That, and the fact that McDonnell Douglas no longer exists as a company anymore. Surprisingly, no one here noticed that they merged with Boeing back in August 1997. The military group is called McDonnell Aircraft and Missile Systems, and they kept MD's logo, but it's Boeing now.
I found a rather useful program I'm using at college that'd work well in a HS environment too...called "Due Yesterday" - it does assignment/grade tracking, and the interface is easy. one tap to create an assignment, scribble in the info, two taps when it's done, and you can store your grades in it.
It's free (not open-sourced, AFAICT)...try any of the Palm software places...
Problem with random meta-moderation
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Moderation Ideas
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The problem I see with interspersing M2 moderation at random into the day's supply of comments is that a meta-moderator then has to go through everything in order to meta-mod. I'd like to help with it, but I don't have the time to read every comment that goes through here. I hit the current M2 page, rate the moderators, and I'm done. Intersperse it, and I either a) waste time reading everything or b) don't moderate at all.
Actually, you don't even need to have control over Sendmail (or any other MTA). There's a Perl script you can use which will do the necessary lookups, and can be called from within Procmail, so you can either filter or/dev/null it to your heart's content. I'll post a URL once I can find it.
Well, there ya go. Godwin's Law has been invoked...move along, nothing to see here, folks.
(refer to www.uiuc.edu/~tskirvin/faqs/godwin.faq)
1. What is Godwin's Law? Godwin's Law is a natural law of Usenet named after Mike Godwin (godwin@eff.org) concerning Usenet "discussions". It reads, according to the Jargon File: As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.
4. That still doesn't answer my question. What does it *MEAN*? The Law is generally used on Usenet as an indicator of whether a thread has gone on too long, who's playing fair and who's just slinging mud, and who finally gets to "win" the discussion. It has, over time, become the closest thing to an impartial moderator that Usenet can get.
Although GCC is one of the most portable compilers, the RTL generation routines aren't well suited to the register-poor x86 architecture. The main difference, however, is the code scheduler. GCC doesn't do much P6 style optimization, where VC++ in conjuction with Vtune from intel is quite an effective optimization tool for the x86...
Well, just get pgcc (the Pentium/P-II optimization patches) patches for egcs - I rebuilt stuff like GNOME and XFree86, and saw significant performance increases - at least 20% faster performance. CPU intensive stuff like The GIMP and XMMS run faster as well.
Redhat makes it a little easier for newbies to get hardware going (just my impression, suse had great hardware autodetection, but didnt find my wierd stuff:[) without having to recompile the kernel so much. Its configuring programs and RPM managment to me seemed HORRIBLE. I cannot understand how this came to be so popular. I would only recommend Redhat to people new to *Computers*. 2/5 Debian, after using SuSE and redhat feels soooo nice. Forget dselect, it is worse than any package manager in SuSE or Redhat, stick with dpkg -i [packagename] and apt!!! Apt is great.
Well, like everything in Linux, there's more than one way to do anything. Don't like GnoRPM? Me either - I just `rpm -Uvh filename.rpm`. If it's on an ftp server? No problem - if I really wanted to, I could write a wrapper script that tries to use an RPM I've got locally, and if there's a newer version, FTP it in.
Debian is good if you already know a bit about computers and partitioning and stuff, it seems the most "linuxy" dist. To get hardware going you dont use any horrible sndconfig or whatever programs, you just do an easy, powerfull kernel compile (im sure redhat can be the same here, but debian doesnt have all that extra useless software). To configure a program you start up vi in/etc. Debian is verrrry stable unlike redhat or even suse and works nicely on my old 486 25 as a gateway. I would recommend Debian for anyone wanting to run a "neat" and "elegant" dist. It gets 6/5:). Anyway, im really not suprised that SuSE has bigger sales than redhat considering how much better it is.
RedHat unstable? Granted, 6.0 had a few flaws, but a few upgraded packages have made my systems even more stable than 5.2. And hey, if you don't want to use sndconfig or anything like that, no big deal. I configured my soundcard using make xconfig, and editing my isapnp.conf in good old vim. You don't have to use the GUI tools - I generally avoid them since I like to stare at the guts of my system's configuration.
Companies are just going to have to deal with this. When they put up total bullshit they will be called on it. The era of one way top down communications is over.
This part is very true - when anyone (business entity, organization, or person) pulls a stunt like this, they should be getting called on it - BUT NOT IN THE WAY THOSE PEOPLE DID . If you're going to tell someone they're wrong, you really ought to have something better than calling them a "Berlin whore" (to quote one of the messages).
The only adjective I can think of to describe all of this is "sad". It's sad that people chose to respond like that - and now they've unwittingly become spokespeople for the Linux community, whether the rest of us like it or not. Do we really want to portray the community as a whole in that immature manner? If I wanted e-mail like that, I'd rewind about 8 years to junior high school.
The sad thing is that many of the people posting that garbage aren't idiots. If they were sitting in a conference room talking to Mindcraft, they wouldn't be like that - but put them behind a keyboard, and it's like a rewind to grade-school playground fights.
I'll bet it has a lot to do with the CD-ROM you're ripping from. A lot of drives (especially IDE) don't do good digital audio extraction (DAE). If you're getting pops and jumps in the sound, that's the problem. Try cdparanoia under Linux (don't have URL handy, sorry) - it does its own error correction, and I've never had a bad rip with it, short of a disc that looked like it was stored in 60-grit sandpaper for a while.
As far as the underwater sounds, that's the fault of your MP3 encoder - try a different one, or encode at a higher bit rate (I'd recommend at least 160Kbps, and preferably 256Kbps) to eliminate this. Some encoders just sound like crap. I've had good results with BladeEnc, though.
Re:Problems I've had with RH 6 (mostly gnome relat
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4. Something in gnome litters core dumps everywhere.
gmc or panel, probably - upgrading to a newer version helped. The 1.0 RPMs that shipped with RH6 are pretty good, but they're a lot more stable in current incarnation.
5. I've seen several cases of "slow login syndrome". When you log into X w/gnome, it inexplicably takes forever to load the window manager and gnome stuff. Once things get started, speed is ok. The syndrome persists even across sessions, which makes sense, but weirder still, you can cure it: switch to a console and kill gnome-session manually. Next time you log in, no problem.
I encountered a similar problem, then I compiled the RPM files myself from source (and threw in the PentiumPro optimizations of PGCC) for gnome-libs and gnome-core, along with WindowMaker. Now, it starts up quickly enough for me.
Except that the source RPM doesn't contain any real source.:) If you take a look into the SRPM file, there's a spec file, and the tarball you normally download from netscape's servers. All the RPM build does in this case is copy the files into a directory tree, and make the binary RPM. There's no recompile done - Netscape 4.x is only free in the "free beer" sense.
Rock solid compared to what? The GNOME stuff shipped with RedHat 6.0 is hardly perfect, but as far as core functionalities, it's light-years ahead of Windows. I haven't had any bugs in RH6 that rendered my system anywhere near unusable, and I've been running it since the day it became available for download (and I was running Starbuck almost since it had been released).
Heck, if we're to evaluate this by the strictest of standards, then Netscape 4.x and KDE aren't release-ready on my system, since they both bomb out (although NS 4.6 has done well so far).
I used KDE for about a month on ym box, and decided that as post-1.0 stabilizations rolled out, I liked GNOME more and more...it just works more the way I work, which is ultimately what's important. You can argue technical superiority with me until I'm blue in the face, but I've tried both environments for an extended period, and I like GNOME.
1) Gnome would quit and take X with it 2) Netscape crashed consistantly (waybe not RH's fault) 3) xconfigurator chowed my settings a few times during reconfiguration, leading to a busted X 4) Minor small stuff
I've experienced #1 to a certain extent, but not to the point of crashing X. I'm running WindowMaker 0.53.0, and occasionally the panel would curl up and die, but it would respawn a new one 50% of the time. The other 50% was a Ctl-Alt-Backspace.
Netscape crashing is hardly RedHat's fault. All the RPM spec file does is unpack the.tar.gz file anyone can download from Netscape's servers, put the files into the RPM tree, and create the package - they're not doing anything to the source.
As far as xconfigurator, I've never used it under 6.0 - I like XF86Setup much better.
I have had minor issues, like the fact that my hard drive throughput went down the drain - apparently, it didn't try to include optimizations. But, reading the hdparm(8) manpage helped, and I'm smokin' again. Overall, RH6 has been quite stable for me.
I take exception to CmdrTaco's statement that bandwidth is more expensive then postage. It is far cheaper to send something digitally then to use sailmail. Not only to you have to pay USPS but there is all costs (and time) involved in packaging and creating/copying the media you are sending. You add all the up and you can see that sailmail is very expensive and very inefficient (unless you are sending massive amounts of data concurrently). Do the math... figure out how much effort and money it would take to send out 5000 copies of a Greatful Dead single via sailmail. But then everybody on/. knows that and that is why we have all abandoned using sailmail in favor of sending messages via email and downloading our music via MP3.
Depends on what format you're sending in, of course. If I'm sending out a Dave Matthews concert in 128Kbps MP3 files, we're talking 150MB per complete download. That's not too bad for a person with a reasonably fat pipe.
The problem is that a lot of us have picky ears - I can tell when music (especially live music) has been MP3'd. So, I get concerts using Shorten, which is a high-speed lossless algorithim. It compresses 1.75:1, so a 2.5 hour concert is roughly 1GB. When you talk about large scale distribution, (even 50 is large scale), that much bandwidth isn't cheap. I can stick 3CDs in a single jewel case and mail it for under $2.
MP3 is nice to preview music, but with the quality of a lot of these recordings, I wouldn't want to burn a CD from MP3s when there's something better.
What do you think DVD and VideoCD hardware decoders do? Video CD is MPEG-I, and DVD movies are stored using MPEG-II.
Of course, it's not as though MP3 decoding should be rough on a reasonably fast machine. My 333 Celeron typically has loads less than 1% while playing using mpg123 or x11amp. Comparably, running WinAmp over on my windows partiton typically uses ~10% CPU.
The problem is that adding a specialized MP3 decoder eats up yet another slot in the case (unless you make it a USB/FireWire thingy). I'm down to one PCI/ISA slot on my ATX (w/ AGP) mainboard, and once I buy a modem next month, it's full.
A potentially bigger problem is that you've got to redo all the MP3 players out there to support the decoders, and you've got to settle on a standard hardware decoding method, so we don't have to have 5 different versions of x11amp.
Don't get too excited yet, man. Take a look at the full text of the opinion. The justice's opinion doesn't cover a blanket lifting of the encryption regulations, regardless of what judicial circuit you're in.
"We emphasize the narrowness of our First Amendment holding. We do not hold that all software is expressive. Much of it surely is not. Nor need we resolve whether the challenged regulations constitute content-based restrictions, sub-ject to the strictest constitutional scrutiny, or whether they are, instead, content-neutral restrictions meriting less exacting scrutiny. We hold merely that because the prepublication licensing regime challenged here applies directly to scientific expression, vests boundless discretion in government officials, and lacks adequate procedural safeguards, it constitutes
an impermissible prior restraint on speech."
This is an important point to consider - the core contention of this case wasn't so much the encryption issue - it was the fact that the professor wasn't able to publish his findings in a scientific journal - his right to literary expression was abridged.
In fact, the Court specifically defers making a general ruling on the constitutionality of controlling crypto software in general.
Second, we note that the government's efforts to regulate and control the spread of knowledge relating to encryption may implicate more than the First Amendment rights of cryp- tographers....
Whether we are surveilled by our government, by crimi- nals, or by our neighbors, it is fair to say that never has our ability to shield our affairs from prying eyes been at such a low ebb. The availability and use of secure encryption may offer an opportunity to reclaim some portion of the privacy we have lost. Government efforts to control encryption thus may well implicate not only the First Amendment rights of cryptographers intent on pushing the boundaries of their sci- ence, but also the constitutional rights of each of us as poten- tial recipients of encryption's bounty. Viewed from this perspective, the government's efforts to retard progress in cryptography may implicate the Fourth Amendment, as well as the right to speak anonymously, see McIntyre v. Ohio Elec- tions Comm'n, 115 S. Ct. 1511, 1524 (1995) , the right against compelled speech, see Wooley v. Maynard, 430 U.S. 705, 714 (1977), and the right to informational privacy, see Whalen v. Roe, 429 U.S. 589, 599-600 (1977). While we leave for another day the resolution of these difficult issues, it is impor- tant to point out that Bernstein's is a suit not merely concern- ing a small group of scientists laboring in an esoteric field, but also touches on the public interest broadly defined."
So, IANAL, but I wouln't go posting your crypto code for the entire world to see just yet. This is certainly a step in the right direction by the 9th Circuit, but we're not out of the woods yet, folks.
Any one person holding a huge stake in a company takes a lot of money...I'll pick on Boeing, since I'm somewhat familiar with their finances. Of however many billion dollars Boeing is worth on paper, 35-40% of the shares are held by non-employees. The rest is owned by executives, the company's charitable foundation, employee stock-investment plans, etc. This 35-40% number is generally considered to be a healthy amount of shares available to the general public.
If RedHat does its IPO, I'd expect that RedHat's suits and their existing investors will hold a big chunk of the shares. A previous poster brought up a good point - MS wouldn't be able to get approval to buy much (if any) stock...which seems like the Right Thing to do.
You know, I can't really think of anything really bad that RedHat has done. They're really one of the driving forces that's gotten Linux into the corporate marketplace, IMHO. They've really become part of the "corporate identity" of Linux (if Linux can have such an identity besides the infamous penguin).
You can't ignore the contributions RedHat has made to the community - they gave us the first of the easier-to-install distributions (back when they came out, I wouldn't call Slackware "easy"). They gave us RPM to make system maintenance and upgrading easy...I know I'd have a lot more headaches if it weren't for RPMs. I think it's tough to argue that any other distribution to this point has had such a significant impact in the general computing community. And now, they're putting capital into the RedHat Labs, helping to make GNOME into a stable and viable desktop system that works, and looks good doing it. (I don't like the look/feel of KDE, personally, and KDE won't get along with WindowMaker as well as I'd like.)
The original question does raise a valid point - could RedHat turn to the "dark side"? I'd argue that the fact that all of RedHat's software is GPL'd makes it difficult at best. Some people might argue that RedHat's now dependent on the investments from various big names in the computing industry, but, once again, I think the Linux community in itself is a strong enough influence to keep RedHat in line. If RedHat were to try and push things "too far" away from OpenSource software, they'll have people rm -rf/'ing their RedHat installs in favor of something else really fast. No one likes a sell-out.
E + GNOME ? Noooooo.....
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Nope. I'm running the 5.9.7 Starbuck available from a few FTP sites. It ships with kernel 2.2.5. And, FWIW, 5.2 didn't ship with a pre kernel either...a full version of 2.0.36.
Oh, and for those of you in the whole GNOME vs. KDE tiff, the installer pops up a special dialog asking if you want to install GNOME. KDE is included, but it doesn't get a special dialog of its own.
I've been running 5.9.7 for a week, and I have yet to encounter any problems with the GNOME apps. I don't use E myself (I run WindowMaker 0.51.2).
Don't like it? Go use another distribution. No one's forcing you to buy RedHat or download it.
Nice review...adding in Tetris to the install process was a bright idea...more installers ought to do that. (especially those 40 NT boxes I had to set up last summer)
I've noticed that the distributions are starting to try to make the Linux startup a little more friendly...the forthcoming RedHat 6.0 is going to have color-coded "OK" or "FAILED" for service startup (although it's still in text mode), and from what I've heard, other distros are similar. The author does bring up a certain concern - newbies are going to react negatively when they see a "failed" message on their screen. Mine gripes when it tries to start NFS. No big deal, because I know I don't need NFS, but a newcomer to Linux might not know that.
One thing I noticed is that the author mentions that RedHat went with glibc while the other vendors went with libc5. The thing is that RedHat does install libc5 compatibility libraries. I've got/usr/i486-linux-libc5/lib in my ld.so.conf. I don't know if Caldera tries the same thing...
Well, quality may not be as much of an issue to you, but it certainly matters to a lot of people. I'm a big trader of Dave Matthews Band concert recordings (they're one of the few major groups that allow it). Lately, we've been running into problems with people who'll download a concert that's been MP3'd, uncompress it and burn it onto CDs and pass it off as a "true copy". Even on my $60 Altec Lansing 3-pc set, I can notice the difference...guitars start to sound "shimmery", etc.
It's actually gotten to the point where a bunch of traders set up a trading network which uses a lossless compression algorithm (Shorten) to send audio files which are decompressed and burned onto a CD. That way, we know we're getting a copy that's as close to the original taper's DAT as possible. I don't take shows that have been MP3-compressed. I'm listening to one that I used to have in MP3, and I can definitely tell a clarity difference.
While I certainly agree that MP3 is a good way to get music out to people for preview purposes (I use it to preview and see if I want to get a particular concert recording), I wouldn't make it my primary music source anytime soon, even encoded at 256 Kbps. Unless MPEG-2 Layer 3 or whatever's next can do the trick, there'll still be people that want the real thing.
Well, that all really depends. If you're someone like me who wasn't aware of ATi's Linux stance at the time I built my system, this announcement is welcome indeed.
And, for an initial release, it seems to run quite well...
Now, we just need to get Creative Labs to write software for their DVD kits or open up the specs...
This is, I think the most effective way to go about solving the problem. If you've got a security hole or something else in violation of a policy on your system, cutting off a port will get the problem fixed fast.
Case in point: yesterday, I let a friend from outside my campus's network make a rather large download from my system via FTP. Unknown to me was that the university imposes a 500MB/day limit on outbound traffic from machines in the dorms. My port got deactivated because the guy downloaded 1GB, and because he was outside the campus network. Two policy violations, and my port got turned off. I got it back on by adding a DENY rule for ftpd for non-campus hosts. Quick and easy fix.
I'm inclined to agree...I prefer the look and feel of WindowMaker/GNUstep applications to the standard Motif and GTK apps. Qt (KDE) does a decent job of creating an interface, but compared to WM, KDE's just a hog...not to mention we've got the Dock and the Clip.:)
Slashdot Mirror
That, and the fact that McDonnell Douglas no longer exists as a company anymore. Surprisingly, no one here noticed that they merged with Boeing back in August 1997. The military group is called McDonnell Aircraft and Missile Systems, and they kept MD's logo, but it's Boeing now.
I found a rather useful program I'm using at college that'd work well in a HS environment too...called "Due Yesterday" - it does assignment/grade tracking, and the interface is easy. one tap to create an assignment, scribble in the info, two taps when it's done, and you can store your grades in it.
It's free (not open-sourced, AFAICT)...try any of the Palm software places...
The problem I see with interspersing M2 moderation at random into the day's supply of comments is that a meta-moderator then has to go through everything in order to meta-mod. I'd like to help with it, but I don't have the time to read every comment that goes through here. I hit the current M2 page, rate the moderators, and I'm done. Intersperse it, and I either a) waste time reading everything or b) don't moderate at all.
Actually, you don't even need to have control over Sendmail (or any other MTA). There's a Perl script you can use which will do the necessary lookups, and can be called from within Procmail, so you can either filter or /dev/null it to your heart's content. I'll post a URL once I can find it.
Well, there ya go. Godwin's Law has been invoked...move along, nothing to see here, folks.
(refer to www.uiuc.edu/~tskirvin/faqs/godwin.faq)
1. What is Godwin's Law?
Godwin's Law is a natural law of Usenet named after Mike Godwin (godwin@eff.org) concerning Usenet "discussions". It reads, according to the Jargon File:
As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.
4. That still doesn't answer my question. What does it *MEAN*?
The Law is generally used on Usenet as an indicator of whether a
thread has gone on too long, who's playing fair and who's just slinging
mud, and who finally gets to "win" the discussion. It has, over time,
become the closest thing to an impartial moderator that Usenet can get.
Although GCC is one of the most portable compilers, the RTL generation routines aren't well suited
to the register-poor x86 architecture. The main difference, however, is the code scheduler.
GCC doesn't do much P6 style optimization, where VC++ in conjuction with Vtune from intel is quite
an effective optimization tool for the x86...
Well, just get pgcc (the Pentium/P-II optimization patches) patches for egcs - I rebuilt stuff like GNOME and XFree86, and saw significant performance increases - at least 20% faster performance. CPU intensive stuff like The GIMP and XMMS run faster as well.
autodetection, but didnt find my wierd stuff
and RPM managment to me seemed HORRIBLE. I cannot understand how this came to be so popular. I would only
recommend Redhat to people new to *Computers*. 2/5
Debian, after using SuSE and redhat feels soooo nice. Forget dselect, it is worse than any package manager in SuSE or
Redhat, stick with dpkg -i [packagename] and apt!!! Apt is great.
Well, like everything in Linux, there's more than one way to do anything. Don't like GnoRPM? Me either - I just `rpm -Uvh filename.rpm`. If it's on an ftp server? No problem - if I really wanted to, I could write a wrapper script that tries to use an RPM I've got locally, and if there's a newer version, FTP it in.
Debian is good if you already know a bit about computers and partitioning and stuff, it seems the most "linuxy" dist. To
get hardware going you dont use any horrible sndconfig or whatever programs, you just do an easy, powerfull kernel
compile (im sure redhat can be the same here, but debian doesnt have all that extra useless software). To configure a
program you start up vi in
as a gateway. I would recommend Debian for anyone wanting to run a "neat" and "elegant" dist. It gets 6/5
Anyway, im really not suprised that SuSE has bigger sales than redhat considering how much better it is.
RedHat unstable? Granted, 6.0 had a few flaws, but a few upgraded packages have made my systems even more stable than 5.2. And hey, if you don't want to use sndconfig or anything like that, no big deal. I configured my soundcard using make xconfig, and editing my isapnp.conf in good old vim. You don't have to use the GUI tools - I generally avoid them since I like to stare at the guts of my system's configuration.
This part is very true - when anyone (business entity, organization, or person) pulls a stunt like this, they should be getting called on it - BUT NOT IN THE WAY THOSE PEOPLE DID . If you're going to tell someone they're wrong, you really ought to have something better than calling them a "Berlin whore" (to quote one of the messages).
The only adjective I can think of to describe all of this is "sad". It's sad that people chose to respond like that - and now they've unwittingly become spokespeople for the Linux community, whether the rest of us like it or not. Do we really want to portray the community as a whole in that immature manner? If I wanted e-mail like that, I'd rewind about 8 years to junior high school.
The sad thing is that many of the people posting that garbage aren't idiots. If they were sitting in a conference room talking to Mindcraft, they wouldn't be like that - but put them behind a keyboard, and it's like a rewind to grade-school playground fights.
I'll bet it has a lot to do with the CD-ROM you're ripping from. A lot of drives (especially IDE) don't do good digital audio extraction (DAE). If you're getting pops and jumps in the sound, that's the problem. Try cdparanoia under Linux (don't have URL handy, sorry) - it does its own error correction, and I've never had a bad rip with it, short of a disc that looked like it was stored in 60-grit sandpaper for a while.
As far as the underwater sounds, that's the fault of your MP3 encoder - try a different one, or encode at a higher bit rate (I'd recommend at least 160Kbps, and preferably 256Kbps) to eliminate this. Some encoders just sound like crap. I've had good results with BladeEnc, though.
gmc or panel, probably - upgrading to a newer version helped. The 1.0 RPMs that shipped with RH6 are pretty good, but they're a lot more stable in current incarnation.
5. I've seen several cases of "slow login syndrome". When you log into X w/gnome, it inexplicably takes forever to load the window manager and gnome stuff. Once things get started, speed is ok. The syndrome persists even across sessions, which makes sense, but weirder still, you can cure it: switch to a console and kill gnome-session manually. Next time you log in, no problem.
I encountered a similar problem, then I compiled the RPM files myself from source (and threw in the PentiumPro optimizations of PGCC) for gnome-libs and gnome-core, along with WindowMaker. Now, it starts up quickly enough for me.
Except that the source RPM doesn't contain any real source. :) If you take a look into the SRPM file, there's a spec file, and the tarball you normally download from netscape's servers. All the RPM build does in this case is copy the files into a directory tree, and make the binary RPM. There's no recompile done - Netscape 4.x is only free in the "free beer" sense.
Rock solid compared to what? The GNOME stuff shipped with RedHat 6.0 is hardly perfect, but as far as core functionalities, it's light-years ahead of Windows. I haven't had any bugs in RH6 that rendered my system anywhere near unusable, and I've been running it since the day it became available for download (and I was running Starbuck almost since it had been released).
Heck, if we're to evaluate this by the strictest of standards, then Netscape 4.x and KDE aren't release-ready on my system, since they both bomb out (although NS 4.6 has done well so far).
I used KDE for about a month on ym box, and decided that as post-1.0 stabilizations rolled out, I liked GNOME more and more...it just works more the way I work, which is ultimately what's important. You can argue technical superiority with me until I'm blue in the face, but I've tried both environments for an extended period, and I like GNOME.
1) Gnome would quit and take X with it
.tar.gz file anyone can download from Netscape's servers, put the files into the RPM tree, and create the package - they're not doing anything to the source.
2) Netscape crashed consistantly (waybe not RH's fault)
3) xconfigurator chowed my settings a few times during reconfiguration, leading to a busted X
4) Minor small stuff
I've experienced #1 to a certain extent, but not to the point of crashing X. I'm running WindowMaker 0.53.0, and occasionally the panel would curl up and die, but it would respawn a new one 50% of the time. The other 50% was a Ctl-Alt-Backspace.
Netscape crashing is hardly RedHat's fault. All the RPM spec file does is unpack the
As far as xconfigurator, I've never used it under 6.0 - I like XF86Setup much better.
I have had minor issues, like the fact that my hard drive throughput went down the drain - apparently, it didn't try to include optimizations. But, reading the hdparm(8) manpage helped, and I'm smokin' again. Overall, RH6 has been quite stable for me.
I take exception to CmdrTaco's statement that bandwidth is more expensive then postage. It is far cheaper to send something digitally then to use sailmail. Not only to you have to pay USPS but there is all costs (and time) involved in packaging and creating/copying the media you are sending. You add all the up and you can see that sailmail is very expensive and very inefficient (unless you are sending massive amounts of data concurrently). Do the math... figure out how much effort and money it would take to send out 5000 copies of a Greatful Dead single via sailmail. But then everybody on
Depends on what format you're sending in, of course. If I'm sending out a Dave Matthews concert in 128Kbps MP3 files, we're talking 150MB per complete download. That's not too bad for a person with a reasonably fat pipe.
The problem is that a lot of us have picky ears - I can tell when music (especially live music) has been MP3'd. So, I get concerts using Shorten, which is a high-speed lossless algorithim. It compresses 1.75:1, so a 2.5 hour concert is roughly 1GB. When you talk about large scale distribution, (even 50 is large scale), that much bandwidth isn't cheap. I can stick 3CDs in a single jewel case and mail it for under $2.
MP3 is nice to preview music, but with the quality of a lot of these recordings, I wouldn't want to burn a CD from MP3s when there's something better.
Nerds are people too. Some of us take humanities courses along with our engineering/CS stuff.
What do you think DVD and VideoCD hardware decoders do? Video CD is MPEG-I, and DVD movies are stored using MPEG-II.
Of course, it's not as though MP3 decoding should be rough on a reasonably fast machine. My 333 Celeron typically has loads less than 1% while playing using mpg123 or x11amp. Comparably, running WinAmp over on my windows partiton typically uses ~10% CPU.
The problem is that adding a specialized MP3 decoder eats up yet another slot in the case (unless you make it a USB/FireWire thingy). I'm down to one PCI/ISA slot on my ATX (w/ AGP) mainboard, and once I buy a modem next month, it's full.
A potentially bigger problem is that you've got to redo all the MP3 players out there to support the decoders, and you've got to settle on a standard hardware decoding method, so we don't have to have 5 different versions of x11amp.
This is an important point to consider - the core contention of this case wasn't so much the encryption issue - it was the fact that the professor wasn't able to publish his findings in a scientific journal - his right to literary expression was abridged.
In fact, the Court specifically defers making a general ruling on the constitutionality of controlling crypto software in general.
So, IANAL, but I wouln't go posting your crypto code for the entire world to see just yet. This is certainly a step in the right direction by the 9th Circuit, but we're not out of the woods yet, folks.
Any one person holding a huge stake in a company takes a lot of money...I'll pick on Boeing, since I'm somewhat familiar with their finances. Of however many billion dollars Boeing is worth on paper, 35-40% of the shares are held by non-employees. The rest is owned by executives, the company's charitable foundation, employee stock-investment plans, etc. This 35-40% number is generally considered to be a healthy amount of shares available to the general public.
If RedHat does its IPO, I'd expect that RedHat's suits and their existing investors will hold a big chunk of the shares. A previous poster brought up a good point - MS wouldn't be able to get approval to buy much (if any) stock...which seems like the Right Thing to do.
I'll be picking up my few shares...
You know, I can't really think of anything really bad that RedHat has done. They're really one of the driving forces that's gotten Linux into the corporate marketplace, IMHO. They've really become part of the "corporate identity" of Linux (if Linux can have such an identity besides the infamous penguin).
/'ing their RedHat installs in favor of something else really fast. No one likes a sell-out.
You can't ignore the contributions RedHat has made to the community - they gave us the first of the easier-to-install distributions (back when they came out, I wouldn't call Slackware "easy"). They gave us RPM to make system maintenance and upgrading easy...I know I'd have a lot more headaches if it weren't for RPMs. I think it's tough to argue that any other distribution to this point has had such a significant impact in the general computing community. And now, they're putting capital into the RedHat Labs, helping to make GNOME into a stable and viable desktop system that works, and looks good doing it. (I don't like the look/feel of KDE, personally, and KDE won't get along with WindowMaker as well as I'd like.)
The original question does raise a valid point - could RedHat turn to the "dark side"? I'd argue that the fact that all of RedHat's software is GPL'd makes it difficult at best. Some people might argue that RedHat's now dependent on the investments from various big names in the computing industry, but, once again, I think the Linux community in itself is a strong enough influence to keep RedHat in line. If RedHat were to try and push things "too far" away from OpenSource software, they'll have people rm -rf
Nope. I'm running the 5.9.7 Starbuck available from a few FTP sites. It ships with kernel 2.2.5. And, FWIW, 5.2 didn't ship with a pre kernel either...a full version of 2.0.36.
Oh, and for those of you in the whole GNOME vs. KDE tiff, the installer pops up a special dialog asking if you want to install GNOME. KDE is included, but it doesn't get a special dialog of its own.
I've been running 5.9.7 for a week, and I have yet to encounter any problems with the GNOME apps. I don't use E myself (I run WindowMaker 0.51.2).
Don't like it? Go use another distribution. No one's forcing you to buy RedHat or download it.
Nice review...adding in Tetris to the install process was a bright idea...more installers ought to do that. (especially those 40 NT boxes I had to set up last summer)
/usr/i486-linux-libc5/lib in my ld.so.conf. I don't know if Caldera tries the same thing...
I've noticed that the distributions are starting to try to make the Linux startup a little more friendly...the forthcoming RedHat 6.0 is going to have color-coded "OK" or "FAILED" for service startup (although it's still in text mode), and from what I've heard, other distros are similar. The author does bring up a certain concern - newbies are going to react negatively when they see a "failed" message on their screen. Mine gripes when it tries to start NFS. No big deal, because I know I don't need NFS, but a newcomer to Linux might not know that.
One thing I noticed is that the author mentions that RedHat went with glibc while the other vendors went with libc5. The thing is that RedHat does install libc5 compatibility libraries. I've got
Well, quality may not be as much of an issue to you, but it certainly matters to a lot of people. I'm a big trader of Dave Matthews Band concert recordings (they're one of the few major groups that allow it). Lately, we've been running into problems with people who'll download a concert that's been MP3'd, uncompress it and burn it onto CDs and pass it off as a "true copy". Even on my $60 Altec Lansing 3-pc set, I can notice the difference...guitars start to sound "shimmery", etc.
It's actually gotten to the point where a bunch of traders set up a trading network which uses a lossless compression algorithm (Shorten) to send audio files which are decompressed and burned onto a CD. That way, we know we're getting a copy that's as close to the original taper's DAT as possible. I don't take shows that have been MP3-compressed. I'm listening to one that I used to have in MP3, and I can definitely tell a clarity difference.
While I certainly agree that MP3 is a good way to get music out to people for preview purposes (I use it to preview and see if I want to get a particular concert recording), I wouldn't make it my primary music source anytime soon, even encoded at 256 Kbps. Unless MPEG-2 Layer 3 or whatever's next can do the trick, there'll still be people that want the real thing.
Well, that all really depends. If you're someone like me who wasn't aware of ATi's Linux stance at the time I built my system, this announcement is welcome indeed.
And, for an initial release, it seems to run quite well...
Now, we just need to get Creative Labs to write software for their DVD kits or open up the specs...
This is, I think the most effective way to go about solving the problem. If you've got a security hole or something else in violation of a policy on your system, cutting off a port will get the problem fixed fast.
Case in point: yesterday, I let a friend from outside my campus's network make a rather large download from my system via FTP. Unknown to me was that the university imposes a 500MB/day limit on outbound traffic from machines in the dorms. My port got deactivated because the guy downloaded 1GB, and because he was outside the campus network. Two policy violations, and my port got turned off. I got it back on by adding a DENY rule for ftpd for non-campus hosts. Quick and easy fix.
I'm inclined to agree...I prefer the look and feel of WindowMaker/GNUstep applications to the standard Motif and GTK apps. Qt (KDE) does a decent job of creating an interface, but compared to WM, KDE's just a hog...not to mention we've got the Dock and the Clip. :)