> This has been ascribed to Bluray's initially inferior codecs. That's impossible as both support _exactly_ the _same_ codecs, namely MPEG-4 AVC aka H.264, MPEG-2 and VC1.
The only possible reasons for possible lower image quality on Blueray discs could be that they are using inferior encoders, or are choosing an inferior codec as there are three to choose from.
TechWorld is running an article saying that Vista's graphics will not be in the kernel. The goal is obviously to improve reliability, alongside the plan to make most drivers run in user mode."... In broader terms, this makes Windows far more like Linux and Unix - and even the MacOS - where the graphics subsystem is a separate component, rather than being hard-wired into the OS kernel."
Yeah, running graphics drivers in kernel space is just plain ugly... Luckily for us Linux users, we can get full graphics acceleration by running the "userspace" NVIDIA kernel module;-) Certainly increases stability!
size/lib/modules/2.6.12-10-k7/volatile/nvidia.ko
text data bss dec hex filename 2476901 947920 6916 3431737 345d39
Freenet: Version 0.7 of Freenet aims to create a scalable darknet, where users only connect directly to other users they know and (at least marginally) trust. The core innovation in Freenet 0.7 will be to allow a globally scalable darknet, capable of supporting millions of users. (DEFCON 13 presentation by Ian Clarke and Oskar Sandberg)
Tor: Tor is a network of virtual tunnels that allows people and groups to improve their privacy and security on the Internet. It also enables software developers to create new communication tools with built-in privacy features. Tor provides the foundation for a range of applications that allow organizations and individuals to share information over public networks without compromising their privacy.
AmaroK music player -- The most feature-rich and polished music player on the Free Software platform.
Well, there are several iTunes clones for GNOME too. Unfortunately, most of them are just as resource hungry and unstable as AmaroK:o) So, I tend to stick with mplayer for playing music:-[
Seamless, transparent network file access on SMB, FTP, SSH and WebDav networks from _any_ KDE application.
I admire this in one way, as it has been far more integrated then the GNOME VFS. BUT, on the other hand I hate them both, since they are both unaccessible from a terminal. So, I tend to just mount the network filesystems anyway... a pitty GNOME and KDE didn't use some kind of other architecture which would allow access from a terminal (FUSE like).
Kaffeine -- The most polished FOSS movie player.
Well, imho the coolness of Kaffeine comes from external projects such as Xine.
That said, there are certainly a lot of really nice KDE applications. But, unfortunately, there are some really basic applications that keep annoying me. Such as KMail and its IMAP support. It crashes a lot on me, and seems to be slower than Evolution or Thunderbird. Most KMail users just tell me to use POP3 in KMail. KDE apps tend to crash more on my system than GNOME apps do. Which is rather annoying since everytime I want to give KDE a go, several apps crash and so I switch back.
And one annoying thing of both environments is that they eat _huge_ amounts of memory... At home I recently switched to IceWM -against my will- because I was running out of memory. I am doing development on this machine, and all these servers, the IDE and compilers all eat a lot of memory, so, as the desktop environment wasn't really aiding me in my work, I decided that was the most obvious part to kick out. (Which is one thing I really like about GNU/Linux, being able to kick stuff out when you want to.)
Consider next that the USA defends its citizens right to sell and buy Nazi material on ebay while it puts some non-US people in a prison in no-mansland without trial or even without accusation.
Many other countries ban certain materials from being sold to minors. I'm just pointing out that most don't consider this censorship per se, and often consider it a good thing, in order to diffuse the argument that "if children aren't allowed to play the games then they're being censored." This is not the case.
That depends. Who decides what children should be allowed to see? What if a government would forbid certain parts of history from being tutored at high schools for example? That could surely be considered as censorship imo. Ofcourse, I'm not saying that children should be allowed access to _everything_.
The violence could have been avoided if they had simply allowed the conference to proceed. So outlawing the speech lead to violence in that case.
I fear that view is a bit simplistic. Their would have been violence too if they would have been allowed to go on with their conference. The anarchists would have surely gone to that conference to express their freedom of speech, which would obviously lead to disagreements, anger and violence.
The ESRB is a board set up by the game industry itself. It is self-policing. The government has no involvement in it,
From the citizens point of view, that doesn't really matter. If you do not get access to the content, whether it was blocked by the goverment or by companies, that doesn't make a difference.
And banning children from certain innapropriate content, while consenting adults can freely play that content (and companies can freely publish that content) hardly constitutes censorship. That would be like saying that laws stating a 14 year old cant have sex with a 30 year old violate the 14 year old's rights (whereas most developed countries have statutory rape laws, and consider them a good thing).
Comparing a cartoonish hidden sexscene (*) to not only rape, but even the rape of children doesn't sound insightfull (as/. rates it) to me.
* And knowing that the cartoonish hidden sexscene was part of an ultra-violent gangstergame where your main objective is to kill either for money or for the "fun" of it makes it sound even more lame to me.
More specifically to your post title; what country offers more freedoms then the US? The socialist nations of the EU certainly don't. Socialism by definition rules itself out. Who? Some tribe in Africa? China? Brazil?
Now that's funny. Most of Western-Europe citizens enjoy a lot more freedom then the citizens of the US.
Tell me, if you go to a rockconcert in Saint Louis for example (as I have been there), you aren't allowed to drink a beer wherever you please in the concerthall. I even bought a _non_ alcohol beer -okay, I _know_ that non-alcoholic beer still contains some alcohol- as I had hoped I could drink this while standing near the stage, but alas.
What happens when you smoke a joint in the US? Well, here in Belgium we even have a state secretary who admits enjoying a joint now and then. He states this just as another person would say he enjoys some whiskey now and then or likes to smoke a cigar.
Why do you hear all these beeps on MTV? Haven't got the freedom to hear some cursewords?
Nudity on television. I'm not talking about pornography, just nudity. Like when someone takes a bath, it might happen that the person undresses before he gets in the tub. Well, in Europe, indeed she/he would be nude. The same with computer games. There's heaps of games which are extremely violent, and children there's no fuss about it. Then there's the famous GTA-SA scene and WOW major commotion. I'm not saying that it is good or bad that that scene was in that specific game, I'm just trying to illustrate that to me it seems stranges that so many extremely violent games and movies are produced in the US, while a bit of nudity is shunned (again, I'm not talking about pornography).
So, the only rights I'm aware of that the US citizens have which the Europeans lack is the right to buy weapons in supermarkets and the right to make racist propaganda. Now why is that so great?
So my point would be that no citizens on this world have absolute freedom, and neither would it be possible to build a society with total and absolute freedom. But, if I could pick and chose I'd rather give in the right to buy a gun in the supermarket and to spread hatefull propagana and get the other beforementioned freedoms instead.
Furthermore, you seem to have a very distorted view on life in Europe. What do you think this "evil socialism" does in Europe? Take away our freedom? No, it is there to prevent people falling into absolute poverty and ending in the gutter. If you get really sick here in Europe or if you lose your job, you will not end up being a beggar on the streets. Other then that it means that there are certain things the goverment pays for (through taxes ofcourse) such as a free public library, free education, (nearly) free access to universities (100EUR/year or so for the lowest incomes), cheap public transportation that covers the entire continent and other similar nice things.
That said, I'm not for or against handing over the root-DNS servers to the U.N. or keeping it handled by the US. Frankly, I don't really care. And, as it is working now, so I don't see a reason for change. Although I must confess that the problems with the delivery of electricity in California has given me some doubts about the capability of the US to deal even with the most basic supplies for its citizens. And the handling of the crisis in New Orleans doesn't show great management capabilities either. So, maybe there haven't been awful problems with DNS yet, if they come, will the US be capable of handling them? I'm not really sure anymore.
The internet that you are trying to "steal" control over wouldn't exist today without the US, but it would exist today without your nation. It's was our money, businesses, and our citizens that made it what it is today. Others helped, but the overwhelming load was carried by Americans. Starting with our scientists, our pentagon, our MONEY, all the way down to our businesses (e.g. Cisco) and then working its way down
As far as I know, the parting of the Red Sea -if it happened at all- wasn't related to fileformats in any way:-)
Furthermore, you seem to miss the point about XML. There's huge differences between XML and.ini files. First of all, XML allows you to store information in a more structured way: you can store it a tree, whereas a.ini file allows only one level deep "trees". Obviously, and specifically for large projects, having just one nesting level is very limiting in structuring the configuration information. This is likely one of the reasons Microsoft switched to the registry which allows the information to be stored in a treestructure, similar to XML. And projects such as Apache already use a XML-like format because it makes structuring configuration information a lot easier.
Secondly, XML _is_ self-documenting while.ini files aren't. XML schemas -such as DTDs- describe what an adhering XML file should look like. So, in an XML based configuration file, you could demand that the user provides a username and petname for example, by creating a DTD demanding this information to be available. Furthermore, self-documenting formats are in generally considered files which describe the field that are contained in them. So, as an example, file "a.dat" would not be self-documenting while file "b.dat" would be self documenting: a.dat: 123:12:adf:0:1:dog
And yes, self-documenting formats are indeed less compact. But the "bloat" serves a purpose: Understanding the format is easy.
So, XML does indeed solve several things. Yes, files adhering to the XML specification are a lot less compact then a file containing the pure information would be, but the "bloat" is there for a reason. I'm not a XML "fanboy" at all, and I'm certainly critical in regards to the justifyability of using XML for any and all formats, but for config files, I don't see a real problem. There's projects encoding large datafiles intirely in XML, thereby tripling the size of the datafiles... that's indeed something the phrase "unnecessary bloat" could be applied for. But for configfiles... With the average size of a configfile being what... 1K, 2K, 10K? And disks being many gigabytes large...
Lastly, XML files are both readable and editable by humans as it's a true textformat. It's not a binary file which is truly unreadable and uneditable by userfriendly texteditors, nor is it someting like a BASE64 encoded binary file. So, again I can't agree with that point either.
So, to summarize:
1. XML files are easier to store information consistently, as they allow you to put more structure in your stored information by storing it in a tree structure, which.ini files can't do. 2. XML files are self-documenting, the DTD files describe the contents the XML file should follow, and shows the user which options are available as well. 3. XML files _are_ readable and editable by humans as they are plain textfiles. 4. XML files are "bloated" because they offer _more_ then plain textfiles or minimally structured files such as.ini files.
So, the.ini-fanboys shouldn't complain to much about their beloved.ini fileformat, as the main/user and designer of that format replaced the format too.
As a geek, I can attest that the *nix arena isn't much better....
But don't expect it to be worth a whole lot for the immediate future... as no one outside the server arena really codes for SMP.
As a geek, I am surprised by your remarks. This geek -and many others I assume- tends to compile an awful lot. Thus, "make -jX" comes to mind immediately, being an example of something which will imply a terribly exciting performance-enhancement.
Compiling TAO in 4 hours instead of 8! Yay!
Futhermore, ffmpeg supports multiple threads, so for multimedia encoding users should experience a significant performance increase.
So, these are both very CPU intensive tasks which would get a tremendous performance benefit.
They are forcing out all other architectural options by demonstrating a high activity development cycle for only one architecture.
Indeed, that is a true problem. And IMHO the only problem.
I don't know about Unbuntu, do they practice that same release practices of Unstable, Testing, Stable? If not, then they are no better than Mandrake, FC2, or the rest...
Sure they are: They're bringing the nice things of Mandrake, FC, SuSE to the Debian world. A lot of people truly _like_ Madrakish desktops...
AFAIK they are giving back all changes. And certainly, as all their software _is_ Free Software, Debian will certainly benefit from it. The usability modifications the Ubuntu-devs are making to the GNOME desktop and apps like Synaptic will surely make it into the release following Sarge (... probably somewhere in 2009;-)
Now imagine if Ubuntu had instead been a group of developers who decided to combine their efforts with the Debian group to improve Debian? We'd have a better Debian and no incompatibility between two popular distros and two communities.
Not really possible. The IMHO biggest differences between Debian and Ubuntu are their release schedule and package inclusion policy:
Debian doesn't fix a release date and releases "when it's ready" (kinda like DNF;-) Ubuntu on the other hand has _fixed_ release dates. To be able to reach those fixed release dates, they support a small subset of the system architectures and a subset of the packages.
Debian seems to accept software packages only if they have been tested for a considerable amount of time. Ubuntu takes the latest stable release of a software package. For a desktop user, this is very often more attractive.
So, if you want to create a nice, up-to-date Debian based desktop system, you can either try to convince the 1000 (?) Debian developers that they should change their ways, change the release procedure, and change the criteria for deciding the inclusion of packages. Or, you can just start a new distro, and do as you please:-) which seems a lot easier (read: doable) to me...
Exactly that. It's testing. There are no security-fixes but instead daily massive upgrades.
Let's say that you'd want to install a Debian system for someone and have it autoupdated. With Debian Stable this works very nicely. You add a crontab entry and get just the bugfixes. With Testing or Unstable, you would get maybe 1G per week, clearly not feasible for all desktop-users.
takis@eros:~$ uname -a Linux eros 2.6.9-ac12-eros #2 Thu Dec 9 01:49:39 CET 2004 i586 unknown
And our student server seems to be running fine, ignoring that "reboot bug":
-(~)> uptime
8:56pm up 74 days, 5:07, 2 users, load average: 1.12, 0.70, 0.66 -(~)> uname -a Linux lumumba 2.4.29-rc1 #1 Sat Jan 15 14:32:12 CET 2005 i686 unknown
Well, then don't bitch when someone writes up an article complaining that their requests aren't heard!
It's Eugenia who's bitching about the lack of developers writing software -they don't need or like themselves- for free for other people.
Sorry, if you don't want to hear any complaints about your product, keep it on your private network and never release it. Just because it's a volunteer effort doesn't mean squat.
No, I prefer the software being released just as it is. If I like, I'll use it, if I don't like it, I will STFU.
We have been ruled by dozens of other countries throughout history (France, Spain, The Netherlands, Austria-Hungaria,...). Belgium has ALWAYS been a melting pot of different cultures.
So please enlighten me, what do you mean by "native Belgians"? There ARE no native Belgians! The country Belgium isn't even 200 years old yet! It was *created* by England as a barrier between France and Germany!
Now, these people may be coming from other cultures than before, but so what? Similar migrations happend in the past and it only strengthened us.
I totally agree on all of the above, but I find it rather funny that you're explaining this to -apparantly- a US citizen:-)
Belgium has been trampled so often by foreign invaders/settlers/liberators that the gene pool is quite thoroughly mixed.
Ah! Finally some intelligent remarks on/.
I wish more people would understand that the roots of most European people -except maybe the Basque people- are very hard to trace because of the numerous migrants that have occurred during at least the last few thousand years.
Indeed, the Belgian government has actually banned a party that favors reducing immigration.
The Belgian government -unfortunately- has not banned that party. It was the independent judiciary system that convicted the party for being racist.
It is rather obvious that the party consists of convinced racists. The problem is that many people in Belgium don't see being racist as a problem anymore...:-(
Here's a picture http://www.blokwatch.be/images/userimage/dillen.jp g of the founder of the party we're talking about called "Vlaams Blok" and now being renamed because of their conviction to "Vlaams Belang".
One reputable analyst, Barbara Simpson, noted that the foreign-born population (including those with Belgian citizenship) now exceeds the native-born population.
Total nonsense. The article you point to even claims the opposite. Only about 10% of the population of Belgium has foreign roots.
In the US immigrants constitute 99.9% of the population, and yes, they did destroy the original culture and values.
Slashdot Mirror
> This has been ascribed to Bluray's initially inferior codecs.
That's impossible as both support _exactly_ the _same_ codecs, namely MPEG-4 AVC aka H.264, MPEG-2 and VC1.
The only possible reasons for possible lower image quality on Blueray discs could be that they are using inferior encoders, or are choosing an inferior codec as there are three to choose from.
Yeah, running graphics drivers in kernel space is just plain ugly... Luckily for us Linux users, we can get full graphics acceleration by running the "userspace" NVIDIA kernel module
size
text data bss dec hex filename
2476901 947920 6916 3431737 345d39
Add this line to your /etc/apt/sources.list: ./
e 0_0.1.0-1_i386.debe -dev_0.1.0-1_i386.deb
deb http://lumumba.uhasselt.be/takis/breezy
Or fetch the individual packages:
http://lumumba.uhasselt.be/~takis/breezy/libjingl
http://lumumba.uhasselt.be/~takis/breezy/libjingl
Freenet: Version 0.7 of Freenet aims to create a scalable darknet, where users only connect directly to other users they know and (at least marginally) trust. The core innovation in Freenet 0.7 will be to allow a globally scalable darknet, capable of supporting millions of users. (DEFCON 13 presentation by Ian Clarke and Oskar Sandberg)
Tor: Tor is a network of virtual tunnels that allows people and groups to improve their privacy and security on the Internet. It also enables software developers to create new communication tools with built-in privacy features. Tor provides the foundation for a range of applications that allow organizations and individuals to share information over public networks without compromising their privacy.
Well, there are several iTunes clones for GNOME too. Unfortunately, most of them are just as resource hungry and unstable as AmaroK
I admire this in one way, as it has been far more integrated then the GNOME VFS. BUT, on the other hand I hate them both, since they are both unaccessible from a terminal. So, I tend to just mount the network filesystems anyway... a pitty GNOME and KDE didn't use some kind of other architecture which would allow access from a terminal (FUSE like).
Well, imho the coolness of Kaffeine comes from external projects such as Xine.
That said, there are certainly a lot of really nice KDE applications. But, unfortunately, there are some really basic applications that keep annoying me. Such as KMail and its IMAP support. It crashes a lot on me, and seems to be slower than Evolution or Thunderbird. Most KMail users just tell me to use POP3 in KMail. KDE apps tend to crash more on my system than GNOME apps do. Which is rather annoying since everytime I want to give KDE a go, several apps crash and so I switch back.
And one annoying thing of both environments is that they eat _huge_ amounts of memory... At home I recently switched to IceWM -against my will- because I was running out of memory. I am doing development on this machine, and all these servers, the IDE and compilers all eat a lot of memory, so, as the desktop environment wasn't really aiding me in my work, I decided that was the most obvious part to kick out. (Which is one thing I really like about GNU/Linux, being able to kick stuff out when you want to.)
Did they really? I thought they just moved them to the registry lookalike GConf? (regedit being replaced by gconf-editor)
France + Germany is not Europe.
Consider next that the USA defends its citizens right to sell and buy Nazi material on ebay while it puts some non-US people in a prison in no-mansland without trial or even without accusation.
That depends. Who decides what children should be allowed to see? What if a government would forbid certain parts of history from being tutored at high schools for example? That could surely be considered as censorship imo. Ofcourse, I'm not saying that children should be allowed access to _everything_.
I fear that view is a bit simplistic. Their would have been violence too if they would have been allowed to go on with their conference. The anarchists would have surely gone to that conference to express their freedom of speech, which would obviously lead to disagreements, anger and violence.
From the citizens point of view, that doesn't really matter. If you do not get access to the content, whether it was blocked by the goverment or by companies, that doesn't make a difference.
Comparing a cartoonish hidden sexscene (*) to not only rape, but even the rape of children doesn't sound insightfull (as
* And knowing that the cartoonish hidden sexscene was part of an ultra-violent gangstergame where your main objective is to kill either for money or for the "fun" of it makes it sound even more lame to me.
Now that's funny. Most of Western-Europe citizens enjoy a lot more freedom then the citizens of the US.
Tell me, if you go to a rockconcert in Saint Louis for example (as I have been there), you aren't allowed to drink a beer wherever you please in the concerthall. I even bought a _non_ alcohol beer -okay, I _know_ that non-alcoholic beer still contains some alcohol- as I had hoped I could drink this while standing near the stage, but alas.
What happens when you smoke a joint in the US? Well, here in Belgium we even have a state secretary who admits enjoying a joint now and then. He states this just as another person would say he enjoys some whiskey now and then or likes to smoke a cigar.
Why do you hear all these beeps on MTV? Haven't got the freedom to hear some cursewords?
Nudity on television. I'm not talking about pornography, just nudity. Like when someone takes a bath, it might happen that the person undresses before he gets in the tub. Well, in Europe, indeed she/he would be nude. The same with computer games. There's heaps of games which are extremely violent, and children there's no fuss about it. Then there's the famous GTA-SA scene and WOW major commotion. I'm not saying that it is good or bad that that scene was in that specific game, I'm just trying to illustrate that to me it seems stranges that so many extremely violent games and movies are produced in the US, while a bit of nudity is shunned (again, I'm not talking about pornography).
So, the only rights I'm aware of that the US citizens have which the Europeans lack is the right to buy weapons in supermarkets and the right to make racist propaganda. Now why is that so great?
So my point would be that no citizens on this world have absolute freedom, and neither would it be possible to build a society with total and absolute freedom. But, if I could pick and chose I'd rather give in the right to buy a gun in the supermarket and to spread hatefull propagana and get the other beforementioned freedoms instead.
Furthermore, you seem to have a very distorted view on life in Europe. What do you think this "evil socialism" does in Europe? Take away our freedom? No, it is there to prevent people falling into absolute poverty and ending in the gutter. If you get really sick here in Europe or if you lose your job, you will not end up being a beggar on the streets. Other then that it means that there are certain things the goverment pays for (through taxes ofcourse) such as a free public library, free education, (nearly) free access to universities (100EUR/year or so for the lowest incomes), cheap public transportation that covers the entire continent and other similar nice things.
That said, I'm not for or against handing over the root-DNS servers to the U.N. or keeping it handled by the US. Frankly, I don't really care. And, as it is working now, so I don't see a reason for change. Although I must confess that the problems with the delivery of electricity in California has given me some doubts about the capability of the US to deal even with the most basic supplies for its citizens. And the handling of the crisis in New Orleans doesn't show great management capabilities either. So, maybe there haven't been awful problems with DNS yet, if they come, will the US be capable of handling them? I'm not really sure anymore.
As far as I know, the parting of the Red Sea -if it happened at all- wasn't related to fileformats in any way :-)
.ini files. First of all, XML allows you to store information in a more structured way: you can store it a tree, whereas a .ini file allows only one level deep "trees". Obviously, and specifically for large projects, having just one nesting level is very limiting in structuring the configuration information. This is likely one of the reasons Microsoft switched to the registry which allows the information to be stored in a treestructure, similar to XML. And projects such as Apache already use a XML-like format because it makes structuring configuration information a lot easier.
.ini files aren't. XML schemas -such as DTDs- describe what an adhering XML file should look like. So, in an XML based configuration file, you could demand that the user provides a username and petname for example, by creating a DTD demanding this information to be available. Furthermore, self-documenting formats are in generally considered files which describe the field that are contained in them. So, as an example, file "a.dat" would not be self-documenting while file "b.dat" would be self documenting:
o me_user=1: favorite_pet=dog
.ini files can't do. .ini files.
.ini-fanboys shouldn't complain to much about their beloved .ini fileformat, as the main/user and designer of that format replaced the format too.
Furthermore, you seem to miss the point about XML. There's huge differences between XML and
Secondly, XML _is_ self-documenting while
a.dat:
123:12:adf:0:1:dog
b.dat:
userid=123:age=12:name=adf:vi_user=0:gn
And yes, self-documenting formats are indeed less compact. But the "bloat" serves a purpose: Understanding the format is easy.
So, XML does indeed solve several things. Yes, files adhering to the XML specification are a lot less compact then a file containing the pure information would be, but the "bloat" is there for a reason. I'm not a XML "fanboy" at all, and I'm certainly critical in regards to the justifyability of using XML for any and all formats, but for config files, I don't see a real problem. There's projects encoding large datafiles intirely in XML, thereby tripling the size of the datafiles... that's indeed something the phrase "unnecessary bloat" could be applied for. But for configfiles... With the average size of a configfile being what... 1K, 2K, 10K? And disks being many gigabytes large...
Lastly, XML files are both readable and editable by humans as it's a true textformat. It's not a binary file which is truly unreadable and uneditable by userfriendly texteditors, nor is it someting like a BASE64 encoded binary file. So, again I can't agree with that point either.
So, to summarize:
1. XML files are easier to store information consistently, as they allow you to put more structure in your stored information by storing it in a tree structure, which
2. XML files are self-documenting, the DTD files describe the contents the XML file should follow, and shows the user which options are available as well.
3. XML files _are_ readable and editable by humans as they are plain textfiles.
4. XML files are "bloated" because they offer _more_ then plain textfiles or minimally structured files such as
So, the
As a geek, I am surprised by your remarks. This geek -and many others I assume- tends to compile an awful lot. Thus, "make -jX" comes to mind immediately, being an example of something which will imply a terribly exciting performance-enhancement.
Compiling TAO in 4 hours instead of 8! Yay!
Futhermore, ffmpeg supports multiple threads, so for multimedia encoding users should experience a significant performance increase.
So, these are both very CPU intensive tasks which would get a tremendous performance benefit.
Indeed, that is a true problem. And IMHO the only problem.
Sure they are: They're bringing the nice things of Mandrake, FC, SuSE to the Debian world. A lot of people truly _like_ Madrakish desktops...
AFAIK they are giving back all changes. And certainly, as all their software _is_ Free Software, Debian will certainly benefit from it. The usability modifications the Ubuntu-devs are making to the GNOME desktop and apps like Synaptic will surely make it into the release following Sarge (... probably somewhere in 2009 ;-)
Not really possible. The IMHO biggest differences between Debian and Ubuntu are their release schedule and package inclusion policy:
So, if you want to create a nice, up-to-date Debian based desktop system, you can either try to convince the 1000 (?) Debian developers that they should change their ways, change the release procedure, and change the criteria for deciding the inclusion of packages. Or, you can just start a new distro, and do as you please
Exactly that. It's testing. There are no security-fixes but instead daily massive upgrades.
Let's say that you'd want to install a Debian system for someone and have it autoupdated. With Debian Stable this works very nicely. You add a crontab entry and get just the bugfixes. With Testing or Unstable, you would get maybe 1G per week, clearly not feasible for all desktop-users.
Strange, my tiny PentiumMMX 32MB RAM server is still running, ignoring "the nasty reboot bug" which has been in there for 10 years...
takis@eros:~$ uptime
20:55:12 up 64 days, 36 min, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.00
takis@eros:~$ uname -a
Linux eros 2.6.9-ac12-eros #2 Thu Dec 9 01:49:39 CET 2004 i586 unknown
And our student server seems to be running fine, ignoring that "reboot bug":
-(~)> uptime
8:56pm up 74 days, 5:07, 2 users, load average: 1.12, 0.70, 0.66
-(~)> uname -a
Linux lumumba 2.4.29-rc1 #1 Sat Jan 15 14:32:12 CET 2005 i686 unknown
Sure, I should have ignored your flamebait...
And even with NetBSD, it seems only i386 and SPARC64 have binary packages for the 2.0 release:
p kg src/archivers/file-roller/README.html
ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-current/
Or am I looking at the wrong spot?
It's Eugenia who's bitching about the lack of developers writing software -they don't need or like themselves- for free for other people.
No, I prefer the software being released just as it is. If I like, I'll use it, if I don't like it, I will STFU.
I totally agree on all of the above, but
I find it rather funny that you're explaining
this to -apparantly- a US citizen
Ah! Finally some intelligent remarks on
I wish more people would understand that the roots of most European people -except maybe the Basque people- are very hard to trace because of the numerous migrants that have occurred during at least the last few thousand years.
The typo was in the 100000, not the percentages. About 10% of the Belgian population has foreign roots.
The Belgian government -unfortunately- has not banned that party. It was the independent judiciary system that convicted the party for being racist.
It is rather obvious that the party consists of convinced racists. The problem is that many people in Belgium don't see being racist as a problem anymore...
Here's a picture http://www.blokwatch.be/images/userimage/dillen.j
of the founder of the party we're talking about called "Vlaams Blok" and now being renamed because of their conviction to "Vlaams Belang".
Total nonsense. The article you point to even claims the opposite. Only about 10% of the population of Belgium has foreign roots.
In the US immigrants constitute 99.9% of the population, and yes, they did destroy the original culture and values.