A 'distribution' is and should be a tested and known well-functioning collection of software made into a usable system.
If only that were the case. But all too often it is not. Debian and Slackware are exceptions, but the others (even Gentoo) have the motto "ship tomorrow's release today". Debian is utterly stable (if you use stable) but the number one complaint with Debian is that it's so outdated. Slackware is frequently dissed by having a nine month release cycle instead of three or six months. On the other side of the spectrum, there's one very popular distro that I suspect doesn't even have a QA process. Another has the reputation to avoid their dot-oh releases.
I would put up with this shoddy QA if it were done by non-commercial distros, but the strange thing is that the non-commercial distros have the highest quality! Go figure...
Big business is not in favor of deregulation. That's a myth perpetrated by the anti-big-business crowd.
Big business want regulations that keep away the competition. Many small businesses and individuals feel the same way. This has been true since the first business that discovered it could use government as a competitive tool.
Guilds, unions, professional licensing, etc., are all supported by the very people who are subject to the regulations. They're all ways of limiting the competition. Big business has the same motives. As long as they can profit from regulations keeping the competition limited they will be in favor of it.
By their nature, all regulations are going to favor the big business with lots of lawyers over the small business with none. Microsoft, IBM and Sun are large enough that they can afford the lawyers to manage patents. Small businesses can't. They can afford huge teams of programmers to reinvent the wheel from scratch and create their own copyrighted wheel. Small business cannot do this as easily so they spend money licensing other peoples' code.
i won't put anything past our judicial and legislative branches.
I wouldn't either. But that's completely and utterly unrelated to the issue at hand. SCO is not the judicial or legislative branch of the US (or even Utah). The only reason that US Judicial branch is involved is because SCO resides in the US. The same situation would be occuring in Germany, France, or Great Britain, if SCO were located in those countries. It would be quite a stretch to assert that those countries have never had an asinine IP lawsuit.
Your statement is a non sequitur. You're implying that congress or the courts are secretly running SCO. That's nonsense.
You're failing to see the huge point looming over your head while you nitpick the trivial to death.
BSD got seriously hurt in the *perception* department. Linux itself was started because it was *perceived* that BSD was encumbered. I agree that IBM/Linus/SuSE/etc will be able to win any case SCO lobs at them. But Linux will still garner a undeserved negative perception among the public. Imagine every news article mentioning Linux for the space of one or two years quoting McBride in paragraph one.
The perception won't affect the geeks, nerds and hackers much, but it will affect the general public. Who will want to buy the latest embedded Linux doodad if they perceive they might get sued for it? Who will want to repartion their harddrive to try out Linux if they might get sued for it. Who will want to hire you as a known Linux programmer since you might introduce some "infected" code into the company's project? The perception may be stupid, but last I checked stupidity ruled the world.
There are numerous solutions, but everytime someone brings them up they get shouted down. The simplest one is to encase them in weighted ceramic nodules and dump them in the Marianas Trench, or other suitable subduction zone.
But it's no big deal. Why not? Because Qt isn't a desktop. A bit of thought will reveal that this is a Good Thing(tm) since Qt is a crossplatform toolkit.
p.s. KDE and GNOME are getting very close to having a unified icon/artwork framework. I suspect that KDE-3.2 and GNOME-2.4 will be able to use each other's icon sets transparently.
Get a clue dude! BSD folk (like me) don't want to write GPLd software, don't want to link to GPLd software, and don't want to put GPLd software in the base system if we can help it, but we have no problem with *using* GPLd software if its worthwhile. Use the best tool for the job.
GRUB is not part of any BSD's base system. It's part of the ports collection. The user can choose to use GRUB or not, just as they can choose to use bash or not. No recipient of a BSD system is going to encumbered by GRUB.
There are times when GPLd software does make sense for the base system (from the FreeBSD perspective). That's when the software is clearly the best of breed and won't encumber anything else. A good example is GNU tar.
GRUB and BootMgr (FreeBSD) are two different kinds of boot loaders. GRUB requires installation in a partition but offers a lot of flexibility. BootMgr only requires a boot block but has only a fraction of the feature set. Depending on your circumstances, one may be more suitable than the other. I prefer BootMgr at home because I rarely boot into other operating systems. At work I need a boot floppy to get into FreeBSD (since I can't alter the MBR). GRUB is the easiest way to make a FreeBSD boot floppy, bare none. My friend prefers GRUB because he is often booting into different operating systems and he can configure GRUB from any of them (all you need is a text editor, no boot0cfg, liloconfig, etc).
p.s. GRUB does work with FreeBSD, but it needs updating, specifically for FreeBSD-5.0.
He really (I think) believed that--that IBM or AOL or maybe even Sun could beat them.
He was, and still is, correct. IBM and AOL/TW are so much larger than Microsoft it isn't funny. OS/2 could have knocked Windows off its throne if only IBM had gotten their act together. They had the resources to make it easy to install and to work with all the prevalent hardware. And Sun still dominates over Microsoft in its respective niche.
What makes Microsoft different is that it focuses almost exclusively on its software. Sun is into hardware, IBM is into services, AOL is into media. In the '80s and '90s only Microsoft devoted itself to software. They didn't start branching out until after they had aquired the monopoly.
Gates blames the users for Windows 95, and that made you think he was a nice person? It gives me the exact opposite impression.
When I read that interview several years ago I had the same opinion as you. What a dirty filthy shyster! Then I started doing commercial software development, and realized he was correct. People do not pay for bug fixes, only features. My current project has a ton of outstanding bugs that will never get fixed until a major customer complains about them, because fixing bugs does not bring in revenue.
He is also correct that many of the bugs in Windows, perhaps most of them, are indeed user errors. It certainly has real bugs of a serious nature, but I've seen enough Windows users screw up their software all on their own. The root of the problem is that computers are too complex for the untrained to use reliably. In my own project with *trained* users I estimate that about 10% of the bugs are still user errors.
The phone sex line is still there. A macfan told me this a couple of weeks ago and I didn't believe him. So he showed me. It wasn't a gay sex line, but it was still a pay-to-listen-to-dirty-talk line. One reason why that support number has changed.
Read the article again. It's not a "bootloader" front-end script, but a "bootloader front-end script". Notice the difference in quotes. One is a bootloader, and the other is a front-end script to a bootloader.
p.s. Please people, take him up on his offer of working on the BSD loading code for GRUB. It's seriously out of date. I've got my own projects on the front burner so I can't at the moment.
Is the state of Linux really that bad? I haven't use it in a while. I'm using FreeBSD now, and FreeBSD-2.0 programs run just fine under FreeBSD-5.0. Qt-1.0 programs STILL run under FreeBSD-5.0, provided you've installed the Qt-1.0 libraries.
But I suspect you're exaggerating. Any reputable commercial application (Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, etc) is going to ship with the libraries it requires. I've got a Qt-2.3 application that runs just fine under any version of Windows, because it ships with the library. I've got an old CD of Staroffice-5.0 that still works under Linux and FreeBSD because it ships with its required libraries.
So stop your bitching and start shipping your applications with the required libraries or start statically linking them, just like the Windows and Solaris developers do.
A billion dollars in cardboard boxes and plastic CDs is a heck of a lot of copies of Windows!
At first I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, then I realized that it was their own software they were giving away. Let's see them donate one billion dollars a year in canned soup to the nation's food banks, peanut butter to the nation's homeless shelters, or apple juice to the nation's schools. Not as easy, 'cuz it ain't their own product. So why a billion dollars a year in their non-software product? Like mice, keyboards, etc. Or have their employees spend a billion dollars worth of labor for Habitat for Humanity, etc? Even a ten for one matching contribution for their employees charitable donations?
But I don't think they are doing this to "undercut" Open Source Software. I think they are doing it just to look good in front of the unsuspecting public.
Your basic copy of Red Hat Linux costs $39.95-$149.95.
My basic copy of Redhat costs zero dollars and zero cents. But that's in the US. In Germany it costs me zero Euros (not taking into account the exchange rate).
If she was objecting to a pentacle or a darwin fish as logo, or anything else that directly contradicted her beliefs, then I would understand. But the BSD daemon is a cartoon. There's nothing satanic, occultic or otherwise about it.
Sorry, don't believe it. You're just repeating an urban legend.
I grew up in a christian community, was raised a christian, and still am. I know christians from virtually every denomination. Here's the typical Fourth of July of my mainstream christian youth: eating devilled ham sandwiches made from Underwood Devilled Ham with devil logo, accompanied by devilled eggs, lighting off Red Devil Fireworks with a devil logo, and finishing off the evening with a thick slice of devilsfood chocolate cake.
I know some christians who won't let their kids participate in halloween, others who won't let their kids go to the theatres, and still others who don't believe in dancing. But I've never once run across one who thought that a cartoon representation of a red guy with horns and tail was satanic.
Fear over cartoon logos does not arise out of religion, but from family trees that don't fork and subscriptions to the National Enquirer.
Although I will agree that medical costs are high, it's not due to the costs of the parts used to build ECG machines. Geez!
You would trust your diagnosis to a $4 machine built by some hobbyist on the weekend? I sure as well wouldn't. But even if the parts for a real ECG cost $400, it still doesn't demonstrate why you can't buy one for $400. So let me explain why it costs so much more: the price of ECGs has nothing to do with the price of its parts. Price is subject to the buyer's and seller's wants. If the price is too low the seller won't sell. If it's too high the buyer won't buy. If you've just spent two years developing a new ECG machine involving the work of a couple dozen engineers, testers, clinicians and marketroids, and hammered it out in clinical trials, fenced with the FDA, and met all the spurious checkboxes of the bureaucracies, you want some return on your investement. If you manage to sell only 50,000 then $400 a pop isn't going to cut it! (do the math) On the other hand, if you're a hospital with an increasingly shrinking budget and overseen by a hospital board composed of well-meaning but ignorant politicians, then $40,000 isn't going to cut it either. So a price is eventually reached that is mutually acceptable. It's going to be a lot higher than the price *you* would have paid, but you're not a hospital.
Why don't you get any input into the price? After all, you're the patient, and thus indirectly the buyer. The reason is that you have absolved yourself of any buyer responsibilities by foisting them off on an insurance company. If everyone who had an ECG reading had to pay for them out of their own pockets, you damn well better believe the price will come down! One reason medical prices are high because people (you, your employer, etc) don't shop for medical prices, they shop for monthly payments to an insurance company instead.
But ignore what I just said. I'll tell you what the real price of ECGs is. Free. Zero dollars and zero cents. You see, when a company like Siemens, Philips or GE makes a sale to a hospital, they throw in the ECG (and lightbulbs) for free. I may still cost those companies $500 in parts and $5,000,000 in R&D, but they'll make it up on the MRI, CAT, and US. And of course, on the service plans.
Bush is buying off the rich for the next two elections
Who are the rich? Is it the top 5%? If so, then big fat hairy deal! If this only helps the top 5% at the expense of the bottom 95%, then what are you worried about? The bottom 95% will just vote him out.
There's no way that I know of. Most operating systems cannot boot from anything but a primary partition, with Linux being the only exception that I know of. Slices are the BSD version of logical partitions, and from what I understand, they predate Microsoft's extended/logical partition scheme. BSD can access DOS logical partitions just fine, but it can't boot from them.
There is a workaround though. Convert that logical partition to a primary partition. This will probably involve some shuffling around, so get a good repartitioner. Once you have a free primary partition, install away.
Or do what I do, and use a separate harddrive. At one time this was prohibitive, but drives are so cheap now that it's the easy and simple solution.
Slashdot Mirror
A 'distribution' is and should be a tested and known well-functioning collection of software made into a usable system.
If only that were the case. But all too often it is not. Debian and Slackware are exceptions, but the others (even Gentoo) have the motto "ship tomorrow's release today". Debian is utterly stable (if you use stable) but the number one complaint with Debian is that it's so outdated. Slackware is frequently dissed by having a nine month release cycle instead of three or six months. On the other side of the spectrum, there's one very popular distro that I suspect doesn't even have a QA process. Another has the reputation to avoid their dot-oh releases.
I would put up with this shoddy QA if it were done by non-commercial distros, but the strange thing is that the non-commercial distros have the highest quality! Go figure...
Big business is not in favor of deregulation. That's a myth perpetrated by the anti-big-business crowd.
Big business want regulations that keep away the competition. Many small businesses and individuals feel the same way. This has been true since the first business that discovered it could use government as a competitive tool.
Guilds, unions, professional licensing, etc., are all supported by the very people who are subject to the regulations. They're all ways of limiting the competition. Big business has the same motives. As long as they can profit from regulations keeping the competition limited they will be in favor of it.
By their nature, all regulations are going to favor the big business with lots of lawyers over the small business with none. Microsoft, IBM and Sun are large enough that they can afford the lawyers to manage patents. Small businesses can't. They can afford huge teams of programmers to reinvent the wheel from scratch and create their own copyrighted wheel. Small business cannot do this as easily so they spend money licensing other peoples' code.
The BSD advertising clause was rescinded, not removed. You no longer have to honor it for any UCR copyrighted code, even for code written in the past.
i won't put anything past our judicial and legislative branches.
I wouldn't either. But that's completely and utterly unrelated to the issue at hand. SCO is not the judicial or legislative branch of the US (or even Utah). The only reason that US Judicial branch is involved is because SCO resides in the US. The same situation would be occuring in Germany, France, or Great Britain, if SCO were located in those countries. It would be quite a stretch to assert that those countries have never had an asinine IP lawsuit.
Your statement is a non sequitur. You're implying that congress or the courts are secretly running SCO. That's nonsense.
You're failing to see the huge point looming over your head while you nitpick the trivial to death.
BSD got seriously hurt in the *perception* department. Linux itself was started because it was *perceived* that BSD was encumbered. I agree that IBM/Linus/SuSE/etc will be able to win any case SCO lobs at them. But Linux will still garner a undeserved negative perception among the public. Imagine every news article mentioning Linux for the space of one or two years quoting McBride in paragraph one.
The perception won't affect the geeks, nerds and hackers much, but it will affect the general public. Who will want to buy the latest embedded Linux doodad if they perceive they might get sued for it? Who will want to repartion their harddrive to try out Linux if they might get sued for it. Who will want to hire you as a known Linux programmer since you might introduce some "infected" code into the company's project? The perception may be stupid, but last I checked stupidity ruled the world.
This is just too funny. Dr. Pepper spewed out my nose and my hernia stitches just opened up. Stop the levity before I piss my pants...
There are numerous solutions, but everytime someone brings them up they get shouted down. The simplest one is to encase them in weighted ceramic nodules and dump them in the Marianas Trench, or other suitable subduction zone.
They don't have any stock icons at all.
But it's no big deal. Why not? Because Qt isn't a desktop. A bit of thought will reveal that this is a Good Thing(tm) since Qt is a crossplatform toolkit.
p.s. KDE and GNOME are getting very close to having a unified icon/artwork framework. I suspect that KDE-3.2 and GNOME-2.4 will be able to use each other's icon sets transparently.
Get a clue dude! BSD folk (like me) don't want to write GPLd software, don't want to link to GPLd software, and don't want to put GPLd software in the base system if we can help it, but we have no problem with *using* GPLd software if its worthwhile. Use the best tool for the job.
GRUB is not part of any BSD's base system. It's part of the ports collection. The user can choose to use GRUB or not, just as they can choose to use bash or not. No recipient of a BSD system is going to encumbered by GRUB.
There are times when GPLd software does make sense for the base system (from the FreeBSD perspective). That's when the software is clearly the best of breed and won't encumber anything else. A good example is GNU tar.
GRUB and BootMgr (FreeBSD) are two different kinds of boot loaders. GRUB requires installation in a partition but offers a lot of flexibility. BootMgr only requires a boot block but has only a fraction of the feature set. Depending on your circumstances, one may be more suitable than the other. I prefer BootMgr at home because I rarely boot into other operating systems. At work I need a boot floppy to get into FreeBSD (since I can't alter the MBR). GRUB is the easiest way to make a FreeBSD boot floppy, bare none. My friend prefers GRUB because he is often booting into different operating systems and he can configure GRUB from any of them (all you need is a text editor, no boot0cfg, liloconfig, etc).
p.s. GRUB does work with FreeBSD, but it needs updating, specifically for FreeBSD-5.0.
He really (I think) believed that--that IBM or AOL or maybe even Sun could beat them.
He was, and still is, correct. IBM and AOL/TW are so much larger than Microsoft it isn't funny. OS/2 could have knocked Windows off its throne if only IBM had gotten their act together. They had the resources to make it easy to install and to work with all the prevalent hardware. And Sun still dominates over Microsoft in its respective niche.
What makes Microsoft different is that it focuses almost exclusively on its software. Sun is into hardware, IBM is into services, AOL is into media. In the '80s and '90s only Microsoft devoted itself to software. They didn't start branching out until after they had aquired the monopoly.
Gates blames the users for Windows 95, and that made you think he was a nice person? It gives me the exact opposite impression.
When I read that interview several years ago I had the same opinion as you. What a dirty filthy shyster! Then I started doing commercial software development, and realized he was correct. People do not pay for bug fixes, only features. My current project has a ton of outstanding bugs that will never get fixed until a major customer complains about them, because fixing bugs does not bring in revenue.
He is also correct that many of the bugs in Windows, perhaps most of them, are indeed user errors. It certainly has real bugs of a serious nature, but I've seen enough Windows users screw up their software all on their own. The root of the problem is that computers are too complex for the untrained to use reliably. In my own project with *trained* users I estimate that about 10% of the bugs are still user errors.
The phone sex line is still there. A macfan told me this a couple of weeks ago and I didn't believe him. So he showed me. It wasn't a gay sex line, but it was still a pay-to-listen-to-dirty-talk line. One reason why that support number has changed.
Read the article again. It's not a "bootloader" front-end script, but a "bootloader front-end script". Notice the difference in quotes. One is a bootloader, and the other is a front-end script to a bootloader.
p.s. Please people, take him up on his offer of working on the BSD loading code for GRUB. It's seriously out of date. I've got my own projects on the front burner so I can't at the moment.
Is the state of Linux really that bad? I haven't use it in a while. I'm using FreeBSD now, and FreeBSD-2.0 programs run just fine under FreeBSD-5.0. Qt-1.0 programs STILL run under FreeBSD-5.0, provided you've installed the Qt-1.0 libraries.
But I suspect you're exaggerating. Any reputable commercial application (Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, etc) is going to ship with the libraries it requires. I've got a Qt-2.3 application that runs just fine under any version of Windows, because it ships with the library. I've got an old CD of Staroffice-5.0 that still works under Linux and FreeBSD because it ships with its required libraries.
So stop your bitching and start shipping your applications with the required libraries or start statically linking them, just like the Windows and Solaris developers do.
if you use Qt AFAIK you must link against KDE to get that.
Not at all. KDE themes are Qt plugins. The application does not need to be linked with KDE at all. Qt-only applications are happy with KDE themes.
You was lucky! We weren't rich enough to afford a keyboard with numbers. We had to use i and o instead.
A billion dollars in cardboard boxes and plastic CDs is a heck of a lot of copies of Windows!
At first I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, then I realized that it was their own software they were giving away. Let's see them donate one billion dollars a year in canned soup to the nation's food banks, peanut butter to the nation's homeless shelters, or apple juice to the nation's schools. Not as easy, 'cuz it ain't their own product. So why a billion dollars a year in their non-software product? Like mice, keyboards, etc. Or have their employees spend a billion dollars worth of labor for Habitat for Humanity, etc? Even a ten for one matching contribution for their employees charitable donations?
But I don't think they are doing this to "undercut" Open Source Software. I think they are doing it just to look good in front of the unsuspecting public.
Your basic copy of Red Hat Linux costs $39.95-$149.95.
My basic copy of Redhat costs zero dollars and zero cents. But that's in the US. In Germany it costs me zero Euros (not taking into account the exchange rate).
If she was objecting to a pentacle or a darwin fish as logo, or anything else that directly contradicted her beliefs, then I would understand. But the BSD daemon is a cartoon. There's nothing satanic, occultic or otherwise about it.
Sorry, don't believe it. You're just repeating an urban legend.
I grew up in a christian community, was raised a christian, and still am. I know christians from virtually every denomination. Here's the typical Fourth of July of my mainstream christian youth: eating devilled ham sandwiches made from Underwood Devilled Ham with devil logo, accompanied by devilled eggs, lighting off Red Devil Fireworks with a devil logo, and finishing off the evening with a thick slice of devilsfood chocolate cake.
I know some christians who won't let their kids participate in halloween, others who won't let their kids go to the theatres, and still others who don't believe in dancing. But I've never once run across one who thought that a cartoon representation of a red guy with horns and tail was satanic.
Fear over cartoon logos does not arise out of religion, but from family trees that don't fork and subscriptions to the National Enquirer.
...and defragging the harddrive.
I use UFS2 you insensitive clod, I don't need to defrag my harddrive!
Makes me wonder why medical care costs so much.
Although I will agree that medical costs are high, it's not due to the costs of the parts used to build ECG machines. Geez!
You would trust your diagnosis to a $4 machine built by some hobbyist on the weekend? I sure as well wouldn't. But even if the parts for a real ECG cost $400, it still doesn't demonstrate why you can't buy one for $400. So let me explain why it costs so much more: the price of ECGs has nothing to do with the price of its parts. Price is subject to the buyer's and seller's wants. If the price is too low the seller won't sell. If it's too high the buyer won't buy. If you've just spent two years developing a new ECG machine involving the work of a couple dozen engineers, testers, clinicians and marketroids, and hammered it out in clinical trials, fenced with the FDA, and met all the spurious checkboxes of the bureaucracies, you want some return on your investement. If you manage to sell only 50,000 then $400 a pop isn't going to cut it! (do the math) On the other hand, if you're a hospital with an increasingly shrinking budget and overseen by a hospital board composed of well-meaning but ignorant politicians, then $40,000 isn't going to cut it either. So a price is eventually reached that is mutually acceptable. It's going to be a lot higher than the price *you* would have paid, but you're not a hospital.
Why don't you get any input into the price? After all, you're the patient, and thus indirectly the buyer. The reason is that you have absolved yourself of any buyer responsibilities by foisting them off on an insurance company. If everyone who had an ECG reading had to pay for them out of their own pockets, you damn well better believe the price will come down! One reason medical prices are high because people (you, your employer, etc) don't shop for medical prices, they shop for monthly payments to an insurance company instead.
But ignore what I just said. I'll tell you what the real price of ECGs is. Free. Zero dollars and zero cents. You see, when a company like Siemens, Philips or GE makes a sale to a hospital, they throw in the ECG (and lightbulbs) for free. I may still cost those companies $500 in parts and $5,000,000 in R&D, but they'll make it up on the MRI, CAT, and US. And of course, on the service plans.
Bush is buying off the rich for the next two elections
Who are the rich? Is it the top 5%? If so, then big fat hairy deal! If this only helps the top 5% at the expense of the bottom 95%, then what are you worried about? The bottom 95% will just vote him out.
There's no way that I know of. Most operating systems cannot boot from anything but a primary partition, with Linux being the only exception that I know of. Slices are the BSD version of logical partitions, and from what I understand, they predate Microsoft's extended/logical partition scheme. BSD can access DOS logical partitions just fine, but it can't boot from them.
There is a workaround though. Convert that logical partition to a primary partition. This will probably involve some shuffling around, so get a good repartitioner. Once you have a free primary partition, install away.
Or do what I do, and use a separate harddrive. At one time this was prohibitive, but drives are so cheap now that it's the easy and simple solution.
Just stay away from volcanoes, geysers and other fumaroles..