Yes, but you get to live with old software. If that makes you happy, fine, but I can't do it. I need the latest and greatest of many things for compliance, and if I were using Debian I would have to roll it myself in many cases.
You seem to be confused. We are talking about Debian "unstable", which for the most part does have the "latest and greatest" (the few exceptions are generally things where the maintainers must be very careful, and these are typically available by using the "experimental" archive as well, e.g., gnome 2.10).
Stable is fine. Unstable sucks wind. That's the point, it's unstable.
No. In fact, it's not particularly unstable, and actually rather rocks. By far the worst thing about it is the name, as it confuses the uninformed into thinking it's dangerous.
I've never hosed a Gentoo system with emerge in stable. I have had some marathon sessions fixing particular fine points, but the system always recovers.
And in over 5 years of updating Debian unstable daily, 99.9% of the time there have been simply no problems at all -- and I've never had any lossage nearly as bad as you seem to have had using Gentoo "stable" (I've certainly never "hosed a system").
The reason for this is that almost all Debian maintainers are really, really, really careful about what they what they do, and put a lot of thought and effort into making even "unstable" as solid as possible.
don't be surprised if most people move on to other projects/distros where "just works" is more important than "ohh, new shiny"
From what I can see "oooh, shiny!" appears to be the driving force behind most linux distros -- and the reason many users choose what they do. MS-windows and macos pretty much have commuter-passes on the oooh-shiny-wagon...
Indeed, I'd say that "boring solidity" is actually a strength of debian.
I think the problem lies with you, not with Branden.
There are a lot of obnoxious twits in the FOSS world, who are quick to flame for silly reasons -- but Branden is not one of them. He neither ignores people nor throws around gratuitous insults. If you compare him to a real flame-master (read a BSD development list sometime...) he seems almost boring.
He isn't afraid to call a spade a spade though, nor to use humor, and he apparently doesn't subscribe to white-bread corporate standards for discourse.
I personally find his honesty, straight-forwardness, and humor refreshing, and think his election is a very good thing for Debian.
I suspect that it has more to do with the fact that they're a large conservative Japanese company than whether it makes sense or not.
I work for a large Japanese hardware company, and it's definitely in our interest to be supportive of free-software, but many parts of the company drag their heels and kick and scream at every opportunity. By and large, they have no real arguments on their side, but for many people -- especially those who are far removed from the actual product (e.g. legal) -- the idea of "giving something away" is simply an anaethema, regardless of the clear benefits of doing so.
Despite this, we do in fact turn out free software in support of our hardware, in increasing quantities, but it will be a while before the nether reaches of company culture catch up with reality...
The "interceptor" (or whatever the jargon of the week is) gets called, does its thing, returns, and your original function runs. This is nothing, lisp does this with defadvice, even emacs lisp can do this (and indeed emacs lisp makes good use of it).
Note that in Emacs lisp, "advice" (as it's called) is considered a debugging tool, and a way for users to add otherwise unanticipated functionality, but it's not acceptable for code in the official Emacs sources to use it.
The reason is that it makes the program hard to understand, as there's no obvious link from the "advised" code to the "advice".
In general the way such code is rewritten to make it acceptable for inclusion is to add an explicit hook invocation at the place which was advised -- this keeps the flexibility, while making the connection more explicit (a programmer reading the source can see that there are potential calls to external code at that point).
The effect on the consumer market may not be the biggest problem for MS -- it may be the erosion of their developer culture. MS's notably progressive stance on such issues is an attractive point for many MS employees. I suppose maybe it's inevitable that MS will eventually be indistinguishable from any other big conservative company, but I think it will definitely hurt them.
Hmmm... My final year in grade-school was in a new school (constructed in 1976), and the walls were all sorts of cheerful shades of yellow and orange, with just a bit of white to rest your eyes. The school layout was sort of cool too, all the classrooms surrounded a large open-plan library (none of the "endless corridor" feeling most schools have). I remember really liking that school, so I suppose there was something to it.
When was your school built? It seems like a very mid-70s sort of thing to do...:-)
What I can't understand is how these companies are planning to deal with the enormous amount of heat that will be dissipated from a multi-CPU system, and not make the console sound like a jet engine at the same time. Anyone able to shed any light on that?
Each company will deal with the problem in its own distinctive way:
Xbox: Giant fan (in fact, an actual jet-engine compressor!)
Nintendo: System layout elegantly designed for optimal airflow; slight underclocking
I'm sure that you, like many CS grads, assume that you *deserve* a job programming fresh out of school. The reality is that most of us who became professional developers do have to pay our dues in support.
Wow, things must really be bad these days...
I graduated in the late 80s, and I don't think I knew anyone who didn't have a "real" (development) job after graduation. Even the not-so-great students simply had less desirable development jobs (e.g., in giant cube farm for IBM).
Have things really deteriorated to the point where CS grads have to dig ditches first to get a foot in?!?
1) Running Ubuntu is better than running Debian sid, hands down.
Why?
I actually run Ubuntu (hoary hedgehog), mostly because I was curious what the difference was (vs. Debian sid).
What I found out was: there's really not much difference.
The main improvement seems to be Xorg instead of Xfree86, and I suppose even that's not really a big deal for most people (unless you want to play with the "Composite" extension, which I did). Almost every other package seems pretty much the same; if do an apt-get upgrade, the latest package versions tend to ping-pong between unbuntu and debian on a daily basis (I use both repositories simultaneously).
[One thing I definitely don't like is that for some reason freetype font rendering seems to have gotten a bit worse by upgrading to ubuntu.]
I've no doubt that ubuntu will make a nice release, but all the furor seems a bit... misplaced. Ubuntu is not really "Super debian"; it's more like "Debian with a bit of a polish."
Keep in mind that Ubuntu is very, very, close to Debian unstable -- Ubuntu concentrates on those core packages they, they don't somehow maintain the whole universe themselves. If Debian were "shut down" (not going to happen anyway, but...), Ubuntu and other Debian-derived distros would definitely suffer.
Ubuntu is cool (I run a Debian/Ubuntu mix), but in concentrating on the glamorous stuff they end up getting a bit more credit than they deserve.
Unless you're programming in assembly code (something I gave up doing before most/. readers were born) who cares?
It's not just the human programmer that's affected -- more importantly, a compiler is much more likely to produce reasonable code for a typical risc architecture.
Often it comes down to a lack of bottlenecks: on an x86 machine, the paucity of registers, the use of a single set of condition flags, etc., all make it hard for the compiler to emit the best code. On something like the IBM risc archs, there are enough registers to give the compiler some breathing room, the multiple condition bits allow it more freedom in scheduling, and so on.
The only thing that matters in an ISA is how it effects how much computrons you get per limiting-factor
Sure, but the ability of the compiler to actually make use of the hardware is a prime factor in this calculation.
Plus, if you have the Apple OS, why go through the trouble of installing linux on the computer? The Apple OS has more support for more things right now.
Sigh. If you don't really care what OS you're running, then sure, why not run OSX? If you want to use a device which requires proprietary drivers, then maybe you have to.
But some of us do care, don't like Apple's GUI (the main reason somebody would want to run OSX), don't need to use proprietary devices, and are clueful enough that installing a new OS is Not A Problem.
So... why not install a nicer OS? Installation is a one-time pain that will make life generally happier afterwards. While OSX is a pretty good solution for a large class of people, it's hardly some kind of ultimate good.
An aside: when I first saw a mac mini in a store, I was shocked to see what an awful blurry mess the font-rendering was, far less readable than what freetype produces on my home system. Is OSX font-rendering mis-configured by default or something?!? C'mon guys, this is your bread-n-butter!
look at how harsly the south deals with students that want some changes and you see it will never happen.
In fairness though, the students are often every bit as nuts as the police putting them down. I have a friend who went to college in S.Korea, and changing your route to avoid molotov-throwing protestors was apparently just one of those things you did some days.
In general I get the feeling that subtlety is not a strong point of most Koreans.
My god, yes. This "watermarking" is insanely annoying; I flat-out refuse to watch anything that is so defaced (no matter how dreadful the program itself).
I'm running a Debian system with all of the following in my/etc/apt/sources.list:
Debian sid
Debian experimental
Ubuntu main
Unbuntu "universe"
In general, everything works wonderfully.
I've encountered one real bug -- a duplicated file in some python packages -- and just have that package on hold.
With a few packages I have to prevent it from trying to use the newer Debian-experimental versions, as the Ubuntu dependencies don't like it.
Right now I have 3 packages on hold for the above reasons. If you're basically aware of how packages and versions work (enough to judge whether you should put a package on hold or downgrade to an older version to satisfy some dependency -- using aptitude is a huge advantage here, as it seems to have far more advanced features for tracking down problems and trying out scenarios than other package managers), I'd say go for it.
[Note that while I tons of packages installed, I don't have anything from KDE or xfce, so I don't know if there are problems there or not.]
As for using Unbuntu instead of Debian, I have no idea, but I certainly don't want to do that.
that offers the best of both worlds (or at least could, would probably need a revision or two)
Your parenthetical comment is spot on -- the Librie's display technology is certainly something to watch, but the Librie itself sucks.
The display is very slow to update, which is theoretically fine for a book, but Sony doesn't seem to have taken this into account at all when designing the user-interface -- it's constantly trying to display conventional GUI elements... slooooooowly (imagine how frustrating menus that take 3 seconds to pop up would be). The whole thing has a dreadful rushed-to-market-without-much-thought feel to it.
Really to make a device like this work, you've got to completely rethink the UI to suit the medium, and Sony didn't even try.
Another thing that freaks me out about the Librie is Sony's focus on DRM'd limited-time content. That sort of model could be OK, but given Sony's generally dreadful history of trying to squeeze as much money as possible out of consumers with locked-down proprietary standards, I sure as hell don't want Sony to design it. Frankly, I don't want the hardware manufacturers to be involved with content at all; today's evil media conglomerates view any new technology as a tool to throw away all the rights traditionally associated with older media, so I want as much competition in the process as possible.
but as they apparently have changed their ways recently
They'll do what they must to win a fight, but I wouldn't bet on their basic attitude having changed.
Sure, wide-screen is great for movies and tv, but the whole point was that what's good for movies/games/tv isn't what's good for books.
If you're willing to scroll around on the page, then it doesn't matter so much -- but frankly, for reading, scrolling a window around on the page really sucks. That's why you want a high-res but low color (to make the cost palatable) display, with a form factor that approximates a normal book page. I think the real problem with the PSP's screen (besides the resolution being too low), is actually that it's so long-and-skinny, which means you either have very long lines (hard to read) with lots of vertical scrolling (yuck), or very short lines (easier to read, but past a certain point become ridiculous).
I've no doubt that some people will use the PSP for e-books, but it's definitely a case of "I've got a PSP, why not use it for...", rather than the PSP being especially well-suited to the task.
His current company is Big Briar, which make very cool (albeit expensive) effects pedals.
His company is now called Moog Music -- previously there was somebody else who owned the rights to the name "Moog", but apparently he's won them back. I'm not sure if he's retired the name Big Briar or whether they simply exist in parallel.
Their signature product is a modern version of the classic Minimoog synthesizer, called the Minimoog Voyager -- very, very cool (albeit expensive:-).
Also check out Dave Smith's current company, Dave Smith Instruments. They make a similarly cool, though quite different (and much less expensive) synthesizer called the Evolver, and are currently gearing up for a keyboard version.
One interesting thing is that both Moog and Dave Smith clearly have taken to heart the experience of having had their respective companies fail in the '70s, and seem to be trying very hard to avoid the excesses which caused those previous failures. Until fairly recently, I think D.S.I. was basically a one-man company (and still, if you send email with a problem or suggestion, it will probably be Dave Smith who answers...).
The PSP looks good on TV because it has a fairly colorful and bright display, but it doesn't seem particularly well suited to being an e-book reader:
The screen is the wrong orientation (you can turn it, but then the controls are awkward), and the long-and-skinny format a bit odd
The screen is somewhat low-resolution for displaying a reasonable amount of text (though fine for games). I'm not sure how much better you can do with a cheap unit, but a higher-resolution grey-scale display would be much more suitable.
The PSP is really heavy, it's like a brick, and most of this weight is probably due to components which are completely unnecessary for reading (massive batteries, lots of chips for high-speed graphics).
It's very expensive -- ideally an e-book reader should be something cheap enough, or robust enough, to just throw in your pocket and always have handy.
They also switch " and @ so to type a " you press shift-2 and to type a @ you press shift-' (which is weird)
It sounds like the layout many old typewriters and pre-IBM personal computers used (with " above 2, the parentheses above 8 and 9 instead of 9 and 0, etc), as did the famous ASR33 teletype:-). Japanese computer keyboards still use it.
I think the basic layout of current american keyboards came from the IBM selectric typewriter (at least that's the first place I recall seeing it).
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Yes, but you get to live with old software. If that makes you happy, fine, but I can't do it. I need the latest and greatest of many things for compliance, and if I were using Debian I would have to roll it myself in many cases.
You seem to be confused. We are talking about Debian "unstable", which for the most part does have the "latest and greatest" (the few exceptions are generally things where the maintainers must be very careful, and these are typically available by using the "experimental" archive as well, e.g., gnome 2.10).
Stable is fine. Unstable sucks wind. That's the point, it's unstable.
No. In fact, it's not particularly unstable, and actually rather rocks. By far the worst thing about it is the name, as it confuses the uninformed into thinking it's dangerous.
I've never hosed a Gentoo system with emerge in stable. I have had some marathon sessions fixing particular fine points, but the system always recovers.
And in over 5 years of updating Debian unstable daily, 99.9% of the time there have been simply no problems at all -- and I've never had any lossage nearly as bad as you seem to have had using Gentoo "stable" (I've certainly never "hosed a system").
The reason for this is that almost all Debian maintainers are really, really, really careful about what they what they do, and put a lot of thought and effort into making even "unstable" as solid as possible.
Have you ever actually used Debian, BTW?
don't be surprised if most people move on to other projects/distros where "just works" is more important than "ohh, new shiny"
From what I can see "oooh, shiny!" appears to be the driving force behind most linux distros -- and the reason many users choose what they do. MS-windows and macos pretty much have commuter-passes on the oooh-shiny-wagon...
Indeed, I'd say that "boring solidity" is actually a strength of debian.
I think the problem lies with you, not with Branden.
There are a lot of obnoxious twits in the FOSS world, who are quick to flame for silly reasons -- but Branden is not one of them. He neither ignores people nor throws around gratuitous insults. If you compare him to a real flame-master (read a BSD development list sometime...) he seems almost boring.
He isn't afraid to call a spade a spade though, nor to use humor, and he apparently doesn't subscribe to white-bread corporate standards for discourse.
I personally find his honesty, straight-forwardness, and humor refreshing, and think his election is a very good thing for Debian.
I suspect that it has more to do with the fact that they're a large conservative Japanese company than whether it makes sense or not.
I work for a large Japanese hardware company, and it's definitely in our interest to be supportive of free-software, but many parts of the company drag their heels and kick and scream at every opportunity. By and large, they have no real arguments on their side, but for many people -- especially those who are far removed from the actual product (e.g. legal) -- the idea of "giving something away" is simply an anaethema, regardless of the clear benefits of doing so.
Despite this, we do in fact turn out free software in support of our hardware, in increasing quantities, but it will be a while before the nether reaches of company culture catch up with reality...
The "interceptor" (or whatever the jargon of the week is) gets called, does its thing, returns, and your original function runs. This is nothing, lisp does this with defadvice, even emacs lisp can do this (and indeed emacs lisp makes good use of it).
Note that in Emacs lisp, "advice" (as it's called) is considered a debugging tool, and a way for users to add otherwise unanticipated functionality, but it's not acceptable for code in the official Emacs sources to use it.
The reason is that it makes the program hard to understand, as there's no obvious link from the "advised" code to the "advice".
In general the way such code is rewritten to make it acceptable for inclusion is to add an explicit hook invocation at the place which was advised -- this keeps the flexibility, while making the connection more explicit (a programmer reading the source can see that there are potential calls to external code at that point).
The effect on the consumer market may not be the biggest problem for MS -- it may be the erosion of their developer culture. MS's notably progressive stance on such issues is an attractive point for many MS employees. I suppose maybe it's inevitable that MS will eventually be indistinguishable from any other big conservative company, but I think it will definitely hurt them.
Hmmm... My final year in grade-school was in a new school (constructed in 1976), and the walls were all sorts of cheerful shades of yellow and orange, with just a bit of white to rest your eyes. The school layout was sort of cool too, all the classrooms surrounded a large open-plan library (none of the "endless corridor" feeling most schools have). I remember really liking that school, so I suppose there was something to it.
:-)
When was your school built? It seems like a very mid-70s sort of thing to do...
Each company will deal with the problem in its own distinctive way:
they layer in new software that I don't want or that break my older apps.
Well surely XP is "more substantial" in at least this respect...
I'm sure that you, like many CS grads, assume that you *deserve* a job programming fresh out of school. The reality is that most of us who became professional developers do have to pay our dues in support.
Wow, things must really be bad these days...
I graduated in the late 80s, and I don't think I knew anyone who didn't have a "real" (development) job after graduation. Even the not-so-great students simply had less desirable development jobs (e.g., in giant cube farm for IBM).
Have things really deteriorated to the point where CS grads have to dig ditches first to get a foot in?!?
1) Running Ubuntu is better than running Debian sid, hands down.
... misplaced. Ubuntu is not really "Super debian"; it's more like "Debian with a bit of a polish."
Why?
I actually run Ubuntu (hoary hedgehog), mostly because I was curious what the difference was (vs. Debian sid).
What I found out was: there's really not much difference.
The main improvement seems to be Xorg instead of Xfree86, and I suppose even that's not really a big deal for most people (unless you want to play with the "Composite" extension, which I did). Almost every other package seems pretty much the same; if do an apt-get upgrade, the latest package versions tend to ping-pong between unbuntu and debian on a daily basis (I use both repositories simultaneously).
[One thing I definitely don't like is that for some reason freetype font rendering seems to have gotten a bit worse by upgrading to ubuntu.]
I've no doubt that ubuntu will make a nice release, but all the furor seems a bit
Keep in mind that Ubuntu is very, very, close to Debian unstable -- Ubuntu concentrates on those core packages they, they don't somehow maintain the whole universe themselves. If Debian were "shut down" (not going to happen anyway, but...), Ubuntu and other Debian-derived distros would definitely suffer.
Ubuntu is cool (I run a Debian/Ubuntu mix), but in concentrating on the glamorous stuff they end up getting a bit more credit than they deserve.
"We are still looking at AMD; they have fairly good technology," said Rollins.
Always amusing to see "AMD totally rox0rs!1!" in utterly-bought corporate-tool speak.
Of course we'll know Intel's toast if he subsequently pulls out the E-word: "We're excited to be working with AMD technology."
Unless you're programming in assembly code (something I gave up doing before most /. readers were born) who cares?
It's not just the human programmer that's affected -- more importantly, a compiler is much more likely to produce reasonable code for a typical risc architecture.
Often it comes down to a lack of bottlenecks: on an x86 machine, the paucity of registers, the use of a single set of condition flags, etc., all make it hard for the compiler to emit the best code. On something like the IBM risc archs, there are enough registers to give the compiler some breathing room, the multiple condition bits allow it more freedom in scheduling, and so on.
The only thing that matters in an ISA is how it effects how much computrons you get per limiting-factor
Sure, but the ability of the compiler to actually make use of the hardware is a prime factor in this calculation.
Plus, if you have the Apple OS, why go through the trouble of installing linux on the computer? The Apple OS has more support for more things right now.
... why not install a nicer OS? Installation is a one-time pain that will make life generally happier afterwards. While OSX is a pretty good solution for a large class of people, it's hardly some kind of ultimate good.
Sigh. If you don't really care what OS you're running, then sure, why not run OSX? If you want to use a device which requires proprietary drivers, then maybe you have to.
But some of us do care, don't like Apple's GUI (the main reason somebody would want to run OSX), don't need to use proprietary devices, and are clueful enough that installing a new OS is Not A Problem.
So
An aside: when I first saw a mac mini in a store, I was shocked to see what an awful blurry mess the font-rendering was, far less readable than what freetype produces on my home system. Is OSX font-rendering mis-configured by default or something?!? C'mon guys, this is your bread-n-butter!
look at how harsly the south deals with students that want some changes and you see it will never happen.
In fairness though, the students are often every bit as nuts as the police putting them down. I have a friend who went to college in S.Korea, and changing your route to avoid molotov-throwing protestors was apparently just one of those things you did some days.
In general I get the feeling that subtlety is not a strong point of most Koreans.
Frequently, the people that understand a work of art least of all are the people that created it in the first place.
Er, however in this case the competition for that honor is studio executives and movie tie-in video game makers.
My god, yes. This "watermarking" is insanely annoying; I flat-out refuse to watch anything that is so defaced (no matter how dreadful the program itself).
In general, everything works wonderfully.
I've encountered one real bug -- a duplicated file in some python packages -- and just have that package on hold.
With a few packages I have to prevent it from trying to use the newer Debian-experimental versions, as the Ubuntu dependencies don't like it.
Right now I have 3 packages on hold for the above reasons. If you're basically aware of how packages and versions work (enough to judge whether you should put a package on hold or downgrade to an older version to satisfy some dependency -- using aptitude is a huge advantage here, as it seems to have far more advanced features for tracking down problems and trying out scenarios than other package managers), I'd say go for it.
[Note that while I tons of packages installed, I don't have anything from KDE or xfce, so I don't know if there are problems there or not.]
As for using Unbuntu instead of Debian, I have no idea, but I certainly don't want to do that.
that offers the best of both worlds (or at least could, would probably need a revision or two)
... slooooooowly (imagine how frustrating menus that take 3 seconds to pop up would be). The whole thing has a dreadful rushed-to-market-without-much-thought feel to it.
Your parenthetical comment is spot on -- the Librie's display technology is certainly something to watch, but the Librie itself sucks.
The display is very slow to update, which is theoretically fine for a book, but Sony doesn't seem to have taken this into account at all when designing the user-interface -- it's constantly trying to display conventional GUI elements
Really to make a device like this work, you've got to completely rethink the UI to suit the medium, and Sony didn't even try.
Another thing that freaks me out about the Librie is Sony's focus on DRM'd limited-time content. That sort of model could be OK, but given Sony's generally dreadful history of trying to squeeze as much money as possible out of consumers with locked-down proprietary standards, I sure as hell don't want Sony to design it. Frankly, I don't want the hardware manufacturers to be involved with content at all; today's evil media conglomerates view any new technology as a tool to throw away all the rights traditionally associated with older media, so I want as much competition in the process as possible.
but as they apparently have changed their ways recently
They'll do what they must to win a fight, but I wouldn't bet on their basic attitude having changed.
Sure, wide-screen is great for movies and tv, but the whole point was that what's good for movies/games/tv isn't what's good for books.
...", rather than the PSP being especially well-suited to the task.
If you're willing to scroll around on the page, then it doesn't matter so much -- but frankly, for reading, scrolling a window around on the page really sucks. That's why you want a high-res but low color (to make the cost palatable) display, with a form factor that approximates a normal book page. I think the real problem with the PSP's screen (besides the resolution being too low), is actually that it's so long-and-skinny, which means you either have very long lines (hard to read) with lots of vertical scrolling (yuck), or very short lines (easier to read, but past a certain point become ridiculous).
I've no doubt that some people will use the PSP for e-books, but it's definitely a case of "I've got a PSP, why not use it for
His current company is Big Briar, which make very cool (albeit expensive) effects pedals.
:-).
His company is now called Moog Music -- previously there was somebody else who owned the rights to the name "Moog", but apparently he's won them back. I'm not sure if he's retired the name Big Briar or whether they simply exist in parallel.
Their signature product is a modern version of the classic Minimoog synthesizer, called the Minimoog Voyager -- very, very cool (albeit expensive
Also check out Dave Smith's current company, Dave Smith Instruments. They make a similarly cool, though quite different (and much less expensive) synthesizer called the Evolver, and are currently gearing up for a keyboard version.
One interesting thing is that both Moog and Dave Smith clearly have taken to heart the experience of having had their respective companies fail in the '70s, and seem to be trying very hard to avoid the excesses which caused those previous failures. Until fairly recently, I think D.S.I. was basically a one-man company (and still, if you send email with a problem or suggestion, it will probably be Dave Smith who answers...).
They also switch " and @ so to type a " you press shift-2 and to type a @ you press shift-' (which is weird)
:-). Japanese computer keyboards still use it.
It sounds like the layout many old typewriters and pre-IBM personal computers used (with " above 2, the parentheses above 8 and 9 instead of 9 and 0, etc), as did the famous ASR33 teletype
I think the basic layout of current american keyboards came from the IBM selectric typewriter (at least that's the first place I recall seeing it).