Ok, I read it. It said two things as far as I can tell: 1. apt conflict resolution is not optimal 2. apt-get UI is not optimal in some situations
So, could you now tell me how "apt-get update" is harmful? Also, could you please explain how problem #2 is relevant here? It's pretty clear the apt-get UI isn't friendly on huge upgrades but how is that interesting when we are talking about Debian stable administration?
It's idealistic to want all software to be open - but for companies which pour a lot of intellectual property into their drivers and firmware, I find it understandable that they wouldn't want their work made available to competitors' products.
You call it idealistic, I call it practical (see below), but that's not the point. What I don't understand is why you are defending people who offer a closed source solution and market it as open source?
As far as idealism vs practicality goes, as an AC already responded "the bar has been raised": I am not going to give Netgear any bonus points for being "almost open". My Thinkpad and my netbook already run nicely without binary blobs (both are very stable, they suspend and resume reliably. I wonder why that is... could it be because idealism turned out to be practical in this case?). Anyway, I expect my next router after the WRT54GL croaks to do the same.
I've understood from talking to an importer that WRT54GL was enough of a success (not a major seller, but an extremely consistent performer that just keeps on selling), that the gateway manufacturers must have realized there is a market here...
I'm not surprised Netgear would totally fail it, though.
As far as I know, since the American Association of Petroleum Geologists changed their mind, there have been no scientific organizations of any importance who reject human influence on climate change.
In a recent study Doran & Zimerman concluded that there really isn't even any debate about the authenticity of global warming among those who understand long term climate processes... Practically everyone agrees that it happens. Take a look: http://tigger.uic.edu/~pdoran/012009_Doran_final.pdf
So... exactly what the are these people missing that only you are seeing?
...have it continue to work, without crappy performance, randomly rebooting itself, freezing, or slowly grinding to a halt over the course of a day or so.
Just to counter your data point: this is exactly the experience I've had with consumer router/APs with original firmware.
This reasoning just doesn't hold. Some netbooks already have 3G chips, I bet that will be a standard feature in all mobile computers in the near future. The result of this is that the network operators cannot control the clients.
It should be blindingly obvious to anyone that the network has to cope with rogue devices. Assuming that wireless clients are all well-behaved is a phenomenally stupid idea.
The "we're only protecting the user from excess charges" idea might hold water if the same companies weren't happy to send you insane roaming charges...
No-one is saying Office didn't have a serious UI design problem (hundreds of menus items in multiple levels makes that pretty obvious), and this is what the data proved.
The feedback data says nothing about how useful Ribbon is or might be. Sample size means nothing when you aren't actually measuring what you think you are...
I'm pretty entrenched on Debian as well so Moblin is a bit difficult to get used to, but you are wrong if you think "linux command line and all of its goodies" are somehow hidden on moblin: I usually have one zone (workspace) for xterm, which is not just available in the repos but preinstalled...
I assume you didn't actually mean "growth" but "sales". Anyway, picking a specific market segment (home in this case) is just as important as the geographical area... I'm sure Apple does a lot better at home than in the workplace.
The only figures I've seen for PC sales are the yearly IGD and Gartner studies (or rather, reports based on those). In those, I've never seen Apple over the 10% mark even in the US (example). In fact, Apple is only ever mentioned in the US numbers because it's not in the top 5 anywhere else...
Your appleinsider link didn't contain any relevant numbers as far as I can see (images don't load so maybe there was something there?).
You're right I was a off on the Mac's overall market share, I was thinking of recent sales figures - Mac sales make up about 14% of all PC sales today, which is an even bigger growth than I thought it was
You really need to start citing your numbers, because I'm not buying that one either;)
14% sounds insanely high compared to what I'm seeing (my experience is in several European countries). Are you sure your numbers aren't for the US? It's very common for US websites to quote figures without mentioning that the research only included sales the US.
Funnily enough, this is one of the reasons I use linux: I don't ever want to install a single driver again, I just don't have time to search for the right CD or use the godawful hardware support sites -- and then keep re-checking every few months just in case they update the crappy drivers...
As long as you pick the right hardware (and I have the opportunity to get exactly what I want), linux Just Works in manner that is far ahead of Windows. YMMV I suppose.
Yeah... buy quality hardware and it tends to work. The problem is that Intel wifi is 30-40% more expensive than the low end crap. Guess which ones the cheap-ass netbooks will get?
"This post isn't intended to be about politics" -- that's possible, but any sane ideas you possibly had are now clouded by the wackiness of the comments that followed that statement.
Could you please point to some references where half of the current US administration support a workers revolution, the dictatorship of the proletariat and in the end a "stateless state" where nothing is owned by anyone. I mean, those are key tenets in Marxism, so it should be easy to find examples if Obama and the crew are Marxists, right?
I really wouldn't know, I'm not a potential customer: I just happened to see the prices on the service desk while waiting for a clerk. The Ultimate edition upgrade is on their web shop as well if my word's not good enough for you: http://www.verkkokauppa.com/popups/prodinfo.php?id=13976 (only in Finnish but I'm sure you'll be able to find the price in there).
Heh, maybe somewhere it is. I just walked by the Windows isle in the local computer store yesterday and laughed at the upgrade price: 272 euros. At the current exchange rate that's almost $400.
However, seems to me that something like a merger of two foreign companies who both happen to do business in your country is rather a bit out of the purview of *another* country's authority.
Why would you think that? Oracle is totally free to buy anyone they want, but if they want to continue doing business in the largest integrated market in the world, they have to abide by the EU laws.
There was no insult in my post, sorry if it seemed that way. You mentioned the systems you use and that list is mostly totally irrelevant to todays version control. After that you have no basis for complaining about the lack of innovation.
More specifically: CVS is ancient, broken and slow to the point of unusability. VSS is clusterfuck, we agree on that. Implying that either of these is more reliable than git is a claim that really needs some backing up... MKS and StarTeam I have no first-hand experience with. I admit I've never even heard of MKS Source (and neither have my colleagues), but the fact that it doesn't do atomic operations makes it a toy, in my opinion. StarTeam on the other hand flunked on the first test I had: "How do I get my data out of there" so I didn't look further.
Clearcase is the only thing in your list that has some merit... It actually sort of works and has some nifty features no-one else has. Still, normal usage is a pain compared to git: it's slow, it doesn't work offline, multi-site support is a joke and it's sloooow. Apparently it's also an asolute pain to maintain. Did I mention it's dog-slow? In any case, there is a reason why git-clearcase bridges are so popular: people who are forced to work with clearcase use git to hide the uglyness...
Now to your comments:You say that none of the new SCMs do what you want. Fine, but that does not mean that there is no innovation in the field... Shouldn't that be self-evident?
As to the problems you see with git: I believe you said git does not meet your needs wrt to implementation, configuration, management, training, maintenance or reliability. Without _any_ details that's just fluff... I have no way to answer that.
Still, some comments: Training is a given, but I assume you didn't expect innovation without any changes. Reliability: suggesting that git is unreliable and implying CVS and VSS are, is just totally absurd in my opinion.
Remember: SCM is merely a tool, not an end.
Yeah. I take pride in the work I do and expect the best tools available. If my employer told me to work with CVS, I'd probably start looking for a new job. Not because working with CVS is impossible but because it's just a really, really bad sign if an employer doesn't give a skilled worker the best tools available... Linus said it better than I can:
For the first 10 years of kernel maintenance, we literally used tarballs and patches, which is a much superior source control management system than CVS is.
Would you have a link for that? As far as I know Finnish jews had full civil rights throughout the war (even if there was considerable pressure from Germany) and no Finnish jews were turned over to the Nazis. As far as I know, the biggest ruckus has been about deporting eight Austrian jew refugees. This was acknowledged and apologized by the prime minister only about ten years ago.
So... could you kindly provide some links about the hundreds of Finnish jews handed over to Gestapo?
I have had the pleasure of using, in no particular order: StarTeam, SVN, CVS, MKS, and ClearCase.
No offence, but hysterion is right: you are not in a position to comment on VCS innovation and have only yourself (and possibly your employer) to blame for a major part of the pain you have to endure.
svn is a vast improvement over rcs and your use case sounds fairly common so I'd guess that you are doing something wrong.
As a sidenote, terms like 'experimental folders' and 'other teams folders' sound really bad: if your source control was sane you wouldn't need 'experimental folders'... What you really want is a tool that makes branches so cheap you can always create new ones... Any time you need to experiment, you just create a new branch on your local repo (and you can work on the main branch at the same time if need be). If you want others to see the branch just push it to a server as a branch. If the experiment is good, merging into main branch is easy. It may not sound like much but trust me, it's what version control should have always been.
Git does the above very nicely, I assume other 'last gen' version control systems do as well.
Do you realize that you're a looking at it with 20/20 hindsight? Yes, the 3.5" floppy did all right but loads of other media did not. I've used 8" floppies, 5 1/4" floppies, Iomega zipdrives, several sorts of tape drives, half a dozen different memory card standards... none of those were seen as fringe technologies at the time.
In other words: No, all technology will not be an arcane relic in 16 years but _many_ technologies will be. The trick is choosing the right one.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, I read it. It said two things as far as I can tell:
1. apt conflict resolution is not optimal
2. apt-get UI is not optimal in some situations
So, could you now tell me how "apt-get update" is harmful?
Also, could you please explain how problem #2 is relevant here? It's pretty clear the apt-get UI isn't friendly on huge upgrades but how is that interesting when we are talking about Debian stable administration?
You call it idealistic, I call it practical (see below), but that's not the point. What I don't understand is why you are defending people who offer a closed source solution and market it as open source?
As far as idealism vs practicality goes, as an AC already responded "the bar has been raised": I am not going to give Netgear any bonus points for being "almost open". My Thinkpad and my netbook already run nicely without binary blobs (both are very stable, they suspend and resume reliably. I wonder why that is... could it be because idealism turned out to be practical in this case?). Anyway, I expect my next router after the WRT54GL croaks to do the same.
I've understood from talking to an importer that WRT54GL was enough of a success (not a major seller, but an extremely consistent performer that just keeps on selling), that the gateway manufacturers must have realized there is a market here...
I'm not surprised Netgear would totally fail it, though.
Dear AC,
As far as I know, since the American Association of Petroleum Geologists changed their mind, there have been no scientific organizations of any importance who reject human influence on climate change.
In a recent study Doran & Zimerman concluded that there really isn't even any debate about the authenticity of global warming among those who understand long term climate processes... Practically everyone agrees that it happens. Take a look: http://tigger.uic.edu/~pdoran/012009_Doran_final.pdf
So... exactly what the are these people missing that only you are seeing?
Just to counter your data point: this is exactly the experience I've had with consumer router/APs with original firmware.
This reasoning just doesn't hold. Some netbooks already have 3G chips, I bet that will be a standard feature in all mobile computers in the near future. The result of this is that the network operators cannot control the clients.
It should be blindingly obvious to anyone that the network has to cope with rogue devices. Assuming that wireless clients are all well-behaved is a phenomenally stupid idea.
The "we're only protecting the user from excess charges" idea might hold water if the same companies weren't happy to send you insane roaming charges...
No-one is saying Office didn't have a serious UI design problem (hundreds of menus items in multiple levels makes that pretty obvious), and this is what the data proved.
The feedback data says nothing about how useful Ribbon is or might be. Sample size means nothing when you aren't actually measuring what you think you are...
I'll wait until the obvious font problem is fixed.
I'm pretty entrenched on Debian as well so Moblin is a bit difficult to get used to, but you are wrong if you think "linux command line and all of its goodies" are somehow hidden on moblin: I usually have one zone (workspace) for xterm, which is not just available in the repos but preinstalled...
I assume you didn't actually mean "growth" but "sales". Anyway, picking a specific market segment (home in this case) is just as important as the geographical area... I'm sure Apple does a lot better at home than in the workplace.
The only figures I've seen for PC sales are the yearly IGD and Gartner studies (or rather, reports based on those). In those, I've never seen Apple over the 10% mark even in the US (example). In fact, Apple is only ever mentioned in the US numbers because it's not in the top 5 anywhere else...
Your appleinsider link didn't contain any relevant numbers as far as I can see (images don't load so maybe there was something there?).
You really need to start citing your numbers, because I'm not buying that one either ;)
14% sounds insanely high compared to what I'm seeing (my experience is in several European countries). Are you sure your numbers aren't for the US? It's very common for US websites to quote figures without mentioning that the research only included sales the US.
Funnily enough, this is one of the reasons I use linux: I don't ever want to install a single driver again, I just don't have time to search for the right CD or use the godawful hardware support sites -- and then keep re-checking every few months just in case they update the crappy drivers...
As long as you pick the right hardware (and I have the opportunity to get exactly what I want), linux Just Works in manner that is far ahead of Windows. YMMV I suppose.
Someone give the AC a +1 on my behalf...
LVM for linux has existed for years. Is the solaris feature somehow better than LVM snapshots?
Yeah... buy quality hardware and it tends to work. The problem is that Intel wifi is 30-40% more expensive than the low end crap. Guess which ones the cheap-ass netbooks will get?
"This post isn't intended to be about politics" -- that's possible, but any sane ideas you possibly had are now clouded by the wackiness of the comments that followed that statement.
Could you please point to some references where half of the current US administration support a workers revolution, the dictatorship of the proletariat and in the end a "stateless state" where nothing is owned by anyone. I mean, those are key tenets in Marxism, so it should be easy to find examples if Obama and the crew are Marxists, right?
I really wouldn't know, I'm not a potential customer: I just happened to see the prices on the service desk while waiting for a clerk. The Ultimate edition upgrade is on their web shop as well if my word's not good enough for you: http://www.verkkokauppa.com/popups/prodinfo.php?id=13976 (only in Finnish but I'm sure you'll be able to find the price in there).
So, what's with the suspicion?
Heh, maybe somewhere it is. I just walked by the Windows isle in the local computer store yesterday and laughed at the upgrade price: 272 euros. At the current exchange rate that's almost $400.
Why would you think that? Oracle is totally free to buy anyone they want, but if they want to continue doing business in the largest integrated market in the world, they have to abide by the EU laws.
There was no insult in my post, sorry if it seemed that way. You mentioned the systems you use and that list is mostly totally irrelevant to todays version control. After that you have no basis for complaining about the lack of innovation.
More specifically: CVS is ancient, broken and slow to the point of unusability. VSS is clusterfuck, we agree on that. Implying that either of these is more reliable than git is a claim that really needs some backing up... MKS and StarTeam I have no first-hand experience with. I admit I've never even heard of MKS Source (and neither have my colleagues), but the fact that it doesn't do atomic operations makes it a toy, in my opinion. StarTeam on the other hand flunked on the first test I had: "How do I get my data out of there" so I didn't look further.
Clearcase is the only thing in your list that has some merit... It actually sort of works and has some nifty features no-one else has. Still, normal usage is a pain compared to git: it's slow, it doesn't work offline, multi-site support is a joke and it's sloooow. Apparently it's also an asolute pain to maintain. Did I mention it's dog-slow? In any case, there is a reason why git-clearcase bridges are so popular: people who are forced to work with clearcase use git to hide the uglyness...
Now to your comments:You say that none of the new SCMs do what you want. Fine, but that does not mean that there is no innovation in the field... Shouldn't that be self-evident?
As to the problems you see with git: I believe you said git does not meet your needs wrt to implementation, configuration, management, training, maintenance or reliability. Without _any_ details that's just fluff... I have no way to answer that.
Still, some comments: Training is a given, but I assume you didn't expect innovation without any changes. Reliability: suggesting that git is unreliable and implying CVS and VSS are, is just totally absurd in my opinion.
Yeah. I take pride in the work I do and expect the best tools available. If my employer told me to work with CVS, I'd probably start looking for a new job. Not because working with CVS is impossible but because it's just a really, really bad sign if an employer doesn't give a skilled worker the best tools available... Linus said it better than I can:
It's not a Zeiss actually, it's just shit.
Would you have a link for that? As far as I know Finnish jews had full civil rights throughout the war (even if there was considerable pressure from Germany) and no Finnish jews were turned over to the Nazis. As far as I know, the biggest ruckus has been about deporting eight Austrian jew refugees. This was acknowledged and apologized by the prime minister only about ten years ago.
So... could you kindly provide some links about the hundreds of Finnish jews handed over to Gestapo?
No offence, but hysterion is right: you are not in a position to comment on VCS innovation and have only yourself (and possibly your employer) to blame for a major part of the pain you have to endure.
svn is a vast improvement over rcs and your use case sounds fairly common so I'd guess that you are doing something wrong.
As a sidenote, terms like 'experimental folders' and 'other teams folders' sound really bad: if your source control was sane you wouldn't need 'experimental folders'... What you really want is a tool that makes branches so cheap you can always create new ones... Any time you need to experiment, you just create a new branch on your local repo (and you can work on the main branch at the same time if need be). If you want others to see the branch just push it to a server as a branch. If the experiment is good, merging into main branch is easy. It may not sound like much but trust me, it's what version control should have always been.
Git does the above very nicely, I assume other 'last gen' version control systems do as well.
Do you realize that you're a looking at it with 20/20 hindsight? Yes, the 3.5" floppy did all right but loads of other media did not. I've used 8" floppies, 5 1/4" floppies, Iomega zipdrives, several sorts of tape drives, half a dozen different memory card standards... none of those were seen as fringe technologies at the time.
In other words: No, all technology will not be an arcane relic in 16 years but _many_ technologies will be. The trick is choosing the right one.