Try running yum without rpm(1) installed, see how far you get, dumbass. Yum is just a front end for the rpm code. I was suggesting throwing away the rpm code and building something reliable instead.
I don't care about the file format, I'm talking about the tools I have to use. Throw away rpm(1) and write a decent tool to handle RPM files, layer something like APT on it, and I'll back it.
No, it's nothing to do with RPM being from RedHat.
RedHat also originated ntsysv, and that beats the pants off Debian's craptastic update-rc.d.
The point is that because of the freedom associated with Linux, people are free to make decisions based on technical merit rather than marketing. Michael Dell's request is a marketing request: Linux would be easier to sell if it was unified.
As a user of Linux, I don't care how easy it is to sell--I'm much more interested in how easy it is to use, how reliable it is, and so on. Those things would be damaged by (for example) making RPM ubiquitous, making sendmail ubiquitous, making GNOME the standard desktop, making MySQL the only relational DB, and so on--even though those same changes would likely make Linux sell better.
In other words, what's good for marketing Linux to new users is often bad for those who are already Linux users. And absent the ability to force distributions to standardize, there will always be a market for distributions that do what's best for the users, rather than what's best for companies.
I've never had dpkg crap out and destroy the database of what's installed. I've never had dpkg lock up and cease functioning.
Being able to ask RPM difficult questions is a nice theoretical feature, but the user interface is so horrible I can't remember how to ask it simple questions; I resort to a cheat sheet with the incantations needed for simple everyday use.
I didn't say RPM lacked features; I said it was crap.
The problem with RPM isn't the lack of an APT equivalent (I ran APT4RPM years ago), it's the fact that RPM is a buggy piece of crap that trashes its own database on a regular basis, and has a horrible UI when you have to interact with it.
Somehow I imagine IBM and Lenovo will work out a deal to purchase PCs without Vista. You don't think IBM buys desktop systems and laptops from Dell, do you?
Yeah, I played "Ocarina of Time" and "Wind Waker" pretty much back to back, and found "Wind Waker" to be a major disappointment.
With the leap in console generation, I was expecting some kind of gameplay innovation... but it turned out "Wind Waker" was just "Ocarina" with cel shading and a boat. And the boat was kinda dull after the first half hour or so.
For 2) you conveniently fail to say what features you feel are missing. I'm betting there aren't any, given that Linux has Gimp, Inkscape, OpenOffice, GnuCash and so on.
Linux had a movement towards a single distribution--it was called UnitedLinux. It died due to lack of interest.
The problem is, when you put companies in the driving seat for a push to a single Linux distribution, you get crap like RPM being made part of the standard. Personally, I'm glad UnitedLinux failed to gain overwhelming momentum, because life's too short to have to deal with RPM.
The Future Sound of London did a series of concerts via ISDN in 1994.
Negativland did what they called "teletours" in the 1980s, using a simple circuit to improve the frequency response (much like pre-emphasis on vinyl LPs). Schematics are available.
Here are some secrets I'll let you into, having written code in well over a dozen languages...
1. Once you've learned to program in one language, you can pick up pretty much any other language much faster. By the time you've learned a handful, you can pick up a new one in a weekend.
2. Languages which are good for learning are rarely what's used in the real world. That's because conceptual simplicity has a performance penalty.
3. The language is the easy bit to learn anyway. The hard part is the standard libraries or OS API.
With this in mind, just because you eventually want to write.NET applications, doesn't mean it makes sense to start out by learning to write in a.NET language.
I would pick almost anything over Visual Basic. I write code in a VB variant almost every day, and after a decade I still find it painful. The type system is crappy, the syntax is fussy with lots of varieties to remember, it's hard to get an overall view of the code, the containers are crappy, and lots of modern programming conveniences are missing.
C#, as a clone of Java, is a somewhat better choice. If you're really limiting yourself to one of those two, I'd say go with C#.
However, I'd pick Ruby or Python over either of them. Ruby is great for getting out of the way and allowing you to actually think about the problem, rather than having to remember syntax. I'm told Python's the same way, except it likes to boss you around more, which is probably why it has started to get traction as a tutorial language.
I'd also actively discourage C++, Perl, PHP, and Common Lisp. C++ is a huge language that takes years to become proficient in, and it's very easy to shoot yourself in the foot with it. Common Lisp is bigger than C++. Perl is full of misfeatures for various historical reasons, and has loads of obscure syntax to remember. PHP is somewhat like Perl with cleaner syntax--just as many misfeatures you can run into, because like Perl it grew out of something much simpler, with no real forethought going into the design.
Actually, you could do a lot worse than learn to program using JavaScript. It's a fairly small and clean language, and it'd actually be useful to a.NET web developer in the long run.
I've been responding to this trend by actively stripping out everything from my site that's just link-propagation. If people want that, they can subscribe to my del.iciou.us feed. In general I've been writing more and longer opinion, fact and commentary pieces recently, and avoiding stuff everyone else is talking about. (Who really gives a crap about Dick Cheney shooting some other Republican in the face?)
I also found that my content quality went up dramatically after I was kicked off of LiveJournal without notice, so in the end that turned out to be a good thing.
2. Pack almost everything into storage crates and ship it to the destination city, to be placed in storage.
There are two companies I know of that do this: PODS and DoorToDoor / CityToCity. I went with DoorToDoor, http://www.doortodoor.com/, as they were much cheaper and their containers were smaller, so you could tailor the size of order more closely to the amount of crap you have.
3. Keep back enough stuff to survive on for a few months. Some clothes, a laptop, and so on. Make sure it all fits in the back of the car.
4. Road trip to your destination city. Enjoy it, because you're not driving a 15' Ryder truck.
5. Stay in an extended stay hotel while you sort out your permanent home.
6. Get DoorToDoor or PODS to deliver all your stuff from storage to the new house.
7. Get some roach motels. Inevitably, your stuff will have gained a small number of six-legged friends while in storage. Unpack cardboard boxes as soon as possible.
This way you only have to move all your crap once, you can enjoy the journey, and you can pack and unpack on your own schedule, so you don't have to trust anyone else to do it.
The only damage I had to my stuff was some hex nuts that came off some bar stools during transit and got lost. I went to the hardware store and bought a dollar bag of hex nuts, end of problem.
Yeah, I'm happily running PhotoShop Elements 2.0. Version 3.0 didn't offer any compelling reason to upgrade, and version 4.0 isn't Intel native--no way am I buying something now only to have to pay for another upgrade to get it to work on any Mac I upgrade to later this year. Get with the program, Adobe, Intel Macs were announced months ago, and have been shipping for a while.
I was suckered into the iTunes upgrade, not knowing that Apple (a) screwed with QuickTime to disable jHymn, and (b) screwed with my iTunes Music Store account so I couldn't downgrade iTunes again without losing access to the store.
Still, it's been their loss. There were a couple of albums I was going to buy, but I'm not going to until jHymn is working again.
First off, decide if you can afford to fight a lawsuit. If not, there's really no point seeking legal advice on how to minimize your legal exposure; it's all or nothing.
As to working for them, consider whether your real initials are "JB". If they are, you've probably already screwed the pooch; they're not going to employ you. Sending in your résumé in the next 6 months would just be saying "Here's my address to send the cops to".
Frankly, in the current legal climate, if I ever reverse engineered something, I wouldn't even bother asking—I'd release it anonymously via an open wireless network or Internet café somewhere distant from my home.
The problem with this variable pricing, based on the product's age, is that many (most?) people will simply wait until the price of the item drops to purchase it.
Like me, for example. I won't pay more than $12 for a CD. I wait for CDs to drop below that price on half.com or whatever.
Now, how is this a problem for the music industry? Are you suggesting it would be better if I just didn't buy the CD at all, or pirated a copy?
Plus many modern PDAs cost almost as much as a small / low budget laptop. Why bother buying an expensive gizmo if you can the real thing for a bit more?
Because you look a complete tool trying to shove a laptop in your pocket.
Slashdot Mirror
Try running yum without rpm(1) installed, see how far you get, dumbass. Yum is just a front end for the rpm code. I was suggesting throwing away the rpm code and building something reliable instead.
I don't care about the file format, I'm talking about the tools I have to use. Throw away rpm(1) and write a decent tool to handle RPM files, layer something like APT on it, and I'll back it.
No, it's nothing to do with RPM being from RedHat.
RedHat also originated ntsysv, and that beats the pants off Debian's craptastic update-rc.d.
The point is that because of the freedom associated with Linux, people are free to make decisions based on technical merit rather than marketing. Michael Dell's request is a marketing request: Linux would be easier to sell if it was unified.
As a user of Linux, I don't care how easy it is to sell--I'm much more interested in how easy it is to use, how reliable it is, and so on. Those things would be damaged by (for example) making RPM ubiquitous, making sendmail ubiquitous, making GNOME the standard desktop, making MySQL the only relational DB, and so on--even though those same changes would likely make Linux sell better.
In other words, what's good for marketing Linux to new users is often bad for those who are already Linux users. And absent the ability to force distributions to standardize, there will always be a market for distributions that do what's best for the users, rather than what's best for companies.
I've never had dpkg crap out and destroy the database of what's installed. I've never had dpkg lock up and cease functioning.
Being able to ask RPM difficult questions is a nice theoretical feature, but the user interface is so horrible I can't remember how to ask it simple questions; I resort to a cheat sheet with the incantations needed for simple everyday use.
I didn't say RPM lacked features; I said it was crap.
That comment is so missing the point.
The problem with RPM isn't the lack of an APT equivalent (I ran APT4RPM years ago), it's the fact that RPM is a buggy piece of crap that trashes its own database on a regular basis, and has a horrible UI when you have to interact with it.
Somehow I imagine IBM and Lenovo will work out a deal to purchase PCs without Vista. You don't think IBM buys desktop systems and laptops from Dell, do you?
Having worked with J2EE, I have to say: be careful what you wish for, you might get it.
The Lotus Notes 7 client for Linux is in beta.
(I'm mentioning this publically because Ed Brill has talked about it publically on his web site, so I'm not revealing any big secret.)
Yeah, I played "Ocarina of Time" and "Wind Waker" pretty much back to back, and found "Wind Waker" to be a major disappointment.
With the leap in console generation, I was expecting some kind of gameplay innovation... but it turned out "Wind Waker" was just "Ocarina" with cel shading and a boat. And the boat was kinda dull after the first half hour or so.
For 1) there are plenty of vendors offering pre-configured working Linux systems. Yeah, they're not Dell, but so what?
l m l
http://www.ibexpc.com/
For 2) you conveniently fail to say what features you feel are missing. I'm betting there aren't any, given that Linux has Gimp, Inkscape, OpenOffice, GnuCash and so on.
http://www.linuxrsp.ru/win-lin-soft/table-eng.htm
http://web.mit.edu/is/topics/linux/equivalents.ht
You're just rationalizing your laziness with convenient plausible-sounding excuses.
Linux had a movement towards a single distribution--it was called UnitedLinux. It died due to lack of interest.
The problem is, when you put companies in the driving seat for a push to a single Linux distribution, you get crap like RPM being made part of the standard. Personally, I'm glad UnitedLinux failed to gain overwhelming momentum, because life's too short to have to deal with RPM.
The Future Sound of London did a series of concerts via ISDN in 1994.
Negativland did what they called "teletours" in the 1980s, using a simple circuit to improve the frequency response (much like pre-emphasis on vinyl LPs). Schematics are available.
Here are some secrets I'll let you into, having written code in well over a dozen languages...
.NET applications, doesn't mean it makes sense to start out by learning to write in a .NET language.
.NET web developer in the long run.
1. Once you've learned to program in one language, you can pick up pretty much any other language much faster. By the time you've learned a handful, you can pick up a new one in a weekend.
2. Languages which are good for learning are rarely what's used in the real world. That's because conceptual simplicity has a performance penalty.
3. The language is the easy bit to learn anyway. The hard part is the standard libraries or OS API.
With this in mind, just because you eventually want to write
I would pick almost anything over Visual Basic. I write code in a VB variant almost every day, and after a decade I still find it painful. The type system is crappy, the syntax is fussy with lots of varieties to remember, it's hard to get an overall view of the code, the containers are crappy, and lots of modern programming conveniences are missing.
C#, as a clone of Java, is a somewhat better choice. If you're really limiting yourself to one of those two, I'd say go with C#.
However, I'd pick Ruby or Python over either of them. Ruby is great for getting out of the way and allowing you to actually think about the problem, rather than having to remember syntax. I'm told Python's the same way, except it likes to boss you around more, which is probably why it has started to get traction as a tutorial language.
I'd also actively discourage C++, Perl, PHP, and Common Lisp. C++ is a huge language that takes years to become proficient in, and it's very easy to shoot yourself in the foot with it. Common Lisp is bigger than C++. Perl is full of misfeatures for various historical reasons, and has loads of obscure syntax to remember. PHP is somewhat like Perl with cleaner syntax--just as many misfeatures you can run into, because like Perl it grew out of something much simpler, with no real forethought going into the design.
Actually, you could do a lot worse than learn to program using JavaScript. It's a fairly small and clean language, and it'd actually be useful to a
And PHP is the Visual Basic of the open source world.
Why, an evil scheme becomes a valid business model once I get a big enough cut, of course.
I've been responding to this trend by actively stripping out everything from my site that's just link-propagation. If people want that, they can subscribe to my del.iciou.us feed. In general I've been writing more and longer opinion, fact and commentary pieces recently, and avoiding stuff everyone else is talking about. (Who really gives a crap about Dick Cheney shooting some other Republican in the face?)
I also found that my content quality went up dramatically after I was kicked off of LiveJournal without notice, so in the end that turned out to be a good thing.
1. Get rid of everything possible.
2. Pack almost everything into storage crates and ship it to the destination city, to be placed in storage.
There are two companies I know of that do this: PODS and DoorToDoor / CityToCity. I went with DoorToDoor, http://www.doortodoor.com/, as they were much cheaper and their containers were smaller, so you could tailor the size of order more closely to the amount of crap you have.
3. Keep back enough stuff to survive on for a few months. Some clothes, a laptop, and so on. Make sure it all fits in the back of the car.
4. Road trip to your destination city. Enjoy it, because you're not driving a 15' Ryder truck.
5. Stay in an extended stay hotel while you sort out your permanent home.
6. Get DoorToDoor or PODS to deliver all your stuff from storage to the new house.
7. Get some roach motels. Inevitably, your stuff will have gained a small number of six-legged friends while in storage. Unpack cardboard boxes as soon as possible.
This way you only have to move all your crap once, you can enjoy the journey, and you can pack and unpack on your own schedule, so you don't have to trust anyone else to do it.
The only damage I had to my stuff was some hex nuts that came off some bar stools during transit and got lost. I went to the hardware store and bought a dollar bag of hex nuts, end of problem.
Yeah, I'm happily running PhotoShop Elements 2.0. Version 3.0 didn't offer any compelling reason to upgrade, and version 4.0 isn't Intel native--no way am I buying something now only to have to pay for another upgrade to get it to work on any Mac I upgrade to later this year. Get with the program, Adobe, Intel Macs were announced months ago, and have been shipping for a while.
Stuart Cheshire's "It's the latency, stupid".
c y.html
http://rescomp.stanford.edu/~cheshire/rants/Laten
I was suckered into the iTunes upgrade, not knowing that Apple (a) screwed with QuickTime to disable jHymn, and (b) screwed with my iTunes Music Store account so I couldn't downgrade iTunes again without losing access to the store.
Still, it's been their loss. There were a couple of albums I was going to buy, but I'm not going to until jHymn is working again.
First off, decide if you can afford to fight a lawsuit. If not, there's really no point seeking legal advice on how to minimize your legal exposure; it's all or nothing.
As to working for them, consider whether your real initials are "JB". If they are, you've probably already screwed the pooch; they're not going to employ you. Sending in your résumé in the next 6 months would just be saying "Here's my address to send the cops to".
Frankly, in the current legal climate, if I ever reverse engineered something, I wouldn't even bother asking—I'd release it anonymously via an open wireless network or Internet café somewhere distant from my home.
I wonder how it deals with cardiac arrhythmia?
Pick up a cheap used copy of The Cluetrain Manifesto and leave it on the manager's desk.
If that fails, leave. Information hoarding doesn't work.
Like me, for example. I won't pay more than $12 for a CD. I wait for CDs to drop below that price on half.com or whatever.
Now, how is this a problem for the music industry? Are you suggesting it would be better if I just didn't buy the CD at all, or pirated a copy?
Because you look a complete tool trying to shove a laptop in your pocket.