Please read the essay by Ian Murdoch that I linked to above. Personal computing simply does not fit with the practice of channeling all possible software options through one centralized source.
Repositories are a bandaid that IMO have now become the problem.
Either define a common platform that includes core GUI and audio functionality, or keep being ignored on the desktop.
Bytecode languages are just as much a problem, because the underlying problem that Ian describes is the lack of a known platform. If the user and the user-targetting ISV can't keep track of what libraries, interpreters and runtime environments come standard on a Linux-user's machine, then you can't easily package/sell/shop for software as "Linux compatible".
Expecting end-users to walk around with a list of high-level languages and runtime environments supported by their OS, just so they can purchase software is just stupid. Its really no better than asking them to remember a list of shared libraries. Just knowing the OS should be enough because that is its role.
Granted there may be an easy solution to all unix problems but they are not intuitive.
They aren't intuitive because they were built with an anti-GUI mindset. Even Xorg itself is anti-GUI, as the stupid thing doesn't know how to fall back to a framebuffer with standard res (like XGA) and present a configuration GUI to the user. Those 'icky' details are left for the distro people work out, and 80% of them just leave it to the user to handle manually while another 10% handle it badly.
GUIs must be employed extensively on PCs to make controls for commonly-used features discoverable. Otherwise, you end up with oxymoronic situations where a GUI like Xorg is useful mainly to CLI experts.
At the top of the social pyramid, of course, are the al-Maktoums and their cousins who own every lucrative grain of sand in the sheikhdom. Next, the native 15% percent of the population -- whose uniform of privilege is the traditional white dishdash -- constitutes a leisure class whose obedience to the dynasty is subsidized by income transfers, free education, and government jobs. A step below, are the pampered mercenaries: 150,000-or-so British ex-pats, along with other European, Lebanese, and Indian managers and professionals, who take full advantage of their air-conditioned affluence and two-months of overseas leave every summer.
However, South Asian contract laborers, legally bound to a single employer and subject to totalitarian social controls, make up the great mass of the population. Dubai lifestyles are attended by vast numbers of Filipina, Sri Lankan, and Indian maids, while the building boom is carried on the shoulders of an army of poorly paid Pakistanis and Indians working twelve-hour shifts, six and half days a week, in the blast-furnace desert heat.
Dubai, like its neighbors, flouts ILO labor regulations and refuses to adopt the international Migrant Workers Convention. Human Rights Watch in 2003 accused the Emirates of building prosperity on "forced labor." Indeed, as the British Independent recently emphasized in an exposé on Dubai, "The labour market closely resembles the old indentured labour system brought to Dubai by its former colonial master, the British."
"Like their impoverished forefathers," the paper continued, "today's Asian workers are forced to sign themselves into virtual slavery for years when they arrive in the United Arab Emirates. Their rights disappear at the airport where recruitment agents confiscate their passports and visas to control them"
They provide a healthcare environment that operates much less expensively (less waste) overall than the US "system". That cannot be considered a subsidy.
An alternative to using flash is to burn the floppy's image to a CD. But you will probably need to add your data files to a DOS boot image before burning it.
Are not Daryl McBride and his brother lawyers? It seems to me they are prolonging the suit in order to drain SCO's coffers (and those of anyone with an anti-Linux interest willing to fund them) into their own pockets.
ReiserFS 3.x supports extended attributes (metadata) and ReiserFS 4.x supports that in spades with all sorts of database-like possibilities.
As for filesystems joining data with executables at the hip, all I have to say is it sounds a lot like OLE, ActiveX, etc. and I shudder to think how it might be abused.
I tend to agree. Switching USB devices between machines is easier.
Even Firewire has builtin multi-host support and daisy-chaining. I can plug my iBook into the back of my FW hard drive, and get access to both the LAN/Internet and the drive plus any other FW devices on the bus. I only have to dismount the drive on the desktop system in order for the iBook to be able to see the partitions.
Gigabit ethernet is also very nice between multiple computers and network drives, esp. if you need long cables.
People hate being offered items that are "free". To most, that word usually translates as "promotional item" or "stuffed full of ads and marketing surveys".
I think offering them a "Safety Disc" or "Security Disc" will sound a lot more practical / no-nonsense. Use it as a failsafe when system trouble strikes, or to scan for rootkits and other malware, or keep yourself protected from Internet criminals.
If you don't opt for Subversion, consider the rsync-like tool Unison. It can synchronize both-ways at once and their site has tips for syncing 3+ machines.
Will unison behave correctly if used transitively? That is, if I synchronize both between host1:dir and host2:dir and between host2:dir and host3:dir at different times? Are there any problems if the "connectivity graph" has loops?
This mode of usage will work fine. As far as each "host pair" is concerned, filesystem updates made by Unison when synchronizing any other pairs of hosts are exactly the same as ordinary user changes to the filesystem. So if a file started out having been modified on just one machine, then every time Unison is run on a pair of hosts where one has heard about the change and the other hasn't will result in the change being propagated to the other host. Running unison between machines where both have already heard about the change will leave that file alone. So, no matter what the connectivity graph looks like (as long as it is not partitioned), eventually everyone will agree on the new value of the file.
The only thing to be careful of is changing the file again on the first machine (or, in fact, any other machine) before all the machines have heard about the first change -- this can result in Unison reporting conflicting changes to the file, which you'll then have to resolve by hand. The best topology for avoiding such spurious conflicts is a star, with one central server that synchronizes with everybody else.
http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/
So basically you just run Unison against the same folders between arbitrary different machines and the new stuff will propagate back and forth as needed. It should always 'just work' if only one copy of your file heirarchy is being used at a time; otherwise it may report a conflict where you decide which side is preferred to propagate from.
If his system is 2 yrs old, it could be Panther. That means using rsyncX instead of rsync; it's what I use. If you want snapshot-like backups from rsync, then use rsnapshot (it uses rsync, so on a pre-10.4 system you'll need to replace rsync with the rsyncX version).
If Leopard is on the horizon, then just use the Timewarp(?) snapshot tool built into the OS.
If you want a full image backup done efficiently, then CCC (Carbon Copy Cloner) is the free GUI tool of choice.
Other great options: DAR, rdiff-backup, Unison, and a tar variant called 'xtar'.
These ALL handle resource forks in their current versions. Of the above, rsync and rsnapshot create full-use backups (folders you can browse), CCC creates a volume you can mount or even boot, and the rest create some type of archive file. You may need Darwin Ports or Fink to easily install some, like rdiff-backup.
IMO the above are the best-of-the-best free tools, and are very competitive with commercial stuff (and I wouldn't buy any at this point with Apple adding robust GUI backup to the OS).
There is already a superior VOIP standard in wide use: IAX2. This is the protocol used between Asterisk routers, and is also supported directly by a growing number of phones (and providers like VOIPJet). It does NAT traversal and generally just works.
For small-medium sized businesses Xandros is a good alternative to SuSE, I'd say, having moved between the two myself. Xandros can be configured extensively through the GUI, but the control panel is much more coherent than SuSE's; the former also wins hands-down for effective samba configuration.
FWIW, this Xandros 4.1 Professional Edition seems to be the replacement for Xandros Business Edition; they are both aimed at desktops. The only thing really new for Xandros niche-wise is their enterprise-level server.
Slashdot Mirror
++ Informative
Interesting.
But can you tell me what business ISPs have blocking whole IP blocks?
Python is a nice language, I agree.
However it doesn't come standard with a GUI toolkit. Even Java is closer to providing a desktop platform.
Please read the essay by Ian Murdoch that I linked to above. Personal computing simply does not fit with the practice of channeling all possible software options through one centralized source.
Repositories are a bandaid that IMO have now become the problem.
Either define a common platform that includes core GUI and audio functionality, or keep being ignored on the desktop.
...nor does it help the ISV bridge that last chasm to the user's desktop.
Why? Because GNU/Linux is a platform that HAS no GUI, much less a desktop.
Yeesh.
Bytecode languages are just as much a problem, because the underlying problem that Ian describes is the lack of a known platform. If the user and the user-targetting ISV can't keep track of what libraries, interpreters and runtime environments come standard on a Linux-user's machine, then you can't easily package/sell/shop for software as "Linux compatible".
Expecting end-users to walk around with a list of high-level languages and runtime environments supported by their OS, just so they can purchase software is just stupid. Its really no better than asking them to remember a list of shared libraries. Just knowing the OS should be enough because that is its role.
They aren't intuitive because they were built with an anti-GUI mindset. Even Xorg itself is anti-GUI, as the stupid thing doesn't know how to fall back to a framebuffer with standard res (like XGA) and present a configuration GUI to the user. Those 'icky' details are left for the distro people work out, and 80% of them just leave it to the user to handle manually while another 10% handle it badly.
GUIs must be employed extensively on PCs to make controls for commonly-used features discoverable. Otherwise, you end up with oxymoronic situations where a GUI like Xorg is useful mainly to CLI experts.
Ubuntu is still its own OS (as are the other distros): See Ian Murdoch essay.
As such, no platform exists for PC software vendors to target.
They provide a healthcare environment that operates much less expensively (less waste) overall than the US "system". That cannot be considered a subsidy.
...an 'educational' TV station for gradeschools which pumps out ads to a captive audience.
...then you are a "malware carrier".
An alternative to using flash is to burn the floppy's image to a CD. But you will probably need to add your data files to a DOS boot image before burning it.
Are not Daryl McBride and his brother lawyers? It seems to me they are prolonging the suit in order to drain SCO's coffers (and those of anyone with an anti-Linux interest willing to fund them) into their own pockets.
Settle down there little doobie.
ReiserFS 3.x supports extended attributes (metadata) and ReiserFS 4.x supports that in spades with all sorts of database-like possibilities.
As for filesystems joining data with executables at the hip, all I have to say is it sounds a lot like OLE, ActiveX, etc. and I shudder to think how it might be abused.
I tend to agree. Switching USB devices between machines is easier.
Even Firewire has builtin multi-host support and daisy-chaining. I can plug my iBook into the back of my FW hard drive, and get access to both the LAN/Internet and the drive plus any other FW devices on the bus. I only have to dismount the drive on the desktop system in order for the iBook to be able to see the partitions.
Gigabit ethernet is also very nice between multiple computers and network drives, esp. if you need long cables.
Hey, some people think Santa is sexy!
People hate being offered items that are "free". To most, that word usually translates as "promotional item" or "stuffed full of ads and marketing surveys".
I think offering them a "Safety Disc" or "Security Disc" will sound a lot more practical / no-nonsense. Use it as a failsafe when system trouble strikes, or to scan for rootkits and other malware, or keep yourself protected from Internet criminals.
http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/
So basically you just run Unison against the same folders between arbitrary different machines and the new stuff will propagate back and forth as needed. It should always 'just work' if only one copy of your file heirarchy is being used at a time; otherwise it may report a conflict where you decide which side is preferred to propagate from.
Here is my script for rsyncX that handles resource forks- Note the list of excludes you can edit starting with
If his system is 2 yrs old, it could be Panther. That means using rsyncX instead of rsync; it's what I use. If you want snapshot-like backups from rsync, then use rsnapshot (it uses rsync, so on a pre-10.4 system you'll need to replace rsync with the rsyncX version).
If Leopard is on the horizon, then just use the Timewarp(?) snapshot tool built into the OS.
If you want a full image backup done efficiently, then CCC (Carbon Copy Cloner) is the free GUI tool of choice.
Other great options: DAR, rdiff-backup, Unison, and a tar variant called 'xtar'.
These ALL handle resource forks in their current versions. Of the above, rsync and rsnapshot create full-use backups (folders you can browse), CCC creates a volume you can mount or even boot, and the rest create some type of archive file. You may need Darwin Ports or Fink to easily install some, like rdiff-backup.
IMO the above are the best-of-the-best free tools, and are very competitive with commercial stuff (and I wouldn't buy any at this point with Apple adding robust GUI backup to the OS).
There is already a superior VOIP standard in wide use: IAX2. This is the protocol used between Asterisk routers, and is also supported directly by a growing number of phones (and providers like VOIPJet). It does NAT traversal and generally just works.
If quantum effects can be important in muscle-fiber actuation, why not elsewhere?
No doubt, though, this involves the patent agreement between MS and Novell. I think this article can lend some perspective.
For small-medium sized businesses Xandros is a good alternative to SuSE, I'd say, having moved between the two myself. Xandros can be configured extensively through the GUI, but the control panel is much more coherent than SuSE's; the former also wins hands-down for effective samba configuration.
FWIW, this Xandros 4.1 Professional Edition seems to be the replacement for Xandros Business Edition; they are both aimed at desktops. The only thing really new for Xandros niche-wise is their enterprise-level server.