking and I/O drivers into separate unprivileged guests.
You better watch out in case they realize that the one thing they really can't stand is a smartass.
What? Talking about physicists not being invited to parties on a Slashdot article titled "A Users Guide to the Universe" and (so far) there are no references to the logic circuits of a Bambleweeny 57 Sub-Meson Brain?
I'm shocked I tell you, shocked!
It looks like a poor copy of Zippy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zippy_(Rainbow)
http://images.google.com/images?q=zippy+rainbow
And speaking of Rainbow, this is required viewing...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kclq2zGQy4w&feature=related
That advice predates your purchase.
The good Matrox driver support finished somewhere around the G550 era.
Hehe, in the 50's just having TV shows like Star Trek probably seemed like impossible science fiction :)
OpenID is not an SSO service. It is more like an authentication protocol and somewhat orthogonal to something like OpenSSO.
eg here is an OpenID extension for OpenSSO:
https://opensso.dev.java.net/public/extensions/openid/
Here's what I do:
I use an editor that can understand Python indentation. This is easier than you think, as the editors not capable of this are too limited to do much coding in anyway.
Then all you do is go to the end of the line before where you want to insert your new line, create a new line and hey presto the next line starts off correctly indented.
Any decent coder is going to configure their editor to automatically indent anyway no matter what language they use, so it isn't really any extra work. Except for trivial edits, I find I need the same kind of indenting features when coding in PHP too.
Good question.
I'll add another variable to consider when pondering this question: the upper atmosphere is way thinner than the lower atmosphere, so would it's capacity to absorb IR radiation be a lot less than the lower atmosphere?
Well duh.
Where did all that carbon go in the meantime? And where are WE putting it now?
Hehe, I did a non degree civil (ie not electrical) engineering certificate nearly 20 yrs ago and even I knew about half the answers to those questions.
Apart from the professional/ethical/liability requirements of being an engineer, I regard an engineer as someone who can quantify how a design is going to perform under different circumstances before it has actually been built.
A lot of programming is build something and see how it works then tune/tweak/fix it if it doesn't work well enough - ie how I work now that I've switched careers (I don't regard myself as an engineer any more). And to be completely fair, this is probably the best approach for a lot of programming work. Most software projects don't have the money or time to actually be 'engineered'.
Engineering is what you are doing when you really only get one shot to get it right beforehand - eg most civil engineering projects are so big and the materials inflexible enough that having to redo something during or after it is built is at best extremely expensive and case career limiting or at worst case criminally negligent.
I think you're missing the point. These tools aren't entirely for debugging as such - there are validators for finding the actual bugs in your own HTML/CSS.
These tools are more for inspecting how that particular browser is working with and interpreting your code, letting you manipulate that on the fly, and identifying the exact parts of your (hopefully already valid) code that the browser is having trouble with rendering or running. They need to work inside the browser as each browser has its own set of bugs or quirks you need to work around and/or learn to avoid in the first place.
Whether a web page is working properly or not to an end user can't really be judged from outside that users browser - they are using their web browsers interpretation of the web page rather than some absolute objective measure.
Heh, I'm not American (nor European either).
I was just using the language of certain irrational reactionaries that share your position to emphasise my point somewhat sarcastically, yet it seems that it might still have been a bit too subtle for you.
Note that I also think that the other side of the debate has its own fair share of irrational reactionaries too.
So two decades after this thing started hitting the radar and one decade after some major UN agreement was signed, the EC is actually starting to enforce something and dismissing many member states plans for being too loose? And these are the tax happy tree hugging commie states to boot. What jack booted carbon thuggery has the rest of the world been doing to "exercise power over the people"?
That first decade was spent ignoring the issue, the second was spent bitching about how it would kill everyones economies. And now some limp wristed pinko countries have just implemented namby pamby trading schemes for large emitters because taxes ended up seeming a bit too harsh in the end.
Wow, you'd think if (as you claim) those nasty governments really had been salivating over their power trips that whole time they could've easily come up with something properly draconian by now. After all, the third reich came and went in less time than that.
Why would they want to bother with this complicated unpopular science stuff, when they can be more popular by using the terrorist bogeyman to get all the draconian power they want over ordinary people anyway?
Yeah right. How many governments have actually done this so far? Even those commie pinko liberal hippy tax happy eurotrash ones seem to be a bit tardy about this.
Come on, they've had over 20 years so far to actually do this. It only took a fraction of that time for Warsaw Pact countries to shift from communism to democracies, or the UK to shift from a democracy to a surveillance based police state, or South Africa to dismantle aparthied, or the Chinese to transform into raving captialists etc.
So far, the main responses from governments seem to be along the lines of pretending it doesn't exist, hoping it goes away, stalling, waiting for everyone else to do something instead, rejecting it outright, or talking big but doing nothing etc etc.
Regarding the "make up your mind bit"
Weak typing doesn't have to mean dynamic typing. The weak <-> strong axis is somewhat orthogonal to the dynamic <-> static axis.
Dynamically typed languages can still be weakly or strongly typed. eg PHP lets you compare or add different types and (for example) Python doesn't.
I'm less familiar with statically typed languages but I'm sure there are examples of weak and strong with statically typed languages too.
The best approach is to have a decoy basement between your actual basement and the street. Maybe two decoys - just in case the first one fills up with cars.
Sheesh... what a tosser.
I'm trying to figure out the what context you are talking about - when you say "we" you're also including empire building, the US economy, US politics, bombs in Irag and Afganistan etc. By "we" do you mean humanity or Americans?
It almost seems as though you're advocating that moving Americans off the planet would save humanity. The scary part is that it does have a certain perverse logic to it.
You're blaming slashdot for that statement? It was taken directly from the article on CIO magazines website.
Sounds like you've got your own set of biases going on.